I play in a band and last week we were lucky enough to have our latest single reviewed newspapers from Melbourne and Perth. The Melbourne reviewer said our song was edgy and brilliant, the Perth reviewer said it was commercial crap. It got me thinking just how poorly critical opinion usually correlates with history, and wondering why in an age of social media, we need to pay attention to professional critics at all.

Mozart, Van Gough, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Gustav Eiffel, Picasso, and virtually any other creative pioneer you can name was unanimously panned by the critics until they eventually gained some traction and became trendy. The unlucky geniuses, like Mozart and Van Gough, only became popular after they died.

Look back at old reviews from the bible of American music criticism, Rolling Stone Magazine, and you’ll see that many albums now considered to be among the greatest of all time were given average ratings by the original reviewers. When the Eiffel Tower was first built, the Parisienne establishment thought it was an abomination on their skyline and wanted it pulled down immediately. Abraham Lincoln was rejected by Republicans as a vice-presidential candidate four years before he became the greatest leader America has ever seen. We clearly can’t trust the critics to know greatness when they first see it. Now that every book, song, album, film, bottle of wine and chocolate cake recipe is accessible to everyone online as soon as the creator wants it to be, and rated by members of the public soon after, we don’t need to rely on critics for their guidance either.

You could argue that when we give the public too much say we end up with American Idols in the charts and George W. Bush in the White House, but you’d be forgetting the long tail of brilliance that follows those two blights on history. For every Idol single there’s an epic Bruce Springsteen album waiting in the record library; George W. Bush, had to govern in the shadow of the Lincoln memorial.

No-one has ever erected a statue in honour of a critic, and thanks to social media, they probably never will.