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.

> 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.

It even happens within counter-culture groups or those who claim that fashion doesn't matter, over time—they develop clothing-related signals and in-group markers. Consider the tech bro in the $140 hoodie and $120 rock-climbing-oriented "tech pants" and $300 hipster throwback work-boots telling you very seriously that they immediately dismiss anyone who comes to an interview in a suit, as a poseur.

For example, not wearing white after labor day to tell apart nouveau riche from old family money circles.

Fascinating meta gameplay here.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

You've managed to scratch a mighty itch that's been bothering me for a long time. I finally have somewhat of a framework to think about it a little more, and I have you to thank for that.

In particular, this bit is pure gold:

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

Art is, at it's core, communication. More precisely, it's the name we've given to the wide variety of traditions that we've developed for communicating in manners distinct from plain everyday communication. Thus, art necessarily represents something, but each individual piece of art represents something different from the next. The message conveyed by a piece of art can indeed be to direct the recipient's attention to the technical skill of the artist, but in most cases skill is secondary, and only matters insofar as it aids the artist in communicating their actual intent.

As such, art which only exists to showcase the artist's skill is essentially devoid of meaning outside of vanity, such pieces of art representing something directly comparable to the significance of a sentence like "Don't you just love my accent?" - a self-referential display of conceit.

For this reason, I don't think you can really refute postmodernism simply by having some kind of direct experience of reality of the sort you were listing – as if postmodernists explicitly deny the primacy of these sorts of experiences. Postmodernists would only contend that a system of thought based on the primacy of such experiences is no more inherently valid or universally applicable than a system of thought with some other basis. (Though of course that is a very trite slogan, and I am not suggesting that all 'postmodern' thinkers would express things in those terms, or even agree at all.)

Understandably, people who don't like postmodern tendencies in thought want to find a definite definition of postmodernism to argue against. But as soon as you cast postmodernism as a particular doctrine that makes particular claims, it's no longer postmodernism.

This is a fairly widely mocked opinion, it;'s the same caliber of criticism as the "we should improve society" meme. The fact that both sides participate in shared narrative isn't a sign that both are corrupt, it's a sign the narrative is important.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...

To take a toy example, consider the George Washington cherry tree myth: https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-e...

I was taught that as a kid as a straight-up truth as a package of patriotic narratives. If I had said, "Well that's a good story, but that never happened," the people teaching it wouldn't have said, "You're right! But it's a good story that has a nice moral." They would have been mad at me for contradicting patriotic truth. And madder still if I asked why they were feeding me false stories as if they were true.

In contrast, the people I've read who would point out the issues with the cherry tree story are generally more frank about why they're doing it and more honest about the limits of knowledge and narrative. Many are happy to appreciate myths as myths, for example, and to have nuanced discussions about the role of myth.

I think we're seeing the consequences of this sort of postmodern thinking playing out "in the field" today. Everyone's an expert, so no one is. Everyone's an armchair epidemiologist. We aren't ignorant or ill-educated, we're "just asking questions".

There's something there that I can't put my finger on regarding the poisonous way we promise everyone that they can be anything. You, too, can earn $10k a month in your underwear via dropshipping. You, too, have the world's information at your fingertips, so nothing's keeping you from being an expert! You, too, can produce professional-quality video; all you need is the latest iPhone. And so on. I think it generates a lot of unspoken societal resentment towards people who are actually good at these things, because people who fail to reach that level of skill after 30 minutes are implicitly made to feel like they're doing something wrong.

I always use stubbing one's toe as an example of a direct experience of reality in all its realness.

(+1 to the favourable comments on your posts - complex ideas expressed skilfully and clearly!)

For example, two decades ago when I was double majoring in both geology and English, I found the poststructuralist idea that a 'text' exists separately from narratives about its meaning, but the narratives of meaning were inseparable from the broader social constructs use to build the narratives, both clearly correct and very useful in understanding the process of scientific inquiry. The Earth exists, you know, somewhat independently of us; however geological theory is a human construct and every part of the process from measurement to analysis to interpretation to presentation is a human act that carries with it the stamp of human ingenuity and human flaws: The sample sites selected for measurement, and the measurements themselves, contain biases and other uncertainties related to the selection process (mostly based on theoretical considerations), the engineering of the measurement tools, and other constraints (e.g. physical and budgetary limits). Obviously, scientific methodologies are centered around scientific theories, one or two of which is tested and refined in the process, but a thousand others are invoked as assumption and context, i.e. a larger theoretical structure. And presentation is communication, and additional choices are made as to what to highlight and what to gloss over.

