ArtsJournal is hosting a one-week only panel blog on the role of the critic in today's webnoisy world. Says moderator Douglas McLennan:
Everyone's a critic. And now that anyone has access to an audience through the internet, our computers have become a cacophony of people with opinions. Clearly not all opinions are equal. Traditionally, the influence of an opinion was closely tied to the venue in which it was published - how widely it was disseminated or how prestigious the publication was thought to be...
With a growing flood of opinions available to all, some suggest that the influence of the traditional critic is waning, that the opinions of the many will drown out the power of the few. But in a time when access to information and entertainment and art seems to be growing exponentially, more than ever we need ways to to sort through the mass and get at the "good" stuff. The question is how? Where is the critical authority to come from?
Some suggest that new social networking software that ranks community preferences and elevates some opinions over others will supplant the formerly powerful traditional critics. So what is to be the new critical currency? Stripped of traditional legitimacies, how will the most interesting critical voices be heard and have influence?
This is a topic that seems to get recycled and rehashed every other month, either in the blogodin (always with a sprinkle of "we're inevitable" superiority) or in the print world (always with a conflicted mixture of jealousy and condescension). The topic therefore wears thin most the time. But ArtsJournal's panel blogs are usually pretty interesting, so I'll be tuning in to see what the fifteen or so online and print critics have to spew—er, say. The conversation began yesterday and will continue through Friday.
Comments