as the great teacher digi would say, the first step in criticism is to ask yourself whether you liked something. i like NPS—and "promotion" as our metric—because it grounds and socializes criticism. it has three scores:
quality has already been quantified. as soon as you say one thing is good, you place it apart from and above all non-good things, a 2 step hierarchy. the reverse is true: find your least favourite Anthony Fantano 10/10, go through then nines and say "was Nevermind really better than 93696?", so on and so forth. all the scoring system does is establish a universal equivalent, a shorthand for the heirarchy.
a recommendation must be a recommendation to. now we must translate taste: i can stomache, or i prestige, this or that kind of experience. is it more important to be emotionally intense, or technically impressive, or sweetly nostalgic? these are questions of taste.
a recommendation is also a recommendation for. one mightn't recommend a burger restaurant for a first date. one oughtn't recommend a heavy red when someone orders salad. ought one recommend sinner get ready to someone with an empty stomach?
in a world with no for or to, addressing the nameless mass, who refuses to read the necessary qualifications, and think, mutatis mutandis, how this might apply to them, we cannot recommend. it's easy to reject all quality as mere taste. this is a symptom, not the cause, of the crisis in culture. yet, i have never had someone tell me a good black tea is worse than a bad black tea—only that a good wulong is better than a good black tea. we continue to speak of good and bad teas.
that's why i'd say:
taste is the faculty of answering questions like "will this pair well? will they like this? do they want to be challenged in this way? do they actually not care, and just want something impressive? what would impress them/make them look impressive, to what crowd?" and when someone says "a good wulong is better than a good black tea", we can say "the teas were the same quality; they have a taste for wulongs".
quality is... uhh....
quality exists, and is, given a certain taste question, objective—but perhaps not immediately obvious. the perceptive faculties that determine quality will be understood as an implicit part of the taste question. those faculties are honed and given rubrics by taste traditions, yes. we will subsume that under our taste question.
when considering taste questions, our first question should be: "does this call for entertainment? or is this a question of art?". entertainment is a biological necessity that answers to comfort and novelty. art can be comforting and is often novel, and these dimensions don't diminish its artfulness, but enrich it as entertainment. the quality of entertainment is a psychological question and left to the reader. i'm interested in qualifying art/culture.
quality is a certain type of value. we obtain a measure of a thing's quality when we evaluate it. we can start with the experience of the thing, by attempting to reverse engineer why something made us feel a certain way. alternatively, we can take a rubric, and, during the experience, systematically turn our eye to each consequent facet of the thing. all evaluation is a dialectic of these two. experience must come first, yet experience is the experience of a thing, conditioned by our prior experiences...
quality is the way objects participate in the aesthetic sphere of value. per Schmitt, there are the aesthetic, moral, economic, and political spheres of value. an object participates in all spheres. the experiences which that object symbolizes, eg, the experience of watching a movie—which is symbolized by the movie—has differing amounts of ethical, aesthetic, political, and economic value to different actors. in more ancient terms, consider the transcendentals of truth, beauty, justice, and goodness: the value of art qua art is beauty, and the more beautiful it is the higher quality it is.
what follows is a loose sketch of rubrics of sorts, signs of quality and valuable qualities.
the wine world viscerally understands the taste-quality distinction. they've narrowed quality down to two things: complexity and length on the palette. delightful wine has a complexity over time—it's non-linear, as they say. a good wine must also be flawless. a good wine should tell a story of its soil, which includes the people that tend to it. a sipping wine must be balanced, but a food wine may be cloyingly sweet, sharply acidic, or painfully tannic. the mouthfeel of the wine should harmonize with the flavour.
wine is somewhat like a movie: you uncork it, let it play it, and must consume it within the night.
a good chocolate snaps, not for its own sake, but to tell you about the temper. a good chocolate needs no sweetener. it's non-linear, fragrant, complex.
the presence of floral notes can raise you a whole number q-grade. almost every aspect is graded on both quality and quantity, so, how much acidity is there, and how pleasant is it? the quality of both the flavour and aftertaste is graded. flaws (deviations from the "clean cup") aren't weighted as heavily as they are in wine.
where wine (and whiskey) prestiges the "marrying" of flavours that occurs with age, coffee people tend to like highly "analytic" coffees, where each flavour sort of lives on its own, distinct from the others.
