Background: Thi Nguyen visited Umeå University for his Burman lectures. This lead to discussions about aesthetics, a topic Nguyen has published influential papers in. I, on the other hand, have zero background in aesthetics, and therefore not very considered judgments on the topic.
During a conference dinner, I said something about how I think art appreciation is mostly down to subjective feelings that can vary a lot from person to person depending on the individual's life experiences etc. Bram Vaassen protested that this view didn't seem to fit with this post I made about the Barbie movie a while ago. I sounded much more objective there, about what's good and bad. I said hm maybe I am more of an art objectivist? I don't have very considered views since I haven't published philosophy papers about this, just blog posts ...
My more considered view might be something like Kant's. With the huge caveat that I'm drawing on an old memory of Critique of Judgment, which I haven't read in ages (no, this would not fly in a peer-reviewed paper, but that's the beauty of having a blog as well). Kant's aesthetics is more sentimentalist than rationalist. It's ultimately about the feelings that art invokes. However, that doesn't mean all art judgments are completely subjective. Some are heavily tied to personal experiences that others need not share. Others are more universal, more shareable (doesn't mean perfectly universal, doesn't mean I could share my judgments and have others agree with me across any gulf of time/space/culture). I also think there's value in trying to distinguish, in one's own case, between the more subjective and more objective judgments. It just makes for better communication with others.
Personal example: I'm a big Star Trek fan. But I think this depends, to a large degree, on particular personal experiences. When I was a little kid, I read popular science articles about how we'd colonize Mars in the twenty-first century, stuff like that. Being a child who knew very little about science (TBF, I was probably knowledgeable for my age, but that doesn't mean knowledgeable period), this seemed entirely plausible to me. Being generally dissatisfied with life, space fantasies made for good escapism. Fast forward to my early twenties: I lived with husband and rabbits in a tiny cheap studio flat. We had very little money, and survived only because everything was cheap in our neighbourhood of shabby old concrete buildings. Star Trek Voyager aired on Swedish TV, and it made for such awesome, futuristic and optimistic space escapism. The local video store had the back catalogue on VHS and we watched it from the beginning. And there were other features about Voyager that hit just right: I was really mental back then (not the happy, productive, professional maniac that I have since become), but Voyager has an overall good track record when it comes to mental health. (Not like certain other Star Trek shows I could mention - looking at you, DS9! Overall a well-written show but damn did they treat mental issues terribly, over and over.) And captain Janeway! People love to talk about Buffy and how it was groundbreaking at the time to have someone being simultaneously badass and feminine. Maybe. But people sometimes forget that there is such a thing as being pressured to conform with traditional feminine gender roles (once again, see my Barbe movie review for a discussion). I got lots of shit growing up for not being sufficiently girly and feminine. So I couldn't really get into the adventures of hyper feminine vampire slayer Buffy when it first aired - but Janeway was both a woman and a space captain and it just wasn't a big deal.
So, Voyager will always have a special place in my heart. And I pride myself on being, perhaps, the first philosopher to reference Star Trek Voyager in a philosophy paper, namely The Agential Perspective: A Hard-Line Reply to the Four-Case Manipulation Argument in Philosophical Studies. People have referenced the Original Series and the Next Generation plenty of times, but I don't know of anyone else who cites Voy!
However. I will never argue that Voy, or Star Trek in general, is The Best TV Ever and everyone must watch this or they're Really Missing Out. Because I don't think that's true. From an objective standpoint, there are many reasons why it's not The Best TV Ever.
- The acting varies a lot. You've got great actors, middling ones, kinda bad ones.
- The worldbuilding is inconsistent. Once in a blue moon, the transporter can be used to resurrect people from the dead, but mostly it cannot, and dead people stay dead. Most of the time, Star Trek is a moneyless communist utopia, but once in a while, we're suddenly supposed to pretend that poor people exist and there are materially based class differences - not just on bad capitalist planets like Ferenginar, but on Earth! The inconsistencies varies somewhat over time and between series, but they've been there from the 1960s to the present day.
- There are also some inconsistencies in values. It's mostly progressive values, occasionally racist, sexist, etc.
- When it is progressive and down with social justice, Star Trek - especially older series - can get pretty preachy about it. There's this weird internet complaint that Star Trek Discovery is insufferably woke, but it's the older Trek series (mostly TOS to DS9) that let characters explicitly preach about some social justice issue. I can sort of appreciate that they're not holding back, but at the same time, it doesn't make for the objectively best TV.
- Later Trek, like Disco, has other problems; because they're less episodic and do longer archs that are meant to really hang together over seasons, inconsistencies and plot holes become more glaring.
Some later Trek also try to go darker than the old series, and often, they just don't pull it off very well.
These are just a few examples. As much as I love Star Trek, I could critique it all day long. It's not, objectively, The Best TV Ever. It certainly has lots of good objective qualities too, it's not the worst TV either, far from it! It's objectively good, just not the best. I can distinguish between my subjective love and more objective quality judgments.
