Perhaps the solution is a hybrid account of aesthetic value, like one sometimes sees in the literature on well-being, where aesthetic pleasure and some other objective value are jointly constitutive of the aesthetic good. So, even though baby shark yields more pleasure than Beethoven, the latter is also beautiful. The pleasure Beethoven's music yields is caused by/due to to its being beautiful. What great about art that isn't beautiful? It might be such that it produces aesthetic pleasure due its manifesting some other value like, say, understanding, wisdom, creativity, etc. If something like this is right we also have a pretty good way of explaining why so much contemporary art is just plain bad; namely, even if, ex hypothesi, such art manifests *some* value or other, it fails to produce aesthetic pleasure. Like, there's certainly something creative about many contemporary works, even if that creativity is often displayed in ways that are aesthetically displeasing.
I think part of the reason why there is so much subjectivity in aesthetics compared to ethics is because works of art take on a collective meaning from their observers/critics. As you implied, comparing Guernica and The Village Lighthouse as simply the works of art themselves ignores the context in which Picasso painted that piece which gives it a much deeper meaning about human suffering. Van Gogh comes to mind as well. Almost no one in his life saw the artistic value of his paintings that future people now line up around the block to see because his work is now understood within the tragic context of his life. It would be interesting to see what works of art people would enjoy the most if you took a bunch of people who somehow had never seen any famous art and had them collectively rank pieces solely on their aesthetic merits. I think the result would be that individual taste is much more subjective when removed from other factors like fame and artistic prestige.
1) Family resemblance: if someone asks for some great art, they’re asking for things intuitively closer to Monlight Sonata than Baby Shark. There may not be necessary or sufficient boundaries of this category, but it’s useful to people, so we can work with it even if classical conceptual analysis might not yield a satisfactory response, or one that works the same way for everyone.
2) Production of otherwise neglected values. Left to their own devices, the market will produce catchy jingles, the state will produce patriotic marching tunes, and so on. You need artists to produce more interesting stuff that hits other and more complex aesthetic notes, which we want as part of the total output of our culture. Artists are right to use this as a prestige marker because it’s helping them bring what other incentive systems wouldn’t.
3) Externalities. A lot of people have enjoyed Baby Shark, but a lot of people have gotten really annoyed by it. The latter might even outweigh the former. Surely if we’re starting off with a simple total hedonic utility criterion this should go in the ledger.
4) Mindstate. Moonlight Sonata encourages a state of reflection that we might instrindically or extrinsically value, whereas Baby Shark is less successful at this.
5) Influence. Obviously it is too early to judge Baby Shark on this, but we may want to count enduring influence as part of what makes art worth engaging with, because it becomes part of the cultural literacy of engaging with everything else. For instance, I don’t know that the Bible on its own is especially great literature (maybe I’m wrong.) But so much after it in Western literature is an engagement with it in one form or another, that learning to appreciate it (or just know it) as literature is helpful, and for canon-making purposes like “what should I include in my western lit survey course?” quite decisive.
This reminds me of this passage from Brideshead Revisited (they are talking about a chapel):
"...You are an artist, Ryder, what do you think of it æsthetically?"
"I think it's beautiful," said Cordelia with tears in her eyes.
"Is it Good Art?"
"Well, I don't quite know what you mean," I said warily. "I think it's a remarkable example of its period. Probably in eighty years it will be greatly admired."
"But surely it can't be good twenty years ago and good in eighty years, and not good now?"
"Well, it may be good now. All I mean is that I don't happen to like it much."
"But is there a difference between liking a thing and thinking it good?"
"Bridey, don't be so Jesuitical," said Sebastian, but I knew that this disagreement was not a matter of words only, but expressed a deep and impassable division between us; neither had any understanding of the other, nor ever could.
"Isn't that just the distinction you made about wine?"
"No. I like and think good the end to which wine is sometimes the means--the promotion of sympathy between man and man. But in my own case it does not achieve that end, so I neither like it nor think it good for me."
