Imagine that a hundred thousand people love a book, while a respected critic explains, in considerable detail, why it is terrible.
Who should we believe?
It sounds like a simple disagreement about taste. But it becomes more complicated the moment we begin asking what the people involved are actually judging.
The readers might have enjoyed the characters, found the story exciting or recognized something important in their own lives.
The critic might have identified predictable plotting, weak prose, inconsistencies or ideas borrowed rather carelessly from better books.
Both assessments could contain valuable information.
Yet we often discuss artistic quality as though these observations are competing measurements of the same thing.
I am not sure they are.
Learning to recognize quality
David Hume explored the problem of aesthetic judgment in his essay Of the Standard of Taste, published in 1757.
He recognized that people experience beauty and artistic pleasure differently. What delights one person may leave another indifferent.
Nevertheless, he did not conclude that every judgment is equally valuable.
Hume argued that practice, comparison, sensitivity and freedom from prejudice can make someone a better judge of art.
That strikes me as a reasonable starting point.
Someone who has read thousands of novels may notice structural weaknesses that I overlook. An experienced musician may hear details in a composition that escape me. A painter may recognize a particularly difficult technique or an unusual relationship between colours.
Knowledge can deepen appreciation.
It can also expose problems.
There are books I enjoyed when I was younger that I might now judge very differently. My preferences have changed because I have encountered more stories, learned to recognize familiar patterns and become more demanding about certain things.
That does not mean the enjoyment I experienced earlier was false.
It means my experience and my judgment have developed.
I would be disappointed if knowledge never changed how I appreciated anything.
At the same time, I would find it rather strange if acquiring expertise meant I was no longer allowed to enjoy something simple.
An experienced chef can appreciate extraordinary cooking and still love a straightforward meal.
Literary taste need not be entirely different.
The people who decide what counts
Expertise, however, is not the only thing that gives an artistic judgment influence.
A newspaper can publish a review. A literary prize can bring a book to international attention. A publisher can decide what receives an advance, and a cultural institution can determine which works are preserved, exhibited or supported.
These decisions can dramatically affect what the public encounters.
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu examined the relationship between cultural taste and social structures in Distinction.
His work challenges the comfortable idea that our preferences develop independently of education, class, institutions and the kinds of cultural knowledge that society rewards.
What counts as sophisticated taste can also function as a form of social distinction.
Knowing which writers to admire, which music to appreciate or how to discuss a particular artwork may communicate something about one’s place in society.
That complicates Hume’s idea of the qualified critic.
Experience can improve judgment, but opportunities to acquire certain kinds of experience are not equally distributed.
People do not all grow up surrounded by the same books, museums, music or conversations about culture.
And being able to speak confidently about art is not identical to having the most perceptive understanding of it.
Still, I would hesitate to replace one simplistic answer with another.
The fact that cultural prestige is shaped by social structures does not establish that artistic expertise is merely an illusion.
A person may recognize genuine technical achievement while also belonging to an institution whose preferences have been shaped by power.
Both things can be true.
The interesting question is how we distinguish them.
The majority, the wealthy and the minister
Suppose we wanted to establish a definitive ranking of artistic quality.
We could ask the public to vote.
Popularity would then carry enormous weight. The works that reached the largest audiences and attracted the strongest support would be rewarded.
That approach might recognize kinds of art that established institutions have historically dismissed.
It might also reward marketing, familiarity and the advantages enjoyed by those who can afford to attract attention.
Alternatively, we could ask wealthy collectors, publishers or cultural institutions to decide.
They may have access to extraordinary expertise and substantial experience with different works.
But wealth is a particularly unconvincing qualification for understanding beauty, meaning or literary achievement.
A person can acquire an expensive painting without understanding it.
A person can understand a painting deeply without being able to afford a reproduction.
Political authority creates a related problem.
In August 2026, Denmark’s culture minister Zenia Stampe publicly expressed concern about AI-generated material displacing human-made art, while distinguishing between using AI and forms of art in which the machine’s contribution outweighs the human contribution.
That raises questions I consider worth taking seriously.
A government has legitimate reasons to consider the conditions under which culture is produced. Public funding can support human creators, protect cultural diversity and help sustain artistic practices that might struggle commercially.
