Is it wrong to “rank” works of art?

In May, Apple Music incrementally released its list of the “100 Best Albums”. It was, without question, a clever marketing technique, designed at once to provide fodder for scores of online “content producers” and to entice potential subscribers to sign up so they can “stream full tracks, or add these albums to [their] library”. One must, at least, applaud Apple for its ambition (it was declared “the definitive list of the greatest albums ever made”) and its audacity — after all, Apple and Spotify are co-conspirators in the destruction of the very notion of an “album”, in favour of algorithmic, user-created, or celebrity-curated playlists (a phenomenon to which we’ve devoted an entire episode).

Chutzpah aside, however, the list itself raises a series of inescapable questions. By what criteria were these albums chosen, for a start? Some of the choices are inspired — Nina Simone’s I Put a Spell on You (at 88), Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (25) and Joni Mitchell’s Blue (16), for example, are rightly recognised and, one feels, rightly ranked. Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon is a genre-bending concept-album that almost certainly belongs where it is at 28, nestled in among weirdo-auteurs like Kanye West, Led Zeppelin, Billie Eilish and Alanis Morissette. Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D City is a work of genius (even if not his best), and warrants its lofty position at 7. The same could be said for Beyoncé’s Lemonade at 10, and Nas’s Illmatic at 39. And Bob Dylan simply had to be in the top-twenty, and assigning Highway 61 Revisited to 14 instinctively feels right (even though Blood on the Tracks is a far superior album, which doesn’t crack the top-hundred). Few would say The Beatles’ Abbey Road does not belong at 3 (or Revolver at 21) much less deny Michael Jackson’s Thriller the next-to-top spot.

But what of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill at number 1? A good album, sure, maybe even great. But the greatest? And how to explain the presence of Tyler, the Creator but the absence of Ray Charles? Or the presence of AC/DC, Guns ’n’ Roses, the Strokes and Nine Inch Nails, but the total absence of Queen, The Who, The Doors, R.E.M., Red Hot Chili Peppers and Pearl Jam? And why George Michael but no Johnny Cash (not even Folsom Prison Blues?), or why Kate Bush but no Whitney Houston? Robyn’s Body Talk squeaks in, but not a single spot for Billy Joel? And not one “live album”? The mind boggles.

Each of these quasi-aesthetic judgements of relative value is, of course, disputable — which returns us to the question of criteria. How do we decide such lists, other than overlapping taste? To press the issue even further, what kind of “taste”? Immanuel Kant distinguished between “the taste of sense” (something, say, that we find instantly pleasing) and “the taste of reflection” (which is both more demanding, takes time, and offers itself to what we might call “the beautiful”). The latter requires an education, a guide, someone to share the experience with and with whom we can discover depths that eluded our first exposure. Is such taste still merely subjective, or is it more than that?

Or maybe, beyond the question of taste, there is something inherently wrong with the very act of “ranking” works of high human achievement. When applied to paintings, or poems, or plays, or novels, or movies, or television series, the entire notion of “rank” feels wrong — even though it would perhaps not be wrong to say there are some novels which sensible or attentive readers should be willing to linger in the presence of, and finally come to love, even if they initially seem foreboding or off-putting (like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, or Toni Morrison’s Beloved, or George Eliot’s Middlemarch, or E.M. Forster’s Howards End, or Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, or Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, or anything by Chekhov or Coetzee).

In other words, rather than “rank”, is it not better to expose ourselves to their genius, their depths, in the hope that, having at first not seen or heard what they have to communicate to us, we might, in time, become attuned (as Zadie Smith beautifully put it)? And having been attuned — the scales falling from our eyes, as it were — we try desperately to share what we’ve discovered with others?

Guest: Ted Nannicelli is Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Queensland. He is the author of Artistic Creation and Ethical Criticism and Appreciating the Art of Television: A Philosophical Perspective.