Are Some Works of Art Better than Others?
What we call entertainment is nothing other than our society’s most popular forms of art. This leads to the question of whether some forms of art are better than others. Is a Beethoven symphony better than a Katy Perry song? Is Romeo and Juliet better than the Twilight saga?
In recent decades, many have answered this question with a resounding “No.”
These people say that there is no objective criterion whereby one could distinguish the value of Perry from Beethoven, that in the end it’s simply a matter of preference: Some prefer popular music, others classical music, and one preference isn’t superior to another.
I agree that there are no objective criteria that can be applied to decide this matter, but I’m reluctant to say that we can never distinguish between good art and bad art. I can think of two possible dimensions along which we might want to judge the value of art, let’s call them beauty and meaningfulness. In this post, I will address beauty; I’ll leave meaningfulness for another time.
