sucking. objectively.

There are things which don't exist, but which never the less have objective standards by which to measure them. Morality, for example, doesn't exist. But if you're going to make a moral claim, then at the very least it has to apply to all people and at all times. Virtue doesn't exist, but if you're going to claim something is a virtue, it has to at least be independent of any value system.

I suspect that there are similar objective standards for evaluating aesthetic judgements. Not that I have a clue what they are, but there are things that I like and things that I don't and I want to be able to say why with something a little more powerful than, “because it's chic, darling.”

To that end, I'd like to say something insulting:

Modern soul music is ugly. It's structure is predictable and it's content is shallow. It sounds like Big Macs taste.

Hopefully you disagree with me. And hopefully, more importantly, you'll tell me why. For the sake of my own sanity, understand that the following two comments don't count:

“It's not ugly, it's just different.”

You're saying that ugliness doesn't exist. That anything that I perceive as ugly could be perceived as beautiful by someone else. But what you don't realize is that you're saying beauty doesn't exist either, because beauty is meaningless without ugliness. But you do believe in beauty. You're trying to save beauty while destroying ugliness, because you're afraid that your taste is ugly. You don't know why you prefer the things that you do, and you're embarrassed of them, so you spout the comforting mantra that there is no such thing as ugliness and assert the nonexistence of beauty by extension. In short, you're a coward.

“You're being ethnocentric”

You're saying that there are objective standards within cultures, but that there are no objective standards between cultures. You're saying that multiple mutually exclusive standards for evaluating beauty are simultaneously true. First, this is a contradiction. You are saying that standards of beauty are both absolute and relative. That is, that they both exist and don't exist simultaneously. Second, you make no argument to justify any of these claims. How do you know that objective standards exist? How do you know that they don't? How do you know that distinctions of culture have anything to do with it? In short, you're pretentious.