Aesthetic standards are the basis for what we see in our museums, art galleries, theatres, ballet and opera houses and recital rooms, and it is nurtured in our art schools, ballet schools and music schools. That's also why we now have a fledgling building design review process, conducted by elite practising architects rather than by bureaucrats.
Only a few problems here. One one hand, you make repeated references to a kind of cultural concensus, using terminology like elite practising architects and cultural standards. You assert that aesthetic standards are the basis of what goes into our galleries and museums. Then, departing from this line of argument, you state that "anyone with eyes" can that the Kenson is irrelevant. This is a flawed argument in many ways.
1. The people making decisions about what goes into our art galleries and museums are bureaucrats, acting exactly as do the bureaucrats who decide what goes on to the inventory of heritage properties.
2. You have a naive faith in the contents of our museums, but in fact what ends up in the collection is based on aesthetics, and on a whole host of other concerns, such as who the donor is, how much they give to the institution, it's relationship to the collection. For instance, I doubt the AGO set out to own a collection of ships, nor do I imagine that every instance of that collection, considered on its own merits, would be included in the collection. In the context of a whole room of ships, though, every ship might add to our understanding of the whole. Finally, museums and art galleries acquire many works that never appear on the walls, and their collections are always in a process of being recycled, with deaccessions occurring regularly. Your faith in this kind of instititional decision is touching, but it renders your complete disregard for those deciding what goes onto the Inventory of Heritage Properties rather puzzling. My point with this argument is that such decisions are complex, made for many reasons, of which aesthetic judgements are really only one, and are revisited frequently. The decisions are made in a complex organizational and financial context and are no different from decisions about the Inventory.
3. As you should know, even when you have a roomful of experts together, such as on a design review panel, they frequently disagree with each other stridently. Their decisions are not unanimous, but formed from a process of concensus. Who knows what kind of considerations they take into their judgements. Architects are full of ego, would it not be possible for someone sitting on a design review panel to use that authority to take a swipe at a colleague? Who knows what motivates people? We are all human, after all. I find your reliance on experts such as elite practicing architects to be simplistic.
4. I don't think in the case of the Kenson in particular that you really are calling for your experts to make a decision, after all, they have decided and the building was considered to merit being preserved. My final point is you keep playing both sides of this coin. On the one hand, there is a cultural standard based on aesthetics and determined by elite experts in the field. On the other hand, whenever you happen to disagree then the elite opinion is yours to decline (citing Ms. Rochon, above, but don't I also remember you criticising the many repeated busts created by a sculpture machine in the AGO - certainly, you're not above critiquing the collections when you want to). I believe the bottom line here is that you wish for the words of elites to be followed until the very moment that you disagree with them, at which point your words trumps theirs, presumably.
Frankly, that's a bit much to take. I wonder if the original recommendation about the Kenson said, "anybody with eyes can see it's worth preserving".
(For the record, I don't actually care that much about the Kenson, though I would mourn its passing, too. But I think the discussion of its merits here has been without merit, and whether or not it's portico is too big this way or that is completely silly).
