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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
