Caleb Crain is an American writer who keeps an elegant blog at www.steamthing.com. At the end of June, he wrote a review of a new book by the essayist Alain de Botton for the New York Times. The day after the review came out, a long comment was posted on Crain’s blog by a reader, calling himself, curiously, ‘Alain de Botton’. “I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make,” it concluded.

De Botton is a philosopher who likes to write about happiness and love, and as the comment was not exactly suggestive of either of these traits, readers initially thought it must have been a hoax. But it was quickly established that ‘de Botton’ was, in fact, de Botton; the following day, he was back with a justification, of sorts. “There’s a point at which a review becomes so angry, cruel and mean-spirited that perspective just disappears,” he wrote.

Curiously, the same weekend Alice Hoffman was having a hard time with a review of her latest novel in her hometown paper, the Boston Globe. Hoffman let off a stream (a song?) of tweets on Twitter, 27 in all, which included the critic’s phone number and email address, and the suggestion that fans “tell her what u think of snarky critics”.

Nobody took Hoffman’s advice, and so no harm was done (except to her reputation). Hers and de Botton’s outbursts may have damaged their brands, but for the wider culture, they were a good thing. They were honest and passionate. As insights into their authors, they will be invaluable to literary biographers and students. And they raised, in gloriously melodramatic fashion, a perennial question: why do we have critics?

This was put to me in a slightly different form recently. “How important are critics?” I was asked on a radio programme. “Not as important as self-important,” I thought. There is a self-regarding tone to the term “critic”, one that seeks to elevate it as a calling above more vulgar forms of journalism, and that seems to hark after the status afforded to those on the other side of the footlights, the artists. In my line of work, there is an idea that critics are a part of the theatre, just like those on stage and back stage. This is badly misguided.

Critics are journalists. Like the political and other correspondents, we’re reporters who’ve acquired the privilege of getting to add our opinion to the bare facts. We write for our readers. The vast majority of them won’t have the opportunity of seeing the play we’re reviewing, no matter how good the review. They want a short, sharp, thorough, opinionated and entertaining account of the play and its context. They want (or so our editors often tell us) a star rating, in case they don’t have time to read the whole review.

The discipline of providing this is not rocket science. You organise free tickets to the play from the publicist. You go and sit in the dark and make surreptitious notes. You avoid the banter and bonhomie in the lobby, and go home to write your review, preferably sober.

You write truthfully, with passion, and with style. You write quickly. With bedtime and deadline looming, you don’t have the luxury of perfection or (much) reflection. The mantra: don’t get it right, get it written.

The media is a crude and vulgar business (vulgar comes from the Latin for “of the people”), and a profoundly democratic one. It celebrates both freedom of expression and the transparency of governance and culture. Any critic is, of course, only as good as his reviews: it’s the quality of the critic that merits respect, not the fact that he’s a critic. But there is a deep need for critics, as for other journalists – not so much to help inform the culture, but so as to communicate that culture to a wider audience than can partake in it first hand.

In this context, it’s not surprising that the relationship between artists and critics is not always a happy one. There is cordiality involved in doing interviews and features, and sometimes a genuine bond forms between people who are, after all, passionate about the same thing. (Though that creates all the more potential for grievance. When the critic opens his arms to you, you never know whether it’s to give you a hug, or stab you in the back.)

But ultimately, the artist and critic worship different gods: one, the audience; the other, the reader. The critic is not a typical audience member, and neither is the artist a typical reader. When an artist starts attempting to produce work for the critics, his plays will be callow and aloof (though the critics might be fooled). When a critic starts writing for the artist he is reviewing, his copy will be self-regarding, cautious and obtuse.

Some correspondence between them is clearly a good thing, and the joy of new media is that it makes that so much easier – perhaps a little too easy, as de Botton and Hoffman have presumably realised. It’s good for critics to be reminded that the people we write about take what we say seriously – often personally. Journalists need to be held to account also.

But as with the theatre, so too with criticism, and so too with an artist’s reply. It’s not enough to say it, you have to say it with style. De Botton and Hoffman get full marks for passion and honesty, but not much for nuance or craft.

Hoffman herself once wrote a review of Richard Ford’s ‘The Sportswriter’ that was less than complimentary. She got a package in the post shortly after. It consisted of one of her novels, with two large, frayed holes in it, where first Ford’s wife, and then Ford himself, had taken to it with the family shotgun. Now that’s style.

Published in the Sunday Tribune.