Do Critics Matter

In Focused Totality: An Open Letter To Larry Young, Mark Fossen writes:

It is my sincere belief that critics matter. I think it now, and I can remember thinking it at 18 when I first read Kott's Shakespeare Our Contemporary. In my theatre days, I greedily devoured book after book of criticism: Brecht, Grotowski, Artaud, Bentley. I think that a good critical essay is art in and of itself - it is simply non-fiction writing, and can rise much higher than the simple level of a consumer review.

My problem is that on a good day, when I'm feeling optimistic, I can barely persuade myself that comics matter. That critics matter is a leap of faith that I can't really take. That's not to say there's no difference between good criticism and bad criticism. Websnark is good, for instance, because it leads me to new comics that I enjoy, and because it sometimes leads me to see something in a comic that I hadn't noticed before. But that the critical enterprise itself matters...nah.