Similarly, postmodernism's stance that there is no objective and unbiased observation and interpretation, and therefore all perspectives use one or more lenses that basically basically bias or filter the results, is clearly and often quite literally applicable to the sciences (think microscopy or remote sensing). Beyond those trivial cases, I think postmodernist theory helped me be able to disentangle the literature a bit and think, "OK, when someone interested in river erosion and landscape evolution looks at this dataset, they see X but I am interested in tectonics and Y stands out", or (in a wider theoretical context) "the geophysicists who come into the geosciences from physics use mathematical tools and make assumptions that assume the processes and configurations are time-invariant; on the other hand, the geologists know this area has evolved over the past 2 million years but their data analysis is trash--and that's why the groups can't talk to each other".

The major difference here I think is intentionality. The STEM communities do generally operate on good faith and have some sense of shared purpose, and scientific advancements are real, positive sum phenomena. So it's possible to apply these tools to the literature and to one's colleagues in a way that doesn't really involve value/moral judgements or seek to diminish or purposefully misinterpret the work of others. However this is missing in much of the liberal arts world where there is no clear definition of progress, and as a result much can be reduced to controlling unfalsifiable narratives and battles for influence.

That said, for all of its possible utility, critical theory's current escape from academia into the wider world doesn't seem to be going well. (For what it's worth, I also see modern Identitarianism as a full-throated but unwitting rejection of postmodernism, by holding that meaning is really implicit in texts, and that only some identity groups can legitimately produce and/or interpret texts. So they have moved on from Derrida's nihilism and are establishing a new priesthood even while canonizing him.)

Edit: I'd also like to emphasize that the ability to make somewhat accurate measurements, quantify misfits between modeled (i.e. theoretical) and observational data, and the ability to downweight, modify and/or reject hypotheses is also a major factor that allows for progress in STEM fields vs. the liberal arts, which limits the proliferation of bad-faith narratives that can use the offenses and defenses of post-(and post-post-)modernist theory.

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

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

So, IMO, this self fulfilling meta-nonsense to generate self fulfilling meta-nonsense.

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."

> 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/

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.

How does one determine "better art"?

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

"Better" and "worse" overall are necessarily subjective assessments. Is that piece of garbage car worse than a high-end one? By some measures, yes. But if your criteria include "being the least expensive", then no, it's not.

I mean, look at Andy Warhol or Banksy or Robert Rauschenberg or Bill Watterson or any of hundreds of examples that clearly fall way outside the "Renaissance = good" bubble.

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".

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.

What? You clearly know very little about how pop music is produced. If you think the stuff people like Lady Gaga and Dua Lipa (and their teams of writers and producers) put out is low-effort then you're just another clueless snob

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

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.

"Aspirational" means "you don't have it".

So all cultural taste is people trying to fake being in a better class than they are? Baloney. There are plenty of people who like things because they like those things, not because they think liking those things will make them look more upper class.

"Aspirational" taste is exactly what you get when people don't have taste, but want to look like they do. They copy someone else's taste (or a group average). And because they're aspirational, they try really hard to pretend that they do in fact have taste. But they just wind up cluttering up the discussion, because they don't actually know anything.

But there are people who actually do know some things about taste, and what is worthwhile, and value. They exist. They just get lost in the noise of a bunch of people who are trying to look like they know, even though they don't...

"It is not at all natural to want to listen to classical music. Learning to appreciate it is like Pascal's wager: you pretend to be religious, and suddenly you have faith. You pretend to love Beethoven-or Stravinsky-because you think that will make you appear educated and cultured and intelligent, because that kind of music is prestigious in professional circles, and suddenly you really love it, you have become a fanatic, you go to concerts and buy records and experience true ecstasy when you hear a good performance (or even when you hear a mediocre one if you have little judgment)."

Like I started with Bach because my mom showed me how to read music, then let me loose on the piano. I had a songbook, and it had Bach's (actually Petzold's) Minuet in G major&minor. That grabbed me in a way nothing else in the book did (kid's book, so stuff like silent night, camptown races, etc). No one 'told' me to like it, or even play it, and there was certainly no social pressure to do so, quite the opposite. It was entirely internal, and contrary to everything happening around me (pop, C&W, think rural uneducated population with a disdain for learning and the arts).

