Whether it's a movie, a song, a restaurant... anything really. It seems I only know how to rate things either 1 or 5 in a 5 point rating system a lot of times. If it's something I don't like but don't absolutely hate it might be easier for me to give a 2 or something, but for something I like I just usually automatically rate 5 stars. So the question is, how do you go about rating something?
Almost certainly TL;DR response:
I have the opposite problem. In terms of creative things, like you say, a movie, a song / album, a restaurant (well, the type that you'd sit down, not dress like a bum, and take a date to, if not really
haute cuisine), at least, things that you see a lot of, that would include movies, albums, restaurants, to me anyway you get some that really stick out in your mind, some that are excellent and that you might return to again and again, things that are average, and then trending down from there. But I have a great difficulty giving anything for 5. Probably a great deal of difficult giving anything a 1, too.
For example, 5-10 years ago, when I had a first date or had people coming out of town to visit, one of my favorite places to go used to be a Spanish place in the West Village called
Tio Pepe. Well done food, decent wine list, good service, not "value" but not ridiculously overpriced. Enjoyed it a lot and became a bit of a regular, they'd recognize me, know my favorite wine, give me little extras. But is that a 5 star restaurant? Definitely not, even accounting for price. It's one that I like a lot, it's memorable in the sense that I would often return there, but it's not exactly as if dining there for the first time was some memorable event. I'd say 3-3.5. 4 would be generous. They've changed the menu over the years and I am no longer so much a fan, so now, regrettably, it's a 2, and I've been there only once or twice in the past few years. Now, something like Masa or the Mandarin Oriental, those are legit 4.5-5 star restaurants, eating there could change your life.
This is something like the
Michelin Star system, which has only 3 stars, and goes like this:
1 Michelin star: "A very good restaurant in its category" ("Une très bonne table dans sa catégorie")
2 Michelin stars: "Excellent cooking, worth a detour" ("Table excellente, mérite un détour")
3 Michelin stars: "Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey" ("Une des meilleures tables, vaut le voyage").
Anything less isn't worthy of a star, i.e. in this formulation:
5 - Perfect
4 - Minor negatives or averages (food was delicious but took a little long, great experience but no parking)
3 - Meh, average, ok. Nothing special. Probably won't return.
2 - Not good (service was HORRIBLE but food was ok, will not return)
1 - Really bad (service and food was horrible)
would rate 1-3. Tio Pepe as I mentioned above has no Michelin Star. But I'm not really a
haute cuisine guy and those kinds of restaurants are ridiculously expensive, for a workaday guy like myself they are not in my regular vocabulary.
Or on to music. I'd say a 5 star album zhas to be flawless, even ground breaking. This gets incredibly subjective. Iconic stuff like
Revolver,
Exile on Main Street, etc. obviously. I might sneak in personally some relevant albums that I really dig, say
Pretenders (self-titled),
Marquee Moon by Television, etc. These are all, I'd say, culturally significant. A cut above. I mostly don't talk about the Dead in album terms although
American Beauty is up there, but 5 star shows would be like 3/1/69, 5/8/77, a very few others. There's obviously a rockist and older bias her. A 4 star album I could listen to forever and is a part of my life, and that I would consider pretty damn well perfectly executed.
Whatever by Aimee Mann,
Ritual of Battle by Army of the Pharaohs to name two. A 3 star album is a good album. Anything less is not going to be on my rotation.
Pretty much the same with movies.
Basically, I can't really go as far as to rate something 5 stars just because I like it. Art is subjective of course, but there's also some kind of objective consideration of artistry that I think needs to come into play.
People who study polls and social statistics find that some people rate things only on the extreme ends in black and white. They see the extremes like a 1 or 5 on a graded scale of 1 to 5. They don't see the nuances or the shades of gray. The social sciences tell us that politically, they tend to see real life issues in black and white as well.
Other people only see things as gray. On a scale of 1 through 5, they rate everything a 3.
This, and maybe what OP is really talking about, and what
Pretty Diamonds is talking about, is more of a
Likert Scale, this is about rating your feelings about something, like/dislike, agree/disagree. There's a lot of discussion on that Wiki page with issues about this. But since OP is mainly asking about
art, which I think is something that has an eternal quality that is beyond ourselves and even our subjective opinion ... I think it cheapens art to talk about it just in terms of what we like ,but we need to look at it as relates to it's impact on culture and lives (yes, including our own lives.) I don't particularly like Abstract Impressionism, or thrash metal, but Pollock's
No. 5 or Slayer's
Reign in Blood probably rate 5 stars. There are cuisines that I don't particularly care for that have 5 star restaurants, etc.
So basically what I think OP is asking is about how do we rate things that go beyond our own simple binary like/dislike, I think that as far as that goes, it's all about context. How does this album, it's impact on that genre and scene, it's impact on you, relate to other albums? How does this restaurant relate to other restaurants in terms of presentation, decor, service, food quality, innovation, all the
je ne sais quois?
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