>3. Baby Shark produces more aesthetic pleasure than the Moonlight Sonata.
>And this pleasure is evidently aesthetic (what else might it be? It’s not like it’s producing gustatory pleasure, or sexual pleasure, or the pleasure of gaining higher social status. It’s the pleasure of listening to a song, which is paradigmatically aesthetic.)
I guess I'd mostly disagree with this assertion? I don't understand "the pleasure of listening to a song" to *necessarily* be a paradigmatic example of aesthetic pleasure, because I've always understood aesthetic pleasure to be strictly connected to the observation of beauty, and it seems plausible that much of the pleasure people experience from listening to Baby Shark is not connected to the song's beauty - IE in my observation, many people listen for a laugh, or to push themselves through a workout, or to have fun at a party, and these forms of enjoyment all strike me as fundamentally non-aesthetic.
In general, the pleasure people get from popular music is often that is energizing, inspires dancing, is easy to follow, sexy, etc - and those pleasures also strike me as non-aesthetic. It's maybe significant that you could get these same pleasures from drugs, in which case it is even more evident that they are non-aesthetic pleasures. If we distinguish the aesthetic value people get from music from the social or psychological value that they get from it, I don't see why it's necessarily a problem that the *most beautiful* works of art are not also the *most holistically valuable* to people, given that art tends to play a variety of decidedly non-aesthetic social and psychological functions?
Of course, "what is art?" is one of those topics for which there are probably no logically watertight arguments, and any argument is unlikely to convince anyone who doesn't already agree.
That said, my personal take is that "beauty" is on the right track to describe the goal of "great art", but a better word is probably "the sublime". That is to say, "great art" generally tries to be thought provoking and inspire meaningful reflection on the deep or numinous parts of the human experience (e.g., what does life mean? Why are we here? What is anyone's purpose? How do we conceive of ourselves in relation to others? etc). Un-coincidentally, these are questions that are not very amenable to analytic or logical thinking. As far as I'm aware, generally so-called "canonical" examples of "great art" tend to satisfy this more often, and to more people, than what you might in contrast call "entertainment".
Note that none of this implies a moral value judgement - one can (and I think should) feel free to enjoy any particular piece of entertainment or art more or less, irrespective of its artistic value. I enjoy plenty of low-brow music or tv, and there are high-brow examples of "great art" that just don't do it for me personally.
I’ve never understood why anyone would think that theories of aesthetics ought to make sense. It seems easy to find some arguments concluding that rationality is universal, and that morality is universal, but harder for aesthetics. Why do humans enjoy art at all, while most (all?) other species find it irrelevant or annoying? The generation and appreciation of art seem to be artifacts of our genetic history, not a characteristic universal to all possible rational beings.
This of course does not disarm the puzzle. Is there really convergence toward a consensus? If so, does that say more about the artifacts being evaluated, or the beings doing the evaluating?
Isn’t Michael the guy who is always telling us that Shakespeare is overrated? Maybe the same process is at work everywhere.
Am I allowed to comment? I’m not a paid subscriber, so let me try.
Okay, that worked, yay!
I very much like Michael’s post because it asks very profound questions about the value of art, and by extension, aesthetics in general.
Even though an old guy now, I seem to be afflicted by the low attention span of some younger people, and Beethovan’s masterpiece is a bit long, isn’t it?
Long it may be, but yeh, I find a lot more aesthetic value in classical music than extremely simple pop music, especially that which seems aimed at young children.
I think the upbeat kiddie music and video goes better with my morning jolt of intravenous caffeine, but damn, I don’t want to listen to it before bed! Context is important, some say, eh?
From a rigidly utilitarian perspective, the kiddie piece has more value, but I see that as a strong argument against strict utilitarianism.
In some sense I see utilitarianism and aesthetics as incompatible.
I can think of a few elements that may characterize "good" art. Good art does a good job of conveying experiences or ideas. The more nuanced the experience or idea, the more skill the artist generally needs to create it. This can be thought of as being akin to physical tools. A simple crude tool may be much more popular than a specialized tool, but we could think of the latter as being a "better tool" inasmuch as it's better able to accomplish specific tasks.
