I'm Sad That The World That Inspired Me To Get Into This Game Is Now Gone
A few thoughts on the death of [paid, institutional] criticism.
Criticism is dying.
When I say that, I don’t mean that there’s a dearth of people or places to read/watch people thoughtfully critiquing art. Rather, I’m talking about the old, legacy world of institutional criticism that many of us grew up consuming.
In the past few months, we’ve seen The New York Times reassign four respected critics to other beats, Vanity Fair lay off its chief film critic, The Associated Press sunset its book criticism section, and the Chicago Tribune eliminate its film critic role — the position once held by Gene Siskel. These used to be the jobs that a person like me would aspire to one day get, maybe in my wildest dreams. Now they barely exist anymore.
There are multiple cultural and economic forces at play here. The media business in general is in a state of decline, with many newspapers and publications struggling to get into the black as tech companies eat up a larger percentage of ad dollars. But I also think the people running many of these places realize that the concept of a critic paid a full-time salary to watch stuff and write about it in a newspaper or on a website doesn’t really make much sense in the current landscape. The overwhelmingly vast majority of people consume reviews and commentary on platforms that are not news websites — they’re on YouTube and Instagram and TikTok. Why should media companies continue investing in an idea that no longer has any cultural relevance?
[Side note: What makes things especially challenging is not just that the media industry is dying, but that the stuff that was supposed to replace it is also in a state of chaos. Twitter (now X) was acquired by a drug-addled right-wing billionaire and has been turned into a cesspool of Nazis and misogynists, while Substack (the platform I’m writing this on) continues to actively promote white supremacists. My days on this space, which I created to get away from the Nazis, are surely numbered. Stay tuned.]
At their best, critics can help us make sense of the work that we’re watching. Some of my fondest and formative memories of coming up in this world were the hours I spent glued to my computer and reading Roger Ebert’s reviews of various films. Ebert, like other great critics, knew how to dive deeper into works of art and unearth hidden meaning, all with prose that would make the original work even more compelling.
But even at their worst, critics can usually help you understand whether it’s worth spending two of your most valuable resources on watching something: your time and your money. There are billion dollar marketing machines (many of them) with thousands of people working all in service of getting you to pay to watch stuff. Given this, it’s useful to have someone whose job it is to say, “Hey, maybe not so fast.”
I know critics aren’t exactly the most aspirational figures, but in a world where media companies can’t pay people to be critics, something is lost. There’s something inherently valuable about having an independent voice, unbothered by financial or business considerations, try to evaluate a work of art. These days, I’m frequently reminded of what New York Times chief film critic A.O. Scott said when he left his film critic post after more than 20 years:
I’m not a fan of modern fandom. This isn’t only because I’ve been swarmed on Twitter by angry devotees of Marvel and DC and (more recently) “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” It’s more that the behavior of these social media hordes represents an anti-democratic, anti-intellectual mind-set that is harmful to the cause of art and antithetical to the spirit of movies. Fan culture is rooted in conformity, obedience, group identity and mob behavior, and its rise mirrors and models the spread of intolerant, authoritarian, aggressive tendencies in our politics and our communal life.
Indeed, modern cultural commentary is less about interpreting art and more about making people feel good. So many people derive their sense of identity and purpose from the way they feel about the works they consume. If you don’t like the art, the rationale goes, you don’t like them. And therefore, the rationale continues, you probably shouldn’t be allowed to talk about art on the internet anymore.
So what’s left? How can someone make a living from criticism these days? Aside from the rapidly vanishing criticism jobs that remain, the only ways to really make a living in this game are to be funded directly by your audience (have I mentioned I have a Patreon?) or to get ad money/sponsorships — sometimes from the studios or companies creating the art itself. This inherently limits the types of people who can actually do this (e.g. those with large audiences, or audiences that can support them), as well as the type of critiques that can actually occur (e.g. if you’re sponsored by the latest Marvel film, it’s hard to offer an impartial review of it). I don’t begrudge anyone taking any reasonable measures to survive in this industry these days. The world we once knew is gone. New business models have to be created if this is to survive in any form.
