The critic’s profession may be destined to fade away, but others will have to take up this simple, irritating, somehow necessary job. PHOTOGRAPH BY ERICH HARTMANN / MAGNUM

In 1992, when I moved to New York and began to write about classical music, every major city newspaper had at least one writer covering the field, sometimes several writers. I would see knots of critics at performances, gaggles of them at big premières. In the intervening years, the ranks of the profession have steadily dwindled, to the point where fewer than ten American papers have full-time classical critics on staff. Longtime colleagues have taken buyouts. Last year, Timothy Mangan, who had been at the Orange County Register for eighteen years, was let go with two weeks’ severance. It’s like being in an exceedingly dull, slow version of Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None.”

You could argue that classical critics are an endangered species because the art form has lost its place in mainstream culture. Indeed, we no longer live in a world where the conductor Sarah Caldwell could make the cover of Time. Yet critic-free cities still have well-attended opera houses and orchestras, which loom large in local cultural economies. Last season, in Dallas, I witnessed a sold-out house for the première of Jake Heggie’s opera “Great Scott.” Not long before that, in Houston, Wagner’s “Die Walküre” drew a capacity crowd. Presumably, most of those in attendance subscribed to the Dallas Morning News or the Houston Chronicle, but neither paper has a full-time classical critic.

And classical music is hardly alone in witnessing a dying-off of critics. Colleagues in other disciplines—dance, theatre, visual arts, books, even movies and pop music—report similar struggles. Over the past decade, dozens of arts critics have lost their jobs or been demoted to freelance status. John Oliver, in a brutally brilliant takedown of the journalism business, concocted a mock trailer for a film called “Stoplight,” in which an investigative reporter is waylaid by inane clickbait assignments. The trailer included this line: “The Atlanta Journal-Constitution raves, ‘Actually, we had to get rid of our full-time movie reviewer nine years ago . . . so we haven’t seen it yet.’ ” That seemingly throwaway joke was precisely sourced. In 2007, the Journal-Constitution made sweeping cuts to its arts-writing staff. Pierre Ruhe, who had been the classical critic, subsequently left journalism and now works for the Alabama Symphony.

Criticism of any kind is increasingly unwelcome at the digital-age paper. Consider a controversy that flared up in Canada last year. Arthur Kaptainis, who had long been the critic of the Montreal Gazette and more recently had been writing freelance for the National Post, reviewed a Canadian Opera Company production of Rossini’s “Maometto II.” The Canadian Opera asked for a couple of corrections, whereupon the Post took the bizarre step of removing the review from its Web site. Amid the resulting hubbub, a Post arts editor was quoted in an e-mail: “I really hate running reviews for performing arts. They simply get no attention online, and almost always end up as our poorest performing pieces of digital content.” The same mantra is heard at culture sections across America. Reviews don’t catch eyeballs. They don’t “move the needle.”

The logic seems irrefutable. Why publish articles that almost nobody wants? On closer examination, some shaky assumptions underlie these hard-nosed generalizations. First, digital data, in the form of counting clicks and hits, give an incomplete picture of reading habits. Those who subscribe to the print edition are discounted—and they tend to be older people, who are also more likely to follow the performing arts. A colleague wrote to me, “The four thousand people reading your theatre critics might be extremely loyal subscribers who press the paper on others. People in power often speak of ‘engagement’ and ‘valued readers,’ yet they still remain in thrall of the big click numbers—because of advertising, mostly.”

Also, even if the data could measure every twitch of every eyeball, should that information control editorial choices? Foreign reporting often draws fewer readers, yet the bigger papers persist in publishing it, because it is felt to be important. One guesses that play-by-play accounts of baseball and football games receive relatively few clicks, yet the sports section is considered sacrosanct. It’s in the cultural field that editors are willing to let online traffic dictate coverage. The spirit seems to be: O.K., we’ll still let you write about this stuff, but you’ve got to make it more topical, more digestible.

The trouble is, once you accept the proposition that popularity corresponds to value, the game is over for the performing arts. There is no longer any justification for giving space to classical music, jazz, dance, or any other artistic activity that fails to ignite mass enthusiasm. In a cultural-Darwinist world where only the buzziest survive, the arts section would consist solely of superhero-movie reviews, TV-show recaps, and instant-reaction think pieces about pop superstars. Never mind that such entities hardly need the publicity, having achieved market saturation through social media. It’s the intellectual equivalent of a tax cut for the super-rich.

The drive to revamp cultural coverage has overtaken major newspapers, including the New York Times, just as the wider public has been rediscovering the virtue of traditional reporting. In the wake of the 2016 Presidential campaign, with its catastrophic feedback loop of fake news and clickbait, people have subscribed in surging numbers to so-called legacy publications. Do these chastened content-consumers really want culture pages dominated by trending topics? Or do they expect papers to decide for themselves what merits attention? One lesson to be learned from the rise of Donald Trump is that the media should not bind themselves blindly to whatever moves the needle.

Cultural criticism is a form of journalism—odd journalism, but journalism nonetheless. The Times film critic A. O. Scott mounted a vibrant defense of this sour science in his recent book “Better Living Through Criticism.” He writes, “As consumers of culture, we are lulled into passivity or, at best, prodded toward a state of pseudo-semi-self-awareness, encouraged either toward the defensive group identity of fanhood or a shallow, half-ironic eclecticism.” The role of the critic, Scott says, is to resist the manufactured consensus—to interrogate the successful, to exalt the unknown, to argue for ambiguity and complexity. Virgil Thomson immortally defined criticism as “the only antidote we have to paid publicity.”

Criticism can assume many forms: essays, profiles, reported pieces, opinionated rants. Ultimately, though, the review is the grounding of what critics do and is the source of whatever authority they possess. Furthermore, criticism is cumulative: its impact can’t be measured by however many hits one piece receives. One common complaint in newsrooms is that reviews—especially reviews of one-off events, like concerts—appear after the fact. Readers can’t act upon such writing as they do with, say, movie or food criticism. Yet reviews are the shoe-leather journalism of the cultural sphere: they convey what happened, however subjectively or impressionistically. No editor would ask that political reporters deliver forecasts of what might happen in a debate, or candidates’ assessments of how they will perform, in place of accounts of the debate itself. This is the ridiculous position in which the non-criticizing critic is placed.

Admittedly, criticism is a strange business—perhaps, on some level, a sinister one. Judge not, lest ye be judged, a wise man said; the implication is unfavorable for those of us who imagine taking a seat behind Bach in heaven’s concert hall. Critics can, however, do a certain amount of good on their way to perdition. They can open new worlds in the minds of readers; a passing phrase may spur a lifelong love. When Roger Ebert died, I recounted how his reviews of “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” “Badlands,” and “The Sacrifice” led me toward the deepest kind of moviegoing pleasure. Almost everyone who cares about culture has had that kind of encounter with critics. Perhaps the profession is destined to fade away, but others will have to take up the critic’s simple, irritating, somehow necessary job: to stand in a public space and say, “Not quite.”