Why anyone would think that any of my comments on the subject of music have been in any way "beyond the pale" is utterly beyond me.

Don't know about pale but certainly beyond the point where responding with actual words is likely to have any benefit.

I did not downvote you earlier. I just ignored the discussion entirely after the first dozen comments a while back made it clear I was going to learn nothing new.

For what it is worth: Paintings are definitely a better analogy. There are objective aspects to musical or artistic performance as well as subjective ones. Most notable are:

• Technical difficulty for the human brain to produce certain types of patterns.
• The extent to which a piece triggers an underlying general mechanism in the naive human brain. (Where the trained brain component is a mix of subjectively arbitrary and that which is covered in the below point.)
• The extent to which the artist predicts the response of the intended audience and elicits desired behavior from them. The ability to predict what people want when they are not quite sure about it themselves. This can be measured via fiscal rewards or proxies for status.