Is there such a thing as good taste?
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
When we think of poor taste, we tend to think of symbols that are separated from their function and meaning, where instead of representing that, "I do this thing," something gaudy says, "I have this thing!" That's what crassness is, and it comes down to our relative apprehension of the real vs. the represented, where typically, something real is powerful independent of who is observing it, and the representation is not. It's whether something legitimately represents power. Taste may be an instinct for honest signals, which would seem like its own sort of intelligence.
Viewed this way, taste is the expression of what you percieve to be power based on your experience, good taste is the inverse of the distance between them, and poor taste is measured in the gap between what is affected and of-what it is the effect.
That difference between effect and affect is one of the sneakiest bits of the english language and perhaps even the culture's most cunningly set trap. Do not underestimate the value of good taste, it's an intuition about power.
The other influences might be Aristotle's nichomachean ethics and the Stoics, but I'm having trouble sourcing my own ideas directly from those much better ones other than to say they were influential.
From a po-mo side, Venturi's "ducks and decorated sheds," essay was influential, as his bit was about buildings that are symbols vs. buildings with symbols. I don't imagine reading Simulacra and Simulation again, and I don't know if it would stand the test of time, but that decoupling of symbols from artifacts and the represented from the real is a theme in 20th century critical theory.
There's some romantic thinking in there as well, and I can't quite source why I believe it, but there is a kind of catholic, hellenism to taking the idea of our perception of beauty and symmetry as a form of truth (as distinct from mere power deciding truth by fiat, or of it being ineffable), and then iterating on that idea into a logic around it. I don't know whose idea that was, but the limits of it became obvious when I learned about things like polyrhythms and self similarity, where the symmetry is more dynamic and implied, whereas even music demonstrates how our minds impose symmetry and favour the things the mind can impose its sense of symmetry and beauty on. That would probably align with pop "cognitive biases" lists and thinking fast and slow.
The effect vs. affect part has been a personal theme for a decade or so, so I can't source that elsewhere.
The Greeks used all sorts of forced perspective tricks in their architecture. Columns aren't equally spaced and lines aren't straight, but when viewed by a human observer at ground level the buildings built to Greek aesthetic rules appear "nicer" than those built to pure geometric ones.
Similarly, in art, there was a lot of talk about "authenticity" in the early 20th century, where it was believed that the more primitive the artist, the more authentic the art, since the true message of the artist would transmit undistorted by such Western constructs as technique or skill.
Decoration, adornment, and "fakeness" in pursuit of aesthetics has always been with us, and it's really a curiosity of modernity to have done away with it so comprehensively. Looking at the burgeoning architectural revival movements, and the return in popularity of portraiture and classical painting techniques, I think we're nearing the end of an era encapsulated by your comment.
The unspoken but founding lie of post-modernity is that criticism is equivalent to competence, and that critics are the equals of performers, but there's just all this false consciousness standing in the way that we can solve by indoctrinating people into narrative anyway. The whole enterprise is predicated on this original deception, and once you have accepted that, you can accept anything, which is why I think they teach it to undergrads.
The authenticity of "primitive" art as being a reaction to the skill and western artifice remains controversial, as if the art does not express the skill of the artist, what does it represent? Not everything has to represent something, but art is purely representation, so if it's not representing skill, there isn't a lot left.
There is certainly an anti-competence movement borne out of critical theories that need for competence to be isolated, as competence and risk are sources of truth themselves* and this physical truth competes with critical narrative, so on this, I don't know that it's a bridgable gulf.
This may be the most important part:
I think po-mo thinkers exist in a simulation founded on that base deception, and they try to convince others that their story (made of language!) is the substrate of our reality, but every time someone gets on a motorcycle, skis down a mountain, prevails over an MMA opponent, hunts food, rides a horse, jumps out of a plane, has sex for pleasure, or has some other peak human experience, the simulation disappears. All the neuroticism that forms the hall of mirrors of false equivalencies, evaporates, and what remains is gravity and time, the physical and the real, and our aesthetic experience of it.
That era has not ended, I'd argue criticism is just telling stories in a very shallow tide pool of history.
This is a fairly widely mocked opinion, it;'s the same caliber of criticism as the "we should improve society" meme. The fact that both sides participate in shared narrative isn't a sign that both are corrupt, it's a sign the narrative is important.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
To take a toy example, consider the George Washington cherry tree myth: https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-e...
I was taught that as a kid as a straight-up truth as a package of patriotic narratives. If I had said, "Well that's a good story, but that never happened," the people teaching it wouldn't have said, "You're right! But it's a good story that has a nice moral." They would have been mad at me for contradicting patriotic truth. And madder still if I asked why they were feeding me false stories as if they were true.
In contrast, the people I've read who would point out the issues with the cherry tree story are generally more frank about why they're doing it and more honest about the limits of knowledge and narrative. Many are happy to appreciate myths as myths, for example, and to have nuanced discussions about the role of myth.
You've managed to scratch a mighty itch that's been bothering me for a long time. I finally have somewhat of a framework to think about it a little more, and I have you to thank for that.
In particular, this bit is pure gold:
> I think po-mo thinkers exist in a simulation founded on that base deception, and they try to convince others that their story (made of language!) is the substrate of our reality, but every time someone gets on a motorcycle, skis down a mountain, prevails over an MMA opponent, hunts food, rides a horse, jumps out of a plane, has sex for pleasure, or has some other peak human experience, the simulation disappears. All the neuroticism that forms the hall of mirrors of false equivalencies, evaporates, and what remains is gravity and time, the physical and the real, and our aesthetic experience of it.
I always use stubbing one's toe as an example of a direct experience of reality in all its realness.
(+1 to the favourable comments on your posts - complex ideas expressed skilfully and clearly!)
I think we're seeing the consequences of this sort of postmodern thinking playing out "in the field" today. Everyone's an expert, so no one is. Everyone's an armchair epidemiologist. We aren't ignorant or ill-educated, we're "just asking questions".
There's something there that I can't put my finger on regarding the poisonous way we promise everyone that they can be anything. You, too, can earn $10k a month in your underwear via dropshipping. You, too, have the world's information at your fingertips, so nothing's keeping you from being an expert! You, too, can produce professional-quality video; all you need is the latest iPhone. And so on. I think it generates a lot of unspoken societal resentment towards people who are actually good at these things, because people who fail to reach that level of skill after 30 minutes are implicitly made to feel like they're doing something wrong.
For example, two decades ago when I was double majoring in both geology and English, I found the poststructuralist idea that a 'text' exists separately from narratives about its meaning, but the narratives of meaning were inseparable from the broader social constructs use to build the narratives, both clearly correct and very useful in understanding the process of scientific inquiry. The Earth exists, you know, somewhat independently of us; however geological theory is a human construct and every part of the process from measurement to analysis to interpretation to presentation is a human act that carries with it the stamp of human ingenuity and human flaws: The sample sites selected for measurement, and the measurements themselves, contain biases and other uncertainties related to the selection process (mostly based on theoretical considerations), the engineering of the measurement tools, and other constraints (e.g. physical and budgetary limits). Obviously, scientific methodologies are centered around scientific theories, one or two of which is tested and refined in the process, but a thousand others are invoked as assumption and context, i.e. a larger theoretical structure. And presentation is communication, and additional choices are made as to what to highlight and what to gloss over.
Similarly, postmodernism's stance that there is no objective and unbiased observation and interpretation, and therefore all perspectives use one or more lenses that basically basically bias or filter the results, is clearly and often quite literally applicable to the sciences (think microscopy or remote sensing). Beyond those trivial cases, I think postmodernist theory helped me be able to disentangle the literature a bit and think, "OK, when someone interested in river erosion and landscape evolution looks at this dataset, they see X but I am interested in tectonics and Y stands out", or (in a wider theoretical context) "the geophysicists who come into the geosciences from physics use mathematical tools and make assumptions that assume the processes and configurations are time-invariant; on the other hand, the geologists know this area has evolved over the past 2 million years but their data analysis is trash--and that's why the groups can't talk to each other".
The major difference here I think is intentionality. The STEM communities do generally operate on good faith and have some sense of shared purpose, and scientific advancements are real, positive sum phenomena. So it's possible to apply these tools to the literature and to one's colleagues in a way that doesn't really involve value/moral judgements or seek to diminish or purposefully misinterpret the work of others. However this is missing in much of the liberal arts world where there is no clear definition of progress, and as a result much can be reduced to controlling unfalsifiable narratives and battles for influence.
That said, for all of its possible utility, critical theory's current escape from academia into the wider world doesn't seem to be going well. (For what it's worth, I also see modern Identitarianism as a full-throated but unwitting rejection of postmodernism, by holding that meaning is really implicit in texts, and that only some identity groups can legitimately produce and/or interpret texts. So they have moved on from Derrida's nihilism and are establishing a new priesthood even while canonizing him.)
Edit: I'd also like to emphasize that the ability to make somewhat accurate measurements, quantify misfits between modeled (i.e. theoretical) and observational data, and the ability to downweight, modify and/or reject hypotheses is also a major factor that allows for progress in STEM fields vs. the liberal arts, which limits the proliferation of bad-faith narratives that can use the offenses and defenses of post-(and post-post-)modernist theory.
Art is, at it's core, communication. More precisely, it's the name we've given to the wide variety of traditions that we've developed for communicating in manners distinct from plain everyday communication. Thus, art necessarily represents something, but each individual piece of art represents something different from the next. The message conveyed by a piece of art can indeed be to direct the recipient's attention to the technical skill of the artist, but in most cases skill is secondary, and only matters insofar as it aids the artist in communicating their actual intent.
As such, art which only exists to showcase the artist's skill is essentially devoid of meaning outside of vanity, such pieces of art representing something directly comparable to the significance of a sentence like "Don't you just love my accent?" - a self-referential display of conceit.
For this reason, I don't think you can really refute postmodernism simply by having some kind of direct experience of reality of the sort you were listing – as if postmodernists explicitly deny the primacy of these sorts of experiences. Postmodernists would only contend that a system of thought based on the primacy of such experiences is no more inherently valid or universally applicable than a system of thought with some other basis. (Though of course that is a very trite slogan, and I am not suggesting that all 'postmodern' thinkers would express things in those terms, or even agree at all.)
Understandably, people who don't like postmodern tendencies in thought want to find a definite definition of postmodernism to argue against. But as soon as you cast postmodernism as a particular doctrine that makes particular claims, it's no longer postmodernism.
Since you say early on good taste is the difference between “I have” and “I do” good taste can’t be anything we possess, so how can anyone “have” good taste. Round n round we go.
This continues to highlight for me the shortcomings of human languages. Chomsky calls them random noise formalized and controlled by political powers. It makes sense, they only show up 5,000 years ago and we had glyphs for process and ideas before then. Given our legal system is normalized to matters of object possession, so goes our discourse. Given your measure it’s about “I do” versus “I have” can anyone “have” good taste since it comes down to advertising and accepting one is possessed of certain character traits? Isn’t it still gaudy self promotion and idolatry?
I’m still leaning towards peoples social power being due to their relative closeness to social power. Not that they’re uniquely beyond human. Why accept that in a system politically and academically normalized abstraction “good taste” is a useful language object itself?
There is no contradiction and no circularity here. You are mixing levels of meaning. The concept of possession in "I have lots of gold" is different from the concept in "I have good taste". One refers to property ("I own lots of gold"), while the other refers to an attribute ("I am well-tasting"). The fact that they happen to use the same word is mostly a coincidence, and in no way makes anything circular.
So, IMO, this self fulfilling meta-nonsense to generate self fulfilling meta-nonsense.
The metonymy itself clouds the concept as well. You can have an ear for music or an eye for design, a nose for a story or a conflict, a tact with others, but taste for...everything? My framing implies one would have a taste for power, even if it bends the lexical rule.
Everyone can have "good taste," by becoming competent at the things they do, and therefore have knowledge of which signals are meaingful and powerful in their domain, and which are not. They will not be equally reliable, as some people will have more experience, talent, or commitment.
The next big question is what power is, as in where is it located or come from, what are its sufficient and necessary conditions, is it real, and if it is what else must be real, and if it isn't, what else can't be, must something be conscious to be subject to it, and is power over unconscious objects or being/things real if they don't experience it, is political power anything other than stored potential energy in the form of violence, etc. I don't have answers, and I think the po-mo's were quite into that (Foucalt, Marcuse I think?). I'm sure someone here knows this stuff for real.
If you are sitting in a meeting with someone who has obviously tuned out and is typing into their laptop, consider the possibility this is what they're thinking about, and I find it makes them more likeable.
> That difference between effect and affect is one of the sneakiest bits of the english language and perhaps even the culture's most cunningly set trap. Do not underestimate the value of good taste, it's an intuition about power.
Much of Fussell's Class ends up being about this, which amounts to how various classes choose to signal, and how good they are at it. One of the biggest tells for the Fussell's Middle—who easily come off as the most unfortunate of the bunch, being the most class-anxious but also very bad at signaling—versus the "higher" classes he outlines, whom members of the Middle are often trying to signal as or imitate, are 1) how much of their stuff, including clothing, involves synthetic materials, and 2) how much of their stuff imitates a real thing—fake flowers, fine art prints on the walls, that kind of thing.
Fascinating meta gameplay here.
It even happens within counter-culture groups or those who claim that fashion doesn't matter, over time—they develop clothing-related signals and in-group markers. Consider the tech bro in the $140 hoodie and $120 rock-climbing-oriented "tech pants" and $300 hipster throwback work-boots telling you very seriously that they immediately dismiss anyone who comes to an interview in a suit, as a poseur.
For example, not wearing white after labor day to tell apart nouveau riche from old family money circles.
> Viewed this way, taste is the expression of what you percieve to be power based on your experience
What about displays of disposable wealth, which demonstrate power in a way that is nonetheless gaudy?
I don't think anyone could seriously argue that a wealthy person is less powerful than a poorer person, and yet displaying that wealth (e.g. having a solid 18k gold toilet) is clearly tasteless in the extreme. I almost wonder if you meant to say the exact opposite of what these quoted parts of your message say.
How would you say "bad taste" and "good taste" relates to how we define the political and the non-political? They both share the notion of power, but is there a more meaningful connection that could be examined?
Closer than we expect? Huh? Competence and skill are the two most common concepts associated with taste, ask any person who hates contemporary art.
> It's whether something legitimately represents power. Taste may be an instinct for honest signals, which would seem like its own sort of intelligence.
I understand that nowadays everything in humanities has to be about power to be fashionable, but that sounds like quite a reach. I don’t really follow this logic on crassness.
Now with respect to originality...that's a separate topic altogether :P
No problem.
