Taste and quality

Years ago, a colleague assailed me for eating a McDonald's Quarter Pounder with cheese. The Quarter Pounder is mediocre, he thought, and I should be eating higher quality food.

I was teaching aesthetics so I worked on the issue. I agree it is mediocre; we buy the Quarter Pounder knowing it tastes and costs about the same in Cincinnati and Coeur d'Alene. There are no surprises and nothing to fear. Even seating areas are standardized. In Paris, the catsup was not as sweet, the patties were seasoned differently, and the fries were even better, which is hard to imagine, but the products were pretty much the same; you could buy beer and wine to go with them.

At the other end of the continuum are works of art. There we value uniqueness which inspires different feelings and ideas with each encounter. Art is subject to interpretation, meaning each person interprets works differently; more subtly, when we encounter a painting, concerto, play or poem for a second time we interpret it differently from the first time. "Hamlet" is different in Coeur d'Alene from a production in Stratford on Avon; but a 1980 Coeur d'Alene production is also different from one in 1990 even if we try to make them the same. Quarter Pounders are none of those things; their appeal lies in their sameness, no matter where or when.

So what makes them OK even though they do not meet the criteria we use to evaluate art? Quality is determined by aesthetics, a quasi science of good and bad. Operating alongside aesthetics is taste, which determines whether or not a person likes something. Taste and aesthetics are separate and frequently yield different results.

Do I hold up the Quarter Pounder as a great sandwich? No, for that award I nominate the Mellow Cheddar at Nosworthy's. But I am not required by law or convention to like only things of high quality; neither am I required to dislike things of lesser quality. It is quite OK with me if you like kewpie dolls, matchbook collections and plastic Santa Claus displays. And if you don't like Picasso, Beethoven and Shakespeare, that's OK with me, too. But I earnestly request one thing. Please do not tell me that such and such is the greatest movie ever made when you really mean to say you like it. If you send me a soppy poem accompanied by photos of angelic infants looking beatifically toward the heavens and then tell me I should forward this great work of art to 10 friends I am not likely to comply. And probably you should refrain from asking my opinion.

Time is a test of quality, not the only test, but an important one. Picasso, Beethoven and Shakespeare have been around for a while. The Phantom of the Opera, Harry Potter, and Shania Twain have not. Will they join the ranks of greatness? I have no idea; it is much too soon to tell. Rabidly devoted fans need not try to persuade the rest of us that Harry Potter is a better drawn character than King Lear or that Bob Dylan is a better poet than Wordsworth. The world is quite large; many great things are in it and we need feel no necessity to compete. I own two books written to cure my own pretensions - "The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse" and "Fifty Great Works of Literature We Could Do Without," which includes essays on The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick and 48 others. Can we call a truce here?

Tim Hunt, the son of a linotype operator, is a retired college professor and nonprofit administrator who lives in Hayden with his wife and three cats. He can be reached at linotype.hunt785@gmail.com.