win and tonic

Objectively Good

Is criticism a suggestion on how to gear one’s work into being objectively good, or what appeals most widely to consumers?

“Objectively good” is a set of qualities established by the few whose creative output overcame the difficulty in creating what they aspired to create.

Put another way: is the criticism that you receive, whether it be for your music, writing, or even your performance at work, gearing you towards the popular end of the spectrum (in other words, pandering specifically to the interests of your critics), or towards becoming a “classic” (adhering to the rules set by the pre-MySpace era of makers or, alternately, the ISO Standard)?

Take typesetting, for example: Those few with access to the printing press established the guidelines of “taste” - not just the aestheticism and artistry, but the readability and practicality of both the end result (type) and of the process (the letterpress itself). They were the deciders of canon, what Best Practices should be used, what was acceptable and what wasn’t. There are rules for this sort of thing, they’d say. Not just any one can do the things we do, they said.

And then, well, MySpace happened, and suddenly everyone had a printing press, and everyone and their their mother rebelled by creating the most garish monstrosities they could dredge up in some sort of subversive protest.

Let’s take another example:

A band is insanely popular all over the world. They get extensive radio play, sold out concert venues, and multi-platinum record sales. Refusing to acknowledge their success is foolish, and if you claim to dislike them, you are accused of contrarianism. That is, not forming an actual opinion, but instead choosing to challenge or self-identify by the opposition of the general public’s opinion.

There are two possible explanations for this band’s success:

1. They are objectively good. The band acts as an organism that thrives in a studio, and its members create hit records by turning themselves inside out next to a microphone, exposing the artistry within them. They are beautiful people who need not embellish what they have the most fun doing before it is accessible by the rest of the world. They are objectively, innately, good at what they do.

2. Lowest common denominator. They create music specifically so that it sells. They are intelligent, but business-minded: they engineer pop music that will appeal to the masses at large. They have identified the lowest common denominator in popular music, and rehashed and tailored it until it was unique enough to build a brand upon.

There are, of course, gray areas. For example, when one band changes their sound from their first record to the next, obviously following popular trends so that they can stay alive as musicians without needing to go back to waiting tables, they are considered to have “sold out”.

If their sound is measurably improved with each additional resource garnered over their organic commercial growth, then they are “true artists” (whatever that means). But those are social variables - what I’m talking about is an artist’s absolute, measurable appeal. Art or work that is mathematically quantifiable as a “classic”, or the Golden Ratio of an aesthetic.

Try this: can you attribute the following bands’ success to their being objectively good, or by merely appealing to the lowest common denominator?

• Coldplay
• U2
• Radiohead

Well? What’s your knee-jerk reaction? And how much of that reaction is based on how you want to present yourself to the rest of the world, and how much of that is actual attraction or repulsion of those artists’ aesthetics? Is groupthink telling you to like or dislike it, or can you make the distinction of your own tastes without the cultural metadata attached?

Artists tend to be their worst critic, and there’s a very simple reason why: because they create art for themselves. When a designer makes something, they are trying to make something that they enjoy. “Would I hang this in my own house?” says the painter. “Would I listen to this song?” says the musician. And every time their answer is “No, I would not,” the artist is determined to learn more about and further develop their skill-set to achieve an output that adheres to their own personal aesthetic. That is how personal taste is formed.

But commercial art is a different beast. When the public decides that an artist’s output is no longer representative of their personal taste, that’s when they are considered inauthentic. If an artist’s misrepresentation - or inappropriately premature display - of their taste results in commercial success, all the other artists will call them “evil” - often publicly:

But [Kenny G] did show a knack for connecting to the basest impulses of the large crowd by deploying his two or three most effective licks (holding long notes and playing fast runs - never mind that there were lots of harmonic clams in them) at the key moments to elicit a powerful crowd reaction (over and over again).

— Pat Metheny on Kenny G

According to Metheny, Kenny G is to jazz as Comic Sans is to design.

Perhaps the larger issue at hand is: are these two metrics, objective worth or commercial success, separate to begin with? Isn’t the objective of commercial art to be successful? What variables are at play when determining Radiohead’s success to be more or less earned, honorable or valid than Lady Gaga’s? If, out of everyone on the playing field, these players are the most appealing - how does one decide that their success was less “deserved”?

When someone breaks the rules and the results are popular, they are called visionaries. If someone breaks the rules and the results are unpopular, they’re called hacks and quickly fall into obscurity.

And, perhaps the most volatile, when someone breaks the rules, the results are popular, but someone decides that the public is somehow wrong for enjoying it… then who’s the loser?

So, how do we separate the bad ones from the good ones?

More importantly: how do you?