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.
There is a passage in one of Feynman’s books where he goes to a museum and thinks all the paintings in a particular room are by Raphael. He concludes that Raphael’s work was uneven in quality. Later he learns that the paintings he thought were worse were not by Raphael. I don’t remember if that was before or after he started learning to draw.
A lot of van Gogh’s best works were painted within a few years of his death, there wasn’t time for him to be appreciated during his life.
Is there more subjectivity in aesthetics compared to ethics? How do you measure/compare that?
Charles Murray wrote a book twenty years ago called Human Accomplishment where he tries to actually quantify which artists and scientists (among many other areas) throughout history in various traditions are the best. He has his own methodology for ranking artists and scientists within their fields and a large part of that is the influence that their work has exerted. I don't know enough about most fields to say if he's right or wrong but at least in philosophy he puts Aristotle above Plato and Kant. Personally, I don't think you can compare artists the same way you can compare philosophers. Michelangelo and Jackson Pollock might both be great artists in very different ways but Aristotle and Kant can't both be right.
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.
6) Reflective depth: there’s a definite limit to how much value you can get from Tic-Tac-Toe, whereas you can spend a lifetime getting better at chess, go, or Magic: the Gathering - not just becoming more likely to win or engaging in memorization but acquiring or developing whole new concepts as you do so.
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 disagree that great art generally tries to be thought-provoking. Of course some great art is thought-provoking (mostly in literature and film), but the more purely aesthetic arts like music and dance generally are not. A piece like Moonlight Sonata does not induce thoughts about the meaning of life; it induces feelings and emotions.
Strongly agree. I don’t see “high art” as being about maximizing pleasure at all, even though it may very well incidentally induce great pleasure. It’s about revealing Truth(s).
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 feel like this is a joke that everyone but me is in on.
First and foremost, the math makes no sense. The only way to listen to baby shark is YouTube. You chose a single video of an extremely popular piano piece, one that has been recorded so many times that I’d hazard to guess that 90% of all recording aren’t even on YouTube to begin with, let alone the likely millions of times it’s been played and not recorded, and then used that as the basis for a comparison? It’s not remotely sensible. A child could see the logic error here.
If we could prove that moonlight sonata has been listened to more than 12B times, which is completely reasonable given how long it has existed, that entirely invalidates your thesis, and yet you didn’t even consider the possibility. Which brings me back to my first sentence: this must be a joke right?
For almost every playing of baby shark, while one (or more) children might be overjoyed, one to two parents are driven to perform an inexpert root canal on their ear drums. It’s not a pretty picture.
When it comes to art, I think what we need is variety above any specific one genre or aesthetics. There is a certain "yin and yang" with it all, I guess; I would like to have both the complexity and craftsmanship of baroque and the simplicity of minimalism. To have the grandiosity of religion and the universe being represented by the perfectionism and mathematical approach of renaissance works as much as the horrors of war being represented by the unpleasant nature of Guernica.
The world just gives us a huge variety of stimulus and ideas that would be impossible to be explored by a single aesthetic alone. This doesn't mean I enjoy every single art out there; but even not enjoying it, I would still rather they existed than not.
TL;DR, to ask which art is better than the other seems misguided; independet if one can truly be better than the other, having both is still the best outcome.
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.
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.
There is a passage in one of Feynman’s books where he goes to a museum and thinks all the paintings in a particular room are by Raphael. He concludes that Raphael’s work was uneven in quality. Later he learns that the paintings he thought were worse were not by Raphael. I don’t remember if that was before or after he started learning to draw.
A lot of van Gogh’s best works were painted within a few years of his death, there wasn’t time for him to be appreciated during his life.
Is there more subjectivity in aesthetics compared to ethics? How do you measure/compare that?
Charles Murray wrote a book twenty years ago called Human Accomplishment where he tries to actually quantify which artists and scientists (among many other areas) throughout history in various traditions are the best. He has his own methodology for ranking artists and scientists within their fields and a large part of that is the influence that their work has exerted. I don't know enough about most fields to say if he's right or wrong but at least in philosophy he puts Aristotle above Plato and Kant. Personally, I don't think you can compare artists the same way you can compare philosophers. Michelangelo and Jackson Pollock might both be great artists in very different ways but Aristotle and Kant can't both be right.
Of course Aristotle and Kant are wrong. But they're still great philosophers. https://fakenous.substack.com/p/great-philosophers
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.
6) Reflective depth: there’s a definite limit to how much value you can get from Tic-Tac-Toe, whereas you can spend a lifetime getting better at chess, go, or Magic: the Gathering - not just becoming more likely to win or engaging in memorization but acquiring or developing whole new concepts as you do so.
"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 disagree that great art generally tries to be thought-provoking. Of course some great art is thought-provoking (mostly in literature and film), but the more purely aesthetic arts like music and dance generally are not. A piece like Moonlight Sonata does not induce thoughts about the meaning of life; it induces feelings and emotions.
Strongly agree. I don’t see “high art” as being about maximizing pleasure at all, even though it may very well incidentally induce great pleasure. It’s about revealing Truth(s).
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 feel like this is a joke that everyone but me is in on.
First and foremost, the math makes no sense. The only way to listen to baby shark is YouTube. You chose a single video of an extremely popular piano piece, one that has been recorded so many times that I’d hazard to guess that 90% of all recording aren’t even on YouTube to begin with, let alone the likely millions of times it’s been played and not recorded, and then used that as the basis for a comparison? It’s not remotely sensible. A child could see the logic error here.
If we could prove that moonlight sonata has been listened to more than 12B times, which is completely reasonable given how long it has existed, that entirely invalidates your thesis, and yet you didn’t even consider the possibility. Which brings me back to my first sentence: this must be a joke right?
For almost every playing of baby shark, while one (or more) children might be overjoyed, one to two parents are driven to perform an inexpert root canal on their ear drums. It’s not a pretty picture.
When it comes to art, I think what we need is variety above any specific one genre or aesthetics. There is a certain "yin and yang" with it all, I guess; I would like to have both the complexity and craftsmanship of baroque and the simplicity of minimalism. To have the grandiosity of religion and the universe being represented by the perfectionism and mathematical approach of renaissance works as much as the horrors of war being represented by the unpleasant nature of Guernica.
The world just gives us a huge variety of stimulus and ideas that would be impossible to be explored by a single aesthetic alone. This doesn't mean I enjoy every single art out there; but even not enjoying it, I would still rather they existed than not.
TL;DR, to ask which art is better than the other seems misguided; independet if one can truly be better than the other, having both is still the best outcome.
bro that have 12B viwes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w
Ok, it's complexity.
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.