the ART COLONY

[GRH]

Originally Posted by ila

My subject was brought to mind yesterday when I read a review about some different wine in yesterday's newspaper. It seems that wine critics (oenophiles?) and beer critics have developed a taste (pun intended) for using buzzwords and not knowing what they are writing about. The rest of the fools follow along because they too want to sound like they know what they are talking about. Specifically one comment yesterday compared the taste of wine to green leaves. It makes me wonder what the critic has been drinking/smoking/injecting. Does this person drink green leaves? Has he ever tasted a green leaf? What kind of green leaf - tree, fern, vegetable? Why would this person taste green leaves? It seems too that whenever a critic tastes red wine it always tastes like blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, cherries, etc. Grape wine has always tasted like grape wine to me. I have never tasted any other fruit or plant in grape wine. Then there is the critic that reviewed beer. He compared the taste to barnyards and manure piles (and he was praising the taste of the beer being reviewed). It makes me won der if this critic eats shit. He certainly dishes it out.

I think criticism of ANY sort reeks of this...Beer, wine, food critics seek to elevate their supposedly higher tastes above the masses through the use of creative vocabulary. I have drank a LOT of beer, and a decent amount of wine, and I know just what you're talking about. The world of criticism is about ass-patting and affirmation. If a CRITIC says it, it must be good, so the general person will adopt the vocabulary of a critic (however inept) to describe things. I agree with critics on many points, but the flowery nature of their vocabulary is so ambiguous as to be useless. I much prefer more quantified means of describing a product such as IBU (International Bitterness Units) than the subjective description of one person. Beer and wine critique is as full of pretension as any other artform. Much of the allusion is just that, a taste that alludes to some preconception of something else...This begs the question, will EVERYONE share the same preconception? Will the taste take EVERYONE to a barnyard, or an orchard, or freshly cut lawn? Doubtful, and this is the difficulty of subjective criticism...It is just that, subjective...

As to the larger topic at hand, I really DO hope to post some stuff as soon as I get around to setting up a third party account. My wife entered a painting gig this weekend...Go figure, her work didn't sell. It was a timed shindig, not something she excels at, she hates time limits...At any rate, she did a very impressionistic work, whereas most of the entrants did a more realism-slanted piece. It just goes to show how people interpret things differently...