Is there such a thing as good taste?

by tosh • 5 years ago

265 463 5 years ago

lr4444lr6• 5 years ago

I don't get into these kinds of discussions with people anymore, because they're not socially palatable. I try to stay open minded too about perspectives that are not mine, and try to be objective about my own biases. But I can't shake the feeling that much as someone might validly prefer some abstract dot on a white canvas to the Sistine Chapel ceiling, who would more likely impress the fans of the other, that artist trying to reproduce Michaelangelo's work or vice versa? Peter Thiel made a similar remark in one of his anti higher ed rants about pitting a group of PhD physicists vs. French lit. PhDs in a contest to reproduce each other's work better - whom would you bet on?

UncleMeat• 5 years ago

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.

forgetfulness2• 5 years ago

Hackers did have things in common with painters after all, or at least the ones that self promote have that in common.

CompelTechnic• 5 years ago

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.

forgetfulness2• 5 years ago

Now I'm no art fancy man like the ones you're describing, but I'm fairly certain that people who like the dot also like the Sistine Chapel, it's just that the Sistine Chapel has been... _done_, and your reproduction of the Sistine Chapel will be enjoyable but forgettable because it will never be as good or as important as the real one.

So, people talk about works that are memorable. Like that one abstract dot of historical interest, or the original paintings from the old masters that perfected the techniques that artists emulate.

ppod• 5 years ago

The whole point of conceptual art is that reproduction of figurative art is trivial now, so we move up a level. It's easy to reproduce the dot, but it's the conceptual move to dotness that's non-trivial. These ideas are 60 years old (Walter Benjamin) and you're doing a bit of a Two Cultures in reverse by being this simplistic about it.

stephencanon• 5 years ago

Nit: Benjamin died 80 years ago. Time flies!

lr4444lr6• 5 years ago

Fine. Then ask a totally unskilled person to reproduce both and let's see how many fans can be fooled.

pengstrom• 5 years ago

The context of art extends beyond the artifact. I image both PhDs would have trouble contributing meaningful novel work.

fsloth8• 5 years ago

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.

dagw9• 5 years ago

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.

TheOtherHobbes2• 5 years ago

Like this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair

ritchiea3• 5 years ago

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.

Brian_K_White• 5 years ago

Like is the wrong word. I think the closest appropriate idea is "appreciate".

You probably should not "like" some of the best art at all, because it should have made you uncomfortable and think things you would rather not.

Of course I say "some", because art has all kinds of different purposes or intents, and that is only the purpose of some art, not all art.

So I think recognize, acknowledge, or appreciate are the kinds of words to apply rather than like.

And art can even be good even if you not only don't like it but don't even appreciate it. It can be skillfully effective on you whether or not you like it or even have the background or perception to recognize it's quality.

So even "appreciate" isn't really a valid metric.

gaze• 5 years ago

For what it’s worth, Felix Gonzalez Torres’ work pushed me from “I don’t understand this modern stuff” to “oh I get it now.” Maybe it can do that for others?

I think there’s this notion that art has to be technically sophisticated to be of value. But really, all art has to do is communicate something interesting or meaningful. If a white dot does this then who cares how it was made?

Finally, people make a big deal about the price of art. Well, artists (the ones I like anyway…) don’t have much to do with what a piece of art will sell for. Ultimately the piece of art is just some interesting exchange between artist and viewer, the price has nothing to do with any of this exchange.

I’m just a guy that walked into a museum and thought this guy has communicated something profound and beautiful. When someone come up and says “but that must’ve taken 5 minutes to make!!” they look like assholes.

pfraze• 5 years ago

This might be overly reductive, but if you use Twitter or any social platform where people indirectly reference other posts, I think you can maybe understand how a dot on a white canvas can have impact. The "Loss" meme [1] borders on being that exact thing.

1. https://news.knowyourmeme.com/news/heres-to-loss-the-interne...

dagw9• 5 years ago

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.

lr4444lr6• 5 years ago

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.

throwaway14356• 5 years ago

My definition grew into this immutable formula:

The only relevant skill an artist can have is to capture their emotions in their work in such a way that the audience of it is made to both experience and ponder those. Extra points for complex compositions.

There is something to be said about the kind of feeling you chose to share. You can be a dick about it while stil perfecting the challange.

The white dot on canvas or the entirely white canvas are simpel displays of arrogance mixed with some prestige. Not a particularly refined combination of and it reduces to anger in many viewers. It doesnt enrich the spectators life, they know those emotions well enough which, like love songs, makes it poor taste.

asoneth• 5 years ago

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".

watwut13• 5 years ago

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.

lr4444lr6• 5 years ago

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.

not_fin_advice• 5 years ago

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.

TimPC5• 5 years ago

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.

jph• 5 years ago

Yes there's good taste. As one example that I've experienced: walk into the Pixar building in Emeryville and it feels amazing, and different, and better. And it turns out that Steve Jobs created it.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/adambvary/inside-steve-jobs-mindblo...

joris_w• 5 years ago

That's your taste, which might be good taste, but how do we decide on that?

fsloth8• 5 years ago

"how do we decide on that?" That's the point. There is no current calculus to compute this but I find Paul's argument pretty convincing still.

Jugurtha• 5 years ago

Blaise Pascal wrote a delightful passage on good taste and bad taste in Pensées (circa 1667).

afavour• 5 years ago

Surely this is just a matter of opinion? Someone might see this (which I personally agree, looks great) and say that it’s too busy and that a cleaner, simpler design like The Oculus[1] in NYC is in better taste. Someone else might conceivably say that design is too cold.

Neither of those opinions is wrong. There isn’t much objective truth to be had here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Center_station_(PA...

Igelau6• 5 years ago

I'm picturing Steve Jobs on stage to make an industry-shaking announcement...

in a turtleneck tucked into his mom jeans, and glaring white sneakers.

quesera2• 5 years ago

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.

dvh1990• 5 years ago

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.

ler0ix• 5 years ago

My thought as well. He seems to be delving into the metaphysics of quality.

trwhite• 5 years ago

I was just about to comment this. It seems as though PG is saying taste (much like quality) is a perceptual experience[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirsig%27s_Metaphysics_of_Qual...

Rastonbury• 5 years ago

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)

codeulike2• 5 years ago

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?

mojuba6• 5 years ago

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?

codeulike2• 5 years ago

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.

loudmax2• 5 years ago

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.

fijiaarone8• 5 years ago

While you can find taste within any field or art, choosing which subject to apply your taste to is also a matter of taste.

ryanSrich2• 5 years ago

This is easily disproven by showing a child two paintings.

watwut13• 5 years ago

How? The kid will like the one painting targeted at kids and that is it.

Also, kids are exactly the demographics super susceptible to claim liking or disliking things based on what their friends say about them.

klik99• 5 years ago

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.

retube• 5 years ago

I don't agree with his argument. I'd argue that it's perfectly possible for something that took huge skill and execution brilliance to create to be ugly / tasteless / vulgar, indeed completely tasteless.

criddell• 5 years ago

Maybe it comes down to Graham's definition of art?

I've always cast a very wide net and thought of art as anything that intentionally provokes a response.

ARandumGuy• 5 years ago

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.

watwut13• 5 years ago

One problem with subs like that is that people tend to really push it. They want to participate, so they desperstely look for badness.

derbOac• 5 years ago

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).

andrewvc• 5 years ago

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”.

abernard13• 5 years ago

For once I agree with Paul Graham.

I expect his post to be surprisingly unpopular with this crowd, as it sleights a core tenet of our postmodern age. Namely, he's arguing for a form of objective truth and of "the good". A statistical derivation of this good for sure (and qualitative as opposed to a Benthamist, quantitative utilitarianism), but a good nonetheless.

But I applaud PG for taking this stance. Truth is not like your favorite flavor of ice cream. Software isn't either, and certain software either works or doesn't. Human culture and beliefs—our ideological software—has objectively superior results depending upon what your measuring stick is. Some beliefs are objectively better.

coopierez• 5 years ago

Which beliefs are objectively better?

abernard13• 5 years ago

Which software is objectively better?

I'm answering your question with a question because the difficulty of the evaluation process is the point. But there can be an evaluation, and there can be an objective answer for a set of values.

For instance, if we said "I would like a worldview that optimizes people not committing suicide" we could compare and contrast and say that worldview A is better than worldview B because A's adherents don't commit suicide and B's do. We can combine multiple factors, however imprecisely, and still compare A and B together as a rational person.

PG is making a similar argument in the "truth" of how art evokes subjective goods in humans. Humans across time and space are the measuring stick, and hence why the present is not overly weighted in his assessment of this evocative metric of art's quality.

PG's view on this is radical today but hasn't been for thousands of years and won't be again, because human nature doesn't change that much. Contextualization (acquired taste) can make one appreciate art better, but there is something transcendent across space and time that makes art lovely to humans, even lacking focused context.

consumer451• 5 years ago

Which beliefs are objectively better?

I believe there can be answers here if one can clearly define what you are optimizing for.

That is the question on my mind these days.

CyberRabbi5• 5 years ago

While you claim to oppose the postmodern idea that there is no truth, you’ve ceded the premise to the postmodernists by framing truth in their terms of objectivity and subjectivity. The success of the postmodernists was precisely to discredit all “subjective” truths by way of distinguishing them from “objective” truths, which no common person can deny.

A stronger position is one that does not require the truth to be objective or material to in turn be universal and self-evident. Abstract truths, such as e^(i*pi) = -1 have no material basis and cannot be materially proven yet remain true and universal. The simultaneously purely abstract and non-arbitrary nature of mathematics is an obvious chink in the armor of the postmodernists’ worldview, so it is no surprise they have gone so far as to now discredit the universality of math by arguing that 2+2=5 https://twitter.com/kareem_carr/status/1289001355437379589?s... (this is a Harvard phd student)

jackcosgrove• 5 years ago

I'm curious do you believe abstract truths are immanent or transcendent?

sidpatil• 5 years ago

I'm not sure what you mean by the universality of math. There exist different algebras which define addition differently.

In the case of 2+2=4, this is formalized by the Peano axioms [1], which define addition of natural numbers. However, in tropical geometry [2], addition returns the minimum of the numbers, not their sum.

The author of the original tweet makes this point, and I strongly agree with it: https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames/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

abernard13• 5 years ago

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.

j7ake• 5 years ago

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.

okkdev• 5 years ago

There is good taste. Good taste is my taste.

WithinReason• 5 years ago

If there's no such thing as good taste, then there's no such thing as good art.

Unless good art is defined as one that appeals to more people's taste.

I agree with the premise that there is such a thing as good taste, but this is not the knockdown argument it's presented to be.

mojuba6• 5 years ago

I was expecting this essay to mention novelty. What we appreciate in art really comes down to novelty and therefore good taste is the ability to recognize it. Which in turn requires the observer to have a solid background in the genre (i.e. having seen a lot of it already) to judge how novel and original a work of art is. That's why art critics, collectors generally agree on things more often than not: they've dealt with enough of previous samples to identify novelty.

The rest, pretty much all the other aspects of art other than novelty are debatable and subjective, I think.

ethanbond• 5 years ago

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.

mojuba6• 5 years ago

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.)

raelmiu• 5 years ago

That's a really interesting attribute to focus on. Never thought of novelty as a standard.

I think there's an argument to be made for culturally convergent "taste" as a measure of value. We like what others like, we're all trying to predict what others will like to increase our own status, etc. These forces should result in a convergent "good taste" to win.

YetAnotherNick• 5 years ago

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.

mojuba6• 5 years ago

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.

dagw9• 5 years ago

random static is the most novel thing that could be present.

Unstructured noise music was novel for while, but by now that has also been done.

Spooky23• 5 years ago

It’s all about perspective.

Some people find original Star Wars to be a truly great movie. Those same people may find the movies that inspired Star Wars, like Kurosawa’s “Hidden Fortress” or Midway boring or solely on technical factors like color vs black and white. In a mass market product those technical factors make the work less approachable.

I spent several years walking through a pretty good collection of mid-20th century modern art. Most of it made no impression on me at all, but one installation’s aesthetic appealed to me for reasons that I cannot really describe. Part of it was the absurdity of what the facility did to that space — they literally dropped a random howitzer in the room. But if I nerded out and studied the artists and their art, I’d develop a more nuanced understanding and appreciation.

Nasrudith• 5 years ago

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.

sixhobbits• 5 years ago

I'm was expecting him to mention "Of the Standard of Taste" by David Hume [0] which makes a similar and I think better (though maybe not as easy to read) argument and which I thought this piece was inspired by at first.

[0] https://home.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361r15.html

brigandish• 5 years ago

The evening of that talk had another speech that led to events of more import. On the side of Paul Graham (at least in the debate) Andrew Graham-Dixon gave a speech[1] that was against fascism, against racism, and against anti-semitism and yet Cambridge Union put him on a list of speakers that will not be invited back because of their racism and anti-semitism.

Why? Because he did a satirical impression of Hitler.

I know, I can almost hear your jaws dropping to the floor.

The Union’s Equalities officer, Zara Salaria, said that Graham-Dixon’s impression was “absolutely unacceptable” and “utterly horrifying.”

There's more of this idiotic hysteria to be found in this article[2] with quotes from students and alumni of one of the world's top universities (supposedly).

What is the world coming to when you can't take the mick out of Hitler? No, what is the world coming to when you take the mick out of Hitler and "top students" think that is somehow support for his views?

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/artists/hitler-row-andrew-gr...

[2] https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/22398

rory• 5 years ago

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.

stordoff• 5 years ago

Video of the debate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5cXXE3jlpc

unethical_ban• 5 years ago

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.

Igelau6• 5 years ago

In other words, he won so hard on proving the existence of bad taste that he's not allowed to play anymore.

This is a "pit boss asking you to leave the table for winning too much" moment.

bravura• 5 years ago

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.

randallsquared• 5 years ago

...operate on people... ...work on people...

It follows, then, that we need to know the effect the author was trying to have on people in order to know how well it "works", right? Without the intention, we can only measure magnitude, but perhaps the author intended to have a small, subtle effect?

fredley• 5 years ago

I don't know if there's such a thing as good taste, but there is definitely such a thing as bad taste.

d--b• 5 years ago

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.

dagw9• 5 years ago

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).