A very simple beat may be entertaining to listen to and arguably conveys a crude idea - something like tempo / movement. But a more complex musical piece is able to convey a much more nuanced experience - and the same for other types of art.
It seems likely that within this framework, there are many more ways to convey the simple messages of bad art, and fewer ways to convey the nuanced messages or good art.
While a simple beat convey the generic feeling of tempo / movement, it seems likely that many other beats could induce nearly identical feelings.
Better art, however, is likely able to convey specific feelings that much fewer other pieces of art would convey.
This would generally correspond to a greater degree of skill necessary to create such art.
In some cases, as in more modern art, the skill lies not in the nominal technical process of creating the art, but in thinking of ways to convey ideas by violating previous paradigms about art.
The finished product may be one that could more easily be recreated by a greater number of artists (indicative of it being lower-skill and lower-quality) but the idea of creatively violating artistic norms, may itself have been novel, requiring skill on the part of the artist, and allowing the artist to convey nuanced ideas / experiences / feelings.
These criteria seem able to differentiate between Midnight Sonata and Baby Shark. The latter likely conveys generic feelings of excitement. It seems likely that a great number of other pieces could generate such feelings. It seems that Midnight Sonata is evocative of much more nuanced emotions that fewer pieces of art could recreate.
It also seems likely that the technical process of creating Midnight Sonata is more difficult than that of Baby Shark. (While some specific pattern of noise could also be extremely technically difficult to create, this relates to the previous point relating music to tools. The skill in creating a "good" tool is in creating a tool that can accomplish some predefined task well. Good art is technically difficult to create, because it needs to succeed at conveying a specific nuanced experience. Some complexly defined pattern of noise may be technically difficult to compute or create, but the experience it evokes would be nearly virtually indistinguishable from those evoked by other patterns of noise.)
'Acquired taste' wasn't mentioned but that's how I view this, like blue cheese and red wine versus burger and Coke. Any old fool can like burger and Coke whereas it takes time and effort to make yourself like smelly blue cheese and tart red wine.
Do you first have to be told 'The Village Lighthouse' is kitsch or should you, despite not being steeped in art and Art History, notice this for yourself? I suspect I would have liked it and placed it, like a Robert Aickman story, in the category of 'dream-like distortions of reality' if I hadn't already internalised the 'correct' view.
One possible refinement is that good art calls its recipient to be a better person, in some way. But I can see that this just raises the question of objectively defining a good person.
As a Christian, at this point I would have to invoke theology: a good person is one who loves God and seeks to glorify Him. And by extension, any art that encourages a person to become more like that is good art. I wouldn't expect a secularist to follow me along this path, though.
How does this analysis look if you're trying to measure the 'best' piece of maths for instance? Presumably you would be more comfortable giving the crown to something subtle and possibly beyond the grasp of 99% of the population. If not, are things like Fields medals bogus?
I don't think Fields medals are bogus - I would say they reward saying things that are true, novel, and in some way non-obvious. i.e. they add to human knowledge in interesting ways (more interesting than say taking a more detailed picture of a galaxy or calculating another decimal place of a fundamental constant). Music at it's best could be said to do the same - say something both true and original. Composers who do this consistently are considered 'great'.
The same could go for Shakespeare (c.f. earlier post). Some new things he said may have been low hanging but by the same token so were Euler's theorems. Many writers today will be higher IQ (or your preferred literary equivalent) than Shakespeare (and many mathematicians higher IQ than Euler), however the ability to see and create new things seems to at least in some way be independent and it is this creativity that is what is actually prized in great works of art / maths / science.
The masses don't have a particularly good cultural taste. The top-scorers on the charts are typically TV and novelty songs, real music with any effect like punk or rock or pop typically becomes lower, but appeals to the tastes of the music journalist class.
