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This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all be strictly ranked “best” to “worst.” There are a million metrics by which we might try to measure it

This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all be strictly ranked “best” to “worst.” There are a million metrics by which we might try to measure it, but well… that’s just not how art works. Thinking this way indicates a fundamental lack of understanding of what art is. Probably one of the most important metrics is “relevance to, and effect on, the state of the world as it is right now.” And pretty much any arbitrary “1000 best” list is not going to take that into account. That’s why people listen to Chappell Roan, and near-instinctively belt her songs out out after a few drinks, instead of Beethoven symphonies or Mozart operas, even if the latter may be “superior” in nearly every measurable way. Part of art is how it speaks to the listener. In fact… I might argue that that’s all of art, with metrics about it being an entirely different, not-art thing. (I say all this as a classical musician and senior software engineer with a math background, myself.)

citizenpaul 1y ago
The fact that you can belt out Chappel Roan drunk is pretty much an objective assessment of its "worse'ness." Beethoven takes many years of dedicated practice to be able to achieve and you would have to be very skilled to perform it drunk.
- voidhorse 1y ago
  This equates the value of art with technical difficulty, which is not how most people actually evaluate art.
  - bigstrat2003 1y ago
    I would not say that the value of art is strictly equivalent to technical difficulty. But I would say that there is a level of technical competence required for art to be good. Something that takes no skill to create (e.g. that absurd banana duct taped to a wall "piece") is not good art, if indeed it can be called art at all.
    - Avicebron 1y ago
      The fact that people still talk about it and ridicule it 6 years after it was created, and it lives on in the cultural zeitgeist as that, makes it good art. It's literally called Comedian.
      - PaulHoule 1y ago
        This guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readymades_of_Marcel_Duchamp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readymades_of_Marcel_Duchamp killed off the argument that "X isn't art" for all X.
        int_19h 1y ago
        I don't see any art in the linked article.
        bccdee 1y ago
        "I don't think it's art, therefore it's not art." Congratulations, you're the type of person Marcel Duchamp was making fun of in 1917. 108 years later, the stance you're defending has been so comprehensively trashed by the art community that anything I could say about it has been said a thousand times already.
        int_19h 1y ago
        If by "art community" you mean people who make "art" like that, the only thing they have succeeded in is convincing most of the rest of us that their opinion on what is and isn't art is irrelevant. Which is to say, it's not that I don't think it's art. It's that most people would agree with me that it isn't art, and what the word means in colloquial speech is defined by popular consensus, not by what a bunch of snobs decide it means.
        bccdee 1y ago
        > If by "art community" you mean people who make "art" like that I didn't. > what the word means in colloquial speech is defined by popular consensus If I asked for the popular consensus on the definition of, say, "insouciant," and the majority of people answered, "I don't know," does that mean the word has no meaning? Which is to say, no, meaning is not a democracy. It's contextual, and I don't care what art means in a context exclusive to people who don't really give a shit about art (which is the context you're appealing to when you say, "most people would agree with me that it isn't art").
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    A friend of the family gave my son a guitar a while back and more recently tried to get him to play Sugar Mountain by Neil Young. He worked at it pretty hard and struggled with it because even though it is simple it has to be played with great precision to sound good. Then he discovered grunge and bar chords and had a breakthrough with The Day I Tried to Live by Soundgarden and Rooster by Alice in Chains. Now he's looking for good songs he can play and that's gotten him into David Bowie songs from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. For a long time I thought of David Bowie as one of those classically trained musicians like Frank Zappa who played rock because it had commercial potential, but he found many songs on that album to be great songs that were within his reach. Now when we have houseguests who say they like Rush he will be able to play the chorus of a few songs in 24 hours and he's building instruments like a Guitar-harp-ukulele (fretless guitar with two bridges, one of which has a harp section) and he's asking me about the physics to build a bass guitar tuned an octave or two below a regular bass guitar.
    - EdwardDiego 1y ago
      When trying to learn the guitar I fell in love with Santa Monica by Everclear, and Go With The Flow by Queens Of The Stone Age.
    - aspenmayer 1y ago
