In my case, I have a lot of experience with criticism, so when I find something good that others insist is Objectively Bad, or vice versa, I know why and can articulate it at length. So I’ve come to accept that I’m often not in the consensus for what is Good, because I know why and I know what I’m looking for that often differs from what the critical consensus is. (This is largely applicable to television or other forms of storytelling.)
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We’re just going to be floundering here. There are many kinds of art, some of those kinds have objective standards of what is good and what is not good. It doesn’t matter if you like it or not or if you like their standards or not. You don’t have to buy their art or like their art, you’ll probably have to look at it if you go into big office buildings or some public spaces.
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If you say it this way, I think we are in agreement. But of course we don’t have to agree.
Like if I had a chance to talk to Michael Bay, I’d want to be careful about what topic I’m debating with him.
Whether the movie can be persuasively argued as objectively good/bad
vs
Whether the movie is good/bad according to its own terms
His audience may agree implicitly on so many of those terms that he knows what expectations and agreed-upon standards he is playing toward in order to provide what is FOR THEM an objectively better movie. If you want to argue whether it’s an objectively better piece of art, we’re going to first have to agree about what we mean when we say “art.”
Sometimes there is enough value of attraction in how different people experience a piece of art that marketers group these preferences into buying choices, such as the sci-fi/fantasy shelves, which are a balance as much between representing as cultivating consumer preferences.
I do think there are objective measures on how humans perceive and experience art that we can then exploit to make content that’s predictably accessible, engaging, and impactful for those people. And there are presumably in principle perfect data that would allow us to manipulate the audience’s experience and the impact of content completely within our control. We could, in theory, perfectly predict the impact and thus the objective value of a piece of art.
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We’re going in circles. There are objective standards for art, you don’t have to view art through that frame or let those standards rule how much you like the work. You may like an artist who does not fit those standards but that does not make that artist good by those standards, or invalidate those standards.
Those standards don’t have to affect your opinions at all, lord knows I’ve stopped listening to anyone around here’s opinion on “good” or “bad” acting or “good” or “bad” shows because it doesn’t increase my enjoyment of the work, I don’t trust their opinion on “good” or “bad” acting, and after a decade of being a stage hand I sympathize with performers too much to care about judging them. However, none of that means I don’t believe there are standards for performing that are objective, I know that I don’t have the training or knowledge to apply them so I don’t.
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Disagree. 12 Angry Men is an objectively good movie
Yeah, but he won the Royal Rumble in 2014 and that was bullshit.
That’s not a question with a meaningful answer, for any movie. The better question to ask is, “Will this movie still have a significant cultural impact in 100 years?”
For Pulp Fiction I think the answer is, “yeah, probably”.
For Transformers it’s, “probably not, but maybe to some”.
For The Wrong Missy the answer is, “lol no”, which is the same answer for the day it was released.
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I was saying Bootista
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I’m going to pretend I understand that and give it a 
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My first rule of good art is that the work itself must be able to convey everything it was meant to express without any external, supplemental explanation required.
So you’re not bidding on my deep fried Lego crucifix covered in rat turds?
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To every person regardless of background, culture, education?
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Good points. I’m sure there are plenty of works of art of historical or religious significance that I could look at today and be ignorant about the significance conveyed.
I was thinking more of modern/abstract works accompanied by lengthy explanations by the artist about what they mean, while conveying none of the same information within the works themselves.
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Objectivity is too strong a word to use for Art, but it would be daft to claim that an infants first painting is the equal of a blue period Picasso .
What’s good and what isn’t is defined by the consensus of academic/critical opinion at the time. There’s no other way of doing it if you want to avoid the cultural abyss of people claiming that some random film is the artistic equal of Apocalypse Now just because they happen to like it.
We had a similar subthread a few months ago when a couple of posters got upset over their super hero films not being taken seriously enough.
There are still problems though, because critical opinion can shift greatly over time. Shakespeare underwent a critical slump during the Victorian era for reasons I’m not clear about… apart from the Victorians being pretty weird about most things.
Like so many debates, the question itself causes much of the confusion. All art has technical aspects which can be objectively good and bad. For example, there is objectively good editing and objectively bad bronze cast work.
It is also possible to objectively rate artistic intention in an historical context. When the abstract expressionists, like Pollack and Sobel, dripped paint on a canvas in the mid 20th century it was an objectively good artistic expression. When I do the same with my left over home paint in 2020 it’s objectively a bad artistic expression. The historical context and intent can be objectively evaluated.
So many of these debates get bogged down in arguments over categories of similarity, like trying to say which is the best and second best film of the year. These rankings are just personal preference.
Art is objective, just like morality.
I mostly agree.
Arguments about what is good art and bad art are valid; as are arguments about whether something is art at all. But going to a greater level of granularity in seeking to place works of art in order might make for interesting debate but is pretty pointless unless it’s something academics/critics are unanimously agreed on like Vertigo being much better art than The Sound Of Music.
