The critic is dead, long live the critic

If the Observer was hoping to reignite the debate on the future of cultural criticism they couldn’t have found a soggier squib than American academic Neal Gabler’s unenlightening essay.

Professional criticism, thinks Gabler, is dead. According to him, reviewers, or “cultural commissars”, used to be able to control what we “ordinary folk” read, watched and listened to “through a process close to cultural brainwashing”. Now we ignore them, consulting blogs and Twitter instead. Gabler sees this as a revolution against cultural elitism.

Several things annoy me about his doomladen, US-centric prognosis:

1. The conflation of the death of criticism with the death of cultural elitism

If professional criticism is in trouble it’s because people don’t read newspapers anymore. Gabler’s idea, that for years critics have been coercing us into watching and reading things we didn’t want to, and that Twitter has finally given us the key to unlock our chains of cultural oppression, is bonkers.