      > he's asking me about the physics to build a bass guitar tuned an octave or two below a regular bass guitar. I barely know anything about music, and probably less about guitars, but if he can do barre chords, then you can try to build a simple capo with him, since he might readily grasp the utility of having a clamp that essentially gives you another hand on that side of the guitar.
      - PaulHoule 1y ago
        He's been experimenting with clamps, he has one for the fretless guitar section of the guitar-ukulele. As for the electric quadro- or octo-bass the variables you can tweak are: * length * mass/length * tension There's some limit to how long you make the strings or you can't play it or otherwise you need something to extend your reach like the levers on the octobass. The other two are inside a square root which is not in your favor. Probably the easy thing to do is find some really heavy strings for a normal bass and see how low you can get the tension. But really he's the one to build things. Back when I was in physics they kept trying to get me to do experiment rather than theory, if I have any regret it is that if I had studied experiment I'd be able to build all the things that my son wanted to build but, hey, he can build those things now.
- pseudocomposer 1y ago
  To be clear: I have spent the years to memorize and be able to perform a few Beethoven sonatas (not to mention the years required to even get to that point). I can also play them drunk (though not as cleanly, and wouldn't do that in any paid/professional performance situation). I literally did this sort of thing for a living before deciding to use my CS/Math degree to be able to better provide for my family (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlatane/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlatane/). And none of that makes Beethoven "better" than Chappell Roan. Because there is no objective assessment of "better/worse"ness in art. That's not how art works, or what art is. On the other had, your inability to correctly spell the name of an influential contemporary artist, with 40+M listeners per month, replying to a comment that did correctly spell her name, is a pretty objective reason to not trust anything you have to say about art (or, perhaps, much else, at least until you address whatever underlying issues/pathologies have you thinking this way). Perhaps this will offer you some perspective: back when I did music for a living, I often did think this way. I thought most contemporary music was trash if it didn't offer the harmonic or contrapuntal complexity of classical, or even jazz. Really, being a young man from a poor background, I believe it was more a survival instinct (trying to gaslight myself and others into measuring me as "good enough" for gigs). It nearly ruined music for me, though. It required me being dishonest with myself about what I really enjoyed. Letting all that go has been a multi-decade process, and it's made me a much more well-adjusted individual. It also applies in many ways to the software world (as long as you stay out of Google-/Meta-/Oracle-type bigtech misery-inducing rat races).
  - citizenpaul 1y ago
    > there is no objective assessment of "better/worse"ness in art. That's not how art works, or what art is. You've been fooled by the rent seeking class.
    - nine_k 1y ago
      There's art that moves you, or does not move you. That's the measure that matters most in your unique and finite life. You get to choose for yourself what to spend your time on, objectivity be damned.
    - 1y ago
- whstl 1y ago
  Man, you should go to an open air classical concert in Europe sometime. Sure we are just quietly getting shitfaced for most of it but if they play Ode to Joy you can be certain that the 10000 drunks in Waldbühne will belt it. Also not Beethoven but I'm pretty sure some violins will get broken if they don't play Berliner Luft here in town.
  - EdwardDiego 1y ago
    Like how it's probably law in the UK that any classical concert with a large crowd in attendance must end with Jerusalem for a good ol singalong, or else they tar and feather the conductor.
- EdwardDiego 1y ago
  I can belt out (and am known to occasionally do so when walking home from the pub solo) Ein Schwan by Grieg (in the German, didn't learn the Norwegian version) and Ave Verum Corpus by Byrd while drunk, so you're saying these two pieces suck? (I also like to throw the occasional Magnificat or Nunc Dimittis to mix it up. As you can tell, I'm a reformed choir boy. Oh, and Jerusalem by Parry/Blake is custom designed for drunken singalongs.) I beg you to listen to the first two pieces and perhaps reconsider your chosen metric. https://youtu.be/BNuT7-6zBds?si=fbyim815cp6tiD4R https://youtu.be/BNuT7-6zBds?si=fbyim815cp6tiD4R https://youtube.com/watch?v=R3vuU7XAaUM https://youtube.com/watch?v=R3vuU7XAaUM
jl6 1y ago
You don't need to rank strictly and linearly. An objective ordering need not exist. It's enough to see that on shortlists of "great" works, common themes emerge. Is The Great Gatsby better than The Catcher in the Rye? It doesn't matter. They both come with universal acclaim, and that's stiff competition for anything new. Besides, are great works not promoted as being timelessly relevant to the state of the world?
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  Stan Lee made a comic about how he and his co-workers made comics, and in one frame he says something like "How dare it he say it is hackneyed? I stole it from the best classic I could find!" That is, if superhero movies sell today, stories about Hercules and Theseus sold 2500 years ago.
