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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
The CIA backed American abstract expressionists, which is a different, more visually complex style of abstract painting that is distinct from minimalist abstract painting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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:
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!"
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,
Both of these statements can be true at the same time. As an extreme example, take the Mona Lisa. No matter how much you think it's a good painting, there is no way that people would travel from around the world in their thousands to see that painting if it wasn't for the whole story/mythology/history around that painting and its creator. It's not THAT good a painting. There are dozens of technically more interesting and 'better' painting hanging in the Louvre that those people happily run past just to see the Mona Lisa. Or go to the Galleria dell'Accademia and count how many people who are just interested in the David statue and ignore all the other, equally 'good', statues they have.
Or take an uninteresting commissioned portrait of a minor nobelmans daughter and tell people it's an original Michelangelo. They will all of a sudden find the painting much more interesting than if you told them it was by an unknown contemporary of Michelangelo.
And there is nothing weird about this. A rusty sword that you can prove has been used by a famous general in a great battle will attract more interest and attention than a rusty sword of unknown provenance.
All of this can be true without taking anything away from Michelangelo as one of the greatest artists who has ever lived.
Okay I can better see where you're coming from, I just cringe at your unironic endorsement of the status game. To the extent that these people are flocking to the paintings just to get its (South Park-style) status "goo", that is something not to be lauded or encouraged, and an indication of the non-seriousness of the artistic appreciation.
The "acid test" of Renaissance art being more praiseworthy than the exhibits in modern art museums is that people can know nothing about the "goo" of the artists and still go away thinking "damn, that's awesome". The fact that some of the artists have "name currency" is noise in this dynamic, not signal.
If the best you can say about the super edgy, more modern art is that "oh yeah, people flock to see it because they think other people like it who think other people like it" -- well, you either aren't familiar with "The Emperor's New Clothes", or you sorely missed its point.
> 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.
It seems you felt attacked by my comment, which was not the intent. Apologies if it came off confrontationally. I never asked you to supply “a specific test”, I asked if there was one. Not sure why you took it as a personal attack on your point. I was genuinely interested in if the topic has been studied/tested.
Then why the bit about "This seems like a big assumption", if you weren't also asserting that it seemed implausible to you that anyone could like any Renaissance art without having someone tell them "this is good, this high status, this is what you like now".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
> 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.
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.
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".
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I believe you 100%. None of those words is synonymous with "good taste".
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.
I find it odd that anyone who has read that book would write such an essay. He'd be aware that there is whole branch of philosophy dedicated aesthetics/quality and didn't touch on any of that either. Maybe cuz it was derived from a talk he gave and it had to be calibrated for a certain audience (definitely not philosophy students)
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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).
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”.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Personally I think novelty is specifically a subcomponent of how creativity is judged with an implicit "judged as good or significant" caveat. Novel styles or techniques which are fertile seems to be a sign of this. Fertile as in it may be applied to many other works, especially if the derivatives are varied and creative. Even genres or works not held in high esteem are considered superior to imitators. Although there is some "if treason doth prosper none dare call it treason" to it.
A well executed refinement of the throughly worn tends to get panned as derivative while foundational works have other sins and lack of polish forgiven. For an extreme example take the infamous Leni Riefenstahl - Adolf Hitler's propagandist. She is studied for her role in pioneering cinematic techniques, if her works weren't novel they would be more a matter of study for historians than cinematographers.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Please, we can discuss art theory without political dimension.
Hackers like to build and respect people who build cool things without getting political. Similarly classical art can be appreciated from the point of view of pure craftmanship.
Is Doom more impressive piece of software than a Javascript "Hello world"?
I claim it is. Similar claims can be applied to specific art genres without political dimension if you know the genre.
I find Bourdeaus analysis to be - frankly - a form of navel gazing that has nothing of merit to give to politics, or art.
Yes, everything people do have a political dimension. But one should be able to discuss art theory without confusing it with class warfare.
While everything can and will be weaponized as an instrument of oppression, I don't see the added value of starting from the point of view.
