When it comes to the less populist of the arts I am almost totally ignorant, not much of a Renaissance man. Most of my appreciation is for pop culture. Yet I do manage to extract from that sufficiently to be touched in a deep place, to get the thing that’s getable from the appreciation of art of whatever type.

I don’t see why such as an opera is any better necessarily at doing that than say a rock tune; why a hundred year old play is any better than a modern day Hollywood film. What the older stuff does have though is posterity and art does need to have posterity as well as consensus for it to qualify as being good. New work by definition can’t have posterity but it can still do much of its job by simply moving people in the way they need to be moved, to help make their life meaningful in some important way.

So, speculation of what makes a good work aside, I am a pop guy, a product of the late 20th Century, but one who is aware of his overall ignorance of the wider arts in general. I might do something about that someday.