FemmeAndroid• 5 years ago

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.

tcldr• 5 years ago

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.

Levitz• 5 years ago

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.

soco• 5 years ago

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.

dagw9• 5 years ago

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.

BeFlatXIII3• 5 years ago

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.

TimPC5• 5 years ago

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.

GoblinSlayer9• 5 years ago

I think it's suspicious that this supposedly good art is anonymous.

quacked• 5 years ago

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.

TheOtherHobbes2• 5 years ago

Go to guy on this is Bourdieu.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu#Theory_of_capi...

PG may say that his father pushed him in a different direction. But I suspect - like me - PG grew up with the cultural direction of the BBC and its mission to "inform, educate, and entertain."

So if you were a bright curious kid your parents wouldn't necessarily be the ultimate authorities on culture and taste. There were other authorities. If you were interested.

I was genuinely shocked a few years ago when I realised how much my cultural interests had been shaped by that kind of social programming. I still enjoy art and music, but I'm little more circumspect about them now.

The point: cultural taste is an aspirational social marker. It correlates loosely with some observable features in various kinds of art. But the real goal of "having taste" is to convince yourself and others you're a certain class of person, and also to reassure yourself and others you're not a certain other class of person.

fsloth8• 5 years ago

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?

pyrale5• 5 years ago

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.

andi999• 5 years ago

Next thing you want to tell me is that wine doesn't really taste good? (the high quality wine of course)

sombremesa2• 5 years ago

Who determines that the wine is high quality? You’ve already established taste there, regardless of the wine’s taste.

SilasX6• 5 years ago

It doesn't. Not to me, anyway. I've never liked wine. It just takes like stingy grape juice.

No, not even the "good" kind.

I can accept that there might be objective criteria for judging wine, and certain standards for judging but that doesn't translate into wine being "genuinely good tasting" in some broad sense.

Universal experiences might not be so universal.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-e...

GoblinSlayer9• 5 years ago

A hypothetical wine that tastes good would have taste too different from wine that it won't count as wine anymore.

thom• 5 years ago

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.

watwut13• 5 years ago

I was genuinely shocked a few years ago when I realised how much my cultural interests had been shaped by that kind of social programming. I still enjoy art and music, but I'm little more circumspect about them now.

I had similar realization, but it did not made me more circumspect about art, music etc. It made me to be more willing to try stuff I assumed I wont like. More likely to look at the context at which something odd to me appeared and then more likely to understand/like it.

cultural taste is an aspirational social marker.

I agree. It is also identity. It also explains why aesthetic culture wars appears. It is not so much about what it is or liking or disliking it. It is about who is assumed to like the thing and performative acceptance/rejection.

jrumbut• 5 years ago

Like you, I had a similar realization but I think it was a pretty good idea. It was some instructions for a nice way to enjoy life.

Fine art, classical music and dance, etc. are all relatively wholesome things that you can absorb as much interest as you can muster.

ambrozk• 5 years ago

What you say is true, but there's something missing, which is that a working-class person who was extremely fashionable by the standards of their own class would, if transplanted into the world of penthousees in SOHO, figure out quite quickly how to tastefully decorate their house, how to dress to impress, and so on. And the same would be true of the penhouse asthete if transplanted into a working-class milieu. Some people are just better than other people at figuring out aesethic systems.

SavantIdiot• 5 years ago

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?

AnimalMuppet2• 5 years ago

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...

Aidevah• 5 years ago

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)."

RogerL• 5 years ago

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).

CyberRabbi5• 5 years ago

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.

matthewmacleod• 5 years ago

TLDR: things that lots of people like are good taste.

loudmax2• 5 years ago

In the current political climate, it's hard enough to get people to agree on objective reality. On the one hand there's healthy skepticism, on the other hand there's selecting news sources to confirm your beliefs.

Paul Graham is certainly aware of this analogy as he even brings up the subject of vaccines in the article. Writing about appreciation of art rather than evaluation of journalism or truth is an interesting way to re-frame the epistemology.

aremat• 5 years ago

I'll dodge the question slightly and say that bad execution comingles with what could be referred to as bad taste and intent forms part of the judgement. For example, someone was clearly going for a rustic aesthetic but accidentally introduced a jarringly modernist aspect (excluding deliberate juxtaposition). Or, the intent was clearly to impress the viewer with "sophistication" (a dubious intent in itself), but some aspects are inconsistent or poorly judged. Then there are copies of others' styles (strike 1) executed with poorly matched subject matter (strike 2). Add in banal subject matter or clearly functional art, etc...

Hugsun• 5 years ago

The mistake he makes is to conflate the ability to recognize quality and the appreciation of quality.

He elaborates further in this recommended read http://paulgraham.com/goodart.html

Goodness is always measured against a standard and although he proposes a reasonable standard, it's still arbitrary as all standards are.

I agree that interrogating ones biases and susceptibility to trickery is worthwhile. Helping oneself and others see through trickery and illusions can be too. This idea can however be pursued ad absurdum as well. All fiction requires a suspension of disbelief and it is in itself a form of trickery.

The implication of the existence of a good taste is that it's good to have this taste. Why are those who like good art better than those who appreciate quality but prefer worse art?

timdellinger• 5 years ago

Perhaps I'm under-informed here, but hasn't this all been covered by the philosophers who concentrate in Aesthetics?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetics

Debug_Overload• 5 years ago

It's been my experience that if you read enough content online, you will realize that it's mostly people rediscovering old debates, and chiming in with what they think is new and insightful perspective which it usually isn't.

SubuSS• 5 years ago

I think that’s a software engineering dilemma spilling out to the rest of the world: how many ‘new software’ have you seen that are just a rehash of something existing already!

handrous3• 5 years ago

Nearly every politics-related thread I participate in on HN ends up with my needing to start back at Book I of The Republic so we can get on the same page about how complex the idea of "Justice" actually is. Literally the first part of one of the first primary works a political philosophy student is likely to read, and it's news to people confidently presenting their ideas about how the economy or social policy or whatever ought to work.

In a sense, I think the social sciences, philosophy, and the arts get "cranks" thinking they've figured them out, just like physics and math et c., do, except at a much higher volume, to the point that any discussion of those topics outside of highly specialized forums ends up consisting mostly of cranks arguing with one another, most of whom, if they have put any actual time into studying the topic at all, have fallen down some narrow crank-dominated rabbit hole of bad ideas. It's like if Flat Earthers were treated as having valid opinions.

beaconstudios10• 5 years ago

nice to see the comment section is criticising PG for an extremely amateur take on sociology, aesthetics and art. I don't know why, but there's a fairly strong association between being in STEM and thinking that the humanities are easy and obvious and people study them just because they don't understand STEM. Thus we get blog posts like this, about how a reductio ad absurdum thought experiment is enough to resolve a central question of the study of aesthetics.

gpjanik• 5 years ago

Paul Graham writing about good taste (and people actually reading this) looks to me like either good trolling on his side, or just the usual startup misery - an extrovert narcissist convinced that he has intellectual capacity to analyse absolutely everything (and that analysis is worth sharing) because he's running a VC. It's sad either way.

beaconstudios10• 5 years ago

I think it's the latter - you see the same thing with Naval too, as well as a slew of rationalists who seem to consider it their role in life to reinvent sociology from the perspective of a software developer without having read any of the existing academic works.

etrautmann2• 5 years ago

This is overly dismissive - why not attack the ideas directly?

I find these ideas overly reductive since the essay presupposes that art should be judged in a vacuum outside of it's societal context, as if that's somehow more objective. The emotional impact of the art (PG's stated objective function to maximize) cannot be pulled out of its context. Said differently, the emotional impact of a piece of art often leans heavily on the story of the artist. PG seems to argue against this, but unconvincingly.

beaconstudios10• 5 years ago

Yes, I am dismissing his contribution - because it's amateurish. I also don't encourage the local nursery to contribute their kids' paintings to the Met. Ironically, his article contributes to his argument that there is such a thing as objective taste if you root it primarily in the skill of the artist.

I'm no art critic or aesthetician, but here's some random issues that I noticed while reading:

- he has failed to separate skill from aesthetic taste. He describes taste as obviously real because some artists are better than others when this is a description of skill not taste; nobody denies the existence of painterly skill.

- his entire argument rests on comparing a child's drawing to a work by Da Vinci. Taste comes into play when you compare artists of comparable skill. Is it Good Taste to prefer Da Vinci to Lichtenstein? To Vermeer, or Van Gogh, or Picasso or whoever? The main arguments you can lean on here are from authority (such-and-such is popular with the galleries/critics, exhibits traits I was taught to look for in class) or from personal analysis/appreciation. He touches on the argument from authority but just hand-waves it away.

- He hints at the critique of art appreciation as being dominated by the celebrity of the artist and its connotations of class signalling but makes no reference to the fact that there's a ton of academic work on both of these factors. Thus he can only really skim the surface of this perspective.

- His whole argument about properties of objects being real or constructed is day-1 metaphysics. Ditto for his description of properties having a dimension of objectivity to subjectivity; he's just trotting out logical positivism like it's a truism, like many rationalist-types do. Logical positivism does not apply to a purely social field like art. Intersubjectivity isn't related to objectivity.

All this would be fine if it was just him thinking about art - it's perfectly reasonable to consider positions out loud without any meaningful expertise. But he makes a claim to truth, in front of a large audience that often accepts his ideas pretty uncritically, and it's an audience that already has disdain for the humanities. That's deserving of derision.

andrewzah• 5 years ago

I think the actual issue is anything posted by PG on HN gets upvoted to the front page, regardless if the content is actually good.

Igelau6• 5 years ago

That first sentence is unnecessary and stinks of mod-bait.

dogleash• 5 years ago

I don't know why, but there's a fairly strong association between being in STEM and thinking that the humanities are easy and obvious and people study them just because they don't understand STEM.

Sampling bias. The association exists because most that don't fit the stereotype keep their yap shut.

I'd say there's also plenty of STEM people that don't think humanities are easy nor obvious, but they interpret the outward appearance as something so far up it's own ass that they're just turned off from exploration of the field. But that's a popular take among non-STEM too.

beaconstudios10• 5 years ago

I think it's an extension of the cultural idea that the hard sciences are more important than the soft sciences, which itself is because hard sciences are more empirical and we culturally value what we can measure more than what we can't.

FWIW, it's a broad enough problem that it has its own term - STEMlord.

jccalhoun• 5 years ago

As others have mentioned, Bourdieu would like a word with him https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinction_(book)

Graham seems to be conflating skill with taste. The artists he mentions are skilled at art and he states that he is not. Distinguishing between skilled and unskilled work may be "good taste" but what is considered good art is more than just skill.

rp14• 5 years ago

What other considerations are there other than skill? Isn’t everything a skill? Graham lists a few other extraneous concerns that people judge art by. He asserts these are unrelated to the art itself, like which museum the art is hanging in.

I agree with Graham’s premise. My theory is that people don’t believe good taste exists because most people have bad taste and that’s too big of a pill to swallow. Would you rather admit to having bad taste, or posit that taste doesn’t exist? This is supported by Graham’s observation that contemporary art critics are nearly always disproven a generation or two later, meaning most critics have flawed taste.

nickelpro2• 5 years ago

The conflation of skill with taste demonstrates exactly why Graham is wrong. There's many widely recognized works of art, by critics of similarly recognized taste, that are far less skillful than what a competent art student can put out today and yet held in higher acclaim.

Post-modernism, Dada, and surrealism drove the stake through this point, The Treachery of Images or Fountain (Duchamp) aren't extremely skillful, but they're world class art from a certain point of view.

beaconstudios10• 5 years ago

Skill is used to produce, but the product of skill isn't necessarily good if it doesn't fulfil a useful purpose. Good taste beyond pure aesthetic appreciation is related to interpretation/analysis, understanding what the artist accomplished and what can be read from the work. Good art says something new. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images is a good example - it has very little aesthetic value but a lot of meaning, especially for the era is was made in. Compare that to e.g. Vermeer (one of my favourite artists), whose work is full of skill and aesthetic beauty but doesn't have anything to say because it's a figurative work.

GoblinSlayer9• 5 years ago

I'd say many people have not much interest in art in the first place. It's not a matter of taste, but whether art is a thing at all.

bitcurious2• 5 years ago

What other considerations are there other than skill?

Narrative is critical, and often external, coming from the curator, dealer, critic, etc. Humans love stories.

“Death and Transfiguration” by Strauss is a beautiful, skillfully written piece of music. A story I heard is that Strauss on his deathbed exclaimed “it’s just like I wrote it!” Is it true? Did he say this? I have no idea, and in a sense it doesn’t matter. The piece is made better by the story I remember when I listen to it. It’s not in the music, it’s with the music.

Igelau6• 5 years ago

My theory is that people don’t believe good taste exists because most people have bad taste

This breaks down pretty quickly outside of fine art criticism. If I put 20 people in a room and only one of them has dressed "in good taste", they'll stick out badly enough that the consensus of the group will be that the one is in "bad taste".

The problem is that "taste" is vague, depends on ephemeral context and may be subject to popular whims and ignorance.

jgtrosh• 5 years ago

Yes, it seems to me that Paul's reasoning makes this mix up at this point:

So if you want to discard the concept of good taste, you also have to discard the concept of good art. And that means you have to discard the possibility of people being good at making it.

People can be measurably good at realising specific criteria, even if you can't absolutely compare these criteria.

marcosdumay• 5 years ago

Then there is a semi-order (fuzzy as it may be) in taste, and "good" and "bad" taste exist.

JKCalhoun• 5 years ago

I agree, he conflates skill with "good art".

I think he is still correct though but for a different reason. When someone first creates art they may begin naively and create art that is lacking in subtlety, perhaps speaking to the more immature aspects of our human nature?

A good artist graduates from that phase and begins to recognize it in other artists — can say, "Yeah, I used to do art like that but I have moved on." In the same way the art connoisseur should be able to say, "Ahhh, I used to like art like that once, but my tastes now appreciate the more nuanced."

Maybe an example is a car that the owner did as "black-on-black", like Darth Vader, blacked out badges, blacked-out windows, black paint job.... You recognize that "Hey, all black, cool, right?"

Am I being too elitist?

