This is a very well-done post, but I do have one comment:
Angelus Novus creeps me out. Like, creeps me out unusually. I would never deliberately choose to look at it, but I am not surprised that some other art critic, who has seen so much beautiful art that he lost the ability to feel anything from beautiful art, might go "I can feel something! Astounding!" after Angelus Novus creeps him out in spite of his shields.
“The 1937 Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich featured over 650 works of modern, expressionist, and abstract art confiscated by the Nazis from German museums, aiming to ridicule artists such as Paul Klee, Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Marc Chagall, and Wassily Kandinsky.”
Yes, and note that much of that art was very much not beautiful and awe inspiring, but rather sought to depict things like the horrors of WWI and the alienation of modernity. I don't see why that can't be great art.
Interesting that people still have that misconception that it was all paintings of the German Expressionist nihilistic variety. Chagall's picture of a Rabbi carrying a Torah was there. Some of Kandinsky's early abstracts (some were joyously colorful), one of Paul Klee's fish paintings. Klee and Kandinsky were singled out for having taught at Bauhaus. I'd love to see that exhibition recreated today, because there was some fantastic art there! Some of it was destroyed by the Nazis and the winds of war, though.
NB: Benjamin didn't mention this (or he may not have known), that there was a whole history of weird angel etchings from the 16th and 17th Centuries that tried to depict the angels as described in the Torah (some of them were distinctly weird and disturbing). Although I don't think we have any clear evidence that Klee saw these etchings, some have suggested that Klee's Angelus Novus was a modernist riff on these.
"that tried to depict the angels as described in the Torah."
Ezekiel isn't a part of the Torah and those etchings and paintings you linked aren't anything like the horror that is Klee's work. They are beautiful, if fantastical, works. No one said beauty couldn't have a little cosmic horror as a treat.
D'oh! Right, it's in the Nevi'im—the Prophets. I meant to write Tanakh instead of Torah. That's what happens when I'm distracted while dealing with life-impacting distractions.
But I find the wheel-within-wheel angelic beings to be much more terrifying than Klee's angel. I've dreamed about them, and while I wouldn't call those dreams nightmares, I find those dreams disturbing—especially since I can't understand what they're saying in my dream version of Hebrew or Enochian.
What is it about Klee's drawing that evokes a fear response in you?
I think Scott's last paragraph sums up my experience. Yes, Johnson tried something different, but it wasn't good. (IMHO, of course - it's totally OK if someone else liked it!)
That's also my answer for why so much storytelling is repetitive, whether corporate or fanfic - it's really hard to come up with a good idea or a popular one, so mimicry is at least as remunerative a strategy as creativity, at least for a while.
My pithy view of TLJ is that it's a good movie and it's good Star Wars, but the parts that are a good movie are not good Star Wars and the parts that are good Star Wars are not a good movie. The film as an introspective critique of the universe and its genre conventions conflicted with its role as 'genre fic' that needed to unironically embody those same conventions.
This relates back to the main post because of expectations. If art is in the experience, then the viewer's expectations are central rather than peripheral. The naif who has never seen a Michaelangelo before will be wowed by their first experience of the form, whereas a seasoned art-appreciator will be inured to the general style and will either appreciate the history of the originals or novel takes on the form.
This makes art criticism and communication a hard problem. A competent critic must be dealing with their medium as a seasoned professional, so their opinion will not necessarily be that of their average audience member. Level-1 criticism just repeats the critic's view, and it takes good criticism skill (distinct from good medium-appreciation skill!) to ascend to the next level and offer a useful opinion-prediction to the audience. (Alternatively: critique as its own experience, dissecting what works and what doesn't about something in an educational context; this offers the audience a leg up on that entire 'genre context and appreciation' thing.)
> The film as an introspective critique of the universe and its genre conventions conflicted with its role as 'genre fic' that needed to unironically embody those same conventions.
But why did it need to do that? It seems to me that it was basically just good and Star Wars fans basically just have bad taste (which is why they like Star Wars). The fact that Marvel fans demand the same thin gruel again and again doesn’t mean that there’s any merit in giving it to them, nor any demerit in giving them something better.
Actually, as a writer and historian, I think that *A New Hope* had some truly spectacular implicit worldbuilding - all the hard science stuff is nonsense, but the Evil Boardroom scene near the beginning does a really spectacular job of showing how and why the villains do what they do and what the rules and stakes are, while staying interesting on its own merits.
Now, all Star Wars movies after that have been worse (sorry, Empire fans, it's a good movie but it's less coherent than ANH), but it's hardly surprising that they revert to the mean over time.
Because commercial art has a patron – the wealthy noble or the paying customer. The artist's role is mixed, balancing artistic merit with giving the patron what they want. Sometimes they know what the patron wants better than the patron does themselves, but that's always a risk.
There is room for subversion inside genre fiction, but it needs to be done carefully. It ideally comes from a love of the genre rather than disdain for it. Star Trek: Lower Decks is a good example in my book, where it works simultaneously as a mild satire of the Star Trek formula and one of the most loving, true incarnations of it.
The thing is that the quasi-philosophical stuff and almost Greek tragedy elements is about the only thing that makes (movie) Star Wars anything but a boilerplate (and fairly crappy post original series) Chosen One pulpy space opera story on a never-ending loop. This is exactly what made the original notable at all from a storytelling point of view and exactly what fans tend to rebel against now. The other thing that made it distinctive was pioneering special effects, but I haven't heard anyone argue that what TLJ needed was more explosions and CGI. I have no specific issue with the existence of stuff like this, but there's reasons why it gets very old after the 50th time that the Joker escapes from Arkham and Batman has the same mental crisis or whatever and only True Fans are the ones who stay on that train forever.
If you think genre fic and even space opera can't meaningfully engage with something besides "plucky Chosen One underdog saves universe," we've been reading/watching/playing very different sci-fi and fantasy. There's a very big pile of TV sci-fi that has consistently engaged with themes beyond this and done well (Star Trek, The Expanse, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, Dr Who even which oscillates between being extremely camp and fun and trying out all kinds of weird interesting things - the episode Midnight in the newer series off the top of my head as an example). And that's to say nothing of sci-fi novels or games.
