I've mentioned my interest in aesthetic judgment before. Part of it arises from pure pleasure in looking at art. I've met perhaps ten people in as many years who tell me that they just don't understand art, or they don't like it (one of them, as I will never forget, in the middle of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, steps away from Titians and a Bronzino that take your breath away). It's difficult to know what to say to these people, except "why?" but to that question I've rarely got a good answer. The man in the Pitti was depressingly typical in his struggle to reply. "It's boring," he stammered, "I feel like there's too much to know...really, the paintings all look the same."
As someone who, until well into her twenties, had virtually no knowledge of classical music except the few pieces I practiced on the piano or that my mother played on records when I was young (Smetana's "Moldau" stands out in my memory: why that piece, I wonder?), I can easily remember the bewilderment and boredom I felt in my first few classical concerts. Even Verdi's "Otello," my first opera, which I attended at the age of seventeen because my residential college was giving out free tickets, left me impressed by its Zeffirelli grandiosity but mostly unmoved by the music. The few moments that struck me as genuinely beautiful, where I glimpsed a flash of how a person might come to love this artform, were drowned out by long stretches where singers sang, sets moved, and I waited for the show to end. But it never crossed my mind to say "I don't like music," or "Music is boring." So the experience of ignorant confusion doesn't help me understand the people who dislike art, and if anything, since I've long moved on, it makes me more impatient with them -- though I suppose it's inappropriate to feel impatience with people suffering from what I can't help calling a disability.
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