The job requires no particular education, background, expertise or perception.

All of us are born with the natural instinct to criticize. The tiniest infant knows enough to spit out creamed spinach and to cry when a tone-deaf relative sings a lullaby.

As we grow, our abilities are refined. In pre-school years, we may confidently exclaim to unknowing parents, "It’s too early to go to bed." Fashion-conscious elementary school students show their discernment in plaintive voice: "Aw, Mom, do I have to wear that dumb thing to school?"

By the time our teenage years arrive, our critical powers have been honed to near-perfection. The abominable tastes of adults in art, music, literature, cuisine and general lifestyle are all to apparent. "Bo-o-o-o-ring!" opines the adolescent appraiser when a parent turns the car radio to an "easy listening" or classical station. "Yechhhh!!!" is the descriptive adjective applied to tuna casserole by the pubescent palate that has already sampled the ambrosia of pizza, burgers and fries.

Young adults reach a loftier peak of taste that permits them to peer down upon anyone under 18 or over 26. "You’re not actually going to hang that hideous portrait in the living room" one might suggest in tones that make your rare antique sound like a long-dead cat. A younger sibling's choice of clothing, hairstyle, music, reading material and movies is beneath contempt.

Finally, sometime around the age of 30, we mount to the apogee of critical acumen. Our instinctual distaste for long lists of life’s offerings and our accrued devotion to a few well-defined elements of style are added to the empirical evidence that only the years provide.

At last we can tell nearly everyone what they’re doing wrong with some degree of authority. Of course, we all have our specialties. There are those who know everything there is to know about art although they have never actually drawn or painted anything. Other, who have confined their own writing abilities to filling out forms and composing a rare personal letter, can decry the novelist or playwright with impunity.

I, myself, know a great deal about things that reside on the periphery of my actual experience. Television, for example. I can tell you, without ever having done so, that to sit through an entire episode of "The Jerry Springer Show" is the same as watching the spin cycle on a laundromat washing machine.

Lacking formal training in art or design, I can propose with some authority that combining red and orange plastic in the dining room of a fast-food restaurant is not the most pleasing choice.

In fact, I can proudly proclaim about all the various art forms, "I don’t know what’s good, but I know what I like."

I think it was Diana Vreeland, the former editor of Vogue magazine, who has been quoted as saying: "Poor taste is better than no taste at all."

Hey, I resemble that remark.