Don't worry. The New York Times culture section will be just fine.
Has the "chief critic" title run its course?
You’d think that the sky was falling from the reaction of some BroadwayTokers, theater social media content creators, and Reddit when the news broke yesterday afternoon that chief theater critic Jesse Green (along with three other high-level culture journalists) would be reassigned.
“We are in the midst of an extraordinary moment in American culture,” wrote Times culture editor Sia Michel in a memo to staffers, obtained by Variety. “New generations of artists and audiences are bypassing traditional institutions, smartphones have Balkanized fandoms even as they have made culture more widely accessible than ever, and arts institutions are facing challenges and looking for new opportunities.”
While some might believe that cultural criticism has taken an uncorrectable nosedive into the abyss, I’d like to think that it’s more like a resurrection. Has our collective attention span been reduced to seconds rather than minutes? For the most part, yes. That’s one of the reasons I launched 1 Minute Critic to begin with.
But not the only reason.
Language, literacy, and culture have taken new forms. No longer are we beholden to a 2,000-word pontification on the latest revival or IP musical to storm Broadway. New storytelling forms are emerging, including short-form writing, video recaps, carousels, and reels.
Our education system is finally catching up, too, training the next generation of teachers to consider all sensory elements in language arts, which means Gen Z and Gen Alpha desire a fresh perspective.
Cultural criticism was, and always will be, an art form unto itself. Just because the packaging may look different doesn’t mean that audiences, editors, journalists, and content creators should be held to a lesser standard. And that’s where you come in. Rather than a commodity, 1 Minute Critic is building a community we ask to engage, react, rage (respectfully), and rejoice at all forms of artistic expression.
Isn’t that the point?
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Perceptive and persuasive -- as always.