As befits a woman who has made art out of channelling feminine archetypes, the show’s design was suitably saturated in oestrogenic imagery. The dramatic stage ejection in question was carried out while the star was recumbent on a full-length train, discarded from a wedding dress worn earlier in the set. She crooned out her first and probably still most famous hit song — the narcoleptic “Video Games” — while sitting on a giant swing covered in ribbons and flowers. Another number was sung while getting her hair and make-up fixed up onstage. There was even a scene involving a maypole. As one rapt reviewer put it: “Everything about the singer’s performance carried a delicate feminine touch that made you assured you were in safe motherly arms to feel all the emotions she conjured.”

Elsewhere this week, a much earlier version of Del Rey was also in the news. Images were discovered and gleefully circulated online of a young Lana — or Lizzy Grant, as she was before her professional name change — modelling ponchos for a knitting pattern catalogue. Fresh-faced and pink-cheeked, Lizzy cycles through some of the stock facial expressions of the catalogue model — demure, cute, proto-sultry — while gamely sporting a variety of tassel-heavy monstrosities. Though she doesn’t know it, ahead of her lies a totally distinctive musical path, a lot of kohl and back-combed hair, some astonishing songs full of rapture and disappointment, and several truly horrible takes by music critics. The pathos is palpable.

Knitting seems like a suitable metaphor for an artist’s creative trajectory — for there, too, you have to just keep going without catastrophically unravelling, until everyone can finally see what it is you were making all along. In the early stages of Del Rey’s career, barely anyone could see what the visually literate philosophy graduate with a beautiful voice was constructing.

Her sun-bleached, tearstained, drowsy West Coast sound was dismissed as pretentious pastiche. Her tremulous, dazed voice with its sensually sibilant diction — swooping from breathy to raspy to pure to the occasional throaty growl — was mocked as pitchy and inadequate. It was suggested that her act was wholly contrived by others; that she was artificially enhanced by plastic surgery; that she pretended for publicity purposes to have lived in a trailer park (she had, for a while) and her father was actually a millionaire (he wasn’t).

In his savage review of her first album Born to Die (2012), the New York Times’s reviewer began: “It’s already difficult to remember Lana Del Rey, but let’s try… That moll with the dangerous tastes in men and pastimes and the puffed-out lips and hair?… Yep, it was a pose, cut from existing, densely patterned cloth. Just like all the other poses.” The author concludes with barely suppressed triumphalism: “The only real option is to wash off that face paint, muss up that hair and try again in a few years. There are so many more names out there for the choosing.”

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Luckily for us, though, Lana-who-was-once-Lizzy persisted. By the time of her album Ultraviolence (2014), with songs such as “Shades of Cool” and “West Coast”, she had perfected her persona of the somewhat sedated but still-devoted girlfriend, swooning at the recollection of kisses with beautiful boys destined to let her down. Just underneath the blank-faced, Xanax-induced composure lay a wave of archetypal female emotion and lachrymosity, surging towards whichever male with an attachment disorder currently occupied the sacred position of “my baby”.

This version of Lana adored her man, longed for him, looked after him, protected him. She was sweet, she was soft, she was all-forgiving. She got off ecstatically on the idea of herself with him, and the look of them together — his tattooed arms wrapped around her; the trappings of her own delicate femininity reflected back in the glint of his fierce eyes or the polished chrome of his motorcycle. She was even willing to pretend she didn’t care at all, just to keep him close.

To my mind, this version reached peak expression in the lushly orchestrated eponymous track of her album Honeymoon (2015), full of dramatic pauses, elongations, and mysterious, ecstatic incantations (“Dark blue… Dark blue”). By the time she languidly breathes out the climactic lines “There are violets in your eyes/There are guns that blaze around you/There are roses in between my thighs/And a fire that surrounds you”, the whole thing rivals Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet for tragic erotic intensity. Five years later, the singer responded angrily to a critic: “Never had a persona. Never needed one. Never will.” If this really is true, then quite frankly Del Rey must be the most stereotypically heterosexual woman who ever existed.

But this is not the stuff that critics now love her for. In fact, it’s the stuff they mostly still don’t know what to do with. On more recent albums, and particularly since Norman Fucking Rockwell! (2019),  Del Rey has complicated her previous limpet-like, ride-or-die presentation. She now manifests a more conventional and modern ambivalence towards the male sex — at least, sometimes. She has also become more maternal in her styling; less pouty, more seraphically sad and queenly in bearing and glances. And you can practically hear journalists breathing a sigh of relief.

