Jud and Tom,
So often in reading gcaers' comments on the quality of courses, after someone makes an argument for one course over another, I'm inclined to write, "Does it really matter? De gustibus non est disputandum!" When one is talking about "taste" in arts -- from architecture to music to winemaking -- judgments are subjective. If you know what you like, build it or play it or listen to it or drink it, without guilt or second-guessing because someone else thinks another work is greater.
On the other hand, as others have noted, when knowledgeable critics -- and that word doesn't leave out the amateurs who've been around, seeing and appreciating and sharing impressions with others of their ilk -- evaluate an art creation in terms of long-established criteria, the judgments are pretty likely to come out in the same ballpark or region of the bell curve. These verdicts are more likely to be objective. That being said, there will still be individual differences, always subjective in nature, based on the personal experience of the evaluator.
A couple of examples. Wine tasters at regional and national competitions are, presumably, the most broadly experienced and knowledgeable people available for the judging. Most often, most judges will know the superior vintages, and rank them within a fairly narrow range. One will rate a particular wine a 9, while another will give it a 10. If asked why, one will say something like, "I knew it was an Alexander Valley Cab, and I just love the well-made ones from there." The other judge might say, "It's a terrific Alexander Valley wine, but you just can't beat a Cab from the Rutherford Bench." Objective judgments mainly, but subjective in the degree that one's judgment has a modicum of personal preference, enough that it tips the scale in favor of one high-quality wine over another.
A second example, illustrating the fallacy of theories like Barthes' and some other lesser lights who think aesthetic judgment is purely subjective, emerges from a discussion between two professional teachers of literature at the university level. In a group discussing the works of several great novelists, one proposed that Charles Dickens was probably the greatest novelist of the Nineteenth Century. Another suggested Henry James, whom she admitted she could hardly stand, although his greatness was undeniable. The first scholar couldn't stand reading Henry James either, and wondered how the creator of art -- which by its classical definition should both instruct and please -- could be rated so highly if his work gave little or no pleasure. When her judgment was questioned, the James proponent insisted that, for her, Dickens was so trivial that his books were unreadable!
That purely subjective judgment, which flew in the face of the experience of the mass audiences Dickens generated for himself and novel writing in general, readers of every level of sophistication, for over a century and a half, led the first critic to end the discussion on the spot, by retorting, " Dickens judges you; you cannot judge Dickens." Shaking his head, he muttered under his breath, "I wonder what field she should have entered for her life's work."
To those of my students who used to say, "What's wrong with my interpretation? That's what I see in the poem," I would usually try to suggest textual and contextual reasons for the misreading -- objective criteria manifest in the poem's actual language -- to help the student see more fully and more clearly. We were trying to do literary criticism in the class, not simply discussing personal preferences on matters of taste. That is, objective analysis, not subjective book-tasting.
But to the persistently subjective student, who would not or could not see beyond his own reading, I posed the example of a color-blind driver coming to a signal light and, seeing green when the light was red, or the reverse. The consequences of inexact vision might then be terribly painful, when objective reality was confronted by your subjective vision.
These observations have relevance for conversations about golf course architecture as well. When one golfer admits he enjoys playing Arnold Palmer's courses more than Jack Nicklaus' tracks, even though he thinks Jack's are finer works of architecture, he's making a subjective judgment of quality. To which we must all agree: De gustibus ..., after all. But when someone insists that Tillinghast was a greater architect than Flynn, he won't gain our assent without proffering indisputable objective criteria.