I'm assuming that what you're calling personal opinion here is what I'd characterize as taste. (I'm making the distinction here because opinion to me implies some analysis has gone into its formation: I have an opinion about the mainstream media's response to Obama's comments about rural Pennsylvania voters. By contrast, no thought whatsoever needs to go into a taste -- I don't like beets, and no amount of knowledge of their good qualities is going to have much impact on that.)
And it seems to me that making that distinction, between taste and opinion, helps to clarify this issue. It's possible to see a great many of the fine qualities of a work you profoundly dislike, without that altering the fact that you don't like it. For example, I don't much like Jane Eyre. There's no mystery to why not -- I don't much like sentimentality or high-pitched emotion or the company of people who're too busy having massive angst to be reasonable about anything. But, I know it's a great book. It has a remarkable and powerful internal vision, a sustaining passion, a vividness in every line: it's a great work of art, and I damned well know it. It's a great work of art that I don't much like, but the not-liking is a taste thing, not an opinion thing. I admire the hell out of it, whether I like it or not.
By contrast, we have, say, The DaVinci Code. This is a bad book - flat and stupid in writing, vision, characterization, any aspect of art I can think of off the top of my head. It's a bad book, and I don't like it.
And again, by contrast to that, I might give you The Hunt for Red October. Clumsily written, with wooden characters and a childish vision of the universe as a whole: in many respects it's a ghastly book. But it's full of stuff I happen to be a sucker for, and I liked it tremendously even while experiencing it as not-a-good-book.
All of which is a long way round to say, I don't think it's really that difficult to tease out the difference between what one likes or doesn't like and what's quasi-objectively good or bad. The two really don't, as you say, have much of anything to do with one another, and as soon as one is clear on that, it's relatively simple to see which is which.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-04-15 04:50 pm (UTC)And it seems to me that making that distinction, between taste and opinion, helps to clarify this issue. It's possible to see a great many of the fine qualities of a work you profoundly dislike, without that altering the fact that you don't like it. For example, I don't much like Jane Eyre. There's no mystery to why not -- I don't much like sentimentality or high-pitched emotion or the company of people who're too busy having massive angst to be reasonable about anything. But, I know it's a great book. It has a remarkable and powerful internal vision, a sustaining passion, a vividness in every line: it's a great work of art, and I damned well know it. It's a great work of art that I don't much like, but the not-liking is a taste thing, not an opinion thing. I admire the hell out of it, whether I like it or not.
By contrast, we have, say, The DaVinci Code. This is a bad book - flat and stupid in writing, vision, characterization, any aspect of art I can think of off the top of my head. It's a bad book, and I don't like it.
And again, by contrast to that, I might give you The Hunt for Red October. Clumsily written, with wooden characters and a childish vision of the universe as a whole: in many respects it's a ghastly book. But it's full of stuff I happen to be a sucker for, and I liked it tremendously even while experiencing it as not-a-good-book.
All of which is a long way round to say, I don't think it's really that difficult to tease out the difference between what one likes or doesn't like and what's quasi-objectively good or bad. The two really don't, as you say, have much of anything to do with one another, and as soon as one is clear on that, it's relatively simple to see which is which.