[HN Gopher] Is there such a thing as good taste?
___________________________________________________________________
Is there such a thing as good taste?
Author : tosh
Score : 202 points
Date : 2021-11-15 12:27 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paulgraham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paulgraham.com)
| slmjkdbtl wrote:
| No. There's no objective "good art", only popular art. When we
| say something is "good" we're saying it's popular, either in mass
| or in a certain community. I think this is the cleanest
| explanation with the minimal assumptions and favored by stuff
| like Occam's razor, because defining "good" requires way too many
| controversial criteria, and you might have to go through that for
| every medium, which is infinite amount.
|
| However, that's just my theory / ideal. I still occasionally feel
| my taste is superior to others, which I'm not proud of. You can
| say it's another argument (a sociological / weak one), that the
| sense of superiority in taste is not helpful.
| tdrdt wrote:
| I think Christopher Alexander has a better answer to this
| question. He states that anything that is designed is good when
| love was put into it. People can taste this love.
|
| So it's more like: when love was put into it, it tastes good.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| It's the background details that bring out the love. A paint-
| by-numbers movie can stick because of the visceral knowledge
| that the production team cared about what they were making,
| even when the story beats are highly formulaic. On a rewatch,
| it becomes apparent that there's more going on than the bog-
| standard storyline presented by the leads.
| b0rsuk wrote:
| Counterpoint: Ed Wood loved making movies. His movies are often
| featured in worst movie contests. People told him he had no
| talent, but he still loved making them.
|
| In a weird way, his movies are watchable. There are movies
| which are more painful to watch. But I think he's a good
| example that genuine passion is NOT ENOUGH.
| dang wrote:
| I was wondering if anyone would bring Christopher Alexander up
| in this thread, because his work has been a long attempt to
| answer this question. His claims about the objectivity of
| beauty, order, and so on, are counterintuitive to contemporary
| assumptions. But he has certainly gone deeply into the question
| --like a deep sea diver, or like someone drilling for water in
| a desert.
| grkvlt wrote:
| this is a little trite and definitely isn't universal, let
| alone well defined (as to what 'love' means in this context) so
| doesn't really help anyone trying to understand more about what
| makes good taste (or good design, in your instance) - i think
| there can be plenty examples of good design and good taste that
| come from hate, or from indifference; all sorts of emotions and
| rationales...
| munificent wrote:
| I can't recall the exact quote, but I read something a while
| back that said that hate is essentially a response to
| something you love being harmed, so great hate still requires
| great love.
|
| Picasso's _Guernica_ is the poster child for art made from
| hate, in this case against the Spanish Civil War. But it 's
| equally a painting centered on love for the victims of the
| war. After all, it's mostly a painting _of_ those victims.
|
| I don't think much good of anything can come from a position
| of indifference.
| dang wrote:
| It does sound trite when distilled into a one-liner, but
| Alexander put 60+ years of work into it and wrote his
| 4-volume masterpiece about it. Nothing trite about that.
| dfdz wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This step of the argument assumes the conclusion. If both people
| answer n true false questions randomly, then with high
| probability (probability at least 1- 1/sqrt(n) ) one person will
| have answered more questions correctly.
|
| This does not imply that either person is better than random.
| bambax wrote:
| > _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_
|
| I mostly agree with the theory here, however doing that is
| impossible or very difficult, because the way you build taste is
| to educate it, by rubbing your senses against great art.
|
| So it's extremely unlikely you can find a person with good taste
| that would "never have seen before" a lot of great art in the
| domain they have taste in.
|
| Although he doesn't discuss this here, I fear the reason why PG
| imagines this setup is because he believes good taste is in fact
| innate; you either have good taste or you don't, and there's
| nothing you can do about it.
|
| That's just not true. As with most things, you start somewhere
| and then you grow.
| mgaunard wrote:
| Good taste is simply a matter of depth.
|
| Take for example coffee. If you have bad taste, you just buy
| supermarket instant coffee and use the cheapest cafetiere. If you
| have taste, you've researched what makes coffee good or bad, buy
| whole beans roasted locally, and acquired a coffee brewer where
| you can control the extraction to get a good result.
| aremat wrote:
| I'll dodge the question slightly and say that bad execution
| comingles with what could be referred to as bad taste and intent
| forms part of the judgement. For example, someone was clearly
| going for a rustic aesthetic but accidentally introduced a
| jarringly modernist aspect (excluding deliberate juxtaposition).
| Or, the intent was clearly to impress the viewer with
| "sophistication" (a dubious intent in itself), but some aspects
| are inconsistent or poorly judged. Then there are copies of
| others' styles (strike 1) executed with poorly matched subject
| matter (strike 2). Add in banal subject matter or clearly
| functional art, etc...
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| There is definitely such a thing as good taste.
|
| I used to work in ultra-high end restaurants (think World's 50
| Best). All the cooks are incredibly skilled. But only a small
| amount of them make good chefs, usually the ones who travel and
| eat out lots themselves. Many simply had no idea what ingredient
| combinations are good or bad, even if they could execute a recipe
| extremely well. I did make it as a chef, ish, got some awards,
| but the economics are tough, I took a few breaks to travel and go
| back to school. Working on a few other things. I still do
| consulting for restaurateurs I know just because I can.
|
| When you look at the top of the top chefs, the difference comes
| down to taste. They all have the same skills. The best simply
| make better combinations.
| andrewvc wrote:
| This ignores the fact that Leonardo and Bellini went from places
| of social relevance and interest to being primarily of historical
| interest. No one says "I really could go for some Bellini about
| now".
|
| "What do people enjoy, and why" is a much more interesting
| question than "what should they like, and why it's only a
| coincidence that aligns with my personal preferences".
| beaconstudios wrote:
| nice to see the comment section is criticising PG for an
| extremely amateur take on sociology, aesthetics and art. I don't
| know why, but there's a fairly strong association between being
| in STEM and thinking that the humanities are easy and obvious and
| people study them just because they don't understand STEM. Thus
| we get blog posts like this, about how a reductio ad absurdum
| thought experiment is enough to resolve a central question of the
| study of aesthetics.
| gpjanik wrote:
| Paul Graham writing about good taste (and people actually
| reading this) looks to me like either good trolling on his
| side, or just the usual startup misery - an extrovert
| narcissist convinced that he has intellectual capacity to
| analyse absolutely everything (and that analysis is worth
| sharing) because he's running a VC. It's sad either way.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I think it's the latter - you see the same thing with Naval
| too, as well as a slew of rationalists who seem to consider
| it their role in life to reinvent sociology from the
| perspective of a software developer without having read any
| of the existing academic works.
| dogleash wrote:
| >I don't know why, but there's a fairly strong association
| between being in STEM and thinking that the humanities are easy
| and obvious and people study them just because they don't
| understand STEM.
|
| Sampling bias. The association exists because most that don't
| fit the stereotype keep their yap shut.
|
| I'd say there's also plenty of STEM people that don't think
| humanities are easy nor obvious, but they interpret the outward
| appearance as something so far up it's own ass that they're
| just turned off from exploration of the field. But that's a
| popular take among non-STEM too.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I think it's an extension of the cultural idea that the hard
| sciences are more important than the soft sciences, which
| itself is because hard sciences are more empirical and we
| culturally value what we can measure more than what we can't.
|
| FWIW, it's a broad enough problem that it has its own term -
| STEMlord.
| etrautmann wrote:
| This is overly dismissive - why not attack the ideas directly?
|
| I find these ideas overly reductive since the essay presupposes
| that art should be judged in a vacuum outside of it's societal
| context, as if that's somehow more objective. The emotional
| impact of the art (PG's stated objective function to maximize)
| cannot be pulled out of its context. Said differently, the
| emotional impact of a piece of art often leans heavily on the
| story of the artist. PG seems to argue against this, but
| unconvincingly.
| andrewzah wrote:
| I think the actual issue is anything posted by PG on HN gets
| upvoted to the front page, regardless if the content is
| actually good.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Yes, I am dismissing his contribution - because it's
| amateurish. I also don't encourage the local nursery to
| contribute their kids' paintings to the Met. Ironically, his
| article contributes to his argument that there is such a
| thing as objective taste if you root it primarily in the
| skill of the artist.
|
| I'm no art critic or aesthetician, but here's some random
| issues that I noticed while reading:
|
| - he has failed to separate skill from aesthetic taste. He
| describes taste as obviously real because some artists are
| better than others when this is a description of skill not
| taste; nobody denies the existence of painterly skill.
|
| - his entire argument rests on comparing a child's drawing to
| a work by Da Vinci. Taste comes into play when you compare
| artists of comparable skill. Is it Good Taste to prefer Da
| Vinci to Lichtenstein? To Vermeer, or Van Gogh, or Picasso or
| whoever? The main arguments you can lean on here are from
| authority (such-and-such is popular with the
| galleries/critics, exhibits traits I was taught to look for
| in class) or from personal analysis/appreciation. He touches
| on the argument from authority but just hand-waves it away.
|
| - He hints at the critique of art appreciation as being
| dominated by the celebrity of the artist and its connotations
| of class signalling but makes no reference to the fact that
| there's a ton of academic work on both of these factors. Thus
| he can only really skim the surface of this perspective.
|
| - His whole argument about properties of objects being real
| or constructed is day-1 metaphysics. Ditto for his
| description of properties having a dimension of objectivity
| to subjectivity; he's just trotting out logical positivism
| like it's a truism, like many rationalist-types do. Logical
| positivism does not apply to a purely social field like art.
| Intersubjectivity isn't related to objectivity.
|
| All this would be fine if it was just him thinking about art
| - it's perfectly reasonable to consider positions out loud
| without any meaningful expertise. But he makes a claim to
| truth, in front of a large audience that often accepts his
| ideas pretty uncritically, and it's an audience that already
| has disdain for the humanities. That's deserving of derision.
| etrautmann wrote:
| All of these are great arguments when fully articulated! I
| wasn't disagreeing with you earlier :)
| Igelau wrote:
| That first sentence is unnecessary and stinks of mod-bait.
| abernard1 wrote:
| For once I agree with Paul Graham.
|
| I expect his post to be surprisingly unpopular with this crowd,
| as it sleights a core tenet of our postmodern age. Namely, he's
| arguing for a form of objective truth and of "the good". A
| statistical derivation of this good for sure (and qualitative as
| opposed to a Benthamist, quantitative utilitarianism), but a good
| nonetheless.
|
| But I applaud PG for taking this stance. Truth is not like your
| favorite flavor of ice cream. Software isn't either, and certain
| software either works or doesn't. Human culture and beliefs--our
| ideological software--has objectively superior results depending
| upon what your measuring stick is. Some beliefs are objectively
| better.
| coopierez wrote:
| Which beliefs are objectively better?
| abernard1 wrote:
| Which software is objectively better?
|
| I'm answering your question with a question because the
| difficulty of the evaluation process is the point. But there
| _can be_ an evaluation, and there _can be_ an objective
| answer for a set of values.
|
| For instance, if we said "I would like a worldview that
| optimizes people not committing suicide" we could compare and
| contrast and say that worldview A is better than worldview B
| because A's adherents don't commit suicide and B's do. We can
| combine multiple factors, however imprecisely, and still
| compare A and B together as a rational person.
|
| PG is making a similar argument in the "truth" of how art
| evokes subjective goods in humans. Humans across time and
| space are the measuring stick, and hence why the present is
| not overly weighted in his assessment of this evocative
| metric of art's quality.
|
| PG's view on this is radical today but hasn't been for
| thousands of years and won't be again, because human nature
| doesn't change that much. Contextualization (acquired taste)
| can make one appreciate art better, but there is something
| transcendent across space and time that makes art lovely to
| humans, even lacking focused context.
| consumer451 wrote:
| > Which beliefs are objectively better?
|
| I believe there can be answers here if one can clearly define
| what you are optimizing for.
|
| That is the question on my mind these days.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| While you claim to oppose the postmodern idea that there is no
| truth, you've ceded the premise to the postmodernists by
| framing truth in their terms of objectivity and subjectivity.
| The success of the postmodernists was precisely to discredit
| all "subjective" truths by way of distinguishing them from
| "objective" truths, which no common person can deny.
|
| A stronger position is one that does not require the truth to
| be objective or material to in turn be universal and self-
| evident. Abstract truths, such as e^(i*pi) = -1 have no
| material basis and cannot be materially proven yet remain true
| and universal. The simultaneously purely abstract and non-
| arbitrary nature of mathematics is an obvious chink in the
| armor of the postmodernists' worldview, so it is no surprise
| they have gone so far as to now discredit the universality of
| math by arguing that 2+2=5
| https://twitter.com/kareem_carr/status/1289001355437379589?s...
| (this is a Harvard phd student)
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| I'm curious do you believe abstract truths are immanent or
| transcendent?
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| If by that you are asking whether abstract truths dwell
| purely in the minds of humans (or otherwise) or exist in
| some external "realm of ideas" to which minds must be
| connected, then I don't have a position on that because I
| see it as a meaningless distinction. I don't see a
| meaningful difference between the two possibilities from my
| perspective, the result would be the same.
| sidpatil wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean by the universality of math. There
| exist different algebras which define addition differently.
|
| In the case of 2+2=4, this is formalized by the Peano axioms
| [1], which define addition of natural numbers. However, in
| tropical geometry [2], addition returns the minimum of the
| numbers, not their sum.
|
| The author of the original tweet makes this point, and I
| strongly agree with it: https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames/s
| tatus/12889571678449623...
|
| As for 2.4 + 2.4 = 5, I think the tweet author is being a bit
| sloppy there in his explanation. But consider 0.1 + 0.2. Ask
| a human, and they'll tell you it's 0.3. Ask a computer, and
| it'll likely tell you it's 0.30000000000000004. The point is
| that in both scenarios, 0.1, 0.2, and addition are defined
| differently.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_geometry
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| > I'm not sure what you mean by the universality of math.
| There exist different algebras which define addition
| differently.
|
| Yet each one is self-consistent and potentially
| independently discoverable by sentient life forms light
| years away from us, even though these different algebras
| have no material form.
|
| > But consider 0.1 + 0.2. Ask a human, and they'll tell you
| it's 0.3. Ask a computer, and it'll likely tell you it's
| 0.3000000000000004
|
| Just because the computer performs imprecise arithmetic
| does not make .1+.2=.300000004 a meaningful statement from
| which an entire self-consistent arithmetic system can be
| derived. The computer's result is in error. It's called
| floating point error.
| abernard1 wrote:
| > While you claim to oppose the postmodern idea that there is
| no truth, you've ceded the premise to the postmodernists by
| framing truth in their terms of objectivity and subjectivity
|
| I do not. What I am saying is that knowledge--if such a thing
| exists at all and is worthy of defense by humans--can be
| _addressed_ in a rational, objective way.
|
| Lots of things are approximations, but we do not deny the
| existence of categories as useful phenomena or an
| epistemological tool. To paraphrase a famous exchange of
| ideas, GB Shaw: "All chairs are quite different" vs.
| Chesterton: "Well how do you then call them _all_ chairs? "
|
| The postmodernist sleight of hand is to say that perhaps
| because there are differing contexts that there is not a
| universal tendency; such a commonality is either non-existent
| or should be disregarded. They would not categorically
| discard visceral human experiences that lead to say "thirst"
| or "hunger" or "anger", but they will claim that there are
| not common phenomena that engender "awe" or "wonder" or
| "intrigue". I disagree with that statement. That humans can
| reliably classify things that are "beautiful" across cultures
| (and have done so for millenia, even when they hate each
| others' cultures), shows there is a common tendency towards
| taste.
|
| When thirsty, many people drink water, but the postmodernist
| looks at the few drinking Brawndo and has to deny the
| generalization that water quenches thirst but of thirst
| entirely.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| > They would not categorically discard visceral human
| experiences that lead to say "thirst" or "hunger" or
| "anger"
|
| Of course they wouldn't. It would be too difficult for the
| average person to buy and they don't need to especially
| since it isn't really their goal to dismantle truth
| completely, their goal is to dismantle the values we hold
| as a society so that in the vacuum they may impose new
| values upon us. They do that under the guise of questioning
| truth. This is why I said that when you embrace their
| objective/subjective categories you are helping their
| cause. Once those categories are established and accepted
| by society it is simply their job to argue that the values
| they do not like are subjective and arbitrary, then people
| who have accepted the subjective/objective dichotomy will
| do the rest.
| j7ake wrote:
| Is "good taste" a universal property or is it specific to
| different cultures?
|
| Is there art that is overwhelming appreciated by people in one
| culture, but does not resonate at all with another culture?
|
| If that is the case, to what extend does good taste transcend
| cultural barriers?
|
| Perhaps the right model to think is that art interacts with the
| ideas and culture of a people. Good art exposes these ideas and
| cultures to the surface for humans to appreciate.
| DanielBMarkham wrote:
| I find with a lot of more interesting topics, I have to come up
| with my own definition, then measure it against what various
| people say.
|
| Good art, at least to me, is art that has emotional impact over
| time. I can view a painting by a master and it will affect me. I
| can hear one of Beethoven's symphonies and somehow I'm inside his
| head during that time.
|
| These do not seem to be things you can measure in the moment, or
| at least I can't. It takes decades to sort out art that people
| like from art that continues to carry strong emotional impact.
| So, in my mind at least, there's a lot of room for subjectivity
| when talking about modern art. As things age, however, much of
| that subjectivity goes away, and it goes away for the exact
| reasons pg outlines.
|
| There is such a thing as good taste, but in terms of modern art
| it's difficult if not impossible to put your finger on it.
| newbamboo wrote:
| 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.
| cwmoore wrote:
| 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.
| newbamboo wrote:
| "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.
| cwmoore wrote:
| 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.
| newbamboo wrote:
| 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.
| cwmoore wrote:
| 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.
| newbamboo wrote:
| 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?
| WA wrote:
| 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?
| wcarron wrote:
| 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.
| cwmoore wrote:
| 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
| rhines wrote:
| 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.
| bobthechef wrote:
| This is where I'd differentiate between taste and beauty. Taste
| is a property of people. Beauty is a property of things. Taste is
| the ability to recognize and respond to the beauty of things in
| proportion to how beautiful they actually are. Thus, taste is
| ultimately a matter of intellectual refinement. The intellect,
| property developed, recognizes beauty effectively. Someone with
| bad taste can be said to either lack discernment (when they
| cannot tell the difference between the Pieta and some second rate
| work) or possess disordered tastes (when they show the same
| estimation or even greater estimation of the inferior to the
| superior).
|
| Taste is very much related to desirability because what is
| beautiful is better than which is less so, and what is therefore
| good is more desirable than which is less so. Just as people can
| have bad taste, they can have bad desires. Take food, for
| example. Those who desire mediocre food to the same degree as
| good food have poor taste and therefore poor desires. Those with
| a desire to eat glass or their couch cushions (something people
| with pika might experience) have disordered tastes and therefore
| disordered desires.
|
| As to the art itself, since art involves mimesis, good art can be
| measured _in part_ by how well it imitates. (Imitation should not
| be understood here simplistically as implying photorealism.) An
| artist who either lacks discernment or lacks technique will
| produce mediocre imitations. There are feature of art itself
| which are not exhausted by imitation. These, too, determine
| whether the artwork itself is good. Composition and
| proportionality of the artwork itself (and not just the subject)
| are examples. While the subject may be beautiful, the execution
| of the artwork may be poor.
|
| Now as PG says, art has an effect on us (indeed, it communicates
| to us), but because art is artifact and thus lacks an inherent
| end, its perfection cannot be completely explained without making
| reference to something with an inherent end which artifacts lack.
| Human nature is that thing. Human beings individually may possess
| variable perfections and variable degrees of perfection,
| including capacity for aesthetic judgement, either because they
| have either intrinsic individual limitations or because they have
| not actualized their capacities fully, but one and the same human
| nature. So we must look to human nature if we want to explain
| art. Indeed, throughout history, art tracks the understanding of
| human nature in a given culture. Cultures that understand the
| dignity of the human person value portraiture in a way those that
| don't do not.
|
| Aesthetic judgement is value judgement from a different
| perspective, and therefore a truth claim (the fact-value
| dichotomy is bogus).
