Death of the critic? A sociological approach to the legitimation problems of reviewing

Abstract

The little theoretical discourse on literary and artistic reviewing has been developed upon a rhetoric of the crisis. This paper proposes to address the criticism’s crisis as a legitimation problem, from a sociological perspective. On the one hand, the tight relation between reviewing and the cultural industry makes it vulnerable to market’s constrictions. On the other hand, criticism is a prescriptive and regulating but scarcely regulated institution. Besides, new technologies and both aesthetic and philosophical discourses seem to question the authority of the art critic. Nonetheless, this paper will put forward the need for reformulation of the function and the validity of criticism, considering the multiplication of the subject of criticism, as well as the reconstitution of its legitimation basis.