Answering another of the 25 questions, this time #2:

Can there be truly objective criteria for judging a work of art?
No, unless you happen to have a truly objective criteria for what IS art in your back pocket. To paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart, when it comes to art, you might not be able to define it, but you know it when you see it.

You can attempt to set up interesting benchmarks for a work of art, however, such as surveys of people viewing/listening to it, various measures of commercial success or failure, or as Galenson did for painters, measure the appearance of work in art history and other textbooks. All are fascinating and make eager reading. All are immediately a bit distasteful to anybody first hearing the idea. Some might define a successful work of art as having accomplished the artist's goals. That's a fine way of looking at it..except if you're an artist, you know that sometimes there's no goals, or the perceived goals weren't your actual goals, and sometimes a work of art that is considered by all standards to be wildly successful is in fact not at all what you intended.

So, I would say there isn't a foolproof way of developing an objective criteria. There is, however a splendid way of creating a foolproof subjective criteria. An artist and sometime art dealer of my acquaintance pointed out that you could easily tell how good a painting is: How long do you want to look at it? If you keep thinking about that movie, keep humming that music, keep staring at that painting, keep thinking about how good that ceviche was at Frontera Grill (terrific, btw)..you've just established your criteria. Congratulations.