- technothrasher 1y ago
  And I loved Catcher in the Rye, but not so much The Great Gatsby. I've found this "shortlist" of classics that have universal acclaim has always been hit or miss for me. The classics I was assigned to read in high school would seem to lurch from riveting to a slog to get thorough. I don't blame the books, it's just what captures my particular interest. Given that, I have never really used "the classics" as a guarantee that I will find the reading fulfilling over other, more obscure, recommendations that I may receive, whether they be old books or new.
  - stirfish 1y ago
    I've felt this before. A librarian taught me a trick: chug the book. You were probably trained to really analyze what you're reading, look for symbolism, etc, but you can enjoy a book as almost an emotional-sensory experience instead.
  - memonkey 1y ago
    I read both twice, once in high school and again a few years after I graduated (this was over 15 years ago). I loved The Great Gatsby even more (that opening first page is magnificent), and couldn't help but feel like The Catcher in the Rye as being so incredibly naive and juvenile. The latter experience is similar to reading (or watching) Fight Club and thinking Tyler Durden is a hero of sorts and something to aspire to, which is not the ultimate lesson.
mathgeek 1y ago
> That’s why people listen to Chappell Roan, and near-instinctively belt her songs out out after a few drinks, instead of Beethoven symphonies or Mozart operas, even if the latter may be “superior” in nearly every measurable way. As someone who grew up on Looney Tunes and the like, I absolutely start humming and making up words to classical music far more often than anything from this century.
- dalmo3 1y ago
  Conversely, watching looney tunes is the only way I can enjoy classical music.
  - anotheruser13 1y ago
    I would love to see the Chicago Symphony Orchestra play the classical music in "What's Opera, Doc?" and other Looney Tunes classics. Saw them do that with The Godfather and a couple other full-length films which was great.
65 1y ago
Art has no objective measure. I cannot stand classical music because it has very little rhythm and emotion compared to the other, more modern music I listen to. Does that make classical music worse? No. Just because something may have been popular in the past and is now seen as "smart" e.g. the opera, books, classical music, painting, does not make it better than what's popular now, e.g. television, video games, and rhythmic music. If anything I'd argue art has gotten significantly better and more advanced over the years. I don't play many video games but the combination of visual, auditory, interactivity, and storytelling still blows me away.
- wbl 1y ago
  Very little rhythm and emotion? First emotion https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JzFi-7H9TKs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JzFi-7H9TKs https://youtu.be/rVw6NRXSDhM?si=wchNK9I3RO_XJxeG https://youtu.be/rVw6NRXSDhM?si=wchNK9I3RO_XJxeG Rythym: let's start with the most infamous percussion sequence of all time https://youtu.be/wZtWAqc3qyk?si=B47DQZ1auKx53OaD https://youtu.be/wZtWAqc3qyk?si=B47DQZ1auKx53OaD Unless you're listening to extremely niche heavy metal, electronica, or the kind of jazz that they don't play on the radio you aren't listen to anything with the skill and complexity of classical. And the people who do also show up to new music. I don't think there is any video game that comes close in depth to the Ring Cycle.
  - EdwardDiego 1y ago
    I thought you were going to link to the incessant ominous col legno (hitting the strings with the stick of the bow) at the start of Holst's Mars for rhythm, so please allow me to add that one to the list. https://youtu.be/cXOanvv4plU?si=WrIuBfmofTo6szRa https://youtu.be/cXOanvv4plU?si=WrIuBfmofTo6szRa And as for emotion, this version of the 1812 Overture always sends chills up my spine. https://youtu.be/uYnCCWsfx3c?si=OQEA5_JYpWn1kHFj https://youtu.be/uYnCCWsfx3c?si=OQEA5_JYpWn1kHFj
    - lucyjojo 1y ago
      All of this is immensely subjective. The pieces presented were utterly bland to me, bordering on the unlistenable. This is obviously not due to a lack of quality for they have plenty, but they register as little more than noise to my brain; to which i prefer silence... That said, I do enjoy some classical music. For instance, I deeply enjoy this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1lvxx9lzAg&list=RDz1lvxx9lzAg&start_radio=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1lvxx9lzAg&list=RDz1lvxx9lz...
wbl 1y ago
Mozart can be really singable. The catalogue song, the Figaro aria, etc. it's not all hell's fire burns in my heart.
yyyk 1y ago
>This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all be strictly ranked “best” to “worst.” Not at all. The only assumption the OP needs is that old media can still appeal to modern people, at which point quantity and accessibility may give it a certain advantage.
makeitdouble 1y ago
Parent's point is not some abstract personal value problem. Think about public libraries. They have limited space and budget, and already abundantly hold loved classics. They'll still take in some amount of new books, but when a 8 yo kid goes in to decide what to read, the vast majority will be older books.
- Amezarak 1y ago
