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Great essay. Paul does here what others take much longer to do and I can’t help but grin when reading the comments here that take issue. Just mentioning the obvious triggers a lot of people. I used to be one of those people, but like Paul, experience and reflection allowed me to grow out of. The world makes more sense once you abandon the position that taste or beauty do not exist. The line “judging art is hard, especially recent art” is key. It’s also what makes art so enjoyable and worthwhile. Anything worth doing requires effort. Enjoying art is challenging and seeing beyond what’s extraneous is a great muscle to strengthen. It pays dividends elsewhere in one’s life. That taste exists is more parsimonious that the other position.

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I wonder whether you think this essay is "great" mostly because you agree with it? That one must judge art, to enjoy art, appears fundamentally exclusionary, itself to my tastes, and to use PG's word, "crass", but in yours, his, and most people's, more or less innocently so.

Not OP but

> 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.

With respect, to me that stance seems both incomplete and absolute, and falsifiable in about nine ways, so surely, while you are entitled to hold that opinion and are not alone in that judgement, you are both wrong. But so am I.

EDIT: another comment may help explain why I find "judgement" so completely orthogonal to this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29229946

Or this one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18000533

Another point this raises is approximately identical to the headline question, so that if there is such a thing as good judgement there is also good taste and vice versa, and they will fail in similar ways related to subjectivity.

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.

“I wonder whether you think this essay is "great" mostly because you agree with it?”

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.

To disabuse you of an apparent misunderstanding, I do not at all find art to be crass. I enjoy it immensely and it enriches every aspect of my life, even elevating the ordinary.

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.

Your point, that some art is better, is exactly the point Paul was making. A point I agree with. So I’m not sure what you find crass? Is it non-artists forming their own independent judgements about art? I’m sincerely interested in what your disagreement is.

Summarizing my comments with the conclusion that "some art is better" and you, Paul, or anyone else can reliably judge which it is, does not come anywhere close to my meaning.

I have to conclude that we are not in disagreement, because we are not even communicating.

Sorry if I didn’t grasp your point. I am trying to.

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?

> 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?

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?

“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.

I appreciate this effort. Not sure where the initial confusion came from, but you don't take it lightly, and that matters.

If you would like to engage further with these ideas I heartily recommend the comments related to and sources mentioned in [1] above and others in this page.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29229456

Assume all art was generated randomly by algorithms, but the observers are not aware of it. Would the same thoughts and conclusions about taste and art emerge in this world?

Hmm. I have trouble with this view. I don't deny that you can find beauty in things, and have tastes for things, but I question whether there's any value in assuming some objective standard for goodness, such that we can judge art to be good or not and say that those who are calibrated to this standard have good taste.

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.

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