It's like a silly action movie trope, only applied to a political context.
I.e. in a fancy restaurant - that's a nice steak knife you have there - it would work really well in a combat setting. Really?
>Please, we can discuss art theory without political dimension.
Bourdieu discusses this very point in the Preface of The Rules of Art.
"(...) countless are those who forbid sociology any profaning contact with the work of art. (...) I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why they are so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational, understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the 'work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence."
A scientific understanding of art doesn't or negate or lower it. On the contrary : "(...) scientific analysis, when it is able to uncover what makes the work of art necessary, that is to say, its informing formula, its generative principle, its raison d'être, also furnishes artistic experience, and the pleasure which accompanies it with its best justification, its richest nourishment. Through it, sensible love of the work can fulfill itself in a sort of amor intellectualis rei the assimilation of the object to the subject and the immersion of the subject in the object, the active surrender to the singular necessity of the literary object (which, more often than not, is itself the product of a similar submission)."
(The below is with an intent of explaining my view of Paul's essay and is written with the tone of a devil's advocate)
Sorry I prefer quoting Feynman - art theory is about as usefull for enjoying and doing art as ornithology is for birds. The original quote was "Philosophy of science is about as useful for science as ornithology is for birds."
Note! This does not denigrate the "useless" fields as such - but the point of view is that their usefulness for the field they claim to study is at most limited.
As a trained physicist and hobbyist artist I can pretty much agree with this. Doing physics and doing art is so friggin hard that while focusing on them, human cognition has no space for analysis in any other domain.
Want to analyse a classical painting? Well, there is a very good technique for this but it requires a huge amount of labour - replicate it.
I realize this is a very technical point of view, but having a hands-on experience, it's very hard to convince me any other way would offer superior understanding of the core issues at play.
I must repeat that I am not discounting analysis - but they are only secondary in importance to the ding an sich.
Sorry. This is getting a very long winded way of expressing my point of view.
I read Paul's essay from this very specifically technical point of view that acknowledges the inherent complexity in the chosen domain (classical art) and hence takes it obvious that there are some works 'better' than others. But there is no numerical metric we can use to gauge paintings - hence we must refer to an intuitive understanding of the quality of a work. Paul calls this 'intuitive understanding of quality' taste.
I think the whole point was to point out that some things can be considered rationally better than others, even though we don't have an objective numerical measure for this goodness.
> I think the whole point was to point out that some things can be considered rationally better than others
While it's anyone's right to pass their opinion as a fact, it helps little in terms of explaining how different people react to art.
> art theory is about as usefull for enjoying and doing art as ornithology is for birds.
I believe the trouble here is that birds rarely try to pass as ornithologists. Trying to formulate a general theory about what makes art or artistic taste is sociology work, not art.
> some things can be considered rationally better than others
I hope blue is your favorite color, because it's mine; and if it's not yours, you're wrong.
"I hope blue is your favorite color, because it's mine; and if it's not yours, you're wrong"
No, but if we both are at a painting course and painting the same still life, it is plausible we can come to a honest agreement about whose painting we prefer, which details are better presented in the others work and so on.
We are obviously talking of two entirely different things - art as a social phenomenon, and art as art (a technical skill, an aesthetic experience ).
"Taste as a metric" has entirely different meaning in these two contexts. In the sociological context I completely agree with you.
But in the "art as craft to be done, not merely observed because that is boring" sense the sociological analysis offers nothing (for the skill or the aesthetic experience).
We could be discussing of racing - the sociological aspect of observing the race - or of the actual driving which operate on completely two context.
So sociology studies audiences, while I am talking about actually driving/painting and how the perceptions in that domain have nothing to do with sociology but the craft based aspects only.
Considering the complexity,we are beyond the point where the work is so difficult that Taylorian external analysis of purely mechanical facts leads to an incomplete understanding of the actual work done.