Sometimes things are both subjectively and objectively the same. Art is like that - for many reasons but the primary being the exact difference you are suggesting doesn't exist, quality. Quality doesn't have to be subjectively appreciated to be objectively understood as superior; for example, my favorite colors are orange and blue. Anything orange and blue immediately catches my attention and I own a lot of stuff bc of that - I don't own things that looked awesome in orange and blue colors but were made by an inferior company or brand. My favorite pair of shoes to date was a very bright orange and blue pair of Fila brand - I bought 3 pairs at 39.99 bc I knew the quality I found was only in the appearance. Subjectively I loved the shoes but objectively I wish they were Asics.
Art is the same. I have viewed artwork that made me literally cringe but I knew immediately that it was painted by a master and despite very negative emotional reaction to the artwork itself, I could no less say that it was a masterpiece. Subjectively I hated it but objectively I could obviously perceive the undeniable quality within the painting.
Also, an artist does more than paint/draw appealing imagery - it is a highly skilled profession with closely guarded secrets often hidden in plain sight. Fine art is always, always more than what it appears to be - in a visual way, like one that changes, visually the way you see the painting. Haha, but thats controversial by all the people who just decided art must be subjective after spending 15 seconds looking at something meant to be viewed in passing at all times of day and in different light conditions - art is meant to be lived with and experienced.
I can hang a Turner painting in my living room and tho I walk by it every day I will literally see it differently depending on conditions of each day - that doesn't work with the coolest movie poster I've ever seen. If I hang the movie poster, I may appreciate the initial visual but that appreciation will fade with time and familiarity and the poster won't do anything more than be a cool looking poster...
So, in short, you've compared a timeless work of art to a brilliantly executed gimmick. Like a lake to an ocean. The cultural depth baby shark added to humanity is akin to the lake and the moonlight sonata akin to the ocean. Like, spend a few hours playing each of them on repeat - it will become quite clear which is art and which isn't.
I actually believe this to be obvious to everyone - even those that dislike the moonlight sonata.
Perhaps the solution is a hybrid account of aesthetic value, like one sometimes sees in the literature on well-being, where aesthetic pleasure and some other objective value are jointly constitutive of the aesthetic good. So, even though baby shark yields more pleasure than Beethoven, the latter is also beautiful. The pleasure Beethoven's music yields is caused by/due to to its being beautiful. What great about art that isn't beautiful? It might be such that it produces aesthetic pleasure due its manifesting some other value like, say, understanding, wisdom, creativity, etc. If something like this is right we also have a pretty good way of explaining why so much contemporary art is just plain bad; namely, even if, ex hypothesi, such art manifests *some* value or other, it fails to produce aesthetic pleasure. Like, there's certainly something creative about many contemporary works, even if that creativity is often displayed in ways that are aesthetically displeasing.
I think part of the reason why there is so much subjectivity in aesthetics compared to ethics is because works of art take on a collective meaning from their observers/critics. As you implied, comparing Guernica and The Village Lighthouse as simply the works of art themselves ignores the context in which Picasso painted that piece which gives it a much deeper meaning about human suffering. Van Gogh comes to mind as well. Almost no one in his life saw the artistic value of his paintings that future people now line up around the block to see because his work is now understood within the tragic context of his life. It would be interesting to see what works of art people would enjoy the most if you took a bunch of people who somehow had never seen any famous art and had them collectively rank pieces solely on their aesthetic merits. I think the result would be that individual taste is much more subjective when removed from other factors like fame and artistic prestige.
Here are some additional considerations:
1) Family resemblance: if someone asks for some great art, they’re asking for things intuitively closer to Monlight Sonata than Baby Shark. There may not be necessary or sufficient boundaries of this category, but it’s useful to people, so we can work with it even if classical conceptual analysis might not yield a satisfactory response, or one that works the same way for everyone.
2) Production of otherwise neglected values. Left to their own devices, the market will produce catchy jingles, the state will produce patriotic marching tunes, and so on. You need artists to produce more interesting stuff that hits other and more complex aesthetic notes, which we want as part of the total output of our culture. Artists are right to use this as a prestige marker because it’s helping them bring what other incentive systems wouldn’t.