Barthes' considered photography to uniquely posses a "punctum", a sort of physical, ineffable, deeply personal, piercing detail. the punctum leaps out and punctures you, by way of its infinite particularity. that this particular thing can pierce you, in its particularity, has a numenous, sonderous dimension: we're all different, but we're all the same.
i don't really like photography, and i consider that a personal failing.
clothing, like food, is difficult to divorce from its use value and sign value. it's en vogue to conspicuously consume clothing that looks as though it'll last longer than other clothes. as such, "quality" in clothing often refers to longevity. as "fitness to a task" this fulfils a taste question. i mourn older, more artful questions of clothing quality: drape, fit, lustre, and simple profundity of luxuriating in nice fabric.
i have some nice jeans, made with nice cotton on a nice loom, and feeling it can be an almost religious experience. certain whiskies can be a meditation on wheat, and thence, a meditation on growth, transformation, the divine growing power of the earth. those jeans, certain linen shirts... those are puncta, of a sort.
all discourse on clothing is mind numbingly stupid. somehow worse than video games.
album music—music meant to be listened to as an album—only really starts with Sgt. Pepper. Pop music, insofar as it interests us here, also starts there. i only listen to albums, so consideration of songs on their own will be left aside. symphonies will be considered on their whole, rather than as collections of movements.
we must now address the "art is when you feel something" camp. when a movie needs the audience to cry at the precise point "studies show audiences are susceptible to feeling" connected to the IP, it breaks out the violin. i find myself returning to [certain](video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z34enKCqRGk&list=OLAK5uy_lvIXOLFb_NVEjnyhZNE66G8O_oeF9IRII&index=20) songs from video games. they certainly return to me. this is embarrasing, but i teared up at the announcement trailer for tears of the kingdom. i don't think that makes the trailer art—if anything, it makes it a more cynical piece of nostalgia-bait marketing. rewatching it pisses me off.
on a similar note, i find catchiness to be a detriment to the appreciation of music as art. on return listens one is chained to the rhythm. the catchy parts stand away from the song, not qua their enculturating qualities (the way one ponders the actions of a tragic hero), but as a castrated petty-song, a snippet, a trigger for an auditory bliss point. the most degenerate form of this is the skinner-box musicality of tiktok, where songs are deconstructed into their most attention grabbing parts, chained and mashed together with the attention grabbing parts of other songs, to optimize audience engagement. Katy Perry is the only person to understand this. we are reducing music to muzak in all places, and, as a mirror, we are being reduced to something less than mere consumers. Katy Perry committed career suicide, Kojève was right, Arendt was right, Adorno was right. Debord was right, Kathy Acker was right. Miyazaki was right. that all being said, music is still good. in fact, music is better than ever. i have heard 784 albums so far this year (2026); at least 50 were better than abbey road, one has made me reconsider everything, and the experience has, at large, been the extended meditation on quality this article is based on. you will never be a good poet if you don't read widely. that was a serious issue in 2016, but nobody reads any more, so i can't imagine it is now. i imagine i must digress.
a good album must be flawless. it oughtn't indulge in big catchy set-pieces. it certainly needn't be a work of self-expression.
modern music emerges with modern recording technology. Glen Gould's interviews point to the identity crisis music was having: where's the line between the piece and the performance? i can memorize Ozymandias, and perform it endlessly, but it remains Percy Bysshe Shelley's. when disney does Hamlet, or Reel Big Fish does take on me, the performance becomes an intellectual property of its own. this is an actual legal distinction in music. in his Aesthetics of pop music, Diedrich Diedrichson argues that recording introduces a certain particularity to music—previously monopolized by photography—that opens up music to attack by spectacular indexicality. music becomes the infinitely, perfectly reproducible; the dwelling-place of the distant and past; the touch point for the lost and impossible. everyone knows everything else in culture is stagnating—the crisis was in the 50s!—yet, when we make our points, we always put forth music. has there been nothing interesting since vapourwave? modern music presences modernity because modernity needs music: certainly for its elevators, its movies, its starbucks', its tiktoks, but also for our heads, that we might be stuck, together.
we can think of modern music as: rhythm, texture, harmony, arrangement. a track like under me sleng teng has a meandering arrangement, simple harmony and texture, and an excellent but supremely repetitive rhythm. how is it so sublime? transilvanian hunger has no harmony, boring rhythm, a quite decent arrangement, exceptional texture, yet rises above all these things.
which speaks to the profound ineffability of music. a coffee scoring sheet is reasonable in a way a Bach scoring sheet wouldn't be. in the case of music, the things i'll bring up are more signs of value than signifying valuable subtleties.
what would length on the palate mean? a haunting melody is good; an earworm is bad. there should be something that cuts it all open. i don't know yet. i need to listen more, more closely, more piercingly.
i don't know.