Celine Nguyen

The decline of criticism might explain the sense that our culture is stagnating. How can we bring it back?

I don’t remember reading any great novels in the ‘90s. Or listening to any good albums, either. It’s not the decade’s fault, it’s mine: I was born in 1993. By the time I could read books and choose my own music, things were already going downhill. The 20th century, apparently, was the last time we had great art, literature, or music. Although the current century was meant to be a Cambrian explosion of creativity — inaugurated by the internet, or the creator economy, or NFTs, or AI — nothing has gotten better, only worse.

That’s the argument, at least, of W. David Marx’s comprehensively pessimistic Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century. The Tokyo-based writer’s first book, Ametora, was a cultural history of Japanese Americana fashion; his second, Status and Culture, was a bold — and largely successful — attempt to synthesize the entire discipline of sociology into an explanation of how taste develops. His latest book, in ambition and scope, is somewhere in between. Art made in the first quarter of the 21st century, Marx argues, has been largely unimpressive. “There have been fewer cultural inventors,” he writes, and although “the culture industry” and “online creators are producing more content than ever … the most radical forms of cultural invention have become scarce.”

Consider the 20th century’s abundance of avant-garde art movements (from fauvism to expressionism) and innovative pop genres (punk, prog rock, synth pop, rap). This century, Marx argues, has failed to achieve the same heights. Despite new technologies and platforms to discover, create, and circulate work, the internet has led to “mediocrity,” not artistic innovation. The web was meant to help long tail artists gain an audience for niche, experimental work and make a living from their 1,000 true fans. Instead, attention has accrued to a minority of major players, who, under the reign of poptimism, are celebrated for pursuing commercial success. In Marx’s history of American pop culture, which places heavy emphasis on media, music, and fashion, with glancing mentions of literature, art, and dance, a theme emerges: Everyone is selling out or trying their best to. Craven commercialism has replaced creativity. Culture has become “a vehicle for entertainment, politics, and profiteering — but at the expense of pure artistic innovation.”

I liked Blank Space, which zips through notable names and scandals — from Ezra Klein to “Elsagate,” Buzzfeed to BTS, Stüssy to Stewart Brand — with remarkable alacrity. Any book that takes aim at other people (for their bad taste and pedestrian art) often encourages a feeling of smug satisfaction in the reader. But I couldn’t decide if I actually agreed with Marx. Is contemporary culture actually worse than that of the past? Consider that when the music critic Simon Reynolds, in his 2010 book Retromania, argued that contemporary pop was merely remixing, recycling, and exhausting the past, the critic Sara Marcus observed that Reynold’s thesis “has several fundamental problems, beginning with his blatant disregard of the First Law of Pop Thermodynamics: No music will ever matter as much as the stuff you loved at 16.”

Did that mean that Blank Space’s argument was wrong? Because I did feel cheated out of a utopian future. I was promised free information, great art, and a four-day work week to appreciate it. Instead, what I had was a profound feeling of generational FOMO. Other people’s stories of the 20th century gave me the distinct feeling that the artists and writers of the past were immersed in an invigorating artistic and intellectual scene, one that led to real stars. The present, with its deluge of social media personalities, doesn’t quite hold up.

The problem with diagnoses of cultural decline, however, is that they tend to be based on vibes. The art just looks worse. The music just sounds worse. Subjective judgments are often the only way to distinguish between good art and bad, but they don’t feel satisfying. I wasn’t entirely convinced by Marx’s approach, which defies nominative determinism by not being particularly, well, Marxist. *Blank Space does *acknowledge structural shifts across industries and how neoliberal economic policies have reshaped the global economy, but it largely blames the ostensible decline in art closer to home, on the “mutual expectations” we have of each other. We’ve rejected hierarchies of taste and commercial success over artistic integrity.

To decide whether I agreed with Blank Space, I found myself reaching for a technique from the other Marx: historical materialism. What social and economic conditions helped produce great work in the 20th century? And what changed that could have made things worse?