  I visit libraries wherever I go and that's not true anymore, outside of university libraries. The average municipal/county library is almost entirely books published in the past 15 years. Most classics have to be procured through ILL, if they're even available then.
  - slibhb 1y ago
    But it's true in book stores. It's not only old classics; there's a lot of well-known 20th century literature, often in new editions.
slibhb 1y ago
> This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all be strictly ranked “best” to “worst.” No it isn't. It's just based on the objectively true assumption that contemporary fiction is competing with all fiction ever written. It absolutely doesn't have to be the case that people buy more classics because the classics are objectively better. (Although that is, in fact, he case).
galaxyavenu 1y ago
Sure you don't have an objective best to worst, but I'm sure that most serious listeners will venture to music from all kind of eras and cultures. I find that it's much harder ( than visual art ) to say "I don't like this" and more "This sounds really fun but I can't budget time to listen to this kind music". Or maybe this is just me.
pif 1y ago
> Probably one of the most important metrics is “relevance to, and effect on, the state of the world as it is right now.” Actually, no! It's more of “relevance to the state of the world as it was right then, and as it is right now, and that teaches you that we are not living in bizarre times, but then we just don't know enough about ourselves as a society and we keep committing the same errors.”
otabdeveloper4 1y ago
I have no idea whatsoever what a "Chappell Roan" even is. Sorry. (I do know Beethoven and Mozart though.)
- seaports 1y ago
  She's a good pop musician. No need to be snarky just because she might not be your thing. Comments on HM tend to put down popular music / art / whatever for the sole reason of having some kind of pop sensibility
  - otabdeveloper4 1y ago
    I'm not being snarky. I literally do not know who or what a "Chappell Roan" is. (And never will, life is too short.)
- graycat 1y ago
  > "Chappell Roan" Just now listened to some of her music, two of her pieces Good Luck Babe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RKqOmSkGgM&pp=ygUcY2hhcHBlbGwgcm9hbiBnb29kIGx1Y2sgYmFiZQ%3D%3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RKqOmSkGgM&pp=ygUcY2hhcHBlb... and Pink Pony Club https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GR3Liudev18&pp=ygUOcGluayBwb255IGNsdWI%3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GR3Liudev18&pp=ygUOcGluayBwb... So, with the definition of art as the "communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion" what I saw in those two pieces was that they were intended for some teen girls and young women -- single, lonely, generally afraid of their circumstances, don't understand what they see of reality, eager for sex but afraid of it, lost, i.e., missing any good cultural, social, or intellectual foundation for understanding reality or facing life, .... So in the music, the costumes and stage shows are rapidly changing, outrageous, meaningless, fantasy, scary, i.e., are communication, interpretation of those women's experience, emotions, rapidly changing, outrageous .... In simple terms, those women have circumstances that yield strong emotions that the music communicates. "Communicates"? Why? As common, to the audience comfortingly confirms that they are not alone and instead like many others. How could this be? In the past the women lived in a culture based on strong social, practical, economic, religious, parenting forces. Now (1) for millions of those women the culture is weak or gone and (2) the Internet permits getting confirming, reinforcing communication, interpretation of their scary circumstances from the loss of the culture. In short, the music really is communication, interpretation of the experience and emotions of those women. To me it seems that Taylor Swift did much the same, i.e., similar audience, but Chappell Roan is stronger, louder, more outrageous for an audience with stronger emotions. As a young man, the teen girls I knew, right, had the anxieties from their circumstances but much more constrained and less scary than now. The music, for me, a man: Get rid of the sets, costumes, dancing, and words and take just the background music (a lot of drum beating) and the singing. In places, the singing is pretty good, i.e., expressive, but really the singing, as art, is all nearly the same, that is, the same vocal content for the same communication, interpretation of experience and emotion. I expect that even the current devoted audience will soon, a year or so, give up on the current Chappell Roan -- for a cruel joke, "A one trick pony.". From Vivaldi and Bach through Beethoven and Brahms ... Wagner, Tchaikowsky, ..., Barber there is a lot of effective communication, interpretation of a wide range of experiences, emotions, that is, really good art. For level 101, a major key is glad and a minor key, sad. Then changing keys, selected chords within keys, pitch, volume, variety of sounds from the variety of instruments, combinations, ..., give a lot more tools for expression than used by Chappell Roan and, thus, permit a lot more music, art. Next, the tools were just means, and Bach, Wagner, Tchaikowsky, ..., were really good in the artistic content, that is, again, communication, interpretation of human experience emotion.

