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What we call entertainment is nothing other than our society’s most popular forms of art. This leads to the question of whether some forms of art are better than others. Is a Beethoven symphony better than a Katy Perry song? Is Romeo and Juliet better than the Twilight saga?
In recent decades, many have answered this question with a resounding “No.” These people say that there is no objective criterion whereby one could distinguish the value of Perry from Beethoven, that in the end it’s simply a matter of preference: Some prefer popular music, others classical music, and one preference isn’t superior to another.
I agree that there are no objective criteria that can be applied to decide this matter, but I’m reluctant to say that we can never distinguish between good art and bad art. I can think of two possible dimensions along which we might want to judge the value of art, let’s call them beauty and meaningfulness. In this post, I will address beauty; I’ll leave meaningfulness for another time.
Of course, people have been attempting to define and understand beauty for millennia, and there is no firm agreement on what beauty is or which works of art are the most beautiful. Since I am an anthropologist, I want to approach beauty from a social and cultural standpoint, and to do so I will draw on some insightful work by the sociologist Ann Swidler.
Swidler points out that people create and understand art on the basis of conventions. Romance novels, for example, are always based on a set of conventions, rules that govern the story: the story will be about an intimate relationship, there will be some impediment to the realization of the relationship, eventually the impediment will be overcome and the couple will find happiness. Or, to take another example, Western music is typically based on certain basic rules: a focus on melody and harmony, the diatonic scale, and so on.
People can enjoy and understand art because they know the conventions; if you listen to music that is based on an unfamiliar scale, it may just sound like noise to you. But here an interesting fact emerges: although we find complete disruption of expected conventions disturbing, very slight variations in the conventions we are used to have almost the opposite effect. They often strike us as beautiful.
That is, we recognize beauty when two things happen: First, the conventions of an art form are broken in a way that violates our expectations. Second, the tension created by this violation are resolved by a return to the expected and familiar. Perhaps that sounds abstract, but it’s actually pretty simple, and something we experience frequently. One of the easiest examples comes from music, in which slightly dystonic notes are resolved into tonic ones in a way that seems, well, beautiful (go here for an example from a song by Adele).
Swidler’s discussion also points the way to understanding the intuition that there are different degrees of beauty in art. The possibilities for beauty are created by the conventions, and some forms of art have more complex conventions than others. Ultimately, this is a social matter. A popular romance like Twilight has to appeal to a very broad audience, and so therefore it has to stick to very basic conventions and rules.
On the other hand, sometimes authors produce their work in social groups that are small and highly interactive. In such situations, the close relationships between authors and audiences can create a highly “educated” audience familiar with complex artistic conventions. The group revels in their extensive and exclusive knowledge of the art and the artists. The complex conventions that can develop in such circumstances allow for intensified experiences of beauty.
So, for example, Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet in a social situation in which there was close interaction between playwrights, actors and audiences, allowing for highly complex interpretive conventions. He even twisted the “happily ever after” part, and that unexpected twist became one of the elements that mark this, even centuries later, as great art.
This isn’t to say that the only art that is great is what gets studied in schools and museums. Great art can occur in any community that works together to fashion complex conventions. American Jazz is a good example, as well as other forms of popular music such as early Hip Hop.
So my answer, suggested by Swidler’s work, is “yes, some art is better than other art in the sense that some art can produce intensified experiences of beauty for educated audiences.” Now, that doesn’t mean that people will always prefer great art. In fact, because it can be difficult to learn complex interpretive conventions, many folks may prefer to stick to less challenging art. If you prefer popular entertainment to great art, that’s your privilege. In many cases, I would probably agree with you.
For more information, please visit the Caught in Play website. Photo by ballet dancers.
