Anthony Fantano is probably the biggest music critic right now as defined by the article. Videogamedunkey is an excellent video game critic (who is now also producing games). YouTube contains many many film critics whose preferred medium is the video essay (let me shout out Lindsey Ellis and Foldable Human).
I'd say the three way relationship described is still most alive in music, but it definitely still exists for other artforms, just in a new artform itself.
thanks for these examples—I'm really interested in the critical culture of YouTube and what people see as the great, very analytical/thorough critics vs the more reactive ones! especially for different artforms
Rereading my comment now I also have to shout out Every Frame a Painting and Patrick Willems, both film critics who have gone on to / are in the process of making films. Also worth mentioning as a critic of things more broadly is Jenny Nicholson
One of the challenges with web-based art is that to create it almost requires you to be a technologist yourself. You don't need to know how a printing press works to publish a novel. You do need to understand software to publish a novel website.
Agreed—it makes web art (and videogames too, imo) difficult to break into, although I think that deep technical expertise actually allows more aesthetic rigor/expressivity sometimes!
This is an area where I'm really, really curious how much LLMs + vibe-coding will change things…like will vibe-coding make it possible for more trained artists (with less of a coding background) to execute technologically complex works? Will more people be able to do what, say, Lawrence Lek has done with complex videogame-like films? Or will the cutting edge of new media art always require very deep technical expertise?
I think we live in a fortunate time to establish some sort of a democratized critic space - if we start to value quality and creativity over numbers and superficial metrics again.
It’s great that basically everybody today has the tools to participate, but the audience has to have a certain level of affection and understanding towards the medium. An interest that is not driven by short time attention or emotions, but is rooted in a deeply artistic view.
In this time where everything seems to lead towards technocracy, an artistic revolution is overdue.
Thank you Anna-Maria—Clara can attest to how much editing and rewriting was involved in the ending, so I'm really glad it resonated!
I think what I'd like to see, more than anything, is a world that preserves that democratic participation and discourse but also has the instinct towards thoughtfulness, rigor, and careful attention/argumentation that characterizes much of the best 20th century criticism. There's no reason why people can't do it today! (Despite the distractions of the attention economy…)
I grew up in the 1980s and watched the world change from the era you describe to the advent of the Internet. The thing is, no one's really looking for quality literature, film or music. If they are, it is a slim minority. While we still have gatekeepers, the Internet has allowed everyone to express themselves all the time to everyone else. So garbage spreads much easier because it's easier to consume. That in turn fueled very short attention spans and people are constantly looking to trigger their reward centers rather than having to put off gratification for long-form content. When someone says something is "dead" whether it's the novel or film or God, that thing isn't dead, people's appetite for it is simply evaporated. A nightclub is dead only when people don't show up to dance.
Returning to this — I also think it's completely wrong that there's been no cultural or artistic innovation in the 21st century. 2010s music sounds completely different from 1990s music, 2010s video games are massively denser & more elaborate than 1990s video games, 2010s tv series had far higher production values and more sophisticated storytelling than 1990s tv series, and even if we quickly got exhausted by the "cinematic universe" franchising of 2010s movies, it was still a creative new idea with a lot of potential when done well: see Into the Spiderverse, a film which not only revolutionized the look of animated movies, but also only succeeds as a narrative because audiences got comfortable with characters being radically reinterpreted through a series of adaptations.
Have the early 2020s had any hot new trends which would be surprising to someone from 2013? I'm not sure yet. Sinners and KPop Demon Hunters are both hit movies that couldn't have gotten made a decade ago, let alone 30 years ago, but that's all I can think of in the moment.
Critics were the gatekeepers. The tastemakers. But the internet decided it didn’t like them anymore. So now we have this flat cultural landscape in terms of art. The real story is the technology itself, though. It is evolving faster than any art or cultural movement.
I finally got around to finishing this today. I figured read it and close the tab. Instead, I need to read it again, and now have several more tabs open to explore sites and people you reference here. Wonderful, thought provoking writing - and criticism. Thank you.
I find myself somewhat nonplussed. To expand on Niclas’ comment, perhaps you just aren’t seeing the parts of the internet where people are critically engaging with media? Fandom boards; subreddits; YouTube essays; chat servers; blogs; and so on. You can probably get ChatGPT or Claude Sonnet 4.5 to inform you of what avenues of criticism exist for any given subculture with a little thoughtful prompting.
I actually started off reading and participating in all those places (fandom boards/listservs, subreddits for literature/art/fashion, IRC channels, and so on…) well before I read any "official" criticism, say in the New Yorker or NYRB. But I would say that "critical engagement" is different than actual critical writing, which—to me—often has a more expansive remit.
