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Just as the artist is entitled to make art as he feels like it, the audience is entitled to like it or not, but, in both cases, we should be intellectually honest. The artist cannot criticise the audience for not liking his art, and the audience must never dismiss art based on their own prejudices.
An extreme case of this is, of course, Leni Riefenstahl, whose movies were nazi propaganda, but one can't judge them based on that, but on their own artistic merits or demerits.
@josemanuel@qoto.org A living example is RateYourMusic: a website dedicated to collecting reviews written by users, where the userbase's most scathing reviews clearly show that they either:
- Don't understand the genre but everyone said the album was well made, so they checked it out
- They picked a popular album because everyone loves it too much for the reviewer's own comfort
- Never had an open mind and just wanted to get angry
- Have a massive ego and feel the need to destroy, with their tastes being extremely narrow already
- Believe that when other well-known artists are bad, their favorite ones are more special
- [I don't understand kids these days]
…afterwards leaving a review where everything they dislike or don't get is presented as a legitimate flaw in the album. SO MANY USERS are unable to tell opinion from fact that reading reviews can be exhausting.
This applies elsewhere of course, but that particular site drives me nuts for that attitude. (At least it's not twitter)