Th is special issue explores how authority and expertise in cultural critique are being renegotiated in the digital media landscape. Over the past decades, digital media technologies, particularly social media platforms, have enabled increased public participation in debates about arts and culture, but they have also challenged intellectual authority, enlightenment and knowledge. Today traditional institutions, such as academia and the news media, which are associated with intellectual and public authority, are not the only avenues for cultural critique. Rather, cultural critique and critical authority are constantly performed and (re)negotiated in various types of digital media by intellectuals, journalists and pundits, vloggers/bloggers and podcasters, as well as celebrities and ordinary people. Th is reconfi guration of the critical public sphere has given rise to new forms of critical expression and action. It has made cultural critique the purview of a wide range of people, which might be seen as a democratization of the cultural public sphere. Many scholars, however, frame this change within a narrative of decline. James Elkins, for example, opens his book, What Happened to Arts Criticism, with the paradoxical statement that "Arts criticism is in worldwide crisis […] at the very same time, art criticism is also healthier than ever […] So it's dying but it's everywhere" (2003, p. 2). Similarly, Ronan McDonald proclaims "the death of the critic," the title of his book from 2007. Th is decline narrative taps into broader scholarly and public debates about societal institutions' loss of authority (Furedi, 2013; Inglehart, 1999), the "death of expertise" (Nichols, 2017) and the weakening of public trust in, for example, institutionalized news media (Fletcher & Park, 2017), most MedieKultur 65