Seems like any time you read a classical music review, it’s a review of a performance or a recording rather than a review of a work. There are huge reference books out there that look like they’re going to be the classical music equivalent of those big video guides, but they’re not; they’re actually just guides to recordings. They don’t say whether or not the music itself is any good (or else they just say the standard worthless stuff about how transcendently wonderful it is). There are also lots of “comments about some classical works” appreciation-style books, but they aren’t review-y in the “two-and-a-half-stars” sense. Generally the implication is that every work mentioned is fundamentally worth your while.

One of my many fantasy web resource ideas is: IMDB-ish sites for every major artform – literature, drama, music, poetry, etc. Every work would have stats and pictures and links to related works, and, most importantly, posted reviews by readers. Amazon sort of offers this kind of thing, but it’s specific to editions and releases rather than to works themselves, which means it’s not quite the proper resource for finding out whether, say, Britten’s piano concerto is any good. Allmusic is pretty impressive as a database, but it doesn’t really offer work reviews per se.

It seems clear to me that the general public indifference to high art is in great part the result of the snobbish taboo on talking about “good” and “bad.” I think it would be a really valuable service to audiences and to the arts themselves for there to be resources presenting stuff like “this piece takes itself too seriously and it goes on too long,” and “this painting is really pretty” as valid responses. People may disagree over how many stars a movie deserves, but the whole notion of “how many stars?” doesn’t generally get challenged. I think that’s a reflection of how comfortable we all are with the idea that we go to the movies to satisfy ourselves, and that some movies satisfy us more than others. Not so with the high arts. People might still believe that some paintings are better than others, but “better” usually just means “more refined” in some vague way and is hard to differentiate from “more important.” Generally I think that outside the context of an explicit historical thesis, the idea of certain works being “important” is dangerously close to pure pretension. Or else it’s the equivalent of saying that celebrities are more “important” than one’s friends.

Actually, my gut reaction is that it would be vulgar and pandering (and/or merely frivolous) to rate paintings with a “how many stars?” system, but I think that reaction on my part is just a symptom of how severe the problem is. Don’t we look at paintings for satisfaction? How is that satisfaction different from what we want out of movies?

Of course, going to a museum does offer another kind of satisfaction: the satisfaction of seeing oneself being so cultured as to be at a museum. That’s a pass-fail sort of satisfaction; I tend to feel that the reason we’ve abandoned the “how many stars?” attitude is because we’ve abandoned the hope of being satisfied by the works themselves. We just want to know that we did something classy. Status satisfaction rather than aesthetic satisfaction.

Classical music is dead to most people today because they can only imagine it offering status satisfaction — something in the manner of Mme. Verdurin, the status satisfaction of professing to be ridiculously overwhelmed by ridiculously overwhelming greatness — and most people today don’t put a high premium on that sort of status satisfaction. The status games played in contemporary music culture are about authenticity and persona. People aren’t into saying how sensitive to the music they are; they’re into saying how much they identify with it. It’s about demonstrating what you’re like rather than how good you are.

You could take this further and say that that’s in fact related to fundamental changes in the art itself, but I’d like to think the fundamentals of aesthetic satisfaction don’t actually change all that much. I think the social roles of the arts change, and certain types of art obviously serve better in different social cultures. But if you can find a way to forget about status and pretense, I think the pleasures of music are pretty much the same ones they’ve always been. Of course, people don’t generally like to forget about status and pretense (they certainly didn’t in Mozart’s time either). I suppose one could worry that “aesthetic pleasure” is doomed to be the recreation of a few antisocial types. But that idea doesn’t really hold water – obviously, people take real aesthetic pleasure in things all the time. Like, for example, movies. People really genuinely love movies, even though they have to watch them in the dark, where it’s hard to demonstrate status. I think the “how many stars?” system is proof of the sincerity. So it’s possible, and that’s why I hold out hope for the other arts as well.

Also, I don’t really see any reason why classical music can’t be repackaged to offer superficial identity-demonstrating rewards as well. It has just as much surface variety as contemporary rock – more, in fact. “Yeah, man, I’m all about Bartók. Mozart is for fags.” Hopeless classical music nerds already do this sort of thing, and the difference between “nerdy” and “acceptable” is just the slightest shift in standards. You’ll notice that pretty much everyone knows who Gollum is, these days. I guess that took many millions of dollars to pull off, but they did indeed pull it off. Way to go, guys!