It was standing room only on March 12 as students, faculty, and staff crowded into the McIntosh Center for a lecture by Doreen St. Félix, the award-winning critic, culture writer, and staff writer for The New Yorker (a position she has held since 2017 at just 25 years old). In her regular contributions to that journal’s weekly column Critic’s Notebook, St. Félix explores subjects across the spectrum of contemporary culture — from what she called the “existential” nature of Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show, to Blake Lively and the collapse of the #MeToo era, to the complexities of the capitalization of the word “Black.”
St. Félix’s talk, titled “Track Changes: The Authority of the Critic in Authoritarian Times,” was presented by LMU’s Media, Arts & a Just Society (MAJS). MAJS, directed by Evelyn McDonnell, professor of journalism in the LMU Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts, was developed through a collaboration between LMU Bellarmine College, LMU School of Film and Television, and the LMU College of Communication and Fine Arts. The initiative is committed to bringing critical discourse to the story-telling fields, investigating the possibility of media arts as a place of accessibility, equity, and justice, all while creating an informed public.
St. Félix’s talk began with a projected image of Charli XCX wearing a pink crop-top whose pink script read “They don’t build statues of critics.” Using this image as an example of the complex layering of semiotic meaning possible within images, as well as general lack of reverence for the critic, St. Félix discussed the role of the critic in Western culture; the idea of authority in relationship to criticism; and her own relationship to writing and criticism.
“I deal with feeling. Part of being a writer, I think, and critic in particular, is realizing that so much of how we process things that we can understand, things that we can write about, things that we can, you know, maybe even dilute to the level of fact is that we’re also processing our feeling or processing how a work of art or music or movie, whether it’s good or bad, kind of just like turns us on. And that’s fundamentally what I feel I do, how it maybe is slightly different from the other journalism work that you might be reading,” said St. Félix.
During the Q & A portion of the talk, St. Félix discussed her origin story. She noted that as a child, she had a way of interacting with the world that was questioning; she loved music and magazines, and would tear out her favorite images to put in her room. It was then that she noticed that critics and reviewers were as interesting as the people they wrote about. “It’s very corny, but I love culture. I love art. I love immersing myself in it. And I think a lot of us here in this room today love those things too. And moreover, we love living in a world that produces culture, and we have designated ourselves, whether we’ve done this consciously or subconsciously, as stewards of this cultural world. We think this stuff is really important, and we think that this work tells us about ourselves,” said St. Félix.