The author of a recent tribute, for instance, talks glowingly about Del Rey’s recent albums and her kinship with Bob Dylan, Sylvia Plath, and Walt Whitman (“eternally constructing and destroying the ‘I’”), but not so much about the previous self-confessed kinship with Marilyn Monroe. Her first four albums are perfunctorily dismissed as showcasing a “much more conventional pop star… whose lyrics traded in self-aware stereotypes — fuck-me-daddy, glacé-cherry, Lolita-cum-Nancy-Sinatra pastiches”. The fantasy that Lolita-cum-Nancy-Sinatra pastiches ever counted as “conventional pop” in the 21^st Century — and especially during years where Beyoncé, Katy Perry, Rihanna, and Nicki Minaj were Del Rey’s main chart rivals — speaks to the difficulty, for some, of assimilating the singer’s earlier output into their narratives of world-class artistry.

Previous commentators have also struggled to place Del Rey with respect to her swaggering, bombastic, “empowered” female contemporaries, singing about how exigent they are in bed or how they insist upon paying for all their own diamonds. For some more obtuse critics, this has meant that Del Rey’s work must be “anti-feminist” and “problematic”. In 2020, the artist defensively responded to such complaints, asking that the leniency shown to peers such as Minaj and Beyonce for hits “about being sexy, wearing no clothes, fucking, cheating etc” also be shown to her for songs about “feeling beautiful by being in love even if the relationship is not perfect”.  Predictably, this intervention from the star only created a further opportunity for smug chiding from female journalists about new perceived crimes — now allegedly including cultural appropriation and anti-blackness.

Yet when Del Rey covers her heroine Nina Simone’s desperate song “The Other Woman”, like Simone before her she is tapping into a well of primitive, hopeless longing that transcends skin colour. When, in “Video Games”, she tells her lover with girl-child intonation that “You the bestest” and leans in for a “big kiss”, she is channelling the thrilled shiver of a sexy young woman who knows that her short skirt attracts more wolf whistles than anything she might have to say. The singer neither validates these feelings nor criticises them, but simply gives aural expression to what they are like from the inside — enhanced in the video by carefully selected visuals, mostly directed by her and her photographer sister, that draw on a wide repertoire of feminine guises from different times and places.

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And the unease of commentators in response is striking. In the sort of world they would apparently prefer, songs by women artists monotonously boasting about sexual prowess, or about grinding in clubs for money, or about cynically using some hapless fool as a sugar daddy are perfectly fine — all good clean feminist fun for seven-year-old girls to use as twerking material in TikTok videos. But songs like Del Rey’s, authentically exploring the trade-offs between the agency and passivity, pleasure and pain lurking just underneath all such superficially “empowered” poses, definitely are not.

Sometimes, journalists try to recuperate Del Rey back into the mainstream feminist fold by representing her positive cultural value as demonstrating to the world the dark side of love, the better to help us “re-focus our agenda on the cultivation of self-love”. Some even like to present her as having been on a redemptive personal journey, making much of her having eventually decided to omit in performance a song lyric originally recycled for her song “Ultraviolence” from The Crystals (“He hit me and it felt like a kiss”).

But Del Rey stands in no need of our redemption, for she has not transgressed. She has simply shown us what is the case — the ecstasy and the agony of sex, love, and loss for many women, young and not-so-young — and has transfigured it into art. She has been knitting these things together from the very beginning. We should continue to cherish this truthful messenger from the dark, tear-soaked underground of female experience — not in spite of her uncomfortably neutral presentations of unfashionable femininity, but partly because of them.

This is far from uncommon, for it’s increasingly common for critics to adopt the brace position before daring to dislike something that many people enjoy. Back in May, the Guardian’s Scott Tobias became Twitter’s baddie of the day for battering Shrek on the occasion of its 20^thanniversary: “Shrek is a terrible movie. It’s not funny. It looks awful.” I found the reaction extraordinary. Tobias was called, at best, a cynical, click-hungry contrarian; at worst a twisted, misanthropic snob. “Shrek Fans Diss ‘Joyless Chud’ Guardian Critic Who Called Film ‘Unfunny and Overrated,’” reported The Wrap. His crime, let’s say it again, was hating an old, animated movie about an implausibly Scottish ogre and his donkey friend.

Critics have never been the world’s most beloved people. Almost exactly 100 years ago, the Czech author and sometime critic Karel Čapek wrote about the consequences of a harsh review: “I’m reconciled in advance to the fact that [the author] considers me unfair, cliquey and incompetent. It’s definitely his right. I, too, use this right when an unfair, cliquey and incompetent critic, who gives my book a bad press, hurts me. To cut a long story short, there’s an eternal conflict between artist and critic. ‘Praise me, or I’ll hate you.’”

