First, let's consider a serious Hall of Fame, the Baseball one. Now, one of the criticisms one can make of the baseball HOF is that it's selection criteria are loose enough to allow the likes of, say, Tony Perez or Billy Williams, who are marginal HOFers (whereas marginal HOFers for me would be players who are, well, more famous). But the induction standard is also pretty high there, requiring 75% of the vote, so maybe the voters know more than I do about HOF-worthiness.
Anyway, the main point I want to make here is that while there might be some dubious inclusions in the baseball HOF (what if Perez weren't part of the Big Red Machine with such no-brainer HOFers as Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench, and Pete Rose [rendered ineligible for the HOF for betting on the game but otherwise an easy "95% on the first ballot" entrant]?), the baseball HOF has no glaring exclusions. What counts as glaring these days, in the age of more advanced baseball value-metrics? Well, if, say, a player has more than 90 career Wins Above Replacement (WAR) but is kept out, then that is glaring. Such players with 90 or so career WAR - e.g., Cal Ripken, Roberto Clemente, Bert Blyleven, Cap Anson, Al Kaline, Wade Boggs - are all no-brainer HOF inductees. Indeed, on that all-time WAR leaders chart, the first player to appear who isn't a HOF inductee is Lou Whitaker with 75 or so WAR. Almost all players with 70 or more WAR are HOF inductees.
Long story short, a pretty good (but not altogether infallible) measure of HOF-worthiness in baseball is career WAR. If there is a player with 90 career WAR kept out of the HOF, that would seriously call into question whether the voters were doing their jobs. (Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are kept out of the HOF on suspicion of use of illegal performance-enhancing substances; otherwise their omissions would be even more glaring than Rose's.) But the HOF voters appear to be doing their jobs well enough to take the Baseball HOF seriously.
One Hall of Fame one cannot rationally take seriously is the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. In such an area as music, how could one determine HOF-worthiness, anyway? Music appreciation is a form of aesthetic appreciation, which is based on ordinal rather than cardinal value. (WAR is a cardinal measurement, whereas Babe Ruth's #1 ranking is ordinal.) But let's say that one could develop certain "advanced" metrics of aesthetic value in music derived from some more-or-less sophisticated application of cardinal value. I have one such a metric in mind: the top-ranked artists based on rateyourmusic (RYM) user ratings. (I haven't found full-time music critics to be any more reliable a guide to interesting music than the user ratings at RYM. And RYMers are, by and large, analytically-inclined music enthusiasts whose opinions would be unwise to ignore if one is seeking promising music leads. The ranking rationale for this list is explained at the link.) I would consider pretty much any top-100 artist on this RYM-derived list to be HOF-worthy (even if I'm hardly a fan of many of the artists listed, myself). But if an artist who is ranked only, say, 80 on this list is kept out of the Rock HOF, that would not be what I call a glaring omission. But if an artist in the top 20 in this list were kept of the Rock HOF, that would be a red flag that the Rock HOF is more a popularity contest than a recognition of merit (and one key function of a HOF is to confer fame where it is merited, where the inductee is otherwise much too overlooked). And here are examples of artists that hardcore music enthusiasts (with as much claim to expertise as anyone) are big on but who are still being kept out of the Rock HOF:
King Crimson, Iron Maiden, Sonic Youth, Brian Eno
I can't think of any good reason for why these artists aren't in the Rock HOF. This calls into question the very credibility of the selection criteria the selectors/voters are using. But the incompetence/unreliability of the selectors is revealed not just in whether such artists are inducted or not, but in whether they are even nominated. Here's a list of a bunch of worthy artists snubbed by the Rock HOF, some of whom haven't even been nominated. (I see that Captain Beefheart hasn't even been nominated [even this comes as surprise...], which is about as glaring a HOF snub as any, even if he doesn't appear in that RYM-derived list.) How is it that Iron Maiden hasn't even been nominated? What is wrong with these people?
It doesn't matter how many snubs there are in this or that HOF: if there is so much as one glaring omission (of which there are none in the Baseball HOF), that calls into question the voters' competence or selection criteria.