I've also seen Star Wars itself do this well so I know it can. All the best Star Wars things I've encountered in the last 30 or so years have broken with the "plucky hero" formula in pretty meaningful ways by either going hard on the quasi philosophical/moral components or dropping the centrality of Skywalker/Empire conflicts altogether and going out exploring in the wider universe (The Mandalorian -at least season 1, the assorted Knights of the Old Republic games, etc.)
The obvious praise first: Star Wars: The Last Jedi swings for the fences, and of course that's something to be grateful for. Particularly for a film that costs this much; particularly for a film made by such a challenge-averse company as Disney; particularly for the sequel to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, one of the most cautious bunts in the history of commercial cinema. [...]
On the other hand:
Sometimes, bunting wins the game. And sometimes, you swing for the fences and miss, and the bat goes flying out of your hands and into the grandstand, and it smacks somebody's nice old grandma in the head and she has to go to the hospital.
Having seen how the sausage is made from the other end, I can reveal the true cause (or at least a large chunk of it, for expensive-to-make media): venture capital sees repetition of a successful recipe as very low risk, and is by and large much happier to fund endless repetitions / reboots than new things.
I accuse fandom of masturbatory repetition due to autistic tendencies because I myself have them and have spent a lot of time in fandom and have observed it firsthand. I don't doubt this other thing matters as well - but you also see this repetition in spaces that aren't dominated by giant risk adverse corporations. It's just as true in cult fandoms dedicated to somewhat fringe novel series.
They are a disproportionate buyer of merchandise. Sure, kids may buy a few actions figures, but adult nerds are a bigger and more reliable revenue stream. The average adult with fond memories of Star Wars as a kid does not buy action figures and the like. Claude has this to say:
"
Claude finished the response
You said: How much Star Wars merchandise is bought by kids as opposed to adult fans?
How much Star Wars merchandise is bought by kids as opposed to adult fans?
10:25 AM
Claude responded: There isn't a clean public number for Star Wars specifically, since Disney and Hasbro stopped breaking out franchise-level sales by demographic years ago.
Synthesized industry data revealing adult-collector dominance in Star Wars merchandise
Synthesized industry data revealing adult-collector dominance in Star Wars merchandise
There isn't a clean public number for Star Wars specifically, since Disney and Hasbro stopped breaking out franchise-level sales by demographic years ago. But the picture from earnings calls and industry analysts is pretty consistent: Star Wars merchandise skews much more toward adults than the toys-in-an-aisle imagery suggests.
A few useful data points:
Industry context. "Kidults" — defined by research firm Circana as anyone 12 and older — are responsible for about one-fourth of all toy sales in the U.S., roughly $9 billion a year, and they're the biggest source of growth in the industry. Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks told the Wall Street Journal in 2023 that adults drive about 40% of Hasbro's annual revenue, and he expected that figure to climb toward 50% within five years. Star Wars is one of the brands that pulls that average up.
CNBC
The Current
Star Wars in particular. Toy industry consultant Richard Gottlieb of Global Toy Experts has said much of the Star Wars merchandising boom has nothing to do with kids — it's driven by Baby Boomers, Gen X, and millennials who grew up on the franchise and have money to spend on it. He calls Star Wars "very much a nostalgia brand."
The Hasbro lines split fairly cleanly. On a 2020 earnings call, then-CEO Brian Goldner described growth in the Black Series and Vintage Collection as separate from "child items," with the kids' business driven by lightsabers and the Mission Fleet vehicle line — essentially confirming what collectors had long assumed: the detailed action-figure lines are bought almost entirely by adults, while roleplay toys and basic vehicles are the kid-facing piece. Lego Star Wars sits in between, with serious adult sets (UCS Millennium Falcon, etc.) sold alongside kid-targeted ones.
Jedi Temple Archives
The pattern under Disney. In 2015 and 2016, Star Wars was the top-selling toy brand in the U.S. with more than $700 million in sales, but analysts at the time noted that adult collectors buy heavily at launch and then demand fades, while kids weren't picking up the slack — one reason sales cratered after Rogue One and The Last Jedi. The 2019 Baby Yoda phenomenon swung that back somewhat by giving the franchise a genuinely kid-appealing character again.
Fortune
WDW News Today
So a fair summary: there's no published "X% kids vs. Y% adults" figure for Star Wars merchandise, but the evidence points to adults being the dominant buyers by revenue — especially for collectibles, apparel, Lego, and detailed figures — with kids concentrated in lightsabers, role-play items, basic toys, and apparel sized for children. The industry-wide kidult share of about 25% likely understates Star Wars specifically, given how heavily it leans on the nostalgia market."
I respect that people enjoyed the movie in ways that I did not.
It's tiring that people can't dislike the movie without either being accused of sexism or being some uptight fan who's terrified of a story being different or whatever else gets thrown around in these discussions.
I'm fine with change, I complained that the Force Awakens was far too "safe" (though still found it to be a functional story that *could* have worked as the beginning of a more interesting story), I enjoy when a story "subverts my expectations".
But it can't *just* subvert my expectations, it actually has to replace my expectations with something better (or at least, as good). You can't just say "ah ha, a boring concrete cube when you were expecting a beautiful building, expectations subverted, 10/10".
Force Awakens was pure reheated mediocrity doing bits from A New Hope with a new younger cast, but tying in old cast so the audience can recognize them. Last Jedi repeatedly seems like it's going to do something different and interesting before then failing to pay them off as anything worthwhile.
The one good thing I'll say about TLJ is that it clearly understands what was wrong with TFA. And it goes out of its way to highlight them, even if it does nothing to fix them, and then drives the plot into a ditch in protest.