> So if you want to discard the concept of good taste, you also have to discard the concept of good art. And that means you have to discard the possibility of people being good at making it.
This skips a step. It assumes without argument that production skill corresponds to subjective preferences. There are many people who are extremely skilled who produce things people hate and there are many productions which take virtually no effort which people love. Again, good blahblah is just consensus of subjective preferences. The whole article is just a disguised appeal to popularity fallacy that depends on confounding skill and value through equivocation on "good."
How does one determine "better art"?
Liking pop music is often snobbishly seen as having "bad taste" in music, even in the face of it being wildly popular, and sometimes even actually interesting from a technical analysis perspective.
Acquired tastes are another example that goes against the idea of better-ness as an universal quality: Natto[0] mixed w/ a raw egg on rice is either a repulsive slimy mess or a delicious delicacy depending on who you ask.
IMHO, the argument that there is no "good taste" merely observes that "good" is not an absolute metric, or even on a linear scale. Yes, things can be objectively "better" than others (e.g. I'm sure Michelangelo is far more skilled at painting than PG), but it's a bit of leap to conflate that specific line of comparison with the fuzzy idea of "better-ness".
"Better" and "worse" overall are necessarily subjective assessments. Is that piece of garbage car worse than a high-end one? By some measures, yes. But if your criteria include "being the least expensive", then no, it's not.
I mean, look at Andy Warhol or Banksy or Robert Rauschenberg or Bill Watterson or any of hundreds of examples that clearly fall way outside the "Renaissance = good" bubble.
This is fair. As for the rest, I don't think you made your argument and I think a massive amount of emperical evidence contradicts that. Pop music, mass produced movies, memes, etc. It's all low effort shit and people love it more than anything else and avoid high-skilled art like the plague. We have a ton of statistics on this. If you try to claim they just don't have taste then you'd just be question begging at that point.
There's really no value in this entire discussion anyway. All it does is serve to reinforce elitism and all you get out of it in the end is being able to say that you're better at liking stuff than other people are liking stuff, which is pretty much kindergarten nonsense.
What? You clearly know very little about how pop music is produced. If you think the stuff people like Lady Gaga and Dua Lipa (and their teams of writers and producers) put out is low-effort then you're just another clueless snob
It only takes a quick trip to reddit to see this in action.
In a thread where people were talking about the jails and the overall penal system, someone said "heh...penal" and it had several Golds and thousands of points.
> There are many people who are extremely skilled who produce things people hate
There's a dedicated subreddit for this, even using the word "taste": Awful Taste But Great Execution https://www.reddit.com/r/ATBGE/
I usually cite art as an example of my point. There is no "good" art or "bad" art. There is successful and unsuccessful art.
Art is intended to make you feel something. If it has done that, it's successful. And making you feel revulsion due to the aesthetic choices made or execution of the piece counts as "feeling something".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu#Theory_of_capi...
PG may say that his father pushed him in a different direction. But I suspect - like me - PG grew up with the cultural direction of the BBC and its mission to "inform, educate, and entertain."
So if you were a bright curious kid your parents wouldn't necessarily be the ultimate authorities on culture and taste. There were other authorities. If you were interested.
I was genuinely shocked a few years ago when I realised how much my cultural interests had been shaped by that kind of social programming. I still enjoy art and music, but I'm little more circumspect about them now.
The point: cultural taste is an aspirational social marker. It correlates loosely with some observable features in various kinds of art. But the real goal of "having taste" is to convince yourself and others you're a certain class of person, and also to reassure yourself and others you're not a certain other class of person.
Some groups will speak highly of a genre while other will despise it. Cultural knowledge will be a more useful capital if it is associated with a more prominent group. Within the group, the extent of your knowledge will help you distinguish from others.
The point is that the way this taste (but also the artist's skill) is acquired is highly correlated with social belonging: your appreciation of a specific piece of work is informed by your past experience within your social environment. Even though you may produce an autonomous opinion on a specific piece of art, this opinion is formed using knowledge that is socially acquired.
To expand a bit with examples:
* if the genre you're into pays a lot attention to technical skill, you will probably need, and focus on distinguishing the technicality of the art piece. People unable to tell the difference will be seen as uneducated.
* if it focuses more on the relevance of the art piece in its time context, what others would consider a crude piece will be seen as a clever way to remind the spectator of the zeitgeist and how subtly references are made to other work. People who think too much about the technical details will be seen as unrefined.
Hackers like to build and respect people who build cool things without getting political. Similarly classical art can be appreciated from the point of view of pure craftmanship.
Is Doom more impressive piece of software than a Javascript "Hello world"?
I claim it is. Similar claims can be applied to specific art genres without political dimension if you know the genre.
I find Bourdeaus analysis to be - frankly - a form of navel gazing that has nothing of merit to give to politics, or art.
Yes, everything people do have a political dimension. But one should be able to discuss art theory without confusing it with class warfare.
While everything can and will be weaponized as an instrument of oppression, I don't see the added value of starting from the point of view.
It's like a silly action movie trope, only applied to a political context.
I.e. in a fancy restaurant - that's a nice steak knife you have there - it would work really well in a combat setting. Really?
Bourdieu discusses this very point in the Preface of The Rules of Art.
"(...) countless are those who forbid sociology any profaning contact with the work of art. (...) I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why they are so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational, understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the 'work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence."
A scientific understanding of art doesn't or negate or lower it. On the contrary : "(...) scientific analysis, when it is able to uncover what makes the work of art necessary, that is to say, its informing formula, its generative principle, its raison d'être, also furnishes artistic experience, and the pleasure which accompanies it with its best justification, its richest nourishment. Through it, sensible love of the work can fulfill itself in a sort of amor intellectualis rei the assimilation of the object to the subject and the immersion of the subject in the object, the active surrender to the singular necessity of the literary object (which, more often than not, is itself the product of a similar submission)."
It's a short but dense 5 page read.
Sorry I prefer quoting Feynman - art theory is about as usefull for enjoying and doing art as ornithology is for birds. The original quote was "Philosophy of science is about as useful for science as ornithology is for birds."
Note! This does not denigrate the "useless" fields as such - but the point of view is that their usefulness for the field they claim to study is at most limited.
As a trained physicist and hobbyist artist I can pretty much agree with this. Doing physics and doing art is so friggin hard that while focusing on them, human cognition has no space for analysis in any other domain.
Want to analyse a classical painting? Well, there is a very good technique for this but it requires a huge amount of labour - replicate it.
I realize this is a very technical point of view, but having a hands-on experience, it's very hard to convince me any other way would offer superior understanding of the core issues at play.
I must repeat that I am not discounting analysis - but they are only secondary in importance to the ding an sich.
Sorry. This is getting a very long winded way of expressing my point of view.
I read Paul's essay from this very specifically technical point of view that acknowledges the inherent complexity in the chosen domain (classical art) and hence takes it obvious that there are some works 'better' than others. But there is no numerical metric we can use to gauge paintings - hence we must refer to an intuitive understanding of the quality of a work. Paul calls this 'intuitive understanding of quality' taste.
I think the whole point was to point out that some things can be considered rationally better than others, even though we don't have an objective numerical measure for this goodness.
While it's anyone's right to pass their opinion as a fact, it helps little in terms of explaining how different people react to art.
> art theory is about as usefull for enjoying and doing art as ornithology is for birds.
I believe the trouble here is that birds rarely try to pass as ornithologists. Trying to formulate a general theory about what makes art or artistic taste is sociology work, not art.
> some things can be considered rationally better than others
I hope blue is your favorite color, because it's mine; and if it's not yours, you're wrong.
No, but if we both are at a painting course and painting the same still life, it is plausible we can come to a honest agreement about whose painting we prefer, which details are better presented in the others work and so on.
We are obviously talking of two entirely different things - art as a social phenomenon, and art as art (a technical skill, an aesthetic experience ).
"Taste as a metric" has entirely different meaning in these two contexts. In the sociological context I completely agree with you.
But in the "art as craft to be done, not merely observed because that is boring" sense the sociological analysis offers nothing (for the skill or the aesthetic experience).
We could be discussing of racing - the sociological aspect of observing the race - or of the actual driving which operate on completely two context.
So sociology studies audiences, while I am talking about actually driving/painting and how the perceptions in that domain have nothing to do with sociology but the craft based aspects only.
Considering the complexity,we are beyond the point where the work is so difficult that Taylorian external analysis of purely mechanical facts leads to an incomplete understanding of the actual work done.
So if someone would focus only on the sociological, observe-without-learning-craft type of analysis, their viewpoint would not envelope the art-ding-an-sich. Which is totally fine - but external to actually _doing art_.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/Jan_Brue...
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437317
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/490581
As you can see, the three artists didn't value the same things in their composition. All three are recognized enough to have their place in a museum. And I seriously doubt you can find a consensus about a general theory to rank their work.
But can we "rank art" at all? I think we can but we need to look not at the masters, but at the multitude of nameless students, most of which will never get their works displayed.
Let's take an thought experiment - an art class of local hobbyists is given the task of copying only one of them, let's say the Pissarro one.
After everyone considers their work done, each student is given the task of distributing the paintings to two groups, "the better half" and "the not-as-good" half.
Are the groupings random, or is there "a sense of taste and quality" guiding the students?
If you agree that it is likely that this grouping can be done in a way that is not random, we can agree on my point that there is a non-numerical-yet-not-random way to rate art that can be applied at least some of the time. If we disagree, we disagree and that's fine.
Another example:
Our daughter likes to draw a lot in her own style. Now she is revisiting her old drawings and redrawing them few years later. While her earlier work has some naive charm, she tends to prefer her later pieces, and indeed I do find her current work "better" in the sense that the characters are "more" there - they are more skilfully renderered and have "more character".
I think she is "a better artist" a few years later. Would others agree on this? Again, I would imagine they do.
I think the condensed version of my claim is "There are scenarios where within a given genre/style art can be rated by a non-random yet non-numerical measure".
I think piano competitions, especially the ones where the contestants play the same pieces work this way - there is a non-numerical, yet non-random measure guided by the jurys taste on who is the best.
I do appreciate you have the patience to continue this dialogue!
> Within the group, the extent of your knowledge will help you distinguish from others.
> the way this taste (but also the artist's skill) is acquired is highly correlated with social belonging: your appreciation of a specific piece of work is informed by your past experience within your social environment.
The setting you describe is a perfect example of this: a group with agreed upon acquired taste, which uses knowledge of that taste as criteria to rank art pieces. In that setting, the judgement is bidirectional: not only do people judge art pieces' worth, but they are judged for their good taste by their ability to separate the pieces according to the group's criteria.
> Our daughter likes to draw a lot in her own style. Now she is revisiting her old drawings and redrawing them few years later. While her earlier work has some naive charm, she tends to prefer her later pieces, and indeed I do find her current work "better" in the sense that the characters are "more" there - they are more skilfully renderered and have "more character".
I don't want to judge your daughter's art, but it is perhaps unsurprising that she uses her latest opinion to judge her own work. As she acquires a sense of aesthetics, her new artwork will tend to confirm to that new taste.
On this we disagree. I think the students can do the sorting without peer pressure, driven only by their innate perception and love of the specific genre.
If we enforce this by making the selection process completely anonymous? Do you still feel the students will still feel judged for their taste?
It is also not only values, but also knowledge. If you know classical music theory, you will be able to appreciate and distinguish baroque music, while people with other educations may seek different things in the music they listen to.
> Do you still feel the students will still feel judged for their taste?
The main point here isn't about judgement. It's a personal gratification for the viewer to be able to see subtleties in the author's art. It's very similar to people personally enjoying learning about technology, while also being able to acknowledge peers in a technical discussion and also seeing social benefits from being able to program.
Bourdieu's analysis is extremely valuable IMHO even if you disagree with it. He's not really starting from a point of view, but he actually did fieldwork and then synthesized a theory of taste and how it relates to class.
> Is Doom more impressive piece of software than a Javascript "Hello world"?
In your question you make a mistake of substituting how impressive something is vs how beautiful it is or less technically whether it is a work of art or not etc.
When the self-identified Bronies were questioned about their enjoyment of the show and its relation to the author's intent, many of them were quite happy to denigrate or take a paternalistic view toward girls' (and children's) entertainment in general.
The authors of the paper pointed out that the narrative of taste (reflected in, say, how the fans described the animation style, voice acting, themes) of the TV show allowed the adult (predominantly male) fans to continue society's general disparagement of childrens' and girls' TV. The adults, the narrative goes, are the ones with taste, who can identify and select what's good, and the girls - the intended audience - have no input. Some paternalistic attitudes involved the idea that the show would teach young girls critical thinking skills, other responses said that the show's quality would teach young girls to appreciate higher quality TV (implicitly, the kind of TV that adult fans approve of, with messages they approve of).
Ironically, this also extended to the author of Season 1 of the show, Lauren Faust - who herself has said that she wanted to create a show that was a break from the typically low quality of girls' entertainment as she saw it.
Taste (and community policing of who has it or can have it) can be a force for exclusion and maintaining hegemony. I think fandom can become a microcosm of what we see play out in a larger scale with highly educated (typically rich) people deciding what media is good and what's bad for the poor.
Also, some of the most appreciated wines by wine connoisseurs are nigh-undrinkable to the uninitiated, and this tends to happen with most foods. Just sticking with wines, some greatly appreciate wines high in tannin, while I personally feel like I'm chewing cotton when drinking one of those wines: give me a decent vinnegar over those any day of the week.
You'll find similar acquired tastes in every food culture (stinky cheeses, fermented teas, ultra-hot peppers, acidic coffees, etc.).
The same actually happens with most art: most abstract art is completely meaningless to the vast majority of people - whether they're looking at a Pollock or generic art at Ikea, they wouldn't prefer either. Minimal music, such as Steve Reich's Four Organs, are profoundly distasteful to much of the population, while being adored by some in the music scene. Art films are routinely incomprehensible to general audiences, while winning critical acclaim.
No, not even the "good" kind.
I can accept that there might be objective criteria for judging wine, and certain standards for judging but that doesn't translate into wine being "genuinely good tasting" in some broad sense.
Universal experiences might not be so universal.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-e...
I tell myself I like coffee but I can’t imagine I enjoyed my very first cup. Even now I find third wave coffee (the fancy coffees of fancy coffee people) to be genuinely undrinkable compost water, but maybe with enough time I’ll change my mind.
I had similar realization, but it did not made me more circumspect about art, music etc. It made me to be more willing to try stuff I assumed I wont like. More likely to look at the context at which something odd to me appeared and then more likely to understand/like it.
> cultural taste is an aspirational social marker.
