Dismantling Power Structures: The Irony of Elite Cultural Critique

Exploring the alienation effect of critique in modern society

Criticism is a form of power. In today’s hyper-realistic world, over-saturated by sterile mass-media facsimiles of art, criticism has become both a form of self defense and a structure of alienation and dismissive disregard.

In Nicholas Holm’s article Critical capital: Cultural Studies, the Critical Disposition and Critical Reading as Elite Practice, he talks about how being able to critically analyze culture, like movies or books, is often seen as a sign of being well-educated and privileged. That “the mark of education is therefore no longer an affinity for blank verse, but rather an penchant for variants of critical deconstruction” (Holm, 2020, p. 14).

This leads to a world where “artists, authors and content creators across forms and platforms become increasingly aware and alert to the important of politics to the success of their work” (Holm, 2020, p. 9). This, of course, doesn’t just show itself in the realm of popular culture. In a culture driven by the popular, critical stances align the critic with one side or another along a political spectrum: over here are the elitist progressive liberals, over there are the uncultured authoritarian regressives.