A smarter approach, I think, would've been not to highlight the problems in TFA at all, but to improve upon them. It's also why I don't like Johnson's Knives Out movies (the first two; haven't seen the latest): He has this attitude shared by others in his generation that one must be seen first pointing out the flaws and then pointing at one's self for being clever in how one subverts those flaws.
To take a less controversial franchise, and one that I don't care about at all, Toy Story 4 was such a gross display of contrarianism that I felt offended on behalf of the fans. Not everything needs to be deconstructed/exposed by the "smarter" next generation. It's OK to let a celebrated thing be what it is, and, if there absolutely has to be a sequel, find a new way to be that same thing in the same way that made the first one special.
Blame other fans, the general level of critique of the Last Jedi is pretty low, and mostly comes from a place of imagining a different movie they would have preferred (something nerds tend to struggle with when doing criticism generally). Whereas the arguments for why TLJ are *good* actually, are generally better written and articulated more specifically. Even this comment section seems like a pretty good example. Whether this is indicative of actual merit in the movie, or just a side effect of people, even smart, articulate people finding it easier to articulate why they like something then why they dislike something is an open question. I think the movie was genuinely brilliant, and can happily explain why, but I have also been in the position of disliking a movie and finding it really hard to put my finger on why.
The level of critique of the critique of the Last Jedi was also extremely low, again, mostly just making assumptions about the people who dislike it. I do not think "blame other fans" is a reasonable response.
Of course some people are going to dislike something for badly articulated or even objectionable reasons, but that doesn't actually mean the thing is not bad.
And, yes, I do think articulating the flaws is tricky. Much easier to say "it's good because it's different" or "it's good because you're just a fanboy". I left the theater confused about why I really disliked it, and it took a lot of discussion and reading other people's takes to really figure out the autopsy of what killed it for me.
(And it's not *all* bad; I actually like Luke's characterization here, mostly... but basically everything involving the rebel fleet which was most of the movie? Nah.)
Ultimately, I think the real blame lies at the whole idea of having a trilogy with no plan, with two directors who apparently did not coordinate and did not respect what the other wrote... but TLJ is where that disrespect became really obvious and I think put Rise of Skywalker in a very difficult position, having thrown out all the plot-hooks that Force Awakens established. Rise of Skywalker was not good, (and had some unforced errors) but it would have taken a miracle for it to be good.
Well originally there were three directors, but yes, I suppose if you were expecting a concise trilogy of films reflecting a complete story that's set up in the first movie and paid off in the last movie then sure, TLJ is already set up to disappoint you. I might point out that that entire expectation is based on a retcon of the original trilogy, where it all somehow fits together when in fact its very clear that all the set ups don't show up until the second movie and even in the third, the payoffs were being figured out on the fly. Maybe someone should have told JJ Abrams that if he wasn't going to be executive producer of the entire sequels, he shouldn't spend all of the Force Awakens setting up dangling threads and then obliging someone else to pick them up.
But beyond that, I can't help but notice that the link you cited is doing exactly what I said it would, he starts off by saying "this is what the movie does" and then moves on to "here's how it could have done it differently and it would have been good actually." But all of his *fixes* imply that he understands what the movie was going for when clearly he did not. His analysis of what Poe's journey is supposed to be about shows he does not. And this goes back to what I was saying before, people who don't like the movie generally seem to have not gotten what the movie was trying to say, which makes them look pretty universally stupid when they try to critique it. TLJ is a narratively dense film, arguably its greatest sin is expecting that people will treat it like a cinematic text as opposed to a popcorn delivery device, ie, having too much respect for its audience. People can't figure out the theme, so instead of meditating on that, they decide the film is just bad at storytelling and worldbuilding, which is the other part of this guy's critique. Any analysis of the Last Jedi which spends time harping on how the logistics of space combat work and how it is portrayed inconsistently compared with the other films is proving that they have spent so much time thinking about canonicity that their brain has rotted.
One day, I will meet someone who actually got everything the Last Jedi was going for and says "still not for me" and that person I will actually respect. But it hasn't happened yet (although Majiromax above comes pretty close).
ESB ends with Han Solo being frozen in carbonite and Luke losing his hand. TLJ doesn't permanently harm any of its core cast (Finn's attempt at a suicide-run is sabotaged by Rose, in a move I thought also risked both their lives), but instead kills off Snoke. It is funny that it's sense of being original is to transplant the Hoth opening of ESB to a salt planet at the end of the film.
Well there's many movies out there that have something other than someone named Skywalker blowing up the Death Star again.
But what TLJ does have is: (a) a young Jedi apprentice goes to learn from a wisened Jedi master living alone on a secret planet, (b) the bad guys in their giant spaceships chasing the fleeing good guys through space for most of the movie, (c) a big battle where the good guys use tiny speeders to try to defend their base against AT-ATs on a planet covered with white powder, and (d) a climactic throne room scene where the secondary bad guy kills the biggest bad guy to save the young Jedi.
So I'm not sure where the idea that it has a lot of unexpected stuff comes from, the major plot points are basically just cribbing Episode 5 and 6 in the same way that 7 cribbed 4, but changing it a tiny bit ("it's salt!")
Angelus Novus seems like an alright painting. Superficially, it reminds me of ancient cave paintings – is that not what Scott wanted more of, emulation of older styles? It reminds me of that one SCP that teleports to you when you look away from it. But I don't see the rubble or the storm or anything.
The ancient cave paintings I like best look much better than this. The beauty of ancient cave paintings is similar to that of Japanese brush stroke art - that they can be as simple as mere silhouettes and still capture deeply the essence of what they represent.
That said, I think Scott significantly underestimates the connection element, because of course the thought that those images evoke me of some ancient human doing it with their fingers on a lamp-lit cave wall so much time ago the mind boggles at understanding it is a part of what makes them impactful.
Yeah, the ancient cave paintings are very much a case where a modern recreation couldn't be as good, because half of the greatness of the art is in the sheer amount of time it continued to exist and how different the artists were from anyone looking at their work now.
I think there's a distinction here between art as information Vs art as object. At any time before the digital era these two were essentially inseparable, but they are different things. There is added value to Michelangelo's David than to a perfect micrometer resolution 3D scan of Michelangelo's David.