I agree. It is also identity. It also explains why aesthetic culture wars appears. It is not so much about what it is or liking or disliking it. It is about who is assumed to like the thing and performative acceptance/rejection.
Fine art, classical music and dance, etc. are all relatively wholesome things that you can absorb as much interest as you can muster.
Of course someone with no taste would say this. :) I'm kidding.
Your statement reads like a punitive judgement, constructed to paint anyone who pursues enlightenment as entirely performative for external validation. Am I wrong?
What makes you so certain it is correct?
In your world does no one pursue enlightenment for its own ends?
"Aspirational" means "you don't have it".
So all cultural taste is people trying to fake being in a better class than they are? Baloney. There are plenty of people who like things because they like those things, not because they think liking those things will make them look more upper class.
"Aspirational" taste is exactly what you get when people don't have taste, but want to look like they do. They copy someone else's taste (or a group average). And because they're aspirational, they try really hard to pretend that they do in fact have taste. But they just wind up cluttering up the discussion, because they don't actually know anything.
But there are people who actually do know some things about taste, and what is worthwhile, and value. They exist. They just get lost in the noise of a bunch of people who are trying to look like they know, even though they don't...
"It is not at all natural to want to listen to classical music. Learning to appreciate it is like Pascal's wager: you pretend to be religious, and suddenly you have faith. You pretend to love Beethoven-or Stravinsky-because you think that will make you appear educated and cultured and intelligent, because that kind of music is prestigious in professional circles, and suddenly you really love it, you have become a fanatic, you go to concerts and buy records and experience true ecstasy when you hear a good performance (or even when you hear a mediocre one if you have little judgment)."
Like I started with Bach because my mom showed me how to read music, then let me loose on the piano. I had a songbook, and it had Bach's (actually Petzold's) Minuet in G major&minor. That grabbed me in a way nothing else in the book did (kid's book, so stuff like silent night, camptown races, etc). No one 'told' me to like it, or even play it, and there was certainly no social pressure to do so, quite the opposite. It was entirely internal, and contrary to everything happening around me (pop, C&W, think rural uneducated population with a disdain for learning and the arts).
I'm not arguing that people can't develop appreciation via faking, but I find it a rather dismissive and cynical way to look at it in general. I would say it takes a bit of openness if you are approaching something that you didn't consume naturally in social situations, but not too much, except perhaps for very abstract things, or complex things far removed from your experience (Chinese opera for an American, for example, which fascinates yet eludes me at some level).
For example, if you think that being nerd is cool, nerdy things will make you happier, and you may even be proud of liking all things nerd. You're not faking; it's a genuine part of how you see yourself.
The rhetorical trick is one that many have pointed out: 'technically' superior is - in fact - easy to recognize. That doesn't mean that objective judgment of technique is synonymous with taste.
"Taste" in that sense becomes something more about having a pulse on how humans will ingest certain ideas. You can have an intuitive understanding of this in a given time and space (creatives get paid a great deal to do this). But that has nothing to do with 'taste' as an objective quality metric, it has to do with how humans will perceive or interact with an object.
I do however hope that I find more people in tune with my current flavor, perhaps more who can add their own spice. Wouldn't that be nice.
;)
To me he missed the easiest way to argue that good taste exists - due to the constraints of human perception, we can generate every possible work of art that fits on a canvas of a certain size. Should we do this, fill an online gallery with all these pictures and then declare that the visual medium is finished? That is a reasonable claim if there is no good taste, and it is absurd.
Furthermore, in the face of this omni-corpus an artist then transforms into a critic, who will browse this archive and highlight pictures they find interesting. Nothing is created, only curated. The outcome of this process is a work of art that someone may appreciate, which exists purely as the outcome of the artist/critic's taste, divorced from any act of creation. Yet this work of art is equivalent to one which was 'created' in the usual sense. The conclusion from this equivalence is that if you don't accept there is good taste, then you also accept that nothing is worth creating.
Post-modernism amounts to making a weaker claim, essentially saying that nothing is worth creating any more.
Nonsense. One can have "refined taste", which means that you can detect all the subtleties of a particular kind of art (e.g. modern abstract art, or modern jazz) that I cannot. My taste in other fields is considerably more refined than the person who likes modern jazz and abstract art; perhaps they cannot stand any science fiction, whereas I have strong opinions about which is good and which is not.
The phrase "good taste" implies there is one standard, one dimension on which one can rate art, but clearly there are many different ones, depending on ones tastes.
This thing is true now, so it has always been true, and it must be true in the future.
Quite a few artists imitated his style, so some had apparently good taste
I wonder how much of this is physiological and how much is mental. I can't help but think you'd need some sort of color blindness for taste to genuinely not notice any difference between scallion pancakes. But perhaps my friend was exaggerating.
My theory is that taste is one quality that separates the academics from the business people. Academia doesn't necessitate a lot of taste. If you have it, great. If you don't have it, no big deal. On the other hand, stuff such as product design, user interfaces, even software engineering, requires taste. You need to understand what makes a good piece of software or a good product. One could argue that Steve Jobs was a product supertaster. He was finely attuned to stuff that the average user (or the average HN reader) would not see. As PG notes, taste is being attuned to the collective unconsciousness, to a collective aesthetic. If you can tap into that, you can attract customers.
But like 10% of music let's say is absolute garbage, mostly top 40 stuff made from cosntructed bands with some models as front men, written by a team constructed by a label to create the most generically likeable music possible, edited to the point where it doesn't matter that the models are bad singers.
This music seems to account for about 90% of global music consumption as far as I can tell. I've been traveling around the world for many years and it get's depressing when you are in some remote jungle somewhere that feels like your finally off the beaten path and you get to some little shack restaurant / bar and they have One Direction on the radio. You can't fucking escape it. I've had times where I was on 3 continents on 3 months and you here the exact same garbage music regardless of location. It's crazy how ubiquitous it is.
And there is so much good music out there. If anything we are in a golden age in terms of volume of quality independent music being produced. And yet a vast majority of people seem to have no problem listening to the bottom of the barrel junk for a majority of the music they listen to.
None of these uses require the music to be “good”.
Actively listening to music is a somewhat rare activity.
And again I have nothing against the genre. I listen to non pop country. But people are specifically attracted to the worst of it and they seem to very actively like it.
I apologized while marveling to myself that something that felt so mediocre and forgettable to me was someone else's reason to exist.
I can't tell good music from bad; either I like the way it sounds or I don't.
I suspect a fair number of other people are like this. And more power to people who have good taste in music.
A few years ago, a group engineered the most unlikeable song ever:
Featuring bagpipes, a rapping opera singer, country music, and a children's choir singing holiday music that ends with telling you to do your shopping at Wal-mart.
There's a certain genius to how bad and obnoxious it is.
For example I watched Shang-Chi the other day, which is basically pop music in film form. As someone who's watched a fair amount of films, it's easy to see how it follows all the usual generic story beats - it's good but formulaic and relatively predictable. But if it was the first film you'd ever seen it would be amazing.
You have films that intentionally subvert expectations, relying on the fact that the audience knows how the story usually goes. That's jazz music. Classical often as well. But that relies on people both knowing the usual tropes and also wanting something different - there's some comfort in the known. Many people just want the superhero film. After all, the simple formula is the most inherently powerful regardless of the audience's internal knowledge of narrative or notation - that's why it's so commonly used.
My guess is that the serendipitous combination of high-level artistry + mass appeal + marketing dollars is simply much less common than the combo of "good at basic formula" + marketing dollars. Every now and then something really clever and different makes it into the top 40 just by sheer luck.
Seems like I was wrong above about the simple formula being the most powerful though doesn't it. Maybe a brand new formula can be even more powerful but is just that much harder to execute.
Though in a broader sense, with any creative endeavor the more people that like something, the worse it is.
Maybe it is just the case where team of experts created music many people like. People really don't mind generic when serving foods daydreaming or eating. Generic is often better, because it won't break flow of what they are doing.
If anything it feels engineered (and I use that term literally) to break your attention and make you focus on it. There tend to be lots of weird and drastic pitch and key changes that are designed to grab interest.
There is tons of music that is better background music than modern pop.
Judging which of two thing is better (aesthetic taste) feels like something quite different.
This is entirely plausible. If you are used to eating some food regularly over the course of decades, you will be able to discriminate between good vs. mediocre versions. If you have only eaten a food a few times, the most relevant comparisons will be with other types of food, and you won’t necessarily notice the difference between two separate experiences of it. When compared to pizza, tacos, or bagels, all scallion pancakes are pretty similar.
For instance, a person who drinks red wine every day will be able to tell you the difference between varietals, regions, distinguish $100 vs. $7 bottles, maybe notice good vs. bad years from some vineyard; someone who has only rarely had red wine might think that they all taste about the same.
Consider an American food analogue. Do I distinguish good and bad grilled cheese? How can I when its identity is that of a basic, unhealthy, cheap, low-class food? If you add more exotic ingredients, it becomes distant from its quintessential identity, so it becomes "good" grilled cheese in inverse proportion to it being, actually, grilled cheese. Contrariwise, if you enhance it by further indulging in the fats, oils, salts, etc., can we say this is "better" when it has also become even more base, even more low class? It becomes better as it becomes worse.
I find myself wanting to say something similar to your friend. All the grilled cheese are the same to me. I can plainly see one is different than another, but they are all objects of derision, and they only rise above that derision insofar as they stop being grilled cheese.
That's an assertion, not a self-evident fact. And one that I (and I am certain, many other people) would dispute.
Also in the cheap camp considering the ingredients are cheap and making it does not seem too time or equipment intensive.
I find working with dough to always be complicated, but the recipe itself seems simple enough, so it might qualify as basic too, relative to other recipes.
Low class is ill defined, but assuming it means it is popular with poorer people due to the lower cost of its ingredients and preparation, then it might also be true.
"Basic" is clearly not a useful adjective, when a grilled cheese sandwich can be made with a variety of different ingredients some of which are easily available in most parts of the world, and some are not. Certainly you can make a basic grilled cheese sandwich, but it's a logical fallacy to leap from there to "all grilled cheese sandwiches are basic".
"Low class" is again highly ingredient dependent. A grilled cheese sandwich made with some "rare" sourdough bread, irish grass fed butter and 3 kinds of artisanal cheese from different parts of the world is just as much as grilled cheese sandwich as one made with wonderbread and slices of american "cheese product". It's a similar logical fallacy: just because you can make a "low class grilled cheese" doesn't imply that "all grilled cheese sandwiches are low class".
"Cheap" is also covered in a similar way.
Unhealthy I will generally concede, other than to note that our ideas about what is and is not healthy or unhealthy food shift a lot over time (and often loop back on themselves).
For instance, I'm Jewish and my mother made potato latkes one way throughout my childhood. I loved those and various details about them (texture, flavor profile, doneness, etc.) but would go to other friends' house for a meal or whatever and they'd have their own latkes that just didn't taste as good, were much simpler flavor-wise, texture was more homogeneous, etc.
And then of course I've bought frozen pre-made latkes from places like Trader Joe's.
I'd imagine it's like buying frozen gyoza at H-mart vs making your own from scratch with either pre-made wrappers or even homemade ones, plus the filling.
That is not to say there is no good vs bad wine/chocolate/name your food. But it has nothing to do with price.
They took a bottle of cheap vodka, took a sample out, filtered the rest, took another sample and set it aside, and re-filtered the remaining vodka, and repeated this 10 times, so that they had a spectrum of vodka samples from filtered zero times to 10 times. They then brought on a vodka expert to taste test them and randomized the order of the samples to see if he could re-order them based on the number of times they went through the filter.
And he did it PERFECTLY.
IIRC, Adam and Jamie could tell the difference after 1 run through the filter, but not further runs.
The problem might just be that the TV shows you watch are so mediocre they can't even get a real expert.
Interpretation/Message A: You can find nuance and subtlety in anything, including Joe Biden photographs. This means that most wine-tasters/foodie snobs/art critics are just grasping at straws, and there is no value in subject pursuits of evaluation of quality whether it be Food or Art.
This is a disappointingly common perspective amongst tech nerds.
Interpretation/Message B: You can find nuance and subtlety in anything, including Joe Biden photographs. This is a testament to the power of the human mind and personality - that we can identify small minute differences in objects, flavours, and creations, and describe them with specificity. There is genuine beauty in the variety in the world and offhand shallow interactions with them do not adequately permit a full appreciation of the wonders of the universe. It's worth taking the time to find an area to gain an in-depth understanding in in, regardless of what anyone thinks. Yes, even Joe Biden photographs, if that's all it would be.
Bad example, as most pizzas _are_ pretty similar. And in my opinion the best pizzas are not too different from average pizzas. And yes, I had a lot of pizzas in my life, in Naples and elsewhere.
What I mean is: when an inexperienced person compares a scallion pancake to a pizza, or compares a scallion pancake to a taco, the two foods are obviously very different. But when an inexperienced person compares a mediocre scallion pancake to a great one, eaten on different days, it may be hard to remember the differences.
Likewise, someone has rarely eaten pizza might consider a good Neapolitan pizza to be broadly similar to a Domino's pizza, whereas someone who has pizza all the time will notice many differences between the two.
Similarly taking a bite of food, then a sip of a drink, and then chewing with a semi -open mouth is in extreme bad taste.
We aren't just the art we wear or aquire. Our tastes position us in a social heireachy.
There are a lot of them, and we each participate in more than one. School, church, family, job and on and on.
This might be true for academics in ancient Greek literature, but certainly isn't true for academics in CS nowadays. If you don't have good taste in research problems that are {important for downstream industry applications, scientifically interesting, tractable}, you won't get anything done, and you won't get published. If anything, the pressure for academics to develop good taste is stronger than for people designing product. You can have a product that provides just one utility that users desperately need and have terrible taste for all the other axes that make a product "good," and do just fine. Academic papers get judged (in peer review / traction after publication) purely against the taste and aesthetics of other people in your community.
I'm just kidding. I agree that it's not fair to make such an overarching statement about academics. I guess I was trying to express that I've noticed there's a difference between academic intelligence and taste, and my HN instincts told me that blaming academics would appeal to the crowd :P. More seriously, I think there's certainly a sense of taste in academia, but it's a very particular, very niche taste, as you've described. Someone who is tapped into the taste of the crowd will not be adept at understanding the taste of the few and vice versa.
I find this funny on HN because up to ~2017/18 the mainstream HN view was all these so called "taste" were people being mentally manipulated by advertising. There is no such thing as "taste", as PG's Dad said. And then gradually, somehow, HN changed. We have this [1]
>> Having taste makes you require more dollars to get the same level of satisfaction
I have carefully avoided trying excessively high quality things because once I've experienced something truly luxury then it becomes an ongoing expense to keep up that level of experience. The irritating part is that before I was perfectly happy in my ignorance of something better being available out there, but aftewards I feel like I'm "ruined" because I'm constantly disappointed and frustrated if I can't keep up the level of quality.
