Getting down to the nuts and bolts ... a critic at Tate Modern. Photograph: Nicolas Asfouri
Are critics dead? They still stagger on, course, and always will. Everyone has an opinion about the film they just saw, the book they read. Some people will always get so heated up in their critical opinions that they become ... critics, and so long as you read us we won't go away. But that's not really the point of recent laments on "the death of the critic". What has passed away is a certain kind of revered and influential critical voice, it is sometimes said: where are today's equivalents of the poet and critic William Empson, the art critic Clement Greenberg, the critic of the novel FR Leavis?
I've been thinking about it, and I suspect it's the wrong way of describing the problem. There really is a problem with criticism today, but to think of it as simply the vanishing of the authoritative critics of yore is to miss the point. The reason the views of, say, TS Eliot on poetry were once taken so seriously (apart from the fact that when he wrote books such as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism he was speaking as one of the greatest modern writers) is not because they exuded some immanent God-like truth. On the contrary.
The high cultural standing of criticism 40 years ago started with the nuts and bolts. Critics in those days had a method. It was because the method was so lucid that what they said took on objective power. Criticism in the 1950s was based on the rigorous examination of word and image and only progressed from there, by careful, precise stages, towards larger questions of value and meaning.
At school, I was lucky enough to get taught English by someone still loyal to those methods. It's interesting how often, in writing about art, I now find myself remembering the simple procedure we followed when writing an essay on a Keats poem. You paid attention to the form of the verse, the images, gradually getting a richer sense of its language; what it was about and how good it was emerged from these precise matters of what was there on the page. This tradition of criticism has certainly influenced the way I think about art. But I wish its influence could be greater.
What happens now in professional criticism is that you start where you like, write about the object under study in any order and at any depth you fancy, and perhaps don't even give a single material fact about it. In other words, the idea of the critic today is not more modest but more arrogant - almost messianic - in its freewheeling claim to subjective authority. No wonder people don't like us! We're just loudmouths giving our opinions, at least unless we escape this arid play of free critical expression.
Can it be done? I honestly don't see why not. The problem is in today's pluralism of cultural forms. Poetry criticism in the old sense, you might say, was destroyed by Bob Dylan: if you analyse his words in the traditional way, they don't hold up, but if you hear them sung you can't doubt their poetic worth. Beyond Dylan lies a whole world of poetic variety undreamt of by Eliot.
In art, the diversity is still more radical. How can rules evolved over hundreds of years to criticise painting be of any value in a world of the readymade? But recently, I started trying to write about - to look at - Duchamp's readymades precisely, as if they were poems, and found I could see more clearly what is specific to them. I think it is possible to do that with pretty much anything - after all, there's no mystique to the kind of criticism Eliot, Empson and Greenberg did. None of them were mystics. They started in the engine room. If criticism is to matter again, it must go back there.