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| And yet for centuries we've had *"Beauty is in the eye of the
| beholder", which insists that you're wrong.
| raz32dust wrote:
| Taste, by definition, is subjective. Good taste is a matter of
| knowing your audience and knowing your inventory. If you can use
| your inventory to create something that your target audience
| loves, you have good taste. It requires having a great inventory
| (knowing the taste of a lot of things), and having good emotional
| intelligence, and hence it takes time to develop good taste and
| maintain it.
| okkdev wrote:
| There is good taste. Good taste is my taste.
| [deleted]
| ipqk wrote:
| Yeah, not working with Peter Thiel.
| dsizzle wrote:
| This has a lot of overlap with the views of David Deutsch, who
| goes a little further and posits there may be such a thing as
| objective beauty
| https://www.nature.com/articles/526S16a.pdf?origin=ppub
| dahak27 wrote:
| Probably a heretical thing to say here but I feel like PG has
| increasingly fallen into the trap where because he's been smart
| and insightful in some areas he's gradually convinced himself
| he's smart and insightful everywhere. IMO the more he veers away
| from writing on e.g. coding and startups the more he comes across
| like a very over-confident man who thinks he's figured it all out
|
| It's quite noticeable on Twitter too where he seems to
| increasingly have very confident diagnoses on everything from
| geopolitics to culture war nonsense to genetic engineering.
|
| Funnily enough a friend said something lately about
| SlateStarCodex (or ACX now) - I wonder if getting that much
| positive feedback on your musings just inevitably starts
| convincing you everything you think must be just as insightful
| skissane wrote:
| What is wrong with expressing one's opinion on things?
| Intelligent people often have opinions on a lot of things which
| are outside of their formal area of expertise. Those opinions
| aren't always right, but can nonetheless make for some
| interesting conversations. They may sometimes say some things
| which sound stupid to the real experts in the field, but a
| genuinely intelligent person is open to taking those expert
| objections thoughtfully and seriously, as opposed to your
| garden variety crank or conspiracy theorist who can't even
| understand those expert objections, but doesn't need to
| understand them to know that they are wrong.
|
| The other day I was having a discussion about psychiatry with a
| relative of mine who is an esteemed psychiatry professor. Now,
| no doubt about it, he knows heaps of things about psychiatry
| which I, as a non-psychiatrist, don't. But, on the other hand,
| the conversation made me realise I know some things about his
| field he doesn't: I read and am interested in psychiatrists who
| criticise "mainstream" approaches (such as by attacking the
| DSM, whether in general or with respect to specific diagnoses
| included in it or both), and so I know a lot about who those
| people are and what their publications and arguments are, and
| what the "mainstream" responses are. He is far less interested
| in that topic, so it appears to me he only knows those
| criticisms at a relatively high level, and that he isn't across
| the details of them to the extent that I am. I think he
| generally trusts that the mainstream approach is right, and
| focuses (both as a researcher and as a clinician) on working
| within it rather than questioning or challenging it.
|
| Does the fact that he is an esteemed professor of psychiatry
| and I have no formal qualifications or professional experience
| whatsoever in this field or any related field mean that he is
| (likely to be) right and I am (likely to be) wrong? Well, I
| think debatable areas of expert opinion, just because you
| happen to personally know an expert on one side of that debate,
| doesn't make that side automatically the right side. Even
| acknowledging that there is a majority and minority side to
| many of these debates, I think often the minority may be a
| minority, not because their actual arguments are weaker, but
| due to social and cultural and historical and political
| factors. That is especially true in fields such as psychiatry,
| which still have a rather weak empirical basis. Or, you could
| say the same about theoretical physics, which starts with a
| very firm empirical basis (experimental physics is at a far
| more advanced stage than neurobiology/psychology/etc) but wants
| to go a long way beyond it - just because string theory is more
| popular in the contemporary theoretical physics community than
| loop quantum gravity, is not good evidence that the former is
| more likely to be true than the later. It is important here to
| distinguish respectable minority views within academia (even if
| small minorities) from truly fringe/crank views (which few
| academics would consider worthy of respect). I also think my
| esteemed-psychiatry-professor-relative would be more likely to
| convince me to abandon my view of the topic in favour of his,
| if this was an area of his field of which he'd developed a
| detailed knowledge, as opposed to it being an area of which he
| only appears to know at a high level.
|
| And now when we come to PG expressing views on aesthetics,
| which is commonly viewed as a branch of philosophy - philosophy
| is an area which is especially unsettled, and in which the
| question of where the majority of academic opinion lies is
| especially distant from the question of what is likely to be
| true. I suppose the main way I'd fault PG here, is there is a
| lot of pre-existing academic work on this question, and he
| doesn't engage with it at all, or display any knowledge of it.
| On the other hand, maybe given the constraints of the format of
| the talk he was asked to deliver, the likely interests and
| abilities of the audience, etc, attempting to engage with that
| work (to the extent that PG knows it) was not really going to
| be possible.
| dang wrote:
| PG hasn't changed in those respects. He was always interested
| in everything (well, a lot of things - I've never heard him
| care about music, for example) and always had the style you're
| talking about, which has always rubbed some people the wrong
| way for whatever reason.
| WithinReason wrote:
| _If there 's no such thing as good taste, then there's no such
| thing as good art._
|
| Unless good art is defined as one that appeals to more people's
| taste.
|
| I agree with the premise that there is such a thing as good
| taste, but this is not the knockdown argument it's presented to
| be.
| crawfordcomeaux wrote:
| As a person who learned to abandon likes and dislikes, I can
| break this proof.
|
| "It means we can't say that any painter is better than a randomly
| chosen eight year old."
|
| First, this is a non-literal arguement and so is disconnected
| from reality in a literal sense. We CAN say this. We can also
| make taste claims AND we can admit it's arbitrarily driven by
| many different decisions and biases developed before this
| lifetime, as artists and art don't exist in vacuums. We can also
| admit it's absolutely an adultist perspective to dismiss a
| person's contributions by the age of their current body.
| Literally everyone has different skills and the impact art has
| can be wildly different depending on the piece and the context
| it's viewed in. A person (namely me) can become inspired to
| change the world by witnessing a 1-year old creating a realistic
| drawing of pumpkin seeds. Is that art good based on whether or
| not the person is successful at changing the world? Who cares!
| It's an arbitrary and unnecessary judgment being made out of a
| habit of judging things, rather than observing and accepting
| whatever's being received.
|
| This post represents a continuation of the cultural norms of
| preference-making (which is a form of limited identity), avoiding
| absurdity, over-reliance on classical logic instead of
| uncertainty logic to process reality (since it doesn't leave room
| for art that exists in multiple classes of equivalence of good
| and bad and judges art based on too short of a timeline).
|
| Anyone who abandons their preferences gets to realize how
| limiting thinking like PG proposes here is, how it limits the joy
| and value of any artist or work of art, and how this creates a
| hostile environment for artists of literally every kind.
|
| Good... bad...meh.... there exists art that meets all needs while
| denying none and then there's the rest.
|
| If you've never abandoned the automated judgment and preference-
| making most of the world teaches, you can never realize a
| perspective that transcends arbitrarily subjective thinking.
|
| Also, as an aside, tastes are, in part driven by trauma. I
| hypothesize this is why some people in addiction recovery develop
| different tastes after having spiritual experiences/awakenings:
| they heal from and release the stuck feelings from some past
| trauma(s) which were being used to judge other things in life.
|
| So does anyone want to abandon their preferences as an attempt to
| falsify this perspective for science? I have a practice that
| worked for me and want to conduct an experiment where some people
| genuinely/sincerely commit to it without being aware of the
| practice and others choose to try it only after learning about
| the practice. Any brave souls want to seek deeper joy and release
| from cultural/ trauma programming?
| renlo wrote:
| Put another way, "good taste" is like universal ethics. There's
| no such thing as "universal taste" (as in, God did not ordain
| something to have the quality of "good taste"), but, most people
| can agree that they like a thing (an "agreement of taste").
| Former doesn't exist but latter does. Tastes shift over time
| indicating that a "universal taste" doesn't exist.
|
| When the term "good taste" is used though, it seems to allude to
| "universal taste". I don't think people mean "what everyone
| likes" ("agreement of taste") when they refer to "good taste",
| otherwise all of the "gaudy" leopard-print clothing of yesteryear
| would be "good taste". "Good taste" means, to most people, "rich
| people value this, for whatever reason"
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > _" 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 is I think the central argument of the piece and I think it
| is very wrong. He conflates the notion of goodness in a
| teleological sense with proficiency. When people talk about good
| or bad taste they try to make an objective claim about the
| purpose of art, that's to say what end a piece of art serves, or
| to judge the quality of what it ultimately expresses.
|
| You can be 'good' in the sense of proficient on utterly
| meaningless tasks. Someone can memorize ten thousand digits of a
| random sequence. You can be good or bad at it, and we can
| objectively figure out if you are, but the task isn't objectively
| meaningful.
|
| To say that there is no good or bad taste is to say there is,
| ultimately no non-subjective standard for a piece of art. This
| does not imply that any subject that produces art cannot be
| judged on their merits by their own standards.
| mojuba wrote:
| I was expecting this essay to mention novelty. What we appreciate
| in art really comes down to novelty and therefore good taste is
| the ability to recognize it. Which in turn requires the observer
| to have a solid background in the genre (i.e. having seen a lot
| of it already) to judge how novel and original a work of art is.
| That's why art critics, collectors generally agree on things more
| often than not: they've dealt with enough of previous samples to
| identify novelty.
|
| The rest, pretty much all the other aspects of art other than
| novelty are debatable and subjective, I think.
| ethanbond wrote:
| I think this is in the right direction but critical that it's
| not interpreted as more novel = more better. There's some sweet
| spot of novelty, which I actually would say is closer to
| _surprise_. In order to surprise someone, you must first build
| expectation (e.g. use elements other artists have used), then
| violate it.
| mojuba wrote:
| Exactly, and I think the 21st century artists have pretty
| much figured it out already and it's why new art created
| these days removes the aesthetics and focuses on the surprize
| alone (Damien Hurst, Jeff Koons, etc.)
| fijiaarone wrote:
| But in the last quarter of the twentieth century M. Peretz
| Bernstein posited successfully that the element of surprise
| had been exhausted in his seminal dissertation "Nothing's
| Shocking" - paraphrasing another Jewish scholar of some
| dozens of centuries before, a M. Solomon Davidson who
| poetically stated "There is nothing new under the sun".
| raelmiu wrote:
| That's a really interesting attribute to focus on. Never
| thought of novelty as a standard.
|
| I think there's an argument to be made for culturally
| convergent "taste" as a measure of value. We like what others
| like, we're all trying to predict what others will like to
| increase our own status, etc. These forces should result in a
| convergent "good taste" to win.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| By that definition the worst movies should be more novel. There
| are definitely movies that exist in which the reaction of
| everyone is that how can anyone produce movie this bad. If you
| think there is no such thing as universally bad, search for
| worst song in youtube.
|
| Also theoretically a random static is the most novel thing that
| could be present.
| dagw wrote:
| _random static is the most novel thing that could be
| present._
|
| Unstructured noise music was novel for while, but by now that
| has also been done.
| orangepurple wrote:
| Not true. I'm still listening to Merzbow.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's all about perspective.
|
| Some people find original Star Wars to be a truly great
| movie. Those same people may find the movies that inspired
| Star Wars, like Kurosawa's "Hidden Fortress" or Midway boring
| or solely on technical factors like color vs black and white.
| In a mass market product those technical factors make the
| work less approachable.
|
| I spent several years walking through a pretty good
| collection of mid-20th century modern art. Most of it made no
| impression on me at all, but one installation's aesthetic
| appealed to me for reasons that I cannot really describe.
| Part of it was the absurdity of what the facility did to that
| space -- they literally dropped a random howitzer in the
| room. But if I nerded out and studied the artists and their
| art, I'd develop a more nuanced understanding and
| appreciation.
| mojuba wrote:
| Can you bring some examples of films that are considered bad,
| rated say below IMDB 5, but are novel in some way? I don't
| know of any. There are some edge cases "so bad it's good"
| like The Room, but I personally don't get the appeal of it.
| And then it's an edge case anyway.
| long_time_gone wrote:
| IMBD might not be a great source because that is graded by
| regular people, not critics. A better measure might be
| differences in Metacritic scores between critics and users.
|
| That said, Zoolander has a 6.5 rating on IMDB and is
| considered a classic. Perhaps comedy as a genre is more
| likely to have that anomaly.
| watwut wrote:
| I find this odd assumption. Of course it is possible to
| have novel ideas and still have horrible dialog and shots.
| And no, I am not in habit of watching IMDB under 5.
|
| Like, the reason people dont know imdb under 5 that satisfy
| your condition is that people avoid watching movies with
| low score. They dont recommend them to others either.
| robofanatic wrote:
| There is never black/while or 1/0. There is always a spectrum of
| possibilities. You can say that whichever taste the majority of
| people like is the good taste!
| levmiseri wrote:
| I really enjoy an article "Learning to See" on a similar topic
| from designer's point of view - from the founder of iA:
| https://ia.net/topics/learning-to-see
|
| A small excerpt:
|
| > Personally (dis-)liking a color, form, or image is not a matter
| of design, it is a question of personal taste. And as we all
| know, when it comes to personal taste there is not much to talk
| about there. But in addition to personal taste there is something
| that we can call "trained taste" or "sophistication". Let me
| recapitulate:
|
| - Whether I like pink or not, sugar in my coffee, red or white
| wine, these things are a matter of personal taste. These are
| personal preferences, and both designers and non-designers have
| them. This is the taste we shouldn't bother discussing.
|
| - Whether I set a text's line height to 100% or 150% is not a
| matter of taste, it is a matter of knowing the principles of
| typography.
|
| - However, whether I set a text's line height at 150% or 145% is
| a matter of Fingerspitzengefuhl; wisdom in craft, or
| sophistication.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You could say the same thing about music, but I know some
| perfectly executed but 'dead' music and the same piece by some
| amateur nobody ever heard of executed in a (far) less than
| perfect way that yet manages to make it come alive somehow. I've
| always been wondering what that quality is but I don't think any
| arguments about logic are going to settle it, if execution is all
| there is to good taste then a lot of well executed art would be
| valuable and yet it isn't.
|
| Piet Mondriaan is a nice example: the execution could have been
| done by anybody willing to spend the time and the effort, but
| somehow the paintings have a value that well exceeds the
| association I have with the skills required to compose and
| execute them. I know a few painters that are off the scale good
| whose work will never be worth more than the materials cost,
| never mind their time.
|
| Good taste is in the eye of the beholder, as well as what people
| agree on is good taste.
|
| It's _much_ easier to label something bad taste than to have a
| meaningful argument about what is mediocre taste or good taste.
| It 's like trying to define culture in terms of observable facts
| about reality, instead of a living thing, the lens through which
| we perceive everything, including the frameworks we use to reason
| about things. You can't really measure anything with a yardstick
| made of rubber and springs.
| b0rsuk wrote:
| I disagree - there's no such thing as UNIVERSAL good taste. My
| current simple definition of art is something that evokes
| emotions just be "being there" and not directly or indirectly
| doing something to someone. No amount of education in classical
| art will make a person appreciate Obfuscated C Contest. But a
| programmer will usually appreciate it, just like he would likely
| appreciate the Javascript WAT video. Programmer humor is still
| humor, and it can be well done. But it will be niche. Someone
| else is an expert on trucks and loves the movie Sorcerer (1977).
| I enjoyed the movie "Tampopo" a lot, but judging by online
| comments people who can cook well have reasons to really admire
| it. I dislike rap and hiphop music, and think it's bad, but I
| still believe there's better and worse rap. Just like there's
| better and worse anime - but in my opinion the good ones are the
| exceptions and not the rule. A broken mechanical clock still
| shows the correct hour twice a day.
|
| So, to wrap it up, I think to claim "good taste" you first need
| to establish some criteria, define an audience. Because no art
| works for all people and THAT IS FINE. I think memes are a form
| of art too. Nyan cat looks crude, but coming up with a similar
| thing that takes the word by storm - or just a new joke - is not
| easy. We have different skills, experiences, sensibilities.
|
| In my language, "art" extends beyond aesthetics and feelings.
| When something is masterfully done, and even goes beyond, it's
| inspired - we say it's art. But just because opera singing takes
| skill and is hard doesn't mean you have to enjoy it.
| arketyp wrote:
| >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. So while it's not possible to have perfect
| taste, it is possible to have good taste.
|
| The tl;dr at the very end. If the partial order is sufficiently
| unlike a total order then his father was basically correct
| because good taste tells you very little.
| slibhb wrote:
| I had the opposite conversation with my father. I claimed
| "there's no accounting for taste" and my father said "that's not
| true, you can claim Shakespeare isn't good but you're wrong".
|
| For judgements of taste, no one is better than Kant. I recommend
| this essay: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetic-
| judgment/
|
| In Kantian aesthetics, judgements of taste are subjective
| (because they differ between people) but are normative in that
| they claim universal validity (when we judge art to be good, we
| will all others to agree). Kant calls this "subjective
| universality". This explains why people disagree about art and
| why we can argue about it. It bothers us when people disagree
| with our judgements of taste. When we claim it doesn't bother us
| ("there's no accounting for taste"), we're either lying or not
| making judgements of taste.
|
| Compare this to judgements about flavor (which Kant calls
| judgments of the agreeable). We don't argue about whether vanilla
| is better than chocolate or, if we do, we consider the argument
| trivial and subjective with no right answer. This is not the case
| when we argue about art.
|
| The heart of the matter is whether beauty is objective or if it
| is merely relative to something. PG's essay argues that it is
| relative to being human, Kant similarly argues that it is
| relative to being a rational being (a somewhat broader category).
| This contrasts with the common argument that beauty is relative
| to some socio-cultural standard.
| msla wrote:
| > I claimed "there's no accounting for taste" and my father
| said "that's not true, you can claim Shakespeare isn't good but
| you're wrong".
|
| So Tolstoy was wrong?
|
| https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/lear/english/e_ltf
|
| > Tolstoy begins by saying that throughout life Shakespeare has
| aroused in him 'an irresistible repulsion and tedium'.
| Conscious that the opinion of the civilized world is against
| him, he has made one attempt after another on Shakespeare's
| works, reading and re-reading them in Russian, English and
| German; but 'I invariably underwent the same feelings;
| repulsion, weariness and bewilderment'.
| karaterobot wrote:
| There's no accounting for taste.
| fijiaarone wrote:
| Tolstoy is free to try and top Shakespeare. To his credit, he
| tried his best, and did better than most, but didn't come
| close.
| watwut wrote:
| To the extend you can compare such massively different
| works, Tolstoy is better.
| abecedarius wrote:
| He's the authority on his own response. And it may be true
| that Shakespeare is overrated. It's _possible_ he could
| persuade me that Shakespeare is _not good_. (E.g. I 've read
| Plato in translation and think his giant reputation is a blot
| on society's collective judgement.)
|
| Tough to argue, though. People still respond to Shakespeare
| and not only because they're supposed to.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Disagreement is a property of values, not a property of
| universalism. Kant just assumes universalism, but assumption is
| not an argument.
|
| Some people have a strong opinion on pineapple pizza. I have a
| strong opinion that wine and tobacco have bad taste.
| cgrealy wrote:
| >my father said "that's not true, you can claim Shakespeare
| isn't good but you're wrong".
|
| Could not disagree more.