3) Externalities. A lot of people have enjoyed Baby Shark, but a lot of people have gotten really annoyed by it. The latter might even outweigh the former. Surely if we’re starting off with a simple total hedonic utility criterion this should go in the ledger.
4) Mindstate. Moonlight Sonata encourages a state of reflection that we might instrindically or extrinsically value, whereas Baby Shark is less successful at this.
5) Influence. Obviously it is too early to judge Baby Shark on this, but we may want to count enduring influence as part of what makes art worth engaging with, because it becomes part of the cultural literacy of engaging with everything else. For instance, I don’t know that the Bible on its own is especially great literature (maybe I’m wrong.) But so much after it in Western literature is an engagement with it in one form or another, that learning to appreciate it (or just know it) as literature is helpful, and for canon-making purposes like “what should I include in my western lit survey course?” quite decisive.
"Baby Shark, whatever else it might be, is not beautiful." Blasphemy!
This reminds me of this passage from Brideshead Revisited (they are talking about a chapel):
"...You are an artist, Ryder, what do you think of it æsthetically?"
"I think it's beautiful," said Cordelia with tears in her eyes.
"Is it Good Art?"
"Well, I don't quite know what you mean," I said warily. "I think it's a remarkable example of its period. Probably in eighty years it will be greatly admired."
"But surely it can't be good twenty years ago and good in eighty years, and not good now?"
"Well, it may be good now. All I mean is that I don't happen to like it much."
"But is there a difference between liking a thing and thinking it good?"
"Bridey, don't be so Jesuitical," said Sebastian, but I knew that this disagreement was not a matter of words only, but expressed a deep and impassable division between us; neither had any understanding of the other, nor ever could.
"Isn't that just the distinction you made about wine?"
"No. I like and think good the end to which wine is sometimes the means--the promotion of sympathy between man and man. But in my own case it does not achieve that end, so I neither like it nor think it good for me."
>3. Baby Shark produces more aesthetic pleasure than the Moonlight Sonata.
>And this pleasure is evidently aesthetic (what else might it be? It’s not like it’s producing gustatory pleasure, or sexual pleasure, or the pleasure of gaining higher social status. It’s the pleasure of listening to a song, which is paradigmatically aesthetic.)
I guess I'd mostly disagree with this assertion? I don't understand "the pleasure of listening to a song" to *necessarily* be a paradigmatic example of aesthetic pleasure, because I've always understood aesthetic pleasure to be strictly connected to the observation of beauty, and it seems plausible that much of the pleasure people experience from listening to Baby Shark is not connected to the song's beauty - IE in my observation, many people listen for a laugh, or to push themselves through a workout, or to have fun at a party, and these forms of enjoyment all strike me as fundamentally non-aesthetic.
In general, the pleasure people get from popular music is often that is energizing, inspires dancing, is easy to follow, sexy, etc - and those pleasures also strike me as non-aesthetic. It's maybe significant that you could get these same pleasures from drugs, in which case it is even more evident that they are non-aesthetic pleasures. If we distinguish the aesthetic value people get from music from the social or psychological value that they get from it, I don't see why it's necessarily a problem that the *most beautiful* works of art are not also the *most holistically valuable* to people, given that art tends to play a variety of decidedly non-aesthetic social and psychological functions?
Of course, "what is art?" is one of those topics for which there are probably no logically watertight arguments, and any argument is unlikely to convince anyone who doesn't already agree.
That said, my personal take is that "beauty" is on the right track to describe the goal of "great art", but a better word is probably "the sublime". That is to say, "great art" generally tries to be thought provoking and inspire meaningful reflection on the deep or numinous parts of the human experience (e.g., what does life mean? Why are we here? What is anyone's purpose? How do we conceive of ourselves in relation to others? etc). Un-coincidentally, these are questions that are not very amenable to analytic or logical thinking. As far as I'm aware, generally so-called "canonical" examples of "great art" tend to satisfy this more often, and to more people, than what you might in contrast call "entertainment".