So if someone would focus only on the sociological, observe-without-learning-craft type of analysis, their viewpoint would not envelope the art-ding-an-sich. Which is totally fine - but external to actually _doing art_.
As you can see, the three artists didn't value the same things in their composition. All three are recognized enough to have their place in a museum. And I seriously doubt you can find a consensus about a general theory to rank their work.
Yes, which means all of whom have recognized mastery of their art. So in a way they all are at the top.
But can we "rank art" at all? I think we can but we need to look not at the masters, but at the multitude of nameless students, most of which will never get their works displayed.
Let's take an thought experiment - an art class of local hobbyists is given the task of copying only one of them, let's say the Pissarro one.
After everyone considers their work done, each student is given the task of distributing the paintings to two groups, "the better half" and "the not-as-good" half.
Are the groupings random, or is there "a sense of taste and quality" guiding the students?
If you agree that it is likely that this grouping can be done in a way that is not random, we can agree on my point that there is a non-numerical-yet-not-random way to rate art that can be applied at least some of the time. If we disagree, we disagree and that's fine.
Another example:
Our daughter likes to draw a lot in her own style. Now she is revisiting her old drawings and redrawing them few years later. While her earlier work has some naive charm, she tends to prefer her later pieces, and indeed I do find her current work "better" in the sense that the characters are "more" there - they are more skilfully renderered and have "more character".
I think she is "a better artist" a few years later. Would others agree on this? Again, I would imagine they do.
I think the condensed version of my claim is "There are scenarios where within a given genre/style art can be rated by a non-random yet non-numerical measure".
I think piano competitions, especially the ones where the contestants play the same pieces work this way - there is a non-numerical, yet non-random measure guided by the jurys taste on who is the best.
I do appreciate you have the patience to continue this dialogue!
> Within the group, the extent of your knowledge will help you distinguish from others.
> the way this taste (but also the artist's skill) is acquired is highly correlated with social belonging: your appreciation of a specific piece of work is informed by your past experience within your social environment.
The setting you describe is a perfect example of this: a group with agreed upon acquired taste, which uses knowledge of that taste as criteria to rank art pieces. In that setting, the judgement is bidirectional: not only do people judge art pieces' worth, but they are judged for their good taste by their ability to separate the pieces according to the group's criteria.
> Our daughter likes to draw a lot in her own style. Now she is revisiting her old drawings and redrawing them few years later. While her earlier work has some naive charm, she tends to prefer her later pieces, and indeed I do find her current work "better" in the sense that the characters are "more" there - they are more skilfully renderered and have "more character".
I don't want to judge your daughter's art, but it is perhaps unsurprising that she uses her latest opinion to judge her own work. As she acquires a sense of aesthetics, her new artwork will tend to confirm to that new taste.
"... but they are judged for their good taste by their ability to separate the pieces according to the group's criteria."
On this we disagree. I think the students can do the sorting without peer pressure, driven only by their innate perception and love of the specific genre.
If we enforce this by making the selection process completely anonymous? Do you still feel the students will still feel judged for their taste?
There is no specific peer pressure mechanism in what I discussed. The system is internalized by the people doing the rating; it is learned as a part of being in the group, discussing whith others about what you like and how you create, and by following the courses in your example.
It is also not only values, but also knowledge. If you know classical music theory, you will be able to appreciate and distinguish baroque music, while people with other educations may seek different things in the music they listen to.
> Do you still feel the students will still feel judged for their taste?
The main point here isn't about judgement. It's a personal gratification for the viewer to be able to see subtleties in the author's art. It's very similar to people personally enjoying learning about technology, while also being able to acknowledge peers in a technical discussion and also seeing social benefits from being able to program.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
> 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...
It may well be that taste is initially acquired through feigning, but it can develop into something more personal down the line. Charles Rosen mentioned it at the end of his Critical Entertainments:
"It is not at all natural to want to listen to classical music. Learning to appreciate it is like Pascal's wager: you pretend to be religious, and suddenly you have faith. You pretend to love Beethoven-or Stravinsky-because you think that will make you appear educated and cultured and intelligent, because that kind of music is prestigious in professional circles, and suddenly you really love it, you have become a fanatic, you go to concerts and buy records and experience true ecstasy when you hear a good performance (or even when you hear a mediocre one if you have little judgment)."