Now for another HOF that isn't serious: the National Women's Hall of Fame. Guess Who is a glaring, inexcusable omission among the inductees? I did just send a message to the NWHOF asking what good reason there is that Rand isn't among the inductees, and did just receive a reply that all inductions begin with a member of the general public making a nomination. I was invited to nominate her, but . . . well, why hasn't she been nominated by anyone yet? How does that even happen? (I note that the baseball HOF doesn't require nominations from members of the general public; I take it that the BBWAA members are entrusted with having enough expertise to make their own nominations.) And it's not like I really care whether this or that figure makes it into this or that HOF. Awards and Honors are only as good as the process by which they are conferred; the Baseball HOF induction process pretty much ensures that the greatest players are inducted, leaving debates over which inductees are (properly considered) the marginal ones. The Rock HOF and NWHOF haven't ensured that the greatest artists/people are inducted (and my nominating Rand obviously won't ensure her induction). It's the very fact that as of 2019 something called the National Women's Hall of Fame hasn't inducted Rand that doesn't sit well with me, making me that much more turned off to bothering with submitting a nomination. It's up to me to make the first nomination, because no one else apparently has had the good sense to do so, while a bunch of other women have already been nominated? (What, you hadn't heard of, say, Julie Krone?) How does the logic of all this end up making the NWHOF look worth taking seriously? What if I decide as a sort of experiment to see how long it takes for anyone else to nominate Rand? What if it takes until 2050? Would the NWHOF consider updating its nominating/inducting criteria then? I don't mind waiting them out on this to make the point. (I had considered that maybe it's blatantly political, but famous left-anarchist Emma Goldman isn't in the NWHOF, either, so we have another glaring omission.)
I hadn't even heard of the NWHOF until a day ago. Now, if Rand had been inducted into the NWHOF, chances are very good I would have heard about that and hence would have heard about the NWHOF. Indeed this raises a very interesting question: which entity is more well-known: Rand, or the NWHOF? And why? Perhaps the NWHOF would have a boost in its cultural recognition/standing if Rand had been inducted when she should have been (i.e., at or near the NWHOF's outset, just as Ruth, Cobb, Wagner, Johnson and Mathewson were the first Baseball HOF inductees).
I mentioned above that I don't even really care all that much whether this or that person is in a HOF. King Crimson is still easily one of the greatest rock bands whether or not the Rock HOF people are idiots. HOF induction doesn't itself improve the quality of the inductee. It's like if there were an Architecture HOF and we asked Howard Roark whether he belongs there: his response might well be, "But I don't think about it."
Likewise, we could look at the Academy Awards with all its glaring omissions over the years; Kubrick (ranked #2 here) received all of one Oscar (for [Trumbull's] special effects on 2001, which is such a no-brainer that even the Academy couldn't fuck that one up). (On a completely related note, however, the Academy didn't even consider 2001 eligible for Best Costume Design, since apparently the judges thought the apes in the opening sequence were real. IOW, the costumes were too good. I mean, why the hell else wasn't it nominated for the category?) (On another note, if the Academy's attitude toward Kubrick films was all that much like critic Pauline Kael's dipshit ones, then it's no surprise he was snubbed so much.) Or, why did Russell Crowe not get a no-brainer Oscar for A Beautiful Mind? Or, how did all those rich fucks in the Academy overlook the Coen brothers 1998 masterpiece The Big Lebowski, now an iconic cultural phenomenon? Are we dealing with morons here? I mean, say what you will about the tenets of Shakespeare in Love or Saving Private Ryan, but at least they could have nominated Lebowski and its ethos rather than snub it. (What, did the Coens' skills magically take a dive between the Oscar-nominated Fargo [1996] and Lebowski? That's fucking interesting. What, were the other top movies in 1998 better than those in 1996? [It so happens that RYM users are aesthetically attuned enough that their movie ratings blow away just about any other movie ratings/rankings resource out there; the IMDb ones are a joke by comparison, although its users' aggregated pick for #1 is likely correct.])
So perhaps the point of this post is to call into question the very idea, legitimacy or usefulness of a Hall of Fame (or perhaps even Awards Ceremonies) of anything. Or, at the very least, to question the grounds upon which we would or should take any HOF seriously. Of the three discussed above, only the Baseball one seems to have its act integrally/reliably together. But the WAR chart at baseball-reference.com may well be regarded among hardcore enthusiasts nowadays as more authoritative than anything that the HOF does to confer recognition/status. Aside from the experience that visitors to Baseball's HOF exhibit in Cooperstown get (I'd visit it...), what does the HOF accomplish in terms of recognizing player greatness that isn't already being accomplished by other means?
