###### from “Piccolo appello al pubblico della cultura”, N. Balestrini
What is the point of criticism?
Over the years I have asked myself this question so many times that I can no longer remember when I started. It is a question that has accompanied me in many contexts — academic, informal, institutional, intimate. I have felt it surface during university courses, re-emerge in workshops, take shape in public conferences or even in mere late-night chats among artists and friends. Each time the answers changed: they took the form of shared reflections, annotated bibliographies, handouts full of cross-references, but also — above all — of uncertainties. Because asking what the point of criticism is today is not simply a theoretical exercise, it is a gesture of responsibility and of positioning.
The very process that led to the birth of GOLEM, which absorbed a significant part of my time and energy throughout 2022, also stems from here: from this urgency to interrogate the function of criticism, and to do so not in the abstract, but militantly. In an artistic landscape that escapes established interpretive grids, how should a conscious and contemporary criticism move?
In recent decades, in fact, many of the presuppositions that for centuries sustained criticism as a genre have fallen away. Traditionally, criticism was founded on an exercise of judgment: selecting, classifying, ordering. Works were evaluated on the basis of aesthetic canons and cultural codes held to be universally valid, in a process of building taste and cultural legitimation that aimed to establish what should be remembered and what forgotten, what could be called “art” and what could not.
Today, however, these paradigms have shattered. The artistic field has become too complex, too fluid to be reduced to rigid models. Works respond to multiple and often irreconcilable impulses: political demands, identity urgencies, geographic belongings, conditions of marginality or privilege. Aesthetics hybridize, contaminate one another, refuse disciplinary boundaries. And above all, the Internet has radically transformed the possibilities of access, throwing listening open to submerged discographies, to musics rendered invisible by centuries of Eurocentric dominance, to sound practices that the record industry — shaped by colonial, sexist, exclusionary logics — had silenced.
Let us return, then, to the initial question: what is the point of criticism today?
One possible answer — and perhaps the most recurrent — is that criticism, in its contemporary form, has undergone a process of downsizing. It has often found itself relegated to a “genre criticism,” where the term “genre” takes on, from time to time, a double meaning: on the one hand the musicological one, tied to classification (jazz, rock, electronic music, oral tradition, sound art…); on the other, broader and more theoretical, tied to identities (of gender, of class, of cultural origin). This shift, though legitimate and useful in many cases, has ended up crystallizing criticism within highly specialized, self-referential domains, where the stakes seem to be the production of academic language more than a real engagement with the works, the contexts and the communities from which they emerge; as well as a disempowerment that comes about by shattering itself across blogs, websites, specialist magazines.
In this way, criticism risks losing touch with art itself, with its capacity to interrogate the world and transform it. It becomes a formal exercise, a code for initiates. Instead of building bridges between works, publics and imaginaries, it builds closed rooms, protected by theoretical barriers and conceptual filters. It concentrates on internal recognition, among insiders, rather than on cultural mediation. And so the original energy of criticism is lost: that of inhabiting the present, of engaging with the tensions of reality, of restoring meaning to artistic making in its living unfolding.
On the other hand, it appears today equally anachronistic — if not downright pretextual — to want to exercise an absolute judgment on music in a global sense, as if there existed a single canon or a single legitimate perspective from which to evaluate works. To think of placing on the same level, with the same tools and the same grids, musics from the United States and Japan, from the Mediterranean and South America, from China and Africa, is not only methodologically fragile as well as often wrong, but also risks reproducing old hierarchical, at times neocolonial logics, which criticism should instead help to deconstruct.
The contemporary sonic world is fragmented and stratified. Musics move along coordinates that are not only aesthetic, but also historical, political, geographic, communal. Every context has its own logics of production, its own rituals of listening, its own devices. In this multiplicity, the task of criticism cannot be to judge from above, but rather to make differences legible, to amplify submerged voices, to question the conditions of possibility of listening. Criticism must learn to decentralize itself, to become situated, to recognize its own limits.
In this sense, perhaps, criticism has not lost its meaning: it has only lost the illusion of being able to have just one. Its value today no longer lies in saying what is good and what is not, what is valid and what should be discarded. But in knowing how to stay inside complexity, in refusing univocity, in cultivating a plural gaze. In the capacity to pose questions — even uncomfortable ones — rather than provide answers. And above all, in the desire to listen before speaking.
The position that I think best suits the present, as far as I am concerned, is that of a criticism that intertwines deeply with curatorship, not as a separate field, but as a complementary practice. Criticism and curatorship, together, can constitute a narrative and political device, capable of accompanying artistic processes rather than judging them, of highlighting connections instead of establishing absolute values.
In this sense, criticism should no longer present itself as an external observer, but as an active part of a cultural ecosystem in continuous transformation. Its function can then be to build frames of meaning, to activate spaces — real or virtual — where listening can happen in new, shared, reflective forms. I therefore think of a criticism that develops alongside those who run independent labels, self-managed spaces, digital sound archives, community platforms, which propose not simply a musical product, but an idea of the world, a proposal for a relation between sound, people and environments.
What matters, in this picture, is no longer only the musical object itself, the closed and finished work, but what happens before and after: the processes that make it possible, the contexts in which it is produced, the ways in which it is enjoyed, discussed, archived, transformed. A truly contemporary criticism should then learn to narrate these processes, to make visible the invisible infrastructures that allow music to exist and circulate: the relationship with the territory, the micro-economies, the software, the technologies, the affective and political tensions, the relations between those who create and those who listen.
All this implies a rethinking of listening itself. No longer understood as an individual, solipsistic act, mediated by devices and algorithms, but as a collective and relational experience. Listening as a social practice, a moment of exchange, of mutual recognition, of shared attention. And with it, music — and listening — reveals itself for what it has always been: a form of life, a way of being in the world, of building community, of imagining new forms of existence and of attention toward the world that surrounds us.
To find a new meaning for criticism therefore means to rethink it no longer as an exercise in aesthetic evaluation or in the affirmation of a canon, but as a practice of active and conscious accompaniment of the audience. A militant presence, capable of positioning itself within the social, cultural and political contexts that run through artistic production and reception, in order to orient and at times even perturb the ways in which we listen to, interpret and live art.
In this perspective, criticism takes shape as a reflective space, one that starts from an a priori theory but remains attentive, able to transform over time through its encounter with works, contexts and experiences. Art, and music in particular, thus become a filter through which to read the changes in the world, but also a tool for rethinking one's own critical categories, renewing language and refining sensibility.
In this way, without claiming to know absolute truths or to judge, one instead takes on the responsibility of creating connections, pointing out possible trajectories and openings. Sharing rather than imposing oneself, offering tools for a community that becomes critical in its turn.
Aware that over the years many have worked on this aspect, we will try to give our contribution, as far as possible, following a vision of our own. In this spirit, the space we are trying to build also aims to evolve over time. We would like it to become a broader and more articulated place, able to welcome different perspectives that are nonetheless coherent with our vision of contemporary sound arts. Seeking each time the form best suited to the content: be it text, conversation, interview, sound documentation, score, archive or participatory experience. Aware that critical identity is not defined once and for all, but is built in the doing, in dialogue, in openness to what emerges from the encounter with the other — and with sound.
English translation of the Italian original. Read the original →