Standard

"The best italian restaurant in Town!"

"One of the best performance on Elgar cello concerto!"

"A piece of junk, the actor simply do not understand how to act."

No matter what you are reading or listening to, you will always come across statement similar to those above. Critics - the people who are writing the message - either be a so called professional in the specified field of interest or simply an amateur to what he/she write.

But the problem is, no matter how well they know about the field of interest, they are just expressing their own judgement. True, there might be general favourites, indeed, does it really make sense if everyone is following in the same course? Tchaikovsky symphony number 6 is entitled as "Patheique" but is it really necessary to play slowly? I mean, there are no single standard on how "slow" a performance should be when we classfied it as a "good" performance or authentic performance.

The hunt for quality is absolutely respectable but when we are challenging the others against "The Standard", we are risking ourselves in pursuing our own thought to the others. In turns, we are simply bringing up argument rather than anything fruitful.