> It only assumes production skill is correlated it doesn’t require a perfect correspondence
This is fair. As for the rest, I don't think you made your argument and I think a massive amount of emperical evidence contradicts that. Pop music, mass produced movies, memes, etc. It's all low effort shit and people love it more than anything else and avoid high-skilled art like the plague. We have a ton of statistics on this. If you try to claim they just don't have taste then you'd just be question begging at that point.
There's really no value in this entire discussion anyway. All it does is serve to reinforce elitism and all you get out of it in the end is being able to say that you're better at liking stuff than other people are liking stuff, which is pretty much kindergarten nonsense.
What? You clearly know very little about how pop music is produced. If you think the stuff people like Lady Gaga and Dua Lipa (and their teams of writers and producers) put out is low-effort then you're just another clueless snob
But those 'thousands of counterexamples' do not tend to have lasting success; fleeting success is fairly clearly popularity-driven. Lasting success takes producing works that appeal to good taste. Both Lady Gaga and Dua Lipa are great examples of artists that have produced works with lasting success. I would put Lil Nas X, 2Pac, Eminem in that category too, as another example from 'not pop.' T-Pain, less so. :)
I'd like to invoke Sturgeon's law[1] here. Basically it's not useful to claim that the overwhelming majority of pop-music is "low-effort shit" because that's true of nearly all genres.
I’m not making an argument about what taste is or which tastes are correct. I’m merely interested in establishing taste exists and the “all works are equally good” school of thought is wrong. We could have a stronger argument separately about a stronger assertion at which point your pop music claims might be relevant but that isn’t the conversation I was attempting to have.
This is fair. As for the rest, I don't think you made your argument and I think a massive amount of emperical evidence contradicts that. Pop music, mass produced movies, memes, etc. It's all low effort shit and people love it more than anything else and avoid high-skilled art like the plague. We have a ton of statistics on this. If you try to claim they just don't have taste then you'd just be question begging at that point.
There's really no value in this entire discussion anyway. All it does is serve to reinforce elitism and all you get out of it in the end is being able to say that you're better at liking stuff than other people are liking stuff, which is pretty much kindergarten nonsense.