(Hello user, BTW.)

humanistbot• 5 years ago

Edit: OK fine, I'll shut up.

cm20122• 5 years ago

There's plenty of things to complain about in PG's essays, but subject matter expertise is not one of them. PG has been an practitioner and student of art for decades.

Igelau6• 5 years ago

rich tech folks writing about areas way outside of their expertise

Even if you were right, the majority of canonical art history comes down to how rich people are spending their money.

hairofadog• 5 years ago

Graham seems to be conflating skill with taste

I came here to type this sentence almost word for word.

I think this divide is most easily seen in the realm of acting, with no better example than Nicholas Cage: high skill level, low taste, at least judging by the majority of projects he chooses. (The counterargument might be that he realizes he's making a lot of bad movies and just needs the paycheck – he's infamous for blowing his money in foolhardy ways – but I definitely think at least some part of the essence of Nicholas Cage comes from conflict between high skill vs low taste).

I was friends with a guy in college who was a masterful musician (toured professionally as an all-purpose backup musician for some mid-tier bands you have heard of) and I used to argue with him about one particular band whose music I disliked [^1], and he would say, "But do you know how hard it is to play those notes? Look!" and he would stretch his fingers all over the bass fret, and I'd say, yeah, but... finger gymnastics is not the same as good music.

Also back in college, when CDs were a thing and money was scarce, I used to debate with myself about whether it would be worthwhile to accept the faustian bargain of trading my own musical tastes to exactly match the contents of the record store's discount CD bin, which was filled with things like Richard Marx albums [^2], so I could buy ten albums for five dollars.

[^1]: I don't want to start a flame war but it's the 80's-era band with complex bass arrangements which I have noticed is popular with sysadmin folks

[^2]: No disrespect intended to people who dig Richard Marx, or to Richard Marx himself, but it sticks in my mind as the thing that was in the bin I was looking at when I had this thought.

Iefthandrule• 5 years ago

You have a point--just because Rush's music is technically sound, that does not mean it is good music.

fijiaarone8• 5 years ago

If taste is subject to experience -- and it is unless you think someone who has only seen very little art in a very limited scope of style is as qualified to judge the quality of art as someone who has seen lots of art of many different styles -- then skill is definitely a strong factor in influencing taste.

While it is true that there are people who have a high degree of technical skill (or of talent) who have poor taste, which means that skill is not the direct cause of taste, it is an essential -- and significant element.

It's like assuming that practicing athletics does not make you better able to appreciate the achievements of other athletes.

Skill give both awareness and depth to your perception, and if you think neither of these attributes are applicable to determining quality, you lack the linguistic or cognitive ability to join the discussion.

tdrdt• 5 years ago

I think Christopher Alexander has a better answer to this question. He states that anything that is designed is good when love was put into it. People can taste this love.

So it's more like: when love was put into it, it tastes good.

grkvlt• 5 years ago

this is a little trite and definitely isn't universal, let alone well defined (as to what 'love' means in this context) so doesn't really help anyone trying to understand more about what makes good taste (or good design, in your instance) - i think there can be plenty examples of good design and good taste that come from hate, or from indifference; all sorts of emotions and rationales...

dang3• 5 years ago

It does sound trite when distilled into a one-liner, but Alexander put 60+ years of work into it and wrote his 4-volume masterpiece about it. Nothing trite about that.

munificent• 5 years ago

I can't recall the exact quote, but I read something a while back that said that hate is essentially a response to something you love being harmed, so great hate still requires great love.

Picasso's Guernica is the poster child for art made from hate, in this case against the Spanish Civil War. But it's equally a painting centered on love for the victims of the war. After all, it's mostly a painting of those victims.

I don't think much good of anything can come from a position of indifference.

dang3• 5 years ago

I was wondering if anyone would bring Christopher Alexander up in this thread, because his work has been a long attempt to answer this question. His claims about the objectivity of beauty, order, and so on, are counterintuitive to contemporary assumptions. But he has certainly gone deeply into the question—like a deep sea diver, or like someone drilling for water in a desert.

BeFlatXIII3• 5 years ago

It's the background details that bring out the love. A paint-by-numbers movie can stick because of the visceral knowledge that the production team cared about what they were making, even when the story beats are highly formulaic. On a rewatch, it becomes apparent that there's more going on than the bog-standard storyline presented by the leads.

kingkawn• 5 years ago

Graham has always had a huge blind spot in understanding where the value in art originates

motohagiography4• 5 years ago

Wrote professionally about taste in a previous life. It is related more closely than we expect to techne or competence from physical knowledge.

When we think of poor taste, we tend to think of symbols that are separated from their function and meaning, where instead of representing that, "I do this thing," something gaudy says, "I have this thing!" That's what crassness is, and it comes down to our relative apprehension of the real vs. the represented, where typically, something real is powerful independent of who is observing it, and the representation is not. It's whether something legitimately represents power. Taste may be an instinct for honest signals, which would seem like its own sort of intelligence.

Viewed this way, taste is the expression of what you percieve to be power based on your experience, good taste is the inverse of the distance between them, and poor taste is measured in the gap between what is affected and of-what it is the effect.

That difference between effect and affect is one of the sneakiest bits of the english language and perhaps even the culture's most cunningly set trap. Do not underestimate the value of good taste, it's an intuition about power.

beaconstudios10• 5 years ago

Thanks for your contribution - this is similar to the impression I get about taste, not having studied aesthetics but having a passing familiarity with postmodern philosophy. Do you have any book or philosopher suggestions I could check out? I'm generally interested in epistemology and this sounds like a good angle for further reading.

dwmbt2• 5 years ago

i'm not a philosophy nut or anything, but consider looking into empiricism versus rationalism and looking at Paul's writing, or conversations about the objectivity/subjectivity of aesthetics through that lens. Paul lives up to his rational roots here.

motohagiography4• 5 years ago

Thank you, while I can't recommend original philosophical sources, I can say I like Matthew B. Craford's "Shopclass as Soulcraft," was the best recent version of these ideas I've read, and it is a much more in-depth treatise than one would typically expect from a popular book. Only tangentially related by motorcycles is zen and the art..., which was also about these kinds of qualities.

The other influences might be Aristotle's nichomachean ethics and the Stoics, but I'm having trouble sourcing my own ideas directly from those much better ones other than to say they were influential.

From a po-mo side, Venturi's "ducks and decorated sheds," essay was influential, as his bit was about buildings that are symbols vs. buildings with symbols. I don't imagine reading Simulacra and Simulation again, and I don't know if it would stand the test of time, but that decoupling of symbols from artifacts and the represented from the real is a theme in 20th century critical theory.

There's some romantic thinking in there as well, and I can't quite source why I believe it, but there is a kind of catholic, hellenism to taking the idea of our perception of beauty and symmetry as a form of truth (as distinct from mere power deciding truth by fiat, or of it being ineffable), and then iterating on that idea into a logic around it. I don't know whose idea that was, but the limits of it became obvious when I learned about things like polyrhythms and self similarity, where the symmetry is more dynamic and implied, whereas even music demonstrates how our minds impose symmetry and favour the things the mind can impose its sense of symmetry and beauty on. That would probably align with pop "cognitive biases" lists and thinking fast and slow.

The effect vs. affect part has been a personal theme for a decade or so, so I can't source that elsewhere.

mrcolin000• 5 years ago

Great comment... I would also like to ask for a book recommendation. Thanks!

ativzzz• 5 years ago

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance talks about this topic in depth.

tompccs• 5 years ago

I think this is very wrong, and the foundation of modernism in art and architecture (which is to say, you are wrong in a very unoriginal way!)

The Greeks used all sorts of forced perspective tricks in their architecture. Columns aren't equally spaced and lines aren't straight, but when viewed by a human observer at ground level the buildings built to Greek aesthetic rules appear "nicer" than those built to pure geometric ones.

Similarly, in art, there was a lot of talk about "authenticity" in the early 20th century, where it was believed that the more primitive the artist, the more authentic the art, since the true message of the artist would transmit undistorted by such Western constructs as technique or skill.

Decoration, adornment, and "fakeness" in pursuit of aesthetics has always been with us, and it's really a curiosity of modernity to have done away with it so comprehensively. Looking at the burgeoning architectural revival movements, and the return in popularity of portraiture and classical painting techniques, I think we're nearing the end of an era encapsulated by your comment.

motohagiography4• 5 years ago

I replied to another comment related, but the anti- version of modernism is of course post-modernism, where nothing is real and everything is mainly its symbolic value. The conceit of that argument is that aesthetics are somehow trivial because anyone can appreciate them but very few can produce them - whereas you take anything post-modern and everyone can produce them but almost nobody can appreciate them sincerely.

The unspoken but founding lie of post-modernity is that criticism is equivalent to competence, and that critics are the equals of performers, but there's just all this false consciousness standing in the way that we can solve by indoctrinating people into narrative anyway. The whole enterprise is predicated on this original deception, and once you have accepted that, you can accept anything, which is why I think they teach it to undergrads.

The authenticity of "primitive" art as being a reaction to the skill and western artifice remains controversial, as if the art does not express the skill of the artist, what does it represent? Not everything has to represent something, but art is purely representation, so if it's not representing skill, there isn't a lot left.

There is certainly an anti-competence movement borne out of critical theories that need for competence to be isolated, as competence and risk are sources of truth themselves* and this physical truth competes with critical narrative, so on this, I don't know that it's a bridgable gulf.

This may be the most important part:

I think po-mo thinkers exist in a simulation founded on that base deception, and they try to convince others that their story (made of language!) is the substrate of our reality, but every time someone gets on a motorcycle, skis down a mountain, prevails over an MMA opponent, hunts food, rides a horse, jumps out of a plane, has sex for pleasure, or has some other peak human experience, the simulation disappears. All the neuroticism that forms the hall of mirrors of false equivalencies, evaporates, and what remains is gravity and time, the physical and the real, and our aesthetic experience of it.

That era has not ended, I'd argue criticism is just telling stories in a very shallow tide pool of history.

whatshisface• 5 years ago

That's a very pro-taste take on taste. I guess I should balance it out by saying that taste can also be knowing which overt signs of wealth are used by successful pharma salesmen, and which are used by successful drug dealers. ;)

oopsyDoodl2• 5 years ago

At the end there you highlight the issue that makes me think good taste is still hand wave-y subjectivity.

Since you say early on good taste is the difference between “I have” and “I do” good taste can’t be anything we possess, so how can anyone “have” good taste. Round n round we go.

This continues to highlight for me the shortcomings of human languages. Chomsky calls them random noise formalized and controlled by political powers. It makes sense, they only show up 5,000 years ago and we had glyphs for process and ideas before then. Given our legal system is normalized to matters of object possession, so goes our discourse. Given your measure it’s about “I do” versus “I have” can anyone “have” good taste since it comes down to advertising and accepting one is possessed of certain character traits? Isn’t it still gaudy self promotion and idolatry?

I’m still leaning towards peoples social power being due to their relative closeness to social power. Not that they’re uniquely beyond human. Why accept that in a system politically and academically normalized abstraction “good taste” is a useful language object itself?

simiones5• 5 years ago

Since you say early on good taste is the difference between “I have” and “I do” good taste can’t be anything we possess, so how can anyone “have” good taste. Round n round we go.

There is no contradiction and no circularity here. You are mixing levels of meaning. The concept of possession in "I have lots of gold" is different from the concept in "I have good taste". One refers to property ("I own lots of gold"), while the other refers to an attribute ("I am well-tasting"). The fact that they happen to use the same word is mostly a coincidence, and in no way makes anything circular.

motohagiography4• 5 years ago

I'd say taste can be more like musical talent. Someone can play well or poorly, and if they are good, we say they "have" talent, even though what we mean is we've observed them "doing" the music, and it is the effect of competence.

The metonymy itself clouds the concept as well. You can have an ear for music or an eye for design, a nose for a story or a conflict, a tact with others, but taste for...everything? My framing implies one would have a taste for power, even if it bends the lexical rule.

Everyone can have "good taste," by becoming competent at the things they do, and therefore have knowledge of which signals are meaingful and powerful in their domain, and which are not. They will not be equally reliable, as some people will have more experience, talent, or commitment.

The next big question is what power is, as in where is it located or come from, what are its sufficient and necessary conditions, is it real, and if it is what else must be real, and if it isn't, what else can't be, must something be conscious to be subject to it, and is power over unconscious objects or being/things real if they don't experience it, is political power anything other than stored potential energy in the form of violence, etc. I don't have answers, and I think the po-mo's were quite into that (Foucalt, Marcuse I think?). I'm sure someone here knows this stuff for real.

If you are sitting in a meeting with someone who has obviously tuned out and is typing into their laptop, consider the possibility this is what they're thinking about, and I find it makes them more likeable.

handrous3• 5 years ago

That's what crassness is, and it comes down to our relative apprehension of the real vs. the represented, where typically, something real is powerful independent of who is observing it, and the representation is not.
That difference between effect and affect is one of the sneakiest bits of the english language and perhaps even the culture's most cunningly set trap. Do not underestimate the value of good taste, it's an intuition about power.

Much of Fussell's Class ends up being about this, which amounts to how various classes choose to signal, and how good they are at it. One of the biggest tells for the Fussell's Middle—who easily come off as the most unfortunate of the bunch, being the most class-anxious but also very bad at signaling—versus the "higher" classes he outlines, whom members of the Middle are often trying to signal as or imitate, are 1) how much of their stuff, including clothing, involves synthetic materials, and 2) how much of their stuff imitates a real thing—fake flowers, fine art prints on the walls, that kind of thing.

golemotron• 5 years ago

Interesting take on Fussell. I just realized there's a connection to the taxonomy that Venkatesh Rao uses in the Gervais Principle. Middle class and middle management having the same qualities in relation to their adjacent groups.

jacquesm3• 5 years ago

This nicely explains overpriced T shirts with the name of some designer on it. It's a T shirt! But it screams 'I could afford to pay too much for this T shirt'.

sharadov• 5 years ago

Isn't taste in art what your peers judge as good or bad?

auggierose2• 5 years ago

What?

itronitron• 5 years ago

Not sure that power is a sufficiently discriminating term for what you are describing. I agree with you but think that purposiveness may be a better fit.

ellyagg• 5 years ago

What a tasteful word substitution.

majormajor2• 5 years ago

This seems much more about what is "tasteful" to display rather than the link's claim about "good taste" that objectively appreciates "good" art over "bad" art.

marifjeren• 5 years ago

It's whether something legitimately represents power.
Viewed this way, taste is the expression of what you percieve to be power based on your experience

What about displays of disposable wealth, which demonstrate power in a way that is nonetheless gaudy?

