My friend Bob Basil once expressed a negative opinion about Barbara Hernstein’s Smith’s “Contingencies of Value,” a book that makes the case for relativism in aesthetic judgments. He said, if I remember correctly, that it is full of jargon and “academic” in the worst way. I concur fully. (John Guillory pillories this book extensively as well.) She admits at one point that works that are likely to last are those that “are structurally complex and, in the technical sense, information rich...” Exactly. That is what “better” usually means! Suppose I claim that John Coltrane is better than Hank Mobley. This is an “objective” claim for all intents and purposes. It’s not all that different from saying Michael Jordan is (was) better than some other player. You can argue about specific cases, of course, but you cannot appeal to mere personal “taste” in either case. Taste only comes into play when you are already dealing with *roughly* comparable talents: “For my taste, José Raúl Capablanca is a more elegant chess player than Bobby Fischer.” What does it add for me to say that “for me, being myself in my own contingent circumstances, etc... Coltrane’s music fulfills more functions with more effectiveness within my personal economy, etc...”? Aside from being unhelpful, this sort of jargon clouds the issue.

What if Mobley were “better” for any number of utilitarian functions: keeping me awake on long road trips, putting me to sleep at night, subliminally influencing me to buy socks in the mall, confusing my cat, etc... Mobley’s superiority at any of these other functions would not alter my judgment. I have the right to question someone who says that Mobley is better and to argue that I am, in fact, correct. I would not accept the argument, “well, I like Mobley better. I have a right to my own taste.” Or, “I play him to confuse my cat.” In the trivial sense my judgment is “contingent”; that is, it depends on my not being a rhinocerus, listening to enough jazz to understand what it is about, etc... Smith raises objections like, “people who don’t know English will not appreciate Shakespeare.” Duh.

You cannot make this an argument about Eurocentrism either. Suppose there were one drummer in the village who was, quite simply, the best one there. The opinion that some other guy, who could barely play the drum, was better than the master drummer, would have no standing, in or out of this community. To me it adds nothing to say: “Theodor Adorno might not agree with this judgment.” I am assuming that the evaluator is familiar enough with the artistic language in question to formulate a meaningful judgment in the first place. This implies that one is able to learn something specific and meaningful about artistic traditions. The anecdote with which she begins the book is silly: she constrasts her own early, superficial rejection of a famous Shakespeare sonnet with a more complex, nuanced reading that made it seem more acceptable to her, and then proclaims her own inability to evaluate the poem. Maybe her earlier, facile dismissal was right, or maybe it was wrong!