It really is a shame how with the era of media consolidation and ‘STAN-ing’ we’ve lost the ability to give truly bad reviews to anything that will upset the general audience. It’s why there is so much contemporary “art” made in the last decade or so that is just okay, not fantastic. Sure, many are just looking for validation of their consumption choices. Which is a role that critics can perform, but a pretty shallow one, and not a particularly valuable one if you are interested in art as anything other than a consumer product. Did it all start with social media, subreddits and various troll lounges looking where to strike next? I think it was more a symptom of something that’s always been true and the internet really turbo-charged it. Insta-whatever gives everybody a voice that is projected for all to hear or read; even when that voice has nothing of real substance to share.
We don’t need real critics anymore, everyone is one.
As far as recent music criticism, I suppose it might stem from the breaking of a radio/MTV music monoculture. It’s great that there is a plurality of genres and distribution methods in music now, but it is increasingly harder for any one music critic to be an expert on every album that ends up in their review pile. And if you, as a class of critics and experts, have been trained to have strong biases against some forms of what you criticize, and the same in favor of others, then it’s just an illusion that your criticism is anything but intellectualization of your biases. For a long time, every type of music that wasn’t white guys playing guitar was treated by music critics as essentially inferior to that standard. Write as many words as you want, if you hate boy bands, you’re never gonna write something useful for people who like them to decide whether a record is worth buying. Perhaps a lot of it as a break away from the Pitchfork-like reviews. Sure, those weren’t always negative but the most memorable ones, usually with fans still holding a grudge to this day, were the negative ones. And it was rarely thoughtful criticism, it was videos of monkeys peeing in their mouths.
The best, nuanced criticism exists between two extremes, the dialectic between a viewpoint, as well as the plurality of other critical viewpoints and the real issue is the equation of “criticism” with “this is good, this is bad and here’s why”. That isn’t the role of a critic, traditionally. Read George Orwell writing about Charles Dickens, or similar works. They’re doing something quite different than trying to make recommendations about consumption habits. There’s a difference between writing for fellow experts and writing to a general audience. Fellow experts are, regardless of field, much more interested in hearing negative comments and discussions of problems than non-experts. Non-experts are mostly interested in answering the question “is this fun enough to spend my time and money on?” What Orwell says about Dickens is irrelevant for finding out if The Mandalorian and Grogu is worth seeing compared to the other Star Wars films. And look, I get that tweets and tik toks and the death of long form anything has pretty much made shallow thinkers out of everyone, but don’t mistake oversimplification for the natural state of things.
– Dagobot