People think art is subjective. Sometimes you hear opinions such as this:
“Those Harry Potter books suck.”
Logically, if you don’t personally like Harry Potter books, knowing full well that a quarter of a BILLION people do, it’s an indication that you might be abnormal, and not necessarily in a good way. Yet no one ever says, “I don’t enjoy Harry Potter books because, evidently, there’s something disturbingly abnormal about my brain. Although scientists say human and chimp DNA only differs by 2%, with me, it’s probably a lot less.”
We’re funny that way. We assume our personal preferences are the standard by which all art should be judged. I think the best way to judge the quality of art is by how well the artist achieves his objectives, whatever those might be.
Take the Garfield comic strip, for example. The creator, Jim Davis, set out years ago to create a massively popular comic strip. That was the goal of his art. He has succeeded for decades. When art achieves its goal, it has to be considered great. Sure, Garfield doesn’t make you dance or cry or fall in love. It doesn’t even amuse most adult males. So what? You can’t judge art against objectives it never held. If you judge it against the standard it seeks to achieve, it’s every bit the equal of the Mona Lisa. Likewise for the movie Borat and the TV show South Park.
Now consider the movie Titanic. It was a huge commercial success, but I have a hard time imagining the director’s artistic goal was to make the viewers feel as if someone put their dogs to sleep. Yet that’s what it did. As a business venture, Titanic was brilliant. It sold a lot of tickets. From the perspective of art, I doubt the artist’s objectives and the result lined up, unless they were sadists.
That’s how I judge art. Your mileage may vary.