It is
a metric, but is it objective?
I think of something like a “like” is hard to add a quality to: if I like something, it doesn’t come at the exclusion of something else, so there’s no shortage of likes that I can give.
If a movie studio could truly harness this, it would find a way to determine who would get the most enjoyment out of a movie, then charge cinemagoers accordingly based on what they would pay. I guess you could already do this by auctioning off movie tickets, but this would be time-consuming and certainly more expensive than the current flat rates to which we are all bound.
You can measure something like this and ask how many people liked something—but what does it
mean?
Given the shenanigans pulled by modern ticket sellers on various sites, it looks like tickets are already basically auctioned. It's just that laws haven't caught up and neither have the methods to prevent that sort of thing.
Gone are the days, apparently, when if I wanted to see something, all I needed to do was go buy a ticket. The idea of having to do it online is alien to me. If I wanted to attend a concert or play (back when I used to do things like that), I'd ideally go to the ticket place in town, in the basement at Hudson's Bay; it was the Bay Ticket Wicket and they sold tickets for concerts, plays, other cultural events, etc. They had a diagram of the auditorium so we could pick our seats, and since I'd already worked in those auditoriums in the theatre, I knew where the best ones were to have clear sight lines, good view of everything on stage, and excellent acoustics. Sometimes there wasn't time for that and I'd go to the venue and hope that there might be a seat left in that good section. I got lucky most of the time. But the prices were never jacked up to the crazy levels they are now. It's been 30 years since I last attended a symphony, 24 since I last saw a play, and 25 since I last went to a movie.
Well... I should have clarified that by "something" I meant some type of art.
I was also discounting negative side-effects for simplicity's sake, although a proper utilitarian approach should certainly account for those as well.
This, however, gets complex... we might easily come to conclusion that "good" art is "bad", because people would get drawn to it to the exclusion of other, more important stuff. Like binging a series while neglecting their duties, health and personal hygiene...
I should say that I didn't intend the thread to get sidetracked onto the topic of smoking being good or bad; it's just the notion that "the more X sells, the greater the proof that X is good" really bothers me.
It could connect to art by the number of actors and singers whose voices and health severely deteriorated due to smoking. Prime examples would include Yul Brynner and Leonard Nimoy. I can think of quite a few others.
i don't think there's much meaning in saying something is "objectively good". what you can do is to describe it with reasonable objectivity (as for any other material one observes), and recognize that the way people respond to it is an objective reality of the world.
There are two contexts in which to say something is objectively good. One is valid. The other can lead to arguments and ill will and a moderator on the Star Trek forum staying mad at me since 2009 because I don't like nuTrek. He's never forgiven me for that (literally; he
still snarks about it).
The valid context is when experts (or at least knowledgeable people) in a field evaluate another person in that field. Example: the organist whose videos some of us have posted/commented about here in OT. As someone who played the organ for many years, took years' worth of exams, originally learned to play by ear and was better at it that way than by reading sheet music, and knows that an active practice session (both hands and feet) is actually a good workout for said hands and feet... that guy is beyond phenomenal. I can tell when he gets in "the zone" - when that large organ becomes a
part of him, and he can make it do anything he wants because it's an extension of him as though he suddenly grew a set of keyboards and stops. A good organist can do that anyway, technically. A better-to-great organist feels it to the point that they're in the music, not the world around them. It's one of the most amazing feelings ever.
Of course the audience will have varying opinions of their own. They might not think he's amazing and would disagree that he's "objectively good". But organists would deem him objectively good, due to how skilled he is.
It's like that with any musical instrument. There was a guy here in town who was said to be an amazing pianist. But to me he sounded like 'plink-plunk' and bored me to the point where I nearly fell asleep in the middle of it (he kept on and on and on, and I wished he'd stop that annoying noise). I guess other pianists considered him good. But for me it has to be a specific musician to make a piano sound good. Yanni managed it.
As for things that are "noise"... I'm reminded of a particular rehearsal one night for "Kiss Me Kate" back in spring of 1979. We'd moved into the theatre by that point (earlier rehearsals were in various rented gyms) and the set crew was busy building sets... on the same night that the orchestra was there and the actors were rehearsing some of the Act 1 musical numbers.
That's not a good mix. The sets had to be built on the stage because they were too big to build them elsewhere. The orchestra had nowhere else to go but the orchestra pit. Both the conductor and the head of the set crew were angry to the point of yelling at each other, since the sounds of hammering interfered with the music and singing.
Finally the guy in charge of the set crew asked the conductor what the time signature was for the song they were doing. 3/4, he was told. Waltz tempo.
Fine, no problem, the set guy said. So the music started, the actors sang and danced, and the guys building the set made sure to hammer in 3/4 time to the music. It worked.
So I can say that I've heard "Wunderbar" played not only with regular instruments but with hammers on nails, pounded into wood.
that a book has been purchased X times is an objective criteria that the book has been purchased X times. this does not substantiate that the material in itself is good, but it gives you a pathway to investigate why people find it good, where you look into its material flow.
Gah. Kevin J. Anderson loves to brag about all the times his books were on some best-seller list, which apparently proves that they're not only good, but great.
Well, McDonalds has sold billions of burgers, and I love their cheeseburgers. But are they as good as a gourmet meal from a fine restaurant? They're nowhere near as nutritious, and they're not as much a special treat as that salmon with freshly-steamed veggies meal I used to love at one of the local restaurants that doesn't exist anymore.
NuDune, in my food metaphor, is an inferior burger, not even as good as a McD cheeseburger. It's dry, without interesting flavor, but the ad campaign has induced many people to buy them. No amount of boasting about the New York Times best-seller list is going to change my mind about that.
your example of cigarettes is actually a good one (besides the fact that drug use, and the sense of smell are both quite poorly talked about in aesthetics, but let's put that aside for the example); since it's so unhealthy for you, but people do it as an aesthetic experience, so an aesthetician of some sort could reasonably describe when a cigarette smoke is and isn't "succesful"; that it kills you, the aesthetician has no say in that over the isolated event of experiencing a cigarette. the issue with the example of course is that i can't say anything about cigarettes because i have no frame of reference for engaging with such material. it's a genre of engagement, so to say, but it's in a field that i'd wager is really, really narrow, if it's even studied. most aesthetic theory on drug use is... weird.
The whole thing about actors posing with a cigarette because "it's cool" or "sexy" or whatever... it makes me want to reach into the photo and rip that death instrument out of their hands and flush out their lungs and try to persuade them that they really don't need that to live a good life, nor do they need it to be successful.
Of course I don't live in their body or brain; maybe they do need something. I just wish they didn't feel that way, or that what they saw as a solution wasn't something guaranteed to give them a premature death.
