In my experience, people often mistake well-thought-out opinions for parochial, personal judgments. Of course other people don’t have to like what one person likes, merely because he holds a certain taste. Nobody thinks otherwise, and it is totally banal to repeat this. But it just so happens that it is not always mere prejudice to knock those who prefer certain forms of entertainment.
For example, if I say that I think people who like boxing are generally stupid, I don’t say that merely because I dislike boxing. I also dislike curling, but I don’t insult the intelligence of those who like curling. I insult the intelligence of those who like boxing because boxing is uniquely violent among major sports, with very high risks of brain injury. I think that favoring such a sport indicates poor judgment.
Judgments about art are tricky, because claims about greatness are often ambiguous. Some people think that objective artistic merit exists, and to those people, a claim like “the Kinks were better than Jefferson Airplane” has an objectively correct answer. I get the impression, from this thread, that most people don’t agree that artistic merit objectively exists. I tend to agree, but the view they reject has been defended by some serious philosophers. For example, the philosopher Massimo Pigliucci has defended that stance in conversations at his blog, Rationally Speaking.
Even if one rejects artistic merit-realism, though, some apparently slanted or parochial remarks about art can turn out to be fairly reasoned. For example, it is simply correct to say that The Beatles are more relevant to the history of popular music than are Led Zeppelin. There is nothing immoral about preferring Led Zeppelin (again, duh), just as there is nothing wrong with finding the Korean War more fascinating than World War II. It’s still perfectly reasonable to say that World War II has greater historical importance than the Korean War. The same is true when comparing the historical prominence of The Beatles and Led Zeppelin.
I could topple on many similar points. It is not necessarily an overextension of personal judgment to say that a certain type of art follows misguided principals, since artistic principals can be based on incorrect factual claims. For example, Language Poetry takes it as fundamental that language is prior to thought, not the other way around. But language is not, in fact, prior to thought, and so Language Poetry has a misguided principal at its base.
We should be wary of overextending our personal biases, of course. But it is also quite common for those who make fair judgment calls to be accused of overextending their personal tastes.