Artists, critics, and artist-critics

A few years ago, a lifelong interest in books led me to moonlight as a literary critic — waking up at 5 a.m. to draft book reviews, going to my day job as a software designer, and then editing in the evenings. As side projects go, it was one of the most financially unremunerative things I could have done. Intellectually, it was the most invigorating activity I could imagine.

Critics are often seen as peevish, elite aesthetes responsible for judging books as good or bad. But the reviews I admired most and sought to write eschewed simple star ratings. Instead, they examined books with more attention, insight, and generosity — situating them in a broader social and artistic context. “Criticism has some inextricable relationship with judgment,” the art professor Alex Kitnick observed, “but perhaps more importantly, it opens up a space for complexity.”

When I came across Chaim Gingold’s book, *Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine, *I knew I had to write about it. For years, I had felt that good writing about software was thin on the ground. In most narratives, software was made by singular boy geniuses or oblivious villains. It was rarely portrayed as a creative act or a social pursuit involving teams of thinkers, makers, engineers, and designers.

By the time my review was published — a 3,500-word essay that drew connections between Building SimCity, Silicon Valley’s favorite anthropology book, Seeing Like a State, and a controversial citybuilding project in California — I had spent upwards of 40 hours on the review. I was gratified when I received an email from Gingold expressing his appreciation.

I began to think that the role of a critic is also a relational one: If someone has spent years of their life on a work, they deserve a serious, sustained response. Critics who write such reviews aren’t just offering something to the maker of a work but to the world. Look here, a critic says. *Imagine what culture could be like *— if there was more of, less of, a certain tendency towards, a turn away from, a movement that looked like: this.

Critics need these idealistic, lofty reasons for what they do because the economics of the profession are disastrously bad. *Los Angeles Review of Books *paid me $100 for my review; I’ve never gotten more than $600 from a publication. “As far as I can tell,” the journalist and critic Adam Morgan wrote in the September issue of World Literature Today, “there are only seven full-time book critics left in the United States.” If you’re reading a review of an art exhibition, album, or novel, the writer was likely paid less than minimum wage for their time. In this profession, other work (or other people) pay the rent. “The truth,” the critic and novelist Christine Smallwood writes, is that

people who do this quite insane and marginal thing of writing criticism do it because they have a passionate attachment to literature. There’s little money or power in it, and no fame. Writing book reviews today is a vocation, not a career.

But is the financial viability of criticism a problem for anyone except critics? For authors, perhaps: Fewer publications, with fewer full-time staff and less budget for freelancers, adds up to fewer reviews. This is bad news for debut novelists, who are pushed to be writers and social media experts to bring their work to an audience. And it’s bad news, I’d argue, if we care about cultural dynamism and artistic innovation.

It’s obvious that artistic movements need artists. My claim is that they also need critics. Critics help name, describe, and contextualize movements. They historicize artists — to reveal what is novel and innovative — and make a persuasive case for what work will be important in the future. Critics, in short, tell the story of how art and culture have changed over time, and how it’s changing now. And without a compelling story, culture stagnates and wanes.

Critics played a key role in two significant artistic movements of the 20th century: Abstract Expressionism and French New Wave cinema. After WWII, a generation of artists, including Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, and Arshile Gorky, benefitted from cheap Manhattan rent and generous state funding: The Federal Art Project kept artists employed during the Great Depression, and veterans could use the GI Bill to pay for art school. While they also worked, the critic Clement Greenberg wrote, arguing that American painters — not European oneswere at the cutting edge of art. The AbEx movement also benefited from artist-critics like Elaine de Kooning, a painter (and wife of Willem de Kooning) who reviewed the works of Pollock, Gorsky, and other influential artists in the scene. Criticism, in the case of Greenberg and Elaine de Kooning, did not emerge out of antagonism, but from affectionate affinity.

Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock in Pollock’s East Hamptons studio. Photograph by Tony Vaccaro/Getty Images.