citizenpaul 1y ago

The fact that you can belt out Chappel Roan drunk is pretty much an objective assessment of its "worse'ness." Beethoven takes many years of dedicated practice to be able to achieve and you would have to be very skilled to perform it drunk.

voidhorse 1y ago
This equates the value of art with technical difficulty, which is not how most people actually evaluate art.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  I would not say that the value of art is strictly equivalent to technical difficulty. But I would say that there is a level of technical competence required for art to be good. Something that takes no skill to create (e.g. that absurd banana duct taped to a wall "piece") is not good art, if indeed it can be called art at all.
  - Avicebron 1y ago
    The fact that people still talk about it and ridicule it 6 years after it was created, and it lives on in the cultural zeitgeist as that, makes it good art. It's literally called Comedian.
    - PaulHoule 1y ago
      This guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readymades_of_Marcel_Duchamp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readymades_of_Marcel_Duchamp killed off the argument that "X isn't art" for all X.
      - int_19h 1y ago
        I don't see any art in the linked article.
        bccdee 1y ago
        "I don't think it's art, therefore it's not art." Congratulations, you're the type of person Marcel Duchamp was making fun of in 1917. 108 years later, the stance you're defending has been so comprehensively trashed by the art community that anything I could say about it has been said a thousand times already.
        int_19h 1y ago
        If by "art community" you mean people who make "art" like that, the only thing they have succeeded in is convincing most of the rest of us that their opinion on what is and isn't art is irrelevant. Which is to say, it's not that I don't think it's art. It's that most people would agree with me that it isn't art, and what the word means in colloquial speech is defined by popular consensus, not by what a bunch of snobs decide it means.
        bccdee 1y ago
        > If by "art community" you mean people who make "art" like that I didn't. > what the word means in colloquial speech is defined by popular consensus If I asked for the popular consensus on the definition of, say, "insouciant," and the majority of people answered, "I don't know," does that mean the word has no meaning? Which is to say, no, meaning is not a democracy. It's contextual, and I don't care what art means in a context exclusive to people who don't really give a shit about art (which is the context you're appealing to when you say, "most people would agree with me that it isn't art").
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  A friend of the family gave my son a guitar a while back and more recently tried to get him to play Sugar Mountain by Neil Young. He worked at it pretty hard and struggled with it because even though it is simple it has to be played with great precision to sound good. Then he discovered grunge and bar chords and had a breakthrough with The Day I Tried to Live by Soundgarden and Rooster by Alice in Chains. Now he's looking for good songs he can play and that's gotten him into David Bowie songs from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. For a long time I thought of David Bowie as one of those classically trained musicians like Frank Zappa who played rock because it had commercial potential, but he found many songs on that album to be great songs that were within his reach. Now when we have houseguests who say they like Rush he will be able to play the chorus of a few songs in 24 hours and he's building instruments like a Guitar-harp-ukulele (fretless guitar with two bridges, one of which has a harp section) and he's asking me about the physics to build a bass guitar tuned an octave or two below a regular bass guitar.
  - EdwardDiego 1y ago
    When trying to learn the guitar I fell in love with Santa Monica by Everclear, and Go With The Flow by Queens Of The Stone Age.
  - aspenmayer 1y ago
    > he's asking me about the physics to build a bass guitar tuned an octave or two below a regular bass guitar. I barely know anything about music, and probably less about guitars, but if he can do barre chords, then you can try to build a simple capo with him, since he might readily grasp the utility of having a clamp that essentially gives you another hand on that side of the guitar.
    - PaulHoule 1y ago
      He's been experimenting with clamps, he has one for the fretless guitar section of the guitar-ukulele. As for the electric quadro- or octo-bass the variables you can tweak are: * length * mass/length * tension There's some limit to how long you make the strings or you can't play it or otherwise you need something to extend your reach like the levers on the octobass. The other two are inside a square root which is not in your favor. Probably the easy thing to do is find some really heavy strings for a normal bass and see how low you can get the tension. But really he's the one to build things. Back when I was in physics they kept trying to get me to do experiment rather than theory, if I have any regret it is that if I had studied experiment I'd be able to build all the things that my son wanted to build but, hey, he can build those things now.
pseudocomposer 1y ago
To be clear: I have spent the years to memorize and be able to perform a few Beethoven sonatas (not to mention the years required to even get to that point). I can also play them drunk (though not as cleanly, and wouldn't do that in any paid/professional performance situation). I literally did this sort of thing for a living before deciding to use my CS/Math degree to be able to better provide for my family (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlatane/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlatane/). And none of that makes Beethoven "better" than Chappell Roan. Because there is no objective assessment of "better/worse"ness in art. That's not how art works, or what art is. On the other had, your inability to correctly spell the name of an influential contemporary artist, with 40+M listeners per month, replying to a comment that did correctly spell her name, is a pretty objective reason to not trust anything you have to say about art (or, perhaps, much else, at least until you address whatever underlying issues/pathologies have you thinking this way). Perhaps this will offer you some perspective: back when I did music for a living, I often did think this way. I thought most contemporary music was trash if it didn't offer the harmonic or contrapuntal complexity of classical, or even jazz. Really, being a young man from a poor background, I believe it was more a survival instinct (trying to gaslight myself and others into measuring me as "good enough" for gigs). It nearly ruined music for me, though. It required me being dishonest with myself about what I really enjoyed. Letting all that go has been a multi-decade process, and it's made me a much more well-adjusted individual. It also applies in many ways to the software world (as long as you stay out of Google-/Meta-/Oracle-type bigtech misery-inducing rat races).
- citizenpaul 1y ago
  > there is no objective assessment of "better/worse"ness in art. That's not how art works, or what art is. You've been fooled by the rent seeking class.
  - nine_k 1y ago
    There's art that moves you, or does not move you. That's the measure that matters most in your unique and finite life. You get to choose for yourself what to spend your time on, objectivity be damned.
  - 1y ago
whstl 1y ago
Man, you should go to an open air classical concert in Europe sometime. Sure we are just quietly getting shitfaced for most of it but if they play Ode to Joy you can be certain that the 10000 drunks in Waldbühne will belt it. Also not Beethoven but I'm pretty sure some violins will get broken if they don't play Berliner Luft here in town.
- EdwardDiego 1y ago
  Like how it's probably law in the UK that any classical concert with a large crowd in attendance must end with Jerusalem for a good ol singalong, or else they tar and feather the conductor.
EdwardDiego 1y ago
I can belt out (and am known to occasionally do so when walking home from the pub solo) Ein Schwan by Grieg (in the German, didn't learn the Norwegian version) and Ave Verum Corpus by Byrd while drunk, so you're saying these two pieces suck? (I also like to throw the occasional Magnificat or Nunc Dimittis to mix it up. As you can tell, I'm a reformed choir boy. Oh, and Jerusalem by Parry/Blake is custom designed for drunken singalongs.) I beg you to listen to the first two pieces and perhaps reconsider your chosen metric. https://youtu.be/BNuT7-6zBds?si=fbyim815cp6tiD4R https://youtu.be/BNuT7-6zBds?si=fbyim815cp6tiD4R https://youtube.com/watch?v=R3vuU7XAaUM https://youtube.com/watch?v=R3vuU7XAaUM

