Critical Wankery Listed

Critics love to be pretentious, but some fields bring out this tendency more than others. In descending order:

7. Games Critics

6. Film critics

5. Literary Critics (as in book reviews, not literary theory)

4. Theatre Critics

3. Food Critics

2. Music Critics

1. Wine Critics

Observations:
1. The harder something is to be objective about, the more douchey the critics become.

 There have been various studies where professional wine critics have failed to discern between cheap plonk and pricier bottles. It's not completely nonsense, but there is a lot of bullshit. Similarly, music criticism seems to be writers trying to justify why their opinion is right. This isn't always the case; some music journalists do know what they're talking about, but quite often, they don't. Perhaps the main problem is that music is just incredibly difficult to describe. We haven't developed a true vocabulary to describe music, instead borrowing from other senses. Take 'dazzling' for instance. It describes visual phenomena, but is frequently shoehorned into music reviews. It doesn't help at all. That's not to say we don't have the words to describe sound, obviously, but those words came into being long before musicians began making entirely new sounds through first, distortion, reverb, and feedback; and second computerised synthetic sounds. The only way around this is to reference other acts, but this quickly becomes a willy-waving contest to see who can pack in the most obscure references (Q Magazine I'm looking at you). The casual reader will likely miss this wanky esoterica, so the reviewers just sound like bell-ends.

We're not really that great at describing taste, either. 'Fruity', 'Tangy', 'Crisp', 'Smoky' and 'Oaky' are popular adjectives, but they all suck, basically. (How does anyone know what oak tastes like!?) Winos may be able to identify different notes (another wine word I loathe) but can't accurately describe them. Consequently they either get it wrong or sound like tossers.

A good contrast is with film criticism. Film is a visual medium, made up of real-world images. We have developed a deep lexis to describe it; thus it is easier to write about. You do get a few critics who write like arseholes, but it isn't usually needed to reference a range of films that no-one's seen.

2. The wider the market, the less pretentious the critic.

There could be two reasons for this. Either, the masses have an innate ability to discern between high-art and pop culture; or the critics recognise the breadth of their audience so write in a style accordingly. Games critics are very un-pretentious. Maybe there isn't much to be pretentious about; games (at the moment) are focussed on being fun and engrossing. Few try to aim to be high art, or to convey deep themes. There really aren't many like this to choose from, but Shadow of the Colossus is the leading candidate for "art" gaming (half a decade after release).The big outlier is music, for the reasons above.