I'm not arguing that people can't develop appreciation via faking, but I find it a rather dismissive and cynical way to look at it in general. I would say it takes a bit of openness if you are approaching something that you didn't consume naturally in social situations, but not too much, except perhaps for very abstract things, or complex things far removed from your experience (Chinese opera for an American, for example, which fascinates yet eludes me at some level).

For example, if you think that being nerd is cool, nerdy things will make you happier, and you may even be proud of liking all things nerd. You're not faking; it's a genuine part of how you see yourself.

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.

When the self-identified Bronies were questioned about their enjoyment of the show and its relation to the author's intent, many of them were quite happy to denigrate or take a paternalistic view toward girls' (and children's) entertainment in general.

The authors of the paper pointed out that the narrative of taste (reflected in, say, how the fans described the animation style, voice acting, themes) of the TV show allowed the adult (predominantly male) fans to continue society's general disparagement of childrens' and girls' TV. The adults, the narrative goes, are the ones with taste, who can identify and select what's good, and the girls - the intended audience - have no input. Some paternalistic attitudes involved the idea that the show would teach young girls critical thinking skills, other responses said that the show's quality would teach young girls to appreciate higher quality TV (implicitly, the kind of TV that adult fans approve of, with messages they approve of).

Ironically, this also extended to the author of Season 1 of the show, Lauren Faust - who herself has said that she wanted to create a show that was a break from the typically low quality of girls' entertainment as she saw it.

Taste (and community policing of who has it or can have it) can be a force for exclusion and maintaining hegemony. I think fandom can become a microcosm of what we see play out in a larger scale with highly educated (typically rich) people deciding what media is good and what's bad for the poor.

Hackers like to build and respect people who build cool things without getting political. Similarly classical art can be appreciated from the point of view of pure craftmanship.

Is Doom more impressive piece of software than a Javascript "Hello world"?

I claim it is. Similar claims can be applied to specific art genres without political dimension if you know the genre.

I find Bourdeaus analysis to be - frankly - a form of navel gazing that has nothing of merit to give to politics, or art.

Yes, everything people do have a political dimension. But one should be able to discuss art theory without confusing it with class warfare.

While everything can and will be weaponized as an instrument of oppression, I don't see the added value of starting from the point of view.

It's like a silly action movie trope, only applied to a political context.

I.e. in a fancy restaurant - that's a nice steak knife you have there - it would work really well in a combat setting. Really?

Bourdieu discusses this very point in the Preface of The Rules of Art.

"(...) countless are those who forbid sociology any profaning contact with the work of art. (...) I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why they are so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational, understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the 'work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence."

A scientific understanding of art doesn't or negate or lower it. On the contrary : "(...) scientific analysis, when it is able to uncover what makes the work of art necessary, that is to say, its informing formula, its generative principle, its raison d'être, also furnishes artistic experience, and the pleasure which accompan­ies it with its best justification, its richest nourishment. Through it, sensible love of the work can fulfill itself in a sort of amor intellectualis rei the assimilation of the object to the subject and the immersion of the subject in the object, the active surrender to the singular necessity of the literary object (which, more often than not, is itself the product of a similar submission)."

It's a short but dense 5 page read.

Sorry I prefer quoting Feynman - art theory is about as usefull for enjoying and doing art as ornithology is for birds. The original quote was "Philosophy of science is about as useful for science as ornithology is for birds."

Note! This does not denigrate the "useless" fields as such - but the point of view is that their usefulness for the field they claim to study is at most limited.

As a trained physicist and hobbyist artist I can pretty much agree with this. Doing physics and doing art is so friggin hard that while focusing on them, human cognition has no space for analysis in any other domain.

Want to analyse a classical painting? Well, there is a very good technique for this but it requires a huge amount of labour - replicate it.

I realize this is a very technical point of view, but having a hands-on experience, it's very hard to convince me any other way would offer superior understanding of the core issues at play.

I must repeat that I am not discounting analysis - but they are only secondary in importance to the ding an sich.

Sorry. This is getting a very long winded way of expressing my point of view.

