We know that newspaper art criticism has gone into a steep decline, and that is in line with the absence of art criticism from contemporary cultural programming on television and in radio. Signs of art criticism slipping off the face of the cultural world as it goes from cultural critique into the safer domains of localized description, careful evocation and "restaurant review" style criticism.

In his What happened to art criticism? James Elkins presents a wide array of evidence suggesting that art criticism has little use in the world today and that almost no one really reads it. It is not read much by ordinary folks, nor is it catalogued and used in research by art historians. As for artists and galleries or museums, they treat the critics who write extended catalog essays as hired workers whose products are only acceptable if they serve the purpose of promotion. This means critics are regarded as waiters asked to bring in a different dish if what comes out of the kitchen does not satisfy them.

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Art criticism is in worldwide crisis. Its voice has become very weak, and it is dissolving into the background clutter of ephemeral cultural criticism. But its decay is not the ordinary last faint push of a practice that has run its course, because at the very same time, art criticism is also healthier than ever. Its business is booming: it attracts an enormous number of writers, and often benefits from high-quality color printing and worldwide distribution. In that sense art criticism is flourishing, but invisibly, out of sight of contemporary intellectual debates. So it’s dying, but it’s everywhere. It’s ignored, and yet it has the market behind it.