There are lots of people who couldn't tell the difference between 120hz screen and 60hz screen. High PPI and low PPI. Prime and Choice Ribeye. French Butter and Margarine. I mean lots of nerds only compare "spec", and fail to recognise there are lots of things beyond spec and numbers.
>One could argue that Steve Jobs was a product supertaster.
And that is why he was the low paying Beta tester and a yardstick of quality. And that was the reason why he was hard to work with. Most people simply dont have his "taste", at least not anywhere near the bar of Steve. And that is why we now have UI design decision devalued into A/B testing. Having an objective measure to prove something. In reality, without people demanding excellence, quality will quickly drift to the average of the team's taste. The results of design by committees.
For judgements of taste, no one is better than Kant. I recommend this essay: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetic-judgment/
In Kantian aesthetics, judgements of taste are subjective (because they differ between people) but are normative in that they claim universal validity (when we judge art to be good, we will all others to agree). Kant calls this "subjective universality". This explains why people disagree about art and why we can argue about it. It bothers us when people disagree with our judgements of taste. When we claim it doesn't bother us ("there's no accounting for taste"), we're either lying or not making judgements of taste.
Compare this to judgements about flavor (which Kant calls judgments of the agreeable). We don't argue about whether vanilla is better than chocolate or, if we do, we consider the argument trivial and subjective with no right answer. This is not the case when we argue about art.
The heart of the matter is whether beauty is objective or if it is merely relative to something. PG's essay argues that it is relative to being human, Kant similarly argues that it is relative to being a rational being (a somewhat broader category). This contrasts with the common argument that beauty is relative to some socio-cultural standard.
So Tolstoy was wrong?
https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/lear/english/e_ltf
> Tolstoy begins by saying that throughout life Shakespeare has aroused in him ‘an irresistible repulsion and tedium’. Conscious that the opinion of the civilized world is against him, he has made one attempt after another on Shakespeare's works, reading and re-reading them in Russian, English and German; but ‘I invariably underwent the same feelings; repulsion, weariness and bewilderment’.
Tough to argue, though. People still respond to Shakespeare and not only because they're supposed to.
Could not disagree more.
Your father can claim Shakespeare is good, but that doesn't make him right. I think Shakespeare is good, but that's a subjective opinion and holds no more weight than someone who thinks Dan Brown is a better writer /shudder.
> It is true that some people sometimes express the view that no judgments of taste are really better than others. They say, “There is no right and wrong about matters of taste”. Others will express the same thought by saying that beauty is “relative” to individual judgment or preference, or that it is “socially relative”. Such relativism is part of the intellectual air in in certain parts of the humanities. In particular, many intellectuals have expressed dislike of the idea that judgments of taste really have any normative claim, as if that would be uncouth or oppressive. However, if we are describing our thought as it is, not how it ought to be, then there is no getting away from the fact that normativity is a necessary condition of judgments of taste or beauty.
If you actually believed what you wrote, you wouldn't have included a "/shudder" at the end. In fact, you believe that Shakespeare is better than Dan Brown to the point that disagreement makes you uncomfortable. That's a judgement of taste. How you ground that belief (if at all) is a separate question.
Yes, but it's subjective. The idea that Dan Brown could be considered a better writer than Shakespeare is horrifying to me. The idea that people would put pineapple on a pizza is sacreligious to me. That someone actually likes Nickelbacks music is borderline offensive to me.
Unless you can objectively quantify why x is better than y, that is subjective.
> there is no getting away from the fact that normativity is a necessary condition of judgments of taste or beauty.
Even if you could agree to an evaluative standard for art, you still cannot objectively measure it.
Just because a majority of people agree on something, does not make it so.
Some people have a strong opinion on pineapple pizza. I have a strong opinion that wine and tobacco have bad taste.
I don't have an answer for whether or not there is a universal good taste, but this argument is fundamentally flawed because it conflates skill and expression. Of course any practiced painter is going to be better at painting, but that doesn't mean that what they paint is tasteful.
That said, did anyone else get the feeling that pg got into the mushrooms before writing this?
In the conversational spaces that attempt to account for taste are the same human conflicts that set one true believer against another of a different religion.
I think the proper reductio ad absurdum is the more trivial one. Taste some rotten meat-- and either spit it out and rinse with strong liquor, or endure (survive?) the GI infection, then tell someone else to eat it, and see what you feel about the subjectivity of taste afterwards. See how the person your recommended the rotten meat feels about it, if anything. Finer points of arguments for or against some artist or movement are unsubstantiable when there is, I think we can agree, such a thing as guts.
[1] I originally found HN after reading PG's book "Hackers and Painters"[2] and realized his practice of implementing the techniques of Old Masters in the late-20th Century, was not at all the kind of work that drew me to visual art.
There are very few universals of taste. Even looking only at food: some people routinely consume, for pleasure, rotten meats, rotten milk (cheese), various bitter poisonous seeds, extremely painful hot peppers, painful acidic or basic substances, and even feces or other bodily fluids. Of course, no one could enjoy drinking concentrated sulfuric acid for example, so there are some ultimate limits.
Similarly in all arts, there is rarely any style that is not seen as more refined than any other by some group of people, or profoundly distasteful. There are certainly people who would rather hang up children's paintings in their house than something like Malevich's Black square.
I bring this up because the topic reminds me of a philosopher of religion, Charles Taylor. One of his points is that this relativistic individualism inevitably leads to our own inability to express what we value. It's a kind of "explanatory atrophy." If your default position is I have my way and he has his, and that's all there really is to it you lose the ability to present and shape your own opinion in reaction to others. Most people don't have the vocabulary to articulate this, so "that's in bad taste" ends up just turning into Dudeism.. that's just your opinion, man.
So when confronted with something we think is in bad taste, we can't put vague thoughts into words, and therefore just fall back to "it's his/her personal taste, who I am to criticize?"
Ultimately, this question arises from a lack of education and cultural interest in the arts and in aesthetics. Without it, the definition of good taste will ultimately boil down to the opinions of whoever has money, power, or popularity.
Just because we may not be able to concretely define what makes art "good", does not mean we can not discuss why we like it.
If one person enjoys a piece because they appreciate the technical mastery of the brushwork, another enjoys it for how accurately it mimics reality, and another finds it special for the feelings evoked by the composition, each of those people can articulate why the piece speaks to them. They can describe why they like it, there's no reason anyone should suffer any sort of explanatory atrophy.
Now, can any of them convince another that the work is better than another? Probably not. The person who enjoyed the brushwork may find an even more masterfully painted piece, which they think is better. But perhaps the new piece doesn't demonstrate quite so much clarity in portraying reality, so the person who enjoyed that from the first piece still prefers the first. Who is to say whose values are more important?
For this reason, I think the multi-axis view is more constructive. Rather than spending our time arguing if technique or novelty or emotions or whatever else are what matters most, we can focus on appreciating each aspect as we see fit. And we can certainly articulate what a piece does well on any axis.
It’s not totally dissimilar from the idea of Newspeak in 1984, except we lose the ability to articulate concepts rather than lose the concept entirely.
Taylor goes into this far more than me, so I really wouldn’t base the entire argument on my comment. Unfortunately I do not remember the exact lecture he said this but I think it was in this series:
Now, perhaps this is the discussion you would like to see survive. If you feel that making arguments for things like why novelty is more valuable than technique is important, then I can understand your perspective and agree that we lose those conversations if we use a multi-axis approach. But if you care about articulating why a technique is impressive, or why a piece speaks to you, then I don't think we need to be able to rank all art on a single axis to have those discussions.
The rest, pretty much all the other aspects of art other than novelty are debatable and subjective, I think.
I think there's an argument to be made for culturally convergent "taste" as a measure of value. We like what others like, we're all trying to predict what others will like to increase our own status, etc. These forces should result in a convergent "good taste" to win.
Also theoretically a random static is the most novel thing that could be present.
That said, Zoolander has a 6.5 rating on IMDB and is considered a classic. Perhaps comedy as a genre is more likely to have that anomaly.
Like, the reason people dont know imdb under 5 that satisfy your condition is that people avoid watching movies with low score. They dont recommend them to others either.
Unstructured noise music was novel for while, but by now that has also been done.
Some people find original Star Wars to be a truly great movie. Those same people may find the movies that inspired Star Wars, like Kurosawa’s “Hidden Fortress” or Midway boring or solely on technical factors like color vs black and white. In a mass market product those technical factors make the work less approachable.
I spent several years walking through a pretty good collection of mid-20th century modern art. Most of it made no impression on me at all, but one installation’s aesthetic appealed to me for reasons that I cannot really describe. Part of it was the absurdity of what the facility did to that space — they literally dropped a random howitzer in the room. But if I nerded out and studied the artists and their art, I’d develop a more nuanced understanding and appreciation.
A well executed refinement of the throughly worn tends to get panned as derivative while foundational works have other sins and lack of polish forgiven. For an extreme example take the infamous Leni Riefenstahl - Adolf Hitler's propagandist. She is studied for her role in pioneering cinematic techniques, if her works weren't novel they would be more a matter of study for historians than cinematographers.
I expect his post to be surprisingly unpopular with this crowd, as it sleights a core tenet of our postmodern age. Namely, he's arguing for a form of objective truth and of "the good". A statistical derivation of this good for sure (and qualitative as opposed to a Benthamist, quantitative utilitarianism), but a good nonetheless.
But I applaud PG for taking this stance. Truth is not like your favorite flavor of ice cream. Software isn't either, and certain software either works or doesn't. Human culture and beliefs—our ideological software—has objectively superior results depending upon what your measuring stick is. Some beliefs are objectively better.
I'm answering your question with a question because the difficulty of the evaluation process is the point. But there can be an evaluation, and there can be an objective answer for a set of values.
For instance, if we said "I would like a worldview that optimizes people not committing suicide" we could compare and contrast and say that worldview A is better than worldview B because A's adherents don't commit suicide and B's do. We can combine multiple factors, however imprecisely, and still compare A and B together as a rational person.
PG is making a similar argument in the "truth" of how art evokes subjective goods in humans. Humans across time and space are the measuring stick, and hence why the present is not overly weighted in his assessment of this evocative metric of art's quality.
PG's view on this is radical today but hasn't been for thousands of years and won't be again, because human nature doesn't change that much. Contextualization (acquired taste) can make one appreciate art better, but there is something transcendent across space and time that makes art lovely to humans, even lacking focused context.
I believe there can be answers here if one can clearly define what you are optimizing for.
That is the question on my mind these days.
A stronger position is one that does not require the truth to be objective or material to in turn be universal and self-evident. Abstract truths, such as e^(i*pi) = -1 have no material basis and cannot be materially proven yet remain true and universal. The simultaneously purely abstract and non-arbitrary nature of mathematics is an obvious chink in the armor of the postmodernists’ worldview, so it is no surprise they have gone so far as to now discredit the universality of math by arguing that 2+2=5 https://twitter.com/kareem_carr/status/1289001355437379589?s... (this is a Harvard phd student)
In the case of 2+2=4, this is formalized by the Peano axioms [1], which define addition of natural numbers. However, in tropical geometry [2], addition returns the minimum of the numbers, not their sum.
The author of the original tweet makes this point, and I strongly agree with it: https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/12889571678449623...
As for 2.4 + 2.4 = 5, I think the tweet author is being a bit sloppy there in his explanation. But consider 0.1 + 0.2. Ask a human, and they'll tell you it's 0.3. Ask a computer, and it'll likely tell you it's 0.30000000000000004. The point is that in both scenarios, 0.1, 0.2, and addition are defined differently.
Yet each one is self-consistent and potentially independently discoverable by sentient life forms light years away from us, even though these different algebras have no material form.
> But consider 0.1 + 0.2. Ask a human, and they'll tell you it's 0.3. Ask a computer, and it'll likely tell you it's 0.3000000000000004
Just because the computer performs imprecise arithmetic does not make .1+.2=.300000004 a meaningful statement from which an entire self-consistent arithmetic system can be derived. The computer’s result is in error. It’s called floating point error.
I do not. What I am saying is that knowledge—if such a thing exists at all and is worthy of defense by humans—can be addressed in a rational, objective way.
Lots of things are approximations, but we do not deny the existence of categories as useful phenomena or an epistemological tool. To paraphrase a famous exchange of ideas, GB Shaw: "All chairs are quite different" vs. Chesterton: "Well how do you then call them all chairs?"
The postmodernist sleight of hand is to say that perhaps because there are differing contexts that there is not a universal tendency; such a commonality is either non-existent or should be disregarded. They would not categorically discard visceral human experiences that lead to say "thirst" or "hunger" or "anger", but they will claim that there are not common phenomena that engender "awe" or "wonder" or "intrigue". I disagree with that statement. That humans can reliably classify things that are "beautiful" across cultures (and have done so for millenia, even when they hate each others' cultures), shows there is a common tendency towards taste.
When thirsty, many people drink water, but the postmodernist looks at the few drinking Brawndo and has to deny the generalization that water quenches thirst but of thirst entirely.
Of course they wouldn’t. It would be too difficult for the average person to buy and they don’t need to especially since it isn’t really their goal to dismantle truth completely, their goal is to dismantle the values we hold as a society so that in the vacuum they may impose new values upon us. They do that under the guise of questioning truth. This is why I said that when you embrace their objective/subjective categories you are helping their cause. Once those categories are established and accepted by society it is simply their job to argue that the values they do not like are subjective and arbitrary, then people who have accepted the subjective/objective dichotomy will do the rest.
I've always cast a very wide net and thought of art as anything that intentionally provokes a response.
Where it gets tricky I think is that "bettering" can be with reference to many different criteria — morality, empathy, insight into ourselves, insight into others, bearing witness, emotional peace, and so forth — that it becomes very complex very quickly. I also think that it necessarily depends on where someone, or some group of people are, at some point in time, so it will shift (this also arguably speaks to how taste is a function of the creator, creation, and the beholder simultaneously).
This is I think the central argument of the piece and I think it is very wrong. He conflates the notion of goodness in a teleological sense with proficiency. When people talk about good or bad taste they try to make an objective claim about the purpose of art, that's to say what end a piece of art serves, or to judge the quality of what it ultimately expresses.
You can be 'good' in the sense of proficient on utterly meaningless tasks. Someone can memorize ten thousand digits of a random sequence. You can be good or bad at it, and we can objectively figure out if you are, but the task isn't objectively meaningful.
