If you can believe it, as a youngster I could be quite dogmatic. I know, I’m so reasonable now. The Right Dishonourable is an hour-long exercise in opinion hedging, my caveats and quibbles evoking a world-weary barrister trying to calm a more excitable colleague.
As the jibe goes, life is easier when you are young enough to still know everything. And when I knew everything I was an ardent fanboy. Latterly this would be for bands, but for a long time it was for Nintendo. I’d tell anybody who didn't want to listen that Nintendo made the best games. If you disagreed you were sadly mistaken: the superior quality was an objective fact.
These days I’m not so self-assured, something I was reminded of while watching a film some weeks ago. The film is what journalists call an action-packed romp about a war between humanity and alien invaders.
I thought the movie was decent, fulfilling every expectation you’d have looking at the poster, and nothing more. But one of my viewing companions – who won’t be able to defend himself as he doesn’t subscribe – informed me that this was a technically great film. And that was a fact.
By technical, my friend wasn’t referring to production values, although those were what you’d expect from big budget Hollywood. His fixation was on the script, pacing and structure of the film. One highlight was the economy of the storytelling, which eschewed the need for crowbarred explanations of how the film’s universe worked.
In other words, it was a great film by dint of its craftsmanship.
My friend is “in the industry”, as such people like to say. And as a man who ensures trade journalism meets a standard, I can appreciate the fixation with production values. When your business is art, the latter is subjected to a factory logic of maximising the outputs from your inputs.
One can decry the fact musicians are trying to cram their best efforts into the first 30 seconds to please Spotify, although it’s always been this way. Pop songs are three to five minutes because it suited the media available back in the day and because it continues to suit the industry economics and our consumer habits. “You should get over that quickly,” as a wise man once said about fussy types refusing to conform to widely-accepted standards.
But we don’t love art because it fits industry standards, and fitting doesn’t make it great. People might broadly want art that is well built, much as they want the same for their furniture, but nobody has every adored music just because the hook lands at exactly the right time. Fitting standards makes your art more accessible, but it doesn’t make it great in the important sense.
In the same way, I once saw a technically great classical pianist whose music didn’t move me an inch. Technical competence might be sought after, but it’s as dismal a compliment as you can ever pay an artist. I’ve told enough people they were good at their instrument to know that it never implied I liked what they played.
And whether you like what someone played is just, like, your opinion man. Nobody has ever been persuaded into liking something because some expert said the pacing was perfect, the lead’s performance spot on, or whatever else. Call me dogmatic, but I think expertise can sit this debate out.