Is Art Subjective?

It likely does not surprise any rationalist that even something as popular as entertainment is misunderstood to the point where the quality of entertainment itself is often regarded as purely subjective.  Wherever this position is embraced, its adherents fail to distinguish between perception and the thing itself.  Ironically, people who would openly and fiercely reject moral relativism tend to be inconsistent with their stance on the objectivity of other matters.  A lack of consistency is not a rare thing, but while it is better to be inconsistent in one's understanding of art than it is to be inconsistent in one's ethical stances, misunderstandings of the nature entertainment still deserve to be addressed in some capacity.

Artistic quality in entertainment is not a matter of subjective taste, contrary to the consensus of many people; it is the enjoyment and appeal of a given video game, film, television show, or book that are subjective.  A person can deeply enjoy a work of art (with art referring here to any work of entertainment across all mediums) even if it has severe flaws, just as another person might despise even a work with high production values and competence behind it for subjective reasons.  Subjectivity determines an individual's personal enjoyment or dislike of a work of entertainment, not its actual significance, success, or failure.

Depending on the medium in question, though, the quality of a given work does depend heavily on the technological context of the time.  This does not not apply to something like books, but is an enormous factor when it comes to video games, movies, and television shows.  The best computer-generated special effects from the 1970s are objectively inferior to modern computer-generated special effects as far as realism goes.  This in no way means that the quality of entertainment is subjective and arbitrarily dictated by consumers: it just means that technological advancement makes old standards obsolete and replace them with new ones, from which it follows that maintaining high quality can objectively require more effort over time.

As an aside, the objectivity of technical competence in entertainment would actually hold even in the absence of objective moral and aesthetic values.  This is because, in one sense, the technical aspects of, say, a given video game or movie succeed or fail to the extent that they either 1) accomplish the original vision of the creators or 2) utilize storytelling devices and artistic resources well.  Regarding the latter, examples illuminate the point well: it is true that an unlikely twist is still an unlikely twist and realistic acting is still realistic acting even if there is no such thing as a moral obligation.  Moral values and artistic excellence are separate things.

Regardless of whether something like objective values exist, therefore, art is not subjective, but the pleasure or displeasure in a person's reaction to art is.  The people who believe that art itself is subjective often hold to this due to overestimating the importance of their personal reactions to entertainment or due to desiring to not irritate others with different feelings about entertainment.  In both cases, it is a lack of alignment with basic logical facts that prompts these non sequiturs.  Entertainment may not have the same importance as the grander issues of epistemology and metaphysics, but it is a very important aspect of human life nonetheless, and misunderstandings of it are completely avoidable.