The user-generated Internet has produced one of the most unique cultural paradoxes of our time: the decline of professional reviews in the face of the rampant pervasiveness of amateur reviews, rendered on any product or service that can be purchased by a human being today. It is well known to all that, today, platforms and social media offer us the opportunity to post, without major filters, our opinion on anything from the watering can bought to water the geraniums on the terrace to thehotel where we have booked our vacation, so much so that now many people base their purchases on the quality of user-generated reviews and decide to buy something after reading the opinions of those who already own that product or have already used that service. The flip side, seemingly paradoxical, is that reviews written by people who write reviews for a living have almost completely disappeared. I was thinking about this while reading a news item that has raised some discussion in the United States and has gone almost completely under the radar in Italy: as of September 1, the Associated Press will stop publishing book reviews. The news agency gave notice to its staff through a circular that Dan Kennedy of Media Nation posted on his personal website: “Unfortunately,” the circular reads, “the audience for book reviews is relatively small and we can no longer sustain the time required to plan, coordinate, write and review reviews.” And then, I translate literally, “AP will continue to deal with books as stories, but at present these will be handled exclusively by internal staff.”
This is a decision that is more surprising for its brutal honesty than for the fact itself: in essence, the public no longer seems to have the desire or interest in reading professionally written reviews. So why waste time and money to commission an outside contributor to write a professional review that, when it goes well, on most readers will have the same effect as a plot summary, and when it goes badly will simply be ignored? Why should you have to spend money to ask someone to read the book, get a feel for it, rate it, and share their assessment with the public, if the public is now content with stories (I use the same term as in the circular) that merely rewrite the description on the back cover, or at best a blurb? It is quicker to administer readers a rinse of a press note, at best. At worst, a thirty-second reel on Instagram will suffice.
So far, nothing strange for those who work in cultural publishing: the news, if anything, is that there is someone who has the courage to play it straight and admit, albeit implicitly, that there is no longer any interest in putting out book reviews because the public eager to be informed about editorial releases is turning to other types of content. Which ones? Those who want to get a pretty good idea can catch up with an article that came out a few weeks ago in Mow Mag, by Alessia Kant, which offers in broad strokes some explanation of what is happening in Italy, a land where the landscape of cultural criticism is even more desertified than that of the United States where even news agencies are shutting down book reviews. The process is not new: already in the late 1980s and early 1990s there were those who lamented the disappearance of criticism, and the deep-seated reasons are those we have been dragging our feet for decades: on the one hand the institutionalization of criticism, on the other hand the new organizational models of the culture industry, which has more and more need for good press (or, even more trivially, good communication), less and less need for criticism. It is a vicious circle: Summing up briefly and simplifying somewhat violently, publishing houses, in order to overcome the unpredictability that characterizes the market in which they operate, are publishing more and more books, partly because they are driven by the need to sell more in an industry where there is an overabundance ofsupply, partly because they are driven by the hope of gaining more visibility on online platforms from which a substantial portion of sales now pass, partly because bookstores are renovating their shelves at the speed of light, and partly because competition has intensified. Inside such a context of overproduction, critics find themselves increasingly marginalized because, on the one hand, as they are no longer able to mediate with the public, they become irrelevant, and on the other because, since the timing of obsolescence of a book today is much faster than it was even five or ten years ago, the function of marketing becomes more useful since it is faster than criticism and therefore able to guarantee an immediate impact on sales. To all this must then be added other phenomena, such as the erosion of the cultural authority of critics (said otherwise: today a review by a professional critic no longer determines the fate of a book), legitimization from below (much of the public today tends to listen more to so-called communities and influencers than to critics), and the increasingly close interrelationships between those who produce and those who evaluate (i.e., that phenomenon caustically referred to by some as “amicitism”). It is a process similar to the one that has also affected art, a quagmire that has already been abundantly written about on these pages, but from which art is perhaps able to save itself a little better, for reasons that will be said a little further below.