Nonetheless, there used to be an understanding among readers that any worthwhile critic, whether it be William Hazlitt, Kenneth Tynan or Pauline Kael, would need to hate as well as to love. As the late Clive James (who was skilled on both counts) wrote in a 2013 defence of hatchet jobs: “You can’t eliminate the negative. It accentuates the positive.”

Now critics are often up against readers who resist the very notion of criticism. A few popular lines of attack pop up regularly. There’s faux-objectivity: You said this movie wasn’t funny but I laughed, ergo it is you are factually wrong and unprofessional. Taking offence: How dare you imply that everyone who likes this movie is a tasteless dolt? Assumption of bad faith: You’re only saying this for clicks and notoriety.

Character assassination: You’re a vindictive killjoy who’s no fun at parties. Moral disapproval: Why would you waste your precious time being mean about something when you could be praising something else? Some people mix and match these accusations into strange hybrids like the schoolmarm-turned-troll: Why can’t you be more positive, you dumb piece of shit?

What these responses all have in common is not so much disagreement with the critique but fury that it was written at all. Thumper the rabbit’s famous maxim, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all,” might have been good advice for Bambi but it’s fatal for the appreciation of art. “Criticism is not nice,” writes AO Scott of the New York Times in Better Living Through Criticism. “To criticise is to find fault, to accentuate the negative, to spoil the fun and refuse to spare delicate feelings.”

For an entertaining reminder of a more knockabout era of criticism, I recommend the Ringer’s current podcast series Gene and Roger, presented by Brian Raftery. Between 1986 and 1999, when they hosted the half-hour TV show At the Movies, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were the most (and perhaps only) famous film critics in America, appearing on David Letterman and Saturday Night Live as celebrities in their own right and introducing many viewers to the concept of film criticism itself.

Central to their appeal was the intensity of their opinions, which often clashed. The show turned disagreement into entertainment. While they were both important champions of overlooked or misunderstood movies, one of my favourite comfort reads is Ebert’s 2000 anthology of pans, I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie. It is an unfortunate truth that it is much easier to be funny when you’re being mean, but Ebert wasn’t just going for cheap laughs; he knew how wonderful cinema could be and was indignant when millions of dollars were squandered on crud.

Why has negative criticism become so contentious? One factor is the growing vulnerability of both journalists and the artists they cover. When there is less space for book coverage, it makes sense to foreground good work than cackle over the bad, except when a real stinker from a big name hoves into view and critics can take the gloves off with a sigh of relief. Smaller journals can be a little spicier, though: Becca Rothfeld’s masterly evisceration of Sally Rooney’s “riskless and conciliatory” novels in The Point last year was a bracing antidote to Rooneymania.

In the world of music, when most albums don’t make money, it is understandable for critics to pull their punches. The world of album reviewing now is so much more collegiate than the knives-out music-press culture that I grew up on. I’m glad that young critics no longer have to make their names with an act of ritual cruelty towards a soft target, but the really thoughtful takedown is an endangered species without which music journalism is merely PR. Older critics tend to lose their taste for blood while, as Clive James wrote, “among young writers, there seems a shortage of critics unhampered by excessive good manners.”

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I would suggest, though, that it’s as much a question of self-preservation as good manners, due to social media’s abolition of context. When Siskel and Ebert panned a movie, regular viewers knew that that was not all they did. In fact, the duo might well rave about another film in the same episode. But when a review goes viral now, most of the people reading it (provided that they do actually read beyond the headline) will have no idea who the writer is, so he or she is reduced to the status of an HM Bateman caricature: The Man Who Hates Shrek, The Woman Who Hates Ted Lasso. Scott Tobias, for example, has written dozens of anniversary pieces for the Guardian, the vast majority of which are celebratory. I suspect he would have been delighted if his ode to, say, Alan Pakula’s 1971 thriller Klute had gone viral and Klute had become a trending topic, but of course it didn’t, because nothing fuels virality like outrage. Thus a negative piece is damned as “clickbait” by the angry people who are clicking on it while ignoring all the positive pieces. Whose fault is that?

Social media has also given us the militarisation of fandom. Major artists and franchises attract armies of fans who demonstrate their fealty by mobbing naysayers. There are DC fans who genuinely believe the conspiracy theory that critics are secretly paid to praise Marvel movies and denigrate their DC rivals, but then Marvel fans are no more reasonable. No movie that Martin Scorsese has made in recent years has generated as much attention as his mild dismissal of the MCU two years ago. Fortunately, the world’s most profitable movie franchise has survived his lack of interest.