But I also think people don’t really understand what we’re losing. Because in a world without impartial critics, all that would be left are the marketing machines and the mob.
Other Stuff David Chen Has Made
On Decoding TV, Patrick Klepek and I discussed the latest episode of Alien: Earth, which was extremely entertaining, but perhaps not all that interesting.
On The Filmcast, we reviewed Darren Aronofsky’s latest, Caught Stealing. Fun movie!
[PAID ONLY] On my personal Patreon, my wife and I are continuing the series in which we talk about five viral videos from the week. Watch here.
Over on the Decoding TV newsletter (subscribe for free!), Dan Gvozden has an interesting theory about what’s going on in Peacemaker this season.
Your article, Dave, raises a point that feels bigger than journalism, bigger even than criticism: it speaks to a fundamental change in how our culture thinks about art, meaning, and public conversation itself. The disappearance of full-time critics from institutions like The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The Chicago Tribune isn’t just about job losses or the crumbling economics of media. It marks the slow erosion of a role that once acted as a kind of cultural conscience — a bridge between artist and audience, interpretation and experience, taste and debate.
Criticism at its best has always been about more than verdicts. You rightly invoke Roger Ebert, because figures like him understood that a good review wasn’t simply a consumer guide telling you whether a film was “worth it.” It was an act of thinking in public. It was about drawing out meaning, noticing patterns, connecting a work to the broader world — historical, political, emotional — and inviting readers to see differently. Ebert, Pauline Kael, James Agee, A.O. Scott: they wrote with the assumption that art mattered, that it deserved to be engaged with seriously rather than passively consumed.
What you capture so sharply, Dave, is how two forces are now squeezing this space out of existence. On one side is the marketing machine — billion-dollar PR campaigns designed to generate not conversation, but consensus. On the other side is fan culture, turbocharged by social media, which increasingly treats criticism not as interpretation but as a threat. As A.O. Scott observed when he left the Times, the rise of aggressive, tribal fandom mirrors our wider political polarisation: it demands loyalty, conformity, and affirmation. To criticise a Marvel film, for example, isn’t read as a claim about the film’s qualities; it’s read as an attack on the community that identifies with it.
The result is that modern cultural discourse often collapses into extremes: uncritical hype or unthinking outrage, with little room for ambiguity, contradiction, or nuance. The independent critic — underpaid, frequently harassed, squeezed between corporate interests and online mobs — becomes an endangered species. And as the article notes, when legacy outlets kill off these roles, the only alternatives are crowdfunding or sponsorships, both of which risk eroding impartiality. A critic reliant on Patreon must keep subscribers happy; a critic reliant on studio money faces apparent conflicts of interest. Either way, the conditions for actual independence shrink.
But perhaps the most unsettling point in your article comes near the end:
“In a world without impartial critics, all that would be left are the marketing machines and the mob.”
This is the real cultural loss. Without independent criticism, art risks becoming either a pure commodity or a pure tribal identity. Both kill serious conversation. Both collapse the space where work can be wrestled with rather than sold or defended. And without that space, we lose something essential: the idea that art can challenge us, unsettle us, even divide us — and that this is part of its value.
The irony is that we live in a time of unprecedented access to art and commentary about art. Yet so much of it feels shallow, transactional, or performative. The extended, thoughtful essay or the rigorous, sceptical review struggles to survive in an attention economy built for speed and outrage. And when critics vanish, so too does the public habit of meeting art with patience, seriousness, and intellectual curiosity.
If the old model of institutional criticism is gone for good — and it may well be — then the challenge ahead is whether new forms can emerge that resist both corporate capture and mob conformity. Because without them, as the article warns, we risk entering a cultural landscape where the only voices left belong either to advertisers or to algorithms. And both speak in the language of persuasion, not understanding.
