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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

But this is why we have “experts”. It’s like the guy playing a Stradivarius on the NYC subway. Most people can’t distinguish ok from brilliant, in a subject they don’t understand. Most humans cannot distinguish slop code from decent code but I assume most HNers can. However I can’t tell you why one electrical wiring job is better than another unless it looks untidy.

Once you get passed a minimum level of decent we have to rely on experts and the communal agreement of experts to decide. Sometimes that easy (is the electrical wiring on fire) sometimes it’s much harder. (Insert controversial wiring discussion here)

I suspect The same applies here.

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I have a feeling like the lay person wouldn’t have made a comment, it’s only the people that think they are an expert that wouldn’t have confidently said why this painting is worse.

Also experts in an art competition have the award to an ai art piece. It was only because they didn’t know it was ai. So no, even experts are susceptible to these issues.

But why do we have to rely on experts to experience 'proper' art?

My naive thought was, that Art is not like a bridge, which would collapse if built by amateur's.

But perhaps art has effects on us which are beneficial and these would actually 'collapse'.

Experts can help frame and understand an art piece. They can provide information regarding the craft, how the piece fits with other work from that time, what were the cultural influences, how the life of the artist influenced the work, etc. but you never had to rely on experts to experience or identify what proper art is. However at the end of the day art is a social concept, it’s something we negotiate between us, humans, and people are attracted to what they believe is considered good and important by others

Thanks … nicely put

That helps me frame the experts vs science idea.

Science is just the parts that evidence does not disprove.

Expertise is understanding how the various explanations we have with science fits together, framing it as it were, and using that understanding to make sensible directional choices. Of course those predictions may later be proven wrong (light is a wave, waves need mediums, ether must exist) but they are more likely than guessing

Science is interesting, because it is at the same time the method and processes, and I think also a vision of what search for truth should be? An expert in that case is (always?) a scientist. When considering art, experts aren't always artists, they can be pure researchers (for some odd reasons I was at a point familiar with people from the art history academic world in my hometown, they weren't artists at all but had a lot of context to provide when discussing an art piece). But maybe it is just different types of expertise.

In any case I do think there is value in the link you're making

We don’t need to rely on experts to experience art - I think that is a fundamental part of art- within the limits similar to free speech, anything is art. (But don’t block rush hour traffic with your interpretive dance troupe)

Is a painting by AI art? Sure

Is a painting by Monet better than one painted by me? Most people would say yes.

Can some people explain why? Yes. They are not “experts” in the same way the Oxford Professor of nuclear physics is an expert but it is on the same scale.

Or possibly I am just hallucinating the argument because you prompted me to…

The wiring point is more subtle than that.

Consider the domestic power panel and wiring that is perfectly acceptable, but would 'splode outright if you moved it to an industrial setting and put it under an enterprise load.

Context matters.

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