alt Hacker NewsRight on. In my experience across different art fields, I’d say the only generalizable facet of ‘good’ art/music/etc is the “it sits just outside of what we expect”.
These days I liken it more to the idea of ‘surprise’ in information entropy which denotes an informative signal then to revealing any sort of objective truth.
Replies
You might like the book Emotion and Meaning in Music - it starts from some outdated psychological ideas (that emotions are only intensity and that we assign positive/negative valence post-hoc) but ties that to early information theory and makes a really compelling theory of music that's all about the interplay between expectation and surprise, across both the physical harmonic ratio stuff this paper talks about and the cultural associations too.
While I agree that "good" art "sits just outside of what we expect", I must play devil's advocate here and say that the uncanny valley of CGI/AI/... also "sits just outside of what we expect".
So there must be more to it.