Quotes About Connoisseurship

Dissanayake writes that art that engages the mind and hands, that is not just passive connoisseurship, can act as an antidote, for our contentious and alienated relationship to our own societies.

Anyone can drink beer, but it takes intelligence to enjoy beer.

I don't really care that much about eating. But I like impressing people with how good a cook I am. So I will cook. I'm an excellent cook. Not many people know that about me.

Tea is much more delicate than wine… The people who respond best to the intricacies of tea are people who enjoy wine. — JAMES LABE, tea sommelier/owner, Teahouse Kuan Yin (Seattle)

Possessed by the grasp of quality and connoisseurship, he knew and measured the worth of man's visible heritage and determined, in the midst of constant change, to preserve and enhance that heritage so that it might be visible to anyone with eyes to see."30

Six tasters were gathered around one of the large tables, listening eagerly as Drayton Conneley, professional tea blender and one of only ten master tea tasters in the United States, delivered a lively lesson in tea connoiseurship.

I suppose you really like them dirty, said Miss Vyner. That's it. Dirty and full of divine mystery, said Cobbler, rolling his eyes and kissing his fingers. "Sheer connoisseurship, I confess, but I've always preferred a bit of ripened cheese to a scientifically packaged breakfast food.

indeed it is very true that, just as the finest air in the world is vulgarized beyond all bearing once the public has taken to hum it and the street organs to play it, so the work of art that has appealed to the sham connoisseurs, that is admired by the uncritical, that is not content to rouse the enthusiasm of only a chosen few, becomes for this very reason, in the eyes of the elect, a thing polluted, commonplace, almost repulsive.

Even connoisseurship can have politics, Slow Food wagers, since an eater in closer touch with his senses will find less pleasure in a box of Chicken McNuggets than in a pastured chicken or a rare breed of pig. It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American) to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.

There are easier ways of making sense, the connoisseurship of gesture, for example. You hold a girl's face in your hands like a vase. You lift a gun from the glove compartment and toss it out the window into the desert heat.

But her greatest assets were her bound feet, called in Chinese "three-inch golden lilies" (san-tsun-gin-lian). This meant she walked "like a tender young willow shoot in a spring breeze," as Chinese connoisseurs of women traditionally put it. The sight of a woman teetering on bound feet was supposed to have an erotic effect on men, partly because her vulnerability induced a feeling of protectiveness in the onlooker.

Even when consciously savoring tea, connoisseurship should never lapse into affectation. Chinese tea-lovers often mock the Japanese tea ceremony for its picayune rules and tiresome rituals. In contrast with stern Japanese formality, Chinese tea-drinking embodies a far more natural aesthetic. Whenever you drink tea, remember to relax, be yourself, and enjoy the moment. Any trace of fussiness or pretension violates the free and easy Daoist spirit that makes Chinese tea-drinking so enjoyable.