To look more closely at the issue raised by the Associated Press, storytelling eating away at criticism appears more like a consequence than a cause, just like the bookinfluencers mentioned in the Mow Mag article, who would hardly be singled out as the culprits of the reading crisis: they are, if anything, a consequence that threatens to exacerbate the decline. Storytelling has inserted itself into the mediation vacuum that criticism and cultural journalism began to leave even before social media existed and has allowed the proliferation of influencers and creators who, favored by algorithms that reward extreme synthesis and rapidity, have offered what was missing: immediacy, user involvement, presumed closeness, a sense of being part of a community. As well as a certain likability: today, one only needs to point a few hundred euro phone at one’s face and use even a basic editing program to have a captivating video to administer to one’s base (and for many, theinfluencer suggesting books based on the color of the cover in a thirty-second or so video is more interesting and, above all, more enjoyable than the review of someone who critiques for a living). Their affirmation, however, risks, as anticipated, to turn into a reinforcing factor of the crisis of criticism and the crisis of reading, on the one hand because many publishing houses prefer to invest in these figures, and on the other hand because a substantial part of what influencers suggest to their users is not the result of’a critical and impartial evaluation rendered to readers according to professional criteria, but more simply derives from sponsorship agreements that the influencer on duty has made with the publisher, who has passed him the title to tell his followers about, or to include in a list of “ten books to read during the summer” or the like.
Art, we said, has managed in part to save itself from the dominance of amateur prompters who have carved out an increasingly substantial role in publishing, for a number of reasons. Meanwhile, because talking about exhibitions and museums is logistically more challenging than talking about books: you can’t talk about an exhibition from your bedroom at home, you have to go and visit it, with all that that entails in terms of time and expense (which is why the bulk of the influencers and creators in our field merely offer the public more or less superficial forms of popularization and rarely go around to exhibitions: if they do visit them, it is usually because they are close to where they are based, or because the organization invites them, and finding an influencer or creator with significant numbers who does critique is almost impossible, for reasons already mentioned). Then, because art is perceived as more of a niche than literature. To make a sports comparison: art is to fencing as literature is to soccer. That is, it is a sport that we look up to, and perhaps like, but do not evaluate because we feel that to evaluate it we need to know it well. On the other hand, there is a sport about which anyone feels entitled to express an opinion, despite the fact that it requires no less expertise than the other. And, again, because in the art sector, in spite of everything, in Italy there is still a network of highly followed and dynamic specialized journals that, although affected by the crisis, overall make very high numbers and constitute an excellence of which there is little knowledge outside the sector and which, at least in Europe, has no equal.
Of course, this does not mean that the art sector suffers less from the problem of the gradual disappearance of critics. On the contrary: even in art it is storytelling that commands. Is there, then, resignation to be had? Will reviews be permanently supplanted by stories? Will others follow the example of the Associated Press? It would be nice to say no and offer a reassuring perspective, but if one of the world’s leading news agencies considers the production of book reviews to be uneconomic, it is really hard to argue that it would be enough simply to reverse course and all it would take is for newspapers to go back to critique. At the moment, there is no possibility for an improvement in the status quo. I cannot speak for the United States knowing little about the public and the publishing system in those latitudes. For Italy, it can be said that reviews, in all likelihood, will decline more and more in generalist titles and will manage to survive in specialized titles, for the simple fact that, taking away the increasingly small part of the public that reads newspapers and magazines on paper, the behaviors of digital users (searches, frequentation of social networks, use of apps and so on) tend to reward specialization. However, it is doubtful that even specialized newspapers and magazines will be able to hold up well to the setbacks of an increasingly serious infodemic (we do not know, for example, what impact artificial intelligence may have). One could, to be sure, point out that criticism should evolve and find other forms: long-form video, Substack, podcasts and other formats perceived as fresher by the public. The problem, however, does not seem to be the format: a critic costs X whether he writes an article or turns a camera on his face. The problem, then, is that doing criticism is an onerous business. And so, if we do not want to see our criticism, which certainly does not suffer any less than that of the United States (mentioned above), permanently dead, we would need useful measures, on the one hand, to guarantee the independence of publishing, and on the other hand, to encourage reading. In this sense, Minister Alessandro Giuli has done well, who in the Olivetti Plan in Culture has put ten million euros on the plate to strengthen the cultural offerings of printed newspapers and forty-four for support for libraries, bookstores and publishing. It is obvious, however, that this is not enough, not least because the Olivetti Plan does not take into account newspapers working with digital, and the bulk of the funds for publishing concerns the purchase of books (for so many, a critique or a negative review is tantamount to an affront, an insult: it is the most obvious and immediate consequence of disaccustomed to criticism): we would need, therefore, actions to promote critical culture starting from schools, awards and recognition, awareness campaigns that enhance the role of criticism as a tool of knowledge and cultural mediation to make the public understand that reading reviews or critical essays is an added value for a conscious habit with culture, support for digital publishing. And the public should recognize that if the crisis continues to deepen and if criticism disappears from the horizons of a public that is less and less accustomed to criticism, the books will not be missing. The books will continue to be there. There will be a lack of readers.
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