|
| Your father can claim Shakespeare is good, but that doesn't
| make him right. I think Shakespeare is good, but that's a
| subjective opinion and holds no more weight than someone who
| thinks Dan Brown is a better writer /shudder.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Given that Dan Brown is alive and that Shakespeare is well
| and truly dead I'm pretty sure that Dan Brown _is_ the better
| writer.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| It amazes me when people seem to lack taste. I'm not even saying
| the ability to rank items in a way that agrees to some general
| standard. I'm saying the ability to _notice_ that there is even a
| difference. I 'll talk about taste in the literal sense but this
| extends to everything. I remember being at a Chinese restaurant
| with some friends where we were eating scallion pancakes. I said,
| boastfully, that my family makes better scallion pancakes and a
| friend remarked that he didn't think there was any difference,
| that indeed all scallion pancakes were exactly alike to him. Or
| another friend couldn't tell the difference between orange juice
| from concentrate and not from concentrate.
|
| I wonder how much of this is physiological and how much is
| mental. I can't help but think you'd need some sort of color
| blindness for taste to genuinely not notice any difference
| between scallion pancakes. But perhaps my friend was
| exaggerating.
|
| My theory is that taste is one quality that separates the
| academics from the business people. Academia doesn't necessitate
| a lot of taste. If you have it, great. If you don't have it, no
| big deal. On the other hand, stuff such as product design, user
| interfaces, even software engineering, requires taste. You need
| to understand what makes a good piece of software or a good
| product. One could argue that Steve Jobs was a product
| supertaster. He was finely attuned to stuff that the average user
| (or the average HN reader) would not see. As PG notes, taste is
| being attuned to the collective unconsciousness, to a collective
| aesthetic. If you can tap into that, you can attract customers.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I used to think that people who said they can't taste the
| difference between things were just being assholes. Then I got
| covid, and I lost most of my sense of smell, and my taste was
| reduced to the basics. Pepsi, and a ripe pear tasted identical
| to me, other than texture. They were both sweet and kind of
| sour. It made me think that some of these people might just
| have trouble tasting, and they don't realize it. Though I still
| think most of them are being assholes.
| anm89 wrote:
| This always bothers me specifically about music. I don't claim
| to have some universal say on what is good and bad music, there
| is tons of music out there which I think is tasteful but I
| simply don't like.
|
| But like 10% of music let's say is absolute garbage, mostly top
| 40 stuff made from cosntructed bands with some models as front
| men, written by a team constructed by a label to create the
| most generically likeable music possible, edited to the point
| where it doesn't matter that the models are bad singers.
|
| This music seems to account for about 90% of global music
| consumption as far as I can tell. I've been traveling around
| the world for many years and it get's depressing when you are
| in some remote jungle somewhere that feels like your finally
| off the beaten path and you get to some little shack restaurant
| / bar and they have One Direction on the radio. You can't
| fucking escape it. I've had times where I was on 3 continents
| on 3 months and you here the exact same garbage music
| regardless of location. It's crazy how ubiquitous it is.
|
| And there is so much good music out there. If anything we are
| in a golden age in terms of volume of quality independent music
| being produced. And yet a vast majority of people seem to have
| no problem listening to the bottom of the barrel junk for a
| majority of the music they listen to.
| jl6 wrote:
| Part of the answer is that such people aren't actually
| listening to the music. They are getting something else out
| of it, like using it as background noise, or just as a beat
| to dance to, or as in-group signaling, or maybe access to the
| culture associated with the music, or perhaps they are self-
| medicating with it, or maybe they are ogling the performer,
| or perhaps it reminds them of something positive that
| happened when they first heard it.
|
| None of these uses require the music to be "good".
|
| Actively listening to music is a somewhat rare activity.
| huge87 wrote:
| I can readily attest to having no taste in music. So much
| so that criticism of music (in reviews of albums, etc.) is
| incomprehensible to me; I tried using good reviews as a way
| to find music I'd want to listen to but discovered that
| music only serves one of the above functions (looking for a
| good beat, or whatever).
|
| I can't tell good music from bad; either I like the way it
| sounds or I don't.
|
| I suspect a fair number of other people are like this. And
| more power to people who have good taste in music.
| anm89 wrote:
| I don't really buy this. Take modern American pop country.
| People LOVE that music and it is some of the worst of the
| lot.
|
| And again I have nothing against the genre. I listen to non
| pop country. But people are specifically attracted to the
| worst of it and they seem to very actively like it.
| Nition wrote:
| I think part of it is how much other music you've listened
| to, and how much you know about music.
|
| For example I watched Shang-Chi the other day, which is
| basically pop music in film form. As someone who's watched a
| fair amount of films, it's easy to see how it follows all the
| usual generic story beats - it's good but formulaic and
| relatively predictable. But if it was the first film you'd
| ever seen it would be amazing.
|
| You have films that intentionally subvert expectations,
| relying on the fact that the audience knows how the story
| usually goes. That's jazz music. Classical often as well. But
| that relies on people both knowing the usual tropes and also
| _wanting_ something different - there 's some comfort in the
| known. Many people just want the superhero film. After all,
| the simple formula is the most inherently powerful regardless
| of the audience's internal knowledge of narrative or notation
| - that's why it's so commonly used.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Subverting expectations also has larger downsides. A
| competently-made movie that just isn't that good is simply
| a boring movie that looks pretty. A subversion that goes
| wrong subverts your expectation of watching a good movie
| with one of watching an incoherent movie.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| There's nuances and an art to pop though. Take Ocean's
| Eleven. It's fundamentally a crowd pleaser movie with a
| star studded cast, a conventional genre and a happy ending.
| But it's executed perfectly. Soderbergh has a mastery of
| the form that shows even when he's making pop. You see this
| with The Beach Boys or The Beatles or even Ed Sheeran,
| where the music is superficially enjoyable but there's a
| depth to it nonetheless. Take Jacob Collier's
| deconstruction of Stevie Wonder:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZP6nogQYPg
| Nition wrote:
| Yeah, so the Beatles and The Beach Boys manage to take
| relatively complex music (chord choices etc) and have it
| still appeal on a fundamental level, which is much harder
| than just taking the easy route and following a formula.
| Often making complex music loses mass appeal (I'd put
| Jacob Collier in that category), making it less viable
| commercially than the simple formula approach.
|
| My guess is that the serendipitous combination of high-
| level artistry + mass appeal + marketing dollars is
| simply much less common than the combo of "good at basic
| formula" + marketing dollars. Every now and then
| something really clever and different makes it into the
| top 40 just by sheer luck.
|
| Seems like I was wrong above about the simple formula
| being the most powerful though doesn't it. Maybe a brand
| new formula can be even more powerful but is just that
| much harder to execute.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I like to explain my taste in music, by saying it's like
| taking a shower. At first it's hot, but then you get used to
| it, and you make it a bit hotter, and a bit hotter. If it
| were that hot in the beginning I never would have got in, but
| this is where I am now.
|
| Though in a broader sense, with any creative endeavor the
| more people that like something, the worse it is.
| cwmoore wrote:
| What you call "garbage" others might label "recycling" ;)
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > written by a team constructed by a label to create the most
| generically likeable music possible
|
| A few years ago, a group engineered the most _un_ likeable
| song ever:
|
| https://youtu.be/-gPuH1yeZ08
|
| Featuring bagpipes, a rapping opera singer, country music,
| and a children's choir singing holiday music that ends with
| telling you to do your shopping at Wal-mart.
| Lammy wrote:
| "This announcement from the producers of this record
| contains important information for radio program directors,
| and is not for broadcast. The first cut on this record has
| been cross-format-focused for airplay success. As you well
| know, a record must break on radio in order to actually
| provide a living for the artists involved. Up until now,
| you've had to make these record-breaking decisions on your
| own, relying only on perplexing intangibilities like
| 'taste' and 'intuition', but now there's a better way. The
| cut that follows is the product of newly-developed
| compositional techniques, based on state-of-the-art
| marketing analysis technology. This cut has been
| analytically designed to break on radio."
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82fshB1F_tE
| watwut wrote:
| > written by a team constructed by a label to create the most
| generically likeable music possible, edited to the point
| where it doesn't matter that the models are bad singers.
|
| Maybe it is just the case where team of experts created music
| many people like. People really don't mind generic when
| serving foods daydreaming or eating. Generic is often better,
| because it won't break flow of what they are doing.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| No way, Jobs created phoneposters.
| FourthProtocol wrote:
| I would extend that to include behavior. Getting spannered at a
| frat party is hardly in good taste, whereas a glass too many at
| afternoon tea is, assuming you're able to limit the effects to
| a giggle.
|
| Similarly taking a bite of food, then a sip of a drink, and
| then chewing with a semi -open mouth is in extreme bad taste.
|
| We aren't just the art we wear or aquire. Our tastes position
| us in a social heireachy.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Agreed. That immediately can be followed up with: taste
| depends entirely upon the particular social hierarchy?
|
| There are a lot of them, and we each participate in more than
| one. School, church, family, job and on and on.
| jl6 wrote:
| The skill of distinguishment seems like something that could be
| learned with practice, or by having better observing tools
| (e.g. better eyesight, or more taste buds). This is the part
| that you could, in principle, program a robot to do.
|
| Judging which of two thing is better (aesthetic taste) feels
| like something quite different.
| gsjbjt wrote:
| > My theory is that taste is one quality that separates the
| academics from the business people. Academia doesn't
| necessitate a lot of taste. If you have it, great. If you don't
| have it, no big deal.
|
| This might be true for academics in ancient Greek literature,
| but certainly isn't true for academics in CS nowadays. If you
| don't have good taste in research problems that are {important
| for downstream industry applications, scientifically
| interesting, tractable}, you won't get anything done, and you
| won't get published. If anything, the pressure for academics to
| develop good taste is stronger than for people designing
| product. You can have a product that provides just one utility
| that users desperately need and have terrible taste for all the
| other axes that make a product "good," and do just fine.
| Academic papers get judged (in peer review / traction after
| publication) purely against the taste and aesthetics of other
| people in your community.
| jacobolus wrote:
| > _friend remarked that he didn 't think there was any
| difference, that indeed all scallion pancakes were exactly
| alike to him._
|
| This is entirely plausible. If you are used to eating some food
| regularly over the course of decades, you will be able to
| discriminate between good vs. mediocre versions. If you have
| only eaten a food a few times, the most relevant comparisons
| will be with other types of food, and you won't necessarily
| notice the difference between two separate experiences of it.
| When compared to pizza, tacos, or bagels, all scallion pancakes
| are pretty similar.
|
| For instance, a person who drinks red wine every day will be
| able to tell you the difference between varietals, regions,
| distinguish $100 vs. $7 bottles, maybe notice good vs. bad
| years from some vineyard; someone who has only rarely had red
| wine might think that they all taste about the same.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| True, although this friend is asian american and likely grew
| up eating scallion pancakes on at least a few occasions. He
| seemed almost proud of his lack of taste which really
| surprised me.
| spike021 wrote:
| I'd imagine there are still different situations at play
| here.
|
| For instance, I'm Jewish and my mother made potato latkes
| one way throughout my childhood. I loved those and various
| details about them (texture, flavor profile, doneness,
| etc.) but would go to other friends' house for a meal or
| whatever and they'd have their own latkes that just didn't
| taste as good, were much simpler flavor-wise, texture was
| more homogeneous, etc.
|
| And then of course I've bought frozen pre-made latkes from
| places like Trader Joe's.
|
| I'd imagine it's like buying frozen gyoza at H-mart vs
| making your own from scratch with either pre-made wrappers
| or even homemade ones, plus the filling.
| zzbzq wrote:
| Perhaps your friend was signaling a taste you couldn't
| perceive. For example, I generally look down upon scallion
| pancakes as a category.
|
| Consider an American food analogue. Do I distinguish good
| and bad grilled cheese? How can I when its identity is that
| of a basic, unhealthy, cheap, low-class food? If you add
| more exotic ingredients, it becomes distant from its
| quintessential identity, so it becomes "good" grilled
| cheese in inverse proportion to it being, actually, grilled
| cheese. Contrariwise, if you enhance it by further
| indulging in the fats, oils, salts, etc., can we say this
| is "better" when it has also become even more base, even
| more low class? It becomes better as it becomes worse.
|
| I find myself wanting to say something similar to your
| friend. All the grilled cheese are the same to me. I can
| plainly see one is different than another, but they are all
| objects of derision, and they only rise above that derision
| insofar as they stop being grilled cheese.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > How can I when its identity is that of a basic,
| unhealthy, cheap, low-class food
|
| That's an assertion, not a self-evident fact. And one
| that I (and I am certain, many other people) would
| dispute.
| ohyeshedid wrote:
| So, then: which one of you has good taste?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Skimming through some recipes I searched, it seems it is
| mostly all purpose flour and a ton of oil to make it
| flaky. It seems to be in the "unhealthy" camp assuming
| carbs and sat fats are unhealthy.
|
| Also in the cheap camp considering the ingredients are
| cheap and making it does not seem too time or equipment
| intensive.
|
| I find working with dough to always be complicated, but
| the recipe itself seems simple enough, so it might
| qualify as basic too, relative to other recipes.
|
| Low class is ill defined, but assuming it means it is
| popular with poorer people due to the lower cost of its
| ingredients and preparation, then it might also be true.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > basic, unhealthy, cheap, low-class
|
| "Basic" is clearly not a useful adjective, when a grilled
| cheese sandwich can be made with a variety of different
| ingredients some of which are easily available in most
| parts of the world, and some are not. Certainly you can
| make _a basic grilled cheese sandwich_ , but it's a
| logical fallacy to leap from there to "all grilled cheese
| sandwiches are basic".
|
| "Low class" is again highly ingredient dependent. A
| grilled cheese sandwich made with some "rare" sourdough
| bread, irish grass fed butter and 3 kinds of artisanal
| cheese from different parts of the world is just as much
| as grilled cheese sandwich as one made with wonderbread
| and slices of american "cheese product". It's a similar
| logical fallacy: just because you can make a _" low class
| grilled cheese"_ doesn't imply that "all grilled cheese
| sandwiches are low class".
|
| "Cheap" is also covered in a similar way.
|
| Unhealthy I will generally concede, other than to note
| that our ideas about what is and is not healthy or
| unhealthy food shift a lot over time (and often loop back
| on themselves).
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| Uhh I can't really understand this argument frankly.
| You're making a value judgement of grilled cheese as a
| commodity food but still, if someone put a grilled cheese
| in front of you that used plain white bread and one that
| used sourdough, you'd notice the difference, right? Sure
| you could argue that the sourdough grilled cheese is not
| a real grilled cheese but in doing so, you are inherently
| _distinguishing_ the two items, therefore demonstrating
| taste to a degree.
| zzbzq wrote:
| The argument is that I can distinguish them, but not rank
| them, because I distinguish them with respect to their
| essential character. Grilled cheese's essential character
| is something I view with derision, and its rank increases
| only by shedding that essential character. Grilled cheese
| with sourdough bread, or with veggies and barbecued meat,
| would rank as "better food" precisely because they rank
| as "worse grilled cheese."
| simiones wrote:
| They would see a difference, but wouldn't find one better
| than other: they're still grilled cheese, and thus
| worthless in their value system.
| asiachick wrote:
| Lots of TV shows showing "experts" where they blind taste
| test them between expensive and cheap wine or expensive vs
| cheap chocolate and blind folded they can not tell the
| difference.
|
| That is not to say there is no good vs bad
| wine/chocolate/name your food. But it has nothing to do with
| price.
| mgaunard wrote:
| I've seen a lot of videos that actually show the opposite.
| Even I as a non-expert over video can clearly see the
| difference from thousands of miles away.
|
| The problem might just be that the TV shows you watch are
| so mediocre they can't even get a real expert.
| [deleted]
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| Do they? Can you give an example? Because there's a
| recurring Epicurious series where an expert tries to
| determine of two samples which one is cheap and which is
| expensive. They're not always right but they're right quite
| often.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| This is just your casual periodic reminder that if
| choosing between two possibilities, you could expect
| someone to be right about half the time by just guessing.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| Yes yes. But the experts are consistently 90 percent plus
| accurate. Check out the videos! They elucidate their
| reasoning quite well. It's not hocus pocus
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Meanwhile, I remember a Mythbusters episode where they
| tested the myth that if you take cheap vodka and run it
| through a Brita water filter, it makes it better.
|
| They took a bottle of cheap vodka, took a sample out,
| filtered the rest, took another sample and set it aside,
| and re-filtered the remaining vodka, and repeated this 10
| times, so that they had a spectrum of vodka samples from
| filtered zero times to 10 times. They then brought on a
| vodka expert to taste test them and randomized the order of
| the samples to see if he could re-order them based on the
| number of times they went through the filter.
|
| And he did it PERFECTLY.
|
| IIRC, Adam and Jamie could tell the difference after 1 run
| through the filter, but not further runs.
| grujicd wrote:
| Obligatory XKCD:
|
| https://xkcd.com/915/
| deanCommie wrote:
| I always felt like that XKCD comic has the opposite message
| than how a lot of folks I know take it as.
|
| Interpretation/Message A: You can find nuance and subtlety
| in anything, including Joe Biden photographs. This means
| that most wine-tasters/foodie snobs/art critics are just
| grasping at straws, and there is no value in subject
| pursuits of evaluation of quality whether it be Food or
| Art.
|
| This is a disappointingly common perspective amongst tech
| nerds.
|
| Interpretation/Message B: You can find nuance and subtlety
| in anything, including Joe Biden photographs. This is a
| testament to the power of the human mind and personality -
| that we can identify small minute differences in objects,
| flavours, and creations, and describe them with
| specificity. There is genuine beauty in the variety in the
| world and offhand shallow interactions with them do not
| adequately permit a full appreciation of the wonders of the
| universe. It's worth taking the time to find an area to
| gain an in-depth understanding in in, regardless of what
| anyone thinks. Yes, even Joe Biden photographs, if that's
| all it would be.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Message C: there's one true way to grasp at straws.
| lexapro wrote:
| >When compared to pizza, tacos, or bagels, all scallion
| pancakes are pretty similar.
|
| Bad example, as most pizzas _are_ pretty similar. And in my
| opinion the best pizzas are not too different from average
| pizzas. And yes, I had a lot of pizzas in my life, in Naples
| and elsewhere.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| And again I ask, really? Because there's a massive
| difference between a soft, light Naples pizza that's eaten
| with a fork and a doughy, thick Dominoes pizza and a
| crispy, salty New York slice and a chewy, deeply roasted
| Sicilian pizza. Even in New York which I'd hazard is in the
| top 5 pizza cities in the world, there's a massive
| difference between Joes Pizza and Lucali.
| lexapro wrote:
| I see what you mean now. What I meant is that I like
| Neapolitan pizza, Domino's Pizza, Pizza Hut, New York
| pizza... pizza is just really great and it's best when
| I'm hungry.
| nikk1 wrote:
| you sir have bad taste in pizza
| lexapro wrote:
| Or maybe I'm just not picky?
| auggierose wrote:
| Same thing, really.
| jacobolus wrote:
| I think you misunderstand me.
|
| What I mean is: when an inexperienced person compares a
| scallion pancake to a pizza, or compares a scallion pancake
| to a taco, the two foods are obviously very different. But
| when an inexperienced person compares a mediocre scallion
| pancake to a great one, eaten on different days, it may be
| hard to remember the differences.
|
| Likewise, someone has rarely eaten pizza might consider a
| good Neapolitan pizza to be broadly similar to a Domino's
| pizza, whereas someone who has pizza all the time will
| notice many differences between the two.
| Hugsun wrote:
| The mistake he makes is to conflate the ability to recognize
| quality and the appreciation of quality.
|
| He elaborates further in this recommended read
| http://paulgraham.com/goodart.html
|
| Goodness is always measured against a standard and although he
| proposes a reasonable standard, it's still arbitrary as all
| standards are.
|
| I agree that interrogating ones biases and susceptibility to
| trickery is worthwhile. Helping oneself and others see through
| trickery and illusions can be too. This idea can however be
| pursued ad absurdum as well. All fiction requires a suspension of
| disbelief and it is in itself a form of trickery.