You should read Walter Benjamin on this. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” IIRC that essay is the source of the Angel of History quote in this one.
Perhaps that is the wrong analogy? My kids would consume nothing but Hershey bars and pink lemonade if I let them, but feed that stuff to an adult for three meals straight and eventually the adult will ask for a nice dish with the stringency of onions and pungency of garlic and burn of jalapenos: all things my kids currently find unpleasant. For another example: I enjoy a good romcom as much as the next person, but if I had to watch nothing but Nora Ephron movies for a month, I would be begging to watch a bunch of dudes get brutally murdered in Antarctica in John Carpenter's version of The Thing. Same goes for pop music vs heavy metal.
Yes, this is a good analogy. Sometimes art helps you become more resilient by normalizing small amounts of pain, or helping you process difficult things, or showing you that you're not alone in them.
Yeah, TBH during more angsty or chronic pain-infused times of my life, I've appreciated darker art; whereas during the times I've been really happy (and when I lived in places with lots of sun!), such things seemed totally unnecessary, and I liked that.
Having seen both sides now, when I see ugly art, I mostly think "what a bummer for them."
This just shows the poverty of the analogy between food and visual art. Are any of the examples I gave bad art, in the way that nauseating food is bad food?
Yeah, to be a bit reductive, great food makes you feel between zero and one emotions, depending on whether you count “delicious” as an emotion, and provokes little in the way of thought other than, perhaps, thoughts about cooking or cuisine. . That’s obviously not the case with a great novel, film, or painting.
If there was an audience for "nauseating" food the way there's an audience for sad, tragic fiction such as Hamlet or Neon Genesis Evangelion, then that would probably be true.
In this case, activating the relevant pain nerves is interpreted by the brain as intense heat rather than the feeling of, say, accidentally biting your tongue. But yes.
Although "pain" and "nausea" are also two different sensations. Perhaps a better comparison is durian fruit?
Food has a utility (nutrition) aside from its aesthetics. Our sense of taste is related to that utility, as it has evolved for that purpose. However, it is the case that people can develop a taste for food that is spicy or bitter.
Unpleasant tastes are a big part of cooking. Heat (in the chili pepper sense) is the most obvious. You are causing literal pain in order to sensitize the tongue. Bitterness and putridity (like in ripe cheeses) are also used in cooking.
See, I don't feel that it misses the point, I feel that it says "I acknowledge your point but don't care about your point." Possibly I should've been more explicit about that (though I was pitching it to Scott, who I think is even further off your position than my position), but overall I'm not sure.
Because this is where we get into questions about what art is for and why people want it, isn't it? Unsettling art that is well done has power, sure. It can make you feel things; it can have effects on the psyche. But I've never felt such an overwhelming urge to feel Something Anything that I ate a ghost pepper and I've never desired an effect on the psyche sufficiently that I took LSD.
So, why call unsettling art great? Because it has an impact? But things that have impacts are cheap; a hammer has an impact. Because it gets you something you want? Well, fair enough, but it doesn't get me something I want.
What I want out of a critic is mostly to point me to things where, afterwards, I will go, "wow, that was a great recommendation." The thing that makes me do that isn't emotional power; If I feel like a novel or movie is overtly manipulating my emotions, I feel sick like I ate too much sugar; it feels wrong and bad. It's something more and different than that, but in my experience whatever the thing is usually involves feeling good while I experience the artwork, not just feeling.
>So, why call unsettling art great? Because it has an impact?
Why call art that inspires positive emotions great? Because it has an impact?
You are definitely missing the point. The point is not that unsettling art is great per se. It is that unsettling art can be great; i.e., that art need not evoke positive emotions to be great.
>If I feel like a novel or movie is overtly manipulating my emotions, I feel sick like I ate too much sugar; it feels wrong and bad
Me, too. But such a work actually LACKS emotional power.
>in my experience whatever the thing is usually involves feeling good while I experience the artwork
That's YOU. Which is fine. But others feel differently. That's the point: your personal preference does not define the universe of great art.
You think I'm missing the point, I think you're missing the point. What you're saying is true, it just seems totally irrelevant to questions like "are art critics doing their jobs properly or not."
> Me, too. But such a work actually LACKS emotional power.
I think in order to actually have a conversation that's useful, we need to start playing Rationalist Taboo or else just defining our terms really, really carefully. You apparently want to define "emotional power" differently than I do, and I don't think we can have a useful conversation without that.
>it just seems totally irrelevant to questions like "are art critics doing their jobs properly or not"
It is absolutely relevant to your specific claim that "some other art critic, who has seen so much beautiful art that he lost the ability to feel anything from beautiful art, might go "I can feel something! Astounding!" after Angelus Novus creeps him out in spite of his shields"
>You apparently want to define "emotional power"
I don't think so. A work that comes across as overtly trying to manipulate emotions is ineffective and hence lacks power.
And, btw, your assumption that a work of art that is unsettling or has emotional power must be overtly manipulating emotions is wrong. See, eg, The Zone of Interest.
> It is absolutely relevant to your specific claim that "some other art critic, who has seen so much beautiful art that he lost the ability to feel anything from beautiful art, might go "I can feel something! Astounding!" after Angelus Novus creeps him out in spite of his shields"
... I... don't think so? I came up with a theory for why someone might like it. Other theories for why someone might like it can indeed be raised, but aren't evidence it's false.
> I don't think so. A work that comes across as overtly trying to manipulate emotions is ineffective and hence lacks power.
Nah, I can have my emotions manipulated and feel the power of the raw emotional manipulation while also feeling annoyance and a desire to stop. These are totally compatible.
> And, btw, your assumption that a work of art that is unsettling or has emotional power must be overtly manipulating emotions is wrong. See, eg, The Zone of Interest.
When did I ever say that? I thought I implied the opposite.
I don't know, I haven't seen the movie since I was six or so.
