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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

Go to guy on this is Bourdieu.

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.

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What you say is true, but there's something missing, which is that a working-class person who was extremely fashionable by the standards of their own class would, if transplanted into the world of penthousees in SOHO, figure out quite quickly how to tastefully decorate their house, how to dress to impress, and so on. And the same would be true of the penhouse asthete if transplanted into a working-class milieu. Some people are just better than other people at figuring out aesethic systems.

> cultural taste is an aspirational social marker.

"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 may well be that taste is initially acquired through feigning, but it can develop into something more personal down the line. Charles Rosen mentioned it at the end of his Critical Entertainments:

"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)."

None of what Rosen writes there resonates with me. This almost reads like the insufferable reddit comments where people claim you don't like Moby Dick or Shakespeare, that you are just parroting opinions you were told to hold in school. I read and listened widely, often discursively, and ended up liking stuff that none of my peers even knew about for the most part. And no, I wasn't trying to be an iconoclast, the endless teasing was oppressive, but what can you do, you like what you like.

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).

Sometimes it's not explicitly faking, but rather you subconsciously associate value in things that bring you more prestige, even some inner prestige that nobody knows about.

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.

So if you disagree with "taste-as-a-measure-of-quality-within-a-genre" do you disagree with the concept works of art can be better than other works of art (within a genre) or do you just disagree this non-numerical measure is called 'taste'? What would you call it instead?

I believe Bourdieu's point is that this ability to rank art within a genre is an attribute of belonging to a cultural group. As such, this cultural knowledge you have will be valued depending on the social importance of that group.

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.

Please, we can discuss art theory without political dimension.

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?

>Please, we can discuss art theory without political dimension.

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.

(The below is with an intent of explaining my view of Paul's essay and is written with the tone of a devil's advocate)

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.

> I think the whole point was to point out that some things can be considered rationally better than others

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.

"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_.

3 examples of still life:

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.

Yes, which means all of whom have recognized mastery of their art. So in a way they all are at the top.

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!

Relevant quotes from my first message:

> 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.

"... but they are judged for their good taste by their ability to separate the pieces according to the group's criteria."

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?

There is no specific peer pressure mechanism in what I discussed. The system is internalized by the people doing the rating; it is learned as a part of being in the group, discussing whith others about what you like and how you create, and by following the courses in your example.

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.

Did you even read Distinction?

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.

One interesting point I saw in in a paper on fan cultures was about how taste can serve to continue existing relations with media. That there are people who can understand taste and pick out what's good and worth enjoying, and others cannot. The paper in question applied this to dynamics within the My Little Pony fandom (and Bronies in partciluar).

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.

> 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.

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.

Like you, I had a similar realization but I think it was a pretty good idea. It was some instructions for a nice way to enjoy life.

Fine art, classical music and dance, etc. are all relatively wholesome things that you can absorb as much interest as you can muster.

Next thing you want to tell me is that wine doesn't really taste good? (the high quality wine of course)

Who determines that the wine is high quality? You’ve already established taste there, regardless of the wine’s taste.

At least ones that give you headaches could arguably be placed in the lower quality bucket? Or the ones that taste like vinnegar? But once the low hanging fruit is done with it becomes a subjective experience and the price becomes the differentiator.

I think by your definition, the best wine is grape juice, which is never vinegary and never gives you a headache.

We were talking about wines, weren’t we? I don’t have a definition pinned down but do drink wine from time to time and I subjectively prefer some to others. What Im quite sure of is that nobody regards wines as high quality if they’re headache inducing or taste like vinnegar.

There are many people for whom the most important characteristics of wine (and other alcoholic beverages) is "how cheap is it and how likely am I to get drunk from it before I get sick?"

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.

And yet sommeliers can be regularly fooled in blind taste tests.

Yes, but only at the extreme details (distinguishing between very similar wines). There is no chance to confuse anyone between, say, a sweet white wine and a dry red wine (to take the other kind of extreme).

It doesn't. Not to me, anyway. I've never liked wine. It just takes like stingy grape juice.

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...

A hypothetical wine that tastes good would have taste too different from wine that it won't count as wine anymore.

I love good wine and I like to think I can tell the difference between wines with an order of magnitude price difference, at the very least. But I don’t think you can call it anything but an acquired taste.

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.

> 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.

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?

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