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August 31, 2005
Why Is It Harder to Critique Cars Than Opera?
The 2004 Pulitzer Prize for criticism went to Dan Neil, an automobile critic for the Los Angeles Times. Weird or wonderful? Check out Diane Barthel-Bouchier's terrific essay on the topic, "Gearheads Among the Eggheads."
Car critics differ from art critics in several interesting ways. Both rely on expert knowledge and skills of assessment and interpretation. They both also reveal personal taste: one man's ugly SUV may be another man's "cute 'ute." In addition to these attributes, though, the car critic needs more highly developed physical skills. He literally has to make the car perform, to test it the way a musician might test the abilities of an instrument, to whose performance the music critic then intelligently listens....Opera, by contrast, with its supposed sensory overload, relies primarily upon sight and sound. You don't touch the elephants in Aida; you don't smell Tosca, or, at least, you're not supposed to. Car criticism calls on four senses minimum, beating opera two to one.
...Most car critics leave the high culture to ex-English majors, and work instead on perfecting the homespun metaphor. Metaphors are useful because critics must do the impossible. They must communicate the feel of a car to someone who has his hands on a magazine. So they use images to which the reader can clearly relate. The O-Z Rally is "exactly as racy as a pound and a half of Velveeta." A Mustang Boss 202 sounds like "BBs bouncing inside an empty Folgers can." Some metaphors have a surprisingly long half-life. When Car and Driver's Tony Swan described the Caterman race car as having "all the handling stability of a hog on ice," one reader detected the distant echo of a 1940s critic's assessment of either a Packard or a Mercury as cornering "like a hippopotamus on wet clay" ( June 2004, p. 21).
Go read it.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at August 31, 2005 05:47 PM