[Saya]

Originally Posted by ape descendant

@ Saya - From what I understand, there's no actual way to quantitatively measure the quality of art, no units to add up and show a hard provable system of showing that one piece is proven to be better than another. From what I understand the quality of art is judged by critics and consensus, and while they are important, to allow popularity or some one's strong opinion to limit what we allow ourselves to take in or affect how much we allow ourselves to enjoy something would be a sad limitation of human individuality.

We do have ways of telling whether something is good or not. In the case of film, how original was it? How was the technical quality (quality of picture, transition, were CGI effects glaringly obvious, lighting, etc)? How convincingly did the actors perform? How was the quality of the plot? How enthralling was it? Even films I don't enjoy I'll admire for the acting, plot or technical side of it. I'm not an expert on music so I can't really tell you what qualifies good music, but I'm sure the list looks something like that. Its not at all a popularity contest, I'm sure we all have less known pieces of art we admire.

Of course there will always be greats, classics, and widely loved pieces. There will also be the little folk pieces, the cheesey pieces and the pieces that we complete in our imaginations, these ones can often mean more to a person than all of the Warhols, Polloks and Picassos combined, because they touch our lives on a daily basis in ways we understand personally.

Nightwish is not a shining example of a folk piece. I do concede that people like crappy things because of personal reasons, but that doesn't mean that those crappy things aren't crap. There it has a personal value, but not an artistic one.