I read Paul's essay from this very specifically technical point of view that acknowledges the inherent complexity in the chosen domain (classical art) and hence takes it obvious that there are some works 'better' than others. But there is no numerical metric we can use to gauge paintings - hence we must refer to an intuitive understanding of the quality of a work. Paul calls this 'intuitive understanding of quality' taste.

I think the whole point was to point out that some things can be considered rationally better than others, even though we don't have an objective numerical measure for this goodness.

While it's anyone's right to pass their opinion as a fact, it helps little in terms of explaining how different people react to art.

> art theory is about as usefull for enjoying and doing art as ornithology is for birds.

I believe the trouble here is that birds rarely try to pass as ornithologists. Trying to formulate a general theory about what makes art or artistic taste is sociology work, not art.

> some things can be considered rationally better than others

I hope blue is your favorite color, because it's mine; and if it's not yours, you're wrong.

No, but if we both are at a painting course and painting the same still life, it is plausible we can come to a honest agreement about whose painting we prefer, which details are better presented in the others work and so on.

We are obviously talking of two entirely different things - art as a social phenomenon, and art as art (a technical skill, an aesthetic experience ).

"Taste as a metric" has entirely different meaning in these two contexts. In the sociological context I completely agree with you.

But in the "art as craft to be done, not merely observed because that is boring" sense the sociological analysis offers nothing (for the skill or the aesthetic experience).

We could be discussing of racing - the sociological aspect of observing the race - or of the actual driving which operate on completely two context.

So sociology studies audiences, while I am talking about actually driving/painting and how the perceptions in that domain have nothing to do with sociology but the craft based aspects only.

Considering the complexity,we are beyond the point where the work is so difficult that Taylorian external analysis of purely mechanical facts leads to an incomplete understanding of the actual work done.

So if someone would focus only on the sociological, observe-without-learning-craft type of analysis, their viewpoint would not envelope the art-ding-an-sich. Which is totally fine - but external to actually _doing art_.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/Jan_Brue...

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437317

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/490581

As you can see, the three artists didn't value the same things in their composition. All three are recognized enough to have their place in a museum. And I seriously doubt you can find a consensus about a general theory to rank their work.

But can we "rank art" at all? I think we can but we need to look not at the masters, but at the multitude of nameless students, most of which will never get their works displayed.

Let's take an thought experiment - an art class of local hobbyists is given the task of copying only one of them, let's say the Pissarro one.

After everyone considers their work done, each student is given the task of distributing the paintings to two groups, "the better half" and "the not-as-good" half.

Are the groupings random, or is there "a sense of taste and quality" guiding the students?

If you agree that it is likely that this grouping can be done in a way that is not random, we can agree on my point that there is a non-numerical-yet-not-random way to rate art that can be applied at least some of the time. If we disagree, we disagree and that's fine.

Another example:

Our daughter likes to draw a lot in her own style. Now she is revisiting her old drawings and redrawing them few years later. While her earlier work has some naive charm, she tends to prefer her later pieces, and indeed I do find her current work "better" in the sense that the characters are "more" there - they are more skilfully renderered and have "more character".

I think she is "a better artist" a few years later. Would others agree on this? Again, I would imagine they do.

I think the condensed version of my claim is "There are scenarios where within a given genre/style art can be rated by a non-random yet non-numerical measure".

I think piano competitions, especially the ones where the contestants play the same pieces work this way - there is a non-numerical, yet non-random measure guided by the jurys taste on who is the best.

I do appreciate you have the patience to continue this dialogue!

> Within the group, the extent of your knowledge will help you distinguish from others.

> the way this taste (but also the artist's skill) is acquired is highly correlated with social belonging: your appreciation of a specific piece of work is informed by your past experience within your social environment.

The setting you describe is a perfect example of this: a group with agreed upon acquired taste, which uses knowledge of that taste as criteria to rank art pieces. In that setting, the judgement is bidirectional: not only do people judge art pieces' worth, but they are judged for their good taste by their ability to separate the pieces according to the group's criteria.

> Our daughter likes to draw a lot in her own style. Now she is revisiting her old drawings and redrawing them few years later. While her earlier work has some naive charm, she tends to prefer her later pieces, and indeed I do find her current work "better" in the sense that the characters are "more" there - they are more skilfully renderered and have "more character".

I don't want to judge your daughter's art, but it is perhaps unsurprising that she uses her latest opinion to judge her own work. As she acquires a sense of aesthetics, her new artwork will tend to confirm to that new taste.

