Grumps Blame It for Everything From the Rise of Taylor to the Fall of Pitchfork. They Don't Even Understand It.

"He was preceded by film critics at the Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and Vanity Fair, as well as four senior arts critics at the New York Timeswho were " reassigned," including its chief popular-music critic Jon Pareles. New York magazinerecently summed up these developments in a piece titled " Do Media Organizations Even Want Cultural Criticism? " After examining media economics and web-traffic trends, the essay reached a gloomy diagnosis: "The vast majority of reviews go virtually unread.""

"Meanwhile, New Yorker staff writer Kelefa Sanneh published a piece in late August called " How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge," asking why critics aren't writing sharp, snarky reviews like in the good old Lester Bangs days. It felt a little like somebody yelling up at people trapped in a burning building, "Hey, why don't you guys do those cool fireworks displays anymore?""

"The decline of the negative review is a subset of the decline of the review, period, with a few specific factors I'll come back to. But like many kvetchers before him, Sanneh largely lays the blame on what he calls "poptimism." He describes it as the position that "critics should not just take pop music seriously but celebrate it-or else," which "sometimes bled into a broader belief that it was bad manners to criticize any cultural product that people liked.""

Prominent arts critics have recently been fired or reassigned across major outlets, including Rolling StoneTV, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, Vanity Fair, and multiple New York Times critics. Media-economics and web-traffic trends indicate that most reviews attract little readership. Music criticism has softened, with fewer sharp, negative reviews reminiscent of earlier eras. The concept of "poptimism" describes a tendency to take pop music seriously and celebrate it, and sometimes to avoid criticizing popular cultural products. Simplified histories often misattribute poptimism's origins to particular critics, making that explanation incomplete.

Read at Slate Magazine