Note that none of this implies a moral value judgement - one can (and I think should) feel free to enjoy any particular piece of entertainment or art more or less, irrespective of its artistic value. I enjoy plenty of low-brow music or tv, and there are high-brow examples of "great art" that just don't do it for me personally.
I’ve never understood why anyone would think that theories of aesthetics ought to make sense. It seems easy to find some arguments concluding that rationality is universal, and that morality is universal, but harder for aesthetics. Why do humans enjoy art at all, while most (all?) other species find it irrelevant or annoying? The generation and appreciation of art seem to be artifacts of our genetic history, not a characteristic universal to all possible rational beings.
This of course does not disarm the puzzle. Is there really convergence toward a consensus? If so, does that say more about the artifacts being evaluated, or the beings doing the evaluating?
Isn’t Michael the guy who is always telling us that Shakespeare is overrated? Maybe the same process is at work everywhere.
Am I allowed to comment? I’m not a paid subscriber, so let me try.
Okay, that worked, yay!
I very much like Michael’s post because it asks very profound questions about the value of art, and by extension, aesthetics in general.
Even though an old guy now, I seem to be afflicted by the low attention span of some younger people, and Beethovan’s masterpiece is a bit long, isn’t it?
Long it may be, but yeh, I find a lot more aesthetic value in classical music than extremely simple pop music, especially that which seems aimed at young children.
I think the upbeat kiddie music and video goes better with my morning jolt of intravenous caffeine, but damn, I don’t want to listen to it before bed! Context is important, some say, eh?
From a rigidly utilitarian perspective, the kiddie piece has more value, but I see that as a strong argument against strict utilitarianism.
In some sense I see utilitarianism and aesthetics as incompatible.
I can think of a few elements that may characterize "good" art. Good art does a good job of conveying experiences or ideas. The more nuanced the experience or idea, the more skill the artist generally needs to create it. This can be thought of as being akin to physical tools. A simple crude tool may be much more popular than a specialized tool, but we could think of the latter as being a "better tool" inasmuch as it's better able to accomplish specific tasks.
A very simple beat may be entertaining to listen to and arguably conveys a crude idea - something like tempo / movement. But a more complex musical piece is able to convey a much more nuanced experience - and the same for other types of art.
It seems likely that within this framework, there are many more ways to convey the simple messages of bad art, and fewer ways to convey the nuanced messages or good art.
While a simple beat convey the generic feeling of tempo / movement, it seems likely that many other beats could induce nearly identical feelings.
Better art, however, is likely able to convey specific feelings that much fewer other pieces of art would convey.
This would generally correspond to a greater degree of skill necessary to create such art.
In some cases, as in more modern art, the skill lies not in the nominal technical process of creating the art, but in thinking of ways to convey ideas by violating previous paradigms about art.
The finished product may be one that could more easily be recreated by a greater number of artists (indicative of it being lower-skill and lower-quality) but the idea of creatively violating artistic norms, may itself have been novel, requiring skill on the part of the artist, and allowing the artist to convey nuanced ideas / experiences / feelings.
These criteria seem able to differentiate between Midnight Sonata and Baby Shark. The latter likely conveys generic feelings of excitement. It seems likely that a great number of other pieces could generate such feelings. It seems that Midnight Sonata is evocative of much more nuanced emotions that fewer pieces of art could recreate.
It also seems likely that the technical process of creating Midnight Sonata is more difficult than that of Baby Shark. (While some specific pattern of noise could also be extremely technically difficult to create, this relates to the previous point relating music to tools. The skill in creating a "good" tool is in creating a tool that can accomplish some predefined task well. Good art is technically difficult to create, because it needs to succeed at conveying a specific nuanced experience. Some complexly defined pattern of noise may be technically difficult to compute or create, but the experience it evokes would be nearly virtually indistinguishable from those evoked by other patterns of noise.)
