Opinion | We have no use for critics

Searching for depth in all the wrong places

As you might have noticed from the gap in articles, I was away recently—not just from my desk, but also from the city. In October, I went upstate on an artistic retreat with some friends to write, hike, and gossip engage in discussions about art over home-cooked dinners for a week (and, also at one point, get lost in the forest in what threatened to become a Blair Witch situation except with working phones). Then, in early November, I went to Connecticut for yet another retreat—this time with my church, for five days, during which I was completely silent and sans devices, focused on praying, meditating, reading, and receiving the sacraments. Lots of time to think.

One of the things I thought about was this publication, which I’m still discovering. “Discovering” may make it sound like I’m not in charge of it—what I mean is that I am listening, both to people giving feedback about the content I’ve posted so far and to myself, as I figure out what I see as its role and what I enjoy doing for it. For example, the monthly listing: I was somewhat disappointed to see almost every single play I featured on my Fall preview show up in Nothing For The Group. Not because of any competitive spirit (who am I to compete with Lauren’s years of experience and—more important— street cred?), but because the point was to highlight things people might miss; if someone else is doing a good job at it, why repeat it? The way I see it, in a healthy media ecosystem, there is no competition (or at least not primarily), but rather complementarity. So what am I adding to the cultural coverage ecosystem with The Downtown Beat? What is its unique role?

I am not the only one asking these questions; the field at large was rocked this summer by a wave of firings and reassignments that did away with, or substantially changed, the cultural criticism desks at several legacy media organizations—and, in the spirit of not repeating, I will offload the responsibility of telling you all the facts to Charlotte Klein, who wrote a comprehensive and well-sourced article for New York Magazine on this topic, “Do Media Organizations Even Want Cultural Criticism?” (In fact, my Fall Preview was supposed to have two Uptown Gossip items, and one of them had to do with the changes at the New York Times and how it’s been impacting the review-hungry marketing departments of Off-Broadway theaters, but my two sources backed out—which compels me to repeat: you CAN gossip around me, I will not publish anything that you don’t explicitly consent to).

There was an uproar from… mostly other critics, who were very upset at seeing their jobs being treated with such carelessness. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody wrote a whole defense of the review as format and, by extension, of the reviewer as profession. He made some excellent points, such as that when it comes to arts journalism, most coverage (interviews, profiles) “should be rightly understood as part of a marketing plan,” being as it is prompted by the project’s or artists’ publicists; the only person who’s not invested in the commercial success of the work is the reviewer, something that allows their work to act as “a consumer guide, an intrinsic variety of service journalism.” Over at The Atlantic, Spencer Kornhaber expressed a similar understanding of the profession and diagnosed the problem in economic terms (quotation abridged):

Demand for cultural commentary seems as high as it’s ever been. TikTok, Instagram, Substack, Letterboxd, and podcast apps teem with analyses of movies, books, Labubus—any cultural artifact you can think of. The very platforms that are stealing eyes away from newspapers and magazines have created a new class of self-styled critics. With this transition, the definition of the profession is in flux. The credibility of traditional reviewers came from expertise, experience, and the imprimatur of trusted publications. Today, more and more critics pay their own bills, build their own followings, and invent their own rules. For better and for worse, the adage “Everyone’s a critic” no longer seems like an exaggeration.

So: you have the facts from New York Magazine (legacy media institutions are shedding cultural critics), the analysis from The New Yorker (the review plays a crucial role in the art form, and we will miss it), and the diagnosis from The Atlantic (this role is being taken on by freelancers/influencers). I will therefore not belabor any of these points, but offer instead a completely different take on the situation: In the mid-2020s arts ecosystem, we have no use for critics—because there is nothing (or barely anything) for them to do.

That’s a big statement, of course, so let me break it down a bit. First: on the necessity of critics. There are many lenses through which one can frame the job of a critic and the role of a review. In my own circle of friends, I’ve heard folks say it’s an active way to engage with a piece and the art form in general (think of a positive review that bolsters an early-career artist’s stature, helping them gain a foothold, or of a pan that closes down a show). Others have said it’s a way for the piece to go on the record, to freeze for posterity the impact that a specific work had on its contemporaneous audience (as represented by the critic), preserving it from a potential future reappraisal becoming the only point of view—or, more likely, from being forgotten forever.

For the purposes of this essay, however, I will adopt Brody’s framing of “service journalism” and posit that the role of a critic is mainly to let the audience know if they should spend their time and money experiencing a particular work of art. As such, I will then posit that, for this to be a job that is needed in society, a few conditions must be met:

1. The critic must live in a time and (a little less important in the digital age) space where art is a valued commodity, which allows them to build an audience;

2. The critic’s audience must have time and money to spend on art;

3. The number of artistic options on which the audience could spend their time and money must exceed their resources, forcing them to choose;

4. The choice(s) must not be one(s) that the audience can reasonably be expected to make for themselves without outside help.

Whether any/all of these conditions are currently met is debatable, but I’d like to focus specifically on the fourth one: what does it take for the choice of what art to experience to become one that requires outside help? As previously established, most work that goes into the marketplace is backed by marketing professionals who make sure that audiences not only hear about it, but also have enough reason to see it. That has been true for a long time, though, and it did not impede the rise of criticism as a profession. The understanding, as I see it, was always that marketing would tell its biased story, and the critic would come in unbiased to either confirm or deny. Has that changed?

I think it has, because the more I consume the art that is being offered to me, the more I feel the work has lost something crucial: mystery. Just what do I mean by that? I will now take you on a bit of a trippy ride, so make sure you’re comfortable and have your thinking cap on!