I've had this thing on my mind lately and I'm sure how exactly to parse it out or organize it, so I apologize if this comes off as rambling or disjointed. I'll be surprised if it doesn't.
Something I've been thinking of lately is the way we define our tastes in media and therefore define ourselves. As modern people, we're exposed to a colossally overwhelming number of works of art in our lives. These can, in most cases, be broken down in different categorizations or genres. Though many, if not most, works defy simple sorting, it's a method by which we can save time and organize things. We're all familiar with different genres as they apply to things like books and movies (Romance, Sci Fi, Drama, comedy, fantasy, etc) and as they apply to music (rap, rock and roll, techno, country, etc) and most of us have preferences that mostly occlude one of these categories en masse. For example, I'm generally not one for romance and there is very little in the way of rap or country music that I enjoy. Forming these opinions helps us to solidify our personalities and serve as a useful method of triage when we're exposed to art.
However, lately I have been thinking that these kinds of definitions are, though necessary, perhaps harmful. The reason being that none of these distinctions can be a surefire indicator of quality and in a perfect world, quality would be the only litmus we would judge works by. By giving yourself rigid definition in this regard, you are shutting yourself off to countless works of enriching art. A good example, and one that I think would broadly apply would be the movie Annie Hall. Annie Hall is undeniably a romantic comedy and contains several of the common tropes of the genre. The quality of this movie is high enough that it easily surpasses movies like Four Thousand Jealous Bridesmaids, Sandra Bullock Fall Down and A Family Engagement (I made those up.) Though I don't care for romantic comedies, I wouldn't usually go see something like Annie Hall. However, due to good word of mouth I did and am glad I did so because it's a great movie. One could say I could be forgiven for thinking it would be terrible based on the track record of romantic comedies because 99% of romantic comedies are garbage.
Consider this: isn't that true of every genre, more or less? Can you think of a genre distinction that even comes close to guaranteeing quality? Are most rap songs good? Are most dramas worth watching? When you consider the whole of human output, can you say even that 25% of rap songs are good? I would say no. So if a genre can't speak to a works quality, what is the point of having such preferences? If there is a difference in the batting average genre to genre, I would guess that it's negligible. If say, 90% of dramas are trash and 92% of sci fi works are trash, is that really a difference worth paying attention to?
It seems silly, a little, in light of this to make such hard line decisions about your preferences. My wife put it well to me when I considered calling off drinking entirely. I'm not a drinker and generally don't enjoy it much or enjoy being around the drunk and had declared that I was considering saying I "don't drink." My wife rightly pointed out that this was stupid because I could just as easily not make any kind of proclamations and just drink if I wanted to and not if I didn't.
Of course, humans don't think this way. We're attracted to things other than quality. This falls under the idea of what interests us and who can say why we're interested in things? If we were motivated to consume primarily by quality, there wouldn't be movies like Transformers 2 or Reindeer Games or Sandra Bullock is Uncomfortable in Heels 2: The Legend of Curly's Gold. To me these things speak more to interest than quality.
This does bring up the subjective/objective issue and I've been accused, angrily by some, of not knowing the difference. This seems like balderdash to me because by accepting the idea that there is no such thing as objectively good or objectively bad you have to accept that the movie Snow Dogs is not a bad movie. Of course its' a bad movie. It's terrible and I can tell you why. It's cheap and cliche and the humor is watered down to the point of being water and the story stretches credibility to the breaking point and it attempts to be funny and heart warming but the jokes are bad and the sentiment is cheap and it just sucks sucks sucks sucks. There is no world in which this is a good movie. Some may think it good but they are wrong.
And that's all right. Subjectivism means no one is wrong about something being good or bad which is silly to me. We're here to be wrong. We're wrong about things all the time. People thought the earth was flat at one point. Some still do. It's ok for them to be wrong. Furthermore, it's ok to like something that is bad. Some feel it is unacceptable to accept this seeming contradiction but it happens all the time and if more people would accept that, I wouldn't get into so many arguments about this sort of thing.
If you can accept that, it puts to rest a portion of the what is art debate. Is Snow Dogs art? Sure, it's just shitty art. To me, that's a lot easier to swallow than some of the other solutions to this problem that are put forth such as there being a difference between art and escapism. I can't, at least at this moment, articulate why the art/escapism axis rankles me other than that it seems to dismiss a lot of works that I love and I believe have a lot to offer. Some could say my good art shitty art axis dismisses Snow Dogs too but I'm not saying it's not art. Saying something is not art seems more damning to me than saying it's not good.
I'm of mixed minds on that too, though. A year or two ago I got into a long debate with my friends Rob and Ryan regarding the act of recontextualizing as art. I won't recap the entire thing here but it frustrated me to no end, the idea of simply moving something to a new place or calling attention to it could make it then art. Ultimately, one of the ideas that came from this (and I'm certainly not suggesting we were the first to come up with it) was that something becomes art simply by calling it art. If someone wanted to consider their morning commute an art piece, how can you argue with it? It seems unreasonable but the idea of art is old enough to get well into unreasonable territory.
The reason I resisted this idea so much is because I wanted art to have inherent value. I believed that simply calling something art gave it a certain stature or value. I now believe this to be incorrect. I could ague with someone all day as to if Snow Dogs was art, and if they convinced me that it was, what did it change? Nothing, it's still the same piece of shit. The question I would have to ask now in response to someone calling something art would be, "So what?" or "Is it any good?"
And if all these things are art, of course calling something art doesn't ascribe it any value because 90% of everything is trash. It's trash that people like but it's still trash. Look at a list of all the movies that are released in a year sometime and tell me that a significant number are good.
Getting back to my first point, I'm not suggesting that we not define ourselves by our preferences for certain genres or categories because the alternative is to spend every waking minute of your life consuming in hopes of experiencing 5% of what the world has to offer. This would drive one insane. This is an issue of the human condition and it's one that has gotten worse with time, primarily through globalization. Kurt Vonnegut has an idea he comes back to again and again about art that goes something like this; when we used to live in small villages our options for entertainment were limited. Each village would have 2 or 3 storytellers, a few musicians, etc etc. As time went on and we could be exposed to the artwork of different villages, we needed to start making choices. The end result is we have Stephen King tell all our stories and U2 write all our rock songs. Vonnegut's point is this was to illustrate the problem of why it's so hard to make it as an artist (a subject for another blog) but it also applies to this. We come up with a lot of sorting mechanisms on our own that result in what I would call safer bets. It's still worth following these instincts but you can't expect them to steer you right a significant amount of the time and you can expect them to result in you missing out on enriching, excellent art. It's just a sacrifice we have to make.
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