With you it seems there are no absolutes when it comes to golf courses or music; all opinion is impermanent and should be treated as such.
I appreciate your patience.
I think it's worth adding that just because there are no absolutes from the bird's-eye view, doesn't mean comparative analysis isn't worthwhile (I very much think it is). E.g., I think golf is more worthwhile when it's strategic. When I'm in agreement with someone else about how we both like strategic golf, it's easy to argue about which courses are better than other courses. This is because we have a framework that we agree on to judge the courses. A good example of this is reflected in the principles of the 147+ Custodians: it's pretty straightforward to agree on which courses, say, encourage the ball to run more vs which ones do not.
The issue for me is that the
frameworks we use are, in a sense, arbitrary. My old roommate was all about the fair police, argued for narrower fairways, didn't play on windy days, thought pristine conditions were the only way to play, etc., etc. My point is that I don't think there is any way for me to assert that his view of golf is
wrong. He lives the card-and-pencil, he thinks golf is about perfecting a golf swing, he likes having it be about skill and doesn't want an inch of randomness involved. It's what he likes. Who am I to tell him anything except that that type of golf makes me miserable.
This is why I focus on a film critic-style system of course ratings over aggregated rankings. When you and someone else agree on a framework (like the 147+ framework), then you can be served by course reviews within
that framework. There may be room to argue about the particulars, but generally speaking there are reasons for these decisions based on the guidelines. When we argue about the particulars, we are often just having a proxy argument over these guidelines. Under this view, we can still have something like Golf Mag's Top 100, but it doesn't hold authority. At best, it's something more like a book club putting out a list of their favorite books (where "favorite" means something very different than "best"). However, as with individual film critics, it would be better if we broke the ratings down to the individual level, so as to maximize the diversity of thought. This is good because it lets the reader find a reviewer that shares the
most similar framework, which allows the reader to find other courses they would like under that framework.
Here, the more well defined the framework, the less subjective reviews are. However, the frameworks themselves are always -- to a large extent -- arbitrary. I'm not saying random noise sounds just as good as composed music. The human brain quite obviously has built in preferences: the vast majority of humans like sweet things more than bitter things. I'm just saying, within that generally pleasant range, general preferences are going to be kind of all over the place, and on occasion (as with vegemite) we might not even agree on what counts as pleasant.
I would add a caveat that a difference between music and architecture is the engineering aspects of it. As art moves toward craft, and as craft moves toward engineering, we leave the world of aesthetics and we enter the world of function. If the
function of an architectural feature is to drain, that it drains well or poorly is not arbitrary.