Symposium: “Criticism in the New Commons”

The morning panel featured four influential voices of present-day criticism, Merve Emre, Samuel Medina, Kate Wagner, and Oliver Wainwright; David Sadighian was the moderator. One after another, each of them talked for twenty minutes about criticism as a theme, its changes over time, and its possible future. Together, their presentations painted a vivid dramatization of a disciplinary upheaval which is struggling with the decline of old institutions and the growth of digital media.

One of the main throughlines, which is a default on criticism panels nowadays, was the notion that criticism is going through a crisis: its readership is decreasing, and its influence is weakening. Yet, I am not convinced that criticism is dying; rather, its mediums are shifting, and with them probably its content. A change in medium inevitably alters the message it carries: what can be said, how it is framed, and whom it reaches. But that transformation is not a loss; it is intrinsic to the life of media itself. As Marshall McLuhan wrote, the medium is the message: the form through which a message travels shapes and even becomes its meaning. The shift from printed formats to new types of media does not signal the end of a long practice, but probably a reconfiguration.

All the panelists were particularly strong and clear on their respective talks, but one stood out the most: Merve Emre. Her precision of language and clarity of argument gave her talk a rare lucidity. Speaking without nostalgia, she affirmed the ongoing necessity of criticism as a form of public thought.

The afternoon workshops turned reflection into method. In Christopher Hawthorne’s session, participants examined his process for Punch List Architecture Newsletter, using a recent article on Norman Foster’s JPMorgan supertall as a case study. His clarity and generosity as a critic made the session especially rewarding, revealing how voice, timing, and context shape the force of a review.

As a whole, the day was not a farewell speech to criticism but rather an exploration of its changes—recognizing that in order to survive it has to change, and that the life of criticism is exactly in its capacity to take up new shapes.