However, from time to time, I come across people (mostly in geeky internet communities) who seem utterly incapable of drawing this distinction.
For instance, I've had Buffy fans insist that I give Buffy another shot, because it's just so good. So I tried watching it. And I don't have a problem with the hyper feminine MC anymore, not at all. My childhood/teenage years where I was constantly pestered about not being feminine enough are long gone now. It still bothers the hell out of me when ostensibly feminist media push the idea that feminists must be feminine, because not feminine equals internalized misogyny - feminist should get rid of restrictive gender roles, not enforce them! - but I didn't get that from Buffy. So I'm fine with Buffy herself, she's a cool MC. Sarah Michelle Geller also did a good job in the role. And some of the monsters of the week were kinda campy fun, I guess. But it really wasn't good enough to keep watching after I had pushed through a season and a half.
- the acting really varied. Allison Hanna sounded like she read all her lines from cue cards (I'm sure she gets better down the line, but she was crap for as far as I watched).
- there's this weird running joke about how Giles is basically from the past because he's from England (???) which just didn't land with me.
- Cordelia came across as a really misogynistic portrayal of "hot popular girl" to me. I'm sure the character gets much better later on, but ... She's like Jane from British sitcom Coupling but played straight.
Coupling had three fun seasons and a fourth that was pretty so-so - one of these shows I watched and laughed at despite the frequent sexism (just stereotypes of women are like this and men are like that). The character of Jane, though, was 100% good fun. It was so obvious that she wasn't a parody of a certain kind of woman, but a parody of ideas that some lonely frustrated men have about popular hot women. It was super clear to me even before I saw an interview with Steven Moffat where he said as much - she represents what he thought that hot popular girls were like when he was an embarrassingly sexist teenage boy. Early seasons Cordelia, though, comes across as if Josh Whedon hadn't moved on as an adult, like he still thought "ok I'm gonna write a hot popular high school girl, and they're honestly this terrible".
I could go on. Anyway. From a more objective standpoint, Buffy is probably about as good/bad as most of Star Trek. It's got both strengths and weaknesses. But I personally love Star Trek because of personal idiosyncratic reasons. I couldn't get into Buffy, because it doesn't have any personally relatable stuff to draw me in.
However. I read an internet post by a middle-aged Buffy fan who was desperate because her teenage daughter had watched a few Buffy eps but didn't like it. How can I make her realize how great Buffy is? And then other middle-aged Buffy lovers suggested, as far as I can tell in all seriousness, that the mum should bribe her daughter to watch Buffy with her. They thought that if only the daughter could be made to sit in front of the TV for enough episodes, the objective greatness of Buffy would eventually affect her, and she would become a fan too. And they thought this was important, because otherwise the teenage daughter would miss out on the objective greatness that is Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
This is a blatant example of failing to distinguish between more objective aesthetic judgments and your personal feelings for something.
Another example of the same thing: Many people younger than me are really into Harry Potter. For my own part, I've never read the books, because I was already an adult when the first one was published and I don't have kids. Alexander and I watched all the movies a few years ago because we felt we had to, in order to understand the millions of Potter references people constantly threw around online. They were decidedly so-so, very generic portal fantasy about magic and wizards. Now, lots of fans will say "but the movies don't hold a candle to the absolutely amazing, groundbreaking books!" Well, as a present-day human with an internet access I have inevitably come across extracts from texts too, and it seems to be completely normal, serviceable children's book prose. So unless there's something amazing about the actual plots that the movies completely changed or left out, I'm gonna assume it's just so-so children's fantasy, with a main character carbon-copied from earlier fictional instances of the chosen English wizard boy with dark hair and glasses . Still, it's not surprising that millions of people worldwide have strong emotions about the series. It's escapism, it's about outsiders-who-are-actually-cool (lots of kids feel like outsiders and wanna believe that they're actually too cool for normal kids, because they're magical or super in some way - me too as a kid!), and this big and intense internet fan community soon emerged around the books.
However. Now I see people talk about the serious moral dilemma they face with their children. Should they introduce their kids to Harry Potter, and support Rowling's evermore hateful bigotry and political campaigning against trans people? Or should they not do that, and have their kids miss out on the objectively greatest children's book series of all time? Should they impoverish their children's childhood by not giving them Harry Potter?
They really seem to think this is some serious moral dilemma worth discussing at length ("maybe you can find the whole book series second-hand ...? Borrow it at the library ...? That way, you're not giving her money!") instead of a complete non-problem. You don't wanna support Rowling? Fine. Just don't. Your child won't grow up with a big gaping hole in their soul where Harry Potter should have been.
So, to sum up: My considered view on aesthetics (or, like, semi-considered - I still haven't read much aesthetic philosophy, and still haven't written actual philosophy on the topic, just this blog post) is that we can meaningfully distinguish between our subjective feelings about a piece of fiction, and more objective quality judgments. And also that it's often useful to be able to draw this distinction, instead of mistaking subjective feelings for objective judgments.