I don't think anyone could seriously argue that a wealthy person is less powerful than a poorer person, and yet displaying that wealth (e.g. having a solid 18k gold toilet) is clearly tasteless in the extreme. I almost wonder if you meant to say the exact opposite of what these quoted parts of your message say.

analog312• 5 years ago

My mom, from whom I inherited many attitudes, would say that this example illustrates the difference between wealth and class.

jhrmnn2• 5 years ago

So we just go one step further into the rabbit hole, now discussing what is truly power.

hitekker• 5 years ago

This comment warrants deep introspection.

How would you say "bad taste" and "good taste" relates to how we define the political and the non-political? They both share the notion of power, but is there a more meaningful connection that could be examined?

LudwigNagasena2• 5 years ago

Wrote professionally about taste in a previous life. It is related more closely than we expect to techne or competence from physical knowledge.

Closer than we expect? Huh? Competence and skill are the two most common concepts associated with taste, ask any person who hates contemporary art.

It's whether something legitimately represents power. Taste may be an instinct for honest signals, which would seem like its own sort of intelligence.

I understand that nowadays everything in humanities has to be about power to be fashionable, but that sounds like quite a reach. I don’t really follow this logic on crassness.

achillesheels• 5 years ago

I write art reviews as a hobby and have published my theory in a work called Critique of the Last Man in Film. I view taste to be more biologically predicated in that, quality can ultimately be measured according to a gradient of "healthy" and "sick". Immediately we can perceive "sacred" and "vulgar" and its connotations as it pertains to the subject of the representation. Nevertheless, it is the representation itself which can be understood as a biological expression of life and its experience in the minds of others which we can judge to be good or not. Thus, good art is that which positively resonates with as universal a mind as possible. That claim infers an everlasting beauty is the best art. (Notice I am necessarily relating positive resonances with beauty, not as a metaphor but as an actual electromechanical experience of the brain upon receiving neural stimulation from the body's senses)

Now with respect to originality...that's a separate topic altogether :P

keiferski2• 5 years ago

This is a question of relativism. Taste is ultimately about value, and "good taste" in art is just one aspect of culture at large. So, if you doubt if "good taste" exists, you also probably think that everyone has the right to believe whatever they want and everyone should be able to exist how they want. You can call this relativistic individualism.

I bring this up because the topic reminds me of a philosopher of religion, Charles Taylor. One of his points is that this relativistic individualism inevitably leads to our own inability to express what we value. It's a kind of "explanatory atrophy." If your default position is I have my way and he has his, and that's all there really is to it you lose the ability to present and shape your own opinion in reaction to others. Most people don't have the vocabulary to articulate this, so "that's in bad taste" ends up just turning into Dudeism.. that's just your opinion, man.

So when confronted with something we think is in bad taste, we can't put vague thoughts into words, and therefore just fall back to "it's his/her personal taste, who I am to criticize?"

Ultimately, this question arises from a lack of education and cultural interest in the arts and in aesthetics. Without it, the definition of good taste will ultimately boil down to the opinions of whoever has money, power, or popularity.

fijiaarone8• 5 years ago

Isn't it funny how relativists preach individualism but are, in practice, the greatest collectivists?

rhines4• 5 years ago

Hmm, I'm not sure this necessarily follows.

Just because we may not be able to concretely define what makes art "good", does not mean we can not discuss why we like it.

If one person enjoys a piece because they appreciate the technical mastery of the brushwork, another enjoys it for how accurately it mimics reality, and another finds it special for the feelings evoked by the composition, each of those people can articulate why the piece speaks to them. They can describe why they like it, there's no reason anyone should suffer any sort of explanatory atrophy.

Now, can any of them convince another that the work is better than another? Probably not. The person who enjoyed the brushwork may find an even more masterfully painted piece, which they think is better. But perhaps the new piece doesn't demonstrate quite so much clarity in portraying reality, so the person who enjoyed that from the first piece still prefers the first. Who is to say whose values are more important?

For this reason, I think the multi-axis view is more constructive. Rather than spending our time arguing if technique or novelty or emotions or whatever else are what matters most, we can focus on appreciating each aspect as we see fit. And we can certainly articulate what a piece does well on any axis.

keiferski2• 5 years ago

It’s not that we can’t define it, but that we are not in the habit of doing so. Because it’s become culturally preferable to just be agreeable about others’ preferences. Since we aren’t in the habit of discussing the topic, our ability to formulate a firm position on it atrophies. Consequently we don’t actually have a good reason why we think X is better than Y and so we just revert to “everyone’s opinion is subjective anyway.”

It’s not totally dissimilar from the idea of Newspeak in 1984, except we lose the ability to articulate concepts rather than lose the concept entirely.

Taylor goes into this far more than me, so I really wouldn’t base the entire argument on my comment. Unfortunately I do not remember the exact lecture he said this but I think it was in this series:

https://youtu.be/j_losVdiARc

ipqk• 5 years ago

Yeah, not working with Peter Thiel.

arketyp• 5 years ago

There is definitely not a total order either of works or of people's ability to judge them, but there is equally definitely a partial order of both. So while it's not possible to have perfect taste, it is possible to have good taste.

The tl;dr at the very end. If the partial order is sufficiently unlike a total order then his father was basically correct because good taste tells you very little.

slibhb2• 5 years ago

I had the opposite conversation with my father. I claimed "there's no accounting for taste" and my father said "that's not true, you can claim Shakespeare isn't good but you're wrong".

For judgements of taste, no one is better than Kant. I recommend this essay: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetic-judgment/

In Kantian aesthetics, judgements of taste are subjective (because they differ between people) but are normative in that they claim universal validity (when we judge art to be good, we will all others to agree). Kant calls this "subjective universality". This explains why people disagree about art and why we can argue about it. It bothers us when people disagree with our judgements of taste. When we claim it doesn't bother us ("there's no accounting for taste"), we're either lying or not making judgements of taste.

Compare this to judgements about flavor (which Kant calls judgments of the agreeable). We don't argue about whether vanilla is better than chocolate or, if we do, we consider the argument trivial and subjective with no right answer. This is not the case when we argue about art.

The heart of the matter is whether beauty is objective or if it is merely relative to something. PG's essay argues that it is relative to being human, Kant similarly argues that it is relative to being a rational being (a somewhat broader category). This contrasts with the common argument that beauty is relative to some socio-cultural standard.

msla• 5 years ago

I claimed "there's no accounting for taste" and my father said "that's not true, you can claim Shakespeare isn't good but you're wrong".

So Tolstoy was wrong?

https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/lear/english/e_ltf

Tolstoy begins by saying that throughout life Shakespeare has aroused in him ‘an irresistible repulsion and tedium’. Conscious that the opinion of the civilized world is against him, he has made one attempt after another on Shakespeare's works, reading and re-reading them in Russian, English and German; but ‘I invariably underwent the same feelings; repulsion, weariness and bewilderment’.

karaterobot• 5 years ago

There's no accounting for taste.

abecedarius• 5 years ago

He's the authority on his own response. And it may be true that Shakespeare is overrated. It's possible he could persuade me that Shakespeare is not good. (E.g. I've read Plato in translation and think his giant reputation is a blot on society's collective judgement.)

Tough to argue, though. People still respond to Shakespeare and not only because they're supposed to.

fijiaarone8• 5 years ago

Tolstoy is free to try and top Shakespeare. To his credit, he tried his best, and did better than most, but didn't come close.

cgrealy2• 5 years ago

my father said "that's not true, you can claim Shakespeare isn't good but you're wrong".

Could not disagree more.

Your father can claim Shakespeare is good, but that doesn't make him right. I think Shakespeare is good, but that's a subjective opinion and holds no more weight than someone who thinks Dan Brown is a better writer /shudder.

jacquesm3• 5 years ago

Given that Dan Brown is alive and that Shakespeare is well and truly dead I'm pretty sure that Dan Brown is the better writer.

slibhb2• 5 years ago

The essay I linked has a good response to what you wrote:

It is true that some people sometimes express the view that no judgments of taste are really better than others. They say, “There is no right and wrong about matters of taste”. Others will express the same thought by saying that beauty is “relative” to individual judgment or preference, or that it is “socially relative”. Such relativism is part of the intellectual air in in certain parts of the humanities. In particular, many intellectuals have expressed dislike of the idea that judgments of taste really have any normative claim, as if that would be uncouth or oppressive. However, if we are describing our thought as it is, not how it ought to be, then there is no getting away from the fact that normativity is a necessary condition of judgments of taste or beauty.

If you actually believed what you wrote, you wouldn't have included a "/shudder" at the end. In fact, you believe that Shakespeare is better than Dan Brown to the point that disagreement makes you uncomfortable. That's a judgement of taste. How you ground that belief (if at all) is a separate question.

GoblinSlayer9• 5 years ago

Disagreement is a property of values, not a property of universalism. Kant just assumes universalism, but assumption is not an argument.

Some people have a strong opinion on pineapple pizza. I have a strong opinion that wine and tobacco have bad taste.

personlurking• 5 years ago

After reading dozens over the years, I unfortunately won't read anymore PG essays due to the endless "In high school..." mentions and differences between bullies/jocks and smart kids. I would have long ago succumbed to alcohol poisoning if it were a drinking game.

I hope this essay is better. In the least, the comments here are interesting.

egeozcan• 5 years ago

I always thought "taste" as the skill to recognize patterns in trends.

That's why something that is considered "good taste" in 1950s can be seen as horrible taste nowadays.

syrusakbary• 5 years ago

It feels like taste and expertise are mixed in the essay. Once the expertise variable is added to the mix, the reductio ad absurdum examples no longer work.

Given that good taste is usually measured by people with expertise, can you really develop good taste without expertise?

barrenko• 5 years ago

You can't talk about taste the same way you can't talk about religion.

fijiaarone8• 5 years ago

Because if you admit one outcome is "better" than another you're conceding that morality exists.

guerrilla5• 5 years ago

If there's no such thing as good taste, then there's no such thing as good art.

No problem.

So if you want to discard the concept of good taste, you also have to discard the concept of good art. And that means you have to discard the possibility of people being good at making it.

This skips a step. It assumes without argument that production skill corresponds to subjective preferences. There are many people who are extremely skilled who produce things people hate and there are many productions which take virtually no effort which people love. Again, good blahblah is just consensus of subjective preferences. The whole article is just a disguised appeal to popularity fallacy that depends on confounding skill and value through equivocation on "good."

robofanatic4• 5 years ago

> If there's no such thing as good taste, then there's no such thing as good art. Because if there is such a thing as good art, it's easy to tell which of two people has better taste. Show them a lot of works by artists they've never seen before and ask them to choose the best, and whoever chooses the better art has better taste.

How does one determine "better art"?

guerrilla5• 5 years ago

Better is just a word that means "more good", so I've already answered this. One simply subjectively prefers some art over other art. What people prefer (i.e. think is better) does not correspond to production skill, as I already argued.

lhorie2• 5 years ago

Better-ness IMHO is a function of expectations. Playing Dream Theater as ambient music in your restaurant is arguably in "bad taste", despite the art itself being technically on virtuoso level, and often being considered "good art" outside of that context.

Liking pop music is often snobbishly seen as having "bad taste" in music, even in the face of it being wildly popular, and sometimes even actually interesting from a technical analysis perspective.

Acquired tastes are another example that goes against the idea of better-ness as an universal quality: Natto[0] mixed w/ a raw egg on rice is either a repulsive slimy mess or a delicious delicacy depending on who you ask.

IMHO, the argument that there is no "good taste" merely observes that "good" is not an absolute metric, or even on a linear scale. Yes, things can be objectively "better" than others (e.g. I'm sure Michelangelo is far more skilled at painting than PG), but it's a bit of leap to conflate that specific line of comparison with the fuzzy idea of "better-ness".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natt%C5%8D

TimPC5• 5 years ago

It only assumes production skill is correlated it doesn’t require a perfect correspondence. I’d argue it is hard to have a meaningful concept of production skill that is either independent of or anticorrelated to taste. Yes production skill alone does not make the piece of art. But if it contributes in any way shape or form that’s enough to establish there is such thing as taste.

guerrilla5• 5 years ago

It only assumes production skill is correlated it doesn’t require a perfect correspondence

This is fair. As for the rest, I don't think you made your argument and I think a massive amount of emperical evidence contradicts that. Pop music, mass produced movies, memes, etc. It's all low effort shit and people love it more than anything else and avoid high-skilled art like the plague. We have a ton of statistics on this. If you try to claim they just don't have taste then you'd just be question begging at that point.

There's really no value in this entire discussion anyway. All it does is serve to reinforce elitism and all you get out of it in the end is being able to say that you're better at liking stuff than other people are liking stuff, which is pretty much kindergarten nonsense.

Sohcahtoa824• 5 years ago

and there are many productions which take virtually no effort which people love

It only takes a quick trip to reddit to see this in action.

In a thread where people were talking about the jails and the overall penal system, someone said "heh...penal" and it had several Golds and thousands of points.

bajsejohannes• 5 years ago

I had this same objection. And in a reductio ad absurdum, it certainly is key that all the steps leading to the contradiction are indisputable.

There are many people who are extremely skilled who produce things people hate

There's a dedicated subreddit for this, even using the word "taste": Awful Taste But Great Execution https://www.reddit.com/r/ATBGE/

JohnFen3• 5 years ago

I've had a longstanding debate with a close friend on this topic. He thinks that there is such a thing as objectively good taste, and I do not.

I usually cite art as an example of my point. There is no "good" art or "bad" art. There is successful and unsuccessful art.

