A Matter of Taste

I read an interesting paragraph today in a piece from The Hollywood Reporter which discussed nominations for the Alma Awards (an award show that honors contributions of Latinos to the arts - apparently Christina Aguilera and Selena Gomez raked in the most nominations).  I'll be honest, I'm not especially interested in the Alma Awards.  It was the following chunk of text that caught my eye:

Categories have been renamed "favorite" instead of "best" because they are fan voted. Voting ends Sept. 5.

 The distinction being drawn here is one I've discussed with many people many times, and I think the time has come to publish my opinion on this subject on the internet.  Is there such a thing as objectively good music (or art in general)?  I'm saying No.


The underlying implication of changing the category names from "best" to "favorite" is that there are qualities other than popularity that can be definitely described that make a piece of art good.  I won't argue that popularity is the best metric for judging the quality of music; my real point is that there isn't any true measure, and any determinations about whether or not any piece of art is good is absolutely subjective.  Let's think about it.  What does it mean to be good?  According to Dictionary.com (which lists over 40 distinct definitions for "good", so obviously I'm choosing the one that's relevant to this question), to be good is to be

"satisfactory in quality, quantity, or degree; i.e. a good teacher;good health."

The definition of "good" doesn't help us get any closer to imagining an objective standard for art.  To have a standard, there has to be a goal or an ideal being strived toward - there has to be a quality that the artist wants to achieve with the work.  And therein lies the real problem.  Art is ultimately personal, and the reasons people create works of art are as diverse as the final products.  If the artist's goal is financial gain or recognition, then popularity is indeed the best measure of good art.  But of course there are plenty of people that hate pop music, and there are countless examples of artists that are now revered but were horrible failures during their own lifetimes (Vangough comes to mind).  Preference, even at the societal level, is highly contextual, and thus subjective.


If, on the other hand, if the artist's goal is to express a particular feeling or idea, then the goodness of the work of art can only be judged by that artist or by no one at all.  Only the creator can determine whether their creation actually represents their internal vision - they are the only one with access to that interior world they were trying to translate.  So in the sense that a work of art turns out the way the artist hoped, they could say their art is good, but it wouldn't be a very significant statement for the rest of the world.  If they were hoping to inspire a particular feeling in those who experience the work of art, the ability to judge its goodness becomes even less meaningful.  The inherent barrier of language, especially as concerns words without material points of reference (is your "happy" the same as my "happy"?  How many different sorts of "happy" are there?)  prevents us from really understanding what feelings are happening inside other people's heads in anything but the most general sense.  You might be able to tell that your painting is pleasant for your friend to look at, but can you really honestly know if it makes him feel that beautiful cocktail of wistful, nostalgic bubbling effervescence that you were going for?  And again, these kinds of emotional reactions are lodged within a societal/historical context, and thus are mutable over time and not objective.


Or perhaps you think that good art is art that satisfies some specific technical or aesthetic goal.  I have a strong negative reaction to ideas like these - when people argue that only an art critic or scholar is in a position to decide whether or not a piece of art is good, it implies by exclusion some kind of deficiency in average people.  If "good" is something that can only be understood in an esoteric way, it's an irrelevant idea for most people and empowering for snobby intellectual elitists.  We all have our own ideas about what good art is, and those ideas should count, even if we all haven't spent years studying art.


To summarize: I think there are two important reasons there isn't any such thing as objectively good art.

1. Art is a personal undertaking.  Each artist may have unique motivations for creation, and thus different goals to fulfill by creating.  If all art isn't trying to do the same thing, we can't really say one piece of art is better than another - it may be comparing apples and oranges.
2. Art is not a quantitative endeavor.  People make judgments of quality in a particular societal context, so something that was good five hundred years ago might be terrible now according to most people.  I guarantee that what many Americans think is "good music" wouldn't be popular in Africa, and vice versa.

People love to dismiss and judge and categorize.  All I'm saying is it might be a good idea to take a step back and remember that your (or our collective) determinations about "good" and "bad" aren't some higher truth; these are just mutable ideas.


P.S.  Am I the only person who thinks Selena Gomez looks like a female Justin Bieber?