My argument is—I hope this is clear—is not that informal online channels can never produce serious critical writing, but that many online platforms have incentives that discourage it. I certainly believe that there are people doing excellent film criticism on YouTube and excellent literary criticism on Reddit, because I've seen it; I also believe that that kind of work rarely gets the same reach as more trivial media takes on the same platforms.
The conclusion of the essay also points to a few places where I think great criticism is happening, and on Substack I regularly read and reshare really exceptional critical writing (a recent favorite: https://chrismarino.substack.com/p/the-death-of-the-cool)
I don't think I need ChatGPT to orient me, but if you think I'm missing something, feel free to let me know :)
I think that one part of the issue is that the sheer quantity of new media makes it difficult for any particular work to tip over from "good" to "important". As someone who is on Letterboxd and RateYourMusic, there are plenty of new movies & albums that get lots of hype from the movie / music enthusiasts on those sites. The hard part is building up a big enough fanbase around one particular thing so that the people who aren't trawling through the new releases every week take notice. Similarly, my friends who are more into video games or tv series than I am are often hype for stuff that I've never heard of.
I also second Niclas' point about youtube video essayists being a small hub of good criticism. A good place to start for recommendations would be to look up Nebula, a mini streaming service created by a large collective of youtube video essayists
Seems the impulse for better criticism (better art, more generally) might be tied to fresh engagement on the issue of too much online-ness? The backlash against AI / subtle but ubiquitous reclamation of what it means to be human—coming after a period of dissociation therewith—might mitigate against a web-based art movement’s significance or even its viability as such?
how can luddite-inspired groups avoid the pitfalls of romanticizing the past while raising our consciousness of "dopaminergic slop"?
how can a web-based people coalesce to create a movement of web-based literature? with online curation bringing the energy and taste of the entertainment genres (simon whybray for hyperpop, twitch streamers for fromsoft) are curator-critics the answer?
Anthony Fantano is probably the biggest music critic right now as defined by the article. Videogamedunkey is an excellent video game critic (who is now also producing games). YouTube contains many many film critics whose preferred medium is the video essay (let me shout out Lindsey Ellis and Foldable Human).
I'd say the three way relationship described is still most alive in music, but it definitely still exists for other artforms, just in a new artform itself.
thanks for these examples—I'm really interested in the critical culture of YouTube and what people see as the great, very analytical/thorough critics vs the more reactive ones! especially for different artforms
Rereading my comment now I also have to shout out Every Frame a Painting and Patrick Willems, both film critics who have gone on to / are in the process of making films. Also worth mentioning as a critic of things more broadly is Jenny Nicholson
One of the challenges with web-based art is that to create it almost requires you to be a technologist yourself. You don't need to know how a printing press works to publish a novel. You do need to understand software to publish a novel website.
Agreed—it makes web art (and videogames too, imo) difficult to break into, although I think that deep technical expertise actually allows more aesthetic rigor/expressivity sometimes!
This is an area where I'm really, really curious how much LLMs + vibe-coding will change things…like will vibe-coding make it possible for more trained artists (with less of a coding background) to execute technologically complex works? Will more people be able to do what, say, Lawrence Lek has done with complex videogame-like films? Or will the cutting edge of new media art always require very deep technical expertise?
That's sort of my hope as well, that with AI spinning up novel UIs will become trivial.
Also I'm a software engineer who made an online novel that I really think you should check out if you're interested in this sort of thing. I have a post about it here, please give it a look: https://open.substack.com/pub/tenminutestopingpong/p/i-spent-a-decade-of-my-life-on-an?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=mtgo5
I have goosebumps. So glad I read til the end.
I think we live in a fortunate time to establish some sort of a democratized critic space - if we start to value quality and creativity over numbers and superficial metrics again.
It’s great that basically everybody today has the tools to participate, but the audience has to have a certain level of affection and understanding towards the medium. An interest that is not driven by short time attention or emotions, but is rooted in a deeply artistic view.
In this time where everything seems to lead towards technocracy, an artistic revolution is overdue.
Thank you Anna-Maria—Clara can attest to how much editing and rewriting was involved in the ending, so I'm really glad it resonated!
I think what I'd like to see, more than anything, is a world that preserves that democratic participation and discourse but also has the instinct towards thoughtfulness, rigor, and careful attention/argumentation that characterizes much of the best 20th century criticism. There's no reason why people can't do it today! (Despite the distractions of the attention economy…)
Exactly, very well put!
I like this
I loved W. David Marx’s "Status and Culture" and I'm looking forward to read Blank Space as soon as possible (even more now after your post!)
Yes, I thought Status and Culture was brilliant—a really good synthesis of so many sociological concepts. Blank Space is coming out in a week or so!
