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Criticism has not been doing well lately The London Review of Books, Europe’s biggest-selling literary publication, would no longer exist if it wasn’t being funded by its wealthy editor’s family trust, having run up debts of £27m in 2009 Harper’s, the oldest monthly in the United States, would have disappeared a long time ago if it had not been supported by a billionaire with journalistic ambitions, John R MacArthur In France, the critic’s stock has never been so low, to the extent that it has become commonplace to deplore the ‘death of criticism’ in the same way that Roland Barthes used to theorise about the ‘death of the author’ In Italy, critical writing has become exceedingly rare, meaning that the occasional book, such as Alessandro Piperno’s Proust antiebreo (Proust, Anti-Jew), is received to tremendous critical acclaim The translation of Daniel Mendelsohn’s collection of essays drawn from the New York Review of Books also serves to underscore the current situation faced by criticism Published as How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, translated as Bellezza e Fragilità, Mendelsohn’s anthology epitomises the difficulty of implementing a type of criticism that is based on the aesthetic notion of beauty at a time when permanent streams of information prevail Is criticism, already fragile, threatened by the excess of information available in modern culture? And are critics now an endangered species? We are experiencing a period of increasing interest in high-quality criticism The answer is yes News can now be transmitted around the world within a matter of seconds, meaning that the empire of information is no longer the sole property of the critic Nonetheless, we are experiencing a period of increasing interest in high-quality criticism despite the relative paucity of contemporary critical writing Since this form can no longer justify its superiority over other types of discourse, it needs to retreat into introspection and to rethink its role and function within contemporary society As in any moment of crisis, critics have initiated a self-reinvention, a ‘retour aux sources’, following Giuseppe Verdi’s advice: ‘Let us turn back to