But even aggression had artistic value: When the film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma was founded in Paris in 1951, its writers were young, idealistic, and savage. One, François Truffaut, became known as “the gravedigger” for his excoriation of French filmmakers. But criticism, as Emilie Bickerton noted in her history of the magazine,* *gave him and others “an education in how to make films … Writing forced them to ask, and answer, how a director employed various techniques to his own unique ends.” Eight years after the first issue of Cahiers, Truffaut won “Best Director” at Cannes for his own debut film. Today, Truffaut and his French New Wave peers — Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and Éric Rohmer, who each wrote for Cahiers — testify to the thin line separating the critic from the artist. As A.O. Scott observed in Better Living Through Criticism, “Every writer is a reader, every musician a listener, driven by a desire to imitate, to correct, to improve, or to answer the models before them.” Instead of the accusation that “All critics are failed artists,” it may be more correct to say that “All art is successful criticism.”

At this point, I’d like to return to our original question — is artistic and cultural innovation really in decline? — and propose a hypothesis. While great artworks can be produced in isolation, art movements — which organize disparate works into coherent scenes and sensibilities — are what contribute to a feeling of progress. If we assume that innovation can be measured by new artistic movements, and those movements are facilitated by a critical culture, then a weakened critical ecosystem will lead to the “blank space” that W. David Marx describes, where art and culture feel stagnant.

This is, as it turns out, exactly what happened in the last decade of the 20th century, with lasting repercussions in the 21st. A useful case study here is the Village Voice, an influential alt-weekly newspaper whose history reveals what a healthy critical culture can do — and what happens when it’s gone.

The Bell Labs of cultural criticism

When the psychologist Ed Fancher, the WWII vet Dan Wolf, and the novelist Norman Mailer founded the Village Voice in 1955, they knew little about journalism or how to run a newspaper. The first issue was bootstrapped from their savings and published out of a two-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village. Despite frequent changes in ownership and leadership, its writers — who were given generous editorial freedom and substantially less generous fees — made it one of the most influential alternative weekly newspapers of the 20th century.

For those who missed the heyday of the newspaper, the best way to learn more is Tricia Romano’s The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice. It’s a who’s who of influential writers and figures — including many of the critics that first inspired me, like Peter Schjeldahl, Vivian Gornick, and Lynn Yaeger. It seemed improbable that all of these stars had worked in the same place! It also reminded me of another intellectual powerhouse.

The Village Voice was, essentially, the Bell Labs of cultural criticism. Both institutions were founded in New York City: Bell Labs in 1925, the Village Voice in 1955. Both were tremendously innovative in their respective fields: The researchers at Bell Labs invented the transistor, the programming language C, UNIX, and the discipline of information theory. The editors and writers of the Voice, meanwhile, were early advocates of influential musical genres (rock music, disco, hip-hop) and ideas (auteur theory in film) — all in the pioneering style of New Journalism, where literary techniques were used to produce criticism and reportage steeped in subjective experience. Alt-weeklies like the Voice, observed its former executive editor Kit Rachlis, showed that “writing about culture was an extraordinarily important thing … to cover, write about, report on, think about, analyze.” And the Voice’s writers weren’t just tastemakers; they also shaped the American political landscape, covering Trump’s early property dealings, judicial corruption, the nascent feminist movement, the AIDS crisis, and ACT UP.

What made the Voice so influential? There were two key elements: talented people with distinctive perspectives on art and a culture that departed from the staid norms of other publications. Some of the earliest employees came from nontraditional backgrounds. Mary Perot Nichols was a Greenwich Village housewife, mother, and neighborhood activist when she asked Dan Wolf (one of the Voice’s founding editors) if anyone was going to cover Robert Moses’s plans for Washington Square Park. “You write about it,” he said. Her column, “Runnin’ Scared,” exerted a major influence on city politics, and it made her one of Moses’s most formidable antagonists — even though the copy she turned in, Wolf once complained to a colleague, was “unreadable.” (Nichols was also friends with Moses’s other opponents; she and Jane Jacobs often brought their children to the park together, and she helped a young Robert Caro, who was struggling to break a major story about Moses, obtain access to the city planner’s files.)

