Objectively good
I have a pet peeve that comes up when I talk with someone about a song, a film, a TV show, or perhaps a book. Occasionally, one of my friends will describe such a work as objectively good or objectively bad. These phrases will always cause me to raise an eyebrow. What exactly are the objective factors that determine the quality of a creative work? I can think of a few ideas, but each seem problematic.
My first thought is numbers. We could sample from a group of people who have experienced a particular work and ask them whether they think the work is "good". If a supermajority says yes, then the work is objectively good; if a supermajority says no, then the work is objectively bad; if there is no clear answer, then the work is objectively neither good nor bad. This method is questionable because it seems to rely heavily on mere popularity. To use an adage that one of my high school English teachers had on her little podium: "What is popular is not always right, and what is right is not always popular." (This quote is sometimes attributed to Albert Einstein, but based on a cursory search it is not immediately obvious to me when and where Einstein ever said this, if he ever did.)
There are a variety of websites out there that aggregate various
opinions of creative works. Perhaps the most famous examples for films
are Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and CinemaScore. For example, the film Toy Story (1995) has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes; Rotten Tomatoes counted 89 published reviews of the film and determined that all 89 reviewers deemed the work good. Because of this, we could potentially claim that Toy Story is objectively good. Again, this scheme is rather dubious. These 89 reviewers were not sampled randomly; they came from a group of journalists and writers who publish film reviews as part of their careers. What makes their analysis of films more authoritative than others? Indeed, there have been numerous cases where the critical reception of a film has differed with the general audience reception. Perhaps the most notorious example in recent years is the film Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi (2017), which has a 90% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, seemingly indicating near-universal acclaim, but the audience rating of the film (based on users of the Rotten Tomatoes website) is only 43%, indicating a much more divided general audience reception compared to the film critic reception. It seems that one could not only make an argument that The Last Jedi is objectively good, but also an argument that the film is objectively bad. However if something is objective, it is supposed to be unambiguous and not influenced by differing opinions. Although "percentage of a sample of audience members who say the film is good" is an objective measure, the leap from this percentage to the conclusion that a film is good is subjective.
There are also a variety of sources that measure the popularity of creative works. Perhaps the most famous example for musical works in the United States is the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The Billboard company generates this popularity ranking of songs distributed in the United States based on objective factors such as radio airplay, song and album sales, and Internet streaming statistics. In 2013, Billboard changed its ranking methodology to include YouTube views as part of the calculation, and as a direct consequence, the song "Harlem Shake" by Baauer immediately took position #1 on the Hot 100 chart. For those unaware, the reason why this song was so popular in 2013 on YouTube was because it was the center of a viral Internet meme. If we subscribe to the notion that mere popularity as measured by the Billboard chart is acceptable as an objective measure for how good a song is, it would seem we would be forced to accept also that the "Harlem Shake" song was not only objectively good, but also objectively one of the best songs of 2013. However, this seems quite suspicious, since before Billboard included YouTube views as part of the math, "Harlem Shake" was not on the chart at all. Additionally, it is possible for two reasonable persons to disagree on whether the ranking methodology should include YouTube views. In other words, although the Billboard ranking is based on factors that are objective in nature (e.g. amount of radio airplay, number of song sales, number of YouTube views), the decision on how much weight each factor plays in producing the final ranking is subjective.
We could turn instead to why individual people believe that a work is good or bad, looking for things that we can objectively analyze. For example, in my experience, many people value originality in the creative works that they consume. Part of the "critics consensus", according to Rotten Tomatoes, of the film Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker (2019) is that it "suffers from a frustrating lack of imagination [...]". It seems pretty reasonable to say that if a creative work is unoriginal or unimaginative, then the work is bad. When we watch a movie, listen to a song, or read a book, we are looking for something new, something that captivates our interest. If the work is too similar to something that we have experienced before, then we may feel the work is boring and therefore bad.
The salient question, then, is whether originality is something that we can objectively measure. If a creative work copies something that came before it, then it seems that in this case, the work would be objectively unoriginal. Anyone who knows me well or who has read this blog extensively knows that I am a huge fan of Owl City, a musician who rose to fame following the song "Fireflies" in 2009. At the time that "Fireflies" was popular, there was extensive criticism that the song was an unoriginal ripoff of the sound of a band named The Postal Service, a side project of the band Death Cab for Cutie that released one album titled Give Up in 2003. Comparing the song "Such Great Heights" by The Postal Service with "Fireflies" by Owl City, I do not disagree that there are some similarities—both songs start with a similar, high-pitched bubbly synthesizer hook, and both projects make similar use of electronic instrumentation. In a scathing review published on Pitchfork.com,
reviewer Ian Cohen equates the song to thievery, writing, "The surprise
No. 1 single in the country, Owl City's 'Fireflies', jacks the Postal
Service in such a bald-faced, obvious manner that getting into specifics
feels redundant at best and tacky at worst." Is, then, "Fireflies" objectively unoriginal?
The claim that Owl City stole the sound of The Postal Service seems quite improbable to me. In a review published in The New York Times in 2009, Ben Sisario interviewed Adam Young (the real name of the person who publishes music as Owl City), who stated that The Postal Service "was never a model" for the sound of Owl City. Additionally, "Fireflies" came at a time when the musical word was at a crossroads, when the rock-pop bands like Daughtry and Blink-182 were still making the top charts, and electronic music in the genre of Owl City and The Postal Service was still a rarity. Since the release of "Fireflies", electronic music has become far more prominent, especially the broad category of music called "electronic dance music". Advancements in technology have allowed more and more artists to become successful by making professional-sounding music from their laptops, just as Adam Young did with "Fireflies". Some successful EDM musicians today even claim to have been inspired by Owl City, such as nanobii/Linus from the Stars. I suspect Owl City and The Postal Service were so intensely compared because the genre of music they inhabited was so niche at the time. If "Fireflies" were released in today's EDM culture, I don't doubt that someone out there would have still compared it to The Postal Service, but I wonder if the criticism would have remained as intense against the backdrop of a more diverse genre.
All of which is to say: although it is not difficult to identify similarities across different creative works, different people can reasonably disagree over the extent to which these similarities render a work "unoriginal". Because of this subjectivity, "originality" cannot be the basis for declaring a creative work objectively bad.
In fact, I would go as far to suggest that there is no such thing as objectively good and objectively bad in the context of creative works. The determination of good and bad in the context of creative works is inherently subjective. You may well have very good reasons for not enjoying a film, a book, a song, a video game, or any other creative work: it's unoriginal, it's unimaginative, it's poorly written, it's badly sung, it's too childish, it's too melodramatic. However, curiously, the same reasons that cause you not to enjoy the work may not apply to someone else. Does this mean that their enjoyment of the work is wrong? Is your subjective experience of a work somehow superior to their subjective experience? Art is peculiar like that. Whether you think a creative work is good depends on your individual experience of the work, which in turn depends on innumerable factors specific to you, such as your upbringing, the kind of books you read as a kid, the kind of music that your parents listened to, the kind of movies that your friends watch, etc.
In an ideal world, the term "guilty pleasure" would not exist because we would never be pretentious enough to shame someone for enjoying something that most of us do not. By labeling a creative work objectively bad, we necessarily alienate our friends who think that work is good because then it would mean that they are wrong in some nebulous sense. Instead, we should be more respectful. We should feel happy, perhaps even a little envious, that someone was able to find enjoyment in something that does not bring the same joy to us. There is no right or wrong. A work is good if you liked it. It's really as simple as that.