None of what Rosen writes there resonates with me. This almost reads like the insufferable reddit comments where people claim you don't like Moby Dick or Shakespeare, that you are just parroting opinions you were told to hold in school. I read and listened widely, often discursively, and ended up liking stuff that none of my peers even knew about for the most part. And no, I wasn't trying to be an iconoclast, the endless teasing was oppressive, but what can you do, you like what you like.
Like I started with Bach because my mom showed me how to read music, then let me loose on the piano. I had a songbook, and it had Bach's (actually Petzold's) Minuet in G major&minor. That grabbed me in a way nothing else in the book did (kid's book, so stuff like silent night, camptown races, etc). No one 'told' me to like it, or even play it, and there was certainly no social pressure to do so, quite the opposite. It was entirely internal, and contrary to everything happening around me (pop, C&W, think rural uneducated population with a disdain for learning and the arts).
I'm not arguing that people can't develop appreciation via faking, but I find it a rather dismissive and cynical way to look at it in general. I would say it takes a bit of openness if you are approaching something that you didn't consume naturally in social situations, but not too much, except perhaps for very abstract things, or complex things far removed from your experience (Chinese opera for an American, for example, which fascinates yet eludes me at some level).
Sometimes it's not explicitly faking, but rather you subconsciously associate value in things that bring you more prestige, even some inner prestige that nobody knows about.
For example, if you think that being nerd is cool, nerdy things will make you happier, and you may even be proud of liking all things nerd. You're not faking; it's a genuine part of how you see yourself.
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.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 328 ms ] threadThe 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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair
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.
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.
https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/
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.
1. https://news.knowyourmeme.com/news/heres-to-loss-the-interne...
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.
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.
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.
This seems like a big assumption. Is there a study that tests this idea?
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.
> 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...
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!"
Both of these statements can be true at the same time. As an extreme example, take the Mona Lisa. No matter how much you think it's a good painting, there is no way that people would travel from around the world in their thousands to see that painting if it wasn't for the whole story/mythology/history around that painting and its creator. It's not THAT good a painting. There are dozens of technically more interesting and 'better' painting hanging in the Louvre that those people happily run past just to see the Mona Lisa. Or go to the Galleria dell'Accademia and count how many people who are just interested in the David statue and ignore all the other, equally 'good', statues they have.
Or take an uninteresting commissioned portrait of a minor nobelmans daughter and tell people it's an original Michelangelo. They will all of a sudden find the painting much more interesting than if you told them it was by an unknown contemporary of Michelangelo.
And there is nothing weird about this. A rusty sword that you can prove has been used by a famous general in a great battle will attract more interest and attention than a rusty sword of unknown provenance.
All of this can be true without taking anything away from Michelangelo as one of the greatest artists who has ever lived.
The "acid test" of Renaissance art being more praiseworthy than the exhibits in modern art museums is that people can know nothing about the "goo" of the artists and still go away thinking "damn, that's awesome". The fact that some of the artists have "name currency" is noise in this dynamic, not signal.
If the best you can say about the super edgy, more modern art is that "oh yeah, people flock to see it because they think other people like it who think other people like it" -- well, you either aren't familiar with "The Emperor's New Clothes", or you sorely missed its point.
It seems you felt attacked by my comment, which was not the intent. Apologies if it came off confrontationally. I never asked you to supply “a specific test”, I asked if there was one. Not sure why you took it as a personal attack on your point. I was genuinely interested in if the topic has been studied/tested.
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.
But now we are no longer talking about them as art, but as interior design and decoration.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/adambvary/inside-steve-jobs-mindblo...
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...
in a turtleneck tucked into his mom jeans, and glaring white sneakers.
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.