|
| The implication of the existence of a good taste is that it's
| good to have this taste. Why are those who like good art better
| than those who appreciate quality but prefer worse art?
| kingkawn wrote:
| Graham has always had a huge blind spot in understanding where
| the value in art originates
| sixhobbits wrote:
| I'm was expecting him to mention "Of the Standard of Taste" by
| David Hume [0] which makes a similar and I think better (though
| maybe not as easy to read) argument and which I thought this
| piece was inspired by at first.
|
| [0] https://home.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361r15.html
| ajuc wrote:
| Each work of art is a multidimensional vector, you can
| objectively decide how long the vector is along its direction
| (how well executed it is), but you cannot objectively decide
| which direction is better.
|
| People call "taste" the part that decides which directions you
| like.
| [deleted]
| barrenko wrote:
| You can't talk about taste the same way you can't talk about
| religion.
| fijiaarone wrote:
| Because if you admit one outcome is "better" than another
| you're conceding that morality exists.
| brigandish wrote:
| The evening of that talk had another speech that led to events of
| more import. On the side of Paul Graham (at least in the debate)
| Andrew Graham-Dixon gave a speech[1] that was _against_ fascism,
| _against_ racism, and _against_ anti-semitism and yet Cambridge
| Union put him on a list of speakers that will not be invited back
| because of their racism and anti-semitism.
|
| Why? _Because he did a satirical impression of Hitler._
|
| I know, I can almost hear your jaws dropping to the floor.
|
| > The Union's Equalities officer, Zara Salaria, said that Graham-
| Dixon's impression was "absolutely unacceptable" and "utterly
| horrifying."
|
| There's more of this idiotic hysteria to be found in this
| article[2] with quotes from students and alumni of one of the
| world's top universities (supposedly).
|
| What is the world coming to when you can't take the mick out of
| Hitler? No, what is the world coming to when you take the mick
| out of Hitler and "top students" think that is somehow support
| for his views?
|
| [1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/artists/hitler-row-andrew-
| gr...
|
| [2] https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/22398
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I'm always leery of posts from right-leaning outlets regarding
| "cancel culture", but after reading more about this, it is as
| bad as it sounds.
|
| It's a disgrace that they reprimanded him. The moderator was
| laughing along that night, then shortly after put out a notice
| of groveling apology and finger-wagging. I wonder what horrid
| administrator or donor was offended by someone making fun of a
| fascist.
| rory wrote:
| We had a mainstream satirical Hitler movie just a couple of
| years ago ( _Jojo Rabbit_ ) in which Hitler was actually made
| to be _amicable_ and _silly_ (which arguably much more
| offensive), so I don 't think this kind of thing is indicative
| of hegemonic cultural norms as a whole.
|
| Now is it indicative of the university climate? The student
| generation? I don't know.
| Igelau wrote:
| In other words, he won so hard on proving the existence of bad
| taste that he's not allowed to play anymore.
|
| This is a "pit boss asking you to leave the table for winning
| too much" moment.
| stordoff wrote:
| Video of the debate:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5cXXE3jlpc
| rojoca wrote:
| Ira Glass has a practical take on the idea of exposing good taste
| (e.g. trying to paint like Bellini): https://youtu.be/X2wLP0izeJE
| where he talks about how your good taste informs you that the
| work you are doing doesn't yet match your ambition, and that this
| can be both motivating and discouraging
| analog31 wrote:
| This is certainly the case for learning jazz improvisation. The
| primary obstacle, even for otherwise good musicians, is knowing
| you're going to suck at it for a long time before you get good.
| Even if you have an unorthodox idea of what you want it to
| sound like.
| rhines wrote:
| The way you've phrased this is rather beautiful, in that it
| suggests that good art is art which matches the intent of the
| author.
|
| Some artists seek to recreate the world around them in great
| fidelity, and if they succeed in producing photorealistic
| paintings then for them, that is great art. Others seek to stir
| up controversy or draw attention to some cause, and if their
| work achieves that then that is great art. Others may simply
| seek to express themselves, or find peace with their feelings,
| and if they succeed in this then it is great art.
|
| This is of course a different definition than Paul Graham would
| use. It does not allow for so much judgement and comparison.
| But for people interested in producing art, rather than
| consuming it, I think it's a much more useful perspective.
| kazinator wrote:
| I don't think that Graham hit the mark here. Taste is not the
| name of the continuum along the bad-to-good axis. Taste is the
| undefinable nuance that plays out in the good end of that axis.
|
| When some artwork is good, I know that and will defend its value,
| even if it is not to my taste.
| bravura wrote:
| This is a pretty hand-wavey analysis. I believe there is rich
| potential for a rigorous, formal, statistical analysis of "good
| taste", that no one in the literature has done yet.
|
| I will outline a few ways that one can formalize "good taste". I
| understand that there are some weaknesses and gaps in the
| concepts that I will delineate. This isn't because I think my
| analysis is final. Rather, I am suggesting the starting point for
| this sort of inquiry, which through refinement by other
| researchers could actually become stronger as a field of inquiry.
|
| There is an economy of attention, and any analysis of taste or
| preference should be based upon how one spends their attention.
|
| One argument might be that a particular kind of good taste is
| being able to anticipate what someone else will like. This is a
| demonstrable skill that some people (and recommender systems)
| possess, and others don't. There might be other kinds of good
| taste besides prediction, but this is one important component
| that can be measured.
|
| Important confounding variables is bias caused by other people.
| For example, no one likes a particular artist until a famous
| critic pronounces them as good. This is a widespread confounding
| variable, but nonetheless could be avoided in certain controlled
| experimental setups. Again, this isn't helpful when we are
| talking about quantifying taste in the real world, which bias is
| unrestricted.
|
| Another form of statistical analysis would be to say that people
| with broad undifferentiated preferences ("pop") have less refined
| taste than subgroups with niche specialized taste. Possible
| analyses here include: Are there subgroups with refined taste
| that is not just associated with a specific subgenre, but extends
| across many genres of this particular medium? That suggests a
| broader sort of refined art taste than generalizes and isn't
| based just upon some expertise. Additionally, detecting people
| with "random" taste that isn't correlated with the taste of other
| people suggests the person is just throwing darts and being
| contrarian, not that they have some taste that suggests a deeper
| shared human understanding.
|
| One weakness of existing recommender systems is that like/dislike
| and five star rating systems rarely quantify: "Wow this is so
| amazing I would sacrifice my right arm for this." This is because
| there is no economy of "five stars" ratings in most systems, and
| the number of five star items is potentially a large percentage
| of the whole corpus of art. Instead, a Michelin-star like system
| could zoom in on the 1% of art that has a really transformative
| impact on the listener.
|
| About the objection pg says that: "Well, we might think some
| artist sucks now but in one hundred years they are revered." I
| think this argument can also be refuted. Within the context of
| art analysis in the 1800s, a particular artist might make no
| sense, because their work is too prescient. Whereas within the
| context of later artists who allow the public to appreciate the
| work of the dead artist, liking the dead artist now contextually
| becomes good taste.
|
| Again, I don't think I've presented a conclusive or bulletproof
| analysis here. I've just tried to outline how a formal and
| rigorous approach to quantifying "good taste" is an endeavor we
| could actually perform and engage in, but I haven't really seen
| in my review of the literate yet. There might be some important
| works that I've missed, perhaps in machine learning philosophy.
| It's easy to hand wave through saying "good taste" doesn't exist,
| but I think there's value in challenging that assumption and
| seeing how far we can get at formalizing it, and what potentially
| illusively remains nebulous and is actually bullshit.
| cwmoore wrote:
| As a painter and hacker[1] myself, I understand the message,
| believe the answer to the headline is "yes, but you can't have
| it" and I (as surely too would you) understand the vast gulf
| between my artwork and Rembrandt's, or my code and Norvig's, or
| my swimming and Phelps', but I've got to say, using "better art"
| as a test of taste is the irreducible absurdity, and I'd hoped
| for better after his introduction purported to propose a proof.
| In principle of charity I'll assume that other speakers at the
| talk this essay was adapted from may have covered those other
| considerations, and that PG was attempting or invited to fill an
| experiential gap which in this extracted form left the piece
| without some necessary reification.
|
| In the conversational spaces that attempt to account for taste
| are the same human conflicts that set one true believer against
| another of a different religion.
|
| I think the proper reductio ad absurdum is the more trivial one.
| Taste some rotten meat-- and either spit it out and rinse with
| strong liquor, or endure (survive?) the GI infection, then tell
| someone else to eat it, and see what you feel about the
| subjectivity of taste afterwards. See how the person your
| recommended the rotten meat feels about it, if anything. Finer
| points of arguments for or against some artist or movement are
| unsubstantiable when there is, I think we can agree, such a thing
| as guts.
|
| [1] I originally found HN after reading PG's book "Hackers and
| Painters"[2] and realized his practice of implementing the
| techniques of Old Masters in the late-20th Century, was not at
| all the kind of work that drew me to visual art.
|
| [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/hackpaint.html
| simiones wrote:
| I think in choosing rotten meat, you haven't gotten close to
| the limits - see Surstromming for an example.
|
| There are very few universals of taste. Even looking only at
| food: some people routinely consume, for pleasure, rotten
| meats, rotten milk (cheese), various bitter poisonous seeds,
| extremely painful hot peppers, painful acidic or basic
| substances, and even feces or other bodily fluids. Of course,
| no one could enjoy drinking concentrated sulfuric acid for
| example, so there are some ultimate limits.
|
| Similarly in all arts, there is rarely any style that is not
| seen as more refined than any other by some group of people, or
| profoundly distasteful. There are certainly people who would
| rather hang up children's paintings in their house than
| something like Malevich's Black square.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| You missed the elephant in the room - wine.
| randallsquared wrote:
| > ... _operate on people_... > ... _work on people_...
|
| It follows, then, that we need to know the effect the author was
| trying to have on people in order to know how well it "works",
| right? Without the intention, we can only measure magnitude, but
| perhaps the author intended to have a small, subtle effect?
| fredley wrote:
| I don't know if there's such a thing as good taste, but there is
| definitely such a thing as bad taste.
| evrydayhustling wrote:
| What I heard: "I find it useful to distinguish products on a
| single axis of quality, and therefore to distinguish talent on a
| single axis of being able to produce it. I can't imagine living
| without doing this ranking, so that single axis must be an
| objective truth others should align with."
|
| For what it's worth, I agree with Paul about valuing art that
| demonstrates a type of technical mastery, and I like ranking
| things. But having multiple axes of quality, and disagreeing
| about how to assess and prioritize them, is far more useful: it's
| what makes a market. Just because your ranking is useful to you
| doesn't make it an objective truth. On the other hand, the
| absence of _objective_ "good taste" doesn't make discussions
| about merit useless.
| TimPC wrote:
| I think a more favourable interpretation is "Taste is
| multidimensional and complex but to show it exists it is
| sufficient to show it exists for the simplest to prove
| dimension. Technical talent is that least subjective dimension.
| Argument follows."
| evrydayhustling wrote:
| Appreciate this read. However, doesn't the result in this
| case end up being trivial? "No matter how complex the
| subject, I can find a part we all agree on." That's great,
| but it doesn't prove a meaningful notion of agreement about
| the whole, and I missed any argument that it could.
| lvs wrote:
| There is such a thing as bad philosophy. By example, it's
| philosophy produced by narcissists thoroughly unaware and
| uninterested in any aspect of the canon of philosophy that
| predates them.
| personlurking wrote:
| After reading dozens over the years, I unfortunately won't read
| anymore PG essays due to the endless "In high school..." mentions
| and differences between bullies/jocks and smart kids. I would
| have long ago succumbed to alcohol poisoning if it were a
| drinking game.
|
| I hope this essay is better. In the least, the comments here are
| interesting.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > 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."
| robofanatic wrote:
| > > 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"?
| guerrilla wrote:
| 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.
| robofanatic wrote:
| 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.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| 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.
| lhorie wrote:
| 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
| JohnFen wrote:
| 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.
| lhorie wrote:
| 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.
| JohnFen wrote:
| 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".
| TimPC wrote:
| 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.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > 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.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| > 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
| guerrilla wrote:
| For every two of those, there are thousands of
| counterexamples.
| borski wrote:
| 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. :)
| TimPC wrote:
| 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.
| bajsejohannes wrote:
| 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/
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > 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.
| cm2012 wrote:
| I can usually tell which advertisement will perform best before
| they go live, at a much higher rate than lay people.
|
| Is that taste? Honest question.
|
| It's being able to tell which piece of art more people will
| choose to interact with, which is pretty close to PG's definition
| of taste.
| d--b wrote:
| Why is it so difficult to admit that taste is relative to
| culture? "according to the people with the same culture as mine,
| Leonardo da Vinci is a better painter than Banksy". I know a lot
| of people who would disagree with that statement, and that's just
| fine.
| dagw wrote:
| _I know a lot of people who would disagree with that statement,
| and that 's just fine._
|
| I think we can objectively say the da Vinci is a better
| painter. Or at least that his known work shows a much higher
| level of skill and technical competence than any known work of
| Banksy. That is however not at all the same as saying that da
| Vinci produced more interesting art than Banksy. Banksy's art
| is certainly easier for many to 'get' and understand and be
| moved by today without having to take an art history class.
|
| And on a personal level, while I respect da Vinci as an artist
| more, I would still chose a Banksy over a da Vinci to have
| displayed in my living room (ignoring all financial arguments).
| vasco wrote:
| I think a more applicable translation of this topic to general
| terms is one of good judgement and how to assess for that. Most
| people think they have good judgement, yet assessing for it very
| hard, similar to good taste, because of all the extraneous
| factors.
|
| You can be right but have an unpopular opinion, similarly to how
| you can have good taste but maybe nobody knows about your art and
| therefore you can remain "undiscovered" forever, so experts might
| never have a chance to review your work and deem it good. You can
| also be right under most circunstances but a bigger factor making
| your judgement sound but wrong.
|
| In engineering (programmers, managers, product managers) you have
| this a lot where you're trying to promote people with good
| judgement to own large codebases, or big projects, or teams of
| people, but identifying those is something that is hard to do.
|
| It'd be interesting to have art experts quantifying art in
| similar ways that we quantify engineering work. If experts can
| classify art, surely there's a mental checklist they go over,
| even if they never tried to put it to paper. I imagine it'd be a
| mixture of from 1-10 "how much of a sense of awe did the piece
| cause you" and from 1-10 how "good are the porportions" or
| whatever, but this is where I struggle. Perhaps it's more
| complicated than that and there's a decision tree of each
| "criteria" but surely there must be one, the same way we'd assess
| a software engineer or a product manager or an engineering
| manager for good judgement in the quality of their work.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Taste is only as good as how one can articulate aspects of a
| certain taste that one appreciates.
|
| If one enjoys something but cannot deconstruct the attributes of
| one's joy, then it isn't necessarily _taste_ that one has but
| merely a pleasurable sensory perception.
|
| You can judge whether someone actually has taste if they can
| describe to you why they appreciate a particular thing. Ask
| someone who listens to a lot of rap music and they can tell you
| what they think makes a good rap song. Ask someone who reads
| poetry and they will tell you how they judge good poetry. Hell, I
| bet you could ask someone who watches a lot of porn and they'll
| tell you what they look for in a good porn scene.
|
| To demonstrate the opposite case, ask a person who casually binge
| watches everything on Netflix and ask them why they enjoy a
| particular show. They might stare at you blankly for a second and
| only respond with nonspecific reasons such as "it's really scary"
| or "because it's funny" and little beyond that. This isn't taste,
| because their experience is hardly different from a tickle. A
| person _can_ have taste for comedy, but just because comedians
| and tickles both result in laughter doesn 't mean it takes the
| same level of thought to appreciate the two. (though I suppose
| it's possible for one to be a _good tickler_ , so my analogy
| falls apart in that sense)
|
| In fewer words, my point is that taste _is a thing_ , but it has
| no objective qualifier other than that it is merely the
| differentiation between thought applied to sensory input as
| opposed to thoughtlessly responding to input.
|
| One's tastes can be entirely inverted from the norm, but we can't
| qualify those tastes because that would require uncommon
| knowledge and experience. On the other hand, the presence of some
| kind of taste can at least be _partially_ measured. It 's the
| _goodness_ and _badness_ of taste that is purely relative absent
| any shared mechanics involved.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| If PG's arguments were true, then a lot of people whose taste
| seemed to be quite good, were completely wrong about the
| Impressionists when they first appeared on the scene. Ditto
| almost every other new art school. So no one prior to that had
| good taste? You take a time machine to the century prior to Van
| Gogh's life, and you might not find anyone in Europe who thought
| his paintings were good if you showed them what they looked like.
| So no one in Europe had good taste then?
|
| Nonsense. One can have "refined taste", which means that you can
| detect all the subtleties of a particular kind of art (e.g.
| modern abstract art, or modern jazz) that I cannot. My taste in
| other fields is considerably more refined than the person who
| likes modern jazz and abstract art; perhaps they cannot stand any
| science fiction, whereas I have strong opinions about which is
| good and which is not.
|
| The phrase "good taste" implies there is one standard, one
| dimension on which one can rate art, but clearly there are many
| different ones, depending on ones tastes.
| tonymet wrote:
| It's possible there are a few standards-not only one, but also
| not infinite.
| jmacd wrote:
| I agree. This is a very Jordan Peterson-esque line of
| reasoning. (I'm sure this has a lot more history than that, but
| it strikes me as a current flavour)
|
| This thing is true now, so it has always been true, and it must
| be true in the future.
| FemmeAndroid wrote:
| > I started studying painting. And it was just like other kinds
| of work I'd done: you could do it well, or badly, and if you
| tried hard, you could get better at it. And it was obvious that
| Leonardo and Bellini were much better at it than me. That gap
| between us was not imaginary. They were so good. And if they
| could be good, then art could be good, and there was such a thing
| as good taste after all.
|
| This doesn't hold up for me. We're comparing PGs painting ability
| to two renaissance artists who painted in fairly similar ways.
| When you go and try to paint in a style, I can 100% agree that
| you can execute better or worse than another person. I don't
| doubt that PGs paintings are not as good as famous renaissance
| paintings.
|
| I don't think that's what people mean when they talk about good
| taste.
|
| PG uses a narrow definition of taste, so let's make sure we're
| using that:
|
| > There's a narrow sense in which it refers to aesthetic
| judgements and a broader one in which it refers to preferences of
| any kind. The strongest proof would be to show that taste exists
| in the narrowest sense...
|
| I don't know that comparing art to Renaissance greats is actually
| engaging in aesthetic judgements. Maybe others look at each piece
| of art as if it has no cultural significance, and see each thing
| as if divorced from all of history. I cannot, despite my best
| efforts, imagine viewing each piece of art like that.
|
| I can certainly tell when a style of art I am familiar with is
| executed well. That is what I think PG is talking about here.
|
| For me, taste is when I decide whether I like a style of art.
| Style, here, can be as broad as an era, or extremely specific.
|
| My 'taste' is how much I enjoy a particular category, be it an
| era or a very specific thing. I really am not a fan of
| Renaissance paintings despite how many times I've walked through
| art galleries. I _can_ pretty clearly point out which are more or
| less successful. But almost none are too my taste.
|
| And that's the difference, to me. The taste is orthogonal to
| execution. But this argument for there being good taste relies on
| the belief that people who say there's no such thing as good
| taste also meaning that one cannot execute well.
|
| The differences between execution and taste become murkier for
| nascent art forms, where it's possible to get into a position
| where it's hard to tell if you have a taste for the style
| execution is not yet there. But that's not really the point here.
| [deleted]
| lr4444lr wrote:
| I don't get into these kinds of discussions with people anymore,
| because they're not socially palatable. I try to stay open minded
| too about perspectives that are not mine, and try to be objective
| about my own biases. But I can't shake the feeling that much as
| someone might validly prefer some abstract dot on a white canvas
| to the Sistine Chapel ceiling, who would more likely impress the
| fans of the other, that artist trying to reproduce
| Michaelangelo's work or vice versa? Peter Thiel made a similar
| remark in one of his anti higher ed rants about pitting a group
| of PhD physicists vs. French lit. PhDs in a contest to reproduce
| each other's work better - whom would you bet on?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I do always find it funny that billionaires finally finally get
| on board with the "labor is what makes something valuable" idea
| when comparing abstract art and other art.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| Hackers did have things in common with painters after all, or
| at least the ones that self promote have that in common.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html
| CompelTechnic wrote:
| You could still spend 1,000 hours painting a blue dot on a
| white canvas if you used a tiny paintbrush.
|
| The pareto frontier of possible artworks approaches higher
| quality with increased labor input. This doesn't mean the
| Labor Theory of Value isn't totally bonkers.
| watwut wrote:
| > But I can't shake the feeling that much as someone might
| validly prefer some abstract dot on a white canvas to the
| Sistine Chapel ceiling,
|
| That is straw position.
|
| > who would more likely impress the fans of the other, that
| artist trying to reproduce Michaelangelo's work or vice versa?
|
| There are many artist capable to reproduce Michaelangelo's
| work. They are not impressing people who admire Michaelangelo
| or classical art. People who admire Michaelangelo typically
| fully understand that people after Michaelangelo learned from
| him. They also understand Michaelangelo was working, learning
| and studying having limitations we don't have.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| You're missing my point: it isn't that Michaelangelo himself
| is unsurpassable. It's that his style insofar as it's
| appreciated for its quality cannot be reproduced in a
| convincing way to people with an eye for that without some
| much higher minimum skill as opposed to the minimum level it
| takes to impress a connoisseur of abstract art with the
| painter's alleged talent. At least, this is my unshakable
| feeling.
| watwut wrote:
| But that is not the same thing as "validly prefering". The
| "how much skill and effort it takes to reproduce it" is
| completely different criteri then "which one do you
| prefer".
| forgetfulness wrote:
| Now I'm no art fancy man like the ones you're describing, but
| I'm fairly certain that people who like the dot also like the
| Sistine Chapel, it's just that the Sistine Chapel has been...
| _done_, and your reproduction of the Sistine Chapel will be
| enjoyable but forgettable because it will never be as good or
| as important as the real one.
|
| So, people talk about works that are memorable. Like that one
| abstract dot of historical interest, or the original paintings
| from the old masters that perfected the techniques that artists
| emulate.
| ppod wrote:
| The whole point of conceptual art is that reproduction of
| figurative art is trivial now, so we move up a level. It's easy
| to reproduce the dot, but it's the conceptual move to dotness
| that's non-trivial. These ideas are 60 years old (Walter
| Benjamin) and you're doing a bit of a Two Cultures in reverse
| by being this simplistic about it.
| stephencanon wrote:
| Nit: Benjamin died 80 years ago. Time flies!