To say that there is no good or bad taste is to say there is, ultimately no non-subjective standard for a piece of art. This does not imply that any subject that produces art cannot be judged on their merits by their own standards.
> That one must judge art, to enjoy art, appears fundamentally exclusionary,
Well, yes. You must make a judgement in order to have a reaction. In order to have a positive reaction to something (enjoy) it, somewhere along the line, you must have decided if had positive attributes. If it had bad attributes, you would not enjoy it. But a decision/judement/evaluation IS made.
EDIT: another comment may help explain why I find "judgement" so completely orthogonal to this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29229946
I feel this even dilutes the situation further because the moral questions of judgement are often out of place or under questioning in works of art.
An odd question but yes I think it’s great, as I explained in post, mostly because I agree with it. Not sure if you’re asking a real question or making a rhetorical point about thinking people are crass for believing in taste, in beauty.
Assuming it is a real question, part of the reason I think it’s a great essay, as I allude to be in my post, is the brevity and succinctness of it. Paul is sort of known for that— being able to put forth provocative ideas in a concise and compelling way.
I’m sincerely sorry, saddened in a way, that you find art crass. You are not alone. It’s threatening to many people I’ve observed. For me, it’s one of the most important of human achievements, and worthy of celebration and contemplation. To fully appreciate it implies comparing artists and artwork and thinking deeply about what makes some art better, special. No human is excluded from this most human of activities, except for those who exclude themselves. I would urge you, don’t be one of those. Engage with art critically, and enjoy the many rewards it brings. The question of aesthetics has captivated the greatest thinkers for very good reasons. It is to be fully human, to appreciate life. Don’t deny yourself that.
The judgement of merit by a non-artist of an artist's work is the part I found to be crass and rather a shadow of the social benefits of taste than good taste itself.
A friend once asked me for a drawing of mine to hang on his wall. I offered the choice between two, one a portrait with some geometric figures and the other a pair of skulls. The latter he told me was "not to his taste", and the former he hung up in his entryway. Some things belong some places and not others, and an absolute hierarchy of taste is only the temporary a side-effect of an absolute hierarchy of power. Judge not, lest ye be in turn.
I have to conclude that we are not in disagreement, because we are not even communicating.
Maybe a simple set of questions would help: You don’t feel some art is better or special? Or you don’t feel a person can discern between art that is better or worse, even in the most extreme cases? Or is it something else?
If you yourself are an artist, or own art, then surely you find some works better than others? Museums make these decisions about what to own. Do you believe one can judge some museums better or worse?
Yes, but that is the point I think, subjectivity. You also feel that way for different reasons, and who's to judge which of us is objectively right?
History, hiring committees, the general public, artists assessment of their own work, artists assessments of other peoples work, common sense, to name a few. Obviously I have come to my own conclusion on the matter. My interest is in why others can’t see what to me seems self evident. I too used to not understand, to think it’s all subjective, that there is no there there. But I hadn’t thought about it deeply enough. It seems some are confused because of books they’ve read or ideas put forth by thinkers they’ve found persuasive. I guess I would need to read all of those the same books to understand their position, but what’s the point if I know they are wrong? When alchemy was a thing I might need to read enormously to understand the full scope of the beliefs of those practitioners. A waste of time frankly.
I like to engage who have less invested in their own mistaken conclusion about art, because many people are like me or Paul, ready to be turned around if prompted to really think about it more deeply. Those people may find, as I have, that art becomes much more meaningful and enriching when you believe there’s something to it. To believe it’s all subjective is a great insult to the professionals and artists who devote themselves to it. It robs the person who possessed those beliefs of the opportunity to fully appreciate art. I know this from personal experience. I’ll leave it at that. A long way of saying I agreed with the essay.
In order for this to be a valid take, it requires that we have some way to measure goodness. Else how can we determine what is good and what is not, and then judge peoples' taste? But I don't think anyone's yet proven any such measure to exist. Certainly many people have offered their personal viewpoint, but how do we know which one has the best taste? We're in a bit of a deadlock - we need to be able to measure goodness to say who has good taste, but we need to know who has good taste so we can know how to measure goodness.
With that said, Paul Graham ultimately ends by saying that "There is definitely not a total order either of works or of people's ability to judge them, but there is equally definitely a partial order of both." Which is not particularly insightful, in my opinion. It's quite easy to see that a flawed attempt to replicate another's work is worse than the unflawed original. But no one really cares about such things, and no one is surprised by this revelation. All in all, the essay takes a long meandering road to make it sound like there is such a thing as good taste, then at the last moment redefines it to something different and uninspired, hoping that the reader is too invested at that point to care. Frankly, it felt disrespectful to the reader, a deceitful waste of time.
So it's more like: when love was put into it, it tastes good.
Picasso's Guernica is the poster child for art made from hate, in this case against the Spanish Civil War. But it's equally a painting centered on love for the victims of the war. After all, it's mostly a painting of those victims.
I don't think much good of anything can come from a position of indifference.
This doesn’t hold up for me. We’re comparing PGs painting ability to two renaissance artists who painted in fairly similar ways. When you go and try to paint in a style, I can 100% agree that you can execute better or worse than another person. I don’t doubt that PGs paintings are not as good as famous renaissance paintings.
I don’t think that’s what people mean when they talk about good taste.
PG uses a narrow definition of taste, so let’s make sure we’re using that:
> There's a narrow sense in which it refers to aesthetic judgements and a broader one in which it refers to preferences of any kind. The strongest proof would be to show that taste exists in the narrowest sense…
I don’t know that comparing art to Renaissance greats is actually engaging in aesthetic judgements. Maybe others look at each piece of art as if it has no cultural significance, and see each thing as if divorced from all of history. I cannot, despite my best efforts, imagine viewing each piece of art like that.
I can certainly tell when a style of art I am familiar with is executed well. That is what I think PG is talking about here.
For me, taste is when I decide whether I like a style of art. Style, here, can be as broad as an era, or extremely specific.
My ‘taste’ is how much I enjoy a particular category, be it an era or a very specific thing. I really am not a fan of Renaissance paintings despite how many times I’ve walked through art galleries. I _can_ pretty clearly point out which are more or less successful. But almost none are too my taste.
And that’s the difference, to me. The taste is orthogonal to execution. But this argument for there being good taste relies on the belief that people who say there’s no such thing as good taste also meaning that one cannot execute well.
The differences between execution and taste become murkier for nascent art forms, where it’s possible to get into a position where it’s hard to tell if you have a taste for the style execution is not yet there. But that’s not really the point here.
Skill is the difference between Picasso's scribbles and the dribbles of a random 8-year-old. Or between pg and Bellini. It's the ability to convey what you want to convey.
Vision is harder to pin down. It's deciding to convey something worthwhile. And that's the hard part. What's worthwhile? It's so dependent on context. Is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel meaningful to somebody that has never heard of Christianity? Is impressionism all that impressive without the photograph? For that matter, why aren't we impressed by new works of impressionism? How come some artists aren't celebrated in their own time?
So yeah, clearly there's such a thing as skillful art, and maybe being able to recognize that could be considered "good taste". But I'm not sure that there's such a thing as objectively meaningful art. If there is, it'd take more than a few paragraphs to prove it.
The presented "proof" doesn't go any further than that, though. It mentions that it changes a lot over time, but instead of engaging with that as an indicator that taste is always a moment-by-moment subjective thing, then IMO goes off the rails a bit with weird analogies. It ends up circular. Good art is that which causes the desired reaction in those with good taste?
The best counter-argument to this skill/practice-based argument is that you can put a lot of skill and practice into something that people end up rejecting. Literature, film, and music shows plenty of examples of this. Even software shows this - you can spend a lot of effort to make a very intricate piece of software, that someone with "taste" may sneer at because of how fragile it is, even if they couldn't create it themselves. And then you are left just with that circular "your effort and practice and skill doesn't matter if it doesn't focus on the right things that hit your audience the right way, so the important skill is that of hitting your audience the right way, so a lot of it is up to the audience, so good taste is defined by ... itself and its audience"?
The entire essay should be a short proposal to a dictionary publisher :
"Please make it clear that the definition of taste is "being able to spot what lots of other people will like"".
People could debate that and you don't need the silly "proofs".
For what it's worth, I agree with Paul about valuing art that demonstrates a type of technical mastery, and I like ranking things. But having multiple axes of quality, and disagreeing about how to assess and prioritize them, is far more useful: it's what makes a market. Just because your ranking is useful to you doesn't make it an objective truth. On the other hand, the absence of objective "good taste" doesn't make discussions about merit useless.
> If there's no such thing as good taste, then there's no such thing as good art. Because if there is such a thing as good art, it's easy to tell which of two people has better taste. Show them a lot of works by artists they've never seen before and ask them to choose the best, and whoever chooses the better art has better taste.
This makes no sense to me.
“If carbon exists, then carbon-based alien life forms exist. Because carbon-based aliens exist, carbon exists.”
Logically, not wrong, but you missed the most interesting part of the proof: aliens exist?! PG missed proving the most interesting part of his post: that good taste exists. I don’t think reductio ad absurdum really works here because there are millions of possible explanations for the “effects” of good taste. In his example, the fact that people have non-random responses to art.
The problem here is just the fact that people have consistent responses to art does not suppose that there exists some inherent reasoning called “taste.” In fact, many popular things are abhorred as poor taste. I think we can agree that liking Citizen Kane more than Twilight would be called “good taste.” The problem here of course is that “taste” is a sociological construct - not a logical or philosophical one - designed by humans to distinguish class upon non-obvious signifiers. Perhaps you could dress a lower class person in fancy dress and perfume, but any upper class person could snuff them out in a moment by any hundreds of small little signifiers.
PG seems to want to talk about taste without having to say any of the unfashionable things about it, not naming any specific art works or signifiers of taste. He wants to “prove” taste exists without ever even defining it. Without a single example in this framework that lends credence to his ideas. By his logic, Marvel movies and Twilight should be more tasteful than Vertigo because more people more consistently like it. In reality, taste works the opposite way, but it’s not that simple either. Most people would hate Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, but that does not mean that liking it means you have good taste. Rather the opposite in fact. The truth here, of course, is that “taste” is a cultural, social, and economic property and lens, not a logical one. You have to get into real world to argue about taste, which PG seems entirely uninterested in doing.
If I may be a bit tongue in cheek, I would advise Paul that if you want to start talking about taste, you must first talk about scarcity and then irony.
If one enjoys something but cannot deconstruct the attributes of one's joy, then it isn't necessarily taste that one has but merely a pleasurable sensory perception.
You can judge whether someone actually has taste if they can describe to you why they appreciate a particular thing. Ask someone who listens to a lot of rap music and they can tell you what they think makes a good rap song. Ask someone who reads poetry and they will tell you how they judge good poetry. Hell, I bet you could ask someone who watches a lot of porn and they'll tell you what they look for in a good porn scene.
To demonstrate the opposite case, ask a person who casually binge watches everything on Netflix and ask them why they enjoy a particular show. They might stare at you blankly for a second and only respond with nonspecific reasons such as "it's really scary" or "because it's funny" and little beyond that. This isn't taste, because their experience is hardly different from a tickle. A person can have taste for comedy, but just because comedians and tickles both result in laughter doesn't mean it takes the same level of thought to appreciate the two. (though I suppose it's possible for one to be a good tickler, so my analogy falls apart in that sense)
In fewer words, my point is that taste is a thing, but it has no objective qualifier other than that it is merely the differentiation between thought applied to sensory input as opposed to thoughtlessly responding to input.
One's tastes can be entirely inverted from the norm, but we can't qualify those tastes because that would require uncommon knowledge and experience. On the other hand, the presence of some kind of taste can at least be partially measured. It's the goodness and badness of taste that is purely relative absent any shared mechanics involved.
I used to work in ultra-high end restaurants (think World's 50 Best). All the cooks are incredibly skilled. But only a small amount of them make good chefs, usually the ones who travel and eat out lots themselves. Many simply had no idea what ingredient combinations are good or bad, even if they could execute a recipe extremely well. I did make it as a chef, ish, got some awards, but the economics are tough, I took a few breaks to travel and go back to school. Working on a few other things. I still do consulting for restaurateurs I know just because I can.
When you look at the top of the top chefs, the difference comes down to taste. They all have the same skills. The best simply make better combinations.
Some artists seek to recreate the world around them in great fidelity, and if they succeed in producing photorealistic paintings then for them, that is great art. Others seek to stir up controversy or draw attention to some cause, and if their work achieves that then that is great art. Others may simply seek to express themselves, or find peace with their feelings, and if they succeed in this then it is great art.
This is of course a different definition than Paul Graham would use. It does not allow for so much judgement and comparison. But for people interested in producing art, rather than consuming it, I think it's a much more useful perspective.
The reason that the art establishment is dismissive about quality or "taste" is a bit more nefarious, and at least as banal -- they are not good at producing art. So they denigrate that which they know is better than they can achieve.
And by their influence (and based upon their degree of control over the opinion-shaping levers) the majority end up rejecting quality -- or being persuaded to reject their own sense of taste.
“What do people enjoy, and why” is a much more interesting question than “what should they like, and why it’s only a coincidence that aligns with my personal preferences”.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirsig%27s_Metaphysics_of_Qual...
It does seem to me that by his reasoning good taste exists since good art exists, problem being that what is considered good art and what people like change with time, present a piece of modern art to Michelangelo and chances are he would consider it some sort of insulting joke.
Good taste then is not something objective, but depends on context and the importance of being able to tell what is good now often pales to the importance of being able to tell what is good for oneself, moreover, the good taste becomes dependent on those "average" tastes.
Sometimes to the detriment of their works. I had a friend who was an aspiring artist, and it was fascinating listening to him talk about his art. He thought deeply about his work and a very clear vision and philosophy about what, how and why he wanted to achieve. Unfortunately his actual execution never got the same care and his actual exhibitions looked mediocre and thrown together together at the last minute (which, to be fair, they tended to be). He never felt that was the important part, and unless you had been in the pub with him the night before you would never have a chance of 'getting' what he was trying to do.
Totally thoughtful. Can talk about development in pub for hours. Can talk about architecture, frameworks, best practices, you name it. And his code still sux, is hard to maintain and unfixable unless you refactor it.
Piet Mondriaan is a nice example: the execution could have been done by anybody willing to spend the time and the effort, but somehow the paintings have a value that well exceeds the association I have with the skills required to compose and execute them. I know a few painters that are off the scale good whose work will never be worth more than the materials cost, never mind their time.
Good taste is in the eye of the beholder, as well as what people agree on is good taste.