I’m of two minds on this. I used to also devour every Roger Ebert review (I discovered him and Siskel when Sneak Previews reviewed Superman in 1978). I religiously bought his review tomes and Leonard Maltin’s. I love a long, detailed review of a movie by someone who knows what they’re talking about or has a distinct viewpoint. Movie reviews/critiques are VALUABLE.
But…
The old guard reviewers aren’t unique anymore. The internet has given literally EVERYONE a voice. And among all that noise are countless, nearly endless very worthwhile voices. Social media is a cesspool, of course, but if you go to Letterboxd, you’ll find dozens of unpaid, non-professional critics who never went to any school or obtained any formal movie criticism training. And those voices are equally valuable.
The Filmcast has been my top go-to movie discussion source for the past fifteen years (whenever Inception came out. That was the first of your podcasts I discovered). To my knowledge, none of you are trained movie critics, or are being paid by a traditional criticism outlet. But it doesn’t matter. You, Devindra and Jeff’s voices are some that I trust, enjoy, disagree with, and revel in.
What I think we are starting to really miss in a variety of ways is The Monoculture(TM). Obviously, music, movies and TV industries are suffering because very very little can gain enough of a cultural penetration to return the sort of profits that used to be relied upon. The top ten movies of the year recently are a few IP blockbusters, and a bunch of formerly-reliable blockbusters that are now barely eking out break-even status, and studios and fans are having to realign what they consider ‘successful’.
The biggest factor *I* believe is the death of The Monoculture. I think we underestimate just how powerful the role that scarcity used to take in our media. By ‘scarcity’, I mean three Broadcast TV channels, a fraction of the movie theaters we currently have, VHS tapes priced to rent not buy, radio stations and MTV being the primary sources of almost all music listening and discovery, with limited selections of the currently popular music available for purchase at the Walmart or Musicland in your town.
We were ALL experiencing the same media, whether we wanted to or not. You knew every song in the top 40 of your genre, even the ones you despised. You had no choice. If you wanted to talk about a movie or TV show, you had to watch one of the ones at the theater or running on TV that one time (pre-VCR days) or wait for reruns. If you examine your own memories of media from bygone days, half or more is stuff you didn’t even like at the time.
We now tend to retroactively apply a sheen of “that was great” to old media we experienced because it just holds such a beloved place in our hearts. We tell ourselves it was great. It was a classic. We tell ourselves the songs and movies that bubbled to the top of our memories do so because of how great they were, and by extension, how great our tastes were. But the reality is that so much of what we think of as “good” is simply that we were worn down by endless repetition. This is not to say that none of the “good” songs were actually good, just that the ones that won the race are those that had enough exposure for it to find its audience and those who were capable of loving it.
All that to bring it back to critics. Back in the Monoculture days, we needed people to contextualize the media we were ALL consuming. Out of all the stuff that everyone liked and everyone considered “good”, what was a monocultural opinion of it? It was filtered through maybe half a dozen voices.
But we don’t have any sort of Monoculture anymore. Everyone experiences media in their own silos. I don’t need a broad opinion of any particular work. I couldn’t care less what a particular ‘authority’ says about a song or movie. I only care about people who are in or adjacent to my silo. A fun game I play every year now is “WHO IS THAT ARTIST NOMINATED FOR ALL THOSE GRAMMYS????” Most of them, I’ve never even heard of, much less any of their music. I don’t even accidentally hear any hip-hop or country music songs. I haven’t accidentally seen any OWI (Organization With Initials) procedural on broadcast TV in a decade. It’s at the point where I can even skip Marvel movies now, and I won’t be missing much conversation.
It’s a sad day, and we’re probably definitely missing something major by not having media funneled to us through limited sources, but I also wouldn’t trade in my unlimited access to EVERY song and movie and TV show and book and podcast and youtube video that’s ever been created, in my pocket, 24/7.