Jon Evans - Science Writer

Critically-acclaimed taste

Lately, I’ve found my mind turning to the question of whether a specific cultural artefact can objectively be classed as better or worse than another. Can films, books and pieces of music be ranked according to their greatness, or does it all just come down to personal preference? Is your view that The Shawshank Redemption is the greatest film ever made just as valid as my view that it’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly? Or are you simply an idiot?

My pondering of this question came about following an argument with my wife. This was sparked by the release of the latest album by Belbury Poly, which was given a five-star review in The Guardian and a four-star review in The Sunday Times.

I’ve mentioned Belbury Poly in passing in a previous blog entry (see Hooray for the long tail). Essentially the work of one man, Jim Jupp, Belbury Poly produces electronic music that sounds like a cross between Jean Michel Jarre, the soundtrack to British horror movies of the early 1970s and the title music to children’s television programmes from the same era. It conjures up a lost, slightly unsettling world of half-day closing and interminable Sundays, and really is very, very good.

The argument with my wife started when I claimed that these glowing reviews for the latest Belbury Poly album, From an Ancient Star, were incontrovertible proof of my superb taste in music and demonstrated that, even in my late 30s, I continue to be achingly hip and trendy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my wife took exception to this rather flattering description of myself.

For although our taste in books and films overlaps quite a bit, my wife and I have very different tastes in music. She thinks the music I like is either boring (the folky stuff) or noise (pretty much everything else), while I think her music is bland and conventional (Robbie Williams, Snow Patrol). There is a small amount of overlap – she likes the more poppy folk stuff like King Creosote and Seth Lakeman while I quite like Amy MacDonald and Martha Wainwright – but it’s fairly minimal.

So our argument revolved around my assertion that my taste in music was better than hers and, by implication, that the music I liked was better than the music she liked. She, on the other hand, argued that it was all down to personal preference. That the music I liked was no better than the music she liked, it was just that our tastes differed.

So that got me thinking about whether cultural artefacts can be objectively rated or whether it is all relative. Interestingly, there is a related argument involving science. For some philosophers postulate that the scientific method, as exemplified by hypotheses and experiments, is just one way of understanding the universe, and that other methods are equally valid and accurate. This is all bound up with the question of whether there is an objective universe out there to study or whether the way in which the universe is studied dictates how it appears to us.

Now while I don’t deny that science and scientific endeavour is strongly influenced by social, cultural and political factors – so successful results are more often published than unsuccessful ones and research is strongly dictated by funding – science generally does a very good job of explaining the universe. And the fact that there is an objective universe out there to study is kind of proven by the fact that our resultant scientific understanding has been converted into working technologies.

Planes fly and satellites orbit the Earth, and we know why this happens. The scientific method is the best way yet devised for understanding the universe; other methods are not as valid or accurate.

So what about films, music and books? Well, unlike with science and the universe, there is no objective standard that we can compare these cultural artefacts against. Indeed, the sheer impossibility of the endeavour is made clear when you imagine comparing artefacts from different cultural disciplines? Is The Good, the Bad and the Ugly better than Revolver by the Beatles? It’s a meaningless question, but if you can rate different films then you should logically be able to compare a film with an album.

Saying that, I do think you can rate cultural artefacts on a very broad scale. There is a clear difference between the excellent and the awful – so Citizen Kane will always be a better film than Plan 9 from Outer Space – but things tend to bunch together around the middle. That’s when personal preference comes into play.

Fortunately, I have excellent taste.

22 February 2009