Art is intended to make you feel something. If it has done that, it's successful. And making you feel revulsion due to the aesthetic choices made or execution of the piece counts as "feeling something".

tshaddox• 5 years ago

Not so fast there! I don't buy the "no good taste implies no good art" argument. If there is an objective standard of how good a piece of art is, that's fine, but his proposed experiment doesn't make sense. What if someone simply knows this objective standard and can thus simply evaluate how good each piece of art is? Is that anything like what we consider to be "taste"? I wouldn't say that someone has good taste in prime numbers if they can be shown a large number and can compute whether it's prime. I'd say their mental arithmetic abilities are good, but I wouldn't think to describe that as "taste."

sombremesa2• 5 years ago

Indeed, no tasty food doesn’t imply no good (e.g. relatively nutritious) food.

rossdavidh2• 5 years ago

If PG's arguments were true, then a lot of people whose taste seemed to be quite good, were completely wrong about the Impressionists when they first appeared on the scene. Ditto almost every other new art school. So no one prior to that had good taste? You take a time machine to the century prior to Van Gogh's life, and you might not find anyone in Europe who thought his paintings were good if you showed them what they looked like. So no one in Europe had good taste then?

Nonsense. One can have "refined taste", which means that you can detect all the subtleties of a particular kind of art (e.g. modern abstract art, or modern jazz) that I cannot. My taste in other fields is considerably more refined than the person who likes modern jazz and abstract art; perhaps they cannot stand any science fiction, whereas I have strong opinions about which is good and which is not.

The phrase "good taste" implies there is one standard, one dimension on which one can rate art, but clearly there are many different ones, depending on ones tastes.

jmacd• 5 years ago

I agree. This is a very Jordan Peterson-esque line of reasoning. (I'm sure this has a lot more history than that, but it strikes me as a current flavour)

This thing is true now, so it has always been true, and it must be true in the future.

tonymet• 5 years ago

It's possible there are a few standards–not only one, but also not infinite.

baud1472582• 5 years ago

So no one in Europe had good taste then?

Quite a few artists imitated his style, so some had apparently good taste

rossdavidh2• 5 years ago

As I understand it, only the young ones. Disclaimer: I am not an art historian.

Meekro• 5 years ago

So PG thinks that someone has good taste if prefer "better" art and bad taste if they prefer "worse" art. He knows some art can be better than other art because when he started painting, his art wasn't very good. Then he kept practicing and produced better art. Therefore, one piece can definitely be better than another.

But if we're looking at two pieces we've never seen before and trying to determine which is better, are there any approaches besides just surveying a bunch of people about which one they prefer?

PG makes an analogy to vaccines, but we measure vaccine quality objectively based on how many people it can help. To simplify a bit, if vaccine A works on 1% of people and vaccine B works on 99% of people, we say vaccine B is better. It wouldn't matter if some "expert" looked at both vaccines while swirling his wine and said in a pompous tone that "vaccine A is clearly more refined no matter what the masses may think."

So how is art any different? Isn't the "better" art determined by what more people like, in which case the top-grossing blockbuster films represent the best art of our generation? If so, then "good taste" is the ability to look at two unreleased movies and correctly predict which will make more money-- a valuable skill, no doubt!

dahak27• 5 years ago

Probably a heretical thing to say here but I feel like PG has increasingly fallen into the trap where because he's been smart and insightful in some areas he's gradually convinced himself he's smart and insightful everywhere. IMO the more he veers away from writing on e.g. coding and startups the more he comes across like a very over-confident man who thinks he's figured it all out

It's quite noticeable on Twitter too where he seems to increasingly have very confident diagnoses on everything from geopolitics to culture war nonsense to genetic engineering.

Funnily enough a friend said something lately about SlateStarCodex (or ACX now) - I wonder if getting that much positive feedback on your musings just inevitably starts convincing you everything you think must be just as insightful

dang3• 5 years ago

PG hasn't changed in those respects. He was always interested in everything (well, a lot of things - I've never heard him care about music, for example) and always had the style you're talking about, which has always rubbed some people the wrong way for whatever reason.

skissane• 5 years ago

What is wrong with expressing one's opinion on things? Intelligent people often have opinions on a lot of things which are outside of their formal area of expertise. Those opinions may sometimes (even often) turn out to be wrong, but can nonetheless make for some interesting conversations. They may sometimes say some things which sound stupid to the real experts in the field, but a genuinely intelligent person is open to taking those expert objections thoughtfully and seriously, as opposed to your garden variety crank or conspiracy theorist who can't even understand those expert objections, but doesn't need to understand them to know that they are wrong.

The other day I was having a discussion about psychiatry with a relative of mine who is an esteemed psychiatry professor. Now, no doubt about it, he knows heaps of things about psychiatry which I, as a non-psychiatrist, don't. But, on the other hand, the conversation made me realise I know some things about his field he doesn't: I read and am interested in psychiatrists who criticise "mainstream" approaches (such as by attacking the DSM, whether in general or with respect to specific diagnoses included in it or both), and so I know a lot about who those people are and what their publications and arguments are, and what the "mainstream" responses are. He is far less interested in that topic, so it appears to me he only knows those criticisms at a relatively high level, and that he isn't across the details of them to the extent that I am. I think he generally trusts that the mainstream approach is right, and focuses (both as a researcher and as a clinician) on working within it rather than questioning or challenging it.

Does the fact that he is an esteemed professor of psychiatry and I have no formal qualifications or professional experience whatsoever in this field or any related field mean that he is (likely to be) right and I am (likely to be) wrong? Well, I think debatable areas of expert opinion, just because you happen to personally know an expert on one side of that debate, doesn't make that side automatically the right side. Even acknowledging that there is a majority and minority side to many of these debates, I think often the minority may be a minority, not because their actual arguments are weaker, but due to social and cultural and historical and political factors. That is especially true in fields such as psychiatry, which still have a rather weak empirical basis. Or, you could say the same about theoretical physics, which starts with a very firm empirical basis (experimental physics is at a far more advanced stage than neurobiology/psychology/etc) but wants to go a long way beyond it – just because string theory is more popular in the contemporary theoretical physics community than loop quantum gravity, is not good evidence that the former is more likely to be true than the later. It is important here to distinguish respectable minority views within academia (even if small minorities) from truly fringe/crank views (which few academics would consider worthy of respect). I also think my esteemed-psychiatry-professor-relative would be more likely to convince me to abandon my view of the topic in favour of his, if this was an area of his field of which he'd developed a detailed knowledge, as opposed to it being an area of which he only appears to know at a high level.

And now when we come to PG expressing views on aesthetics, which is commonly viewed as a branch of philosophy – philosophy is an area which is especially unsettled, and in which the question of where the majority of academic opinion lies is especially distant from the question of what is likely to be true. I suppose the main way I'd fault PG here, is there is a lot of pre-existing academic work on this question, and he doesn't engage with it at all, or display any knowledge of it. On the other hand, maybe given the constraints of the format of the talk he was asked to deliver, the likely interests and abilities of the audience, etc, attempting to engage with that work (to the extent that PG knows it) was not really going to be possible.

dec0dedab0de3• 5 years ago

We don't realize how far we'd have to go if we discarded the concept of good taste, because we don't even debate the most obvious cases. But it doesn't just mean we can't say which of two famous painters is better. It means we can't say that any painter is better than a randomly chosen eight year old.

I don't have an answer for whether or not there is a universal good taste, but this argument is fundamentally flawed because it conflates skill and expression. Of course any practiced painter is going to be better at painting, but that doesn't mean that what they paint is tasteful.

That said, did anyone else get the feeling that pg got into the mushrooms before writing this?

lifeisstillgood• 5 years ago

My take is that taste is a complex selection of trade-offs.

It is something we see a lot in software and (proper) engineering. I might have a taste on how to shard a database or pool connections, arrange workers off a queue. All of those come together to reflect a taste on how to build a complete system.

My taste will differ from others - the more dimensions we measure the easier / harder it is to find commonality. (This might be a lesson in politics)

The point being is that taste can be "wrong" - but only when looking at the desired goal. The goal for most art is self-expression. The goal for software systems might be monthly engagement. Its a lot easier to decide if engagement goes up and so judge taste in software design.

This does lead to the interesting point that one can "teach" taste ... through following a metric and iterating. And this is often the advice - paint lots.

But it does indicate that there is Good Taste. Its the taste that gets you to your goal. There may well have been painters like Pollock in Renaissance Italy, but they just starved to death before dripping much paint. And if there was only one "Good Taste" (what the Medici's liked) then there was a way to harness the greatest skill to that subset of Taste. Da Vinci may well have preferred abstract modernism, but he also preferred to eat.

Now it is possible for more ways to align skill with different tastes. So we have more good tastes. More groupings of trade offs.

And that is something i think we are seeing in software too. Open Source is one huge trade off that influences other things. Sort of like, Perspective.

wruza• 5 years ago

What if there’s no clear hierarchy of “better”? https://mathsgear.co.uk/products/non-transitive-grime-dice

kabanossen• 5 years ago

So the only purpose of art is to consume it? What is this guy five?

evrydayhustling2• 5 years ago

What I heard: "I find it useful to distinguish products on a single axis of quality, and therefore to distinguish talent on a single axis of being able to produce it. I can't imagine living without doing this ranking, so that single axis must be an objective truth others should align with."

For what it's worth, I agree with Paul about valuing art that demonstrates a type of technical mastery, and I like ranking things. But having multiple axes of quality, and disagreeing about how to assess and prioritize them, is far more useful: it's what makes a market. Just because your ranking is useful to you doesn't make it an objective truth. On the other hand, the absence of objective "good taste" doesn't make discussions about merit useless.

TimPC5• 5 years ago

I think a more favourable interpretation is “Taste is multidimensional and complex but to show it exists it is sufficient to show it exists for the simplest to prove dimension. Technical talent is that least subjective dimension. Argument follows.”

evrydayhustling2• 5 years ago

Appreciate this read. However, doesn't the result in this case end up being trivial? "No matter how complex the subject, I can find a part we all agree on." That's great, but it doesn't prove a meaningful notion of agreement about the whole, and I missed any argument that it could.

ravenstine• 5 years ago

Taste is only as good as how one can articulate aspects of a certain taste that one appreciates.

If one enjoys something but cannot deconstruct the attributes of one's joy, then it isn't necessarily taste that one has but merely a pleasurable sensory perception.

You can judge whether someone actually has taste if they can describe to you why they appreciate a particular thing. Ask someone who listens to a lot of rap music and they can tell you what they think makes a good rap song. Ask someone who reads poetry and they will tell you how they judge good poetry. Hell, I bet you could ask someone who watches a lot of porn and they'll tell you what they look for in a good porn scene.

To demonstrate the opposite case, ask a person who casually binge watches everything on Netflix and ask them why they enjoy a particular show. They might stare at you blankly for a second and only respond with nonspecific reasons such as "it's really scary" or "because it's funny" and little beyond that. This isn't taste, because their experience is hardly different from a tickle. A person can have taste for comedy, but just because comedians and tickles both result in laughter doesn't mean it takes the same level of thought to appreciate the two. (though I suppose it's possible for one to be a good tickler, so my analogy falls apart in that sense)

In fewer words, my point is that taste is a thing, but it has no objective qualifier other than that it is merely the differentiation between thought applied to sensory input as opposed to thoughtlessly responding to input.

One's tastes can be entirely inverted from the norm, but we can't qualify those tastes because that would require uncommon knowledge and experience. On the other hand, the presence of some kind of taste can at least be partially measured. It's the goodness and badness of taste that is purely relative absent any shared mechanics involved.

bitcurious2• 5 years ago

In the book Seeing Like a State (recommended here, thank you anonymous hacker), one of the core arguments is that the State, in whatever form, expresses its authority by forcing legibility of its subjects. Examples span from the generally beneficial (see: standard measurements, introduced in France to facilitate centralized taxation) to horribly detrimental (see: centrally planned farming and the resulting famines in the USSR and China). A core thesis is that, regardless of the “goodness” of outcome, this introduction of legibility necessarily reduces the agency and individuality of the subjects, as any subject is exactly as complex as it is illegible. I think Wolfram speaks of this in another context as computational irreducibility.

This essay, and the core premise of “good taste” looks to be another example of the same. “Good taste” can exist on average, outside of the context of specific individuals. Indeed, good taste is emergent. It exists in the sense that “critics” are just another market, and market needs are met. “Good taste” can then be described and prescribed, but like most centrally planned policies, it will fail to adapt.

So yes, good taste can be said to exist. It cannot, however, be possessed.

disambiguation• 5 years ago

so this is clearly indirect commentary to mitigate the controversy.

That being said, I can't tell if he's saying "it's bad taste to question the efficacy" or "it's bad taste to disallow a conversation on effectiveness"

.. or both?

robofanatic4• 5 years ago

If there's no such thing as good taste, then there's no such thing as good art. Because if there is such a thing as good art, it's easy to tell which of two people has better taste. Show them a lot of works by artists they've never seen before and ask them to choose the best, and whoever chooses the better art has better taste.

In this statement, how do you define "better art"? You'll need a third person or a judge to define it! which is again biased.

amznbyebyebye• 5 years ago

I think pg has finally reached peak rich

newbamboo5• 5 years ago

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

cwmoore10• 5 years ago

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

wcarron• 5 years ago

Not OP but

That one must judge art, to enjoy art, appears fundamentally exclusionary,

Well, yes. You must make a judgement in order to have a reaction. In order to have a positive reaction to something (enjoy) it, somewhere along the line, you must have decided if had positive attributes. If it had bad attributes, you would not enjoy it. But a decision/judement/evaluation IS made.

newbamboo5• 5 years ago

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

An odd question but yes I think it’s great, as I explained in post, mostly because I agree with it. Not sure if you’re asking a real question or making a rhetorical point about thinking people are crass for believing in taste, in beauty.

Assuming it is a real question, part of the reason I think it’s a great essay, as I allude to be in my post, is the brevity and succinctness of it. Paul is sort of known for that— being able to put forth provocative ideas in a concise and compelling way.

I’m sincerely sorry, saddened in a way, that you find art crass. You are not alone. It’s threatening to many people I’ve observed. For me, it’s one of the most important of human achievements, and worthy of celebration and contemplation. To fully appreciate it implies comparing artists and artwork and thinking deeply about what makes some art better, special. No human is excluded from this most human of activities, except for those who exclude themselves. I would urge you, don’t be one of those. Engage with art critically, and enjoy the many rewards it brings. The question of aesthetics has captivated the greatest thinkers for very good reasons. It is to be fully human, to appreciate life. Don’t deny yourself that.

rhines4• 5 years ago

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

In order for this to be a valid take, it requires that we have some way to measure goodness. Else how can we determine what is good and what is not, and then judge peoples' taste? But I don't think anyone's yet proven any such measure to exist. Certainly many people have offered their personal viewpoint, but how do we know which one has the best taste? We're in a bit of a deadlock - we need to be able to measure goodness to say who has good taste, but we need to know who has good taste so we can know how to measure goodness.