Editors played an essential role in finding and nurturing talent. The newspaper’s philosophy, said Richard Goldstein, who joined in 1966 and later became executive editor, was that

you do not hire an expert; you hire someone who is living through the phenomenon worth covering … A lot of the people I hired were effectively amateurs as writers but had amazingly interesting sensibilities and were totally attuned to the subjects they wrote about.

Editors like Robert Christgau — the self-described “dean of American rock critics,” though he was also partial to hip-hop and riot grrrl — brought iconic writers into the fold. As a student at Howard, Greg Tate looked to the Voice for its coverage of avant-garde jazz and hip-hop. Later, Christgau brought him in, and Tate became one of the most influential Black cultural critics of his generation. (His inimitable style arguably made him a peer of the artists he covered: David Bowie was a fan, and Flea, the bassist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, reportedly broke down in tears after reading Tate’s positive review of the rock band’s Californification.) Christgau managed to “defy the illogic of white supremacy in publishing,” Tate says in Romano’s book, of “We can’t find any qualified Black people.” Christgau “just seemed to trip over them anywhere he went.” Though the Voice’s record on race wasn’t perfect, it was often ahead of other publications. It was, according to the playwright and journalist Lisa Jones, “the most important news organization” in the ‘90s to incubate Black writers and give them space to write about Black culture.

Writers were shaped, too, by the fractious, intellectually combative culture of the Voice. Though the Voice was largely left-wing, with a sizable contingent of feminists, lesbians, and gay men, its writers occupied a wide ideological range. There was a culture of what might be politely described as radical candor; a less positive framing would call it all-out ideological antagonism. Many, including staff writer Lucian K. Truscott IV, saw the Voice as “the organ of the feminist movement,” thanks to influential articles like Vivian Gornick’s coverage of the New York Radical Feminists group and Susan Brownmiller’s 1969 cover story of a “legendary” East Coast abortion doctor. But when David Schneiderman joined the Voice as editor in chief and began hiring more women, Jack Newfield — of “10 Worst Landlords” fame — complained to Schneiderman that he was hiring too many “Stalinist feminists.” And the jazz columnist Nat Hentoff, a Jewish atheist libertarian, became nationally famous for his vigorous anti-abortion politics. But the Voice couldn’t be what it was without the ideological range — which often included writers attacking each other in its pages.

Romano’s book showcases the high-minded idealism and petty grievances that made the Voice such a fascinating, original, and enduring influence on American intellectual life.** **Her interviewees vividly convey how its critics helped popularize new artistic movements, bringing innovative subcultures into the mainstream. Unfortunately, the book also serves as an elegy for the newspaper; after limping into the 21st century, the Voice was shut down as a print venture in 2017. Though it was revived a few years later, it’s nothing like the iconoclastic publication of the past. Here, sadly, the comparison between Bell Labs and the Village Voice works all too well. Today, Bell Labs exists as a subsidiary of Nokia. But outside the name, the engineer Brian Potter noted in his newsletter Construction Physics, “it has little relationship to the industrial research powerhouse of the 20th century.” Nostalgia often manifests as a desire to revive old, beloved institutions, but it’s easier to daydream about than do. As Potter points out, ”The world that Bell Labs thrived in no longer exists: To push technological progress forward, we’ll need to understand both why Bell Labs worked and why it no longer could.”

The same could be said for the Voice, which reached its greatest heights under a specific economic model for journalism — one that 21st century technologies have destroyed. When the paper was founded in 1951, it had two sources of revenue: from readers purchasing the paper and classified ads. (The ads were mostly for apartments, though Bruce Springsteen famously found his drummer through the Village Voice’s classifieds.) By 1996, however, the Voice was the only NYC weekly that cost money ($1.25 at the newsstand), and circulation was declining. The Voice’s owner at the time, Leonard Stern, decided to make the newspaper free. It was a brilliant move at the time: Distribution shot up from 75,000 issues a week to 250,000, and revenue went up, too.

But this business model disintegrated with the rise of the internet. In the summer of 2001, a twentysomething Anil Dash began working as a web developer of the Voice. “I was supposed to work on the classifieds,” he tells Romano. “It was some personals and the real estate listings,” and the latter paid the bills. “My third day there, Craigslist launched in New York. I knew. I was like, ‘Oh my god.’” The Voice could no longer sell what Craigslist offered for free.