jl6 1y ago

You don't need to rank strictly and linearly. An objective ordering need not exist. It's enough to see that on shortlists of "great" works, common themes emerge. Is The Great Gatsby better than The Catcher in the Rye? It doesn't matter. They both come with universal acclaim, and that's stiff competition for anything new. Besides, are great works not promoted as being timelessly relevant to the state of the world?

PaulHoule 1y ago
Stan Lee made a comic about how he and his co-workers made comics, and in one frame he says something like "How dare it he say it is hackneyed? I stole it from the best classic I could find!" That is, if superhero movies sell today, stories about Hercules and Theseus sold 2500 years ago.
technothrasher 1y ago
And I loved Catcher in the Rye, but not so much The Great Gatsby. I've found this "shortlist" of classics that have universal acclaim has always been hit or miss for me. The classics I was assigned to read in high school would seem to lurch from riveting to a slog to get thorough. I don't blame the books, it's just what captures my particular interest. Given that, I have never really used "the classics" as a guarantee that I will find the reading fulfilling over other, more obscure, recommendations that I may receive, whether they be old books or new.
- stirfish 1y ago
  I've felt this before. A librarian taught me a trick: chug the book. You were probably trained to really analyze what you're reading, look for symbolism, etc, but you can enjoy a book as almost an emotional-sensory experience instead.
- memonkey 1y ago
  I read both twice, once in high school and again a few years after I graduated (this was over 15 years ago). I loved The Great Gatsby even more (that opening first page is magnificent), and couldn't help but feel like The Catcher in the Rye as being so incredibly naive and juvenile. The latter experience is similar to reading (or watching) Fight Club and thinking Tyler Durden is a hero of sorts and something to aspire to, which is not the ultimate lesson.

