Nietzsche's Parable of the Porcupines

The critic, when we think about it, is like this intellectual figure who analyzes works of art and tells us about the moral nature of the story. And so what does he say? While the critic got the upper hand in the theater, in the concert hall, the journalist in the schools, and the press and society, art degenerated into a particularly lowly topic of conversation. Aesthetic criticism was used as a means of uniting a vein, distracted, selfish, and moreover, pitiously unoriginal sociability.