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 necessar…