What I tend to think of as "has emotional power but overtly manipulates my emotions so that I end up net disliking it" is things like Play Sad Music or Play Scare Chords, as content rather than augmentation for the content. That still has an impact on me, because I only rarely watch movies.
What tries to do that, but doesn't, is usually writing a character as The Most Annoying And Despicable Man so that we are supposed to want the hero to punch him, but then I mostly end up feeling sorry for The Most Annoying And Despicable Man who is victimized by his author. But I may well be unusual in this sense.
To be fair, movies are wholly the manipulation of emotions to some degree.
I think there is a difference between cheap manipulation of emotions -- take something like A Fault in Our Stars -- and the richer manipulation of emotions. Maybe "Me, Earl and the Dying Girl" is a good counterpoint, as both movies center on a teenager dying from cancer.
In AFIOS, the movie is very much on the surface: What do you say about a girl who is 16 and died? It's sad. That's about the extent of it. A movie that simple can still work if the actors are charming enough (I can't remember if they are) and the director puts in the right music in the right places. It can easily make a baseline empathetic person cry with the most basic manipulation. When the emotional response is over, little is left behind.
In MEATDG, there's a lot more going on. The movie is more about how a closed-off teenage boy, whose life is encased in protective irony, handles the death of his friend. And he deals with it badly. The point of the movie is not that it's sad when a teenager who looks like a movie star dies; it's about how people build these elaborate defense mechanisms around themselves to protect from relatively mundane trials, and how poorly those mechanisms cope with real tragedy. The emotional breakthrough, when it happens, is profound and illustrates something complex about humanity. That's a rich manipulation that leaves more than just the temporary welling of emotion.
It looks to me more like a comical cartoon lion, drawn not very expertly on a flat bed plotter, with code that neglected to raise the pen most times when it should! But when it comes to modern art, I'm the biggest Philistine since Goliath and have probably missed all kinds of subtle nuances!
It's probably a personal thing but for me, Angelus Novus doesn't even creep me out. I don't mean that only some very accurate figurative oil painting depiction of an Ophanim would have managed to creep me out. But that even if you tried to depict the incomprehensible and baffling non-Euclidean image of an angel by purposefully using only abstract and non-figurative techniques to shake me to my soul, I don't know what that would look like, but it wouldn't be a goofy sketch with a Funko Pop sized bobble head.
All of Klee's works have this effect on me, which is why I like him even if I don't quite "understand" him. As I understand it, Klee was very interested in children's drawings as a way to access deeper layers of the unconscious. Klee's unsettling effect, for me, has to do with this naive style applied to adult concerns, all with a bit of a sinister edge.
I think his more mechanical drawings are a bit easier to get.
I have a print of his Alter Dampfer (https://api.nga.gov/iiif/c33297dc-45d8-441c-b09e-36944e33f61c/full/!800,800/0/default.jpg) on my wall. You might imagine a child gazing at a steamboat, or any modern contraption and rendering something like this, where the mechanical components are recognizable but their connections and functions are mysterious. You could say this is a metaphor for man in modernity.
Another favorite is Twittering Machine (https://www.moma.org/collection/works/37347). Birds are mechanized, hooked to a crank, made to sing their song on command. Do they look happy? Tortured? It's hard to say. And on top of it all, there's the childish playfulness of the style -- the Twittering Machine is perhaps fun to use!
I came into this thread fully prepared to be a hater but dammit you've convinced me. Wow that is so interesting, and now I'm looking at Angelus Novus anew, as if the Angel of History is trapped within the unconscious and can only look out in horror...
The Alter Dampfer feels interesting, like it catches some of the phenomenology of what we might actually see when we think that we see a ship. Both the angles and the birds just make laugh (which to be fair is a pretty cool effect as well). However, I love the description of the angle and the song by Laurie Anderson (Dream Before https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGL2Ne0V9mI) and really want someone to draw an angle that makes me cry not laugh.
Angelus Novus creeps me out in the same way that some of my own doodles and certain children's drawings creep me out. And reddit creepy posts are a dime a dozen. If you do or look at a lot of weird freehand drawing, the feeling isn't unusual. I grant that it's still *something*.
it just made me laugh out loud. because it was so ridiculous after reading that poetic description. not even saying it's bad art per se, it's just a funny juxtaposition of the critic's essay except and then the goofiness of the actual artwork.
Works usually have conventional boundaries, like a picture frame or a book cover. One way of looking at art is to confine your observations to what's inside the boundary. On this way, importing assumptions about what the author was trying to do or the conversation they were in dialogue with might be art history, but it's not art appreciation. It's not an aesthetic experience.
Art history might give you more things to see inside the frame, more references to structural patterns and conscious or unconscious ideas. But the work of art is a little volume in the Library of Babel, which admits of all interpretations and none. You think that's English you're reading now?
When I was a kid I went to the Tate Modern art gallery in London with my mum and her friend. I must have been 7 or 8 - this is not the optimal day out for a 7 year old child and I was pretty bored. Then, I saw a sign for an exhibit called Brontosaurus. I was dinosaur mad at that point, so I finally found something I was excited about. This excitement lasted about 25 seconds until the moment I actually saw the thing.
Brontosaurus was a dark tunnel, in the centre of which was a projector displaying a film of a fully nude man helicoptering his flaccid penis wildly put on rotation like a gif image. In the corner of the image was a tiny plastic… stegosaurus. I hated it and was incredibly disappointed.
I can safely say that of my early childhood experiences this is probably the one I think about the most. I now work as a musician - as a performer, a composer, and (mostly, nowadays) an arranger. In case you don’t know, the job of a musical arranger is to create orchestral versions of other people’s music to accompany commercial artists - to do so one needs to be aware of and skilled in replicating the essence of as many different musical styles and idioms as possible.
