Different Strokes for Different Folks (Contra Snobbery, continued)
Art is such a hard thing to qualify. And yet we do it all the time. My earliest preferences were colored by my opinionated mother, who never waffled on anything, and always had a reason for her preferences. This place is better than that place because such and so happened at that place; this TV show is better than that one because its sex jokes are implied rather than explicit; this piece of music is intolerable because it's performed by hippies; and so it went. She could back up every one of her clearly-defined judgments with some bit of information, some personal experience that rendered the conclusion obvious to anyone with a brain. As a child and adolescent, I clung to this binary view of all things. But then along came college and professors whose opinion mattered to me even more than my mother's did. They clearly knew what they were talking about, and mostly what they wanted was for me to keep an open mind about music I initially disliked intensely. This was partic...