@believer258: See, to me that quote shows what's wrong with this kind of thinking. If you look up the definition of subjectivity, you can see it reads "Based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions", so to say that something is subjectively good, while simultaneously saying that personally you don't enjoy it is a contradiction. You can say that people in general consider something good, while simultaneously saying you don't personally, but I can see that's obviously not what you're getting at either. I think if you look at the works people have classified as "Good" and "Bad" over history, you'll see that they're considered that way because of how much people enjoyed them. There are no real works of art or entertainment out there where people are going "Well, I hated it, and the audiences and critics hated it, but it was a good, right guys?". This is a subjective judgement.
But I didn't bring up the word "subjectivity". I did bring up the word "objective" and said that there's no absolute objective measure by which something is factually good or bad, but you can criticize something and bring up points about what is good and what is bad about a piece of art.
By your line of thinking, average Joe who enjoys cheesy action movies is as equally qualified to judge movies as Roger Ebert was simply because he enjoyed it. The two are not equally qualified to judge movies. Average Joe will tell you that an action movie was awesome because he thought the scenes looked cool. Roger Ebert might have told you that this same action movie had good action scenes, like a well-made car chase or a martial arts scene where the viewer could keep up with what was going on, but the plot made no sense and the actors either didn't care or couldn't act, that the lines the actors were given didn't make much sense, that the camerawork was, that the one-liners weren't timed well, that the shakycam used throughout the movie was to its detriment, etc. There's some subjectivity to these things, yes, but again we're not talking about binary things here.
But maybe I just can't bring myself to believe that popularity is the only measure of quality, because then Twilight is actually good, CoD is the greatest FPS on Earth, and Shin Megami Tensei is just some shit turn based RPG by a niche developer currently owned by a bankrupt company in Japan. And that's not true, because there are authors that write more sensible plots and cover more worthwhile themes than Twilight, there are FPS games that are better-paced than CoD's "always on" action, and Shin Megami Tensei games are by no stretch of the imagination "shit".
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