When Everyone’s a Critic: How U.S. Arts and Culture Critics Strategize to Maintain Their Cultural Authority

Abstract

ABSTRACT Cultural criticism is a struggle for audience attention, cultural authority, and the power to curate cultural consumption and extend cultural capital. And the authority of cultural critics, whose subjective work evaluates the taste and merit of cultural products including music and film, is complicated by an explosion in cultural production, increased competition for audience attention and the ready availability of amateur culture opinions online. Through in-depth interviews with 44 professional U.S. critics devoted to a wide variety of cultural beats, this study examines the challenges to their cultural and journalistic authority these critics face, as well as the strategies and norms they have developed in order to maintain and reinforce that authority. These challenges include hot takes, performance of the self, amateur competition, and tension surrounding straying too far from their peers. And tactics to strengthen their authority include crafting cultural arguments, pursuing increasingly niche expertise, and supporting diversity and inclusion of non-white-male identities within their ranks.