The death knell of the American critic?

Newspaper and magazine critics say they don't get no respect.

"You gets arts journalists together these days," says Doug McLennan, editor of Arts Journal.com and a longtime Seattle music writer, "and it's what they talk about: their declining influence. They say Frank Rich was the last critic who could close a show." Most remember when Time and Newsweek had full rosters of arts critics.

What happened? Besides the Internet and its rash of blogs, suspected culprits include the culture of celebrity, anti-intellectual populism, stingy newspaper owners and what some critics say is a loss of vitality or visibility in their art forms. While many lament the situation, some think the decentralization of authority means the arts — and the conversation around them — will flourish without these stern, doctrinaire figures.

But many newspaper and magazine critics pine for a golden age when giants walked the Earth: When the imposing Clement Greenberg was shaping modernism in painting, the biting H.L. Mencken was exhuming the reputation of Theodore Dreiser, and the impious Leslie Fiedler found unsettling Freudian meanings in the novels of Mark Twain.

Via Arts & Letters Daily.