Hard disagree on the first part (if you can even taste tannins an average person should be able to distinguish red from white 90% of the time on that factor alone)
But the overall thrust is right, b/c the main point of criticism is just to find dudes with similar taste to yours
Criticism of any kind involves two main branches of "expertise": sampling way more of the field than anyone normal has any time for, and then applying your specific aesthetic preferences to whatever you've just tasted/read/watched/etc
The first branch is, for almost all people, way more important than the second: so the goal of most criticism *should* be that of a humble aggregator
"I waded through all this so you don't have to, and here's the stuff I'd watch for fun if it wasn't my job"
This was the joy of say Siskel & Ebert. They surely thought they had better taste than the public, but they didn't scorn the public
Like the best wine critics, they tried to explain why this $15 bottle was better than this $21 bottle, or why this $9 bottle was surprisingly good
They were absolutely experts, but they understood that most of the audience *isn't*, and that's fine, but here's the *really* good stuff that you're really gonna like—trust us, we've mostly got the same aesthetics that you do, just try it, see if we're wrong
Best of all, here are the works that will resonate with you AND us, like a Monet painting, any idiot can see that it's beautiful—a truly good critic can explain its full greatness in a way that vibes with your visceral understanding
A shit critic has to "theory" you into it
I believe that the best art resonates in both the mind and the gut, to both the aristocrats and the average man, and so the best critics are those that can recognize this dual appeal
But who even needs a "critic" to explain the Sistine Chapel
And this is where I converge back to the original point. Wines, like paintings, are limited in the number that can be owned, unlike a night at the movies: so "criticism" here is increasingly used to detach the price of a thing from its actual value
I can guarantee you that almost everyone on earth, with no "critics" required, can taste the difference between a $6 bottle of champagne and a $60 bottle. But I doubt that without "experts" they would show a preference between the $60 and the $600 (or $6000) bottle
So yes: the highest-end critics are either charlatans, or autists, and are a net negative to anyone who isn't either obsessed with status, or a very particular aesthetic preference
They are either fakers, or catering to wealthy people who've grown bored of everything else
Nearly all modern critics, like nearly all experts, look down on their audience with contempt. They are "better than," and no longer want to uplift the audience, but to stomp on them
They've lost all connection: this breeds hatred from the audience.
And rightly so.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
In just fifteen pages of "Suicide of the West," Burnham's already proven a major thesis: that the West has lost the will to survive
Published 1964, so written before the Civil Rights Act. Always crazy to read people forecasting these processes so (relatively) early in the game
Really looking forward to the extrapolation of the passage that follows: that liberalism is the rationalization of this process of suicide
Probably best captured by "the conservative case for X," e.g. "the conservative case for chopping your son's nuts off"
lol. Basically, for liberalism, "the science is settled" on everything, and if you resist "the science" of the consensus, you are, as it turns out, the only group liberalism is justified in wielding force against
This is how progressives have been engineering "democracy" for years now, remember that the idea isn't to engage in discussion/debate, it's to bypass it through carefully designed rhetoric
Big data various iterations of propaganda until you find the form that achieves the goal
This was formerly achieved by passing the winning iteration to journalists who would then distribute it to the public
So once you've got enough data, it becomes possible to program JournoBots to guide unruly citizens through their dialogue tree to reach the approved conclusions
Of course normal people recoil at hearing the NYT say "So we built a little propaganda machine to help you route-around your fellow citizen's concerns in real time lol"
But this is all second nature to journalists, who've been steeped in this process for a long time
To understand leftism, you just have to understand its fundamental animating goal, which it turns out is very straightforward: to dissolve us all into interchangeable human gray goo
Once you've got that in place, everything else follows from it
The mind naturally recoils from this goal, because of how unnatural it is. It throws up all kinds of rationalizations, "No, it's about protecting those who can't protect themselves"
Yeah, you're making my point. The value of harm reduction, continued to its end goal, is gray goo
This basic principle immediately exposes the flaw at the core of Marxism, which the modern liberal "right" treats as Ur-Leftism, because the "liberal right" is itself a ridiculous contradiction, doomed by its inability to reach back *beyond* Communism
You know what, here's the hottest take I can drop, Stephen King *should* have been the next Poe or Lovecraft, he had both the imaginative horsepower, the narrative mastery, and the sense of horror necessary to become this.
Some of King's work, especially his early ones, and *especially* the first four Gunslinger novels, prove this. He had it in him. Immense, insane imagination, the sensitivity was there.
Bad. Ass. Author. But there was something just a little off. He couldn't quite do it.
So wait—my most volcano-scorching-hot take is that early Orson Scott Card, the Mormon, is the greatest horror author of our age. He sold out later but his '70s/80s shorts are the most horrifying works I've ever read from that period. Even more terrifying than King
"The value of a human being today is measured in terms of his economic efficiency and his erotic potential—that is to say, in terms of the two things that Lovecraft most despised."
lol. Houellebecq presaging a lot of his own soon-to-come preoccupations here
lol, right. "We at the highly scrupulous Intercept would never 'expose' our political enemies, who we definitely don't report on because we hate them. We just wait for any outlet with even lower standards to make these people a matter of public interest—and *then* we expose them"
This is Activist Journalism 101, it's a completely incestuous movement, "respected" outlets know they can just sit back and wait for millennial bottom-feeder outlets to "do the work" for them
Then they're allowed to link to it, as legitimate journalism, and launder it upwards
As this process has continued it's become even more pathetic than that, their justification isn't even some VICE article written by a 21-year-old college girl, it's literally "online speculation"
Oh wait "Multiple links to speculation," so now we get to launder it into fact