Which is better, sushi or a cheeseburger? Depends on who's cooking, right?
Not everything is equivalent. You might have thought that was obvious, but it’s fascinating to see just how many false equivalencies people endorse. Qualitative hierarchies not only exist, but they exist inside frameworks of aesthetically describable criteria. Here’s an example: if you hear a musician who repeatedly, but unintentionally, plays wrong notes from a sheet of music, he or she is not as good a player as someone who hits all the right notes at the right time.
But I’d bet you’re wise to my scheme already; that thought experiment is too easy. The problem isn’t about comparing degrees of skill. The real problem emerges by comparing the relative merits of work in different categories. For example, is Italian cooking more or less sophisticated than French cooking? Does classical music demonstrate a higher level of artistic value as a genre than, say, American folk music? The perils of relativism really roar when trying to compare separate but related ideas.
At this point it would be appropriate to ask, “Who cares?”, so let’s not get stuck. The traps here present real dangers including veiled justifications for cultural ghettoization. Qualitative comparisons often degenerate into sneaky mechanisms for keeping certain people out of the cultural conversation. A long history of cultural hierarchies demonstrates pernicious ways to dress bias in academically structured, but more morally palatable—that is to say, coded— language. Power imbalances often promote aesthetic styles as means for maintaining those inequities.
Nonetheless, there’s still something here worth considering.The question turns on how to determine a descriptive language about relative quality without sliding into inauthenticly comparative, competitive evaluation.
As a function of pure economics, we could make certain evaluations simply by watching tastes change. It would have been nearly impossible to find a decent Thai restaurant in middle America in the 1970s. Now a decent pad prik king is hardly novel just about anywhere. Where sushi constituted something impossibly exotic just a few years ago, it’s now something sold in plastic takeout containers in middle American groceries (although that’s probably not where to go for good kampachi sashimi!)
Cold War America didn’t value these cuisines until globalization began to emerge at the end of the 20th century. Their explosive growth and current ubiquity suggests that their intrinsic aesthetic merits makes a case for their value. Does that make traditional steak and potatoes any less tasty? Given the recent ascendant popularity of more diverse choices, it might, at least relatively speaking.
Why does this matter? For creatives of all types, as well as for cultures considering their own broader aesthetic trajectories, relativism can dull the senses. It’s not enough to declare preference for one thing over another. It’s essential to unpack descriptive vocabularies about why one thing compels more than another.
What matters more than a simple hierarchical ordering of “better over worse” is the development of a critical scheme for why some things have merit. That conversation will always be invested with cultural perspective, and it’s vital that well-meaning participants of this conversation never lose sight of just how significant that genesis happens to be. The conversation about “which one is better” is aesthetic quicksand, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
Relativism can become a crutch for justifying mediocrity. In simply declaring that one thing cannot be compared to another, honest qualitative appraisals disappear, and that reduces the value of everything. But the converse is true, too. When all things are compared to each other, the risks of critical diminishment looms large.
Rather than turning to comparative rankings, which inevitably leads to the ridiculous ubiquity of lists, or dodging the question altogether by declaring that taste is all about personal preference, consider this modest alternative. Think about why something matters to you. If the answer is simply “I like it”, you may already have a clue that it’s lasting value isn’t very high. The same goes for things you don’t like. If you don’t like something simply because it’s unfamiliar, you might not be ready to certify a strong position. The point is, relative value only matters when people can articulate clear positions about why they feel the way they do about an idea, object, or experience. Where comparisons can be a useful tool in teasing apart diacritical nuances, they can also trap a person into believing that the side of the comparison coming out on top is better (or worse) than it may actually be.
And why does that matter? Life—and art—is all about making choices. Choices made simply for the purpose of winning a competition is a dumb way to choose anything, especially when there’s often an alternative to make a selection on other, more thoughtful criteria.
@michaelstarobin or facebook.com/1auglobalmedia