Cultural criticism is constantly developing and diversifying. Institutional and technological media developments have enabled widespread public participation in debates about arts and culture over the past few decades. As a result, cultural criticism today comprises many different types of voices, which apply different stylistic formats and genres and which gain authority, visibility, and recognition across digital platforms in a wide variety of ways. These multiple cultural arbiters of taste, both old and new, address the cultural public sphere and its many sub-publics and communities in new and different ways, and these agents are situated at the complex intersections of agency and control within the connectivity afforded by platform society (van Dijck et al. 2018).
Being interdisciplinary, culturally diverse, and cross-mediated in scope, this edited volume investigates the complexity of contemporary cultural criticism and communication. It does so by bringing together scholars from different disciplines, including media studies, celebrity studies, journalism studies, cultural sociology, and cultural studies. The contributors to this volume thus apply various methodological approaches, among them historical perspectives, conceptual debates, qualitative textual analyses, surveys, and netnography, to study global cases such as the Golden Globe Awards, the Intellectual Dark Web, YouTube, Rotten Tomatoes, and Artsy.net. Some focus on particular national contexts, such as Britain, the Czech Republic, Denmark, and the Netherlands, while others focus on particular cultural domains, such as film, television, art, and wine, or on culture more generally. A common denominator is that all the chapters engage with cross-mediated cultural criticism, that is, the interactions of the (news) media industry, digital platforms, and social networking sites, situated within the hybrid media system (Chadwick 2013).
The book showcases how the increasingly heterogeneous group of cultural arbiters of taste perform critical authority and bring expertise to bear by combining emotional, experience-based, or subjective reactions to culture and cultural consumption that are typically produced bottom-up with the types of aesthetic knowledge and expertise about art and culture that have traditionally been exercised top-down (e.g., Kristensen and From 2015; Verboord 2014). This complex combination of voices and approaches means that communication and communicative performances of culture critical authority have changed considerably, which has challenged traditional cultural experts, such as intellectuals and journalists, and critical institutions, such as academia and the news industry. Digital media technologies have provided new platforms, such as social networking sites, file and video sharing sites, and aggregator sites, to produce and distribute cultural criticism, inviting users to adopt and develop the ever-changing digital media logics or platform vernaculars (e.g., Gibbs et al. 2015; van Dijck and Poell 2013).
Some scholars have lamented these developments in cultural criticism, highlighting the death of the critic (e.g., McDonald 2007), while others have emphasized them as examples of the constant uncertainties of cultural criticism (e.g., Chong 2020) or identified their innovative and democratizing potential (e.g., Frey 2015). This edited volume does not take sides in these debates. Rather than discussing these changes as opportunities or threats to critical cultural debate, it argues that the reconfigurations call for new types of research questions and cross-disciplinary approaches to advance cultural criticism in the digital age as a wide-ranging and multifaceted object of study in the twenty-first-century media landscape. Presenting a broad collection of case studies from various contexts, the book showcases the many theoretical and methodological approaches that may serve as useful frameworks for studying new culture critical voices in the digital age. On this basis, it provides new insights into how critical authority and expertise in a cultural context are being reconfigured in digital media and by means of digital media as the boundaries of cultural criticism, and who may perform as a cultural critic, are constantly renegotiated.
Studying cultural critics in the media is nothing new. Existing scholarship has provided single nation studies, especially within the Anglo-Saxon context (e.g., Blank 2007; Chong 2020; Frey and Sayad 2015; McDonald 2007; Orlik 2016; Rixon 2011); used specific disciplinary approaches or focused on a particular cultural domain or genre, e.g., film (Carroll 2009; Frey 2015; Frey and Sayad 2015; McWhirter 2016), literature (e.g., Chong 2020; McDonald 2007), or television (Bielby et al. 2005; Poole 1984; Rixon 2011); or examined cultural criticism on specific media platforms, e.g., newspapers (e.g., Purhonen et al. 2019), radio (Rixon 2015), or electronic media (Orlik 2016). By applying a cross-media, cross-disciplinary, and cross-national approach, this book aims to add to this existing literature by studying how cultural criticism is today performed across a range of interpretive, text-based and visual genres, platforms, and cultural fields.
In this introduction, we will first outline the book’s approach to its two key concepts, culture and criticism, which are both polysemantic and rich in meaning. Our goal is not to offer an exhaustive definition of either concept but to provide a context for the subsequent chapters and how they contribute new theoretical and empirical perspectives to current understandings of cultural criticism. Since cultural criticism is conceptually related to and encapsulates central aspects of critique and reviewing, we will also sketch how the chapters in the book engage with these dimensions of criticism. We then wish to contextualize the book in broader scholarly debates about changing notions of cultural authority and expertise occasioned by the hybrid media ecology and its intertwined mass media and social media logics, and how these developments reconfigure traditional valorization circuits and modes of performing cultural criticism. We will end by summarizing how the chapters in the book address these newer conditions for and dimensions of cultural criticism in the digital age.
Culture and Criticism
As the book centers on cultural criticism, it is relevant to briefly address our conceptualization of culture—a frequently used but also highly contested concept in and beyond humanistic research. A key reference in the literature is Raymond Williams, who identifies three definitions of culture in the modern understanding of the word (Williams 1976/1984, p. 90): The first refers to general processes of cultivation and to intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic movements that originated in the eighteenth century. The second relates to culture as a particular way of life, “whether of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in general” (ibid.). The third relates to artistic activities, meaning that culture is music, literature, painting, sculpture, and film (ibid., p. 90). This book adopts the third definition of culture as artistic activities, which has become a dominant meaning in both everyday language and aesthetic scholarly debates. Historically, this definition conceptualized culture in a relatively narrow sense, as the arts, but, during the twentieth century, scholarly debates (also in media and journalism studies) broadened this definition of aesthetic culture to include popular culture as the boundaries between high art and popular culture have dissolved (e.g., Gans 1999; Purhonen et al. 2019). The chapters in this edited volume apply a...