Bonetti Booed

Over on the Critical Mass email list, they're smarting over PD Visual Art Critic David Bonetti's recent comments - specifically, "By rights, there probably shouldn't be any art galleries in St. Louis. The city and region have only a small artists community and relatively few collectors whose needs could be, and are met elsewhere."

One poster there compares Bonetti to a restaurant critic who visits the same place time after time and disparages the rest.

"Consider this scenario. In a city as large, as vital, as diverse, and as original as St. Louis, the major newspaper hires a restaurant critic. This individual in the several years he has covered the restaurant scene, has reviewed perhaps at most a dozen restaurants. And for those few he has visited, he has repeatedly returned, at the expense of others that equally deserve his opinion. But there’s more. Beyond this narrow, limited focus, this restaurant critic constantly avoids, dismisses and most importantly criticizes all the remaining local restaurants, cuisines and people working in the field. With broad generalizations, this critic indicts nearly the entire regional restaurant community for lacking innovation, variety, quality, and commitment. With this blatant bias and inaccuracy, is this a restaurant critic St. Louis Post-Dispatch readers would tolerate? I rather doubt it."