In pre-industrial times, it was assumed that great literary works contained a certain virtue. People who were either born attuned to that virtue or worked to become so attuned were people who had "good taste." Aristotle, father of literary criticism, opined that a "complex" play was inherently superior to a "simple" play, but the main difference was structural: the former had two storytelling features that the latter did not: peripeteia or reversal, and anagnorisis, or recognition. Aristotle's argument for preferring one type of play to another on the basis of plot-content gave way in many post-industrial societies to criteria based on superior style. And yet,even those in the highbrow cadres could have severe differences over what sort of style should be followed by superior artists, as seen in this essay by James Miller, in which he contrasts the approaches of George Orwell and Theodor Adorno:
...when it came to assessing the need for clear language in social criticism, they parted ways dramatically. In "Politics and the English Language," Orwell asserts that to write and think "clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration." In his 1956 essay "Punctuation Marks," Adorno asserts, just as boldly, that "lucidity, objectivity, and concise precision" are merely "ideologies" that have been "invented" by "editors and then writers" for "their own accommodation."
Mr. Miller cites a number of biographical reasons as to why the two writers might have had such disparate responses to style, and I don't dismiss those reasons, especially in relation to the picture given of Adorno:
Although Southern California in the 1940s was teeming with illustrious European exiles, including Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Igor Stravinsky, Adorno disappeared into his writing and research, repelled by the vainglory and vulgarity of the people he was expected to get along with amiably, in the American style. Outside the émigré community, Adorno's painstakingly acquired storehouse of knowledge--about modern opera, German philosophy, and the evils of the cash nexus and the commodity form--impressed no one.
However, while my personal tastes are closer to Orwell's party than to Adorno's, I would note that I don't think purely biographical factors, particularly regarding events that occured late in an author's life, could ever be determining factors in one's tastes. I have no interest in exploring the childhoods of either author, but I feel sure that it is there that one would see in both future authors the incipiency of their later tastes: Orwell's for plain talk and Adorno's for hermeticism. Had they both been born in the backwoods of Tennessee I think it feasible that these authors' disparate tastes would have manifested in some fashion, however much environment would have altered the expression of those tastes.
For all the supposed breakthroughs of cognitive science and its fellow travelers, the reasons why one person likes a thing and another does not remain as mysterious as when Socrates discoursed on the passions of the "soul" in the PHILEBUS.
With respect to comics-criticism, of course, this comes into play with the notorious (in my view) concept of the Pedagogical Paradigm. Bloody comic book elitists, unable to analyze taste as a complex matter, generally resort to this paradigm when faced with comics-fans who do not like what they like. They assume that a genre-fan (not necessarily a superhero fan only, though typical invective is always careful to apply this label) must be clinging to what he liked as a child out of either simple nostalgia or, in the Adornite mold, subservience to a conservative ideology.
In fairness I will note that the populist defense of popular genres is no more well-informed regarding the motivations of the elitists, as the populist usually assumes that the elitist doesn't really like what he likes for its own sake, but for whatever perceived status those tastes may seem to confer on the elitist.
In both cases these accusations, whatever partial truths they may incarnate, should not be used as a substitute for understanding the root-causes of disparate taste, which for me come down to differing perceptions of resonance and concomitant dynamization.
In his book THE FANTASY PRINCIPLE Michael Vannoy Adams argues that Jung's analysis of dream-images was superior to that of Freud and Klein because Jung avoided the "referential fallacy" of assuming that a dream automatically signifies something other than itself. This would be a desireable hermeneutic for budding pluralists to follow: that there exists no formula of "standards" (Gary Groth) or its populist parallels (Tony Isabella, perhaps) that signifies one's possession of "good taste" of any kind.
One likes what one likes. The reasons why are no more separable from one's embodied life than Yeats' dancer is separable from his dance.
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