What Makes Things Good
A brief attempt to carve up the different kinds of value that art can provide.
These seem to make sense, but the role of subjectivity confuses the matter.
Stickiness is probably an objective trait of the work.
Literary merit should be something more than subjective, if we are saying it has positive value after all.
But why the hell is digestibility so damn subjective? The way you phrase it (which is quite reasonable) sounds like something that would be roughly similar across readers. But it isn’t, and this seems the trait that I am most uncertain whether another read will judge a book in the same way I do.
Hrm. I don’t actually think that digestibility is subjective, or at least not very much so. It’s possible that we’re having an actual empirical disagreement, but it’s also possible that we’re just looking at different things. So it’s worth teasing out a bit.
On a trivial level, obviously, something about the experience of media-consumption is very subjective. Person A likes the movie, Person B hates it, this is the most common thing in the world. My instinct is to say that it usually happens because of things that don’t really fit into the schema of “artistic virtue” at all.
The most obvious culprit is content. If you really dislike the tense feeling of being fake-scared, you’re not going to enjoy a horror movie. If your cultural training has taught you that spaceships and wizards are Dumb Stuff For Philistine Babies, you’re not going to enjoy a F/SF novel. (For that matter, if your cultural training has taught you that spaceships and wizards are required for entertaining reading, you’re not going to enjoy Philip Roth talking about suburban Jewish angst in the ‘40s.) If twitchy shooting and perception-management gameplay is confusing and un-fun for you, as it is for me, you’re not going to enjoy a first-person shooter.
But this is not a matter of virtue. It’s not like you get Entertainment Points for having the “right” kind of content (which I guess would be the most popular kind?). It seems obvious to me that horror movies can be good, that books can be good with OR without the genre trappings of F/SF, that first-person shooters can be good.
I posit that you can strip away all the content – the actual meat of the characters, the genre markers, the things that the audience sees and cares about – and be left with, essentially, the skeleton of an experience. And that skeleton can be manipulated and reshaped, more or less successfully depending on your skill, so as to “digestible” in a way that is almost objective.
This is mostly going to be a matter of using the sort of tricks-of-the-trade that the analysts of TV and movies love to to talk about (presumably because TV and movies have been ruthlessly optimized for this in a way that most art forms haven’t). Beats. Act structure. Cliffhangers. Making sure that your audience is laughing and crying and feeling suspense at exactly the right moments so that boredom and irritation don’t set in.