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But Hume was okay with this and thought you should be too. “It is almost impossible not to feel a predilection for that which suits our particular turn and disposition.”
Of course
you liked Van Halen when you were a teenager, he said (to update his Ovid and Tacitus references a touch), and the Pixies when you were twenty-three, and you now favor Leonard Cohen at fifty. We are not here to judge you personally. But we do
need
, he implied, to judge. In spite—or because—of this multiplicity of opinions, “we seek in vain for a standard, by which we reconcile the contrary sentiments.”

But who would make the judgment? For this, we needed good critics. These were rare: “Few are qualified to give judgment on any work of art, or establish their own sentiment as the standard of beauty.” A good critic needed many things, including a “delicacy of taste,” for which
Hume invoked not just the eye but the palate,
for it was only recently that “taste” as a sensory act and as a synonym for refined discernment more generally had been separated.

The good critic also needed time, to avoid the “flutter or hurry of thought” that “
confounds the genuine sentiment of beauty.” In a comment that seems to explain the Kinkade study, Hume noted that good critics needed to take another look. “There is a species of beauty,” he wrote, “which, as it is florid and superficial, pleases at first; but being found incompatible with a just expression either of reason or passion, soon palls upon the taste, and is then rejected with disdain, at least rated at a much lower value.”

By now, you might have raised some of the questions that modern philosophers have of Hume.
Did he, in saying that the standard of good art would be decided by good critics, merely punt the ball down the field? What if two critics, judged of equally good sense, still came to violent disagreement over a work? Hume insisted that critics preserve their minds “free from all prejudice” yet said a critic judging the work of another time or culture needs to allow for “the peculiar views or prejudices” of that time or culture. Was Hume,
as the professor of philosophy Michelle Mason wondered, simply asking judges to “
abandon their own prejudices in preparation for taking up others”?

Hume anticipated what an immemorial swamp he was wandering into. He was raising “embarrassing” questions that might circle back to the same despond of “uncertainty” from which he was trying to extricate himself. A contemporary critic of Hume's complained that “
instead of fixing and ascertaining the standard of taste, as we expected, our author leaves us in the same uncertainty as he found us.”

Centuries on, however, the essay seems fascinating and alive, if only because we seem no closer to any answers ourselves (and perhaps, as with the Bible, there is so much room for interpretation). As the professor of philosophy James Shelley suggested, Hume speaks so strongly to us because, whether we can ever achieve a standard, we want to
believe
we can. The best Hume hoped for was that the judgments of those who were judged the best judges would be paid attention to; the results of those “joint” decisions would then prove justified by the test of time. “Authority or prejudice may give a temporary vogue to a bad poet or orator,” Hume wrote, “but his reputation will never be durable.”
Exposure, in other words, could never be enough.
Kinkade may be in one in twenty American homes now,
but the work of Maxfield Parrish was once said to be in one in
five
homes.
Good luck finding him there today.

“When you are in the grip of what you might think of as the cultural atmosphere,” Matthew Kieran told me, “it's much harder to distinguish between something that's really good or just a quite good version of that thing which is really popular.” Curiously, I only later realized we were standing in a gallery whose exhibit was titled
Forgotten Faces
. It featured works such as Charles Wellington Furse's
Diana of the Uplands
, a portrait that was, the wall text noted, once as popular as John Everett Millais's
Ophelia
(the work that one informal survey found people looked at longest at Tate). These paintings, the museum noted, were once “stars” of the collection, but they had “fallen out of fashion.” Hume had it that the best work endures, that “the same Homer who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, is still admired at Paris and at London.” But without “exposure,” how would anyone know a particular work
was
good or come to like it? What if changes in fashion swept away the good with the bad? But something else haunts the edges of Hume's inquiry: Why, exactly, did tastes
change
?

This question will be examined in the next chapter. But there is one unresolved complication of Hume's theory that deserves a deeper look. In his essay, appreciation and liking are more or less intertwined: It is assumed that what you (or ideal critics, anyway) like is what is good. But what about when things are a bit more mixed up?

When researchers want to investigate how people respond to art that they judge favorably—and the stuff they hate—they face a problem: How do you find art that most people are reliably going to think is
bad
? A number of scholars have solved this problem by heading to the Museum of Bad Art (MOBA), a decades-old institution near Boston that collects cultural castoffs under the mantra “Art too bad to be ignored.”
Typically, they will gather a portfolio of paintings and then show them to subjects, contrasted with work from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Usually—but not always—the MoMA trumps the MOBA.

The tenor of the collection is perhaps best summed up by a transcript of my conversation with Michael Frank, the MOBA's curator, as he tried to steer me, over the phone, to an image on the museum's Web site. “Have you gone past the Liza Minnelli with jazz hands? Do you see the eye with the tongue through it? The penis with teeth?” Finally, the object of our search swims into view:
Swamp Picnic
, by Ted Cate Jr., which depicts a couple wearing what look like chartreuse Lilly Pulitzer versions of the bodysuits worn in George Lucas's dystopian parable
THX 1138
and lounging in the eponymous swamp. It is a curious hybrid, as if two characters from a pulp sci-fi paperback cover had been airlifted from the future and settled into a hotel lobby landscape painting. “Whoever painted that had some technique,” Frank told me. “But the image is kind of—you scratch your head and say, ‘What was this person thinking?' ”

This is one of the most striking things about the MOBA: not that it unabashedly uses the word “bad”—quality judgments being a bit taboo these days—but that it has a set of discriminating, if eclectic, standards about what is to be so dubbed. Nonrepresentational art tends to not make the MOBA because, as Frank told me, it is “hard to judge.” The MOBA accepts only about half of what is donated; the rest is, presumably, too bad to be bad. “We don't collect kitsch,” Frank told me. No velvet Elvis, no Bob Ross. What he looks for is someone who has tried to make an “artistic statement” but who, either in technique or in subject matter, has gone wrong. And yet, despite that failure—or precisely because of it—there is something about the image that captures the eye or the imagination.