mathgeek 1y ago

> That’s why people listen to Chappell Roan, and near-instinctively belt her songs out out after a few drinks, instead of Beethoven symphonies or Mozart operas, even if the latter may be “superior” in nearly every measurable way. As someone who grew up on Looney Tunes and the like, I absolutely start humming and making up words to classical music far more often than anything from this century.

dalmo3 1y ago
Conversely, watching looney tunes is the only way I can enjoy classical music.
- anotheruser13 1y ago
  I would love to see the Chicago Symphony Orchestra play the classical music in "What's Opera, Doc?" and other Looney Tunes classics. Saw them do that with The Godfather and a couple other full-length films which was great.

65 1y ago

Art has no objective measure. I cannot stand classical music because it has very little rhythm and emotion compared to the other, more modern music I listen to. Does that make classical music worse? No. Just because something may have been popular in the past and is now seen as "smart" e.g. the opera, books, classical music, painting, does not make it better than what's popular now, e.g. television, video games, and rhythmic music. If anything I'd argue art has gotten significantly better and more advanced over the years. I don't play many video games but the combination of visual, auditory, interactivity, and storytelling still blows me away.

wbl 1y ago
Very little rhythm and emotion? First emotion https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JzFi-7H9TKs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JzFi-7H9TKs https://youtu.be/rVw6NRXSDhM?si=wchNK9I3RO_XJxeG https://youtu.be/rVw6NRXSDhM?si=wchNK9I3RO_XJxeG Rythym: let's start with the most infamous percussion sequence of all time https://youtu.be/wZtWAqc3qyk?si=B47DQZ1auKx53OaD https://youtu.be/wZtWAqc3qyk?si=B47DQZ1auKx53OaD Unless you're listening to extremely niche heavy metal, electronica, or the kind of jazz that they don't play on the radio you aren't listen to anything with the skill and complexity of classical. And the people who do also show up to new music. I don't think there is any video game that comes close in depth to the Ring Cycle.
- EdwardDiego 1y ago
  I thought you were going to link to the incessant ominous col legno (hitting the strings with the stick of the bow) at the start of Holst's Mars for rhythm, so please allow me to add that one to the list. https://youtu.be/cXOanvv4plU?si=WrIuBfmofTo6szRa https://youtu.be/cXOanvv4plU?si=WrIuBfmofTo6szRa And as for emotion, this version of the 1812 Overture always sends chills up my spine. https://youtu.be/uYnCCWsfx3c?si=OQEA5_JYpWn1kHFj https://youtu.be/uYnCCWsfx3c?si=OQEA5_JYpWn1kHFj
  - lucyjojo 1y ago
    All of this is immensely subjective. The pieces presented were utterly bland to me, bordering on the unlistenable. This is obviously not due to a lack of quality for they have plenty, but they register as little more than noise to my brain; to which i prefer silence... That said, I do enjoy some classical music. For instance, I deeply enjoy this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1lvxx9lzAg&list=RDz1lvxx9lzAg&start_radio=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1lvxx9lzAg&list=RDz1lvxx9lz...

wbl 1y ago

Mozart can be really singable. The catalogue song, the Figaro aria, etc. it's not all hell's fire burns in my heart.

yyyk 1y ago

>This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all be strictly ranked “best” to “worst.” Not at all. The only assumption the OP needs is that old media can still appeal to modern people, at which point quantity and accessibility may give it a certain advantage.

makeitdouble 1y ago

Parent's point is not some abstract personal value problem. Think about public libraries. They have limited space and budget, and already abundantly hold loved classics. They'll still take in some amount of new books, but when a 8 yo kid goes in to decide what to read, the vast majority will be older books.