With that said, Paul Graham ultimately ends by saying that "There is definitely not a total order either of works or of people's ability to judge them, but there is equally definitely a partial order of both." Which is not particularly insightful, in my opinion. It's quite easy to see that a flawed attempt to replicate another's work is worse than the unflawed original. But no one really cares about such things, and no one is surprised by this revelation. All in all, the essay takes a long meandering road to make it sound like there is such a thing as good taste, then at the last moment redefines it to something different and uninspired, hoping that the reader is too invested at that point to care. Frankly, it felt disrespectful to the reader, a deceitful waste of time.

crawfordcomeaux• 5 years ago

As a person who learned to abandon likes and dislikes, I can break this proof.

"It means we can't say that any painter is better than a randomly chosen eight year old."

First, this is a non-literal arguement and so is disconnected from reality in a literal sense. We CAN say this. We can also make taste claims AND we can admit it's arbitrarily driven by many different decisions and biases developed before this lifetime, as artists and art don't exist in vacuums. We can also admit it's absolutely an adultist perspective to dismiss a person's contributions by the age of their current body. Literally everyone has different skills and the impact art has can be wildly different depending on the piece and the context it's viewed in. A person (namely me) can become inspired to change the world by witnessing a 1-year old creating a realistic drawing of pumpkin seeds. Is that art good based on whether or not the person is successful at changing the world? Who cares! It's an arbitrary and unnecessary judgment being made out of a habit of judging things, rather than observing and accepting whatever's being received.

This post represents a continuation of the cultural norms of preference-making (which is a form of limited identity), avoiding absurdity, over-reliance on classical logic instead of uncertainty logic to process reality (since it doesn't leave room for art that exists in multiple classes of equivalence of good and bad and judges art based on too short of a timeline).

Anyone who abandons their preferences gets to realize how limiting thinking like PG proposes here is, how it limits the joy and value of any artist or work of art, and how this creates a hostile environment for artists of literally every kind.

Good... bad...meh.... there exists art that meets all needs while denying none and then there's the rest.

If you've never abandoned the automated judgment and preference-making most of the world teaches, you can never realize a perspective that transcends arbitrarily subjective thinking.

Also, as an aside, tastes are, in part driven by trauma. I hypothesize this is why some people in addiction recovery develop different tastes after having spiritual experiences/awakenings: they heal from and release the stuck feelings from some past trauma(s) which were being used to judge other things in life.

So does anyone want to abandon their preferences as an attempt to falsify this perspective for science? I have a practice that worked for me and want to conduct an experiment where some people genuinely/sincerely commit to it without being aware of the practice and others choose to try it only after learning about the practice. Any brave souls want to seek deeper joy and release from cultural/ trauma programming?

robofanatic4• 5 years ago

There is never black/while or 1/0. There is always a spectrum of possibilities. You can say that whichever taste the majority of people like is the good taste!

hardwaregeek10• 5 years ago

It amazes me when people seem to lack taste. I'm not even saying the ability to rank items in a way that agrees to some general standard. I'm saying the ability to notice that there is even a difference. I'll talk about taste in the literal sense but this extends to everything. I remember being at a Chinese restaurant with some friends where we were eating scallion pancakes. I said, boastfully, that my family makes better scallion pancakes and a friend remarked that he didn't think there was any difference, that indeed all scallion pancakes were exactly alike to him. Or another friend couldn't tell the difference between orange juice from concentrate and not from concentrate.

I wonder how much of this is physiological and how much is mental. I can't help but think you'd need some sort of color blindness for taste to genuinely not notice any difference between scallion pancakes. But perhaps my friend was exaggerating.

My theory is that taste is one quality that separates the academics from the business people. Academia doesn't necessitate a lot of taste. If you have it, great. If you don't have it, no big deal. On the other hand, stuff such as product design, user interfaces, even software engineering, requires taste. You need to understand what makes a good piece of software or a good product. One could argue that Steve Jobs was a product supertaster. He was finely attuned to stuff that the average user (or the average HN reader) would not see. As PG notes, taste is being attuned to the collective unconsciousness, to a collective aesthetic. If you can tap into that, you can attract customers.

anm894• 5 years ago

This always bothers me specifically about music. I don't claim to have some universal say on what is good and bad music, there is tons of music out there which I think is tasteful but I simply don't like.

But like 10% of music let's say is absolute garbage, mostly top 40 stuff made from cosntructed bands with some models as front men, written by a team constructed by a label to create the most generically likeable music possible, edited to the point where it doesn't matter that the models are bad singers.

This music seems to account for about 90% of global music consumption as far as I can tell. I've been traveling around the world for many years and it get's depressing when you are in some remote jungle somewhere that feels like your finally off the beaten path and you get to some little shack restaurant / bar and they have One Direction on the radio. You can't fucking escape it. I've had times where I was on 3 continents on 3 months and you here the exact same garbage music regardless of location. It's crazy how ubiquitous it is.

And there is so much good music out there. If anything we are in a golden age in terms of volume of quality independent music being produced. And yet a vast majority of people seem to have no problem listening to the bottom of the barrel junk for a majority of the music they listen to.

cwmoore10• 5 years ago

What you call "garbage" others might label "recycling" ;)

jl62• 5 years ago

Part of the answer is that such people aren’t actually listening to the music. They are getting something else out of it, like using it as background noise, or just as a beat to dance to, or as in-group signaling, or maybe access to the culture associated with the music, or perhaps they are self-medicating with it, or maybe they are ogling the performer, or perhaps it reminds them of something positive that happened when they first heard it.

None of these uses require the music to be “good”.

Actively listening to music is a somewhat rare activity.

Sohcahtoa824• 5 years ago

written by a team constructed by a label to create the most generically likeable music possible

A few years ago, a group engineered the most unlikeable song ever:

https://youtu.be/-gPuH1yeZ08

Featuring bagpipes, a rapping opera singer, country music, and a children's choir singing holiday music that ends with telling you to do your shopping at Wal-mart.

Nition3• 5 years ago

I think part of it is how much other music you've listened to, and how much you know about music.

For example I watched Shang-Chi the other day, which is basically pop music in film form. As someone who's watched a fair amount of films, it's easy to see how it follows all the usual generic story beats - it's good but formulaic and relatively predictable. But if it was the first film you'd ever seen it would be amazing.

You have films that intentionally subvert expectations, relying on the fact that the audience knows how the story usually goes. That's jazz music. Classical often as well. But that relies on people both knowing the usual tropes and also wanting something different - there's some comfort in the known. Many people just want the superhero film. After all, the simple formula is the most inherently powerful regardless of the audience's internal knowledge of narrative or notation - that's why it's so commonly used.

dec0dedab0de3• 5 years ago

I like to explain my taste in music, by saying it's like taking a shower. At first it's hot, but then you get used to it, and you make it a bit hotter, and a bit hotter. If it were that hot in the beginning I never would have got in, but this is where I am now.

Though in a broader sense, with any creative endeavor the more people that like something, the worse it is.

watwut13• 5 years ago

written by a team constructed by a label to create the most generically likeable music possible, edited to the point where it doesn't matter that the models are bad singers.

Maybe it is just the case where team of experts created music many people like. People really don't mind generic when serving foods daydreaming or eating. Generic is often better, because it won't break flow of what they are doing.

jl62• 5 years ago

The skill of distinguishment seems like something that could be learned with practice, or by having better observing tools (e.g. better eyesight, or more taste buds). This is the part that you could, in principle, program a robot to do.

Judging which of two thing is better (aesthetic taste) feels like something quite different.

jacobolus2• 5 years ago

friend remarked that he didn't think there was any difference, that indeed all scallion pancakes were exactly alike to him.

This is entirely plausible. If you are used to eating some food regularly over the course of decades, you will be able to discriminate between good vs. mediocre versions. If you have only eaten a food a few times, the most relevant comparisons will be with other types of food, and you won’t necessarily notice the difference between two separate experiences of it. When compared to pizza, tacos, or bagels, all scallion pancakes are pretty similar.

For instance, a person who drinks red wine every day will be able to tell you the difference between varietals, regions, distinguish $100 vs. $7 bottles, maybe notice good vs. bad years from some vineyard; someone who has only rarely had red wine might think that they all taste about the same.

hardwaregeek10• 5 years ago

True, although this friend is asian american and likely grew up eating scallion pancakes on at least a few occasions. He seemed almost proud of his lack of taste which really surprised me.

asiachick• 5 years ago

Lots of TV shows showing "experts" where they blind taste test them between expensive and cheap wine or expensive vs cheap chocolate and blind folded they can not tell the difference.

That is not to say there is no good vs bad wine/chocolate/name your food. But it has nothing to do with price.

grujicd• 5 years ago

Obligatory XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/915/

lexapro3• 5 years ago

When compared to pizza, tacos, or bagels, all scallion pancakes are pretty similar.

Bad example, as most pizzas _are_ pretty similar. And in my opinion the best pizzas are not too different from average pizzas. And yes, I had a lot of pizzas in my life, in Naples and elsewhere.

GoblinSlayer9• 5 years ago

No way, Jobs created phoneposters.

FourthProtocol• 5 years ago

I would extend that to include behavior. Getting spannered at a frat party is hardly in good taste, whereas a glass too many at afternoon tea is, assuming you're able to limit the effects to a giggle.

Similarly taking a bite of food, then a sip of a drink, and then chewing with a semi -open mouth is in extreme bad taste.

We aren't just the art we wear or aquire. Our tastes position us in a social heireachy.

JoeAltmaier• 5 years ago

Agreed. That immediately can be followed up with: taste depends entirely upon the particular social hierarchy?

There are a lot of them, and we each participate in more than one. School, church, family, job and on and on.

gsjbjt• 5 years ago

My theory is that taste is one quality that separates the academics from the business people. Academia doesn't necessitate a lot of taste. If you have it, great. If you don't have it, no big deal.

This might be true for academics in ancient Greek literature, but certainly isn't true for academics in CS nowadays. If you don't have good taste in research problems that are {important for downstream industry applications, scientifically interesting, tractable}, you won't get anything done, and you won't get published. If anything, the pressure for academics to develop good taste is stronger than for people designing product. You can have a product that provides just one utility that users desperately need and have terrible taste for all the other axes that make a product "good," and do just fine. Academic papers get judged (in peer review / traction after publication) purely against the taste and aesthetics of other people in your community.

hardwaregeek10• 5 years ago

This is where an ancient Greek professor butts in and says that you need good taste in ancient Greek, but it's those damn ancient Aramaic professors who don't need good taste.

I'm just kidding. I agree that it's not fair to make such an overarching statement about academics. I guess I was trying to express that I've noticed there's a difference between academic intelligence and taste, and my HN instincts told me that blaming academics would appeal to the crowd :P. More seriously, I think there's certainly a sense of taste in academia, but it's a very particular, very niche taste, as you've described. Someone who is tapped into the taste of the crowd will not be adept at understanding the taste of the few and vice versa.

dec0dedab0de3• 5 years ago

I used to think that people who said they can't taste the difference between things were just being assholes. Then I got covid, and I lost most of my sense of smell, and my taste was reduced to the basics. Pepsi, and a ripe pear tasted identical to me, other than texture. They were both sweet and kind of sour. It made me think that some of these people might just have trouble tasting, and they don't realize it. Though I still think most of them are being assholes.

ksec• 5 years ago

I have a term for it, "Pepla". People who cant taste the difference between Pepsi and Coca Cola. I used to joke about this 10+ years ago. Until there are lots of YouTube video showing people really cant tell the difference.

I find this funny on HN because up to ~2017/18 the mainstream HN view was all these so called "taste" were people being mentally manipulated by advertising. There is no such thing as "taste", as PG's Dad said. And then gradually, somehow, HN changed. We have this [1]

> Having taste makes you require more dollars to get the same level of satisfaction

I have carefully avoided trying excessively high quality things because once I've experienced something truly luxury then it becomes an ongoing expense to keep up that level of experience. The irritating part is that before I was perfectly happy in my ignorance of something better being available out there, but aftewards I feel like I'm "ruined" because I'm constantly disappointed and frustrated if I can't keep up the level of quality.

There are lots of people who couldn't tell the difference between 120hz screen and 60hz screen. High PPI and low PPI. Prime and Choice Ribeye. French Butter and Margarine. I mean lots of nerds only compare "spec", and fail to recognise there are lots of things beyond spec and numbers.

One could argue that Steve Jobs was a product supertaster.

And that is why he was the low paying Beta tester and a yardstick of quality. And that was the reason why he was hard to work with. Most people simply dont have his "taste", at least not anywhere near the bar of Steve. And that is why we now have UI design decision devalued into A/B testing. Having an objective measure to prove something. In reality, without people demanding excellence, quality will quickly drift to the average of the team's taste. The results of design by committees.

cm20122• 5 years ago

I can usually tell which advertisement will perform best before they go live, at a much higher rate than lay people.

Is that taste? Honest question.

It's being able to tell which piece of art more people will choose to interact with, which is pretty close to PG's definition of taste.

curiousllama• 5 years ago

It was obvious that Leonardo and Bellini were much better at it than me. That gap between us was not imaginary. They were so good. And if they could be good, then art could be good, and there was such a thing as good taste after all.

Is taste simply recognition of skill? If that's the case, I think "taste" is commonly used too narrowly.

Is it "tasteful" to appreciate a heart surgeon's life-saving? Or a teacher's ability to help me learn? That sounds odd to me (though we should obviously appreciate it!).

I've always thought of taste as an ability to identify intrinsic value, especially when others might miss it ("it's just a picture, dude"). If it's skill alone, why is taste typically applied to aesthetic pursuits?

fijiaarone8• 5 years ago

The reason most people are dismissive about quality or "taste" in art, or so many other topics, is simply because they have very poor taste -- that is, that they are not qualified to judge, or that their judgement is easily influenced by irrelevant factors (like popularity).