You probably know the rest of the story. After Craigslist, the deluge. New technological upstarts would emerge, with a missionary zeal for making information free, and newspapers had to adapt — painfully — to this new world. Google’s “first click free” policy, instituted in 2008, forced online publishers to offer unpaywalled articles if they wanted to be indexed in Google search. The policy strangled newspaper profit for years: “If you don’t sign up for ‘first click free,’ the CEO of News Corp complained, “you virtually disappear from a search.” When the Wall Street Journal ran a two-week experiment in 2017 that removed “First Click Free” for 40% of their readers, they saw a 86% jump in subscriptions. But when they made the experiment permanent, Google penalized them by demoting WSJ links in Google’s products, leading to 38% less traffic from searches and 89% less from Google News. Although Google finally ended the policy in late 2017, the damage had been done.

What happened to journalism in the 21st century is, in many ways, the story of the conflict between two utopian values: Information wants to be free and Writers should be paid. Focusing on the former has led to undeniably positive outcomes, like better searchability and reduced barriers to important news. But it has also destroyed the economic model that helped the Village Voice cultivate a generation of legendary critics and journalists. Of course, publications are still trying to make it work. In 2011, the New York Times rolled out a paywall, and today it’s one of the few success stories of traditional media, thanks in part to its games and recipes offering. Other news publications benefit from billionaire owners who became wealthy from the tech boom: The Atlantic is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, and the Washington Post by Jeff Bezos. Still, today’s critics have to be lucky and good to snatch up the handful of jobs at the handful of surviving publications. Some Voice alums have managed: The staff writer and theater critic Hilton Als is now a staff critic at The New Yorker. But the next Hilton Als is facing down the triple threat of little work, low wages, and high cost of living. And I haven’t even mentioned the looming threat of AI. It doesn’t matter if an LLM can actually replace a human critic. The real risk is that they replace a critic’s day job once execs decide that experienced copywriters and technical writers aren’t needed.

I’m an optimist by nature, but even I have to admit that things aren’t looking good for America’s critics. “It is impossible to know,” the critic Christine Smallwood writes, “what ideas never came into the world because someone couldn’t or wouldn’t accept an hourly rate that barely covers the babysitter.” It’s hard to measure the impact this has had on America’s intellectual and cultural life, but I do feel a certain despair. “You don’t pay writers now,” the Voice alum Laurie Stone says in Romano’s book, “because the culture has determined that intellectual contributions, aesthetic contributions are something that someone can do on the side, like a hobby. And see what happens to a culture who treats its artists and its intellectuals that way? Not good.”

We have criticism at home

I feel impatient, though, when I encounter yet another essay that pines after the past. Yes, if only we could return to that world — where newspapers raked in ad revenue; where rent was cheap in lower Manhattan; where there were thousands of journalism jobs across the country — then maybe American criticism could be great again. But we can’t revive the past, any more than leftists can bring back postwar trade unions in a globalized economy, or conservatives can bring back 1950s-style traditional marriages in a world where more women have bachelor’s degrees than men. In July, the New York Times announced that four of their longtime staff critics would be reassigned. Their replacements, the culture editor Sia Michel wrote in an internal memo, would be charged with guiding readers “not only through traditional reviews but also with essays, new story forms, videos and experimentation with other platforms.” The outcry was immediate: The film critic Richard Brody penned an impassioned defense of the traditional review, while the writer Adlan Jackson’s commentary in the worker-owned NYC publication Hell Gate had the cutting headline: “Does the NYT want culture writing or TikTok videos?”