Amezarak 1y ago
I visit libraries wherever I go and that's not true anymore, outside of university libraries. The average municipal/county library is almost entirely books published in the past 15 years. Most classics have to be procured through ILL, if they're even available then.
- slibhb 1y ago
  But it's true in book stores. It's not only old classics; there's a lot of well-known 20th century literature, often in new editions.

slibhb 1y ago

> This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all be strictly ranked “best” to “worst.” No it isn't. It's just based on the objectively true assumption that contemporary fiction is competing with all fiction ever written. It absolutely doesn't have to be the case that people buy more classics because the classics are objectively better. (Although that is, in fact, he case).

galaxyavenu 1y ago

Sure you don't have an objective best to worst, but I'm sure that most serious listeners will venture to music from all kind of eras and cultures. I find that it's much harder ( than visual art ) to say "I don't like this" and more "This sounds really fun but I can't budget time to listen to this kind music". Or maybe this is just me.

pif 1y ago

> Probably one of the most important metrics is “relevance to, and effect on, the state of the world as it is right now.” Actually, no! It's more of “relevance to the state of the world as it was right then, and as it is right now, and that teaches you that we are not living in bizarre times, but then we just don't know enough about ourselves as a society and we keep committing the same errors.”

otabdeveloper4 1y ago

I have no idea whatsoever what a "Chappell Roan" even is. Sorry. (I do know Beethoven and Mozart though.)

seaports 1y ago
She's a good pop musician. No need to be snarky just because she might not be your thing. Comments on HM tend to put down popular music / art / whatever for the sole reason of having some kind of pop sensibility
- otabdeveloper4 1y ago
  I'm not being snarky. I literally do not know who or what a "Chappell Roan" is. (And never will, life is too short.)
graycat 1y ago
> "Chappell Roan" Just now listened to some of her music, two of her pieces Good Luck Babe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RKqOmSkGgM&pp=ygUcY2hhcHBlbGwgcm9hbiBnb29kIGx1Y2sgYmFiZQ%3D%3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RKqOmSkGgM&pp=ygUcY2hhcHBlb... and Pink Pony Club https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GR3Liudev18&pp=ygUOcGluayBwb255IGNsdWI%3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GR3Liudev18&pp=ygUOcGluayBwb... So, with the definition of art as the "communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion" what I saw in those two pieces was that they were intended for some teen girls and young women -- single, lonely, generally afraid of their circumstances, don't understand what they see of reality, eager for sex but afraid of it, lost, i.e., missing any good cultural, social, or intellectual foundation for understanding reality or facing life, .... So in the music, the costumes and stage shows are rapidly changing, outrageous, meaningless, fantasy, scary, i.e., are communication, interpretation of those women's experience, emotions, rapidly changing, outrageous .... In simple terms, those women have circumstances that yield strong emotions that the music communicates. "Communicates"? Why? As common, to the audience comfortingly confirms that they are not alone and instead like many others. How could this be? In the past the women lived in a culture based on strong social, practical, economic, religious, parenting forces. Now (1) for millions of those women the culture is weak or gone and (2) the Internet permits getting confirming, reinforcing communication, interpretation of their scary circumstances from the loss of the culture. In short, the music really is communication, interpretation of the experience and emotions of those women. To me it seems that Taylor Swift did much the same, i.e., similar audience, but Chappell Roan is stronger, louder, more outrageous for an audience with stronger emotions. As a young man, the teen girls I knew, right, had the anxieties from their circumstances but much more constrained and less scary than now. The music, for me, a man: Get rid of the sets, costumes, dancing, and words and take just the background music (a lot of drum beating) and the singing. In places, the singing is pretty good, i.e., expressive, but really the singing, as art, is all nearly the same, that is, the same vocal content for the same communication, interpretation of experience and emotion. I expect that even the current devoted audience will soon, a year or so, give up on the current Chappell Roan -- for a cruel joke, "A one trick pony.". From Vivaldi and Bach through Beethoven and Brahms ... Wagner, Tchaikowsky, ..., Barber there is a lot of effective communication, interpretation of a wide range of experiences, emotions, that is, really good art. For level 101, a major key is glad and a minor key, sad. Then changing keys, selected chords within keys, pitch, volume, variety of sounds from the variety of instruments, combinations, ..., give a lot more tools for expression than used by Chappell Roan and, thus, permit a lot more music, art. Next, the tools were just means, and Bach, Wagner, Tchaikowsky, ..., were really good in the artistic content, that is, again, communication, interpretation of human experience emotion.