Mario Naves
From our cave-dwelling ancestors to the here and now, the fundamental question remains: Is a given thing any good? You might as well ask if sex will matter in 2020.

Thigh Master
As long as people are creating, there will always be someone there to mock or rock it. But criticism ultimately doesn’t matter. How else do you explain the success of crap like Rush Hour 3 or Fergie?

Dalton Ross
I compare the rise of the online critic-blogger to what happened when reality television first was introduced in 2000. Everyone thought reality was going to either take over television or be a short-lived fad, when in fact it did neither. It carved out its own place in the TV landscape and settled in. That’s what’s going to happen with online criticism. Will it make print journalism obsolete? I doubt it. But it definitely is another place for people to turn to for opinions.

Aaron Riccio
The future will belong to the metacritic, a composite of all criticism for the art in question, valued and ranked heuristically, so as to provide the audience with a single voice. Within that, the individual critic will still be useful (especially those ranked higher, via hits or links—like Google searches) in intelligently culling the good from the bad, but the process will become more democratically open-source and less dictatorially closed-minded. One of the sites I work for as an editor, New Theater Corps, is actually trying to bridge the gap between “blogger” and “critic”—the site aims to find young, up-and-coming theatergoers and help develop their style. Web communes (webunes?) might be the next-best hope for criticism continuing as we know it now.

Illustration: Nathan Huang

Andy Horwitz
By 2020 the line between creation and criticism will probably blur a lot. The time between thought, expression and reaction will continue to shrink, and the critics’ role will evolve into part of the process, not just outside commentary—like the scroll at the bottom of a newscast or director’s commentary on a DVD. Or maybe, especially with live performance, criticism will stay mostly the same—an important interpretive documentation of a moment that is lived and then gone.

Adam Szymkowicz, playwright, blogger (aszym.blogspot.com)
Maybe bloggers will become more powerful, maybe not. Maybe all reviews will be podcasts. Maybe we will all be flying around in “aircars” which will run on hydrogen and dreams. But if we are alive, we will continue to have opinions and will express them just as loudly as we do now, and it doesn’t matter if they are written or spoken or fed into our brains via “headchips.”

Stephanie Zacharek
Can you hear the howls of bitter laughter emanating from Brooklyn? I think there will always be good writers who care about art—movies, music, fine arts, books, what have you. Criticism will live in some form. But will it survive as a profession, as something people can actually make a living at (even a meager one)? I have serious doubts about that, partly because so many established print publications have decided criticism doesn’t matter, now that people can get so much “information” out there on the Web.

Alex Ross
Who knows? I doubt criticism itself will change much, even if the media world is transformed beyond recognition. There’s a reason Addison DeWitt still gets laughs for his lines in All About Eve; snark is eternal.

Charlie Finch
Criticism is about the critic and everybody’s a critic.

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