A few years ago I was in the UK watching a film that audiences widely loved. I was enjoying it thoroughly. During the interval I heard a couple of people nearby tearing it apart. Completely dismissing it. And I remember feeling a mild surprise, not because they disliked it, but because there was no curiosity in the dismissal. No question of why the filmmaker made the choices they made. Just a verdict.
That is where I think we go wrong with art. Disliking something is perfectly fine. Personal taste is personal. What I like you may not like and there is nothing to debate there. But there is a difference between not liking something and not trying to understand why it was made. The second one is a closed door. The first one is just preference.
This comes back to me every time I think about something a friend said after visiting museums in Holland. He came back and said that Raja Ravi Varma’s paintings are better than Van Gogh and the only reason Van Gogh is so famous is because nobody is promoting Raja Ravi Varma. I am not sure why my friend felt the way he did. I have seen a couple of Van Gogh paintings myself and I liked them. But I am no art connoisseur. I cannot tell you why one painting is greater than another. What I do know is that my friend was not wrong to feel what he felt. And I was not wrong to feel what I felt. We were just standing in different places looking at the same wall.
That is the thing about any art form. The question worth asking is never whether you liked it. The question worth asking is why someone made it, and why it moves certain people the way it does. You do not have to change your opinion at the end of that inquiry. But you will almost certainly come out of it a little more interesting than when you went in.
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