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Is There Good Mass Art?

Summary/Abstract: Could mass art be qualitative? The answer to this question is clearly yes. However, even in clear cases, we need to be able to justify them and define the criteria that guarantee the supposed quality of mass art. If this is done, we are still left in a difficult condition. As we shall see, the situation proves to be challenging from a moral point of view, but it would not pose any particular problems from either a theoretical or a functional standpoint. The hardest part is always accepting that something, even though we mostly trade negative taste judgments about it, should be evaluated by essentially the same criteria as something we definitely like. It makes almost no difference to the quality of art whether we create high, popular, or mass forms of it. The complexity of the content is a secondary issue. What matters is always the quality of the relationship between the content expressed and the means of its expression. First, I will try to prove this by alluding to some basic notions introduced by Noël Carroll in the assessment of mass art. Second, I will provide two examples to corroborate the main thesis that high and mass art could be good or bad based on the very same criteria.

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