The reason that the art establishment is dismissive about quality or "taste" is a bit more nefarious, and at least as banal -- they are not good at producing art. So they denigrate that which they know is better than they can achieve.

And by their influence (and based upon their degree of control over the opinion-shaping levers) the majority end up rejecting quality -- or being persuaded to reject their own sense of taste.

Mikeb85• 5 years ago

There is definitely such a thing as good taste.

I used to work in ultra-high end restaurants (think World's 50 Best). All the cooks are incredibly skilled. But only a small amount of them make good chefs, usually the ones who travel and eat out lots themselves. Many simply had no idea what ingredient combinations are good or bad, even if they could execute a recipe extremely well. I did make it as a chef, ish, got some awards, but the economics are tough, I took a few breaks to travel and go back to school. Working on a few other things. I still do consulting for restaurateurs I know just because I can.

When you look at the top of the top chefs, the difference comes down to taste. They all have the same skills. The best simply make better combinations.

cwmoore10• 5 years ago

As a painter and hacker[1] myself, I understand the message, believe the answer to the headline is "yes, but you can't have it" and I (as surely too would you) understand the vast gulf between my artwork and Rembrandt's, or my code and Norvig's, or my swimming and Phelps', but I've got to say, using "better art" as a test of taste is the irreducible absurdity, and I'd hoped for better after his introduction purported to propose a proof. In principle of charity I'll assume that other speakers at the talk this essay was adapted from may have covered those other considerations, and that PG was attempting or invited to fill an experiential gap which in this extracted form left the piece without some necessary reification.

In the conversational spaces that attempt to account for taste are the same human conflicts that set one true believer against another of a different religion.

I think the proper reductio ad absurdum is the more trivial one. Taste some rotten meat-- and either spit it out and rinse with strong liquor, or endure (survive?) the GI infection, then tell someone else to eat it, and see what you feel about the subjectivity of taste afterwards. See how the person your recommended the rotten meat feels about it, if anything. Finer points of arguments for or against some artist or movement are unsubstantiable when there is, I think we can agree, such a thing as guts.

[1] I originally found HN after reading PG's book "Hackers and Painters"[2] and realized his practice of implementing the techniques of Old Masters in the late-20th Century, was not at all the kind of work that drew me to visual art.

[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/hackpaint.html

simiones5• 5 years ago

I think in choosing rotten meat, you haven't gotten close to the limits - see Surstromming for an example.

There are very few universals of taste. Even looking only at food: some people routinely consume, for pleasure, rotten meats, rotten milk (cheese), various bitter poisonous seeds, extremely painful hot peppers, painful acidic or basic substances, and even feces or other bodily fluids. Of course, no one could enjoy drinking concentrated sulfuric acid for example, so there are some ultimate limits.

Similarly in all arts, there is rarely any style that is not seen as more refined than any other by some group of people, or profoundly distasteful. There are certainly people who would rather hang up children's paintings in their house than something like Malevich's Black square.

GoblinSlayer9• 5 years ago

You missed the elephant in the room - wine.

flippinburgers• 5 years ago

For myself good taste sits on the axis of reproducibility. Food, for instance, will go stale over time, become bland and even toxic approaching an asymptote of "not good". Fresh food + skill = something delicious that is difficult to replicate. Knowing that deliciousness is good taste.

vasco• 5 years ago

I think a more applicable translation of this topic to general terms is one of good judgement and how to assess for that. Most people think they have good judgement, yet assessing for it very hard, similar to good taste, because of all the extraneous factors.

You can be right but have an unpopular opinion, similarly to how you can have good taste but maybe nobody knows about your art and therefore you can remain "undiscovered" forever, so experts might never have a chance to review your work and deem it good. You can also be right under most circunstances but a bigger factor making your judgement sound but wrong.

In engineering (programmers, managers, product managers) you have this a lot where you're trying to promote people with good judgement to own large codebases, or big projects, or teams of people, but identifying those is something that is hard to do.

It'd be interesting to have art experts quantifying art in similar ways that we quantify engineering work. If experts can classify art, surely there's a mental checklist they go over, even if they never tried to put it to paper. I imagine it'd be a mixture of from 1-10 "how much of a sense of awe did the piece cause you" and from 1-10 how "good are the porportions" or whatever, but this is where I struggle. Perhaps it's more complicated than that and there's a decision tree of each "criteria" but surely there must be one, the same way we'd assess a software engineer or a product manager or an engineering manager for good judgement in the quality of their work.

levmiseri• 5 years ago

I really enjoy an article "Learning to See" on a similar topic from designer's point of view - from the founder of iA: https://ia.net/topics/learning-to-see

A small excerpt:

Personally (dis-)liking a color, form, or image is not a matter of design, it is a question of personal taste. And as we all know, when it comes to personal taste there is not much to talk about there. But in addition to personal taste there is something that we can call “trained taste” or “sophistication”. Let me recapitulate:

- Whether I like pink or not, sugar in my coffee, red or white wine, these things are a matter of personal taste. These are personal preferences, and both designers and non-designers have them. This is the taste we shouldn’t bother discussing.

- Whether I set a text’s line height to 100% or 150% is not a matter of taste, it is a matter of knowing the principles of typography.

- However, whether I set a text’s line height at 150% or 145% is a matter of Fingerspitzengefühl; wisdom in craft, or sophistication.

rojoca• 5 years ago

Ira Glass has a practical take on the idea of exposing good taste (e.g. trying to paint like Bellini): https://youtu.be/X2wLP0izeJE where he talks about how your good taste informs you that the work you are doing doesn’t yet match your ambition, and that this can be both motivating and discouraging

rhines4• 5 years ago

The way you've phrased this is rather beautiful, in that it suggests that good art is art which matches the intent of the author.

Some artists seek to recreate the world around them in great fidelity, and if they succeed in producing photorealistic paintings then for them, that is great art. Others seek to stir up controversy or draw attention to some cause, and if their work achieves that then that is great art. Others may simply seek to express themselves, or find peace with their feelings, and if they succeed in this then it is great art.

This is of course a different definition than Paul Graham would use. It does not allow for so much judgement and comparison. But for people interested in producing art, rather than consuming it, I think it's a much more useful perspective.

analog312• 5 years ago

This is certainly the case for learning jazz improvisation. The primary obstacle, even for otherwise good musicians, is knowing you're going to suck at it for a long time before you get good. Even if you have an unorthodox idea of what you want it to sound like.

lvs• 5 years ago

There is such a thing as bad philosophy. By example, it's philosophy produced by narcissists thoroughly unaware and uninterested in any aspect of the canon of philosophy that predates them.

jeremysalwen• 5 years ago

My immune system has better taste than yours. It only responds to the most refined vaccines.

p.s. help im dying.

alakra• 5 years ago

I was talking to an artist a few years ago who seemed to downplay the significance of her art as we discussed the paths of lives we each took, she a traditional artist and I a hacker.

I had to quickly remind her that the importance of her art was substantial because it helped other people see ideas and other unseen things clearly. We need this in our communities and societies more than ever.

I love this idea because those with good taste can show layers of depth through their art much better than those with poor taste.

raydev• 5 years ago

I wonder if this is at all related to the massive wave of hatred for Bored Apes/Lions, etc.

Even putting aside people's issues with the concept of NFTs, people seem to agree the art is somewhere between bad and revolting. Except for the people investing in them.

bambax• 5 years ago

Because if there is such a thing as good art, it's easy to tell which of two people has better taste. Show them a lot of works by artists they've never seen before

I mostly agree with the theory here, however doing that is impossible or very difficult, because the way you build taste is to educate it, by rubbing your senses against great art.

So it's extremely unlikely you can find a person with good taste that would "never have seen before" a lot of great art in the domain they have taste in.

Although he doesn't discuss this here, I fear the reason why PG imagines this setup is because he believes good taste is in fact innate; you either have good taste or you don't, and there's nothing you can do about it.

That's just not true. As with most things, you start somewhere and then you grow.

DanielBMarkham• 5 years ago

I find with a lot of more interesting topics, I have to come up with my own definition, then measure it against what various people say.

Good art, at least to me, is art that has emotional impact over time. I can view a painting by a master and it will affect me. I can hear one of Beethoven's symphonies and somehow I'm inside his head during that time.

These do not seem to be things you can measure in the moment, or at least I can't. It takes decades to sort out art that people like from art that continues to carry strong emotional impact. So, in my mind at least, there's a lot of room for subjectivity when talking about modern art. As things age, however, much of that subjectivity goes away, and it goes away for the exact reasons pg outlines.

There is such a thing as good taste, but in terms of modern art it's difficult if not impossible to put your finger on it.

ajuc• 5 years ago

Each work of art is a multidimensional vector, you can objectively decide how long the vector is along its direction (how well executed it is), but you cannot objectively decide which direction is better.

People call "taste" the part that decides which directions you like.

majormajor2• 5 years ago

There is definitely such a thing as "popular" taste (and indeed, there are many variations of it, since the populace is large and varied - this alone starts to make a sole idea of "good taste" difficult to accept), and there is definitely such a thing as skill at producing works that those with a popular taste appreciates.

The presented "proof" doesn't go any further than that, though. It mentions that it changes a lot over time, but instead of engaging with that as an indicator that taste is always a moment-by-moment subjective thing, then IMO goes off the rails a bit with weird analogies. It ends up circular. Good art is that which causes the desired reaction in those with good taste?

The best counter-argument to this skill/practice-based argument is that you can put a lot of skill and practice into something that people end up rejecting. Literature, film, and music shows plenty of examples of this. Even software shows this - you can spend a lot of effort to make a very intricate piece of software, that someone with "taste" may sneer at because of how fragile it is, even if they couldn't create it themselves. And then you are left just with that circular "your effort and practice and skill doesn't matter if it doesn't focus on the right things that hit your audience the right way, so the important skill is that of hitting your audience the right way, so a lot of it is up to the audience, so good taste is defined by ... itself and its audience"?

danielmarkbruce2• 5 years ago

Yes, I got the same thing from it. It seems like pg is confused by the existing definition of "good taste". At least one definition of good taste is being able to spot what will be popular. It doesn't mean the things you like are "good" in some vague sense. Anecdotally some people have insight into humans which allows them to figure if something will be popular.

The entire essay should be a short proposal to a dictionary publisher :

"Please make it clear that the definition of taste is "being able to spot what lots of other people will like"".

People could debate that and you don't need the silly "proofs".

anusharma• 5 years ago

>So if you want to discard the concept of good taste, you also have to discard the concept of good art. And that means you have to discard the possibility of people being good at making it.

This kind of assumes that all good artists have good taste. Some artists may have good taste, but may not be great artists themselves. Others may create great art, sometimes by chance, and understand its relevance post-facto (maybe as it becomes more contextually relevant?).

In my experience (some engineering, mostly product mgmt), taste is an emergent property. As some others have alluded, good taste can emerge from both intuition and thought/reflection. The hard part is articulating what makes one piece of art better than others. Most people can recognize the gap between paintings of an 8 yr old's painting vs. Bellini, but does that mean they have good taste? Many of us have some built-in, intuitive sense of taste. But to apply/execute on it, we need to be able to articulate it.

mgaunard2• 5 years ago

Good taste is simply a matter of depth.

Take for example coffee. If you have bad taste, you just buy supermarket instant coffee and use the cheapest cafetiere. If you have taste, you've researched what makes coffee good or bad, buy whole beans roasted locally, and acquired a coffee brewer where you can control the extraction to get a good result.

raz32dust• 5 years ago

Taste, by definition, is subjective. Good taste is a matter of knowing your audience and knowing your inventory. If you can use your inventory to create something that your target audience loves, you have good taste. It requires having a great inventory (knowing the taste of a lot of things), and having good emotional intelligence, and hence it takes time to develop good taste and maintain it.

bobthechef• 5 years ago

This is where I'd differentiate between taste and beauty. Taste is a property of people. Beauty is a property of things. Taste is the ability to recognize and respond to the beauty of things in proportion to how beautiful they actually are. Thus, taste is ultimately a matter of intellectual refinement. The intellect, property developed, recognizes beauty effectively. Someone with bad taste can be said to either lack discernment (when they cannot tell the difference between the Pietà and some second rate work) or possess disordered tastes (when they show the same estimation or even greater estimation of the inferior to the superior).

Taste is very much related to desirability because what is beautiful is better than which is less so, and what is therefore good is more desirable than which is less so. Just as people can have bad taste, they can have bad desires. Take food, for example. Those who desire mediocre food to the same degree as good food have poor taste and therefore poor desires. Those with a desire to eat glass or their couch cushions (something people with pika might experience) have disordered tastes and therefore disordered desires.

As to the art itself, since art involves mimesis, good art can be measured in part by how well it imitates. (Imitation should not be understood here simplistically as implying photorealism.) An artist who either lacks discernment or lacks technique will produce mediocre imitations. There are feature of art itself which are not exhausted by imitation. These, too, determine whether the artwork itself is good. Composition and proportionality of the artwork itself (and not just the subject) are examples. While the subject may be beautiful, the execution of the artwork may be poor.

Now as PG says, art has an effect on us (indeed, it communicates to us), but because art is artifact and thus lacks an inherent end, its perfection cannot be completely explained without making reference to something with an inherent end which artifacts lack. Human nature is that thing. Human beings individually may possess variable perfections and variable degrees of perfection, including capacity for aesthetic judgement, either because they have either intrinsic individual limitations or because they have not actualized their capacities fully, but one and the same human nature. So we must look to human nature if we want to explain art. Indeed, throughout history, art tracks the understanding of human nature in a given culture. Cultures that understand the dignity of the human person value portraiture in a way those that don't do not.

Aesthetic judgement is value judgement from a different perspective, and therefore a truth claim (the fact-value dichotomy is bogus).

PaulDavisThe1st4• 5 years ago

And yet for centuries we've had *"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", which insists that you're wrong.

brahadeesh• 5 years ago

"If there's no such thing as good taste, then there's no such thing as good art. Because if there is such a thing as good art, it's easy to tell which of two people has better taste. Show them a lot of works by artists they've never seen before and ask them to choose the best, and whoever chooses the better art has better taste."

