How do we determine quality if not by establishing what is the

>>8833697

We define it by masterful use of literary techniques and insight into the human condition. Yes, that's a bit of a vague definition, but it's not meant to be a checklist.

What's enjoyable to most people always changes depending on marketing trends, and what's considered pop-lit of one generation rarely survives its popularity to the next.

>>8833740
>What's enjoyable to most people always changes depending on marketing trends, and what's considered pop-lit of one generation rarely survives its popularity to the next.
That's a good point. Couldn't we say that on that basis the classics actually are the most enjoyable to the greatest amount of people, because they remain enjoyable throughout the years?

>>8833697
Perhaps it only seems arbitrary if you haven't studied literature, but just pretend you have because you've read meme books on your own. There are elements of chance in fame/recognition, but at the end of the day, Fifty Shades of Grey is objectively shit compared to anything by a skillful author. We don't delude ourselves that the average person is the smartest or most educated (otherwise, they wouldn't be average), so why pretend their taste is the best measure?

>>8834836
So the quality of a book can be objectively determined?

>>8834982
Not entirely, but we do have standards for judging authorial skill, and academic consensus is for me a better judge of qualities like depth and complexity, features that tend to not appeal to the general public much anyway. I don't imagine myself to be able to judge the proper score for an Olympic dive because I don't have the training and experience to understand the accepted criteria. Unless we're willing to pretend knowledge is all subjective and useless, we can probably agree that all fields have experts.

>>8833697

you stop bothering with silly aesthetic masturbation and realize that what you are experiencing as "Quality" is the effect of the phenomenon of art being captured and reified as a use-value under capitalism.

>>8833697
>this is your brain on Utilitarianism

>>8834988
There is a difference in expertise in different subjects though. For example, an expert in aerospace engineering would be better suited to judge planes than your average person even by the consensus of average people. Certain expertise is valued because it is demonstrable, and thus people are authorities on subjects not only by their own saying but by the judgement of people who are not. The same does not necessarily go for matters of aesthetics or even ethics.

An aerospace engineer is better at making planes by the shared standards for judging the quality of planes, like the plane not crashing. We agree that not crashing is a feature of a good plane, and then rely on the expert to determine whether this is the case. A literary critic is better at judging literary by the shared standards of literary critics. It's basically "we're right because we say so and what we say should be valued because we are right". It's a closed loop of mutual masturbation, which is probably why it is so generally dismissed and disregarded.