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Comment by guerrilla | Hacker News Reader

> If there's no such thing as good taste, then there's no such thing as good art.

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."

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I had this same objection. And in a reductio ad absurdum, it certainly is key that all the steps leading to the contradiction are indisputable.

> 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/

> 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.

> > 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.

How does one determine "better art"?

Better is just a word that means "more good", so I've already answered this. One simply subjectively prefers some art over other art. What people prefer (i.e. think is better) does not correspond to production skill, as I already argued.

without a 3rd person to judge or an already set criteria that dictates what is "good" and whats "not so good" art it's impossible to tell who chose the better art out of those 2 people.

There's no 3rd person. It's first person judgement. The 3rd person and criteria must be judged too, so in the end it all boils down to first person judgement.

Better-ness IMHO is a function of expectations. Playing Dream Theater as ambient music in your restaurant is arguably in "bad taste", despite the art itself being technically on virtuoso level, and often being considered "good art" outside of that context.

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".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natt%C5%8D

Things are only better or worse than other things when comparing specific attributes. Something can be better looking, better functioning in some specific way, and so forth.

"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.

Exactly. I find that using art of all things to make an argument about good taste is particularly ironic, given that historically, art has always been a vehicle for shaking the status quo.

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.

My immediate thought when I read the essay was about Dream Theater and I almost jumped when I saw the reference from you. Dream Theater is my absolute favorite band for 25 years and counting, but I know people that think that they are poseurs. To me, liking Dream Theater is a good taste because it is a good signal of people and their qualities that I like. Pop music is neither good nor bad taste as this taste does not really signal anything useful to me. Driving a loud car with semi-disabled muffler on city streets is a bad taste because not only it is annoying, it perfectly signals qualities that I dislike in people.

Not so fast there! I don't buy the "no good taste implies no good art" argument. If there is an objective standard of how good a piece of art is, that's fine, but his proposed experiment doesn't make sense. What if someone simply knows this objective standard and can thus simply evaluate how good each piece of art is? Is that anything like what we consider to be "taste"? I wouldn't say that someone has good taste in prime numbers if they can be shown a large number and can compute whether it's prime. I'd say their mental arithmetic abilities are good, but I wouldn't think to describe that as "taste."

Indeed, no tasty food doesn’t imply no good (e.g. relatively nutritious) food.

I've had a longstanding debate with a close friend on this topic. He thinks that there is such a thing as objectively good taste, and I do not.

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".

It only assumes production skill is correlated it doesn’t require a perfect correspondence. I’d argue it is hard to have a meaningful concept of production skill that is either independent of or anticorrelated to taste. Yes production skill alone does not make the piece of art. But if it contributes in any way shape or form that’s enough to establish there is such thing as taste.

> It only assumes production skill is correlated it doesn’t require a perfect correspondence

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.

I’m not making an argument about what taste is or which tastes are correct. I’m merely interested in establishing taste exists and the “all works are equally good” school of thought is wrong. We could have a stronger argument separately about a stronger assertion at which point your pop music claims might be relevant but that isn’t the conversation I was attempting to have.

> Pop music ... it's all low effort shit

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

For every two of those, there are thousands of counterexamples.

But those 'thousands of counterexamples' do not tend to have lasting success; fleeting success is fairly clearly popularity-driven. Lasting success takes producing works that appeal to good taste. Both Lady Gaga and Dua Lipa are great examples of artists that have produced works with lasting success. I would put Lil Nas X, 2Pac, Eminem in that category too, as another example from 'not pop.' T-Pain, less so. :)

I'd like to invoke Sturgeon's law[1] here. Basically it's not useful to claim that the overwhelming majority of pop-music is "low-effort shit" because that's true of nearly all genres.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

Fine, that would just add support to my original point.

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