Here's what Carl Wilson, an editor and critic at The Globe and Mail in Toronto, Canada, and the author of Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, had to say about my July 27 Ann Powers/American Idol post. He opined on his blog Zoilus:
At Creative Loafing's Tampa Calling blog, Wade Tatangelo intelligently speculates that the trend may be economically based: With the crisis of critical authority brought on by the Internet and the (also 'net-related) decline of newspaper sales, he says, critics are losing their jobs and those still employed are in more vulnerable positions: Maybe they take an interest in American Idol because they can't afford not to? There's something to that – I remarked in my book that unlike, say, an academic specialist, a working critic has to address a broad audience, and one who wrote only about the ultra-weird and never about the popular eventually would be out of a job. In the book I add "(rightly)", but it's debatable.
This article appears in Jul 23-29, 2008.