It's much easier to label something bad taste than to have a meaningful argument about what is mediocre taste or good taste. It's like trying to define culture in terms of observable facts about reality, instead of a living thing, the lens through which we perceive everything, including the frameworks we use to reason about things. You can't really measure anything with a yardstick made of rubber and springs.
He said that there isn't any higher truth that can "prove" that a recording of off-tempo typewriter clacking is 'worse' than the Beatles, and that technically both are equally valid as an artistic statement, but that since taste is based on the subject, we can use someone's stated preference for typewriter clacking over the Beatles as revealing of their personality and belief set, and then we can decide whether or not we want to be in society with them.
This put this debate entirely to rest in my mind. I no longer worry about whether or not my tastes are "inferior" or "superior" to someone else's tastes, only whether or not they are compatible. Some people want to rid the world of traditional architecture, classical music, and any other old-fashioned hierarchical art form; their taste for the contemporary isn't inferior to my taste for the traditional, it is merely incompatible, and will inevitably lead to a different society than the one in which I would like to reside.
In a sense, I think the social sciences, philosophy, and the arts get "cranks" thinking they've figured them out, just like physics and math et c., do, except at a much higher volume, to the point that any discussion of those topics outside of highly specialized forums ends up consisting mostly of cranks arguing with one another, most of whom, if they have put any actual time into studying the topic at all, have fallen down some narrow crank-dominated rabbit hole of bad ideas. It's like if Flat Earthers were treated as having valid opinions.
This essay, and the core premise of “good taste” looks to be another example of the same. “Good taste” can exist on average, outside of the context of specific individuals. Indeed, good taste is emergent. It exists in the sense that “critics” are just another market, and market needs are met. “Good taste” can then be described and prescribed, but like most centrally planned policies, it will fail to adapt.
So yes, good taste can be said to exist. It cannot, however, be possessed.
The pareto frontier of possible artworks approaches higher quality with increased labor input. This doesn't mean the Labor Theory of Value isn't totally bonkers.
So, people talk about works that are memorable. Like that one abstract dot of historical interest, or the original paintings from the old masters that perfected the techniques that artists emulate.
The argument works in any recognized genre or art - the claim is "In a particular chosen genre, a person can be more skilled than an 8 year old who has no idea what they are doing".
The genre can be whatever that has no known established numeric metric. I.e. sports do not generally qualify for this argument as they most of the time have a metric that is more or less objective, and you can say based on numbers who is better without the need for "taste".
To my understanding, Paul is familiar with academic art so he feels confident in using it as the example genre as he is comfortable in discussing it's nuances.
You see arguments about aesthetics and taste all the time in sport. "Team A may have won the championship, but they have a very ugly style. Team B played a much more beautiful game" or "I love watching Team C play even if they lose almost all the time, because they have such a fun and interesting way of playing". In some sports like MMA you have fighters with near perfect records and impressive win streaks against the best in the league, but no one watches them because they're "boring".
Essentially there are two ways of viewing sport. From the player/teams point of view where it is all about winning, or from the spectators point of view where the primary goal is to be entertained.
Feel free to not like any of it, it is subjective, that's the point. You shouldn't let anyone tell you what art to like. Group think is bad in the art world as well (though it can be good for art dealers). But I thought it was worth the time to speak up against your characterization of the values of the art world. I have my own critiques of the art world but it's absolutely unfair to generalize that people see no difference between minimalist abstract art and the Sistine Chapel. And I believe it is interesting to understand why people consider particular works of art important even if that doesn't mean you should also subjectively like the piece.
You probably should not "like" some of the best art at all, because it should have made you uncomfortable and think things you would rather not.
Of course I say "some", because art has all kinds of different purposes or intents, and that is only the purpose of some art, not all art.
So I think recognize, acknowledge, or appreciate are the kinds of words to apply rather than like.
And art can even be good even if you not only don't like it but don't even appreciate it. It can be skillfully effective on you whether or not you like it or even have the background or perception to recognize it's quality.
So even "appreciate" isn't really a valid metric.
I think there’s this notion that art has to be technically sophisticated to be of value. But really, all art has to do is communicate something interesting or meaningful. If a white dot does this then who cares how it was made?
Finally, people make a big deal about the price of art. Well, artists (the ones I like anyway…) don’t have much to do with what a piece of art will sell for. Ultimately the piece of art is just some interesting exchange between artist and viewer, the price has nothing to do with any of this exchange.
I’m just a guy that walked into a museum and thought this guy has communicated something profound and beautiful. When someone come up and says “but that must’ve taken 5 minutes to make!!” they look like assholes.
1. https://news.knowyourmeme.com/news/heres-to-loss-the-interne...
No one prefers a random dot on a random piece of canvas. They prefer a very particular dot on a very particular canvas made by a very particular person at a very particular point in history. Remove any one one those and it loses all meaning and value. And even the most ardent fan of that work would never argue that that artist was a greater painter or even artist than Michaelangelo.
At the end of the day the "Art" is not in the craft and as such art cannot be reproduced. The world is full of Sistine Chapel pastiches on rich peoples ceilings, painted by great craftsmen, many whom might be talented artists in their own rights, and no one is in awe by them.
And anyway I feel that putting our unnamed theoretical artist up against one of the all time great artists in history is a bit unfair. Anything recognizable as a Michelangelo will automatically win just because he's Michelangelo. Probably more fair to put him up against a second-rate contemporary of Michelangelo that most people haven't heard of if you want to remove 'name recognition' from the equation.
It wins because it’s good work, not because it’s Michelangelo. A Michelangelo work will win even when the viewer doesn’t know it’s Michelangelo or even who that is.
That the point: people will appreciate it without having to be told “oh this is the high-status guy, you’re supposed to like it”, “only the high-status people can see the emperor’s clothes”, etc.
This seems like a big assumption. Is there a study that tests this idea?
If you're going to demand copious evidence solely of the hypotheses you don't like, you're going to be locked into confirmation bias.
But yes, there are easy tests you could do: get the ratios of "can't identify who made this" to "I like this" for visitors to Michaelangelo (or any still-displayed Renaissance artist, really) vs random high-status super-edgy modern.
> Why is it a big assumption that most people don't need to know "This is by Michelangelo and he is a high status artist" to enjoy the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (or whatever else)?
This is an entirely different statement than your original comment. Of course, you don't need to know Michelangelo to "enjoy" the Sistine Chapel, nobody argued otherwise. Your claim was that, "A Michelangelo work will win even if the viewer doesn't know it's Michelangelo or even who that is." This implies a measure of comparison to something or someone else, which is far different than enjoying a single piece of art.
Surely, there are people who prefer Bertoldo di Giovanni [1] to Michelangelo.
[1] https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-little-known-s...
It is when you don't ask for the same evidence of the opposite, original assertion, and when the test you demand/clarify-the-existence-of is a strangely narrow test that no one would have reason to do in the first place because the core problem is that no one is subjecting the more modern art to that kind of rigor to begin with! (Which would obviate the whole debate.[1])
So yes, when you come in and single out my response as needing a very specific test before you'll consider it plausible, aren't being epistemically fair.
>Of course, you don't need to know Michelangelo to "enjoy" the Sistine Chapel, nobody argued otherwise.
Are we looking at the same thread? From earlier in this same thread:
>>Anything recognizable as a Michelangelo will automatically win just because he's Michelangelo.
The assertion is that the knowledge of Michelangelo and his association with that work is artificially raising the viewer's appreciation of it. My contrary claim was that it's appreciated as good work, more so than the garbage you see in modern art museums, because it's good, not because the average viewer cares about Michelangelo specifically, which dagw was saying that the later art does (apparently) require (knowledge of the artist and other "context").
>Your claim was that, "A Michelangelo work will win even if the viewer doesn't know it's Michelangelo or even who that is." This implies a measure of comparison to something or someone else, which is far different than enjoying a single piece of art.
It implies exactly what it meant in the original comment and thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29227817
That is, a comparison against the later super-edgey modern art.
[1] Except maybe the time that troll passed off a monkey's art as prestigious, which made the duped critics double down and say, "well ... maybe that monkey has artistic talent!"
Both of these statements can be true at the same time. As an extreme example, take the Mona Lisa. No matter how much you think it's a good painting, there is no way that people would travel from around the world in their thousands to see that painting if it wasn't for the whole story/mythology/history around that painting and its creator. It's not THAT good a painting. There are dozens of technically more interesting and 'better' painting hanging in the Louvre that those people happily run past just to see the Mona Lisa. Or go to the Galleria dell'Accademia and count how many people who are just interested in the David statue and ignore all the other, equally 'good', statues they have.
Or take an uninteresting commissioned portrait of a minor nobelmans daughter and tell people it's an original Michelangelo. They will all of a sudden find the painting much more interesting than if you told them it was by an unknown contemporary of Michelangelo.
And there is nothing weird about this. A rusty sword that you can prove has been used by a famous general in a great battle will attract more interest and attention than a rusty sword of unknown provenance.
All of this can be true without taking anything away from Michelangelo as one of the greatest artists who has ever lived.
The "acid test" of Renaissance art being more praiseworthy than the exhibits in modern art museums is that people can know nothing about the "goo" of the artists and still go away thinking "damn, that's awesome". The fact that some of the artists have "name currency" is noise in this dynamic, not signal.
If the best you can say about the super edgy, more modern art is that "oh yeah, people flock to see it because they think other people like it who think other people like it" -- well, you either aren't familiar with "The Emperor's New Clothes", or you sorely missed its point.
It seems you felt attacked by my comment, which was not the intent. Apologies if it came off confrontationally. I never asked you to supply “a specific test”, I asked if there was one. Not sure why you took it as a personal attack on your point. I was genuinely interested in if the topic has been studied/tested.
Ask someone, you can have a replica of a piece you've seen, maybe even in person, that has cultural importance to their religion and it is by {famous artist} or you can have a replica of a piece by {some other artist}. I'd guess they'd go with what they know, sight unseen.
But now we are no longer talking about them as art, but as interior design and decoration.
Also, I would not picked any of those for living room. Might pick dot for background screen. And this choice have nothing to do with actual value of either.
But equally, that is not what made Michelangelo a great artist. There where dozens of extremely technically skilled painters that lived around the same time, none of whom most people have heard of. So if you want to argue for Michelangelo as a great artists, you cannot simply say "well he was very good at painting and made pretty pictures". Lots of people did that, so why is Michelangelo famous today and none of them.
The only relevant skill an artist can have is to capture their emotions in their work in such a way that the audience of it is made to both experience and ponder those. Extra points for complex compositions.
There is something to be said about the kind of feeling you chose to share. You can be a dick about it while stil perfecting the challange.
The white dot on canvas or the entirely white canvas are simpel displays of arrogance mixed with some prestige. Not a particularly refined combination of and it reduces to anger in many viewers. It doesnt enrich the spectators life, they know those emotions well enough which, like love songs, makes it poor taste.
There are many technically skilled artists, physicists, and entrepreneurs whose names you will never learn because the never ended up doing anything particularly original. (And of course there are many original thinkers who will never be known because they're just not technically skilled enough to execute on their vision.)
In my opinion, value in many fields ends up being the cross product of "doing the thing right" and "doing the right thing".
That is straw position.
> who would more likely impress the fans of the other, that artist trying to reproduce Michaelangelo's work or vice versa?
There are many artist capable to reproduce Michaelangelo's work. They are not impressing people who admire Michaelangelo or classical art. People who admire Michaelangelo typically fully understand that people after Michaelangelo learned from him. They also understand Michaelangelo was working, learning and studying having limitations we don't have.
I know that Thiel is clearly trying to get the audience to go "oh wow, physics is harder than lit!"
But strangely enough this runs counter to my personal experience. While not physics in particular, I know far more lit/classics/humanities people doing advanced/research work in technical areas than I do technically trained people excelling in anything humanities related.
My experience has also been that most physicists, when confronted with challenging French critical theory, simply dismiss it as nonsense rather than taking any time to understand it. I have met far more people who were trained on reading Derrida who can converse casually about advanced calculus topics than the reverse.
Additionally I find something like Lagrangian mechanics to take far less time to under stand than not just learning French, but learning French well enough to engage deeply with texts and theory spanning a fairly broad period of history.
As to your question:
> Sistine Chapel ceiling, who would more likely impress the fans of the other, that artist trying to reproduce Michaelangelo's work or vice versa?
That's a combination of a straw man and a false equivalency. First the "dot on a white canvas" represents a very, very narrow part of a very specific field of Modern art which the vast majority of trained academic artists and theorists will agree is not particularly their taste. There's plenty of niche physicists doing work that most physicists find questionable. A better example of postmodern art is Pulp Fiction, and I think if you polled the general public on whether or not they wanted to see the Sistine chapter or watch Pulp Fiction you'd find a bigger split, and likewise each artist would have an equally hard time.
The false equivalency is that you're comparing Michelangelo to some imagined Modernist painting that I'm guessing you don't have a name for. This is a bit like comparing Einstein to an imaginary string theorist a liberal arts college.
This kind of assumes that all good artists have good taste. Some artists may have good taste, but may not be great artists themselves. Others may create great art, sometimes by chance, and understand its relevance post-facto (maybe as it becomes more contextually relevant?).
In my experience (some engineering, mostly product mgmt), taste is an emergent property. As some others have alluded, good taste can emerge from both intuition and thought/reflection. The hard part is articulating what makes one piece of art better than others. Most people can recognize the gap between paintings of an 8 yr old's painting vs. Bellini, but does that mean they have good taste? Many of us have some built-in, intuitive sense of taste. But to apply/execute on it, we need to be able to articulate it.
Unless good art is defined as one that appeals to more people's taste.
I agree with the premise that there is such a thing as good taste, but this is not the knockdown argument it's presented to be.
Who are these two people? Art historians or layman? Are they looking at the work of established artists or newcomers? Are they given context for the work that's displayed, or not? Who's deciding which of the 'art' is better?
I think all we're saying here is that good taste is a consensus preference.
This step of the argument assumes the conclusion. If both people answer n true false questions randomly, then with high probability (probability at least 1- 1/sqrt(n) ) one person will have answered more questions correctly.
This does not imply that either person is better than random.
You can be right but have an unpopular opinion, similarly to how you can have good taste but maybe nobody knows about your art and therefore you can remain "undiscovered" forever, so experts might never have a chance to review your work and deem it good. You can also be right under most circunstances but a bigger factor making your judgement sound but wrong.
In engineering (programmers, managers, product managers) you have this a lot where you're trying to promote people with good judgement to own large codebases, or big projects, or teams of people, but identifying those is something that is hard to do.