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Fine. Then ask a totally unskilled person to reproduce both
| and let's see how many fans can be fooled.
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| My definition grew into this immutable formula:
|
| The only relevant skill an artist can have is to capture their
| emotions in their work in such a way that the audience of it is
| made to both experience and ponder those. Extra points for
| complex compositions.
|
| There is something to be said about the kind of feeling you
| chose to share. You can be a dick about it while stil
| perfecting the challange.
|
| The white dot on canvas or the entirely white canvas are simpel
| displays of arrogance mixed with some prestige. Not a
| particularly refined combination of and it reduces to anger in
| many viewers. It doesnt enrich the spectators life, they know
| those emotions well enough which, like love songs, makes it
| poor taste.
| pengstrom wrote:
| The context of art extends beyond the artifact. I image both
| PhDs would have trouble contributing meaningful novel work.
| asoneth wrote:
| The skill required to create a thing is not the sole arbiter of
| its value, whether in art, physics, or business. After all, it
| would be foolish to claim that the most useful discoveries in
| physics were the ones that required the most difficult advanced
| math or that the most valuable companies are the ones that
| require the most skill to manage.
|
| There are many technically skilled artists, physicists, and
| entrepreneurs whose names you will never learn because the
| never ended up doing anything particularly original. (And of
| course there are many original thinkers who will never be known
| because they're just not technically skilled enough to execute
| on their vision.)
|
| In my opinion, value in many fields ends up being the cross
| product of "doing the thing right" and "doing the right thing".
| fsloth wrote:
| Paul did not discuss the merits of academic art versus modern
| art. He simply attempted to proof that it is "less wrong" to
| say there can be good taste, than that there is no taste.
|
| The argument works in any recognized genre or art - the claim
| is "In a particular chosen genre, a person can be more skilled
| than an 8 year old who has no idea what they are doing".
|
| The genre can be whatever that has no known established numeric
| metric. I.e. sports do not generally qualify for this argument
| as they most of the time have a metric that is more or less
| objective, and you can say based on numbers who is better
| without the need for "taste".
|
| To my understanding, Paul is familiar with academic art so he
| feels confident in using it as the example genre as he is
| comfortable in discussing it's nuances.
| dagw wrote:
| _sports do not generally qualify for this argument as they
| most of the time have a metric that is more or less
| objective_
|
| You see arguments about aesthetics and taste all the time in
| sport. "Team A may have won the championship, but they have a
| very ugly style. Team B played a much more beautiful game" or
| "I love watching Team C play even if they lose almost all the
| time, because they have such a fun and interesting way of
| playing". In some sports like MMA you have fighters with near
| perfect records and impressive win streaks against the best
| in the league, but no one watches them because they're
| "boring".
|
| Essentially there are two ways of viewing sport. From the
| player/teams point of view where it is all about winning, or
| from the spectators point of view where the primary goal is
| to be entertained.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Like this?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair
| ritchiea wrote:
| It's really not that anyone prefers an abstract dot on a white
| canvas over the Sistine Chapel. It helps to think of art as a
| historical dialogue with other art, as well as an exploration
| of how our senses experience the world. Minimalist abstract art
| (Ad Reinhardt is one of the more famous practitioners) was
| pushing viewers to pay attentions to subtleties and small
| differences in our perceptions of color and shapes. That type
| of art isn't even fashionable or popular anymore (though many
| works from the 60s-80s are still revered, exhibited and
| expensive because of how they contributed to the art canon), in
| part because, as you can imagine after a while it was no longer
| fresh and new and making people think differently about art.
| What's hip now is video, multi-media sculpture and art that
| makes more of a comment on the state of world. Also a lot of
| art that uses new technologies. And a lot of irony.
|
| Feel free to not like any of it, it is subjective, that's the
| point. You shouldn't let anyone tell you what art to like.
| Group think is bad in the art world as well (though it can be
| good for art dealers). But I thought it was worth the time to
| speak up against your characterization of the values of the art
| world. I have my own critiques of the art world but it's
| absolutely unfair to generalize that people see no difference
| between minimalist abstract art and the Sistine Chapel. And I
| believe it is interesting to understand why people consider
| particular works of art important even if that doesn't mean you
| should also subjectively like the piece.
| gaze wrote:
| For what it's worth, Felix Gonzalez Torres' work pushed me
| from "I don't understand this modern stuff" to "oh I get it
| now." Maybe it can do that for others?
|
| I think there's this notion that art has to be technically
| sophisticated to be of value. But really, all art has to do
| is communicate something interesting or meaningful. If a
| white dot does this then who cares how it was made?
|
| Finally, people make a big deal about the price of art. Well,
| artists (the ones I like anyway...) don't have much to do
| with what a piece of art will sell for. Ultimately the piece
| of art is just some interesting exchange between artist and
| viewer, the price has nothing to do with any of this
| exchange.
|
| I'm just a guy that walked into a museum and thought this guy
| has communicated something profound and beautiful. When
| someone come up and says "but that must've taken 5 minutes to
| make!!" they look like assholes.
| pfraze wrote:
| This might be overly reductive, but if you use Twitter or any
| social platform where people indirectly reference other
| posts, I think you can maybe understand how a dot on a white
| canvas can have impact. The "Loss" meme [1] borders on being
| that exact thing.
|
| 1. https://news.knowyourmeme.com/news/heres-to-loss-the-
| interne...
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Like is the wrong word. I think the closest appropriate idea
| is "appreciate".
|
| You probably should not "like" some of the best art at all,
| because it should have made you uncomfortable and think
| things you would rather not.
|
| Of course I say "some", because art has all kinds of
| different purposes or intents, and that is only the purpose
| of some art, not all art.
|
| So I think recognize, acknowledge, or appreciate are the
| kinds of words to apply rather than like.
|
| And art can even be good even if you not only don't like it
| but don't even appreciate it. It can be skillfully effective
| on you whether or not you like it or even have the background
| or perception to recognize it's quality.
|
| So even "appreciate" isn't really a valid metric.
| ritchiea wrote:
| It's perfectly reasonable to appreciate a piece of art,
| recognize its importance and subjectively dislike it. I
| believe it's going in the wrong direction to try to
| completely disconnect your subjective like or dislike of
| art in an effort to better understand or recognize its
| value. If anything I try to go the other direction and
| acknowledge my subjective like/dislike/etc sense experience
| and then intellectualize from there.
| pydry wrote:
| Ironically, the "white dot" type of art was popularized by
| CIA who poured money into cultural promotion following
| remarks by the USSR that the US was a culturally barren
| wasteland:
|
| https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/
| ritchiea wrote:
| The CIA backed American abstract expressionists, which is
| a different, more visually complex style of abstract
| painting that is distinct from minimalist abstract
| painting.
| not_fin_advice wrote:
| > pitting a group of PhD physicists vs. French lit. PhDs in a
| contest to reproduce each other's work better - whom would you
| bet on?
|
| I know that Thiel is clearly trying to get the audience to go
| "oh wow, physics is harder than lit!"
|
| But strangely enough this runs counter to my personal
| experience. While not physics in particular, I know far more
| lit/classics/humanities people doing advanced/research work in
| technical areas than I do technically trained people excelling
| in anything humanities related.
|
| My experience has also been that most physicists, when
| confronted with challenging French critical theory, simply
| dismiss it as nonsense rather than taking any time to
| understand it. I have met far more people who were trained on
| reading Derrida who can converse casually about advanced
| calculus topics than the reverse.
|
| Additionally I find something like Lagrangian mechanics to take
| far less time to under stand than not just learning French, but
| learning French well enough to engage deeply with texts and
| theory spanning a fairly broad period of history.
|
| As to your question:
|
| > Sistine Chapel ceiling, who would more likely impress the
| fans of the other, that artist trying to reproduce
| Michaelangelo's work or vice versa?
|
| That's a combination of a straw man and a false equivalency.
| First the "dot on a white canvas" represents a very, very
| narrow part of a very specific field of Modern art which the
| vast majority of trained academic artists and theorists will
| agree is not particularly their taste. There's plenty of niche
| physicists doing work that most physicists find questionable. A
| better example of postmodern art is Pulp Fiction, and I think
| if you polled the general public on whether or not they wanted
| to see the Sistine chapter or watch Pulp Fiction you'd find a
| bigger split, and likewise each artist would have an equally
| hard time.
|
| The false equivalency is that you're comparing Michelangelo to
| some imagined Modernist painting that I'm guessing you don't
| have a name for. This is a bit like comparing Einstein to an
| imaginary string theorist a liberal arts college.
| TimPC wrote:
| You've substantially moved the goalposts. Your argument about
| the French Lit. PhDs involves understanding the field at a
| roughly undergraduate level not producing new work.
| Developing a deep enough understanding of physics to create
| novel ideas in it is far harder than this. I'd argue that
| producing relevant new work in French Lit. is easier because
| of the high degree of subjectivity creating a low bar for
| relevance. The low bar for relevance makes it far easier to
| be novel since one can explore almost any tangential point of
| the work one can imagine. It's far harder to come up with new
| interesting ideas in a field where ideas have standards of
| correctness than in a field where it's sufficient to be novel
| and vaguely relevant.
| [deleted]
| dagw wrote:
| _might validly prefer some abstract dot on a white canvas_
|
| No one prefers a random dot on a random piece of canvas. They
| prefer a very particular dot on a very particular canvas made
| by a very particular person at a very particular point in
| history. Remove any one one those and it loses all meaning and
| value. And even the most ardent fan of that work would never
| argue that that artist was a greater painter or even artist
| than Michaelangelo.
|
| At the end of the day the "Art" is not in the craft and as such
| art cannot be reproduced. The world is full of Sistine Chapel
| pastiches on rich peoples ceilings, painted by great craftsmen,
| many whom might be talented artists in their own rights, and no
| one is in awe by them.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| But it doesn't hold up the other way when you remove one
| piece. I'd wager most people would select a Michaelangelo
| replica even if they were directly told it was a replica than
| the dot on the canvas if told it was a replica of whatever
| artist made it.
| dagw wrote:
| Select as what though, by what criteria and for what
| purpose? No one is arguing that the Michelangelo replica
| isn't a more beautiful object or representative of better
| craftsmanship.
|
| And anyway I feel that putting our unnamed theoretical
| artist up against one of the all time great artists in
| history is a bit unfair. Anything recognizable as a
| Michelangelo will automatically win just because he's
| Michelangelo. Probably more fair to put him up against a
| second-rate contemporary of Michelangelo that most people
| haven't heard of if you want to remove 'name recognition'
| from the equation.
| SilasX wrote:
| > Anything recognizable as a Michelangelo will
| automatically win just because he's Michelangelo.
|
| It wins because it's good work, not because it's
| Michelangelo. A Michelangelo work will win even when the
| viewer doesn't know it's Michelangelo or even who that
| is.
|
| That the point: people will appreciate it without having
| to be told "oh this is the high-status guy, you're
| supposed to like it", "only the high-status people can
| see the emperor's clothes", etc.
| long_time_gone wrote:
| > A Michelangelo work will win even when the viewer
| doesn't know it's Michelangelo or even who that is.
|
| This seems like a big assumption. Is there a study that
| tests this idea?
| SilasX wrote:
| Why is it a big assumption that most people don't need to
| know "This is by Michelangelo and he is a high status
| artist" to enjoy the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (or
| whatever else)?
|
| If you're going to demand copious evidence solely of the
| hypotheses you don't like, you're going to be locked into
| confirmation bias.
|
| But yes, there are easy tests you could do: get the
| ratios of "can't identify who made this" to "I like this"
| for visitors to Michaelangelo (or any still-displayed
| Renaissance artist, really) vs random high-status super-
| edgy modern.
| long_time_gone wrote:
| I never demanded "copius evidence" I asked a clarifying
| question. If you are going to make specific claims,
| people might ask for evidence of those claims. It's not
| confirmation bias to ask for supporting details, quite
| the opposite.
|
| > Why is it a big assumption that most people don't need
| to know "This is by Michelangelo and he is a high status
| artist" to enjoy the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (or
| whatever else)?
|
| This is an entirely different statement than your
| original comment. Of course, you don't need to know
| Michelangelo to "enjoy" the Sistine Chapel, nobody argued
| otherwise. Your claim was that, "A Michelangelo work will
| win even if the viewer doesn't know it's Michelangelo or
| even who that is." This implies a measure of comparison
| to something or someone else, which is far different than
| enjoying a single piece of art.
|
| Surely, there are people who prefer Bertoldo di Giovanni
| [1] to Michelangelo.
|
| [1] https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-little-
| known-s...
| SilasX wrote:
| >I never demanded "copius evidence" I asked a clarifying
| question. If you are going to make specific claims,
| people might ask for evidence of those claims. It's not
| confirmation bias to ask for supporting details, quite
| the opposite.
|
| It is when you don't ask for the same evidence of the
| opposite, original assertion, and when the test you
| demand/clarify-the-existence-of is a strangely narrow
| test that no one would have reason to do in the first
| place because the core problem is that no one is
| subjecting the more modern art to that kind of rigor to
| begin with! (Which would obviate the whole debate.[1])
|
| So yes, when you come in and single out my response as
| needing a very specific test before you'll consider it
| plausible, aren't being epistemically fair.
|
| >Of course, you don't need to know Michelangelo to
| "enjoy" the Sistine Chapel, nobody argued otherwise.
|
| Are we looking at the same thread? From earlier in this
| same thread:
|
| >>Anything recognizable as a Michelangelo will
| automatically win just because he's Michelangelo.
|
| The assertion is that the knowledge of Michelangelo and
| his association with that work is artificially raising
| the viewer's appreciation of it. My contrary claim was
| that it's appreciated as good work, more so than the
| garbage you see in modern art museums, because it's good,
| not because the average viewer cares about Michelangelo
| specifically, which dagw was saying that the later art
| does (apparently) require (knowledge of the artist and
| other "context").
|
| >Your claim was that, "A Michelangelo work will win even
| if the viewer doesn't know it's Michelangelo or even who
| that is." This implies a measure of comparison to
| something or someone else, which is far different than
| enjoying a single piece of art.
|
| It implies exactly what it meant in the original comment
| and thread:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29227817
|
| That is, a comparison against the later super-edgey
| modern art.
|
| [1] Except maybe the time that troll passed off a
| monkey's art as prestigious, which made the duped critics
| double down and say, "well ... maybe that monkey has
| artistic talent!"
| dfxm12 wrote:
| If this is true, I would bet it has more to do with
| metadata of the art rather than the art itself. _Taste_
| might not even enter the equation. The Michelangelo piece
| has many things going for it _before_ you even get to the
| art itself: Painter 's name value, importance to a
| Catholics (and probably other Christians, too), the
| original is a larger part of pop culture, the original is
| hung in a more iconic building, the importance of who
| commissioned it, people are more likely to have seen the
| Michelangelo in person and are likely to have a personal
| connection to it, etc.
|
| Ask someone, you can have a replica of a piece you've seen,
| maybe even in person, that has cultural importance to their
| religion and it is by {famous artist} or you can have a
| replica of a piece by {some other artist}. I'd guess they'd
| go with what they know, sight unseen.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Fair challenge. But go to a totally different culture
| where no one has heard of either of the two artists or at
| least produce a replica of a very obscure work from each
| of them and ask the unknowing, uneducated person would
| rather have hanging on their wall for their equally
| ignorant friends to come and see. I have a really tough
| time believing that even an African bushman living as a
| hunter gatherer would rather have an abstract paint
| spatter to a figured scene with complex light and
| composition. The difference in the skilled labor is
| compellingly hard to ignore.
| dagw wrote:
| _uneducated person would rather have hanging on their
| wall for their equally ignorant friends to come and see._
|
| But now we are no longer talking about them as art, but
| as interior design and decoration.
| watwut wrote:
| Select for what? Art students nowdays can create
| Michealengelo like art. Not just reproduction, but own
| pieces with same style. They are not admired nor anything
| like that.
|
| Also, I would not picked any of those for living room.
| Might pick dot for background screen. And this choice have
| nothing to do with actual value of either.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Art students, yes. But not the average guy off the street
| as compare to a single dot on a canvas.
| watwut wrote:
| Yes and? I honestly don't know what it is supposed to
| argue.
| dagw wrote:
| No one is arguing the Michelangelo wasn't a fantastic and
| talented craftsman, far more so than our made up modern
| artist. Everybody agrees that to do what he did takes
| decades of practice and schooling.
|
| But equally, that is not what made Michelangelo a great
| artist. There where dozens of extremely technically
| skilled painters that lived around the same time, none of
| whom most people have heard of. So if you want to argue
| for Michelangelo as a great artists, you cannot simply
| say "well he was very good at painting and made pretty
| pictures". Lots of people did that, so why is
| Michelangelo famous today and none of them.
| majormajor wrote:
| There is definitely such a thing as "popular" taste (and indeed,
| there are many variations of it, since the populace is large and
| varied - this alone starts to make a sole idea of "good taste"
| difficult to accept), and there is definitely such a thing as
| skill at producing works that those with a popular taste
| appreciates.
|
| The presented "proof" doesn't go any further than that, though.
| It mentions that it changes a lot over time, but instead of
| engaging with that as an indicator that taste is always a moment-
| by-moment subjective thing, then IMO goes off the rails a bit
| with weird analogies. It ends up circular. Good art is that which
| causes the desired reaction in those with good taste?
|
| The best counter-argument to this skill/practice-based argument
| is that you can put a lot of skill and practice into something
| that people end up rejecting. Literature, film, and music shows
| plenty of examples of this. Even software shows this - you can
| spend a lot of effort to make a very intricate piece of software,
| that someone with "taste" may sneer at because of how fragile it
| is, even if they couldn't create it themselves. And then you are
| left just with that circular "your effort and practice and skill
| doesn't matter if it doesn't focus on the right things that hit
| your audience the right way, so the important skill is that of
| hitting your audience the right way, so a lot of it is up to the
| audience, so good taste is defined by ... itself and its
| audience"?
