Why do people dislike critics? My theory is that many of us have become arbiters of what is “good” and “bad” in increasingly reductive ways, replacing well-formed opinions with moral scrutiny.
There’s an economic explanation for this. As publication budgets tighten, it is less profitable to spend a week on a nuanced review when a critic could easily churn out three hot takes in the same time. But, to compensate for this lack of depth, “moral responsibility” has resurfaced from the trash can we tossed it in the 1980s, revived as a mainstream cultural lens.
Put simply, critics are producing ever more surface-level critiques, with moral judgement often standing in for context.
I’ve worked as a critic for almost a decade. In that time, I’ve come to see my role not as deciding whether a work is morally good or bad but as contextualizing it. I can attribute much of my reverence for context to a single source, a podcast called Supercontext that I have been recommending to my peers since it ended five years ago.
A self-proclaimed “media autopsy,” Supercontext was an independent podcast hosted by Christan Sager and Charlie Bennett from 2016 to 2020. Its aim was to understand why a piece of art or media was actually made, refusing plot summaries and instead asking how a work fit its moment.
My favorite episodes were on the work of Joan Didion, the film Heat, and John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction. Gardner, a mid-century American novelist, believed that morality has only two sources: religion or Romanticism. He was aware of the tension between social order and individual liberty in his evaluation of art’s subversions, but ultimately concluded that moral art is the foundation of a “true” culture. For Gardner, “moral” art celebrates life, rather than debasing it. Critics, he said, should be concerned with only three things: the good, the true, and the beautiful.
I would argue today’s discourse chases a different triad: the good, the “authentic,” and the conformist. I sympathize with modern critics; deadlines pile up, and quick, inflammatory takes are tempting. Yet when we skip context, criticism withers. A restaurant reviewer who ignores where ingredients come from or a music writer who can’t place an album in its genre or within an artist’s discography provides readers little value. You might as well ask for the opinion of your neighbor on the subway, or your great aunt who never listens to pop music anyway.
In the vacuum left by missing context, moral judgment rushes in. Many critics — and none more so than new-media reviewers on YouTube, TikTok, and elsewhere — now trade analysis for ethical verdicts. Take the response to Sabrina Carpenter’s cover art for her forthcoming album, Man’s Best Friend. Its detractors believe that gender satire is not appropriate for our “current political climate,” assuming, once again, that women are responsible for their own oppression.
Can women participate in patriarchy? Of course. But looking at Carpenter’s album cover through a literalist lens neglects the myriad of alternative responses through which the critic can examine the visual.
A literalist would say that depicting oppression in this flippant way is an endorsement of that oppression. This is a valid lens, if easy to argue against. If we can’t see a distinction between an artistic depiction of self-oppression and real examples of self-oppression (Bop Houses, Bonnie Blue), then our critics are failing us. If we begin to equate depictions of harm with harm itself, and socially prosecute such a depiction, the consequence is censorship.
Here’s an alternative way of reading Carpenter’s new album cover. I was struck by the surrealist way her left hand is positioned near the focal point of the image. It is splayed open, a ring shining on her middle finger as it reaches towards the faceless man in front of her. Her hand is in an unnatural, stylized position, indicating that the whole image is also stylized. Posed. Unrealistic.
Her positioning is a signal that invites us to look deeper, to ask why we feel uncomfortable when we look at her crawling on the floor. Or, indeed, why we don’t feel uncomfortable. Is she signalling kink? Trying to shock conservative America? The answer lies somewhere between Carpenter’s intentions and your response, in that unsettled zone that rewards further thought.
When I read the response to Carpenter’s cover art online, I returned to Supercontext’s episode on Gardner to make sense of my growing trepidation.
Are we entering an era of media literacy where everything is filtered not only through a literalist lens, but through what some have termed “new puritanism” or “puriteens?”
There are many places where the “moral art” debate can go. Does art wield real power? If so, does it have too much sway on the moral actions of our society, especially on young men? Those supporting Carpenter’s album cover may say the opposite; that art has no bearing on our moral choices. Neither is true.
Art rarely convinces. We bend it to our ends: self-expression, excuse, armor.
Supercontext was a show that refused shortcuts. Whether they discussed a Bond film, a comic book, or podcasting itself, Sager and Bennett asked simple but probing questions of their subject matter. Who made it, why did they make it, and how was it received?
It was the show’s pursuit of understanding that elevated this podcast as the standard to which I compared other shows. Their curiosity has always astounded me, not least their refusal to morally condemn a work like On Moral Fiction that itself demands moral consciousness.
The Gardner episode isn’t the only one I keep revisiting. A few months ago I set out to re-listen to Supercontext’s entire 200-plus-episode archive. At twelve hours a day, I calculated, it would take twenty-three days—a figure that felt perfectly reasonable, which says a lot about how much the show means to me.
Supercontext was the podcast that helped me through some of my loneliest moments at college, and it is now the antidote to the YouTube commentators and “debunking” podcasts that have driven me to write this essay. As a podcast critic, I’m often asked what I look for in a show. Despite increasingly elaborate answers, my most honest would be “just remake Supercontext.”
After years of writing about this podcast (and reaching Episode 132 in my journey through the archive), Sager and Bennett dropped a surprise teaser for their first new episode in over five years. The episode that came a week later, an analysis of Fugazi’s Repeater, is a perfect return to form.
It would be reductive to say Supercontext is a podcast for nerds, though I’m happy to take that label myself. It’s not even just for critics. It’s a show that celebrates context. As for methodological lenses, they’ve got plenty. Morality, as you may expect, is pretty far down the list.
Before you start listening to the new episodes, I’ll end with this statement: Supercontext is the podcast that made me a critic. Maybe it will make you one too.
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Alice Florence Orr is a staff writer and managing editor for Podcast Review. She is a writer and freelance media strategist.