Is anyone else finding this hard to accept? What if, for some mysterious reason, everyone chooses one particular artist? What if everyone knows good art from bad art, but there is no such thing as good taste precisely because everyone has the same taste?

actually_a_dog• 5 years ago

Yes, there is. And, I will say that people who operate a website and don't tell their users they've done something wrong before limiting their accounts, then provide only a cryptic error message that doesn't indicate what the infraction is, don't have it.

Specifically, if you're going to penalize people for doing something, tell them that you're doing it, rather than hide behind some cryptic, "technical difficulties"-sounding error message. Treat people like adults, and I suspect you'll have better results most of the time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29037349

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024602

slmjkdbtl• 5 years ago

No. There's no objective "good art", only popular art. When we say something is "good" we're saying it's popular, either in mass or in a certain community. I think this is the cleanest explanation with the minimal assumptions and favored by stuff like Occam's razor, because defining "good" requires way too many controversial criteria, and you might have to go through that for every medium, which is infinite amount.

However, that's just my theory / ideal. I still occasionally feel my taste is superior to others, which I'm not proud of. You can say it's another argument (a sociological / weak one), that the sense of superiority in taste is not helpful.

arcanon• 5 years ago

I disagree with Paul when he weakened his argument from perfect to good taste. There are some artists who have more control over details than others. By perfect you would be able to perfectly recreate the reality of the subject/scene.

JohnFen3• 5 years ago

I think that my definition of "good taste" still beats every other definition or argument I've heard (including this essay): if you like what I like, you have good taste.

dfdz• 5 years ago

Because if there is such a thing as good art, it's easy to tell which of two people has better taste. Show them a lot of works by artists they've never seen before and ask them to choose the best, and whoever chooses the better art has better taste.

This step of the argument assumes the conclusion. If both people answer n true false questions randomly, then with high probability (probability at least 1- 1/sqrt(n) ) one person will have answered more questions correctly.

This does not imply that either person is better than random.

d_burfoot• 5 years ago

The problem of taste is philosophically deep and relates to issues in epistemology that have only recently been resolved with new ideas from information theory and machine learning.

Part of the problem is about complex inductive processes. Human knowledge has encompassed simple deduction (Aristotelian syllogism), simple induction (P values, N=200 medical studies), and complex deduction (operating systems, compilers, etc). We are comfortable with how these systems of reasoning work.

But art relates to the fourth quadrant - complex induction, with billion-parameter models trained against enormous datasets. When a human says "I think this painting is beautiful, but that one is ugly", they are expressing something about the response of their visual cortex (a multi-billion parameter learning system) to a rich stimulus (say, 1 million pixels). With the advent of research like GPT-3, we can now build these systems, though we don't understand their properties very well. There is a lot more for us to understand here, both conceptually and technically.

renlo• 5 years ago

Put another way, "good taste" is like universal ethics. There's no such thing as "universal taste" (as in, God did not ordain something to have the quality of "good taste"), but, most people can agree that they like a thing (an "agreement of taste"). Former doesn't exist but latter does. Tastes shift over time indicating that a "universal taste" doesn't exist.

When the term "good taste" is used though, it seems to allude to "universal taste". I don't think people mean "what everyone likes" ("agreement of taste") when they refer to "good taste", otherwise all of the "gaudy" leopard-print clothing of yesteryear would be "good taste". "Good taste" means, to most people, "rich people value this, for whatever reason"

Barrin92• 5 years ago

"So if you want to discard the concept of good taste, you also have to discard the concept of good art. And that means you have to discard the possibility of people being good at making it"

This is I think the central argument of the piece and I think it is very wrong. He conflates the notion of goodness in a teleological sense with proficiency. When people talk about good or bad taste they try to make an objective claim about the purpose of art, that's to say what end a piece of art serves, or to judge the quality of what it ultimately expresses.

You can be 'good' in the sense of proficient on utterly meaningless tasks. Someone can memorize ten thousand digits of a random sequence. You can be good or bad at it, and we can objectively figure out if you are, but the task isn't objectively meaningful.

To say that there is no good or bad taste is to say there is, ultimately no non-subjective standard for a piece of art. This does not imply that any subject that produces art cannot be judged on their merits by their own standards.

ryanyde• 5 years ago

The piece just seems to fully encapsulate Silicon Valley Hubris. It's amazing that he thinks he's settled a debate on 'quality' or 'taste' with a logical argument, and that people consider this an 'objective' answer to the question.

The rhetorical trick is one that many have pointed out: 'technically' superior is - in fact - easy to recognize. That doesn't mean that objective judgment of technique is synonymous with taste.

"Taste" in that sense becomes something more about having a pulse on how humans will ingest certain ideas. You can have an intuitive understanding of this in a given time and space (creatives get paid a great deal to do this). But that has nothing to do with 'taste' as an objective quality metric, it has to do with how humans will perceive or interact with an object.

nixpulvis• 5 years ago

I don't bother reading these peices anymore, they no longer suit me. I suppose commenting on this forum will fall out of fashion completely one day as well. For my tastes change and my perpectives widen and narrow.

I do however hope that I find more people in tune with my current flavor, perhaps more who can add their own spice. Wouldn't that be nice.

;)

Gatsky• 5 years ago

He is making an argument that in a narrow sense good taste exists. He does not judge that that Italian artist that canned his own faeces is inferior to the Italian artist that sculpted the statue of David. One can appreciate the size and labelling of the can, the way it was lit and photographed, the fact that it was sealed. It is possible to imagine an inferior version of the canned faeces. This doesn't seem to be a crazy claim to make? To be honest I think taste is somewhat the wrong word, it seems to get hackles up about elitism.

To me he missed the easiest way to argue that good taste exists - due to the constraints of human perception, we can generate every possible work of art that fits on a canvas of a certain size. Should we do this, fill an online gallery with all these pictures and then declare that the visual medium is finished? That is a reasonable claim if there is no good taste, and it is absurd.

Furthermore, in the face of this omni-corpus an artist then transforms into a critic, who will browse this archive and highlight pictures they find interesting. Nothing is created, only curated. The outcome of this process is a work of art that someone may appreciate, which exists purely as the outcome of the artist/critic's taste, divorced from any act of creation. Yet this work of art is equivalent to one which was 'created' in the usual sense. The conclusion from this equivalence is that if you don't accept there is good taste, then you also accept that nothing is worth creating.

Post-modernism amounts to making a weaker claim, essentially saying that nothing is worth creating any more.

dsizzle• 5 years ago

This has a lot of overlap with the views of David Deutsch, who goes a little further and posits there may be such a thing as objective beauty https://www.nature.com/articles/526S16a.pdf?origin=ppub

jacquesm3• 5 years ago

You could say the same thing about music, but I know some perfectly executed but 'dead' music and the same piece by some amateur nobody ever heard of executed in a (far) less than perfect way that yet manages to make it come alive somehow. I've always been wondering what that quality is but I don't think any arguments about logic are going to settle it, if execution is all there is to good taste then a lot of well executed art would be valuable and yet it isn't.

Piet Mondriaan is a nice example: the execution could have been done by anybody willing to spend the time and the effort, but somehow the paintings have a value that well exceeds the association I have with the skills required to compose and execute them. I know a few painters that are off the scale good whose work will never be worth more than the materials cost, never mind their time.

Good taste is in the eye of the beholder, as well as what people agree on is good taste.

It's much easier to label something bad taste than to have a meaningful argument about what is mediocre taste or good taste. It's like trying to define culture in terms of observable facts about reality, instead of a living thing, the lens through which we perceive everything, including the frameworks we use to reason about things. You can't really measure anything with a yardstick made of rubber and springs.

kazinator2• 5 years ago

I don't think that Graham hit the mark here. Taste is not the name of the continuum along the bad-to-good axis. Taste is the undefinable nuance that plays out in the good end of that axis.

When some artwork is good, I know that and will defend its value, even if it is not to my taste.

cwp• 5 years ago

This essay seems to conflate skill with... oh, let's call it vision.

Skill is the difference between Picasso's scribbles and the dribbles of a random 8-year-old. Or between pg and Bellini. It's the ability to convey what you want to convey.

Vision is harder to pin down. It's deciding to convey something worthwhile. And that's the hard part. What's worthwhile? It's so dependent on context. Is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel meaningful to somebody that has never heard of Christianity? Is impressionism all that impressive without the photograph? For that matter, why aren't we impressed by new works of impressionism? How come some artists aren't celebrated in their own time?

So yeah, clearly there's such a thing as skillful art, and maybe being able to recognize that could be considered "good taste". But I'm not sure that there's such a thing as objectively meaningful art. If there is, it'd take more than a few paragraphs to prove it.

dools• 5 years ago

His reasoning is circular because artists create art to suit the tastes of their audience.

ahartmetz• 5 years ago

Partially, I guess? The celebrated ones tend to be the ones to suit a taste the audience didn't know they had - especially today when we've seen incredible virtuosos of just about anything, so "different" is the only thing people haven't seen before. But surely there are artists who are more or less successful with more conventional work.

teunispeters• 5 years ago

There's a level of "craft" to many things - quality of work that increases the more one practices at it. Not arbitrary "I taste food anyway" more like "I learn to identify the flavours and cooking techniques".

In visual presentation, there's also the human preferences - movement (eg Van Gogh and his inspirations including traditional Chinese and Japanese brush art and its attentions on wind and wave), symmetry (almost all cultures, and rebels against such as Picasso), detailed representation, and difficulty to craft.

But I know little of art, other than I like going to galleries from time to time. In code, there's cleanliness, efficiency, symmetry with documentation and effects and - the end result. All of these take craft, and - it can show. The more consistent and reliable, the better the craft, as well. Oh one can get into aesthetic tastes as well - how well a particular medium is for use to be effective, the different art and craft in all the sources and contexts. Not everyone will see the craft in the construction of paper, or the laying of a foundation, but those who know the craft - may. And it can matter to those who wish do to work they value, even if never seen by another.

treatmesubj• 5 years ago

Such thing as 'good' taste (in art)? *Is there 'good' art? Are there 'good' artists?

Graham says: If no such thing as 'good' taste >>> no such thing as 'good' art >>> no such thing as being 'good' at making art You could still have popular art, but not 'good' art. In a vaccum, on the whole, people would generally say Davinci's art was better than a 4-year-old's *probably because it seems more impressive or skillful

*Art-skill is the effectiveness of conveying a concept to the observer or illiciting a desired response from the observer

---- someone basically commented: You can be extrememly skilled at making some obscure art that no one else could make, but almost no one likes, but if the target niche receives it well, you made good art.

You can make popular art with virtually no effort, that literally anyone else could've made.

somone responded: > and there are many productions which take virtually no effort which people love It only takes a quick trip to reddit to see this in action. In a thread where people were talking about the jails and the overall penal system, someone said "heh...penal" and it had several Golds and thousands of points. ----

someone basically commented: People who like Pop music are regarded as having horrible taste, yet Pop music is wildly popular.

*Are the people who make Pop music 'good' at making music? Yes, they effectively make music designed to be consumed by the masses

*Then, why do the people who like Pop music have bad taste? Well, you'd assume that if they're choosing to listen to widely consumable music of their own volition, rather than using their time appreciating more sophisticated music, that takes more knowledge to appreciate, they probably don't have good taste.

*Taste is the ability to recognize _power_ in art. If you can recognize power in art without it already being widely appreciated, but you expect it to down the line, and it does become popular down the line, you have good taste.

danielmarkbruce2• 5 years ago

You have better taste than me if the art you like is better than the art I like.

That definition sends the essay down a strange path. Does anyone actually use that definition? Most definitions of taste say something which amounts to "a person with good taste has good judgement about how popular something is/will be on some dimension". Even if it's purely aesthetics. And, anecdotally there are some people who have it.

simonblack• 5 years ago

"If it wasn't for bad taste, you guys would have no taste at all." - Honeysuckle Rose (1980 film)

bmitc• 5 years ago

The strongest proof would be to show that taste exists in the narrowest sense, so I'm going to talk about taste in art. You have better taste than me if the art you like is better than the art I like.
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.

This makes no sense to me.

ramraj07• 5 years ago

Seems like PG has run out of good insights. It’s possible almost all the great essays he wrote were seeded quite early in his life and he slowly evolved them into great writing. But once he exhausted that original bucket nothing good has come out of his head since :(

uncomputation• 5 years ago

Because his argument is not good. The structure is “If there is no X, then there is no Y. Because Y, X.” This is circular reasoning which is more obvious if we use the same structure as

“If carbon exists, then carbon-based alien life forms exist. Because carbon-based aliens exist, carbon exists.”

Logically, not wrong, but you missed the most interesting part of the proof: aliens exist?! PG missed proving the most interesting part of his post: that good taste exists. I don’t think reductio ad absurdum really works here because there are millions of possible explanations for the “effects” of good taste. In his example, the fact that people have non-random responses to art.

The problem here is just the fact that people have consistent responses to art does not suppose that there exists some inherent reasoning called “taste.” In fact, many popular things are abhorred as poor taste. I think we can agree that liking Citizen Kane more than Twilight would be called “good taste.” The problem here of course is that “taste” is a sociological construct - not a logical or philosophical one - designed by humans to distinguish class upon non-obvious signifiers. Perhaps you could dress a lower class person in fancy dress and perfume, but any upper class person could snuff them out in a moment by any hundreds of small little signifiers.

PG seems to want to talk about taste without having to say any of the unfashionable things about it, not naming any specific art works or signifiers of taste. He wants to “prove” taste exists without ever even defining it. Without a single example in this framework that lends credence to his ideas. By his logic, Marvel movies and Twilight should be more tasteful than Vertigo because more people more consistently like it. In reality, taste works the opposite way, but it’s not that simple either. Most people would hate Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, but that does not mean that liking it means you have good taste. Rather the opposite in fact. The truth here, of course, is that “taste” is a cultural, social, and economic property and lens, not a logical one. You have to get into real world to argue about taste, which PG seems entirely uninterested in doing.

If I may be a bit tongue in cheek, I would advise Paul that if you want to start talking about taste, you must first talk about scarcity and then irony.

dredmorbius• 5 years ago

It's presently in good taste to answer "no".

LudwigNagasena2• 5 years ago

It is an okay essay for an intro into philosophy of aesthetics class.

bradwood• 5 years ago

Yes.

Source: me

Is there such a thing as good taste?

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