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Yes, I got the same thing from it. It seems like pg is confused
| by the existing definition of "good taste". At least one
| definition of good taste is being able to spot what will be
| popular. It doesn't mean the things you like are "good" in some
| vague sense. Anecdotally some people have insight into humans
| which allows them to figure if something will be popular.
|
| The entire essay should be a short proposal to a dictionary
| publisher :
|
| "Please make it clear that the definition of taste is "being
| able to spot what lots of other people will like"".
|
| People could debate that and you don't need the silly "proofs".
| jph wrote:
| Yes there's good taste. As one example that I've experienced:
| walk into the Pixar building in Emeryville and it feels amazing,
| and different, and better. And it turns out that Steve Jobs
| created it.
|
| https://www.buzzfeed.com/adambvary/inside-steve-jobs-mindblo...
| Jugurtha wrote:
| Blaise Pascal wrote a delightful passage on good taste and bad
| taste in Pensees (circa 1667).
| afavour wrote:
| Surely this is just a matter of opinion? Someone might see this
| (which I personally agree, looks great) and say that it's too
| busy and that a cleaner, simpler design like The Oculus[1] in
| NYC is in better taste. Someone else might conceivably say that
| design is too cold.
|
| Neither of those opinions is wrong. There isn't much objective
| truth to be had here.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Center_station_(PA...
| joris_w wrote:
| That's your taste, which might be good taste, but how do we
| decide on that?
| fsloth wrote:
| "how do we decide on that?" That's the point. There is no
| current calculus to compute this but I find Paul's argument
| pretty convincing still.
| Igelau wrote:
| I'm picturing Steve Jobs on stage to make an industry-shaking
| announcement...
|
| in a turtleneck tucked into his mom jeans, and glaring white
| sneakers.
| quesera wrote:
| I think you're making a derisive judgement on his fashion
| choices, from the distance of a couple decades. This is
| always an error, but you should see his "vest" years!
|
| As it happens, there's a story behind the choices of black
| turtleneck (very specific maker), Levi's (5xx?), and New
| Balance (993s). They are the results of deliberate
| application and prioritization of optimizations -- evaluated
| by his personal criteria only, of course. You might think I'm
| kidding, but I am not.
| brahadeesh wrote:
| "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."
|
| Is anyone else finding this hard to accept? What if, for some
| mysterious reason, everyone chooses one particular artist? What
| if everyone knows good art from bad art, but there is no such
| thing as good taste precisely because everyone has the same
| taste?
| tcldr wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Who are these two people? Art historians or layman? Are they
| looking at the work of established artists or newcomers? Are they
| given context for the work that's displayed, or not? Who's
| deciding which of the 'art' is better?
|
| I think all we're saying here is that good taste is a consensus
| preference.
| dvh1990 wrote:
| This question is what Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
| is all about - that quality is objective. I know PG is familiar
| with that book, which is why I find it odd that there's no
| mention of it in this essay.
| trwhite wrote:
| I was just about to comment this. It seems as though PG is
| saying taste (much like quality) is a perceptual experience[0].
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirsig%27s_Metaphysics_of_Qual...
| ler0ix wrote:
| My thought as well. He seems to be delving into the metaphysics
| of quality.
| ryanyde wrote:
| The piece just seems to fully encapsulate Silicon Valley Hubris.
| It's amazing that he thinks he's settled a debate on 'quality' or
| 'taste' with a logical argument, and that people consider this an
| 'objective' answer to the question.
|
| The rhetorical trick is one that many have pointed out:
| 'technically' superior is - in fact - easy to recognize. That
| doesn't mean that objective judgment of technique is synonymous
| with taste.
|
| "Taste" in that sense becomes something more about having a pulse
| on how humans will ingest certain ideas. You can have an
| intuitive understanding of this in a given time and space
| (creatives get paid a great deal to do this). But that has
| nothing to do with 'taste' as an objective quality metric, it has
| to do with how humans will perceive or interact with an object.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| _We don 't realize how far we'd have to go if we discarded the
| concept of good taste, because we don't even debate the most
| obvious cases. But it doesn't just mean we can't say which of two
| famous painters is better. It means we can't say that any painter
| is better than a randomly chosen eight year old._
|
| I don't have an answer for whether or not there is a universal
| good taste, but this argument is fundamentally flawed because it
| conflates skill and expression. Of course any practiced painter
| is going to be better at painting, but that doesn't mean that
| what they paint is tasteful.
|
| That said, did anyone else get the feeling that pg got into the
| mushrooms before writing this?
| curiousllama wrote:
| > It was obvious that Leonardo and Bellini were much better at it
| than me. That gap between us was not imaginary. They were so
| good. And if they could be good, then art could be good, and
| there was such a thing as good taste after all.
|
| Is taste simply recognition of skill? If that's the case, I think
| "taste" is commonly used too narrowly.
|
| Is it "tasteful" to appreciate a heart surgeon's life-saving? Or
| a teacher's ability to help me learn? That sounds odd to me
| (though we should obviously appreciate it!).
|
| I've always thought of taste as an ability to identify intrinsic
| value, especially when others might miss it ("it's just a
| picture, dude"). If it's skill alone, why is taste typically
| applied to aesthetic pursuits?
| motohagiography wrote:
| Wrote professionally about taste in a previous life. It is
| related more closely than we expect to _techne_ or competence
| from physical knowledge.
|
| When we think of poor taste, we tend to think of symbols that are
| separated from their function and meaning, where instead of
| representing that, "I do this thing," something gaudy says, "I
| have this thing!" That's what crassness is, and it comes down to
| our relative apprehension of the real vs. the represented, where
| typically, something real is powerful independent of who is
| observing it, and the representation is not. It's whether
| something legitimately represents power. Taste may be an instinct
| for honest signals, which would seem like its own sort of
| intelligence.
|
| Viewed this way, taste is the expression of what you percieve to
| be power based on your experience, good taste is the inverse of
| the distance between them, and poor taste is measured in the gap
| between what is affected and of-what it is the effect.
|
| That difference between _effect_ and _affect_ is one of the
| sneakiest bits of the english language and perhaps even the
| culture 's most cunningly set trap. Do not underestimate the
| value of good taste, it's an intuition about power.
| [deleted]
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Thanks for your contribution - this is similar to the
| impression I get about taste, not having studied aesthetics but
| having a passing familiarity with postmodern philosophy. Do you
| have any book or philosopher suggestions I could check out? I'm
| generally interested in epistemology and this sounds like a
| good angle for further reading.
| dwmbt wrote:
| i'm not a philosophy nut or anything, but consider looking
| into empiricism versus rationalism and looking at Paul's
| writing, or conversations about the objectivity/subjectivity
| of aesthetics through that lens. Paul lives up to his
| rational roots here.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| PG's essay is awful - I was looking for something with more
| merit. PG is a logical positivist, which is just a
| philosophical position - it isn't inherently rational,
| especially outside the hard sciences.
| dwmbt wrote:
| i agree. personally, i tend to look at the world through
| something akin to Kant's empirical realism. though it's
| not epistemology, his work Critique of Judgement is
| unique in that he directly tackles how "the judgement of
| taste" (X is beautiful) is reached. i recommend reading
| critiques on the critique, as this is how i regularly
| consume philosophy. on that note, i was wondering if you
| had any recommendations for how to consume philosophy,
| since it is something of interest to you?
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I have to be honest, it's something I struggle with too -
| especially as the postmodernists are known to be quite
| difficult to read. I tend to start with secondary sources
| (books about a field, essays from academics, even YouTube
| video essays) to understand a philosopher's broader
| contentions and positions and the vocabulary that they
| have inevitably invented, then go back and read the
| primary source with that initial knowledge in mind.
| xoac wrote:
| Kant is not a postmodern, he is _the_ modern if anything.
| If you are even remotely interested in the subject of
| aesthetics, it is required reading. It 's still quite a
| subtle and difficult read but not because of him trying
| to be convoluted, but the opposite as he's trying so hard
| to be clear that it ends up being a bit of a slog. One of
| my favorite books of philosophy.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| yeah I know Kant isn't a postmodernist - I haven't
| actually read the Critique, or any of Kant's works. I'm
| more interested in Deleuze & Guattari at the moment, but
| am slowly working my way through. I will probably go back
| and read Kant at some point though!
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Even within the hard sciences, logical positivism isn't
| inherently rational. It's an epistemological position
| that is self-inconsistent, and applying it within the
| sciences does not make it any less self-inconsistent.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I agree, I'm a social constructivist. I was just pointing
| out that logical positivism is only even viable within
| hard sciences so applying it to art is beyond
| nonsensical.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Thank you, while I can't recommend original philosophical
| sources, I can say I like Matthew B. Craford's "Shopclass as
| Soulcraft," was the best recent version of these ideas I've
| read, and it is a much more in-depth treatise than one would
| typically expect from a popular book. Only tangentially
| related by motorcycles is zen and the art..., which was also
| about these kinds of qualities.
|
| The other influences might be Aristotle's nichomachean ethics
| and the Stoics, but I'm having trouble sourcing my own ideas
| directly from those much better ones other than to say they
| were influential.
|
| From a po-mo side, Venturi's "ducks and decorated sheds,"
| essay was influential, as his bit was about buildings that
| are symbols vs. buildings with symbols. I don't imagine
| reading Simulacra and Simulation again, and I don't know if
| it would stand the test of time, but that decoupling of
| symbols from artifacts and the represented from the real is a
| theme in 20th century critical theory.
|
| There's some romantic thinking in there as well, and I can't
| quite source why I believe it, but there is a kind of
| catholic, hellenism to taking the idea of our perception of
| beauty and symmetry as a form of truth (as distinct from mere
| power deciding truth by fiat, or of it being ineffable), and
| then iterating on that idea into a logic around it. I don't
| know whose idea that was, but the limits of it became obvious
| when I learned about things like polyrhythms and self
| similarity, where the symmetry is more dynamic and implied,
| whereas even music demonstrates how our minds impose symmetry
| and favour the things the mind can impose its sense of
| symmetry and beauty on. That would probably align with pop
| "cognitive biases" lists and thinking fast and slow.
|
| The effect vs. affect part has been a personal theme for a
| decade or so, so I can't source that elsewhere.
| majormajor wrote:
| This seems much more about what is "tasteful" to display rather
| than the link's claim about "good taste" that objectively
| appreciates "good" art over "bad" art.
| auggierose wrote:
| What?
| tompccs wrote:
| I think this is very wrong, and the foundation of modernism in
| art and architecture (which is to say, you are wrong in a very
| unoriginal way!)
|
| The Greeks used all sorts of forced perspective tricks in their
| architecture. Columns aren't equally spaced and lines aren't
| straight, but when viewed by a human observer at ground level
| the buildings built to Greek aesthetic rules appear "nicer"
| than those built to pure geometric ones.
|
| Similarly, in art, there was a lot of talk about "authenticity"
| in the early 20th century, where it was believed that the more
| primitive the artist, the more authentic the art, since the
| true message of the artist would transmit undistorted by such
| Western constructs as technique or skill.
|
| Decoration, adornment, and "fakeness" in pursuit of aesthetics
| has always been with us, and it's really a curiosity of
| modernity to have done away with it so comprehensively. Looking
| at the burgeoning architectural revival movements, and the
| return in popularity of portraiture and classical painting
| techniques, I think we're nearing the end of an era
| encapsulated by your comment.
| motohagiography wrote:
| I replied to another comment related, but the anti- version
| of modernism is of course post-modernism, where nothing is
| real and everything is mainly its symbolic value. The conceit
| of that argument is that aesthetics are somehow trivial
| because anyone can appreciate them but very few can produce
| them - whereas you take anything post-modern and everyone can
| produce them but almost nobody can appreciate them sincerely.
|
| The unspoken but founding lie of post-modernity is that
| criticism is equivalent to competence, and that critics are
| the equals of performers, but there's just all this false
| consciousness standing in the way that we can solve by
| indoctrinating people into narrative anyway. The whole
| enterprise is predicated on this original deception, and once
| you have accepted that, you can accept anything, which is why
| I think they teach it to undergrads.
|
| The authenticity of "primitive" art as being a reaction to
| the skill and western artifice remains controversial, as if
| the art does not express the skill of the artist, what does
| it represent? Not everything has to represent something, but
| art is purely representation, so if it's not representing
| skill, there isn't a lot left.
|
| There is certainly an anti-competence movement borne out of
| critical theories that need for competence to be isolated, as
| competence and risk are sources of truth themselves* and this
| physical truth competes with critical narrative, so on this,
| I don't know that it's a bridgable gulf.
|
| This may be the most important part:
|
| I think po-mo thinkers exist in a simulation founded on that
| base deception, and they try to convince others that their
| story (made of language!) is the substrate of our reality,
| but every time someone gets on a motorcycle, skis down a
| mountain, prevails over an MMA opponent, hunts food, rides a
| horse, jumps out of a plane, has sex for pleasure, or has
| some other peak human experience, the simulation disappears.
| All the neuroticism that forms the hall of mirrors of false
| equivalencies, evaporates, and what remains is gravity and
| time, the physical and the real, and our aesthetic experience
| of it.
|
| That era has not ended, I'd argue criticism is just telling
| stories in a very shallow tide pool of history.
| wpietri wrote:
| I certainly appreciate and enjoy your points here. But
| given that you are not out eating a gourmet meal while
| galloping a horse toward your ski chalet, it seems that you
| and the postmodern crowd both value highly the creation of
| a shared narrative about what's important and what's going
| on. A narrative specifically shaped toward political ends.
| So in the end I don't see you as much different.
| Afforess wrote:
| >it seems that you and the postmodern crowd both value
| highly the creation of a shared narrative about what's
| important and what's going on
|
| This is a fairly widely mocked opinion, it;'s the same
| caliber of criticism as the "we should improve society"
| meme. The fact that both sides participate in shared
| narrative isn't a sign that both are corrupt, it's a sign
| the narrative is important.
|
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-
| som...
| wpietri wrote:
| I agree that shared narratives are important. But one
| important distinction in various approaches is the extent
| to which a given side acknowledges their promoted
| narrative as a narrative.
|
| To take a toy example, consider the George Washington
| cherry tree myth: https://www.mountvernon.org/library/dig
| italhistory/digital-e...
|
| I was taught that as a kid as a straight-up truth as a
| package of patriotic narratives. If I had said, "Well
| that's a good story, but that never happened," the people
| teaching it wouldn't have said, "You're right! But it's a
| good story that has a nice moral." They would have been
| mad at me for contradicting patriotic truth. And madder
| still if I asked why they were feeding me false stories
| as if they were true.
|
| In contrast, the people I've read who would point out the
| issues with the cherry tree story are generally more
| frank about why they're doing it and more honest about
| the limits of knowledge and narrative. Many are happy to
| appreciate myths as myths, for example, and to have
| nuanced discussions about the role of myth.
| cossatot wrote:
| I've long thought that postmodernist critical theory
| offered an array of very useful tools and positions for
| epistemic inquiry, but that due to various internal and
| external conditions of the literature/arts/sociology
| departments, more widespread and beneficial use of these
| tools were basically lost (in no small part because of the
| insecurities, narcissism and nihilism of many of the
| critical theorists themselves).
|
| For example, two decades ago when I was double majoring in
| both geology and English, I found the poststructuralist
| idea that a 'text' exists separately from narratives about
| its meaning, but the narratives of meaning were inseparable
| from the broader social constructs use to build the
| narratives, both clearly correct and very useful in
| understanding the process of scientific inquiry. The Earth
| exists, you know, somewhat independently of us; however
| geological theory is a human construct and every part of
| the process from measurement to analysis to interpretation
| to presentation is a human act that carries with it the
| stamp of human ingenuity and human flaws: The sample sites
| selected for measurement, and the measurements themselves,
| contain biases and other uncertainties related to the
| selection process (mostly based on theoretical
| considerations), the engineering of the measurement tools,
| and other constraints (e.g. physical and budgetary limits).
| Obviously, scientific methodologies are centered around
| scientific theories, one or two of which is tested and
| refined in the process, but a thousand others are invoked
| as assumption and context, i.e. a larger theoretical
| structure. And presentation is communication, and
| additional choices are made as to what to highlight and
| what to gloss over.
|
| Similarly, postmodernism's stance that there is no
| objective and unbiased observation and interpretation, and
| therefore all perspectives use one or more lenses that
| basically basically bias or filter the results, is clearly
| and often quite literally applicable to the sciences (think
| microscopy or remote sensing). Beyond those trivial cases,
| I think postmodernist theory helped me be able to
| disentangle the literature a bit and think, "OK, when
| someone interested in river erosion and landscape evolution
| looks at this dataset, they see X but I am interested in
| tectonics and Y stands out", or (in a wider theoretical
| context) "the geophysicists who come into the geosciences
| from physics use mathematical tools and make assumptions
| that assume the processes and configurations are time-
| invariant; on the other hand, the geologists know this area
| has evolved over the past 2 million years but their data
| analysis is trash--and that's why the groups can't talk to
| each other".
|
| The major difference here I think is intentionality. The
| STEM communities do generally operate on good faith and
| have some sense of shared purpose, and scientific
| advancements are real, positive sum phenomena. So it's
| possible to apply these tools to the literature and to
| one's colleagues in a way that doesn't really involve
| value/moral judgements or seek to diminish or purposefully
| misinterpret the work of others. However this is missing in
| much of the liberal arts world where there is no clear
| definition of progress, and as a result much can be reduced
| to controlling unfalsifiable narratives and battles for
| influence.
|
| That said, for all of its possible utility, critical
| theory's current escape from academia into the wider world
| doesn't seem to be going well. (For what it's worth, I also
| see modern Identitarianism as a full-throated but unwitting
| rejection of postmodernism, by holding that meaning is
| really implicit in texts, and that only some identity
| groups can legitimately produce and/or interpret texts. So
| they have moved on from Derrida's nihilism and are
| establishing a new priesthood even while canonizing him.)
|
| _Edit_ : I'd also like to emphasize that the ability to
| make somewhat accurate measurements, quantify misfits
| between modeled (i.e. theoretical) and observational data,
| and the ability to downweight, modify and/or reject
| hypotheses is also a major factor that allows for progress
| in STEM fields vs. the liberal arts, which limits the
| proliferation of bad-faith narratives that can use the
| offenses and defenses of post-(and post-post-)modernist
| theory.
| notpachet wrote:
| > criticism is equivalent to competence
|
| I think we're seeing the consequences of this sort of
| postmodern thinking playing out "in the field" today.
| Everyone's an expert, so no one is. Everyone's an armchair
| epidemiologist. We aren't ignorant or ill-educated, we're
| "just asking questions".
|
| There's something there that I can't put my finger on
| regarding the poisonous way we promise everyone that they
| can be anything. You, too, can earn $10k a month in your
| underwear via dropshipping. You, too, have the world's
| information at your fingertips, so nothing's keeping you
| from being an expert! You, too, can produce professional-
| quality video; all you need is the latest iPhone. And so
| on. I think it generates a lot of unspoken societal
| resentment towards people who are actually good at these
| things, because people who fail to reach that level of
| skill after 30 minutes are implicitly made to feel like
| they're doing something wrong.