Looking through the collection, occasionally, lurking beneath the knowing laugh, one feels the same gnawing anxiety one might feel in the auction house or at any showing of contemporary art:
Is this good or bad?
Hume had described how our first hurried glance at a work might cloud our true sentiment. As he put it, “perfections and dislikes” might together be “wrapped up in a species of confusion.”

What is less important than
how
you first feel about a work of art is
that
you feel—a spark that keeps you coming back. Art critics often talk
about how they first “resented” some of the works they have come to love the most. As the critic Linda Nochlin put it, “
You can hate something, but maybe that powerful feeling unconsciously is igniting the flames of love somewhere.”

Semir Zeki, in a study looking at the “neural correlates of hate,” found that when people looked at photographs of people they hated, the brain networks that fired included several regions “
that are almost identical to the ones activated by passionate, romantic love.” It is something like the way a word such as “terrific” contains two strong, but contradictory, meanings. It means both “very bad” and “unusually fine.” The context decides the meaning.

In his book
Love
, Stendhal noted how “even little facial blemishes” in a person might begin to “touch the heart” of someone in love. “
Ugliness
,” he wrote, “even begins to be loved and given preference, because in this case it has become beauty.” But there is a moment where judgment hangs in the balance, where flaws become charming or harden into indictments.

This happens as much in our feelings about art as in our feelings toward people. If you develop a “love” for, say, science fiction films, you no longer see them as you do other films; it becomes difficult to consider them outside your own love for the larger genre. A friend asks, “Should I see this sci-fi film?” You say, “Well, if you like science fiction films you will like it, otherwise…” When our love is too great, our taste blinds us. The designer Jason Kottke once described on his popular Web site a new viral video as “so perfectly in the kottke.​org wheelhouse that I can't even tell if it's any good or not.”

The point is that what you think about something
as
affects how you feel about it. Just as our liking for a scent varies wildly if we are told it is good cheese versus dirty socks, our aesthetic and liking judgments are influenced by the category under which something has been placed. As the art historian Kendall Walton observed, when we first encounter a Cubist painting or Chinese music (for those of us who are not Chinese), we might find it “
formless, incoherent, or disturbing” because, he suggested, we are not perceiving the work by those categories. What animates a new art form, or really any new cultural trend, is being able to categorize it, to have a way to think about it.
There is a bit of a
causal loop here: While knowing the category of something can help us to like it, research suggests that when we like something, we
want
to categorize it.

My favorite record store, when it still existed, did not simply lump records into “rock” or “jazz” but lovingly curated the most arcane categories: “freakbeat,” “acid folk,” “soft psych.” These were all probably indistinguishable to the average person but glaringly distinct to the store's clientele. Thinking of some obscure record as part of a larger
thing
no doubt made me appreciate it more.

When we do not like something, on the other hand, we tend to dismiss it quickly, with sweeping generality: “I don't like Spanish food.” Not “I don't really care for that rare variety of Valencian paella in which the rice is braised in oil.”
Liking seems to require finer gradients on a hedonic scale than disliking, as if, once someone had decided he did not like something, he needed fewer ways to express that disliking, or it was not worth the mental energy.

In an argument that virtually anticipates the Museum of Bad Art, Walton suggested that if we took a “tenth-rate” artwork and perceived it by “some far-fetched set of categories that someone might dream up,” it might begin to “appear to be first-rate, a masterpiece.” An “offending feature” might become a virtue, a cliché in one category might be fresh in another. As the music critic Simon Frith argues, when 1970s disco songs are said to sound the same, it is a negative feature. They are “formulaic.” When folk songs collected from a specific time and place are also said to “sound the same,” this time it is viewed as a good thing (for example, they display “
collective roots”). Some of the MOBA's work would not warrant a raised eyebrow at an “outsider art” show, or at least few would deign to call it “bad.” Sometimes people call the MOBA, Frank told me, and say that “something doesn't belong here, it's too good, I like it.” To which he replies, “I like it. If I didn't like it,
I
wouldn't collect it.”

The idea that one might take pleasure in the avowedly
bad
is not something that Hume (or any other notable philosopher of aesthetics) was prepared to deal with. We might have our own tastes, our judgment might first be clouded, but eventually good critics would come around to the truth of a work's quality. If “irregular” art (poetry was Hume's
example) did please, it pleased not by “
transgressions of rule or order, but in spite of these transgressions.”

The work at the MOBA falls into the curious category of “camp.” This is viewing through quotation marks, as Susan Sontag put it, celebrating works—sometimes kitsch, sometimes not—that attempt “to do something extraordinary,” exhibiting a “
seriousness that fails.” It is laughing
with
rather than laughing
at
. Camp, she wrote, “doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good.” Instead, it provides a new set of standards: “It's good
because
it's awful.” This raises the question, per Hume, of whether there can be “good critics” of “bad art.” Frank's gut-level criteria at the MOBA is that a work be interesting. Merely being bad is not interesting. It needs, to dust off an old category invoked by George Orwell (quoting G. K. Chesterton), to be “good bad.” This is harder than you might think. Frank rejects a lot of works that he says are trying to be “self-consciously silly.” Sontag warned of works that were “bad to the point of being laughable, but not bad to the point of being enjoyable.”