Standards of quality can be taught. More importantly, the criteria for quality can be so narrowed that eventually they become specific recognition rules for a particular type of input.
For example: I don’t doubt that there are aesthetic and sensory properties of wines that render some more pleasant than others, and certainly there may be general principles held by many people that make some types and varieties of wine better than others. Individual taste may vary, but some things may honestly taste better.
But with quite a few wines, the definition of a quality variety has (I suspect) ceased having anything to do with whether it’s tasty in the reviewer’s mind, and has more to do with meeting learned criteria for that variety. Eventually the standards became so narrow that any deviation away from a narrow state means it’s an “inferior” wine.
Similar things may have happened to classical music. If people are sensitive to even tiny variations, and evaluations of quality depend on hitting a very narrow target, experimentation becomes so expensive that it’s not worthwhile.
The early days of jazz are almost the perfect antithesis of this process.
There was a study I won’t bother to look up now which showed that while wine experts could discriminate between cheap and expensive wines, and got much more enjoyment from the expensive ones (or at least claimed to), people who were new to wine reported no differences between the groups in either objective quality or subjective enjoyment.
Standards of quality can be taught. More importantly, the criteria for quality can be so narrowed that eventually they become specific recognition rules for a particular type of input.
For example: I don’t doubt that there are aesthetic and sensory properties of wines that render some more pleasant than others, and certainly there may be general principles held by many people that make some types and varieties of wine better than others. Individual taste may vary, but some things may honestly taste better.
But with quite a few wines, the definition of a quality variety has (I suspect) ceased having anything to do with whether it’s tasty in the reviewer’s mind, and has more to do with meeting learned criteria for that variety. Eventually the standards became so narrow that any deviation away from a narrow state means it’s an “inferior” wine.
Similar things may have happened to classical music. If people are sensitive to even tiny variations, and evaluations of quality depend on hitting a very narrow target, experimentation becomes so expensive that it’s not worthwhile.
The early days of jazz are almost the perfect antithesis of this process.
There was a study I won’t bother to look up now which showed that while wine experts could discriminate between cheap and expensive wines, and got much more enjoyment from the expensive ones (or at least claimed to), people who were new to wine reported no differences between the groups in either objective quality or subjective enjoyment.