On this we disagree. I think the students can do the sorting without peer pressure, driven only by their innate perception and love of the specific genre.

If we enforce this by making the selection process completely anonymous? Do you still feel the students will still feel judged for their taste?

It is also not only values, but also knowledge. If you know classical music theory, you will be able to appreciate and distinguish baroque music, while people with other educations may seek different things in the music they listen to.

> Do you still feel the students will still feel judged for their taste?

The main point here isn't about judgement. It's a personal gratification for the viewer to be able to see subtleties in the author's art. It's very similar to people personally enjoying learning about technology, while also being able to acknowledge peers in a technical discussion and also seeing social benefits from being able to program.

Bourdieu's analysis is extremely valuable IMHO even if you disagree with it. He's not really starting from a point of view, but he actually did fieldwork and then synthesized a theory of taste and how it relates to class.

> Is Doom more impressive piece of software than a Javascript "Hello world"?

In your question you make a mistake of substituting how impressive something is vs how beautiful it is or less technically whether it is a work of art or not etc.

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

Of course someone with no taste would say this. :) I'm kidding.

Your statement reads like a punitive judgement, constructed to paint anyone who pursues enlightenment as entirely performative for external validation. Am I wrong?

What makes you so certain it is correct?

In your world does no one pursue enlightenment for its own ends?

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.

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.

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.

;)

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.

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

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

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.

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.

https://xkcd.com/915/

Interpretation/Message A: You can find nuance and subtlety in anything, including Joe Biden photographs. This means that most wine-tasters/foodie snobs/art critics are just grasping at straws, and there is no value in subject pursuits of evaluation of quality whether it be Food or Art.

This is a disappointingly common perspective amongst tech nerds.

Interpretation/Message B: You can find nuance and subtlety in anything, including Joe Biden photographs. This is a testament to the power of the human mind and personality - that we can identify small minute differences in objects, flavours, and creations, and describe them with specificity. There is genuine beauty in the variety in the world and offhand shallow interactions with them do not adequately permit a full appreciation of the wonders of the universe. It's worth taking the time to find an area to gain an in-depth understanding in in, regardless of what anyone thinks. Yes, even Joe Biden photographs, if that's all it would be.

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

They took a bottle of cheap vodka, took a sample out, filtered the rest, took another sample and set it aside, and re-filtered the remaining vodka, and repeated this 10 times, so that they had a spectrum of vodka samples from filtered zero times to 10 times. They then brought on a vodka expert to taste test them and randomized the order of the samples to see if he could re-order them based on the number of times they went through the filter.

And he did it PERFECTLY.

IIRC, Adam and Jamie could tell the difference after 1 run through the filter, but not further runs.

The problem might just be that the TV shows you watch are so mediocre they can't even get a real expert.

Consider an American food analogue. Do I distinguish good and bad grilled cheese? How can I when its identity is that of a basic, unhealthy, cheap, low-class food? If you add more exotic ingredients, it becomes distant from its quintessential identity, so it becomes "good" grilled cheese in inverse proportion to it being, actually, grilled cheese. Contrariwise, if you enhance it by further indulging in the fats, oils, salts, etc., can we say this is "better" when it has also become even more base, even more low class? It becomes better as it becomes worse.

I find myself wanting to say something similar to your friend. All the grilled cheese are the same to me. I can plainly see one is different than another, but they are all objects of derision, and they only rise above that derision insofar as they stop being grilled cheese.

That's an assertion, not a self-evident fact. And one that I (and I am certain, many other people) would dispute.

Also in the cheap camp considering the ingredients are cheap and making it does not seem too time or equipment intensive.

I find working with dough to always be complicated, but the recipe itself seems simple enough, so it might qualify as basic too, relative to other recipes.

Low class is ill defined, but assuming it means it is popular with poorer people due to the lower cost of its ingredients and preparation, then it might also be true.

"Basic" is clearly not a useful adjective, when a grilled cheese sandwich can be made with a variety of different ingredients some of which are easily available in most parts of the world, and some are not. Certainly you can make a basic grilled cheese sandwich, but it's a logical fallacy to leap from there to "all grilled cheese sandwiches are basic".

