Post History

Any discussion of quality in art depends on your theory of what art is for. There seem to be two dominant theories of art today.

1. The function of art is to create an experience. 

In the case of literature, this means that reading the piece gives the reader an experience analogous in some way to an experience in real life. The "in some way" is an important qualifier here. How art works is a little mysterious. How is music an experience analogous to real life, for instance? We don't know, but it is. Literature seems to work by exciting the memory.  

>Where dips the rocky highland  
>Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,  
>There lies a leafy island  
>Where flapping herons wake  

These lines call from memory images of rocky highlands dipping down to lakes, of leafy islands, and herons flapping their wings. Why exactly Yeats words are so much more evocative than my prosaic transcription is more than we know (or its more than I know, anyway). But Yeats' version is objectively better than mine because it produces a more vivid and moving experience than mine. 

I say that Yeats version is objectively better, even though its quality depends on provoking a reaction in people and, since people differ, it will not produce this reaction consistently. But there is not subjective about the fact that a chemical produces a different reaction when combined with different other chemicals, and so there is nothing subjective about a good poem producing a different reaction in different readers. The difference in the reaction is caused not by varying quality of the literature but by the varying receptivity of the readers. 

The objective quality of literature should be judged by its ability to create a profound experience for the most receptive of readers. That is an extremely difficult judgement to make, but it is, objectively, an objective one. 

2. Art supports an ideology.

In this theory of art, the value of a piece of literature is judged based on whether it supports the reader's ideology. 

Major parts of the current literary establishment, for instance, condemn virtually the entire western canon as the product of patriarchy and oppression. It matters not in the least if some of that literature is capable of producing the most profound experiences: it is the produce of patriarch and oppression, or supports patriarchy and oppression, or it fails to condemn patriarchy and oppression in sufficiently explicit and modern terms. 

The question of whether a piece of literature supports a particular ideology or not might be considered objective (though many such judgements are so crushingly lacking in subtlety and understanding as to be laughable). 

The question of whether a piece of literature is good or bad under this theory of art is entirely subjective however, since it depends entirely on which ideology the reader believes in.