Quote:
Originally Posted by singer4660  You ask an interesting question. What are the qualifications of a restaurant reviewer? If you travel 50% of the time and therefore eat 50% of your meals in a restaurant, is that sufficient experience to decide what's good and what's bad, or is this option limited to those who are professionally trained in the culinary arts? The analogy is the local music critic who is trained but has never left his small town vs. the the untrained person who has great appreciation and has been to events in many large cities. Who is better qualified to determine the merits of the performance? I'm not trying to be argumentative, I really just want to know. |
The analogy is a good one, but it needs to be drawn out a bit.
1. small-town vs. big-town concert-goer
2. 2 years of piano lessons when you were a kid vs. advanced performance training
3. can sort of read music vs. have foundational composition training
4. recognize some favorites vs. deeply knowledgeable about several musical eras
5. listen only vs. study scores
and so on.
If the only person qualified to review a concert is in the second half of every category, there will be very few reviewers. More than you'd think, but few.
But isn't the first guy, on the left in every column, qualified too? What's his claim: "I don't know much in an expert way, I can't make general statements, but I think that folks like me -- who let's face it are a pretty large constituency -- will find it very helpful to have a review from their own perspective."
The usual problem, I think, is that reviews (perhaps especially restaurant reviews) come from people who are sorta-kinda knowledgeable and think they're experts. They tell you about the extraordinary freshness of the fish (the cooks are giggling -- they know the tuna was frozen), the exciting new creations (cribbed from an old Nouvelle Cuisine cookbook), and so on. They tell you about authentic this and that when they don't know anything beyond what they saw on Food Network. And these people's reviews are the overwhelming majority.
Anyone can review, but almost nobody who reviews is honest enough to make the reviews worthwhile.