Those are important political choices.
But the authority to decide what should receive public support is not identical to the authority to decide what every person must recognize as art.
A cultural policy can establish priorities.
It cannot determine what a stranger will experience when encountering a novel.
Nor should disagreement with a politician’s aesthetic preferences automatically be mistaken for opposition to their broader concerns about human creativity, employment or cultural institutions.
The questions overlap without becoming the same question.
How many people must enjoy it?
Consider two fictional books.
The first becomes enormously popular. Readers laugh, enjoy the adventure, recommend it to friends and spend a few pleasant evenings inside its world.
The second reaches a much smaller audience. Most readers find it difficult or unpleasant. But one person encounters something that profoundly changes how they understand their own life.
Which book is better?
We could attempt to measure the total amount of pleasure.
We could count readers, recommendations, ratings or hours spent reading.
We might decide that an intensely meaningful experience deserves greater weight than ordinary entertainment.
But how much greater?
There is no obvious way to establish an exchange rate between a thousand enjoyable evenings and one life-changing encounter.
And we have another problem.
Powerful feelings are not necessarily evidence of artistic quality.
A misleading advertisement can be moving. Propaganda can inspire intense loyalty or fear. A manipulative story can produce strong emotions while relying on crude methods.
Conversely, a carefully constructed work may be subtle enough that its effects emerge slowly, perhaps years after it is first encountered.
Emotional intensity matters, but it cannot carry the entire judgment.
Technical achievement matters too, although technical sophistication alone does not guarantee that a work will be meaningful.
Popularity, originality, emotional impact and craftsmanship tell us different things.
Trying to collapse them into a single number may be less objective than it appears.
The book nobody reads
There is another possibility I find especially interesting.
Imagine a remarkable novel that nobody ever reads.
Its language is inventive. Its structure is carefully considered. It contains insights that future critics might admire enormously.
But the manuscript remains in a drawer.
Does its artistic quality depend on someone eventually discovering it?
We can say that the book has qualities that would reward attention even though nobody has encountered them.
But then we have to explain how we recognize those qualities and why they matter.
Perhaps we mean that the work has the capacity to produce certain experiences under suitable circumstances.
Perhaps we consider the achievement involved in creating it valuable independently of its reception.
Or perhaps we think artistic value emerges partly through the relationships people establish with works over time.
Those positions lead toward different understandings of art.
None can be settled simply by counting an audience that does not exist.
What happens when the label changes?
Now imagine two readers encountering exactly the same passage.
Both find it effective.
One believes it was written entirely by a human being.
The other discovers that artificial intelligence contributed to the prose.
Their assessments may diverge.
One might become interested in the creative process behind the work. Another might feel that something essential is missing. A third might care primarily about whether the words themselves are any good.
Learning about a work’s origin can change how we value it.
The reason matters.
If our concern is plagiarism, attribution or the treatment of other creators, we are making an ethical judgment.
If our concern is whether the prose succeeds as prose, we are making a literary judgment.
If our concern is whether a particular process should receive public funding, we are making a cultural policy judgment.
These are not interchangeable.
A work can be artistically successful and ethically troubling.
A work can be ethically admirable and artistically poor.
The categories sometimes pull in different directions, and there is little benefit in pretending otherwise.
The critic and the reader
When I revise Max Aura Dungeon, I make judgments about quality all the time.
I may reject a scene because it explains too much, because a character behaves unconvincingly or because the rhythm of the prose makes the encounter less interesting than it could be.
Those are genuine judgments.
Someone else may read the revised scene and disagree.
Their disagreement does not mean my standards have become irrelevant.
Nor does my understanding of the work give me the final authority over their experience.
There is value in serious criticism. A perceptive critic can reveal weaknesses, relationships and achievements that might otherwise remain unnoticed.
There is also value in listening to readers who encounter something important in a work that critics consider unremarkable.
I would not want either perspective to silence the other.
The fact that a story moved someone does not prove that it is a masterpiece.
But neither can a critic’s argument erase the experience of the person who was moved.
Perhaps the most useful artistic judgments are not the ones that end the conversation.
They are the ones that help us notice more than we did before.