Comment by pyrale | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pyrale | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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