I encountered Brontosaurus before I even played an instrument or had any engagement with music; but the message it gave me has stuck with me through everything else I do as a professional - by counterexample. Whatever I do in music, it needs to be the exact opposite of the sort of vacuous pseudo-profound nonsense that can’t even get the name of the plastic dinosaur right!! In a sense, this art therefore had a (small) real world impact, and I guess therefore fulfilled some sort of purpose? But it feels like a bit of a bait and switch if the only purpose your art can fulfil is to make everyone who sees it disgusted by the concept of your style of art…
"Brontosaurus" *changed my life.* I honestly can't even believe that somebody else on here also saw it and remembers it. I went to the Tate also, and was only a few years older than you -- exactly fourteen, I happen to know. I can totally understand why it struck you that way, especially at eight. But to me, it felt like the artist was speaking directly to me. It said something about the human form -- *my* human form -- and that it was OK to be confused by it and to want feel strange things and have urges that didn't correspond to what everyone else was talking about. And somehow, the "brontosaurus" made it more explicitly about our human place as embodied creatures, animals, in a long tale of evolutionary history. Even the fact that it was mislabeled landed -- it seemed to be saying that the dinosaur there had been misnamed, and so, inevitably, would the man be (and so would I be). But yet its existence -- like mine -- was a fact, a stubborn fact about reality that no amount of misunderstanding or misnaming could ever negate.
Actually, none of that happened. It sounds like total garbage. I'm glad you took the lesson you did!
I too had an upsetting experience with modern art at the Tate*! Fiona Banner had taken two fighter jets and hung them in weird positions. The artist's commentary was "It's hard to believe that these planes are designed for function, because they are beautiful. But they are absolutely designed for function, as a bird of prey is, and that function is to kill. That we find them beautiful brings into question our very notion of beauty, but also our own intellectual and moral position."
My reactions were: (1) a bird of prey is 'designed' (well, actually, evolved) to reproduce, killing is a just a necessary component of its reproductive pattern; (2) fighter jets aren't designed to kill, they are designed to assure air superiority, and killing is a necessary component of that; (3) many functional things are beautiful, many beautiful things have some sort of function, and Kelly Johnson (who, you know, designed jets rather than hung them from ceilings) for one insisted that beauty and function could not be separated.
"The artist's commentary was "It's hard to believe that these planes are designed for function, because they are beautiful. But they are absolutely designed for function, as a bird of prey is, and that function is to kill. That we find them beautiful brings into question our very notion of beauty, but also our own intellectual and moral position."
Now that is odd, because I agree with her up to a point: I too find fighter planes beautiful, in the same way a bird of prey is beautiful, and that their function is the same - to kill. But that doesn't make me question my notion of beauty, because if we can find the birds beautiful without attributing moral blame to them, since they do what their function is by nature, then finding fighter jets beautiful is neutral. We can question the morality of war and violence and politics and so forth, but that is going back to the human part of the equation, not the appearance of the jets.
Indeed, we may go on to deeper questions about reality along the lines of "if, by the processes of nature, the most functional design is also beautiful, and destruction/violence requires the most functional design, what do we say about this world we live in?" Death of God, nature red in tooth and claw, Original Sin and the Fall of Man and other subjects of philosophy.
But that does not change that raptors and fighter jets are both beautiful and designed for destruction. Is beauty a necessary part of that, or are we finding beauty even in the worst places because ultimately hope is the virtue and not despair?
Beauty is still beauty, even if linked to the terrible.
She is not the only one to make this observation !
"Before them, in the valley, lay the thunder chariot. Slim and unadorned, the color of bronze, though it was not bronze, it stood upon a wide, grassy plain. It looked like a fallen prayer tower or a giant's house key or some necessary part of a celestial instrument of music that had slipped free of a starry constellation and dropped to the ground. It seemed to be somehow incomplete, although the eye could not fault its lines. It held that special beauty that belongs to the highest orders of weapons, requiring function to make it complete."
I recall (possibly incorrectly) that in some interview, he claimed to have written the entire book just for the sake of that pun. I wouldn't put it past him.
Fighter jets are designed to fly fast and be maneuverable. Actually killing is the job of the attached bombs and missiles, which are not beautiful.
I wish we lived in a world where it was economically practical to have fast maneuverable single seater jets just for flying around for fun. I bet those would be even more beautiful than fighter jets.
Fun fact: I looked up "Brontosaurus" and learned the artist later directed "Fifty Shades of Grey" (as well as "Nowhere Boy" and "A Million Little Pieces").
I tried looking it up on Wikipedia, but it didn't have an entry. The artist who directed those films is Sam Taylor-Johnson. She did apparently direct the quasi-pornographic short film "Death Valley" as part of the anthology "Destricted", but her page doesn't mention "Brontosaurus".
Surely the titular brontosaurus is the man's penis? Because, y'know, a dick and balls look kind of like a brontosaurus.
I can't say I'd have appreciated such an elaborate yet tasteless dick joke at 7, but probably a little more than I would now (assuming I didn't find it traumatic being unexpectedly shown a video of a naked man waving his dick.) It's a very 7-year-old thought to have. It *does* kind of look like a brontosaurus.
I'm not sure any dick joke could live up to the expectation of a proper brontosaurus when you're seven, though.
Personally I find myself almost never seriously emotionally moved by paintings and similar visual art. In contrast, I find music and the written and spoken word moves me deeply all the time. Sometimes I am also moved similarly by natural landscapes, or the combination of all of these things in something like a film. But the one thing I think is consistent for me is that I almost never find art that is purely intellectual moving in any sense, and I’m frustrated by art that can only really be engaged with if you read the little blurb next to it, which reveals that the squealing sound coming from the Found Object is actually the exact frequency of blah blah blah.
I don’t know how close to the mean I am in that regard.
As for criticism, I think critics these days have vastly less influence as tastemakers than they used to, now that culture is so much more fragmented. It increasingly seems like the sort of defensive insularity you get from things that are dying. Status games also always get more savage as the status being fought over becomes more and more diluted. Perhaps we’ll cherish snobbish critics more when we get a better idea of what culture will be like when their grip on the reins slips completely!
It's interesting how avant garde music, while very much a thing, is much, much less of a thing than avant garde art. Market effects? A rich wanker can buy a visual artwork, but music makes money by being popular.
