Quality in the arts

[Angrboda]

I'd say that there are objective differences which people base their aesthetic preferences upon, but it's not necessarily true that there are objective aesthetic facts. It is supposed that people evolved to find certain human physical traits more appealing than others, because mating with people who possessed those traits lead to more and healthier offspring, and those judgements are projected onto our aesthetic sense when it comes to visual stimuli. I suppose a similar argument could be made about other aesthetic judgements, that they likely trace back to evolved preferences. So one could argue the case, and if one argues morality similarly, then there is a parallell there. However, many moral realists argue that it goes beyond the question of evolved moral preferences to acknowledgement of facts which are objectively true about the world. I don't think you could make a similar argument about aesthetic sense as easily.

Aside from that there is the question of how art shapes the standards of art. The King James bible was a standard of literature for centuries because of its religious content. As a consequence, various aspects of the work have become standard bearers for literary excellence and beauty, but would we have the same reaction if it had not been arbitrarily held forth as a literary masterwork? Forces both within and outside the artistic community work to promote certain aesthetics and to diminish others. It's hard to see that side of aesthetic preference as anything but cultural and subjective. It's said that we fixate on certain styles of music during our adolescence, yet the music we listen to during adolescence is driven by many factors which often eclipse the aesthetic. Can a person say they have any kind of objectivity about musical taste given this phenomena? And what does it mean that we do fixate in this way? Is it possible that our visual tastes also have a critical period during which they are formed? Our literary tastes?