What Is Criticism | Ryan Ruby

What Is X?

What is the relation between criticism and crisis—is criticism in crisis? On this episode of "What is X?," taped in July 2021, Justin invites the critic and poet Ryan Ruby on to attest to the state of criticism today. Is it even possible to play a social role as a critic today, Justin asks, given the economic structures that disadvantage serious long-form criticism? There’s more good criticism than one might expect, Ryan offers—an embarrassment of riches amid the top-ten listicles. Criticism, Ryan says, following Oscar Wilde, has become a form of art in its own right. What can account for the paradoxical abundance of good criticism precisely at the time when there are so few incentives to writing it? Ryan and Justin discuss criticism in an age of abundance and information overload: Is everything a worthy critical object? How central is negativity—or, conversely, praise and rapture—to the critic’s arsenal? Along the way they talk about the medium of poetry, hierarchies of taste, individual subjective judgment vs. the canon, and the Filet-o-Fish.