Modern English literary scholar Rónán McDonald offers a minor variation in the critic’s self-justifying rhetoric: If critics don’t force us to try new things, who will? “Controversial artists have often been brought to a resistant public by prominent critics,” McDonald writes for the Guardian. “Clement Greenberg did it for Jackson Pollock. John Ruskin did it for Turner. But are there now critics of sufficient authority to perform this role?” Nope, and you know why? All those pesky blogs and Amazon.com customer reviews. (Actually, he claims, it goes back further than that, to “the anti-authoritarian spirit of the late 1960s.)
“Can we rely on the bloggers to bring vital if alienating art to a wide audience?” McDonald asks. (Apparently not, because Lord knows that blogs are all about reaffirming the limited tastes of the masses, and you’ll never find a blog dealing with the idiosyncratic.) “Without critics of authority,” he warns, “the size and variety of contemporary criticism may ultimately serve the cause of cultural banality and uniformity.” Among the more cynical reactions one might have to such a statement: If America’s newspapers and magazines are anything to go by, critics of authority seem to be doing a fine job of serving the cause of cultural banality and uniformity all on their own.