Wait, so you're telling me that someone is allowed to critique art simply because they can see it? I think you may be confusing "uninformed opinion" with "educated critique", my friend.
Yes, I'm saying exactly that. I think the very notion that art critics are the only ones qualified to say whether something is good art or not has caused huge damage to art in general. Art critics are responsible for the greatest artistic disaster the world has ever witnessed - because of them, we've had to endure almost half a century of post-modernism... and for that, I want my money back, damn it. Thanks to art critics, we've actually reached the point where somebody can literally send a piece his own shit in a glass box to an art gallery (I kid you not - it has been done), and seriously expect it to not only be shown, but to get rave reviews from art critics. In this regard, it is far, far better to rely on the common sense of the ordinary person, who looking at this piece of "art" will be simply disgusted.
While art critics are generally painted as snobbish, wine drinking jerks - the reason they're art critics at all is because they know their field. It goes beyond meer opinion, unless you're willing to admit that a high schooler has the levity of denying certain scientific theories simply because it's "only" a theory.
There is a world of difference between studying artistic theories and critiquing art. What people actually study in university courses related to art critique is how art works in general. We study, for example, what kind of composition looks good to the human eye, and what will look wrong. This is all very amazing, very useful stuff - but knowing how the human eye perceives an image does not mean you're more qualified to assess the beauty of an image than any other human being who happens to have eyes. Another thing we study is art history, the different styles that had developed over the ages, and so on - but again, being able to recognise the difference between an impressionist and an expressionist image does not mean you're more qualified to assess the beauty of this image than anybody else. What it
does mean is that you're more qualified to tell
what the image is, what style it represents, and so on - but none of this in any way actually affects whether an image is pleasing to the eye or not. The beauty of an image has nothing to do with the degree to which it conforms to the tenets of, say, impressionism.
I mean, art critics can tell you how original a piece of art is, they can tell you (to some degree) what most likely inspired the author, they can tell you what techniques the author used, and how well he managed to imitate a particular style already in existence... they can tell you a lot of amazing stuff. But there is one thing they will never be able to tell you - whether
you will like a piece of art. Unfortunately for them, however, that happens to be the only thing that counts when it comes to assessing art - whether people like it or not. It's not that a picture is beautiful
because the majority of the population happens to like it - but the fact that the majority of the population happens to like it certainly does
prove that it is beautiful. And if the majority of the population couldn't be
paid to stay awake throughout the entirety of
Dog Star Man, it really doesn't matter how many art critics praise this film. At the end of the day, if most people think it's an ugly, boring, unenjoyable mishmash that leads to nowhere, that's probably because that's exactly what it is - and the art critics can go sit on a pack of ice for all I care.
It's also worth noting that art critics are a relatively new invention - there certainly was no such thing in the middle ages or earlier. The lack of art critics has not negatively affected the art from those times, however. It is remarkable to note that the problem of a select clique of professionals considering someone's work to be amazing while the rest of the population hated it, is actually a new problem that arose in the 20th or perhaps 19th century - it never existed until the appearance of the art critics.
In short: art critics are
almost as vital to the continued existence and quality of art as astronomers are to the continued existence and quality of the universe.
