On Friday, the Abbey Theatre will host a symposium on the current state of arts criticism.
The title, Mission Critical, suggests the situation is grim. For anyone who has spent time in arts journalism, the sense of unease will be familiar. The number of reviews is falling; attention spans are shrinking; the broader media ecosystem that once helped to nurture new critical voices has all but disappeared.
The appetite for cultural conversation has not necessarily gone away, but it has scattered into more places than most of us can comfortably track.
The keynote address on Friday, from The Guardian’s Arifa Akbar, will ask whether the art of criticism is facing a crisis. The short answer is yes. The longer one depends on where you look.
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National newspapers retain some commitment to the idea that if an event took place, someone should try to make sense of it for the rest of us. But the downward pressure on print revenues has led to the near-extinction of the smaller specialist publications that once offered space for emerging voices to practise the craft. They could publish long, discursive essays that did not need to chase instant clicks; they provided a halfway house between academia and journalism, keeping whole genres of criticism alive.
Most are now gone or digitised into ghosts of their former selves. The all-important career ladder has been pulled away.
The nationals have not escaped the squeeze. Budgets have been pared back. Specialists now find themselves filing across multiple disciplines.
For freelancers – who make up the bulk of arts journalists – the picture is even starker. Pay hasn’t matched inflation for decades, while the pool of outlets commissioning reviews has contracted, leaving patchwork careers held together by goodwill and side jobs.
Changing audience tastes add further uncertainty. The traditional review format remains useful for some artforms but sits awkwardly with others. The music album, for example, no longer holds the commanding position it had from the 1960s to the early 2000s. In an age of streaming, playlists, viral snippets and constant churn, the idea of a critic approaching a discrete body of work, judging it in context and conveying that judgment to readers feels quaint.
Films now land simultaneously in cinemas and on couches; television seasons appear in bulk; books arrive with pre-assembled fanbases on social platforms. The audience, accustomed to endless choice, often turns to guidance from user-generated reactions or aggregator sites. The traditional review, with its blend of description, verdict and a bit of history, still has a place, but a less prominent one.
If one culprit looms behind these shifts it is the early digital consensus that everything should be free. For newspapers, this was particularly unforgiving. When online advertising proved incapable of replacing print revenue, something had to give. Too often that something was culture coverage, mislabelled as an optional luxury.
The huge irony is that readers aligned with specific cultural interests can be among the most loyal of all. The slow turn toward paid digital subscriptions has made that clearer. Specialist writers, knowledgeable voices and distinctive judgments are exactly the sort of material that persuades people to sign up and stay. For a subscription business, niche is a feature, not a bug.
There is, then, a faint glimmer of hope amid all the gloom. The migration to subscription models has revived some of the conditions that support critical writing: time, depth, the sense that a writer is speaking to a known audience rather than shouting into the digital void.
But the forms themselves will need to change. Criticism is appearing in podcasts, newsletters and hybrid essays that sit somewhere between reporting and personal reflection. New platforms emerge and new conventions develop; the tone is often more conversational, sometimes more intimate. This adaptation to how contemporary audiences consume media is both healthy and necessary. But it can also provoke unease. When The New York Times recently adjusted its approach to criticism, favouring more of what its editors described as cultural analysis, it caused a predictable backlash.
It is worth remembering that criticism has always been a hybrid. William Hazlitt’s theatre notices, Kenneth Tynan’s essays, Pauline Kael’s freewheeling arguments: none confined themselves to a fixed template.
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They moved between description and theory, sharp verdicts and enthusiastic advocacy. The current moment is not unprecedented. Technological change has repeatedly forced critics to rethink their role. What is new is the speed of change and the fragility of the professional structures around it.
Why persist with professional criticism when everyone has an opinion and can post it instantly? Criticism is a public good that helps us think about the art we encounter. It offers context, comparison and, when done well, the pleasure of good writing for its own sake. It also keeps cultural institutions honest. Artists may not always enjoy being reviewed, but most will agree that the absence of informed scrutiny is worse.
Still, if criticism is to thrive, it will require not just financial support but formal innovation, from slow-burn newsletters to live discussions to entirely new types of digital annotation.
At the same time, the traditional review, despite all the obituaries, retains a grip on the imagination in a way arid academic analysis never will. It captures a moment in time and offers a verdict that readers can agree or quarrel with, turning a private encounter into a shared conversation. The craft still matters and its uncertain future is worth fighting over.
