The Thing About Criticism

In an age where everyone with a smartphone is a potential critic, traditional cultural criticism seems to be on life support. The Associated Press just ended its weekly book reviews. The Chicago Tribune is without a chief film critic for the first time since the 1950s. Even giants like the New York Times are reassigning critics to bring different perspectives to coverage. 

But here's the twist: we need cultural criticism now more than ever.

Why? Because in a sea of TikTok hot takes, Reddit deep dives, and YouTube reaction videos, we risk losing the depth, context, and expertise professional critics bring to the table. Yes, democratization of opinion is powerful, but it can’t replace nuanced analysis.

Here are five reasons why cultural criticism still matters: 

1. Innovation thrives on critique.

Insightful criticism helps creators refine ideas and push boundaries – without it, culture stagnates. 

Consider the world of scholarly research, for example. Only a small faction of the population actually reads academic articles. Still, they provide the foundation upon which new ideas in technology, medicine, business, and other fields are created, making their contribution to society consequential. The same thing goes with cultural critiques. They provide a foundational baseline that gives cultural works context and contemporary meaning, upon which perspectives and subsequent think-pieces are scaffolded. Without it, the self-referential nature of accumulating knowledge basically becomes a bunch of opinions built on sand.

2. Cultural understanding is at risk. 

Social media algorithms often show us what we already like. Critics guide us through unfamiliar worlds. 

One critic referred to it as a landscape of media consumption equivalent to never having to eat your vegetables, and that means you never get to realize that, suddenly, you love Brussels sprouts. Go figure. Sure, we’ll take dessert every time, if left to our own devices, but is that what’s best for us? Of course not. We need our vegetables. Even if we don’t fully appreciate them today, later on, we just might—if not for its taste, then certainly for its health benefits. Otherwise, we find ourselves in an Idiocracy-like situation where life imitates art, and we eschew what nourishes us for what's easy.

3. Quality over quantity. 

A million “likes” don’t equal insight.

Professional critics provide depth that TikTok trends can’t match. As Ryan Dombal, a longtime features editor at Pitchfork, put it, the written critic offers a deep investigation into why something is meaningful by exploring how it relates to other works over time and through contextual framings. This isn’t a matter of hot takes, quick opinions, thumbs up or down, or the aggregation of the same—i.e., Rotten Tomatoes—as the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, Dave Remnick, has so rightly declared. No, criticism is ideally something a great deal more probing, more substantive, and surgical than that. Just because something has been viewed a lot, that doesn’t make it substantive—again, see Idiocracy for reference. 

4. Brands and culture are intertwined.

Consumption is a cultural act; therefore, we buy the branded products that are congruent with our cultural subscription. “I am, therefore, I buy,” if you will.

Companies know this intuitively, which is why so often they look to trends and zeitgeist-happenings to identify potential opportunities to engage "in culture." However, trendwatching and cool-hunting only tell you “what people are doing.” Deep cultural analysis, on the other hand, tells us “why” they’re doing it. It goes beyond the surface to the subconscious, meaningful foundations of the observable. When we replace deep analysis for superficial observations, we reduce our ability to truly engage. It’s no surprise that so many companies continue to misunderstand the values of the youth; they’re merely interacting with what they’re doing as opposed to immersing themselves into why they’re doing it. Critiques can help these marketing practitioners understand relevance and establish credibility, see folks like Taylor Lorenz and Wesley Morris, for example. 

5. The future is balanced. 

Traditional criticism and new voices don’t need to compete; they can and should coexist, creating a richer, more diverse conversation.

Sports have done a fairly good job of creating a prototype for what could be. For example, athletic events happen on the court. Commentators observe and analyze these happenings with in-depth statistics and knowledge of the game, which helps inform the metatext that results in a slew of podcast conversations, Twitter exchanges (I’ll never call it “X,” for the record), and “water-cooler” banter. It’s an ecosystem that enables discourse and invites more voices to the conversation. They all work together to deepen our engagement with sport even beyond the actual playing season. It’s not unlike the arts. There used to be a time in my youth when a Vibe article was the end-all, be-all of a conversation regarding a new album release or bubbling artist. We’d read the article and discuss it at school, and that was that. However, today’s technology has welcomed those “lunchroom conversations” to the broader discussion so that more people can impart their analysis and perspective on cultural productions that are put into the world. That’s terrific. You have the critics’ take. You have the laymen's voices and the analysis of dope creators like F.D. Signifer (who provides brilliantly rigorous analysis on cultural happenings informed by the scholarship and the critics), all available in the media milieu to add texture to the broader metatext. The cacophony of the entire ecosystem provides a landscape of rich dialogue, which is net-positive for social discourse. However, at the rate we’re going, we’ll only be left with our lunchroom banter, based purely on vibes and not a ton of rigor.

Idiocracy, ironically, provides a useful analog for us. As a social commentary and a cautionary tale about a future where humanity has been “dumbed down” through anti-intellectualism and consumerism, perhaps we’d be well advised to take note. After all, in the world of culture, silence isn't golden - it's a missed opportunity for growth, understanding, and, ultimately, connection.