In the process of trying to explain why I love scotch, I realized recently that the reasons are very similar to those underlying why I am so attracted to certain kinds of complicated art, and that the respective experiences of each have a great deal in common for me.
Though I love it, I don’t drink scotch all that often. It’s more of an occasional delicacy, as I find that I enjoy it more when it’s consumed in smaller amounts and less frequently. Part of the reason for this is that for me a little goes a long way - not in terms of alcohol content but in pure weight of experience. I thoroughly enjoy the complexity of good scotch and the process of experiencing and working through this complexity. At the same time I find that this kind of extra depth in any experiential form naturally requires additional space in which to resonate, and therefore that avoiding saturation allows me to experience scotch more ideally when I do drink it. An amazing scotch is both challenging and comforting at the same time, and at its best the world of taste it offers is an autonomous rabbit hole. I know I would be frustrated were everything I consumed to be this rich and confronting. However, I nonetheless gratefully reserve a small space in my life in which to ideally enjoy this particular kind of aesthetic puzzle, simply because it adds something special that wasn’t there before.
I don’t drink cheap scotch unless it’s blanketed in a cocktail. For me, naked scotch is only worth taking the time and consideration for if it’s of a certain age and standard as, not unlike rich chocolate, it seems best consumed in high quality and sparing amounts. I enjoy different cocktails for different reasons and there’s nothing wrong with a one-dimensional drink: I love a sweet, cheap margarita. However, I also recognize that I enjoy a $5 margarita and a 15-year-old scotch in different ways and for very different reasons.
As with booze, different approaches to art and media are also best criticized and understood against a specific and appropriate context. I make no apologies for judging the music at the nightclub differently than that presented in the concert hall, because the two are deliberately designed with very different (yet both functional) goals in mind. However, each can be judged in terms of its craft and intentions within the context of its own world, as compared against its own goals. Craft is contextual, and with both art and booze, “good” remains a situational question.
The question of ultimate adjudication is also relevant to both alcohol and art. To become an expert in discerning and judging wine, a sommelier will dedicate copious time ingesting, considering, analyzing, and then articulating the minute distinctions in an endless library of variations. Given this, when an expert drinks a glass of wine and tells us what he or she tastes, we don’t wonder at the process. We understand that deep immersion in a specialized field tends to lead to a certain kind of heightened judgment concerning items within that field, and that we sometimes find this judgment very useful when, say, we’re trying to figure out what to order with dinner or what might be a good cellar investment.
A core problem, however, is that it can be difficult for a novice to accurately discern where a standard does or should lie, particularly when a field becomes very abstruse and we are unsure of the motivations of those helping to guide our choices. Every niche wine maker and scotch dealer wants you to believe that his or her product is the best, and so distinguishing between truth and marketing can be hard in these situations, especially when we ourselves are not experts in the field. Were leaders of any stripe inherently trustworthy and self-policing this would not be an issue. However, too many obvious incentives exist now for the keepers of arcane tastes not to educate toward an open and free thinking society, but to control the standard of what is tasteful for ultimately personal gain: by controlling resources, gerrymandering aesthetic rules, and mastering a game of rhetorical justifications, highly mediocre artists with theories far more creative and considered than their music are able to engineer little worlds that mathematically justify their work in utter spite of its impotence and irrelevance.
Therefore, though we may not be expert, in the end we have nothing but ourselves as the most trustworthy barometers when we approach the new thing about which we are curious. Whether scotch or complicated music or whatever else, our experience will always be incomplete, always imperfect, because in the end no one ever has a complete experience. Sure, those who’ve spent more time studying a thing will tend to understand more about its mechanics, but in the end no one sees everything and even the best judgments are easily be clouded by arrogance, insecurity, and other people’s bad opinions. Research, dig around for yourself, follow your own curiosity, and yes, do ask the advice of those who’ve dedicated their lives to the subject, whatever it may be. However, at the same time realize that if an individual can approach a new experience openly and honestly, then it’s ultimately the sole duty of that individual to make his or her own choices about the particular new experience - what was valuable about it, and whether something like it should be undertaken again.
I am no educated connoisseur of scotch, just another fan. I ask recommendations and listen to those around me who know more, but in the end I understand that if I can have an honest experience then I need make no apology for making up my own mind. I’ve found some of the most precious things in my life this way, far outside of anything I thought I knew. However, to get to these treasures we have to first be comfortable cutting through the fortifications of expert nonsense, to just focus on simply what we are experiencing and what we love about that experience: Complexity, challenge, and the ongoing reward of spending a little extra time considering something special and beautiful.
