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Why would your reaction be meaningful to anyone who is not you? You're just saying "Yuck!" with more words.
Why should anyone else's reaction be more meaningful than mine? They're just saying "Yum!" with more words.
...And to be clear, I'm at least provisionally willing to give a "Yum!" for this specific work, and my reasons for doing so appear to align with yours: technical details of the process. On the other hand, it seems you share my skepticism of the work in the broader context outside the technical.
"That claim is unfalsifiable, compared to having failed" seems like a reasonable statement, and one that I'm not sure you're even disagreeing with.
When someone tells me "This is bad" or "This is good," I'd rather hear why they think that. Not just "I liked it" or "I didn't like it" or "It disgusts me."
I do think to some degree there is such a thing as "objectively" good and bad art, but that is mostly in the realm of technical skill, and perhaps to a lesser degree, does it accomplish what it intended? So for example, I think Twilight largely fails in the first category (it's badly written, though not the worst written book I've ever read) but obviously succeeds in eliciting feelings in its (mostly teenage girl) audience that the author intended. Angelus Novus actually shows technical proficiency which is perhaps not obvious at first glance, and it elicits feelings and analysis that some random minimalist angel sketch wouldn't. I wouldn't claim it's great or even the best in its class, but when people just sneer at it because it's "ugly" or "degenerate," or claiming "it fails because I didn't like it," I don't see that as meaningful critique. And it's telling that most of the critique seems to come not from a genuine analysis of the work, or even a particular dislike of the style, but because of culture war reads.
I disagree that "having failed" is more falsifiable than "it didn't fail." It implies you can objectively say it "fails" as art (because I didn't like it).
How do you feel about popularity? As a very simple toy model, say that society's tastes as judged by 'this is bad', 'this is good' boil down to a predictable 95%/5% split of obligate normie vs. obligate edgy. Lots of room for individual preferences within that, but basically two clusters of markedly disproportionate sizes.
Would you accede to the proposition that a work of art which is loved by much or most of the 95% is 'objectively good' and one which disgusts and repels them is 'objectively bad'? To my mind, whether a given work will delight the vast majority of people seems like a far better indication of its quality than technical skill or whether it accomplished what the artist wanted.
Personally, I've enjoyed lots of things that were technically bad - everyone dunks on Rowling's prose, the art for Higurashi is genuinely terrible, etc. And I have relatively little interest in whether the artist succeeded in his wish to discomfort and repel me (tragedy is a bit more complicated) vs. failing to please me if the result is repellent.
I think you have this exactly backwards. This is the Culture War. It's the beating core of the culture war, far deeper in many ways than immigration or politics. For complex reasons, in the West a group of extremely unrepresentative people rose to control of the beating organs of our society including but not limited to the arts and the universities. They enjoy disharmony, extreme novelty, and 'modernism' for lack of a better word, and their tastes are broadly genuine but anti-correlated with the tastes of the vast majority of the population. To please and delight themselves, they acted in a semi-coordinated way to move society towards what pleased them, aided by the cultural and literal razing of the two world wars. The built environment (bauhaus and brutalism), the social environment (immigration, the more culturally dissimilar the better), etc. This wasn't necessarily malevolent in intent, though it was sometimes selfish. Often they thought of themselves as uplifting the normies, albeit by force. However, they completely overlooked or even applauded the long term psychic damage it did to the normies who were forced to live in their world and to bow to their tastes thanks to their control of the institutions.
Contrast with Japan, which has certainly changed over the last 150 years but in which normies remain firmly in charge, and with even the very early Marxists. (Marx himself once said that the point of Marxism was to give every man the privilege of being a hunting, shooting, fat, happy aristocrat.)
TL;DR: The binary of objective vs. subjective obscures that you can have a 'subjective' question where 99.9% of people agree. It's not objective in the way that 'the sky is blue' is objective, one can perfectly well hold the opposing opinion without being mad or evil. Nevertheless, it doesn't seem to me to be particularly subjective in the, 'what's better? no way to say, really...' way where we have to abandon audience reaction and go for something explicitly relativistic like 'is the author skilled at doing this thing that almost everyone hates?'.
I think popularity has a loose, but certainly not precise, correlation to "good."
Can you give me an example of a work that is loved by 95% of the population but which you think might be arguably "bad" on a technical level? I wouldn't agree that popularity defines "goodness" but I'd be hard-pressed to think of something so universally beloved that just somehow snookered everyone and is bad, actually.
I am not familiar with Higurashi, but I've written about Rowling before. Her prose is not great (though she's improved quite a bit since Harry Potter), but it's also not the strong point of her work. I would not agree that she is "technically bad," though I would agree that there are other authors whose prose is objectively better.
When you conflate bauhaus and brutalism with immigration, you kind of lose me. Bauhaus and brutalism are not to my tastes but I've seen works of both that I thought were pretty good and I am unconvinced they are some deliberate construct imposed on the masses by the same elites who do all the other social things you disapprove of.