Also—you might also enjoy this interview W. David Marx did with Andrea Domanick and Emilie Friedlander about the book. Domanick and Friedlander run the Culture Journalist newsletter + podcast (very good, I just subscribed!) https://theculturejournalist.substack.com/p/blank-space-cultural-history-twenty-first-century-w-david-marx
I grew up in the 1980s and watched the world change from the era you describe to the advent of the Internet. The thing is, no one's really looking for quality literature, film or music. If they are, it is a slim minority. While we still have gatekeepers, the Internet has allowed everyone to express themselves all the time to everyone else. So garbage spreads much easier because it's easier to consume. That in turn fueled very short attention spans and people are constantly looking to trigger their reward centers rather than having to put off gratification for long-form content. When someone says something is "dead" whether it's the novel or film or God, that thing isn't dead, people's appetite for it is simply evaporated. A nightclub is dead only when people don't show up to dance.
Returning to this — I also think it's completely wrong that there's been no cultural or artistic innovation in the 21st century. 2010s music sounds completely different from 1990s music, 2010s video games are massively denser & more elaborate than 1990s video games, 2010s tv series had far higher production values and more sophisticated storytelling than 1990s tv series, and even if we quickly got exhausted by the "cinematic universe" franchising of 2010s movies, it was still a creative new idea with a lot of potential when done well: see Into the Spiderverse, a film which not only revolutionized the look of animated movies, but also only succeeds as a narrative because audiences got comfortable with characters being radically reinterpreted through a series of adaptations.
Have the early 2020s had any hot new trends which would be surprising to someone from 2013? I'm not sure yet. Sinners and KPop Demon Hunters are both hit movies that couldn't have gotten made a decade ago, let alone 30 years ago, but that's all I can think of in the moment.
Critics were the gatekeepers. The tastemakers. But the internet decided it didn’t like them anymore. So now we have this flat cultural landscape in terms of art. The real story is the technology itself, though. It is evolving faster than any art or cultural movement.
I finally got around to finishing this today. I figured read it and close the tab. Instead, I need to read it again, and now have several more tabs open to explore sites and people you reference here. Wonderful, thought provoking writing - and criticism. Thank you.
I find myself somewhat nonplussed. To expand on Niclas’ comment, perhaps you just aren’t seeing the parts of the internet where people are critically engaging with media? Fandom boards; subreddits; YouTube essays; chat servers; blogs; and so on. You can probably get ChatGPT or Claude Sonnet 4.5 to inform you of what avenues of criticism exist for any given subculture with a little thoughtful prompting.
I confess I am also nonplussed by your comment!
I actually started off reading and participating in all those places (fandom boards/listservs, subreddits for literature/art/fashion, IRC channels, and so on…) well before I read any "official" criticism, say in the New Yorker or NYRB. But I would say that "critical engagement" is different than actual critical writing, which—to me—often has a more expansive remit.
My argument is—I hope this is clear—is not that informal online channels can never produce serious critical writing, but that many online platforms have incentives that discourage it. I certainly believe that there are people doing excellent film criticism on YouTube and excellent literary criticism on Reddit, because I've seen it; I also believe that that kind of work rarely gets the same reach as more trivial media takes on the same platforms.
The conclusion of the essay also points to a few places where I think great criticism is happening, and on Substack I regularly read and reshare really exceptional critical writing (a recent favorite: https://chrismarino.substack.com/p/the-death-of-the-cool)
I don't think I need ChatGPT to orient me, but if you think I'm missing something, feel free to let me know :)
I think that one part of the issue is that the sheer quantity of new media makes it difficult for any particular work to tip over from "good" to "important". As someone who is on Letterboxd and RateYourMusic, there are plenty of new movies & albums that get lots of hype from the movie / music enthusiasts on those sites. The hard part is building up a big enough fanbase around one particular thing so that the people who aren't trawling through the new releases every week take notice. Similarly, my friends who are more into video games or tv series than I am are often hype for stuff that I've never heard of.
I also second Niclas' point about youtube video essayists being a small hub of good criticism. A good place to start for recommendations would be to look up Nebula, a mini streaming service created by a large collective of youtube video essayists
Seems the impulse for better criticism (better art, more generally) might be tied to fresh engagement on the issue of too much online-ness? The backlash against AI / subtle but ubiquitous reclamation of what it means to be human—coming after a period of dissociation therewith—might mitigate against a web-based art movement’s significance or even its viability as such?
how can luddite-inspired groups avoid the pitfalls of romanticizing the past while raising our consciousness of "dopaminergic slop"?
how can a web-based people coalesce to create a movement of web-based literature? with online curation bringing the energy and taste of the entertainment genres (simon whybray for hyperpop, twitch streamers for fromsoft) are curator-critics the answer?