I read this article at NYMag—“Do Media Organizations Even Want Cultural Criticism?,” by Charlotte Klein—and I found it sort of annoying. Then a friend sent it to me asking what I thought of it and I said I thought it was kind of annoying. Then a separate friend sent it to me asking me what I thought of it and at that point though my answer remained “this is kind of annoying” I sort of felt like OK, fine. I will etch my annoyance in a medium that is less lasting than bronze, i.e., email. Here we are.
My problems are twofold and can basically be summed up as:
part one, “media organizations”
part two, “cultural criticism”
To begin, though, the actual passage that made me go, “this is sort of annoying” involves neither of these things. It is this line: “The irony of the decline of written criticism is that nearly everyone I spoke to agrees that it is more necessary than ever.” I mean yes, because you talked to a bunch of writers who are critics. What exactly were they going to say? “I feel like we’re a definite medium priority”?
First, “media organizations.” This is an accurate term for how the big leagues work, in a way that calling them “magazines” and “newspapers” and so on probably isn’t in many cases. The magazines are like… a little hand puppet on the tentacle of some Cthulhu-like being. That is a bit unfair as it implies the magazine is fake, which it isn’t, but while I can imagine what it is like to be “an editor” of “New York Magazine” such that I can imagine what an “editor” “wants” I cannot possibly imagine what a media organization wants other than attention and growth. What is it like to be a media organization? We’ll never know, if we’re lucky. Anyway, Klein writes:
Part of the problem is that reviews now float amid millions of other pieces of similar content on the web instead of being part of a bundle that you used to get on your doorstep, which allowed a reader to serendipitously stumble upon a piece of criticism they otherwise wouldn’t have sought out. “By having packaged content, the big and the small together, you could funnel the eyes there for the big shiny things to the less shiny thing, and it was exciting. Now we know people love Q&As and Thanksgiving recipes and could give less of a shit about dance reviews,” said one prominent arts critic. “Some of it is anti-intellectualism and the death of high culture, but some of it is also that the landscape of media consumption is set up now so you never have to do the equivalent of eating your vegetables, and that means you never get to suddenly realize that you love Brussels sprouts.”
Actually… I think there’s a slightly different thing going on here, which is that if you were a magazine, you had an audience of subscribers. You brought in new subscribers by various means, like news stands sales, but you also had the people who were really New Republic readers (or whatever magazine you choose). An audience is not just a way of getting attention. An audience creates a conversation, a culture, a context. It is not simply that in a paper copy you might as well read everything because it’s in front of you (and nobody would know if you didn’t). The audience and the magazine existed in a relationship with each other.1
If you’re reading the reminiscences of writers of a certain age, they mention looking at magazine covers and tables of contents of the magazines to which their parents subscribed, or which they saw for sale, aspirationally: that could be me.… But I wasn’t doing that, and I can’t imagine the kids younger than me were either. I had no dreams of writing for a place. I just wanted to write. The only big-gish American magazine which I think has successfully kept its sense of identity and specificity in this way is Harper’s. If you say that you think Harper’s dealt with the internet well by pretending it simply never happened, you sound crazy. But… well, didn’t it, kind of? I’m sure the internal story is more complicated and much more frustrating.
So do media organizations want cultural criticism? No, because they don’t want anything that is an actual thing. Media organizations do not want cultural criticism the same way they do not want war reporting or fluffy opinion pieces as those specific things. They want those things as a way of getting what they actually want. The problem for writers and for editors is that there’s no way to teach the media organization to value what you value, because the media organization exists in Lovecraft space and does not have human values.
Here is an illustration of what I mean:
But that brings us to part two.
“Cultural criticism” is a term like “religion,” that is, it exists but it also doesn’t. “Cultural criticism” is a great term for me, a maniac with very diverse interests, to abuse in my resume and cover letters and other statements such as these. But we can say that actually there are some very different things under this umbrella. There are:
Pieces about pop culture and (to the extent such a thing still exists) “low” culture.
Pieces about middlebrow culture that do not require any particular specialized knowledge.
Pieces about truly niche types of art, where some level of acquired knowledge is useful.
Pieces about things that exist in specific locations, like theater.
Pieces about high culture that require special knowledge, like dance or art galleries.
Types one and two are going to be fine. Generalist critics, like myself, may never make a living writing, but we’ll always be able to work. When we want to, we can even dabble in specialized topics. Type three will also probably be fine, because niche interests are shared by other niche people. Again, people may not make a living off it. But that’s okay. You can make a living other ways.2 There’s a podcast that is guys talking about old radio shows that pulls in about $2k a month on Patreon. I really don’t think it gets more niche than that.
Types four and five, on the other hand, require both local presence and (for five) some level of professional training. The people who write these pieces are in a very different situation from me. They need local institutions (or big national institutions) that invest in their presence. And the art forms need them. And that situation will not be fixed by me hosting a podcast where I watch every episode of the X-Files or read every Nobel Winner, or by my reviewing niche small press publications, or even by my becoming employed. Dance critics, classical music critics, art critics—they have expertise as well as taste. Theater critics need to write for audiences that can conceivably go see the show. The reassigned critics at the New York Times were, as Klein notes, “television critic Margaret Lyons, music critic Jon Pareles, classical-music critic Zach Woolfe, and theater critic Jesse Green.” In other words, two of them fall directly into this category.3 And while there will always be ways to hear people talk about music and television, that is not true of classical music or theater. Those art forms, and their critics, have different demands and different needs because (not to repeat myself) they happen in specific places.
As long as these two situations are conflated, I think this conversation will never be coherent. There is no single practice of criticism. There is no single subject of criticism that is “culture.” There are objects we’re trying to understand and / or evaluate that require different things and different approaches. And those different practices of criticism have basically different needs.4 Anyway, this is very dashed off and I’m sure it contains at least three assertions of which I will later repent. But that is my read of the vibes.
I’m told.
ETA… As a reader points out, though, the Times is also hiring new critics:
“Lost in the static around reassignments of four critics is the very welcome news that the Times is hiring four new critics,” said Times assistant managing editor Sam Sifton, who oversees the paper’s cultural coverage. “We’re taking valued colleagues who’ve done incredible work on their beat and moving them into new assignments where they can really benefit the report, and we’re taking that opportunity to inject some new voices and some new critics into the report.”
And they’re hiring a theater critic.
It’s also clear to me when I read these things that I conceive of my own work pretty differently from the way other (one might say, more successful and / or better) people do. I don’t view myself as a “beacon of taste” or whatever. I think of myself as part of a conversation.
Interesting--I stopped subscribing to my local paper partially because I felt like I finally had the years and the money to make use of a local culture section and I just wasn't getting anything useful. Still subscribe to the NYT as the ur-paper, of course.
Should we be concerned? I mean, this is third article in three days.
Your classification feels right but I'm completely unqualified to add anything of note. A bit on the side, Due The Circumstances I'm going to spend big part of this autumn basking in the so called high culture. And I noticed something while picking things to attend, the operas, theaters and concert halls who put on the shows and spectacles are not that interested in shining some light on events itself. Every spectacle, opera or recital description published on their respectable websites were bland, Wikipedia like, times and dates, duration, actors, Opus this and that, a few biographical paragraphs.
I had this feeling that they assume that if you're going to see it you already know what you're doing.
OK, let's make a "social experiment", I'm going to go to my local newspaper's website and see if someone reviewed the opera to sell me on it.
Nope.