Are they still relevant? Everyone's a critic.

The flaws extend beyond film. In pop music, especially at top-of-the-food-chain publications like Rolling Stone, critics have a distressing tendency to pull their punches for leading artists. As Bill Wyman points out in a hilarious post at his Hitsville.com site, a long string of Rolling Stone critics has gotten twisted into pretzels to try to portray any new R.E.M. album as a throwback to the band's glory days, even though the albums now written off as disappointments were the ones originally labeled comebacks.

"In the music industry press, you are frequently discouraged from writing negative reviews," Wyman told me. "It's considered uncool to say that a lot of pop music is terrible. You're not supposed to tell readers things they don't want to hear."

The best critics have always done exactly the opposite. As the late critic Kingsley Amis put it: "If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing." Whether critics are irritants or masters of elucidation, opinions still matter. But no one is respected simply because of the authority of the institution they write for. The Web isn't the enemy of critical thinking. The land of a million blogs is a medium brimming with opinion. What's different is the reader gets to decide whose opinion matters the most. It's a big adjustment, but maybe it's time critics, like many artists, realize they should pay more attention to their audience.

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"The Big Picture" runs every Tuesday in Calendar. E-mail questions or comment to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.