In defense of cultural criticism
In the precarious practice of cultural criticism and reportage, it is often the most capable and most committed that sticks around. But, sometimes, even the best succumb to the ever-evolving demands of the cultural landscape.
Consider the shocking closure of CNN Philippines Life in January 2024, after nearly a decade of elevating the coverage of the country’s culture and lifestyle beat, or Rappler’s recent shift in the way it covers arts and entertainment, veering away from the written review and moving toward profiles and people-centered stories.
Even major US publications could not avert this cultural criticism crisis. In July 2025, The New York Times had a major culture desk shake-up, which saw its theater, television, and music critics assuming new roles in an effort to “expand beyond the traditional review.” Two months later, The Associated Press gutted its weekly literary coverage, citing a declining audience for book reviews. Vanity Fair, for its part, is set to part ways with trade-style reviews. And in February this year, The Washington Post slashed its Book World section altogether, laying off almost half of its staff.
For people who spend a lot of time thinking about art, myself included, the dismay was immediate—the grief more gradual. No wonder fellow critics are dangling the question of whether the written review is finally nearing its demise. But these institutional shake-ups, alarming as they are, can hardly be considered new omens, for arts criticism has been in decline for quite a while now. It’s already hard to subsist on writing alone; what more on criticism? Pragmatism, however, is hardly the reason why I began writing on the arts, in much the same way as I see art beyond a medium of affective expression. Criticism, to me, is a hopeful gesture of attending to the unknown.
And it’s all too apparent why media and cultural institutions capitulate to the algorithmic attention economy brought about by the current capitalist terror we’re living in. On the one hand, the internet has made culture accessible to the widest variety of audiences to the point of shaping politics and regime changes, but on the other, it has also contributed to this growing aversion to divergent perspectives and critical writing, which, in the long run, will not only be damaging to critics—and therefore the craft of criticism—but to anybody who engages with art, regardless of persuasion. Not to mention that the signature image of the critic is already one of acerbity.
I don’t oppose the desire to present criticism beyond longform and via new mediums, including vertical videos and podcasts; after all, any craft, to be effective and relevant, must constantly evolve. But when this evolution comes at the expense of a valid, tested mode of articulation, it becomes problematic, as though co-existence is not an alternative. By this measure, critics and culture writers now have to compete with algorithms and artificial intelligence systems designed to profit off the audience by encouraging them to disengage from critical thought and to view art, or anything of cultural value, as homogeneous and as a kind of performative online aesthetic.
And that is the beauty of criticism: writing against consensus. Because critics enjoy a level of independence, editorial or otherwise, they can properly assess the work at hand and risk an interpretation instead of simply entertaining the dangerous dichotomy of a pan or praise, of a one-star or five-star rating.
The best critics meet a work of art on its own terms and meaningfully build on that encounter. They are not afraid to invoke the personal and to be swept up in the unbridled, transformative power of bearing witness that they’d be willing to passionately share the experience with a broader public, with a distinct critical voice, taste, and a command of language that may not be readily available to other “consumers” of culture. They do this so that casual viewers or general-interest readers, who have no access to the work in question, may revel in the encounter too. So that aficionados and non-aficionados alike may raise their own questions or reflections and even challenge those of the critic’s, flouting the idea that critics have the final word. In this way, criticism allows for discursive exchange and, thereby, a sense of community.
Beyond the limited context of a release date or box-office performance, responsible critics explore new vistas through which the audience can make sense of a cultural piece—film, book, painting, record, video game, and so on. They confront new works by tapping into their possibilities and implications—sometimes not the implications of a work’s entirety but of its particular units, such as the stylization of dialogue, an emergent trope, a single shot, a single scene, etc. The best reviews are specific and rigorous. They trace the ways in which an individual work converses with other works by the author or artist under scrutiny, with other art forms, and with broader material, social, and political contexts, both past and present, and perhaps even future.
But perceptive critics know full well that it’s only possible when they take their time. Sometimes a single viewing or listening may not suffice. They are aware that they must struggle, sentence by sentence, because struggle plays an integral role for them to arrive at the sharpest of ideas. They possess a wealth of lenses with which one can explicate a given work, alongside the ability to determine whether a particular lens benefits such explication.
This is also why criticism, though inherently subjective, is not solely an affirmation of the critic’s biases, a narrow approach that never leads to productive insights. Contrary to the popular notion that criticism is anathema to creation, it is fundamentally a form of renegotiation and expansion in that what might be deemed a weakness in the work under review might just be a lived reality or nuance that needed a better vocabulary for appraisal. It narrows the gap between writer, audience, and subject.
The difference between critics and influencers, who now slowly, albeit insufficiently, take the place of the former in the cultural conversation, is that critics do not cater to search traffic. Without voices who have a sense of history and a long-term relationship with the arts, who would write about one’s favorite cult classic or music that only a handful of people know?
Discerning critics do not fall into the clutches of aggregation and recommendation, which are more a function of arts marketing and appreciation than of criticism. They are less interested in indulging a kind of personalized generalism than in parsing out the contradictions of the work at hand. They neither neatly promote nor punish; rather, they put the work into context and map the corners the viewer or reader might have missed. Indeed, in criticism, context is currency.
The difference between critics and influencers, who now slowly, albeit insufficiently, take the place of the former in the cultural conversation, is that critics do not cater to search traffic.
At a time when hyperspecialization and optimization are the default, criticism loosens the algorithm’s leash. Critics, of course, can be wrong. To some extent, that is the point. But they have a curious temperament and an energetic commitment that cannot be easily replicated by whoever has greater mileage in this likes, content-overload economy. Rather than merely react or describe, the best reviews entice, enliven, and unnerve — sometimes all at once. Their engagement with the work is deeply active instead of passive. They attend closely and intimately, insisting on the whys and wherefores, with the inconvenient awareness that the answers they may yield, should there be answers at all, might estrange the critic and the audience from familiar and fixed convictions.
The essence of the review, beyond mere eloquence, is empathy. Criticism exposes us to what is not made available by dismal systems that sanitize our experience of the world. Algorithms do not discern; they satisfy us over and over to the point that we strive for a uniformed existence for ourselves and others. As a result, we bristle at divergent opinions and refuse to engage with lived truths outside our own. We insist on the lack of “media literacy” when another audience does not resonate with a given work the same way we do. Cultural criticism invites us to undo this tendency by courting intimacy with the unfamiliar, the diverse, and the complex, so that we may be able to develop empathy for what our immediate realities cannot access.
“Can we live in a world without culture criticism?” is a question that warrants another question: Can we live in a world without culture, without art? Without meaning, without imagination?