But the most revealing part of Michel’s memo wasn’t the content formats she mentioned but her description of the changing cultural landscape. “New generations of artists and audiences,” she wrote, “are bypassing traditional institutions.” The internet has fundamentally reshaped the three-way relationship between artist, critic, and audience. This is most obvious in music. During the Voice’s heyday, musicians could — and often did — get touchy about negative reviews: After Robert Christgau’s negative review of a Sonic Youth album, the band’s songwriter Thurston Moore wrote a song called “Kill Yr Idols,” which included the lyrics ““I don’t know why / You wanna impress Christgau.” (Christgau’s terse reply: “Idolization is for rock stars … critics just want a little respect.”) But although artists could be “coolly resentful, if not openly adversarial” towards their critics in the past, as the writer Luke Ottenhof observed, they understood that critics were indispensable. Christgau’s “Consumer Guide” columns for the Voice helped introduce people to new artists and music. But social media has altered the artist-critic dynamic: Not only can artists send their fans to harass a reviewer, they also have newfound leverage against publications. As Ottenhof writes,

Flanked by fans who don’t rely on the music press to access or learn about their icons, famous artists can hold their relationships with financially-challenged music publications hostage on condition of favorable coverage — coverage that most publications in a click-driven economy can’t afford to pass up … These dynamics punish dialogue, nuance, and even careful dissent, inching us towards a hegemonic monoculture.

This points to another key change. The internet has made it easy to evaluate all content — including criticism — against three key metrics: views, likes, and shares. Criticism, it turns out, underperforms. “The consensus,” the media columnist Charlotte Klein reported in New York Magazine is that “stand-alone reviews just don’t generate traffic.” Media organizations, already struggling with a traffic apocalypse, have an “acute sensitivity,” Klein wrote, to what goes unread.

It’s hard to argue with the numbers. But I can’t help but think of C. Thi Nguyen’s concept of values capture, which — as he writes in his forthcoming book, The Score — happens “when we are exposed to a simple public scoring system — a ranking, a metric, a numerical score — and it takes over our decision-making.” Newspapers, he writes, “can be value-captured by clicks and page views,” which enable efficient quantitative comparisons against qualitatively different forms of content. A 3,000-word review that elegantly synopsizes the history of hip-hop is intended to accomplish something very different than a 500-word recap of two artists feuding on Twitter, but page views let us compare them directly. And a review championing an unknown artist has a smaller built-in audience than flattering, shallow coverage of an existing star. Though the former is more likely to facilitate an artistically innovative culture, the latter is rewarded in today’s attention economy. (A similar problem affects social reviewing sites like Goodreads and Letterboxd. The reviews that rack up the most likes tend to be quippy, highly polarized one-liners instead of reviews that carefully engage with the complexities of a work — the ones, that is, that function as actual criticism.)

From a venture capitalist’s perspective, the creator economy has been relatively successful. But when it comes to 21st century culture, it’s not enough for a handful of tech startups to achieve unicorn valuations. Rather, we should see if they can facilitate the creation and dissemination of artistically ambitious works. Because great art is, in many ways, the solution to the attention economy’s problems. Much of the internet is now optimized for shallow and trivially dopaminergic slop, but perhaps it’s also accentuated the unique value proposition, if you will, of genuine artistic works. Art can hold our attention in a more rewarding way — restoring the capacities that have been degraded by other apps.

When I finish a great novel, film, or videogame, I don’t feel dispirited and hollowed out by the experience. Instead, it feels as if I’ve lived with and through its characters. Often, I want to relive that experience, deepen it, and feel it again. I can do so as part of an audience, and search out recommendations, reviews, and criticism as a guide. But I might also do so as a critic — carefully, generously, and rigorously evaluating a work — or as an artist, responding to historical precedent and contemporaneous peers with an artwork of my own. The 21st century has democratized artistic production and discourse like never before; it’s easier than ever for artists to learn from the past, find a community of peers, and access professional-grade tools. More people than ever can review art and make it. Two years ago, the critic Ryan Ruby suggested that we are in a golden age of literary criticism. “It is not unusual,” the critic and scholar Merve Emre wrote, “to stumble upon an essay on Goodreads or Substack that is just as perceptive as academic or journalistic essays.” In the art world, Sean Tatol’s Manhattan Art Review is directly inspired by Christgau’s approach to music criticism, and his efforts to comprehensively review even small gallery shows have made the site, in the words of Ben Davies, “an independent media project in the true sense.” It’s a form of criticism that the internet is most capable of facilitating.

