This is one my favorite essays on Kubrick and art in general, and it was written eleven years ago, but I think the sentiments expressed still stand. Below are some of the first reactions to Eyes Wide Shut.
“I can state unequivocally that the late Stanley Kubrick, in his final
film, ‘Eyes Wide Shut,’ has staged the most pompous orgy in the history
of the movies.” -David Denby in The New Yorker
“Ridiculously though intellectually overhyped for the very marginal
entertainment, edification and titillation it provides over its somewhat
turgid 159-minute running time.” -Andrew Sarris in The New York Observer
“This two hour and 39 minute gloss on Arthur Schnitzler’s fantasmagoric
novella feels like a rough draft at best.” -J. Hoberman in The Village
Voice
“In Eyes Wide Shut nothing works.” -Louis Menand in The New York Review
of Books
“An unfortunate misstep.” -Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times
I soon began to discover something even more startling. Not a single
critic, not even those few who claimed to like Eyes Wide Shut, made any
attempt to understand the film on its own artistic terms. Instead, the
critics denounced the film for not living up to the claims its
publicists had made for it, reduced it to a question of its director’s
personality, measured it by how much information it conveyed about the
familiar world around us. And I realized that something that had been
stirring around in the depths of the culture had risen to the surface.
After years of vindictive, leveling memoirs of artistic figures; after
countless novels, plays, films, paintings, and installations constructed
to address one social issue or another; after dozens of books have been
published proclaiming the importance of the “great books” and “humanist
ideas” to such a point of inflation that the effect was to bun’ the
specificity of great books and of original ideas-after the storm of all
this self-indulgence had passed, a new cultural reality had taken shape.
Our official arbiters of culture have lost the gift of being able to
comprehend a work of art that does not reflect their immediate
experience; they have become afraid of genuine art. Art-phobia is now
the dominant sensibility of the official culture, and art-phobia
annihilated Stanley Kubrick’s autumnal work. Much talk–some of it real,
a lot of it fake–has been in the air over the last decade about empathy
for the “other,” for people different from us. But no one has dwelled on
the essential otherness of a work of art. There is, after all, that
hackneyed but profound notion of a willing suspension of disbelief.
Genuine art makes you stake your credulity on the patently counterfeit.
It takes you by surprise. And for art to take you by surprise, you have
to put yourself in the power of another world–the work of art–and in
the power of another person–the artist. Yet everything in our society,
so saturated with economic imperatives, tells us not to surrender our
interests even for a moment, tells us that the only forms of cultural
expression we can trust are those that give us instant gratification,
useful information, or a reflected image of ourselves. (Italics mine)