It'd be interesting to have art experts quantifying art in similar ways that we quantify engineering work. If experts can classify art, surely there's a mental checklist they go over, even if they never tried to put it to paper. I imagine it'd be a mixture of from 1-10 "how much of a sense of awe did the piece cause you" and from 1-10 how "good are the porportions" or whatever, but this is where I struggle. Perhaps it's more complicated than that and there's a decision tree of each "criteria" but surely there must be one, the same way we'd assess a software engineer or a product manager or an engineering manager for good judgement in the quality of their work.
In visual presentation, there's also the human preferences - movement (eg Van Gogh and his inspirations including traditional Chinese and Japanese brush art and its attentions on wind and wave), symmetry (almost all cultures, and rebels against such as Picasso), detailed representation, and difficulty to craft.
But I know little of art, other than I like going to galleries from time to time. In code, there's cleanliness, efficiency, symmetry with documentation and effects and - the end result. All of these take craft, and - it can show. The more consistent and reliable, the better the craft, as well. Oh one can get into aesthetic tastes as well - how well a particular medium is for use to be effective, the different art and craft in all the sources and contexts. Not everyone will see the craft in the construction of paper, or the laying of a foundation, but those who know the craft - may. And it can matter to those who wish do to work they value, even if never seen by another.
It is something we see a lot in software and (proper) engineering. I might have a taste on how to shard a database or pool connections, arrange workers off a queue. All of those come together to reflect a taste on how to build a complete system.
My taste will differ from others - the more dimensions we measure the easier / harder it is to find commonality. (This might be a lesson in politics)
The point being is that taste can be "wrong" - but only when looking at the desired goal. The goal for most art is self-expression. The goal for software systems might be monthly engagement. Its a lot easier to decide if engagement goes up and so judge taste in software design.
This does lead to the interesting point that one can "teach" taste ... through following a metric and iterating. And this is often the advice - paint lots.
But it does indicate that there is Good Taste. Its the taste that gets you to your goal. There may well have been painters like Pollock in Renaissance Italy, but they just starved to death before dripping much paint. And if there was only one "Good Taste" (what the Medici's liked) then there was a way to harness the greatest skill to that subset of Taste. Da Vinci may well have preferred abstract modernism, but he also preferred to eat.
Now it is possible for more ways to align skill with different tastes. So we have more good tastes. More groupings of trade offs.
And that is something i think we are seeing in software too. Open Source is one huge trade off that influences other things. Sort of like, Perspective.
Is there art that is overwhelming appreciated by people in one culture, but does not resonate at all with another culture?
If that is the case, to what extend does good taste transcend cultural barriers?
Perhaps the right model to think is that art interacts with the ideas and culture of a people. Good art exposes these ideas and cultures to the surface for humans to appreciate.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/adambvary/inside-steve-jobs-mindblo...
Neither of those opinions is wrong. There isn’t much objective truth to be had here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Center_station_(PA...
in a turtleneck tucked into his mom jeans, and glaring white sneakers.
As it happens, there's a story behind the choices of black turtleneck (very specific maker), Levi's (5xx?), and New Balance (993s). They are the results of deliberate application and prioritization of optimizations -- evaluated by his personal criteria only, of course. You might think I'm kidding, but I am not.
Pretty sure that's Issey Miyaki.
> They are the results of deliberate application and prioritization of optimizations -- evaluated by his personal criteria only, of course. You might think I'm kidding, but I am not.
I believe you 100%. None of those words is synonymous with "good taste".
But see above re: application of current sensibilities to historical fashion decisions. Always a mistake.
A small excerpt:
> Personally (dis-)liking a color, form, or image is not a matter of design, it is a question of personal taste. And as we all know, when it comes to personal taste there is not much to talk about there. But in addition to personal taste there is something that we can call “trained taste” or “sophistication”. Let me recapitulate:
- Whether I like pink or not, sugar in my coffee, red or white wine, these things are a matter of personal taste. These are personal preferences, and both designers and non-designers have them. This is the taste we shouldn’t bother discussing.
- Whether I set a text’s line height to 100% or 150% is not a matter of taste, it is a matter of knowing the principles of typography.
- However, whether I set a text’s line height at 150% or 145% is a matter of Fingerspitzengefühl; wisdom in craft, or sophistication.
Part of the problem is about complex inductive processes. Human knowledge has encompassed simple deduction (Aristotelian syllogism), simple induction (P values, N=200 medical studies), and complex deduction (operating systems, compilers, etc). We are comfortable with how these systems of reasoning work.
But art relates to the fourth quadrant - complex induction, with billion-parameter models trained against enormous datasets. When a human says "I think this painting is beautiful, but that one is ugly", they are expressing something about the response of their visual cortex (a multi-billion parameter learning system) to a rich stimulus (say, 1 million pixels). With the advent of research like GPT-3, we can now build these systems, though we don't understand their properties very well. There is a lot more for us to understand here, both conceptually and technically.
When the term "good taste" is used though, it seems to allude to "universal taste". I don't think people mean "what everyone likes" ("agreement of taste") when they refer to "good taste", otherwise all of the "gaudy" leopard-print clothing of yesteryear would be "good taste". "Good taste" means, to most people, "rich people value this, for whatever reason"
Good art, at least to me, is art that has emotional impact over time. I can view a painting by a master and it will affect me. I can hear one of Beethoven's symphonies and somehow I'm inside his head during that time.
These do not seem to be things you can measure in the moment, or at least I can't. It takes decades to sort out art that people like from art that continues to carry strong emotional impact. So, in my mind at least, there's a lot of room for subjectivity when talking about modern art. As things age, however, much of that subjectivity goes away, and it goes away for the exact reasons pg outlines.
There is such a thing as good taste, but in terms of modern art it's difficult if not impossible to put your finger on it.
He elaborates further in this recommended read http://paulgraham.com/goodart.html
Goodness is always measured against a standard and although he proposes a reasonable standard, it's still arbitrary as all standards are.
I agree that interrogating ones biases and susceptibility to trickery is worthwhile. Helping oneself and others see through trickery and illusions can be too. This idea can however be pursued ad absurdum as well. All fiction requires a suspension of disbelief and it is in itself a form of trickery.
The implication of the existence of a good taste is that it's good to have this taste. Why are those who like good art better than those who appreciate quality but prefer worse art?
I mostly agree with the theory here, however doing that is impossible or very difficult, because the way you build taste is to educate it, by rubbing your senses against great art.
So it's extremely unlikely you can find a person with good taste that would "never have seen before" a lot of great art in the domain they have taste in.
Although he doesn't discuss this here, I fear the reason why PG imagines this setup is because he believes good taste is in fact innate; you either have good taste or you don't, and there's nothing you can do about it.
That's just not true. As with most things, you start somewhere and then you grow.
Is taste simply recognition of skill? If that's the case, I think "taste" is commonly used too narrowly.
Is it "tasteful" to appreciate a heart surgeon's life-saving? Or a teacher's ability to help me learn? That sounds odd to me (though we should obviously appreciate it!).
I've always thought of taste as an ability to identify intrinsic value, especially when others might miss it ("it's just a picture, dude"). If it's skill alone, why is taste typically applied to aesthetic pursuits?
However, that's just my theory / ideal. I still occasionally feel my taste is superior to others, which I'm not proud of. You can say it's another argument (a sociological / weak one), that the sense of superiority in taste is not helpful.
People call "taste" the part that decides which directions you like.
Graham says: If no such thing as 'good' taste >>> no such thing as 'good' art >>> no such thing as being 'good' at making art You could still have popular art, but not 'good' art. In a vaccum, on the whole, people would generally say Davinci's art was better than a 4-year-old's *probably because it seems more impressive or skillful
*Art-skill is the effectiveness of conveying a concept to the observer or illiciting a desired response from the observer
---- someone basically commented: You can be extrememly skilled at making some obscure art that no one else could make, but almost no one likes, but if the target niche receives it well, you made good art.
You can make popular art with virtually no effort, that literally anyone else could've made.
somone responded: > and there are many productions which take virtually no effort which people love It only takes a quick trip to reddit to see this in action. In a thread where people were talking about the jails and the overall penal system, someone said "heh...penal" and it had several Golds and thousands of points. ----
someone basically commented: People who like Pop music are regarded as having horrible taste, yet Pop music is wildly popular.
*Are the people who make Pop music 'good' at making music? Yes, they effectively make music designed to be consumed by the masses
*Then, why do the people who like Pop music have bad taste? Well, you'd assume that if they're choosing to listen to widely consumable music of their own volition, rather than using their time appreciating more sophisticated music, that takes more knowledge to appreciate, they probably don't have good taste.
*Taste is the ability to recognize _power_ in art. If you can recognize power in art without it already being widely appreciated, but you expect it to down the line, and it does become popular down the line, you have good taste.
Is anyone else finding this hard to accept? What if, for some mysterious reason, everyone chooses one particular artist? What if everyone knows good art from bad art, but there is no such thing as good taste precisely because everyone has the same taste?
I had to quickly remind her that the importance of her art was substantial because it helped other people see ideas and other unseen things clearly. We need this in our communities and societies more than ever.
I love this idea because those with good taste can show layers of depth through their art much better than those with poor taste.
In this statement, how do you define "better art"? You'll need a third person or a judge to define it! which is again biased.
Graham seems to be conflating skill with taste. The artists he mentions are skilled at art and he states that he is not. Distinguishing between skilled and unskilled work may be "good taste" but what is considered good art is more than just skill.
I agree with Graham’s premise. My theory is that people don’t believe good taste exists because most people have bad taste and that’s too big of a pill to swallow. Would you rather admit to having bad taste, or posit that taste doesn’t exist? This is supported by Graham’s observation that contemporary art critics are nearly always disproven a generation or two later, meaning most critics have flawed taste.
Post-modernism, Dada, and surrealism drove the stake through this point, The Treachery of Images or Fountain (Duchamp) aren't extremely skillful, but they're world class art from a certain point of view.
That Graham wrote an entire essay rubbing up against this point without once encountering any literature that explains this (seminally Bourdieu, but there are many others) is surprising.
Narrative is critical, and often external, coming from the curator, dealer, critic, etc. Humans love stories.
“Death and Transfiguration” by Strauss is a beautiful, skillfully written piece of music. A story I heard is that Strauss on his deathbed exclaimed “it’s just like I wrote it!” Is it true? Did he say this? I have no idea, and in a sense it doesn’t matter. The piece is made better by the story I remember when I listen to it. It’s not in the music, it’s with the music.
This breaks down pretty quickly outside of fine art criticism. If I put 20 people in a room and only one of them has dressed "in good taste", they'll stick out badly enough that the consensus of the group will be that the one is in "bad taste".
The problem is that "taste" is vague, depends on ephemeral context and may be subject to popular whims and ignorance.
> So if you want to discard the concept of good taste, you also have to discard the concept of good art. And that means you have to discard the possibility of people being good at making it.
People can be measurably good at realising specific criteria, even if you can't absolutely compare these criteria.
I think he is still correct though but for a different reason. When someone first creates art they may begin naively and create art that is lacking in subtlety, perhaps speaking to the more immature aspects of our human nature?
A good artist graduates from that phase and begins to recognize it in other artists — can say, "Yeah, I used to do art like that but I have moved on." In the same way the art connoisseur should be able to say, "Ahhh, I used to like art like that once, but my tastes now appreciate the more nuanced."
Maybe an example is a car that the owner did as "black-on-black", like Darth Vader, blacked out badges, blacked-out windows, black paint job.... You recognize that "Hey, all black, cool, right?"
Am I being too elitist?
(Hello user, BTW.)
Even if you were right, the majority of canonical art history comes down to how rich people are spending their money.
I came here to type this sentence almost word for word.
I think this divide is most easily seen in the realm of acting, with no better example than Nicholas Cage: high skill level, low taste, at least judging by the majority of projects he chooses. (The counterargument might be that he realizes he's making a lot of bad movies and just needs the paycheck – he's infamous for blowing his money in foolhardy ways – but I definitely think at least some part of the essence of Nicholas Cage comes from conflict between high skill vs low taste).
I was friends with a guy in college who was a masterful musician (toured professionally as an all-purpose backup musician for some mid-tier bands you have heard of) and I used to argue with him about one particular band whose music I disliked [^1], and he would say, "But do you know how hard it is to play those notes? Look!" and he would stretch his fingers all over the bass fret, and I'd say, yeah, but... finger gymnastics is not the same as good music.
Also back in college, when CDs were a thing and money was scarce, I used to debate with myself about whether it would be worthwhile to accept the faustian bargain of trading my own musical tastes to exactly match the contents of the record store's discount CD bin, which was filled with things like Richard Marx albums [^2], so I could buy ten albums for five dollars.
[^1]: I don't want to start a flame war but it's the 80's-era band with complex bass arrangements which I have noticed is popular with sysadmin folks
[^2]: No disrespect intended to people who dig Richard Marx, or to Richard Marx himself, but it sticks in my mind as the thing that was in the bin I was looking at when I had this thought.
While it is true that there are people who have a high degree of technical skill (or of talent) who have poor taste, which means that skill is not the direct cause of taste, it is an essential -- and significant element.
It's like assuming that practicing athletics does not make you better able to appreciate the achievements of other athletes.
Skill give both awareness and depth to your perception, and if you think neither of these attributes are applicable to determining quality, you lack the linguistic or cognitive ability to join the discussion.
That definition sends the essay down a strange path. Does anyone actually use that definition? Most definitions of taste say something which amounts to "a person with good taste has good judgement about how popular something is/will be on some dimension". Even if it's purely aesthetics. And, anecdotally there are some people who have it.
Take for example coffee. If you have bad taste, you just buy supermarket instant coffee and use the cheapest cafetiere. If you have taste, you've researched what makes coffee good or bad, buy whole beans roasted locally, and acquired a coffee brewer where you can control the extraction to get a good result.
It follows, then, that we need to know the effect the author was trying to have on people in order to know how well it "works", right? Without the intention, we can only measure magnitude, but perhaps the author intended to have a small, subtle effect?
I think we can objectively say the da Vinci is a better painter. Or at least that his known work shows a much higher level of skill and technical competence than any known work of Banksy. That is however not at all the same as saying that da Vinci produced more interesting art than Banksy. Banksy's art is certainly easier for many to 'get' and understand and be moved by today without having to take an art history class.
And on a personal level, while I respect da Vinci as an artist more, I would still chose a Banksy over a da Vinci to have displayed in my living room (ignoring all financial arguments).
But if we're looking at two pieces we've never seen before and trying to determine which is better, are there any approaches besides just surveying a bunch of people about which one they prefer?
PG makes an analogy to vaccines, but we measure vaccine quality objectively based on how many people it can help. To simplify a bit, if vaccine A works on 1% of people and vaccine B works on 99% of people, we say vaccine B is better. It wouldn't matter if some "expert" looked at both vaccines while swirling his wine and said in a pompous tone that "vaccine A is clearly more refined no matter what the masses may think."
