Interesting article in this morning's WSJ that touches on the subject: "Deconstruction, Identity and the Dying Art of Criticism". Two particularly applicable quotes resonated with me- Toni Morrison's "If there were better criticism, there would be better books.", and T.S. Eliot's on the function of the critic as "the common pursuit of true judgement and correction of taste".
On the subject of "canon" in gca, it became fairly obvious to me well over a decade ago that there were several common areas of taste expressed often on this site. Using MacKenzie's list of design principle's as a model, I attempted to come up with the site's dominant preferences/tastes and posted them for consideration.
Of course, opinions on golf architecture are just that- e.g. someone's preference for a tight routing is another's aversion on the grounds of safety, site compromises, clutter, less than peaceful environment, etc. I wasn't thinking of "canon" as used in literature or religion, but was trying to arrive at a set of characteristics that seemed to have wide support on this site.
The response was not encouraging. One, from a then good friend who no longer posts, was representative though particularly negative, arguing that the subject matter was far too wide and varied to be pigeon-holed. Though he was an iconoclast like many here when it came to gca and likely thought highly of MacKenzie, he and others resisted to be tied down to a set of principles or standards in evaluating golf courses.
In my years of analyzing performance, having clear standards/expectations was extremely important. As the Desert Forest thread indicates, two knowledgeable people can look at a piece of work and one sees it as "vandalism" while another as a finest example of its kind. Criticism furthers knowledge if we can get passed our own implicit biases and engage it for reasons other than to show how clever we are. It is also helpful to be able to gauge the opiner's familiarity with his subject matter.