Introduction managers and researchers in the cultural sector rely primarily on indicators of
popular recognition to evaluate the success of cultural goods. Numbers of tickets sold, box-
office revenues, selling prices and measures of satisfaction are accorded attention at the
expense of other forms of recognition such as recognition by peers or by experts (see Allen
and Lincoln, 2004). However, success in the arts, both material and symbolic, is dependent
as much on the artists themselves and on independent experts as on consumers (Joy and …

This paper explores the role of critics in the cultural industries through a multidisciplinary
literature review. By synthesizing works in the fields of management, economics, sociology
and information sciences, the author raises three issues. He begins with a short discussion
of the nature of media criticism and its relationship to the cultural industries. He then tackles
the question of how critical discourse is constructed: how do critics evaluate cultural
products, knowing that both the economic fate of the work and the critic's professional …