I mean, you'd need some way to purchase limited edition music. That seems harder to make into an item? It seems easier to just purchase items associated with the music. And we see that.
David Gilmour (Pink Floyd) - guitar: $14.55 Million
Eric Clapton guitar: $3.003 Million
John Lennon guitar: $2.86 Million
I mean, granted these are all pop musicians like you predicted and not some avant garde niche.
Here's a deepseek search on sale of musical items related to avant garde musicians.
Karlheinz Stockhausen: 'Hymnen' Sketches (Six-Figure Range): The monumental archive of sketches for electronic work "Hymnen" sold by Bonhams, with the auction results for avant-garde composer manuscripts typically reaching tens of thousands.
Pierre Boulez: 'Le Visage Nuptial' Manuscript (Six-Figure Range): Manuscript by the French composer and conductor surfaced at auction in Paris, expected to reach tens of thousands of euros (50k−50k−120k).
Kraftwerk: Custom Sennheiser VSM-201 Vocoder ($256,000): The voice of "Autobahn" and "The Man-Machine," this rare vocoder is arguably the most quintessentially "avant-garde" item on the list, shaping the band's iconic sound through custom-built electronics.
Aphex Twin: Yamaha GX-1 Synthesizer (£99,950 / ~$125,000): A legendary synth owned by Richard D. James, one of only 100 ever made, that helped define the sound of 1990s IDM and electronic music .
John Cage: Rare Manuscripts (Mid Five-Figures): Autograph musical leaf from his revolutionary "Concert for Piano and Orchestra" can fetch between 10,000−10,000−15,000, while a manuscript from his 'Diary' series can be found in the £10,000 - £15,000 (12k−12k−18k) range.
Florian Schneider (Kraftwerk): EMS Synthi A Synthesizer ($115,200): The portable synth synonymous with Kraftwerk's groundbreaking live sound far exceeded its estimate, selling for over fourteen times the expected price.
And there's also mass market visual art. Look at what Pixar pulls in for an animated movie or what Industrial Light and Magic is worth. There's plenty of mass market art.
Interesting question. I'm far from an expert on this topic so I did a little reading. There doesn't seem to be a market for brushes, specifically. They're too ephemeral, maybe? But *pallets*, which last longer and are a bit more information rich and iconic and rare, seem to have a good market.
From an unverified DeepSeek query;
" Pablo Picasso (Sotheby's, 2020): A palette Picasso used in 1961, dated and directly linked to his masterpiece Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, sold for £56,250 (approx. $70,000). This was over eleven times its estimate, after 39 bids, driven by its direct connection to a seminal work. A small cardboard palette he used for painting Femme sold for £16,250, and a ceramic palette used for Hibou fetched £12,500.
Sir Stanley Spencer (BBC, 2025): One of his palettes sold for £3,048 at auction.
To put the Picasso sale in context, David Bowie—an art collector himself—purchased a Sir Stanley Spencer palette at auction in 2016 for £11,000, showing that these objects are sought after by discerning collectors who appreciate their unique artistry. Also, in 1993, a Lucian Freud palette was gifted to Nicola Bowery after he used it to complete the painting And the Bridegroom. While not a public sale, this highlights the deep personal and historical value attached to these objects, further supporting their status as artifacts of creative genius."
I paint in oils, and if I had the finances, I'd purchase a Picasso palette from his later life. Damn! The things I could learn from seeing how he mixed colors.
Also, at my one and only exhibition (in a minor small-town gallery), I displayed a bunch of my old palettes arranged in interesting ways upon a sheet of plexiglass. They made an interesting abstract composition.
Memorabilia was the closest thing that I could think of which was rare, marketable, and music-or-music-adjacent. I'd welcome the suggestion of something else which fits that criteria better.
Though I do think that there's a fair bit of overlap between collecting memorabilia and collecting art, enough to be worth considering.
A poster of the Mona Lisa is cheap, after all. And even a good replica would be far cheaper than the original. So hopefully we can agree it's not the aesthetic that people are primarily looking for when they pay huge amounts of money at auction.
No, I was just being clever. I understand the connection of something someone owned, but it's not an artistic question, really, although one follows from the other, I suppose. Limited edition music would be absurd. I would consider it a violation of humanity.
Part of it is surely that "digital goods have zero marginal cost", no? I don't know what the NFT equivalent of a music piece would be. For any given recording though, you can't really charge more than a couple dozen bucks maybe, and that's still fairly rare. How many people actually buy tracks on Bandcamp rather than stream on Spotify? Like I'm happy to throw money at Boris, but no one's getting filthy rich off $10 digital albums. Whereas if the only way to hear them was a live concert, well, now we're talking real money. But then I'd probably never have discovered them in the first place.
Perhaps this is one of those things were the boundary drawing determines the answer. There seems to be a lot of music labelled avant garde, but very little of it is, say, atonal music. If traditional music is a landscape painting and and properly avant garde music in my sense is a shark preserved in Formaldehyde or a banana taped to a wall, most so called avant garde music seems closer to the former than the later. But when I refer to avant garde music I am thinking of the audible equivalent of a preserved shark. 4:12 and air raid sirens, not industrial house or experimental jazz.
That level of weirdness seems more common in visual art.
I’m not thinking necessarily of industrial house or experimental jazz, but maybe for example noise music like Pharmakon or Merzbow, though they have more specific aesthetic project in a way I think an artist doing shark in formaldehyde might not. Throbbing Gristle, idk. Another take on this would include something like Captain Beefheart. Similarly, The Shaggs are a bit like Naive art. And I’m sure there are still people doing stuff like Monk: Our Lady of Late. Maybe Meredith Monk herself. That, alongside Cage and early electronic bleep bloops are probably what I first think of as ”avant garde” though it’s more clearly musical than Merzbow and sort of in the past.
Note that I respect the people mentioned here a lot more than the formaldehyde shark caricature.
