If you care about art, and discussing art, then few things are as frustrating as someone retreating into “well, it’s all subjective anyways.” The phrase is a thought-terminating cliche par excellence.
It’s true that the individual aesthetic experience is subjective, but this is a small part of art, and often not even that interesting. A critic who only says “I liked this” and “I didn’t like that” is near worthless. To move from the subjective to the objective — to declare that “this book is bad” or “this band is the greatest of all time” — is to escape the blurred lens of your own taste and look to larger markers. There are concrete, observable facts for each work of art, and our judgments on them are not arbitrary. Here is a list.
Intent
Authorial intent gets a bad rap these days, now that Barthes is in the groundwater. Still, works have purpose. A horror movie serves to scare, a comic play elicits laughter, and if nothing else, most things want to hold your attention. We can judge whether a work accomplishes its aims without indexing our personal enjoyment.
In fact, sometimes these run contrary. The Room is named one of the worst movies of all time because it utterly fails at being a romantic drama — but in such spectacular fashion that it can still entertain us. All the mastery of ballet is lost on me, spent in a direction that simply doesn’t appeal, but I don’t deny that there is any merit to the form. A good critic scores a piece on its own rubric: what is it trying to do, and how well does it do that?
When it fails, it is often because the artist lacks
Technical skill
(is measurable). Painters spend years mastering light, anatomy, and perspective. A violinist who plays in tune is demonstrably more skilled than one who cannot. We can identify when a portrait bears resemblance, whether a dancer maintains a proper turnout, or if the vocalist can keep on-key.
This is not to say that virtuosity alone is commensurate with quality; many a heartless technician seems lacking next to a soulful enthusiast. Nor must we wield metrics of beauty naively! Shakespeare bent meter with purpose. But principles can be taught, learned, broken for effect, or violated through ignorance, and the difference matters. That Picasso mastered realism at 15 indicates his scribbles as more than just that.
Originality
Technique tends to accumulate. We likely live in the time of greatest artistic ability in history — education, technology, and prosperity have seen to that. Why care about artists of old, then? Should we not discard them as we do Bessemer’s process and the flying shuttle?
There is clearly more to the appreciation of art than recognizing technical prowess. The flawless nudes of William-Adolphe Bouguereau are seldom as celebrated as the feverish scenes of Vincent Van Gogh.
We may judge great artists as we do great scientists and engineers: on their innovations. To be Greta Van Vleet aping Led Zeppelin in the 2020s is allowed and perhaps even okay. To be The Velvet Underground in the 1960s is to be divine.
A friend of mine gently mocks this idea. Surely then, he says, the greatest work of art is the first human handprint made on a cave wall?
Yes, I say. Yes it is.
Influence
The original artist leads a difficult life. History overflows with visionaries before their time dying impoverished and obscure — your Melvilles, your Dickinsons. They work for a brighter currency than ours. Their only wage is the admiration of generations hence.
It goes without saying that the masses cannot be trusted; art criticism is a field for which the wisdom of crowds will not work. They would nominate lo-fi beats, celebrity memoirs, and unboxing videos for their Nobel, and Funko Pops for the canon.
No. Art belongs to the artists. That expert consensus converges at all is evidence for more than just status games in ivory towers. In Tolstoy, you will find exactly one great writer who denies the greatness of Shakespeare. You will not find a composer who denies the brilliance of Bach.
If you, god forbid, should suffer a brain injury that renders you incapable of personal aesthetic experience, I hope that these guidelines — in combination with a compass and straightedge — shall be enough to calculate an approximately correct opinion. Godspeed.