This not to say that there aren't objective axis on which one can make objective judgments. As an example as I write this I am listening to "I Will" by The Beatles, off The White Album, and I can safely say that the album is a master piece and the artists one of the greatest bands yet. What's going on here? Taste is a skill, a refinement. I try to imagine what a real connoisseur (from the French conoistre meaning "to know" or "to recognize") would think [0]. A good start to being able to judge a piece of jazz music I'd say would be listening to a lot of jazz music. How can someone evaluate Yundi Li playing a Beethoven sonata if they haven't heard dozens of hundreds of performance of that very sonata? Short answer: they cannot. With this information the path we chart is clear to liking lots -- consuming widely.
"Okay, but I really don't like some things" you may be thinking, and, well, me too. I have a hard time listening to music that someone puts on for me, I far more often then not dislike it, for me it seems that consumption of new things is best done alone. Why? I have no answer yet. Part of the answer for myself is wrapped up with who I want to be -- I want to like Henry James and Thoreau (struggling after this first chapter in Walden)[1] but do I want to like Sally Rooney or RF Kuang? Yes. Yes I do want to like them. Stop being a stuck up prick! (To me.) For myself, I need to adjust who I want to be into someone who likes... everything! It's much easier to like something when suggested by someone I admire, I find. One great influence recently has been Tyler Cowen who interviews widely (including RF Kuang, who performed moderately in the interview) but consumes even much more widely. He is perhaps one of the best read people alive, but he also keeps up with music and art. He can talk about El Greco and Bob Dylan with depth in the same sentence. Finding influences like this is crucial so we always remember -- if they can like it, we should too! Incidentally, Intermezzo is the next book for a book club of which I'm a member, despite my regular Marxian (Groucho) rejoinder that I don't want to be part of any club that would have me as a member.
From Walden: "A man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of everything succeeding age have assured us of;-- and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and class-books, and when we leave school, the 'Little Reading,' and story books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins"[2]. Accordingly, our goal is to simply pick up the gold around us, in any form it may inhabit. The Beatles? Yes. Thoreau? Yes. Sabrina Carpenter? (Begrudgingly) yes.
[1]: I mean -- Economy? I get that people then might've cared about the exact sums for building your house and buying your food and clothes, but... Not me, in 2024... But then again, sprinkled through are lines of absolute beauty, so trying not to over skim, but to drink it in full fat.
[2]: Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. 1854. Reprint, London: Penguin Classics, 1983. "Reading."