| Nition wrote:
| Just seconding the general responses here - although there
| is of course some discussion on whether your interpretation
| is _correct_ , it's excellent to read your comments that so
| clearly have a great deal of condensed prior thought on the
| topic in them, dense with real content but not descending
| into jargon. A Modern discussion in a Postmodern comment
| world.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| > every time someone gets on a motorcycle, skis down a
| mountain ...
|
| I always use stubbing one's toe as an example of a direct
| experience of reality in all its realness.
|
| (+1 to the favourable comments on your posts - complex
| ideas expressed skilfully and clearly!)
| airstrike wrote:
| At the risk of simply repeating what countless others have
| said elsethread, I must say I thoroughly enjoyed reading
| your comments on this discussion.
|
| You've managed to scratch a mighty itch that's been
| bothering me for a long time. I finally have somewhat of a
| framework to think about it a little more, and I have you
| to thank for that.
|
| In particular, this bit is pure gold:
|
| _> I think po-mo thinkers exist in a simulation founded on
| that base deception, and they try to convince others that
| their story (made of language!) is the substrate of our
| reality, but every time someone gets on a motorcycle, skis
| down a mountain, prevails over an MMA opponent, hunts food,
| rides a horse, jumps out of a plane, has sex for pleasure,
| or has some other peak human experience, the simulation
| disappears. All the neuroticism that forms the hall of
| mirrors of false equivalencies, evaporates, and what
| remains is gravity and time, the physical and the real, and
| our aesthetic experience of it._
| elcamino44 wrote:
| I agree that it's an important and persuasive point (and
| well made!) but I'd also argue that it's not true that
| the simulation entirely disappears in those moments.
| There's definitely _something_ like that going on, but
| sometimes once the flash of adrenaline is over the
| simulation returns and your aesthetic experience physical
| and real quickly resumes its relationship to the
| convoluted web or narratives and signs that are proposed
| to construct the world of meaning. And perhaps more and
| more experiences that we think should be "real" (eg:
| parents watching their children at play) are instead
| becoming further entangled in this web.
| whatshisface wrote:
| That's a very pro-taste take on taste. I guess I should balance
| it out by saying that taste can also be knowing which overt
| signs of wealth are used by successful pharma salesmen, and
| which are used by successful drug dealers. ;)
| oopsyDoodl wrote:
| At the end there you highlight the issue that makes me think
| good taste is still hand wave-y subjectivity.
|
| Since you say early on good taste is the difference between "I
| have" and "I do" good taste can't be anything we possess, so
| how can anyone "have" good taste. Round n round we go.
|
| This continues to highlight for me the shortcomings of human
| languages. Chomsky calls them random noise formalized and
| controlled by political powers. It makes sense, they only show
| up 5,000 years ago and we had glyphs for process and ideas
| before then. Given our legal system is normalized to matters of
| object possession, so goes our discourse. Given your measure
| it's about "I do" versus "I have" can anyone "have" good taste
| since it comes down to advertising and accepting one is
| possessed of certain character traits? Isn't it still gaudy
| self promotion and idolatry?
|
| I'm still leaning towards peoples social power being due to
| their relative closeness to social power. Not that they're
| uniquely beyond human. Why accept that in a system politically
| and academically normalized abstraction "good taste" is a
| useful language object itself?
| simiones wrote:
| > Since you say early on good taste is the difference between
| "I have" and "I do" good taste can't be anything we possess,
| so how can anyone "have" good taste. Round n round we go.
|
| There is no contradiction and no circularity here. You are
| mixing levels of meaning. The concept of possession in "I
| have lots of gold" is different from the concept in "I have
| good taste". One refers to property ("I own lots of gold"),
| while the other refers to an attribute ("I am well-tasting").
| The fact that they happen to use the same word is mostly a
| coincidence, and in no way makes anything circular.
| oopsyDoodl wrote:
| Sure if you dissect the language syntax; no circles. If I
| try to consider what this means to my agency, we're saying
| I have to accept others are possessed by good taste or act
| in good taste, so I should emulate them. Conformity is good
| taste.
|
| So, IMO, this self fulfilling meta-nonsense to generate
| self fulfilling meta-nonsense.
| motohagiography wrote:
| I'd say taste can be more like musical talent. Someone can
| play well or poorly, and if they are good, we say they "have"
| talent, even though what we mean is we've observed them
| "doing" the music, and it is the effect of competence.
|
| The metonymy itself clouds the concept as well. You can have
| an ear for music or an eye for design, a nose for a story or
| a conflict, a tact with others, but taste for...everything?
| My framing implies one would have a taste for power, even if
| it bends the lexical rule.
|
| Everyone can have "good taste," by becoming competent at the
| things they do, and therefore have knowledge of which signals
| are meaingful and powerful in their domain, and which are
| not. They will not be equally reliable, as some people will
| have more experience, talent, or commitment.
|
| The next big question is what power is, as in where is it
| located or come from, what are its sufficient and necessary
| conditions, is it real, and if it is what else must be real,
| and if it isn't, what else can't be, must something be
| conscious to be subject to it, and is power over unconscious
| objects or being/things real if they don't experience it, is
| political power anything other than stored potential energy
| in the form of violence, etc. I don't have answers, and I
| think the po-mo's were quite into that (Foucalt, Marcuse I
| think?). I'm sure someone here knows this stuff for real.
|
| If you are sitting in a meeting with someone who has
| obviously tuned out and is typing into their laptop, consider
| the possibility this is what they're thinking about, and I
| find it makes them more likeable.
| mrcolin000 wrote:
| Great comment... I would also like to ask for a book
| recommendation. Thanks!
| ativzzz wrote:
| Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance talks about this
| topic in depth.
| itronitron wrote:
| Not sure that power is a sufficiently discriminating term for
| what you are describing. I agree with you but think that
| purposiveness may be a better fit.
| ellyagg wrote:
| What a tasteful word substitution.
| sharadov wrote:
| Isn't taste in art what your peers judge as good or bad?
| handrous wrote:
| > That's what crassness is, and it comes down to our relative
| apprehension of the real vs. the represented, where typically,
| something real is powerful independent of who is observing it,
| and the representation is not.
|
| > That difference between effect and affect is one of the
| sneakiest bits of the english language and perhaps even the
| culture's most cunningly set trap. Do not underestimate the
| value of good taste, it's an intuition about power.
|
| Much of Fussell's _Class_ ends up being about this, which
| amounts to how various classes choose to signal, and how good
| they are at it. One of the biggest tells for the Fussell 's
| Middle--who easily come off as the most unfortunate of the
| bunch, being the most class-anxious but also very bad at
| signaling--versus the "higher" classes he outlines, whom
| members of the Middle are often _trying_ to signal as or
| imitate, are 1) how much of their stuff, including clothing,
| involves synthetic materials, and 2) how much of their stuff
| _imitates_ a real thing--fake flowers, fine art prints on the
| walls, that kind of thing.
| golemotron wrote:
| Interesting take on Fussell. I just realized there's a
| connection to the taxonomy that Venkatesh Rao uses in the
| Gervais Principle. Middle class and middle management having
| the same qualities in relation to their adjacent groups.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This nicely explains overpriced T shirts with the name of
| some designer on it. It's a T shirt! But it screams 'I could
| afford to pay too much for this T shirt'.
| kazinator wrote:
| Or, "the overseas factory shipped this to me for 3 dollars
| and the designer couldn't do anything about it".
| WhisperingShiba wrote:
| Upper Middles selling Upper Middles and Middles fake status
| symbols, but really elevating the esteem of a singular
| Upper Middle, and making themselves stand out as fake Upper
| Middle class.
|
| Fascinating meta gameplay here.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Yes, there is. And, I will say that people who operate a website
| and don't _tell_ their users they 've done something wrong before
| limiting their accounts, then provide only a cryptic error
| message that doesn't indicate what the infraction is, don't have
| it.
|
| Specifically, if you're going to penalize people for doing
| something, tell them that you're doing it, rather than hide
| behind some cryptic, "technical difficulties"-sounding error
| message. Treat people like adults, and I suspect you'll have
| better results most of the time.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29037349
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024602
| Levitz wrote:
| I think that this, sadly, boils down to semantics.
|
| It does seem to me that by his reasoning good taste exists since
| good art exists, problem being that what is considered good art
| and what people like change with time, present a piece of modern
| art to Michelangelo and chances are he would consider it some
| sort of insulting joke.
|
| Good taste then is not something objective, but depends on
| context and the importance of being able to tell what is good
| _now_ often pales to the importance of being able to tell what is
| good _for oneself_ , moreover, the good taste becomes dependent
| on those "average" tastes.
| TimPC wrote:
| I think one could argue there is an objective good taste even
| if every attempt in society to find it results in quite
| different subjective approximations.
| soco wrote:
| Let my give you my primitive explanation to this, maybe it
| helps a bit. Art is actually more than than the drawing itself,
| art always comes with a story. When the technique is so great
| that you can get a good hang of the story just by looking at
| it, you have the Sixtine chapel. Probably you won't get
| everything the master wanted to say at a first view, but it's
| already a lot. On most modern art though, you have zero chances
| to grab the meanings by just looking at the creation. Thus
| modern artists write also a lot, talk about their works, and
| try their best to sell the story to the listening consumer.
| What are the chances of a casual museum goer to know the story
| of a certain piece of scrap metal? Thus we can only laugh at
| what we call ridiculous attempt and walk on. But it's only
| because we don't know the its story. I won't say that all
| modern art have a convincing story, of course - not everybody
| is a master. But my point is that where there's less technique,
| it needs way more story.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| My rule of thumb is "the longer the artist's statement, the
| worse the art". If more effort went into storytelling than
| producing the artistic artefact, I'm not interested in that
| pretentious puffery. Make art of concentric green circle
| because you enjoy the effects they bring through your eyes.
| No need to write an essay.
| dagw wrote:
| _Thus modern artists write also a lot, talk about their
| works_
|
| Sometimes to the detriment of their works. I had a friend who
| was an aspiring artist, and it was fascinating listening to
| him talk about his art. He thought deeply about his work and
| a very clear vision and philosophy about what, how and why he
| wanted to achieve. Unfortunately his actual execution never
| got the same care and his actual exhibitions looked mediocre
| and thrown together together at the last minute (which, to be
| fair, they tended to be). He never felt that was the
| important part, and unless you had been in the pub with him
| the night before you would never have a chance of 'getting'
| what he was trying to do.
| watwut wrote:
| To be fair, I know multiple programmers who are exactly
| like that.
|
| Totally thoughtful. Can talk about development in pub for
| hours. Can talk about architecture, frameworks, best
| practices, you name it. And his code still sux, is hard to
| maintain and unfixable unless you refactor it.
| egeozcan wrote:
| I always thought "taste" as the skill to recognize patterns in
| trends.
|
| That's why something that is considered "good taste" in 1950s can
| be seen as horrible taste nowadays.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| My take is that taste is a complex selection of trade-offs.
|
| It is something we see a lot in software and (proper)
| engineering. I might have a taste on how to shard a database or
| pool connections, arrange workers off a queue. All of those come
| together to reflect a taste on how to build a complete system.
|
| My taste will differ from others - the more dimensions we measure
| the easier / harder it is to find commonality. (This might be a
| lesson in politics)
|
| The point being is that taste can be "wrong" - but only when
| looking at the desired goal. The goal for most art is self-
| expression. The goal for software systems might be monthly
| engagement. Its a lot easier to decide if engagement goes up and
| so judge _taste_ in software design.
|
| This does lead to the interesting point that one can "teach"
| taste ... through following a metric and iterating. And this is
| often the advice - paint lots.
|
| But it does indicate that there is Good Taste. Its the taste that
| gets you to your goal. There may well have been painters like
| Pollock in Renaissance Italy, but they just starved to death
| before dripping much paint. And if there was only one "Good
| Taste" (what the Medici's liked) then there was a way to harness
| the greatest _skill_ to that subset of Taste. Da Vinci may well
| have preferred abstract modernism, but he also preferred to eat.
|
| Now it is possible for more ways to align skill with different
| tastes. So we have more good tastes. More groupings of trade
| offs.
|
| And that is something i think we are seeing in software too. Open
| Source is one huge trade off that influences other things. Sort
| of like, Perspective.
| arcanon wrote:
| I disagree with Paul when he weakened his argument from perfect
| to good taste. There are some artists who have more control over
| details than others. By perfect you would be able to perfectly
| recreate the reality of the subject/scene.
| jeremysalwen wrote:
| My immune system has better taste than yours. It only responds to
| the most _refined_ vaccines.
|
| p.s. help im dying.
| timdellinger wrote:
| Perhaps I'm under-informed here, but hasn't this all been covered
| by the philosophers who concentrate in Aesthetics?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetics
| Debug_Overload wrote:
| It's been my experience that if you read enough content online,
| you will realize that it's mostly people rediscovering old
| debates, and chiming in with what they think is new and
| insightful perspective which it usually isn't.
| SubuSS wrote:
| I think that's a software engineering dilemma spilling out to
| the rest of the world: how many 'new software' have you seen
| that are just a rehash of something existing already!
| handrous wrote:
| Nearly every politics-related thread I participate in on HN
| ends up with my needing to start back at Book I of The
| Republic so we can get on the same page about how complex the
| idea of "Justice" actually is. Literally the first part of
| one of the first primary works a political philosophy student
| is likely to read, and it's news to people confidently
| presenting their ideas about how the economy or social policy
| or whatever _ought_ to work.
|
| In a sense, I think the social sciences, philosophy, and the
| arts get "cranks" thinking they've figured them out, just
| like physics and math et c., do, except at a _much_ higher
| volume, to the point that any discussion of those topics
| outside of highly specialized forums ends up consisting
| mostly of cranks arguing with one another, most of whom, if
| they have put any actual time into studying the topic at all,
| have fallen down some narrow crank-dominated rabbit hole of
| bad ideas. It 's like if Flat Earthers were treated as having
| valid opinions.
| d_burfoot wrote:
| The problem of taste is philosophically deep and relates to
| issues in epistemology that have only recently been resolved with
| new ideas from information theory and machine learning.
|
| Part of the problem is about complex inductive processes. Human
| knowledge has encompassed simple deduction (Aristotelian
| syllogism), simple induction (P values, N=200 medical studies),
| and complex deduction (operating systems, compilers, etc). We are
| comfortable with how these systems of reasoning work.
|
| But art relates to the fourth quadrant - complex induction, with
| billion-parameter models trained against enormous datasets. When
| a human says "I think this painting is beautiful, but that one is
| ugly", they are expressing something about the response of their
| visual cortex (a multi-billion parameter learning system) to a
| rich stimulus (say, 1 million pixels). With the advent of
| research like GPT-3, we can now build these systems, though we
| don't understand their properties very well. There is a lot more
| for us to understand here, both conceptually and technically.
| alakra wrote:
| I was talking to an artist a few years ago who seemed to downplay
| the significance of her art as we discussed the paths of lives we
| each took, she a traditional artist and I a hacker.
|
| I had to quickly remind her that the importance of her art was
| substantial because it helped other people see ideas and other
| unseen things clearly. We need this in our communities and
| societies more than ever.
|
| I love this idea because those with good taste can show layers of
| depth through their art much better than those with poor taste.
| wruza wrote:
| What if there's no clear hierarchy of "better"?
| https://mathsgear.co.uk/products/non-transitive-grime-dice
| kabanossen wrote:
| So the only purpose of art is to consume it? What is this guy
| five?
| anusharma wrote:
| >>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 kind of assumes that all good artists have good taste. Some
| artists may have good taste, but may not be great artists
| themselves. Others may create great art, sometimes by chance, and
| understand its relevance post-facto (maybe as it becomes more
| contextually relevant?).
|
| In my experience (some engineering, mostly product mgmt), taste
| is an emergent property. As some others have alluded, good taste
| can emerge from both intuition and thought/reflection. The hard
| part is articulating what makes one piece of art better than
| others. Most people can recognize the gap between paintings of an
| 8 yr old's painting vs. Bellini, but does that mean they have
| good taste? Many of us have some built-in, intuitive sense of
| taste. But to apply/execute on it, we need to be able to
| articulate it.
| codeulike wrote:
| This ignores the sociological aspects - having 'good taste' in
| something (art, sneakers, car modifications, tattoos) is a way of
| signalling membership of a group or distinction within that
| group. Even being interested in [classical] 'art' in the first
| place is a signifier of being in a certain strata of society. The
| way this essay is written seems anchored in one very particular
| social strata and the signifiers that characterise it. Replace
| 'art' with 'sneakers' and re-read, how does it seem different?
| [deleted]
| klik99 wrote:
| I generally agree with you but signaling membership is far from
| the sole reason people like art - for example: the existence of
| hidden "guilty pleasures" indicates purely aesthetic enjoyment!
| I personally like fountain pens and riding a one wheel despite
| really hating the cultures around both of them
|
| But the key point you're making - that good art only exists in
| a specific context - I totally agree with. Good taste/art exist
| only in relation to a specific culture, and depends on what
| that culture values (technique, creativity, bold ideas,
| traditional ideas (for example: pre-romantic period, good
| composers were seen as empty vessels "pure music" divinely
| flowed through rather than as geniuses with bold new ideas)).
| Shostakovich wouldn't have had a chance 100 years prior.
| mojuba wrote:
| Social signals exist, no doubt about it, but that doesn't
| explain a lot. Let's say you are in a museum alone, some of the
| works presented can resonate and excite you more than the
| others, but you can't share your excitement with anyone. Where
| is the social signaling element gone then?
| codeulike wrote:
| Social signals aren't real-time light-beams that someone has
| to be there to witness; they make up our likes and interests
| and who we are.
|
| _Let 's say you are in a museum alone, some of the works
| presented can resonate and excite you more than the others,
| but you can't share your excitement with anyone. Where is the
| social signaling element gone then?_
|
| Lets say: Two months later I'll be at a dinner party and over
| a bowl of Caldo Verde I'll recount an anecdote about the Paul
| Manship sculpture that I saw that time in the museum on my
| own, and how it was placed in relation to the other works.
| mojuba wrote:
| Yes but your momentary reaction to what you see, how much
| of it is "social"?
| ff317 wrote:
| It could be the case that a lot of the momentary, solo
| reaction is driven by your brain's anticipation of those
| future social situations.
| mojuba wrote:
| I'm sure it's partly that. But then how do things become
| fashionable? Who defines the common taste for the rest of
| the society? Now we are back to the basics and I'll stick
| to my hypothesis (I explained elsewhere in the thread)
| that it's about appreciating novelty.
| fijiaarone wrote:
| Being in a museum itself is a "social signal".
| [deleted]
| loudmax wrote:
| I think sneaker aficionados would say that there really are
| designs that are better than others. That's even leaving aside
| functionality and just considering aesthetics. To those of us
| outside the sneaker-head community, sneaker fashion looks like
| a lot of noise and kind of silly. But I'd expect if one really
| got into sneaker fashion one could learn to appreciate the
| different colors or fabric patterns or whatever else drives
| their interest. And then one could say that some particular
| design really is better than another.
|
| Same for tattoos or car modifications. Yes, there's a lot of
| signaling within your social strata, but if you're in that
| strata it's valid to say that some tattoos are better than
| others.
|
| Also it's okay not be in the loop. Not everyone has to have an
| opinion on why Leonardo Da Vinci is a better artist than
| Botticelli.
| fijiaarone wrote:
| While you can find taste within any field or art, choosing
| which subject to apply your taste to is also a matter of
| taste.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| This is easily disproven by showing a child two paintings.
| watwut wrote:
| How? The kid will like the one painting targeted at kids and
| that is it.
|
| Also, kids are exactly the demographics super susceptible to
| claim liking or disliking things based on what their friends
| say about them.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| That doesn't make sense.
|
| Show a kid 2 paintings they've never seen before. Show it
| to them in isolation. Guess which one they pick?
