There’s a difference between an experienced individual looking for information to handle degrees of uncertainty surrounding vintage, current drinking windows (should I buy Bordeaux futures? Should I open this bottle of Montrose? Answer is always no), and the handling of inexperience / lack of tacit knowledge by virtue of being a neophyte.
When talking about an aesthetic experience, inexperience is addressed through (drum roll) experience! not reading or recommendation.
Sure, you can read a textbook about the aesthetics of Anselm Kiefer, but if you don’t go see one and experience how it makes you feel, you’ll really never know.
Lots of the big posters here on Berserkers are also on IG. Or people who used to be big on the boards but now post elsewhere. Much of the conversation that used to happen on these boards is now on IG, among people who know each other to the same extent we know each other here (i.e. it varies), plus a lot of others.
Sure. But my point is that social media hasn’t changed anything in that equation. (Admittedly, my personal bias is that people overstate the effect of social media on the universal underlying human truths)
In the past, you got recommendations in the shop or from a book or a magazine and then you acquired experience. Today the medium may have shifted to your phone/internet, but the underlying dynamic is the same as it ever was.
I am bringing people back to Chenin Blanc. They’re responding above expectations.
I did an exclusive high end Cab tasting on Saturday for eight (8) of our good customers. $175 each. Wines were Vueve to soften the palate then: 2017 Heitz Martha’s Vineyard. 2018 Taub Beckstoffer George III; 2018 Taub Beckstoffer MO Hopper; and 2020 Dauo Soul of the Lion. Everything WS 94 and above.
Of this elite group I asked about declining wine sales. Answers ranged between pummeled QPR for Napa Wines, crappy wine lists and prices at many restaurants, surprisingly huge price swings at different venues. If they paid $300 for a wine to lay down , and then see it offered for $225, they feel abused. Result: they stop buying and wait.
I was, before I retired, a literature professor. I had no particular taste in art or much interest in it, despite a nephew and brother who were artists. Through my interests in literary theory, I undertook the writing of a book on aesthetics. The book had, as a topic, the shift in art theory from the aesthetics justifying abstraction, to the aesthetics behind post-modern art objects such as Duchamp’s Fountain and Warhol’s Brillo Boxes. To understand this controversy, I found myself also looking at abstract art, impressionistic art, and, pretty soon Renaissance art, etc… I am now very interested in art. I just had to go through the period of, as the joke goes, knowing what art was, just not knowing what I liked. This may be just because I learn about things by hearing them talked about or by reading about them, but the first cure for anaesthesia about art may sometimes be reading a textbook, and then looking at the art again (but,really, only if you read five textbooks that disagree with each other and try to work out what they are arguing over by looking at the painting).