Dancing About Architecture: Popular Music Criticism and the Negotiation of Authority
- 1 February 2005
- journal article
- Published by Taylor & Francis Ltd in Popular Communication
- Vol. 3 (1), 1-20
- https://doi.org/10.1207/s15405710pc0301_1
Abstract
This article addresses the impact of the culture divide on the establishment of critical authority through the examination of popular music critics. In-depth interviews with music critics illustrate how the popular culture critic's experience might be distinguished from that of high culture critics. If criticism has the ability to elevate the status of the object it evaluates, this article argues that, in the case of popular criticism, the cultural object has the ability to lower the status of the critic. Lacking the formal training characteristic of higher critics, popular music critics must establish their cultural authority by consistently displaying their qualifications-proficiency as a writer, breadth of knowledge, and studied judgment regardless of personal preferences-through their work. Likewise, it analyzes how aspects of the roles, relationships, and resources managed by popular music critics can create obstacles to the establishment of cultural authority in the popular realm.Keywords
This publication has 9 references indexed in Scilit:
- What Are Critics for?American Art, 2002
- Intellectualization and Art World Development: Film in the United StatesAmerican Sociological Review, 2001
- Oxford University PressPublished by Oxford University Press (OUP) ,2001
- Fringe and FortunePublished by Walter de Gruyter GmbH ,1996
- Has Communication Explained Journalism?Journal of Communication, 1993
- Journalists as interpretive communitiesCritical Studies in Mass Communication, 1993
- The Routinization of Film CriticismThe Journal of Popular Culture, 1990
- The Authority of Music CriticismJournal of the American Musicological Society, 1981
- Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsmen's Notions of ObjectivityAmerican Journal of Sociology, 1972