All of this makes criticism an increasingly hairy business. Woe betide the outlier who costs a film its 100% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. When the critic Ann Powers published an ambivalent essay about Lana Del Rey in 2019, it was denounced by Del Rey herself to her 9.5 million Twitter followers, thus sending an avalanche of abuse in Powers’ direction. Complaints to employers are common, as are death threats. It’s hard to imagine a review of a major artist as famously scathing as Greil Marcus’ take on Bob Dylan’s 1970 album Self Portrait (first line: “What is this shit?”) in the age of Twitter. You want to take an axe to Korean boy band BTS and their ride-or-die followers? Lock your account first.

The instinct to abuse critics is justified by the idea that it is “punching up” at elitist gatekeepers. But unlike Siskel and Ebert, modern critics are neither famous nor wealthy nor powerful. They may have influence en masse, via review aggregators such as Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic (there is safety in numbers), but the days when one critic could make or break a movie, album or anything else are long gone. Yet fans still see them as dream-crushing monsters from which million-selling musicians and billion-dollar movies must be defended at all costs.

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Perhaps there is so much ambient hostility online that critics are too easily lumped in with the trolls and “haters” who plague your timeline. There are of course some contrarians, bullies and attention-seekers who have built a brand on performative contempt but they are not typical. The author Matt Haig is nonetheless adept at painting his detractors as bitter, shrunken souls whose arguments are therefore invalid. Last weekend, the Thumper of British publishing crystallised the Haigist theory of criticism in a tweet that was ostensibly about Sally Rooney’s sceptics but implicitly about his own: “There is so much jealousy of Sally Rooney. If you don’t like her books, don’t read them. The great thing about books is there are lots. There have literally never been more books. Why spend your time dissing authors other people like when you could be championing ones you do?” It’s all there: the unfounded assumption of jealousy; the nonsensical idea that you can know you don’t like a book before you’ve read it; the suggestion that negative criticism is simply a waste of time. To voice disappointment or antipathy, in Haig’s world, is a moral failing.

Similarly, anyone who resists the gentle charms of Ted Lasso, which received a Peabody Award for “offering the perfect counter to the enduring prevalence of toxic masculinity, both on-screen and off, in a moment when the nation truly needs inspiring models of kindness”, risks being accused of hating kindness itself. The success of the show, so unlike caustic 2000s sitcoms such as Extras or Curb Your Enthusiasm, is itself symptomatic of a general desire for more warmth and less cynicism.

But the Peabody citation acknowledges that the premise “has all the markings of a formulaic cornball dud,” so it is inconceivable that some people, not all of them unfeeling bastards, wouldn’t indeed find it a formulaic cornball dud. It’s particularly tricky right now for black critics who dislike politically well-intentioned work by black creators. After Angelica Jade Bastién caught flak for shredding the generally well-received new Candyman movie, another writer responded: “one of the frustrating things about this era of didactic capitol b Black art is the idea that serious criticism amounts to some kind of disloyalty.”

I suspect that this hypersensitivity to critical voices has been compounded first by the ugly intensity of politics and then by the pandemic. If you think Candyman was made by good people with timely things to say about racism in gentrification, then you might be inclined to forgive its didacticism. And if Ted Lasso or Shrek made your lockdown a little more cheerful, then you might overreact to someone stomping all over them. But I worry that enthusiasm is being mistaken for a moral virtue, and negative criticism for a character flaw: What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you just like things?

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We all know, in our own lives, that everything isn’t for everybody. Any night of the year there are heated disagreements in living rooms and cinema lobbies, and negative reactions are no less worthy of representation in public discourse than positive ones. Disliking certain things is not just normal but essential. Hate is the back of the mirror, without which you would just have a piece of glass. “It can be positive,” Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys wrote in a terrific 1992 polemic on the virtues of hate. “It throws into relief all the things you know you like. It tells you, by elimination, what you’re about… To hate a lot of things is tantamount to really caring about others. If you like everything, you deal with nothing.”

Personally, I find that the act of disagreeing with a sharp takedown sharpens my appreciation of the work in question. If I have to think a bit harder about what I like and why I like it, that’s fine by me, especially when it’s something that has been almost universally acclaimed. I was wowed by Jia Tolentino’s essay collection Trick Mirror but I got a kick out of Lauren Oyler’s brilliant demolition job in the London Review of Books last year, as did Tolentino, who gamely retweeted it. “I’ve been idly waiting since my book came out for a truly scathing review of my bullshit, which seemed inevitable given the rest of my good luck & also like it could be useful,” she wrote. “It finally came: a cleansing, illuminating experience to be read with such open disgust!”

Tolentino’s suggestion that negative criticism is not just valid but useful would have surprised Karel Čapek. In the current climate, it verges on the saintly. It’s not that I long for an epidemic of gleeful brutality but I will always cherish the right of critics to express their hate, hate, hate in the ultimate service of what they love, love, love.