Earlier today, I was having a heated argument with myself, and I know that sounds crazy, but I really need you guys help on settling this one.
I have a question for you guys, and it's a pretty simple straightforward one and it goes like this.
Do one have to be an expert in a field in order to be a good critic in that field? For example, do someone need to know how to cook, in order to be able to properly become a food critic?
Personally, I feel not all fields requires expertise, just like cooking for example, you don't need to know how to cook to know that a food taste bad or not. As a matter of fact, I believe there are popular food critics out there who don't even know how to make the food they criticise all the time and it's fine.
Unfortunately, not a lot of people understands this, because sometimes I go on the comment section and all I see are people getting angry with the critic, telling him or her to go make the food themselves if they think it's easy to cook.
The same thing also applies to movie critics. I honestly think that you don't have to be an actor or a director to spot a bad movie. I personally don't know how to direct movies, but there are certain movies that I've seen where I found myself giving notes, saying that if I was a director, I would have done this and that because of how bad the movie is.
But then again, like I said, not all field works like this because I believe there are certain fields that does requires experts to be able to properly give the right criticism...one of those fields being in sport I believe.
And I say this because when watching sport, it's almost like everyone has something to say but they keep on ignoring certain stuff, like asking a football player to run while ignoring the fact that he's been running for the last one and half hour and is clearly exhausted, or asking the player to hit the ball a certain way when you have no idea what the outcome will be.
So yeah, I do agree that certain fields do requires expertise, but also, can we all agree that there are also some which doesn't require any special training? You just have to pay attention and be you.
I think it's not necessary to be an expert in every field to understand if the quality is good or not but if you want to give suggestions then I think being and expertise is that field is necessary.