'Acquired taste' wasn't mentioned but that's how I view this, like blue cheese and red wine versus burger and Coke. Any old fool can like burger and Coke whereas it takes time and effort to make yourself like smelly blue cheese and tart red wine.
Do you first have to be told 'The Village Lighthouse' is kitsch or should you, despite not being steeped in art and Art History, notice this for yourself? I suspect I would have liked it and placed it, like a Robert Aickman story, in the category of 'dream-like distortions of reality' if I hadn't already internalised the 'correct' view.
Lots of good questions here.
One possible refinement is that good art calls its recipient to be a better person, in some way. But I can see that this just raises the question of objectively defining a good person.
As a Christian, at this point I would have to invoke theology: a good person is one who loves God and seeks to glorify Him. And by extension, any art that encourages a person to become more like that is good art. I wouldn't expect a secularist to follow me along this path, though.
How does this analysis look if you're trying to measure the 'best' piece of maths for instance? Presumably you would be more comfortable giving the crown to something subtle and possibly beyond the grasp of 99% of the population. If not, are things like Fields medals bogus?
I don't think Fields medals are bogus - I would say they reward saying things that are true, novel, and in some way non-obvious. i.e. they add to human knowledge in interesting ways (more interesting than say taking a more detailed picture of a galaxy or calculating another decimal place of a fundamental constant). Music at it's best could be said to do the same - say something both true and original. Composers who do this consistently are considered 'great'.
The same could go for Shakespeare (c.f. earlier post). Some new things he said may have been low hanging but by the same token so were Euler's theorems. Many writers today will be higher IQ (or your preferred literary equivalent) than Shakespeare (and many mathematicians higher IQ than Euler), however the ability to see and create new things seems to at least in some way be independent and it is this creativity that is what is actually prized in great works of art / maths / science.
The masses don't have a particularly good cultural taste. The top-scorers on the charts are typically TV and novelty songs, real music with any effect like punk or rock or pop typically becomes lower, but appeals to the tastes of the music journalist class.
Sometimes things are both subjectively and objectively the same. Art is like that - for many reasons but the primary being the exact difference you are suggesting doesn't exist, quality. Quality doesn't have to be subjectively appreciated to be objectively understood as superior; for example, my favorite colors are orange and blue. Anything orange and blue immediately catches my attention and I own a lot of stuff bc of that - I don't own things that looked awesome in orange and blue colors but were made by an inferior company or brand. My favorite pair of shoes to date was a very bright orange and blue pair of Fila brand - I bought 3 pairs at 39.99 bc I knew the quality I found was only in the appearance. Subjectively I loved the shoes but objectively I wish they were Asics.
Art is the same. I have viewed artwork that made me literally cringe but I knew immediately that it was painted by a master and despite very negative emotional reaction to the artwork itself, I could no less say that it was a masterpiece. Subjectively I hated it but objectively I could obviously perceive the undeniable quality within the painting.
Also, an artist does more than paint/draw appealing imagery - it is a highly skilled profession with closely guarded secrets often hidden in plain sight. Fine art is always, always more than what it appears to be - in a visual way, like one that changes, visually the way you see the painting. Haha, but thats controversial by all the people who just decided art must be subjective after spending 15 seconds looking at something meant to be viewed in passing at all times of day and in different light conditions - art is meant to be lived with and experienced.
I can hang a Turner painting in my living room and tho I walk by it every day I will literally see it differently depending on conditions of each day - that doesn't work with the coolest movie poster I've ever seen. If I hang the movie poster, I may appreciate the initial visual but that appreciation will fade with time and familiarity and the poster won't do anything more than be a cool looking poster...
So, in short, you've compared a timeless work of art to a brilliantly executed gimmick. Like a lake to an ocean. The cultural depth baby shark added to humanity is akin to the lake and the moonlight sonata akin to the ocean. Like, spend a few hours playing each of them on repeat - it will become quite clear which is art and which isn't.
I actually believe this to be obvious to everyone - even those that dislike the moonlight sonata.
Just hard to elucidate is all