Many people hate reviewers. Sometimes even reviewers hate themselves. As the literary critic Cyril Connolly put it glumly, reviewing can feel like “the thankless task of drowning other people’s kittens”.

In the social media age, things are complicated by the fact that the subjects of reviews can claw back. Last month, the American singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey took a swipe at the veteran US music critic Ann Powers via the unholy medium of Twitter. “Here’s a little sidenote on your piece,” she typed with seemingly ice-cool rage. “I don’t even relate to one observation you made about the music. There’s nothing uncooked about me.”

“Uncooked?” Power’s NPR review of Del Rey’s latest album, Norman Fucking Rockwell!, included the insight that, next to a Joni Mitchell lyric, a Del Rey one “feels uncooked.” Well, nobody really comes out of a comparison with Joni Mitchell alive, but “uncooked” seems hardly the stuff to pierce a person to the heart. Perhaps Del Rey detected a suggestion of inauthenticity? Even so, Powers’s review is, at worst, mixed in its feelings. And its sheer length (an extravagant 3,618 words, many of them effusive) indicates a respectful degree of attention.

Quick Guide Enter the Burgess prize Show The 2020 Observer/Burgess prize – for a previously unpublished review of up to 800 words on new work in the arts – closes 30 November 2019. First prize is £3,000; two runners-up will receive £500 each. The winners will be announced in early 2020 and the winning work published in print in the Observer New Review. The prizes are presented by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and the Observer. Enter online here

None of this seemed to deter Del Rey’s fans, who cheerfully piled in, tagging Powers on Twitter and prompting her to declare she was taking “a few days off” social media to take her dog “on a long walk”.

Reviewing has always been a thorny business, and artists don’t need a thin skin to feel pricked. “Good reviews make your heart swell,” observed the novelist Mark Haddon, while “bad reviews are like seeing your daughter heckled during the Nativity play”. So what does it mean for criticism that the internet offers artists an immediate right of reply – and the ability to summon an army of social media foot soldiers to push back? Are critics pulling their punches as a result?

Mostly, I think not. Critics have always had to be made of sterner stuff. The great Rabbie Burns was once so riled by a Scottish reviewer that he wrote to him: “Thou eunuch of language… thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense” and, most cutting of all: “Thou Englishman, who never was south the Tweed.” All of which makes Martin Amis calling Tibor Fischer “a creep and a wretch… and a fat-arse” seem positively mild. (To be fair, Fischer had remarked that reading Amis’s novel Yellow Dog was like finding “your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating”.)

Alain de Botton responded to one critic: ‘I will hate you till the day I die.’ Photograph: David Hartley/Rex/Shutterstock

The trouble is that there is no longer anywhere for a critic to hide. A byline is enough to track someone down online. “I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make,” was Alain de Botton’s comment on Caleb Crain’s website following Crain’s review of his The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. Sometimes the consolations of philosophy are simply not enough.

Legal recourse is the other option. “It is not my habit to reply to hostile book reviews, but a personal attack that amounts to libel is another matter,” boomed Niall Ferguson in the letters pages of the London Review of Books in 2011, responding to a sharp-edged article by Pankaj Mishra. “I am, I repeat, owed an apology.”

The petty rivalries and colourful invective involved in bouts between critic and artist have, at least, a quaint charm. But there’s little charming about squabbles over amateur star ratings on Amazon. In our consumer-oriented review culture, everyone’s a critic and nobody has a clue. “Review bombing”, a reverse marketing strategy in which crowds of online visitors leave negative reviews to sink a product, is the latest headache (see Captain Marvel, starring Brie Larson, which garnered more than 50,000 largely negative reviews within hours of its release). With the waters so muddied, clear-sighted criticism seems more important than ever.

“To write about me is nothing like it is to be with me,” Del Rey complained of Powers’s review. That may be so, but the task of the reviewer isn’t really to connect with the artist on their own terms – it’s to offer a pathway through the work and intelligent company along the way. In any case, it’s worth remembering the old joke about the food critic who gave a restaurant such a bad review that he woke up to find a horse’s head in his bed.

He ate it. And gave that a bad review, too.

Shahidha Bari is an academic and broadcaster and former winner of the Observer/Anthony Burgess prize for arts journalism. She’s a judge for this year’s competition, which has a prize fund of £4,000. The deadline for entries is 30 November. For more information, go to anthonyburgess.org