"Low class" is again highly ingredient dependent. A grilled cheese sandwich made with some "rare" sourdough bread, irish grass fed butter and 3 kinds of artisanal cheese from different parts of the world is just as much as grilled cheese sandwich as one made with wonderbread and slices of american "cheese product". It's a similar logical fallacy: just because you can make a "low class grilled cheese" doesn't imply that "all grilled cheese sandwiches are low class".

"Cheap" is also covered in a similar way.

Unhealthy I will generally concede, other than to note that our ideas about what is and is not healthy or unhealthy food shift a lot over time (and often loop back on themselves).

For instance, I'm Jewish and my mother made potato latkes one way throughout my childhood. I loved those and various details about them (texture, flavor profile, doneness, etc.) but would go to other friends' house for a meal or whatever and they'd have their own latkes that just didn't taste as good, were much simpler flavor-wise, texture was more homogeneous, etc.

And then of course I've bought frozen pre-made latkes from places like Trader Joe's.

I'd imagine it's like buying frozen gyoza at H-mart vs making your own from scratch with either pre-made wrappers or even homemade ones, plus the filling.

What I mean is: when an inexperienced person compares a scallion pancake to a pizza, or compares a scallion pancake to a taco, the two foods are obviously very different. But when an inexperienced person compares a mediocre scallion pancake to a great one, eaten on different days, it may be hard to remember the differences.

Likewise, someone has rarely eaten pizza might consider a good Neapolitan pizza to be broadly similar to a Domino's pizza, whereas someone who has pizza all the time will notice many differences between the two.

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.

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

Actively listening to music is a somewhat rare activity.

And again I have nothing against the genre. I listen to non pop country. But people are specifically attracted to the worst of it and they seem to very actively like it.

I apologized while marveling to myself that something that felt so mediocre and forgettable to me was someone else's reason to exist.

I can't tell good music from bad; either I like the way it sounds or I don't.

I suspect a fair number of other people are like this. And more power to people who have good taste in music.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82fshB1F_tE

There's a certain genius to how bad and obnoxious it is.

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

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.

My guess is that the serendipitous combination of high-level artistry + mass appeal + marketing dollars is simply much less common than the combo of "good at basic formula" + marketing dollars. Every now and then something really clever and different makes it into the top 40 just by sheer luck.

Seems like I was wrong above about the simple formula being the most powerful though doesn't it. Maybe a brand new formula can be even more powerful but is just that much harder to execute.

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.

If anything it feels engineered (and I use that term literally) to break your attention and make you focus on it. There tend to be lots of weird and drastic pitch and key changes that are designed to grab interest.

There is tons of music that is better background music than modern pop.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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’.

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

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.

> 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.

Yes, but it's subjective. The idea that Dan Brown could be considered a better writer than Shakespeare is horrifying to me. The idea that people would put pineapple on a pizza is sacreligious to me. That someone actually likes Nickelbacks music is borderline offensive to me.

Unless you can objectively quantify why x is better than y, that is subjective.

> there is no getting away from the fact that normativity is a necessary condition of judgments of taste or beauty.

Even if you could agree to an evaluative standard for art, you still cannot objectively measure it.

Just because a majority of people agree on something, does not make it so.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Now, perhaps this is the discussion you would like to see survive. If you feel that making arguments for things like why novelty is more valuable than technique is important, then I can understand your perspective and agree that we lose those conversations if we use a multi-axis approach. But if you care about articulating why a technique is impressive, or why a piece speaks to you, then I don't think we need to be able to rank all art on a single axis to have those discussions.

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

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

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

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

That said, Zoolander has a 6.5 rating on IMDB and is considered a classic. Perhaps comedy as a genre is more likely to have that anomaly.

Like, the reason people dont know imdb under 5 that satisfy your condition is that people avoid watching movies with low score. They dont recommend them to others either.

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

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

A well executed refinement of the throughly worn tends to get panned as derivative while foundational works have other sins and lack of polish forgiven. For an extreme example take the infamous Leni Riefenstahl - Adolf Hitler's propagandist. She is studied for her role in pioneering cinematic techniques, if her works weren't novel they would be more a matter of study for historians than cinematographers.

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.

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)

I do not. What I am saying is that knowledge—if such a thing exists at all and is worthy of defense by humans—can be addressed in a rational, objective way.

Lots of things are approximations, but we do not deny the existence of categories as useful phenomena or an epistemological tool. To paraphrase a famous exchange of ideas, GB Shaw: "All chairs are quite different" vs. Chesterton: "Well how do you then call them all chairs?"