There are artists, too, creating works in distinctively 21st century mediums. I’m particularly interested in the work shown at places like the The HTML Review, an annual journal of web-based literature. The fourth issue, published this spring, includes works like the software engineer and artist Reuben Son’s “Airs,” which features poems presented in a programmatically-distorted typeface, accompanied with a generative audio soundtrack inspired by the wind. Son’s work is inspired by existing artistic forms — concrete poetry and ambient music — and combines them into a form uniquely suited for the web, with its accretion of multimedia technologies. This is an artistic medium still in its infancy. In the same issue, the poet and coder Theo Ellin Ballew observes that more web-based artworks and poetry are starting to emerge. Perhaps, they speculate, there is now “a critical mass … [of] enough artist and poet-age people who grew up on the internet to build a vibrant conversation. Or maybe we just need some time to warm up to a new tool before we can let it give us beauty or meaning or intensity.”

What would it take for web-based art to become a significant art movement? For more people, I think, to pay attention to these works, write about them, and contextualize them in existing cultural narratives. To take part in making them, and to participate in critiquing them — pushing both artists and audiences to expect more. These are new forms; they need their critics and audiences. (“An audience with a high level of connoisseurship,” Fran Lebowitz once said, “is as important to the culture as artists.”) Here I’m reminded of a proposition from the art professor and critic Alex Kitnick, who, at a March event hosted by the arts criticism website 4Columns, quoted a work by the poet David Antin on the New York art world of the 1960s:

There were millions of people all around and most of them seem to have been artists of some sort or another … artists went to see each other’s work and we were all very excited with everything we were doing and we were all doing everything … and everybody was an art critic … all artists were art critics.

In this world, Kitnick notes, “Having lots of critics around is understood … as having been a rather positive thing.” It meant that criticism wasn’t just “siloed off, professionalized … but rather that it belonged to and was practiced by everyone, especially artists.” A collective investment in creating art helps create a lively, varied artistic ecosystem. And criticism, with its public and social qualities, can help that community construct a shared understanding of artistic excellence. “Today,” Kitnick continues,

we say such a thing pejoratively: “Everyone’s a critic” means that no one is, that everything has been leveled, that judgment has been suspended or that its enormity has given way to equilibrium. But it’s important to push this thought against the grain and imagine that criticism can only exist when everyone, or at least a critical mass of people, are actively involved in the culture of art. Criticism is better when more people take part in it.

This doesn’t, of course, solve the material problems facing today’s critics. But the social function of criticism is too valuable to lose. And the three-way relationship between artists, critics, and audiences must be carefully restored, if we want the 21st century to produce meaningful artistic innovations.

These are dispiriting times. But I refuse to believe that the past will always be better than the future, that art and technology are inevitably opposed, that Silicon Valley can only destroy — instead of transform — cultural innovation. And I refuse to believe that more participation leads to a degraded cultural ecosystem. We can’t go back to the past, but that may be a good thing; there were millions of people who were denied full access to the cultural sphere because of their gender or race or sexuality. People who would have never made it into the inner sanctum of American culture — even at a defiantly countercultural publication like the Voice — can now, for the first time in history, publish from anywhere and reach an audience everywhere.

“When a window closes,” the critic Johanna Fateman offered at the same event, “a door opens, eventually.” It’s a typical critical maneuver — not apocalyptic despair, nor blind optimism, but a secret third thing: a highly contingent, careful prescription for hope. Because despite all the ominous reports of the death of literacy, the death of critical thinking, the death of subcultures, and the death of artistic innovation — no one seems ready, at the end of the day, to give up trying. The fact that people continue to create art and culture, even though the economic conditions are getting worse and worse, continues to inspire me. How can we ensure that they don’t stop?

​Celine Nguyen is a software designer and writer from California. Her criticism has appeared in ArtReview, The Atlantic, The Believer, and the Cleveland Review of Books. She writes the newsletter personal canon about literature, design and technology.

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