Love and Irony in Twenty-first Century Culture

With the onset of the new century, digitalisation spread rapidly and “the user” began to be courted just as “the consumer” had been before it.  Every public and private body in the West hastened to form an online version of itself as communication between the individual and the wider world was construed as vital to both professional success and basic social functioning.

Society became like market research on a mass scale.  Opinions were wanted and audience interaction was plugged at every turn by the media and public bodies, creating a huge, overflowing vat of homogenous talk.  By the late ‘90s, the term “user-friendly” had outgrown its buzzword status, but having permeated society to its core, the concept endured as fundamental to our ideology.

In the last few years, places and spaces devoted to Comment have become ubiquitous, whilst distinctions between professional and amateur commentators have become blurred and in some ways irrelevant.  Comment was invested in as the shiny new commodity – perhaps seen as a perfect, renewable resource because it’s free.

Culture, that useful, catch-all deposit for a plethora of odds and ends, has proved the ideal climate for the growth of Comment, as it supports the increasing tendency towards self-referencing and self-reflexivity that has resulted from the general acceleration of media and information-exchange. The national media has capitalised upon the rapid succession of social networking sites, boosting its prominence in cultural life and, with the near-mania for audience engagement, bringing us closer to it.

Irony

Something about the combination of this new prominence of the media and our culture’s appetite for myth-making proved to be toxic, and everything began to seem unpleasantly “seeped” – as they would say – in rhetoric.  With hyperbole a key element of this, we are perpetually in a state of crisis: off-hand, I recall hearing that criticism, culture, schools, politics and British sport are all in a state of crisis, and this was just yesterday.  Initially, I was devastated, but who knows?  It might be different tomorrow.

A bleak future for criticism – or is this just the overhaul it needs?

The impending “death of criticism” has been forecast with some regularity in recent years, usually by critics themselves – they can’t resist a bit navel-gazing – but the feeling that the profession is in a state of crisis has now been given weight in an unhappily quantifiable way by significant job cuts.

The beginning of last year saw all of The Daily Telegraph’s critics come off contract jobs and go freelance, their rates having been cut by 70% according to one critic, and in the US, 55 movie critics have been fired since 2006.  As newspapers have fewer and fewer staff writers, they can no longer justify employing specialised critics, as the art and restaurant critic Toby Young explained in an article on The Guardian’s Organ Grinder blog, and he anticipates further cutbacks yet.

When Young appeared on The Culture Show in November prophesying a dark future for criticism as a result of printed matter’s inability to compete with ubiquitous, free digital content, I thought he might be missing the point.  One look at the blogosphere shows there has never been more enthusiasm for discussing and dissecting culture and, accordingly, attendance figures at gallery exhibitions and theatres are higher than ever too.

Yes, masses of these bloggers are the amateurs against whom the professionals have to compete, but couldn’t the newly inflated demand for criticism be seen as a positive?  The democratic, DIY ethic promoted by the web has bred an organic blossoming of active engagement among wide audience demographics with what’s traditionally an exclusive, elitist practice.  Such an aberration would never have resulted from deliberate engineering, but if anything can offer the general public a way into the obscurities of contemporary art – a subject of much concern for people in suits who themselves could use a few hints – the internet probably can.