So how is art any different? Isn't the "better" art determined by what more people like, in which case the top-grossing blockbuster films represent the best art of our generation? If so, then "good taste" is the ability to look at two unreleased movies and correctly predict which will make more money-- a valuable skill, no doubt!
When some artwork is good, I know that and will defend its value, even if it is not to my taste.
Given that good taste is usually measured by people with expertise, can you really develop good taste without expertise?
Is that taste? Honest question.
It's being able to tell which piece of art more people will choose to interact with, which is pretty close to PG's definition of taste.
Even putting aside people's issues with the concept of NFTs, people seem to agree the art is somewhere between bad and revolting. Except for the people investing in them.
Specifically, if you're going to penalize people for doing something, tell them that you're doing it, rather than hide behind some cryptic, "technical difficulties"-sounding error message. Treat people like adults, and I suspect you'll have better results most of the time.
That's why something that is considered "good taste" in 1950s can be seen as horrible taste nowadays.
Why? Because he did a satirical impression of Hitler.
I know, I can almost hear your jaws dropping to the floor.
> The Union’s Equalities officer, Zara Salaria, said that Graham-Dixon’s impression was “absolutely unacceptable” and “utterly horrifying.”
There's more of this idiotic hysteria to be found in this article[2] with quotes from students and alumni of one of the world's top universities (supposedly).
What is the world coming to when you can't take the mick out of Hitler? No, what is the world coming to when you take the mick out of Hitler and "top students" think that is somehow support for his views?
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/artists/hitler-row-andrew-gr...
Now is it indicative of the university climate? The student generation? I don't know.
It's a disgrace that they reprimanded him. The moderator was laughing along that night, then shortly after put out a notice of groveling apology and finger-wagging. I wonder what horrid administrator or donor was offended by someone making fun of a fascist.
This is a "pit boss asking you to leave the table for winning too much" moment.
Paul Graham is certainly aware of this analogy as he even brings up the subject of vaccines in the article. Writing about appreciation of art rather than evaluation of journalism or truth is an interesting way to re-frame the epistemology.
I hope this essay is better. In the least, the comments here are interesting.
That being said, I can't tell if he's saying "it's bad taste to question the efficacy" or "it's bad taste to disallow a conversation on effectiveness"
.. or both?
Let's say you are in a museum alone, some of the works presented can resonate and excite you more than the others, but you can't share your excitement with anyone. Where is the social signaling element gone then?
Lets say: Two months later I'll be at a dinner party and over a bowl of Caldo Verde I'll recount an anecdote about the Paul Manship sculpture that I saw that time in the museum on my own, and how it was placed in relation to the other works.
Same for tattoos or car modifications. Yes, there's a lot of signaling within your social strata, but if you're in that strata it's valid to say that some tattoos are better than others.
Also it's okay not be in the loop. Not everyone has to have an opinion on why Leonardo Da Vinci is a better artist than Botticelli.
Also, kids are exactly the demographics super susceptible to claim liking or disliking things based on what their friends say about them.
Show a kid 2 paintings they’ve never seen before. Show it to them in isolation. Guess which one they pick?
But the key point you're making - that good art only exists in a specific context - I totally agree with. Good taste/art exist only in relation to a specific culture, and depends on what that culture values (technique, creativity, bold ideas, traditional ideas (for example: pre-romantic period, good composers were seen as empty vessels "pure music" divinely flowed through rather than as geniuses with bold new ideas)). Shostakovich wouldn't have had a chance 100 years prior.
I find these ideas overly reductive since the essay presupposes that art should be judged in a vacuum outside of it's societal context, as if that's somehow more objective. The emotional impact of the art (PG's stated objective function to maximize) cannot be pulled out of its context. Said differently, the emotional impact of a piece of art often leans heavily on the story of the artist. PG seems to argue against this, but unconvincingly.
I'm no art critic or aesthetician, but here's some random issues that I noticed while reading:
- he has failed to separate skill from aesthetic taste. He describes taste as obviously real because some artists are better than others when this is a description of skill not taste; nobody denies the existence of painterly skill.
- his entire argument rests on comparing a child's drawing to a work by Da Vinci. Taste comes into play when you compare artists of comparable skill. Is it Good Taste to prefer Da Vinci to Lichtenstein? To Vermeer, or Van Gogh, or Picasso or whoever? The main arguments you can lean on here are from authority (such-and-such is popular with the galleries/critics, exhibits traits I was taught to look for in class) or from personal analysis/appreciation. He touches on the argument from authority but just hand-waves it away.
- He hints at the critique of art appreciation as being dominated by the celebrity of the artist and its connotations of class signalling but makes no reference to the fact that there's a ton of academic work on both of these factors. Thus he can only really skim the surface of this perspective.
- His whole argument about properties of objects being real or constructed is day-1 metaphysics. Ditto for his description of properties having a dimension of objectivity to subjectivity; he's just trotting out logical positivism like it's a truism, like many rationalist-types do. Logical positivism does not apply to a purely social field like art. Intersubjectivity isn't related to objectivity.
All this would be fine if it was just him thinking about art - it's perfectly reasonable to consider positions out loud without any meaningful expertise. But he makes a claim to truth, in front of a large audience that often accepts his ideas pretty uncritically, and it's an audience that already has disdain for the humanities. That's deserving of derision.
Sampling bias. The association exists because most that don't fit the stereotype keep their yap shut.
I'd say there's also plenty of STEM people that don't think humanities are easy nor obvious, but they interpret the outward appearance as something so far up it's own ass that they're just turned off from exploration of the field. But that's a popular take among non-STEM too.
FWIW, it's a broad enough problem that it has its own term - STEMlord.
The tl;dr at the very end. If the partial order is sufficiently unlike a total order then his father was basically correct because good taste tells you very little.
Source: me
"It means we can't say that any painter is better than a randomly chosen eight year old."
First, this is a non-literal arguement and so is disconnected from reality in a literal sense. We CAN say this. We can also make taste claims AND we can admit it's arbitrarily driven by many different decisions and biases developed before this lifetime, as artists and art don't exist in vacuums. We can also admit it's absolutely an adultist perspective to dismiss a person's contributions by the age of their current body. Literally everyone has different skills and the impact art has can be wildly different depending on the piece and the context it's viewed in. A person (namely me) can become inspired to change the world by witnessing a 1-year old creating a realistic drawing of pumpkin seeds. Is that art good based on whether or not the person is successful at changing the world? Who cares! It's an arbitrary and unnecessary judgment being made out of a habit of judging things, rather than observing and accepting whatever's being received.
This post represents a continuation of the cultural norms of preference-making (which is a form of limited identity), avoiding absurdity, over-reliance on classical logic instead of uncertainty logic to process reality (since it doesn't leave room for art that exists in multiple classes of equivalence of good and bad and judges art based on too short of a timeline).
Anyone who abandons their preferences gets to realize how limiting thinking like PG proposes here is, how it limits the joy and value of any artist or work of art, and how this creates a hostile environment for artists of literally every kind.
Good... bad...meh.... there exists art that meets all needs while denying none and then there's the rest.
If you've never abandoned the automated judgment and preference-making most of the world teaches, you can never realize a perspective that transcends arbitrarily subjective thinking.
Also, as an aside, tastes are, in part driven by trauma. I hypothesize this is why some people in addiction recovery develop different tastes after having spiritual experiences/awakenings: they heal from and release the stuck feelings from some past trauma(s) which were being used to judge other things in life.
So does anyone want to abandon their preferences as an attempt to falsify this perspective for science? I have a practice that worked for me and want to conduct an experiment where some people genuinely/sincerely commit to it without being aware of the practice and others choose to try it only after learning about the practice. Any brave souls want to seek deeper joy and release from cultural/ trauma programming?
I will outline a few ways that one can formalize "good taste". I understand that there are some weaknesses and gaps in the concepts that I will delineate. This isn't because I think my analysis is final. Rather, I am suggesting the starting point for this sort of inquiry, which through refinement by other researchers could actually become stronger as a field of inquiry.
There is an economy of attention, and any analysis of taste or preference should be based upon how one spends their attention.
One argument might be that a particular kind of good taste is being able to anticipate what someone else will like. This is a demonstrable skill that some people (and recommender systems) possess, and others don't. There might be other kinds of good taste besides prediction, but this is one important component that can be measured.
Important confounding variables is bias caused by other people. For example, no one likes a particular artist until a famous critic pronounces them as good. This is a widespread confounding variable, but nonetheless could be avoided in certain controlled experimental setups. Again, this isn't helpful when we are talking about quantifying taste in the real world, which bias is unrestricted.
Another form of statistical analysis would be to say that people with broad undifferentiated preferences ("pop") have less refined taste than subgroups with niche specialized taste. Possible analyses here include: Are there subgroups with refined taste that is not just associated with a specific subgenre, but extends across many genres of this particular medium? That suggests a broader sort of refined art taste than generalizes and isn't based just upon some expertise. Additionally, detecting people with "random" taste that isn't correlated with the taste of other people suggests the person is just throwing darts and being contrarian, not that they have some taste that suggests a deeper shared human understanding.
One weakness of existing recommender systems is that like/dislike and five star rating systems rarely quantify: "Wow this is so amazing I would sacrifice my right arm for this." This is because there is no economy of "five stars" ratings in most systems, and the number of five star items is potentially a large percentage of the whole corpus of art. Instead, a Michelin-star like system could zoom in on the 1% of art that has a really transformative impact on the listener.
About the objection pg says that: "Well, we might think some artist sucks now but in one hundred years they are revered." I think this argument can also be refuted. Within the context of art analysis in the 1800s, a particular artist might make no sense, because their work is too prescient. Whereas within the context of later artists who allow the public to appreciate the work of the dead artist, liking the dead artist now contextually becomes good taste.
Again, I don't think I've presented a conclusive or bulletproof analysis here. I've just tried to outline how a formal and rigorous approach to quantifying "good taste" is an endeavor we could actually perform and engage in, but I haven't really seen in my review of the literate yet. There might be some important works that I've missed, perhaps in machine learning philosophy. It's easy to hand wave through saying "good taste" doesn't exist, but I think there's value in challenging that assumption and seeing how far we can get at formalizing it, and what potentially illusively remains nebulous and is actually bullshit.
p.s. help im dying.
It's quite noticeable on Twitter too where he seems to increasingly have very confident diagnoses on everything from geopolitics to culture war nonsense to genetic engineering.
Funnily enough a friend said something lately about SlateStarCodex (or ACX now) - I wonder if getting that much positive feedback on your musings just inevitably starts convincing you everything you think must be just as insightful
The other day I was having a discussion about psychiatry with a relative of mine who is an esteemed psychiatry professor. Now, no doubt about it, he knows heaps of things about psychiatry which I, as a non-psychiatrist, don't. But, on the other hand, the conversation made me realise I know some things about his field he doesn't: I read and am interested in psychiatrists who criticise "mainstream" approaches (such as by attacking the DSM, whether in general or with respect to specific diagnoses included in it or both), and so I know a lot about who those people are and what their publications and arguments are, and what the "mainstream" responses are. He is far less interested in that topic, so it appears to me he only knows those criticisms at a relatively high level, and that he isn't across the details of them to the extent that I am. I think he generally trusts that the mainstream approach is right, and focuses (both as a researcher and as a clinician) on working within it rather than questioning or challenging it.
Does the fact that he is an esteemed professor of psychiatry and I have no formal qualifications or professional experience whatsoever in this field or any related field mean that he is (likely to be) right and I am (likely to be) wrong? Well, I think debatable areas of expert opinion, just because you happen to personally know an expert on one side of that debate, doesn't make that side automatically the right side. Even acknowledging that there is a majority and minority side to many of these debates, I think often the minority may be a minority, not because their actual arguments are weaker, but due to social and cultural and historical and political factors. That is especially true in fields such as psychiatry, which still have a rather weak empirical basis. Or, you could say the same about theoretical physics, which starts with a very firm empirical basis (experimental physics is at a far more advanced stage than neurobiology/psychology/etc) but wants to go a long way beyond it – just because string theory is more popular in the contemporary theoretical physics community than loop quantum gravity, is not good evidence that the former is more likely to be true than the later. It is important here to distinguish respectable minority views within academia (even if small minorities) from truly fringe/crank views (which few academics would consider worthy of respect). I also think my esteemed-psychiatry-professor-relative would be more likely to convince me to abandon my view of the topic in favour of his, if this was an area of his field of which he'd developed a detailed knowledge, as opposed to it being an area of which he only appears to know at a high level.
And now when we come to PG expressing views on aesthetics, which is commonly viewed as a branch of philosophy – philosophy is an area which is especially unsettled, and in which the question of where the majority of academic opinion lies is especially distant from the question of what is likely to be true. I suppose the main way I'd fault PG here, is there is a lot of pre-existing academic work on this question, and he doesn't engage with it at all, or display any knowledge of it. On the other hand, maybe given the constraints of the format of the talk he was asked to deliver, the likely interests and abilities of the audience, etc, attempting to engage with that work (to the extent that PG knows it) was not really going to be possible.
Taste is very much related to desirability because what is beautiful is better than which is less so, and what is therefore good is more desirable than which is less so. Just as people can have bad taste, they can have bad desires. Take food, for example. Those who desire mediocre food to the same degree as good food have poor taste and therefore poor desires. Those with a desire to eat glass or their couch cushions (something people with pika might experience) have disordered tastes and therefore disordered desires.
As to the art itself, since art involves mimesis, good art can be measured in part by how well it imitates. (Imitation should not be understood here simplistically as implying photorealism.) An artist who either lacks discernment or lacks technique will produce mediocre imitations. There are feature of art itself which are not exhausted by imitation. These, too, determine whether the artwork itself is good. Composition and proportionality of the artwork itself (and not just the subject) are examples. While the subject may be beautiful, the execution of the artwork may be poor.
Now as PG says, art has an effect on us (indeed, it communicates to us), but because art is artifact and thus lacks an inherent end, its perfection cannot be completely explained without making reference to something with an inherent end which artifacts lack. Human nature is that thing. Human beings individually may possess variable perfections and variable degrees of perfection, including capacity for aesthetic judgement, either because they have either intrinsic individual limitations or because they have not actualized their capacities fully, but one and the same human nature. So we must look to human nature if we want to explain art. Indeed, throughout history, art tracks the understanding of human nature in a given culture. Cultures that understand the dignity of the human person value portraiture in a way those that don't do not.
Aesthetic judgement is value judgement from a different perspective, and therefore a truth claim (the fact-value dichotomy is bogus).