What, however, is a useful alternative? What is in this new world without criticism that seems on the verge of displacing our old, cranky one? On the quotidian level, it seeks to either refrain from criticism or to replace it with cheerleading. An example of the first would be the decision of the novelist Dave Eggers, who sometime back declared that, being keenly aware of how difficult fiction writing is, he would review no more books (true, it can be uncomfortable, but this simply removes from the critical pool one writer who knows what creation entails), and of the second the editors of Buzzfeed, who announced that their culture writers would thenceforth comment solely on works they like (“if you can’t find  something nice to say, just don’t say anything”).

But the more sophisticated examples of Postcritical commentary on any artform are more assertive than mere withdrawal, and cooler, more neutral than the enthusiast variety. They share the foundational assumptions so well articulated by the formidable art critic and philosopher Arthur C. Danto, who, first noting that most contemporary art is about the concept of art, goes on to propose that we live now in a post-historical time when art is collapsed into philosophy, which surely implies that the only things to be said about art would be postjudgmental, philosophical things about concept itself (i. e., ideas)—Postcritical things, in short.^(I) Those, I suppose, would involve carefully removed, “objective,” analytical observations on the selected art objects, with the taste, the feelings—even the reasons for stated preferences—of the commentator set aside with a firmness that goes beyond the “disinterested” stance of serious old-style critics. (That is seen as only a concealment of emotional response or ideological agenda beneath an appearance of balanced consideration, and is always betrayed by telltale signs of subjectivity.) Postcritical acts of advocacy lie not in outright endorsement, but in the selection of the objects for examination: they, and not others, are chosen. However, the choices themselves are critical acts, for they pass judgment on all the excluded objects, and so form a hierarchy of taste as subjective as any other.

How would Postcriticism approach the moving targets of the performing arts, wherein the objects are endlessly morphing? Performance is very much in the material, personal world, not the ideational, cerebral one, and is not fixed like a concept—it must move, play out, and as it does, ideas and concepts are apt to shift about or get lost. And the immediate context of a performance is other performances, other attempted realizations of an envisioned potential. That implies comparisons, evaluations, in which standards are necessarily involved. It also implies ongoing contact with an unfolding scene, and acquaintance with the scene’s backstories—a history, a narrative not of ideas, but of acts. In a book about an “ism,” all this can legitimately be marginalized. But that’s a little tougher on the journalistic performance beat. There, Postcritical purity must be compromised. Some criticism, and of performance itself, really must be allowed entrance, particularly when one is absolutely the only remaining paid, full-time music critic on a national magazine, standing alone in a field of rubble and stubble where standards have taken a dive. How does Alex Ross, with the permission and, I assume, encouragement of his editors at The New Yorker, deal with this evident contradiction?