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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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I always enjoy Kate Taylor's column in the Saturday Globe and Mail. She is very straightforward in her broad scope summations of art's role in the overall socio-economic matrix. This week (unfortunately it's subscription only online) she says some clear-headed stuff about criticism.
...the great paradox of all the cultural babble on the net is that a phenomenon driven by a huge appetite for critical information is also deeply hostile to traditional critics, who are routinely dismissed as arrogant elitists dispensing questionable judgements from their self-appointed perches.She cites Bookninja.com as an example of a site where "the critical air is bracingly pure."
[...]
Mainstream critics have taken note—and are worried about their shrinking authority. Of course, critics are always worried about their shrinking authority, criticism being one of those things, like morale at the CBC or the fortunes of the symphony orchestra, that are in perpetual decline.
[...]
But at the same time, critics are professional opinion-makers and the Internet is a beast that is hungry for opinion. If the consumer sites and the blogs can be full of subjective rants disguised as reviews, the best arts sites are experimenting with criticism, providing their readers with new voices and more depth....They can mix academic and popular criticism and can try out Platonic dialogues or conversations in the place of traditional reviews; they can push aside publicists to set their own agendas and can ignore publication schedules and release dates, reviewing classic films or books that are centuries old.