Pretty sure that's Issey Miyaki.
> 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.
I believe you 100%. None of those words is synonymous with "good taste".
But see above re: application of current sensibilities to historical fashion decisions. Always a mistake.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirsig%27s_Metaphysics_of_Qual...
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.
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.
Also, kids are exactly the demographics super susceptible to claim liking or disliking things based on what their friends say about them.
Show a kid 2 paintings they’ve never seen before. Show it to them in isolation. Guess which one they pick?
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.
I've always cast a very wide net and thought of art as anything that intentionally provokes a response.
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).
“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”.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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/status/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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The rest, pretty much all the other aspects of art other than novelty are debatable and subjective, I think.
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.
Also theoretically a random static is the most novel thing that could be present.
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.
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.
Unstructured noise music was novel for while, but by now that has also been done.
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.
A well executed refinement of the throughly worn tends to get panned as derivative while foundational works have other sins and lack of polish forgiven. For an extreme example take the infamous Leni Riefenstahl - Adolf Hitler's propagandist. She is studied for her role in pioneering cinematic techniques, if her works weren't novel they would be more a matter of study for historians than cinematographers.
[0] https://home.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361r15.html
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
Now is it indicative of the university climate? The student generation? I don't know.
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.
This is a "pit boss asking you to leave the table for winning too much" moment.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Bourdieu discusses this very point in the Preface of The Rules of Art.
"(...) countless are those who forbid sociology any profaning contact with the work of art. (...) I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why they are so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational, understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the 'work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence."
A scientific understanding of art doesn't or negate or lower it. On the contrary : "(...) scientific analysis, when it is able to uncover what makes the work of art necessary, that is to say, its informing formula, its generative principle, its raison d'être, also furnishes artistic experience, and the pleasure which accompanies it with its best justification, its richest nourishment. Through it, sensible love of the work can fulfill itself in a sort of amor intellectualis rei the assimilation of the object to the subject and the immersion of the subject in the object, the active surrender to the singular necessity of the literary object (which, more often than not, is itself the product of a similar submission)."
It's a short but dense 5 page read.
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.
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.
No, but if we both are at a painting course and painting the same still life, it is plausible we can come to a honest agreement about whose painting we prefer, which details are better presented in the others work and so on.
We are obviously talking of two entirely different things - art as a social phenomenon, and art as art (a technical skill, an aesthetic experience ).
"Taste as a metric" has entirely different meaning in these two contexts. In the sociological context I completely agree with you.
But in the "art as craft to be done, not merely observed because that is boring" sense the sociological analysis offers nothing (for the skill or the aesthetic experience).
We could be discussing of racing - the sociological aspect of observing the race - or of the actual driving which operate on completely two context.
So sociology studies audiences, while I am talking about actually driving/painting and how the perceptions in that domain have nothing to do with sociology but the craft based aspects only.
Considering the complexity,we are beyond the point where the work is so difficult that Taylorian external analysis of purely mechanical facts leads to an incomplete understanding of the actual work done.
So if someone would focus only on the sociological, observe-without-learning-craft type of analysis, their viewpoint would not envelope the art-ding-an-sich. Which is totally fine - but external to actually _doing art_.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/Jan_Brue...
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437317
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/490581
As you can see, the three artists didn't value the same things in their composition. All three are recognized enough to have their place in a museum. And I seriously doubt you can find a consensus about a general theory to rank their work.
But can we "rank art" at all? I think we can but we need to look not at the masters, but at the multitude of nameless students, most of which will never get their works displayed.
Let's take an thought experiment - an art class of local hobbyists is given the task of copying only one of them, let's say the Pissarro one.
After everyone considers their work done, each student is given the task of distributing the paintings to two groups, "the better half" and "the not-as-good" half.
Are the groupings random, or is there "a sense of taste and quality" guiding the students?
If you agree that it is likely that this grouping can be done in a way that is not random, we can agree on my point that there is a non-numerical-yet-not-random way to rate art that can be applied at least some of the time. If we disagree, we disagree and that's fine.
