Aesthetic Ranking: Tomatoes, Parker Points, and Pitch Forks

Despite the sustained social critique of the idea of an aesthetic canon, rankings of aesthetic items are ubiquitous and influential: film rankings, year-end lists, wine scores, album scores, social media about who or what is worse, better, and best. Why do we persist in doing this? Is it legitimate? A glance at some of the more influential ranking systems like Rotten Tomatoes, Pitchfork, and others reveals deep epistemic flaws—they tend to be exclusionary, distorted, or evaluatively opaque. How can we reconcile the ubiquity and apparent importance of aesthetic ranking with its manifest shortcomings? Here I argue that aesthetic rankings are “epistemically expropriative”. They are fundamentally aesthetic goods, and as such the norms of aesthetic valuing can override the epistemic rules that govern ranking systems. As aesthetic goods, these rankings promote the social exercise of our aesthetic capacities by promoting engagement, aesthetic conversation, comparative evaluation, self-expression, and aesthetic community. Aesthetic ranking may be epistemically flawed but it can be, even because of that, a powerful technology for the social practice of aesthetic valuing.