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Originally Posted by Vivian
What we like and what we don't is definitely significant, and certainly there are things that I don't "get" and don't like but still have artistic value (abstract art?). All the same, I don't think art is entirely subjective. There's got to be some kind of line one can draw and say, this is quality, that isn't. It may be a fuzzy line, but it exists. Can't we agree, for example, that Arthur Conan Doyle was a better writer than Dan Brown?
(I'm not really satisfied with this example. It's so much easier to call people geniuses after they've been dead a hundred years. I'll try and think of a better one.)
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No, I really can't go with that.
Sure , Doyle's finished novels were good, but I don't think I can say he was better than Dan Brown. I also can't say he was worse than Dan Brown. They were different, certainly.
I think people forget that most the writers we view as "classic" , Dickens, Doyle, Twain , Shakespere, were writing for "common folk." They would appear, one chapter or story at a time, or a play, and people would pay for it.
Take your Dan Brown Novel, divide it into 50 chapters. Release the first through fourth chapter in month one.. then the remaining chapters two a month until the last four, and finish it in another four chapter release. That's the serial. That's how popular authors of the day were released, in tawdry little monthly magazines, paid by the word.
Our favorite authors then were basically equal to soap opera writers, or JK Rowling, or Dan Brown, or James Patterson, etc.
So better than? Worse than? Nah. Just different methods for delivering popcorn fiction to the masses, only with time, we've made them more nostalgic.