The roles of media critics in the cultural industries

This paper explores the role of critics in the arts and entertainment industries through a multi-disciplinary literature review. By synthesizing works from authors in the fields of management, economics, sociology, and information sciences, it raises three principal issues. It begins with a short critical discussion of the specific nature of press criticism and its relationship to the cultural industry. I then tackle the question of how critical discourse is constructed: how do critics evaluate cultural products, knowing that both the work’s economic destiny and the critic’s professional legitimacy depend on these evaluations. Lastly, I consider the multiple roles that press critics perform. I explore how this form of independent expertise contributes to modeling the values and the behaviors of different actors in the field of the cultural industry. The literature review concludes with the proposal of several avenues for future research.