| watwut wrote:
| How would that prove there is no sociological aspect? Or
| that people don't use taste as in-group signaling?
| nepeckman wrote:
| I'm almost positive most kids would pick a Lisa Frank
| piece over the Mona Lisa. Are you trying to make the
| point that bright colors, rainbows, and unicorns are the
| highest form of art?
| watwut wrote:
| To be fair, Mona Lisa as general go to example of bestest
| painting is on itself a proof that taste is socially
| constructed.
| nepeckman wrote:
| I agree with you, and view my comment as complementing
| yours by refuting the parent, rather than making a value
| judgement on Lisa Frank's work. Apologies if I missed the
| mark there!
| loudmax wrote:
| In the current political climate, it's hard enough to get people
| to agree on objective reality. On the one hand there's healthy
| skepticism, on the other hand there's selecting news sources to
| confirm your beliefs.
|
| Paul Graham is certainly aware of this analogy as he even brings
| up the subject of vaccines in the article. Writing about
| appreciation of art rather than evaluation of journalism or truth
| is an interesting way to re-frame the epistemology.
| keiferski wrote:
| This is a question of relativism. Taste is ultimately about
| value, and "good taste" in art is just one aspect of culture at
| large. So, if you doubt if "good taste" exists, you also probably
| think that _everyone has the right to believe whatever they want_
| and _everyone should be able to exist how they want._ You can
| call this relativistic individualism.
|
| I bring this up because the topic reminds me of a philosopher of
| religion, Charles Taylor. One of his points is that this
| relativistic individualism inevitably leads to our own inability
| to express what we value. It's a kind of "explanatory atrophy."
| If your default position is _I have my way and he has his, and
| that 's all there really is to it_ you lose the ability to
| present and shape your own opinion in reaction to others. Most
| people don't have the vocabulary to articulate this, so "that's
| in bad taste" ends up just turning into Dudeism.. _that 's just
| your opinion, man._
|
| So when confronted with something we think is in bad taste, we
| can't put vague thoughts into words, and therefore just fall back
| to "it's his/her personal taste, who I am to criticize?"
|
| Ultimately, this question arises from a lack of education and
| cultural interest in the arts and in aesthetics. Without it, the
| definition of _good taste_ will ultimately boil down to the
| opinions of whoever has money, power, or popularity.
| fijiaarone wrote:
| Isn't it funny how relativists preach individualism but are, in
| practice, the greatest collectivists?
| rhines wrote:
| Hmm, I'm not sure this necessarily follows.
|
| Just because we may not be able to concretely define what makes
| art "good", does not mean we can not discuss why we like it.
|
| If one person enjoys a piece because they appreciate the
| technical mastery of the brushwork, another enjoys it for how
| accurately it mimics reality, and another finds it special for
| the feelings evoked by the composition, each of those people
| can articulate why the piece speaks to them. They can describe
| why they like it, there's no reason anyone should suffer any
| sort of explanatory atrophy.
|
| Now, can any of them convince another that the work is better
| than another? Probably not. The person who enjoyed the
| brushwork may find an even more masterfully painted piece,
| which they think is better. But perhaps the new piece doesn't
| demonstrate quite so much clarity in portraying reality, so the
| person who enjoyed that from the first piece still prefers the
| first. Who is to say whose values are more important?
|
| For this reason, I think the multi-axis view is more
| constructive. Rather than spending our time arguing if
| technique or novelty or emotions or whatever else are what
| matters most, we can focus on appreciating each aspect as we
| see fit. And we can certainly articulate what a piece does well
| on any axis.
| keiferski wrote:
| It's not that we _can't_ define it, but that we are not in
| the habit of doing so. Because it's become culturally
| preferable to just be agreeable about others' preferences.
| Since we aren't in the habit of discussing the topic, our
| ability to formulate a firm position on it atrophies.
| Consequently we don't actually have a good reason why _we_
| think X is better than Y and so we just revert to "everyone's
| opinion is subjective anyway."
|
| It's not totally dissimilar from the idea of Newspeak in
| 1984, except we lose the ability to articulate concepts
| rather than lose the concept entirely.
|
| Taylor goes into this far more than me, so I really wouldn't
| base the entire argument on my comment. Unfortunately I do
| not remember the exact lecture he said this but I think it
| was in this series:
|
| https://youtu.be/j_losVdiARc
| quacked wrote:
| The smartest thing I've ever heard someone say about "taste" was
| an elaboration on the phrase "taste is subjective", with
| 'subjective' meaning "based on or influenced by personal
| feelings, tastes, or opinions".
|
| He said that there isn't any higher truth that can "prove" that a
| recording of off-tempo typewriter clacking is 'worse' than the
| Beatles, and that technically both are equally valid as an
| artistic statement, but that since taste is based on the subject,
| we can use someone's stated preference for typewriter clacking
| over the Beatles as revealing of their personality and belief
| set, and then we can decide whether or not we want to be in
| society with them.
|
| This put this debate entirely to rest in my mind. I no longer
| worry about whether or not my tastes are "inferior" or "superior"
| to someone else's tastes, only whether or not they are
| compatible. Some people want to rid the world of traditional
| architecture, classical music, and any other old-fashioned
| hierarchical art form; their taste for the contemporary isn't
| inferior to my taste for the traditional, it is merely
| incompatible, and will inevitably lead to a different society
| than the one in which I would like to reside.
| fijiaarone wrote:
| The reason most people are dismissive about quality or "taste" in
| art, or so many other topics, is simply because they have very
| poor taste -- that is, that they are not qualified to judge, or
| that their judgement is easily influenced by irrelevant factors
| (like popularity).
|
| The reason that the art establishment is dismissive about quality
| or "taste" is a bit more nefarious, and at least as banal -- they
| are not good at producing art. So they denigrate that which they
| know is better than they can achieve.
|
| And by their influence (and based upon their degree of control
| over the opinion-shaping levers) the majority end up rejecting
| quality -- or being persuaded to reject their own sense of taste.
| [deleted]
| jccalhoun wrote:
| As others have mentioned, Bourdieu would like a word with him
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinction_(book)
|
| Graham seems to be conflating skill with taste. The artists he
| mentions are skilled at art and he states that he is not.
| Distinguishing between skilled and unskilled work may be "good
| taste" but what is considered good art is more than just skill.
| fijiaarone wrote:
| If taste is subject to experience -- and it _is_ unless you
| think someone who has only seen very little art in a very
| limited scope of style is as qualified to judge the quality of
| art as someone who has seen lots of art of many different
| styles -- then skill is definitely a strong factor in
| influencing taste.
|
| While it is true that there are people who have a high degree
| of technical skill (or of talent) who have poor taste, which
| means that skill is not the direct cause of taste, it is an
| essential -- and significant element.
|
| It's like assuming that practicing athletics does not make you
| better able to appreciate the achievements of other athletes.
|
| Skill give both awareness and depth to your perception, and if
| you think neither of these attributes are applicable to
| determining quality, you lack the linguistic or cognitive
| ability to join the discussion.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I agree, he conflates skill with "good art".
|
| I think he is still correct though but for a different reason.
| When someone first creates art they may begin naively and
| create art that is lacking in subtlety, perhaps speaking to the
| more immature aspects of our human nature?
|
| A good artist graduates from that phase and begins to recognize
| it in other artists -- can say, "Yeah, I used to do art like
| that but I have moved on." In the same way the art connoisseur
| should be able to say, "Ahhh, I used to like art like that
| once, but my tastes now appreciate the more nuanced."
|
| Maybe an example is a car that the owner did as "black-on-
| black", like Darth Vader, blacked out badges, blacked-out
| windows, black paint job.... You recognize that "Hey, all
| black, cool, right?"
|
| Am I being too elitist?
|
| (Hello user, BTW.)
| humanistbot wrote:
| Edit: OK fine, I'll shut up.
| Igelau wrote:
| > rich tech folks writing about areas way outside of their
| expertise
|
| Even if you were right, the majority of canonical art history
| comes down to how rich people are spending their money.
| cm2012 wrote:
| There's plenty of things to complain about in PG's essays,
| but subject matter expertise is not one of them. PG has been
| an practitioner and student of art for decades.
| hairofadog wrote:
| _> Graham seems to be conflating skill with taste_
|
| I came here to type this sentence almost word for word.
|
| I think this divide is most easily seen in the realm of acting,
| with no better example than Nicholas Cage: high skill level,
| low taste, at least judging by the majority of projects he
| chooses. (The counterargument might be that he realizes he's
| making a lot of bad movies and just needs the paycheck - he's
| infamous for blowing his money in foolhardy ways - but I
| definitely think at least some part of the essence of Nicholas
| Cage comes from conflict between high skill vs low taste).
|
| I was friends with a guy in college who was a masterful
| musician (toured professionally as an all-purpose backup
| musician for some mid-tier bands you have heard of) and I used
| to argue with him about one particular band whose music I
| disliked [^1], and he would say, "But do you know how hard it
| is to play those notes? Look!" and he would stretch his fingers
| all over the bass fret, and I'd say, yeah, but... finger
| gymnastics is not the same as good music.
|
| Also back in college, when CDs were a thing and money was
| scarce, I used to debate with myself about whether it would be
| worthwhile to accept the faustian bargain of trading my own
| musical tastes to exactly match the contents of the record
| store's discount CD bin, which was filled with things like
| Richard Marx albums [^2], so I could buy ten albums for five
| dollars.
|
| [^1]: I don't want to start a flame war but it's the 80's-era
| band with complex bass arrangements which I have noticed is
| popular with sysadmin folks
|
| [^2]: No disrespect intended to people who dig Richard Marx, or
| to Richard Marx himself, but it sticks in my mind as the thing
| that was in the bin I was looking at when I had this thought.
| Iefthandrule wrote:
| You have a point--just because Rush's music is technically
| sound, that does not mean it is good music.
| jgtrosh wrote:
| Yes, it seems to me that Paul's reasoning makes this mix up at
| this point:
|
| > 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.
|
| People can be measurably good at realising specific criteria,
| even if you can't absolutely compare these criteria.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Then there is a semi-order (fuzzy as it may be) in taste, and
| "good" and "bad" taste exist.
| rp1 wrote:
| What other considerations are there other than skill? Isn't
| everything a skill? Graham lists a few other extraneous
| concerns that people judge art by. He asserts these are
| unrelated to the art itself, like which museum the art is
| hanging in.
|
| I agree with Graham's premise. My theory is that people don't
| believe good taste exists because most people have bad taste
| and that's too big of a pill to swallow. Would you rather admit
| to having bad taste, or posit that taste doesn't exist? This is
| supported by Graham's observation that contemporary art critics
| are nearly always disproven a generation or two later, meaning
| most critics have flawed taste.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| I'd say many people have not much interest in art in the
| first place. It's not a matter of taste, but whether art is a
| thing at all.
| Igelau wrote:
| > My theory is that people don't believe good taste exists
| because most people have bad taste
|
| This breaks down pretty quickly outside of fine art
| criticism. If I put 20 people in a room and only one of them
| has dressed "in good taste", they'll stick out badly enough
| that the consensus of the group will be that the one is in
| "bad taste".
|
| The problem is that "taste" is vague, depends on ephemeral
| context and may be subject to popular whims and ignorance.
| rp1 wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Graham is not
| saying that taste is quantifiable or identifiable via
| public opinion or consensus, so I'm not sure how the
| situation of 20 people in a room evaluating taste is
| relevant.
| nickelpro wrote:
| The conflation of skill with taste demonstrates exactly why
| Graham is wrong. There's many widely recognized works of art,
| by critics of similarly recognized taste, that are far less
| skillful than what a competent art student can put out today
| and yet held in higher acclaim.
|
| Post-modernism, Dada, and surrealism drove the stake through
| this point, The Treachery of Images or Fountain (Duchamp)
| aren't extremely skillful, but they're world class art from a
| certain point of view.
| rp1 wrote:
| I think you're taking too narrow a definition of skill.
| True, drawing a straight line is a skill, but the vision to
| draw a particular line in an innovative way is also a
| skill.
| nickelpro wrote:
| And what counts as visionary and what counts as nonsense
| is entirely subjective. We can judge how straight a line
| is objectively, but we can't judge "vision" objectively,
| and thus "taste" is inherently subjective.
|
| That Graham wrote an entire essay rubbing up against this
| point without once encountering any literature that
| explains this (seminally Bourdieu, but there are many
| others) is surprising.
| rp1 wrote:
| But subjectiveness applies to everything. For instance,
| whether or not something is moral is subjective, and yet
| there is a collective notion of morality.
| havermeyer wrote:
| There's even a subreddit dedicated to awful taste but great
| execution :) https://old.reddit.com/r/ATBGE/
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Skill is used to produce, but the product of skill isn't
| necessarily good if it doesn't fulfil a useful purpose. Good
| taste beyond pure aesthetic appreciation is related to
| interpretation/analysis, understanding what the artist
| accomplished and what can be read from the work. Good art
| says something new.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images is a
| good example - it has very little aesthetic value but a lot
| of meaning, especially for the era is was made in. Compare
| that to e.g. Vermeer (one of my favourite artists), whose
| work is full of skill and aesthetic beauty but doesn't have
| anything to say because it's a figurative work.
| bitcurious wrote:
| > What other considerations are there other than skill?
|
| Narrative is critical, and often external, coming from the
| curator, dealer, critic, etc. Humans love stories.
|
| "Death and Transfiguration" by Strauss is a beautiful,
| skillfully written piece of music. A story I heard is that
| Strauss on his deathbed exclaimed "it's just like I wrote
| it!" Is it true? Did he say this? I have no idea, and in a
| sense it doesn't matter. The piece is made better by the
| story I remember when I listen to it. It's not in the music,
| it's with the music.
| retube wrote:
| I don't agree with his argument. I'd argue that it's perfectly
| possible for something that took huge skill and execution
| brilliance to create to be ugly / tasteless / vulgar, indeed
| completely tasteless.
| criddell wrote:
| Maybe it comes down to Graham's definition of _art_?
|
| I've always cast a very wide net and thought of art as anything
| that intentionally provokes a response.
| derbOac wrote:
| I have no idea what the right answers are in this area, if
| there are any. But for me, I don't know that it's so much about
| skill as it is something that results in the bettering of
| experience. That might require skill in the sense of technique,
| but it also reflect lots of thought or insight, or something
| else.
|
| Where it gets tricky I think is that "bettering" can be with
| reference to many different criteria -- morality, empathy,
| insight into ourselves, insight into others, bearing witness,
| emotional peace, and so forth -- that it becomes very complex
| very quickly. I also think that it necessarily depends on where
| someone, or some group of people are, at some point in time, so
| it will shift (this also arguably speaks to how taste is a
| function of the creator, creation, and the beholder
| simultaneously).
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| If you want examples, take a look at
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ATBGE/ (ATBGE stands for Awful Taste
| but Great Execution). While I think that taste is subjective,
| it would be difficult to argue that many of these posts were
| good ideas.
| watwut wrote:
| One problem with subs like that is that people tend to really
| push it. They want to participate, so they desperstely look
| for badness.
| bitcurious wrote:
| In the book Seeing Like a State (recommended here, thank you
| anonymous hacker), one of the core arguments is that the State,
| in whatever form, expresses its authority by forcing legibility
| of its subjects. Examples span from the generally beneficial
| (see: standard measurements, introduced in France to facilitate
| centralized taxation) to horribly detrimental (see: centrally
| planned farming and the resulting famines in the USSR and China).
| A core thesis is that, regardless of the "goodness" of outcome,
| this introduction of legibility necessarily reduces the agency
| and individuality of the subjects, as any subject is exactly as
| complex as it is illegible. I think Wolfram speaks of this in
| another context as computational irreducibility.
|
| This essay, and the core premise of "good taste" looks to be
| another example of the same. "Good taste" can exist on average,
| outside of the context of specific individuals. Indeed, good
| taste is emergent. It exists in the sense that "critics" are just
| another market, and market needs are met. "Good taste" can then
| be described and prescribed, but like most centrally planned
| policies, it will fail to adapt.
|
| So yes, good taste can be said to exist. It cannot, however, be
| possessed.
| disambiguation wrote:
| so this is clearly indirect commentary to mitigate the
| controversy.
|
| That being said, I can't tell if he's saying "it's bad taste to
| question the efficacy" or "it's bad taste to disallow a
| conversation on effectiveness"
|
| .. or both?
| robofanatic wrote:
| > 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.
|
| In this statement, how do you define "better art"? You'll need a
| third person or a judge to define it! which is again biased.
| Meekro wrote:
| So PG thinks that someone has good taste if prefer "better" art
| and bad taste if they prefer "worse" art. He knows some art can
| be better than other art because when he started painting, his
| art wasn't very good. Then he kept practicing and produced better
| art. Therefore, one piece can definitely be better than another.
|
| But if we're looking at two pieces we've never seen before and
| trying to determine which is better, are there any approaches
| besides just surveying a bunch of people about which one they
| prefer?
|
| PG makes an analogy to vaccines, but we measure vaccine quality
| objectively based on how many people it can help. To simplify a
| bit, if vaccine A works on 1% of people and vaccine B works on
| 99% of people, we say vaccine B is better. It wouldn't matter if
| some "expert" looked at both vaccines while swirling his wine and
| said in a pompous tone that "vaccine A is _clearly_ more refined
| no matter what the masses may think. "
|
| So how is art any different? Isn't the "better" art determined by
| what more people like, in which case the top-grossing blockbuster
| films represent the best art of our generation? If so, then "good
| taste" is the ability to look at two unreleased movies and
| correctly predict which will make more money-- a valuable skill,
| no doubt!
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 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.
| andi999 wrote:
| Next thing you want to tell me is that wine doesn't really
| taste good? (the high quality wine of course)
| SilasX wrote:
| 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...
| thom wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| A hypothetical wine that tastes good would have taste too
| different from wine that it won't count as wine anymore.
| sombremesa wrote:
| Who determines that the wine is high quality? You've already
| established taste there, regardless of the wine's taste.
| tartoran wrote:
| 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.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| And yet sommeliers can be regularly fooled in blind taste
| tests.
| simiones wrote:
| 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).
| i_love_limes wrote:
| I think by your definition, the best wine is grape juice,
| which is never vinegary and never gives you a headache.
| tartoran wrote:
| 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.
| simiones wrote:
| 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.
| watwut wrote:
| > 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.
| jrumbut wrote:
| 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.
| fsloth wrote:
| 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?
| pyrale wrote:
| 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.
| fsloth wrote:
| 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?
| xoac wrote:
| 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.
| etage3 wrote:
| >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'etre, 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.
| fsloth wrote:
| (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.
| pyrale wrote:
| > 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.
| claudiawerner wrote:
| 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > 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...
| ambrozk wrote:
| 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.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| > 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?
| syrusakbary wrote:
| It feels like taste and expertise are mixed in the essay. Once
| the expertise variable is added to the mix, the reductio ad
| absurdum examples no longer work.
|
| Given that good taste is usually measured by people with
| expertise, can you really develop good taste without expertise?
| flippinburgers wrote:
| For myself good taste sits on the axis of reproducibility. Food,
| for instance, will go stale over time, become bland and even
| toxic approaching an asymptote of "not good". Fresh food + skill
| = something delicious that is difficult to replicate. Knowing
| that deliciousness is good taste.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| The question of the existence of taste can be reframed as the
| question of whether all people are equal. The answer to one
| implies the answer to the other and vice versa.
| amznbyebyebye wrote:
| I think pg has finally reached peak rich
| raydev wrote:
| I wonder if this is at all related to the massive wave of hatred
| for Bored Apes/Lions, etc.
|
| Even putting aside people's issues with the concept of NFTs,
| people seem to agree the art is somewhere between bad and
| revolting. Except for the people investing in them.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I think that my definition of "good taste" still beats every
| other definition or argument I've heard (including this essay):
| if you like what I like, you have good taste.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| TLDR: things that lots of people like are good taste.
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