The postmodernist sleight of hand is to say that perhaps because there are differing contexts that there is not a universal tendency; such a commonality is either non-existent or should be disregarded. They would not categorically discard visceral human experiences that lead to say "thirst" or "hunger" or "anger", but they will claim that there are not common phenomena that engender "awe" or "wonder" or "intrigue". I disagree with that statement. That humans can reliably classify things that are "beautiful" across cultures (and have done so for millenia, even when they hate each others' cultures), shows there is a common tendency towards taste.

When thirsty, many people drink water, but the postmodernist looks at the few drinking Brawndo and has to deny the generalization that water quenches thirst but of thirst entirely.

Of course they wouldn’t. It would be too difficult for the average person to buy and they don’t need to especially since it isn’t really their goal to dismantle truth completely, their goal is to dismantle the values we hold as a society so that in the vacuum they may impose new values upon us. They do that under the guise of questioning truth. This is why I said that when you embrace their objective/subjective categories you are helping their cause. Once those categories are established and accepted by society it is simply their job to argue that the values they do not like are subjective and arbitrary, then people who have accepted the subjective/objective dichotomy will do the rest.

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

The author of the original tweet makes this point, and I strongly agree with it: https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/12889571678449623...

As for 2.4 + 2.4 = 5, I think the tweet author is being a bit sloppy there in his explanation. But consider 0.1 + 0.2. Ask a human, and they'll tell you it's 0.3. Ask a computer, and it'll likely tell you it's 0.30000000000000004. The point is that in both scenarios, 0.1, 0.2, and addition are defined differently.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_geometry

Yet each one is self-consistent and potentially independently discoverable by sentient life forms light years away from us, even though these different algebras have no material form.

> But consider 0.1 + 0.2. Ask a human, and they'll tell you it's 0.3. Ask a computer, and it'll likely tell you it's 0.3000000000000004

Just because the computer performs imprecise arithmetic does not make .1+.2=.300000004 a meaningful statement from which an entire self-consistent arithmetic system can be derived. The computer’s result is in error. It’s called floating point error.

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

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

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

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

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

That is the question on my mind these days.

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).

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

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.

> 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.

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

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

I feel this even dilutes the situation further because the moral questions of judgement are often out of place or under questioning in works of art.

The judgement of merit by a non-artist of an artist's work is the part I found to be crass and rather a shadow of the social benefits of taste than good taste itself.

A friend once asked me for a drawing of mine to hang on his wall. I offered the choice between two, one a portrait with some geometric figures and the other a pair of skulls. The latter he told me was "not to his taste", and the former he hung up in his entryway. Some things belong some places and not others, and an absolute hierarchy of taste is only the temporary a side-effect of an absolute hierarchy of power. Judge not, lest ye be in turn.

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

Maybe a simple set of questions would help: You don’t feel some art is better or special? Or you don’t feel a person can discern between art that is better or worse, even in the most extreme cases? Or is it something else?

If you yourself are an artist, or own art, then surely you find some works better than others? Museums make these decisions about what to own. Do you believe one can judge some museums better or worse?

Yes, but that is the point I think, subjectivity. You also feel that way for different reasons, and who's to judge which of us is objectively right?

History, hiring committees, the general public, artists assessment of their own work, artists assessments of other peoples work, common sense, to name a few. Obviously I have come to my own conclusion on the matter. My interest is in why others can’t see what to me seems self evident. I too used to not understand, to think it’s all subjective, that there is no there there. But I hadn’t thought about it deeply enough. It seems some are confused because of books they’ve read or ideas put forth by thinkers they’ve found persuasive. I guess I would need to read all of those the same books to understand their position, but what’s the point if I know they are wrong? When alchemy was a thing I might need to read enormously to understand the full scope of the beliefs of those practitioners. A waste of time frankly.

I like to engage who have less invested in their own mistaken conclusion about art, because many people are like me or Paul, ready to be turned around if prompted to really think about it more deeply. Those people may find, as I have, that art becomes much more meaningful and enriching when you believe there’s something to it. To believe it’s all subjective is a great insult to the professionals and artists who devote themselves to it. It robs the person who possessed those beliefs of the opportunity to fully appreciate art. I know this from personal experience. I’ll leave it at that. A long way of saying I agreed with the essay.

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

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.

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

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.