Houman Barekat in The Guardian:
Lauren Oyler, an American literary critic who writes for Harper’s Magazine and the New Yorker, believes her metier is under threat. “I am a professional, and I am in danger,” she declares in My Perfect Opinions, one of eight previously unpublished essays gathered in her first nonfiction book. She wonders if popular digital platforms such as Goodreads, where users can upload book reviews with minimal editorial filtering, will have long-term ramifications for the more considered, rigorous literary criticism that she gets paid to write. What these online communities lack in intellectual acumen, they make up for in sheer weight of numbers. Are they reshaping literary culture in their own image?
The answer seems to be yes. Oyler believes a facile populism has crept into arts and culture commentary in recent years, premised on the notion that, since all taste is ultimately subjective, anything can be as good as anything else – evidenced, for example, in some critics’ insistence that Marvel comics deserve to be treated as serious art. “To reduce appeal to a matter of taste and temperament is the most boring way to be irrefutably correct,” Oyler notes. This tendency, a kind of philistinism dressed up as anti-elitism, lies at the heart of what she calls “today’s crisis in culture criticism”.
More here.