Another example:
Our daughter likes to draw a lot in her own style. Now she is revisiting her old drawings and redrawing them few years later. While her earlier work has some naive charm, she tends to prefer her later pieces, and indeed I do find her current work "better" in the sense that the characters are "more" there - they are more skilfully renderered and have "more character".
I think she is "a better artist" a few years later. Would others agree on this? Again, I would imagine they do.
I think the condensed version of my claim is "There are scenarios where within a given genre/style art can be rated by a non-random yet non-numerical measure".
I think piano competitions, especially the ones where the contestants play the same pieces work this way - there is a non-numerical, yet non-random measure guided by the jurys taste on who is the best.
I do appreciate you have the patience to continue this dialogue!
> Within the group, the extent of your knowledge will help you distinguish from others.
> the way this taste (but also the artist's skill) is acquired is highly correlated with social belonging: your appreciation of a specific piece of work is informed by your past experience within your social environment.
The setting you describe is a perfect example of this: a group with agreed upon acquired taste, which uses knowledge of that taste as criteria to rank art pieces. In that setting, the judgement is bidirectional: not only do people judge art pieces' worth, but they are judged for their good taste by their ability to separate the pieces according to the group's criteria.
> Our daughter likes to draw a lot in her own style. Now she is revisiting her old drawings and redrawing them few years later. While her earlier work has some naive charm, she tends to prefer her later pieces, and indeed I do find her current work "better" in the sense that the characters are "more" there - they are more skilfully renderered and have "more character".
I don't want to judge your daughter's art, but it is perhaps unsurprising that she uses her latest opinion to judge her own work. As she acquires a sense of aesthetics, her new artwork will tend to confirm to that new taste.
On this we disagree. I think the students can do the sorting without peer pressure, driven only by their innate perception and love of the specific genre.
If we enforce this by making the selection process completely anonymous? Do you still feel the students will still feel judged for their taste?
It is also not only values, but also knowledge. If you know classical music theory, you will be able to appreciate and distinguish baroque music, while people with other educations may seek different things in the music they listen to.
> Do you still feel the students will still feel judged for their taste?
The main point here isn't about judgement. It's a personal gratification for the viewer to be able to see subtleties in the author's art. It's very similar to people personally enjoying learning about technology, while also being able to acknowledge peers in a technical discussion and also seeing social benefits from being able to program.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Fine art, classical music and dance, etc. are all relatively wholesome things that you can absorb as much interest as you can muster.
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?
"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...
"It is not at all natural to want to listen to classical music. Learning to appreciate it is like Pascal's wager: you pretend to be religious, and suddenly you have faith. You pretend to love Beethoven-or Stravinsky-because you think that will make you appear educated and cultured and intelligent, because that kind of music is prestigious in professional circles, and suddenly you really love it, you have become a fanatic, you go to concerts and buy records and experience true ecstasy when you hear a good performance (or even when you hear a mediocre one if you have little judgment)."
Like I started with Bach because my mom showed me how to read music, then let me loose on the piano. I had a songbook, and it had Bach's (actually Petzold's) Minuet in G major&minor. That grabbed me in a way nothing else in the book did (kid's book, so stuff like silent night, camptown races, etc). No one 'told' me to like it, or even play it, and there was certainly no social pressure to do so, quite the opposite. It was entirely internal, and contrary to everything happening around me (pop, C&W, think rural uneducated population with a disdain for learning and the arts).
I'm not arguing that people can't develop appreciation via faking, but I find it a rather dismissive and cynical way to look at it in general. I would say it takes a bit of openness if you are approaching something that you didn't consume naturally in social situations, but not too much, except perhaps for very abstract things, or complex things far removed from your experience (Chinese opera for an American, for example, which fascinates yet eludes me at some level).
For example, if you think that being nerd is cool, nerdy things will make you happier, and you may even be proud of liking all things nerd. You're not faking; it's a genuine part of how you see yourself.