Not really - genuinely terrible-all-round stuff doesn't get popular. Harry Potter is known for not having great prose but good story, Fate Stay Night has terrible prose but good story, Higurashi had terrible art until they remade it (look it up if you're interested) but good story etc. I'm mostly pointing out that 'technical skill' is not a good indicator of popularity and therefore of 'goodness' by my lights beyond a base level.
By my own definition, I don't think something almost universally beloved can be bad. The idea that one can 'snooker' people into liking something that is actually bad seems like a confusion of terms to me. Of course, if one says something like, "Potter's plot is great, everyone loves the plot" then we are in a fully circular realm.
Did you read that one famous debate between architects where the Bauhaus guy basically said, "I love disharmony, I love that I can put it in the middle of the city, and if the vast majority of people find it uncomfortable that is their problem not mine"? On immigration, my brother has a genuine preference for both brutalist architecture and the parts of London that I find extremely culturally uncomfortable, he actively enjoys the strong non-Britishness of it all. I'm genuinely trying to take his expressed preferences and those of @Primaprimaprima and Ozy seriously and at face value.
I tried to be clear that I wasn't writing a polemic or positing a malevolent conspiracy, it's just that the people broadly in control of the culture genuinely have preferences that can't be publicly satisfied without making lots of other people unhappy as a side effect. There's other stuff going on, economics and technological changes and so on, but I believe that the taste incompatibility is a hugely understated influence on what has become the Culture War and it's why these questions have been bubbling up with increasing frequency lately. Scott's essays, the failed efforts by both the UK conservatives (Build Back Better) and Trump to enforce building styles that are popular against furious institutional resistance, and so on. I'll also say that the idea that much of this stuff arises from an unfortunate incompatibility is much, much more charitable than the position I held when I started thinking about this a decade ago.
I think perhaps we disagree about cause and effect. I think if something is universally popular, it's almost certainly because it's good. You seem to be arguing that popularity makes it good by definition.
This is probably true to some degree, if by "people broadly in control of the culture" you mean the Left, because pretty definitionally leftists want to change society, and that is going to upset lots of people. There might be a correlation between "likes brutalist architecture" and "likes immigration" but I am not convinced it's coming from the same place or that "upsets people/is bad" is its defining characteristic.
Perhaps I'm still not expressing myself well, but I would also ask you to read a little more charitably. I am not talking about 'the Left'. The Left is maybe 30%, 40% of society. It comprises people who believe in socialist economic theory, people who believe that social hierarchies need to be rejigged, unionists, feminists, ethnic minorities, all sorts of people who have a reason to want society to change in certain ways that they believe are good in general or good for them in particular. Lately it also includes a certain number of temperamental conservatives, because certain left-wing causes have been causes long enough to become the status quo, as in Scott's essay "Gay Rights are Civil Rites".
I am talking about a much smaller group of people, perhaps 5-10%, who seem to have tastes that are broadly anti-correlated with the majority of people. That does not mean that the defining characteristic of their tastes is "upsets people". I'm not really equipped to say what the defining characteristic of their tastes are, because I don't share them and I don't have the right equipment to pick up what they pick up. If you haven't, please do read Ozy's essay, where she explains her viewpoint much better than I can. Just in case, I will quote:
This cluster of people have, for the last hundred years or so, clustered on the Left and been disproportionately represented at the top of cultural institutions. They are clustered at the top of cultural institutions because their tastes have broadly become the marker of what culture is, and they have historically been clustered on the Left partly because 'changing things' is what you want to do when your aesthetics are unpopular and not established, and when you have a far-greater-than-normal hunger for novelty. Partly also because their aesthetics have generally dictated the aesthetics of the Left in the non-Soviet countries, and therefore the Left is the champion of their aesthetics. Chicken, egg; egg, chicken.
To some degree, the affiliation with the Left may change, because the Left has got rather more boring as it's got more powerful and more established, which is why you see some of the 'obligate edgy' like perhaps Walt Bismark moving to the alt-right. I don't think that will take, long term, but I don't know for sure.
The reason I bring up immigration is because there while are a lot of economic arguments and non-aesthetic on the pro- side, as someone who has spent a lot of time in university towns and known a lot of pro-immigration people, there is also a deep, fundamental hunger for new, different culture on your doorstep. Often this coincides with a boredom and a certain repulsion towards the culture of their birth. Take the recent Iran and Palestine rallies for example. I know some people who don't really express a strong opinion on the issues but they love that they're happening. It's historical! You can go and watch people shouting and yelling in Arabic and it's like being in a different country. So I note in various different fields a strong desire for alien-ness and I believe it's a very underappreciated driver of the cultural conflicts that have been happening over the last 100 years.
EDIT: just to quickly address your other point.
Yes. I don't think 'technical goodness' beyond a base level, as measured by technical experts, is very predictive of popularity. Indeed, I think in many areas it's smuggling popularity through a back door. What makes Harry Potter's plot so good? Well, the characters are written in a way that makes people care for them, and events are written in a way that excites people...
In something like poetry, where people supposedly have much finer sensibilities for technical skill, we find that the most lauded poets are generally considered execrable by the majority of people while Britain's favourite poem is 'If' by Kipling who is regarded by those in the know as a hack.
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