I actually know of him for entirely different reasons, and might even have met him briefly many years ago, but am checking out his music too now. Had no idea what kind of music he did before now! Thanks for the rec!
Atonal? Avant-garde? Björk is composing atonal music nowadays, and for all the weird acommercial stuff she's been doing, we're still talking about a bona fide pop star here.
So, yes, boundary determining the answer. You're probably looking specifically for [things nobody listens to], and I don't think there's much of that left. People actually love listening to weird shit! Well, not your generic radio consumer, but still a significant market niche.
There was avant-garde music not long ago, it did silly things like record everyday sounds and make buzzes with electronics and claim it can be called music, and was so thoroughly vindicated we don't perceive what it pioneered as avant-garde anymore (in other words, it was actually, literally avant-garde). I'm sure there are still some "avant-garde" musicians, but I'm not sure where the current would even go from there, humanity at large simply agreed with them to a degree that dissolved most boundaries between (non-classical) art and popular music.
It was a bigger thing at the beginning of the 20th Century. The audience rioted the first time that Stravinsky's Rite of Spring was performed. Nowadays, we find the piece to be innocuously beautiful. But it sounded dissonant and a-rhythmic to the audience. A year later, it was performed again, and the critics and music audience had come around to it.
I think you might enjoy these excerpts from Jennifer Homans' "Apollo's Angels," (p.317–8) on the opening night of The Rite of Spring:
"Although firsthand accounts vary wildly and the events of that evening were almost immediately obscured by the fog of the ballet's own myth, we know that Diaghilev—no stranger to the commercial value of controversy—deliberately stocked the house with the adherents of rival and feuding artistic factions who could be counted on to create a ruckus."
"Shouting, yelling, pitching chairs, and police: the outcry was loud and physical. Those who were there that first night (and even some, such as Gertrude Stein, who thought they had been there but were not) never forgot it. Indeed, the show in the house was at least as impressive and unnerving as the show onstage: the theater, it was said, was "shaken like an earthquake" and seemed to "shudder." When the dancers held their cheeks in a strange pose, people cried out, "Un docteur! Un dentiste! Deux dentistes!" and one man was reportedly so engrossed that he compulsively beat the rhythms of Stravinsky's music on the head of the critic standing in front of him."
I particularly like the detail that Gertrude Stein somehow convinced herself that she attended?
There are people who went to Palo Alto High School in the mid 1960s who insist the saw the Warlocks play there (the Warlocks being the first incarnation of the Grateful Dead). They never did, but people remember it.
I don't think most people would find the rite of Spring beautiful. Maybe they would agree that the opening solo sounds kind of nice, but generally I don't think they would enjoy the piece.
Somebody must like it a lot, because it's listed as one of the most recorded pieces of classical music, with over 200 versions — including the soundtrack to Disney's Fantasia.
Gemeni says the only classical pieces with larger discographies are...
1. Vivaldi: The Four Seasons
2. Beethoven: Symphony No. 5
3. Beethoven:Symphony No. 9 ("Choral")
4. Mozart: Eine kleine Nachtmusik
5. Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker Suite: Highly popular repertoire
6. Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1
7. Bach: Mass in B minor:
8. Mahler: Symphony No. 5
(It surprised me that Mahler's Symphony No. 5 is on this list. I remembered hearing it and thinking it terribly pretentious, and I half way through it again as I write this, and I still think it's pretentious.)
Is it much less of a thing? Or are you just less likely to encounter it?
If you're a normal sort of person then you'll eventually encounter some avant-garde art because you'll go to an art gallery to see some of the things you like and you'll eventually come across a banana taped to the wall or whatever and you'll say "oh that's dumb". But most normal people will go their whole lives escaping ever hearing Stockhausen's Hymnen ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDxpa-XPMTo )
>I will instead take the bold stand that conflating many different things is bad
I think there's a common thing they share that elevates them as art: specialness/rareness.
Sensory delight is rare, personal transformations are rare, technical craft is rare, groundbreaking observations are rare. Michaelangelo created technical masterworks, and Warhol made statements that only he could make. Despite their incredible differences, they're united as artists by the scarcity of what they had to offer. I guess that's the theory?
Yes, there are edge cases (a string of random numbers may be unique/rare in some sense but nobody finds that interesting) and we might specify "intentional, aesthetic specialness/rareness", but art is broadly a way we "make special" the world (odd that there doesn't seem to be a word for that). This seems to connect most of the things on your list.
>The type of critic young Scott dreamed of could make true discoveries. They might learn that the family restaurant down the street makes a steak that beats the $100-a-plate Michelin-starred steakhouse. Probably the average claim like this isn’t true. But probably there’s some claim like this which is true, and they could learn it. The real-world restaurant critic who writes stuff about “ambience” never will.
So you don't think that decor and ambience matter at all when eating out a restaurant? Critics should discuss only the food and nothing else?
Scott...I thought you were sensitive to sound! If a restaurant's floor was carpeted in loud popping bubble-wrap and everyone sat on rolling chairs, wouldn't you consider this important information when deciding whether to go there?
My problem with the scarcity explanation is that it suggests we either shouldn't bother going to see Michelangelo exhibits (because technically masterful statues are no longer scarce) or we should be equally interested in having other people continue to make masterful statues.
My claim is that people should be interested in whether food is good or bad. If a drug is in extremely inconvenient packaging, that matters a lot for patients, but anything which conflates it with the drug's effectiveness is doing a disservice.
Might be instructive to compare with the great scientists of history.
The average modern physicist has a much better and more complete understanding of the physical world than Newton did, and a standard textbook explains Newtonian physics better than Newton could. But we revere Newton for very good reason. And we still do the scientific equivalent of going to Newton exhibits.
A lot of art appreciation is history appreciation in disguise.
But that does get to an important difference. Despite the fact that most people with an interest in physics hold Newton in high esteem, very few would say that Newton's writings are the best way to explain his ideas. We've decoupled the value of what Newton was trying to communicate from the form which he used to communicate it. But most people with an interest in art would find it absurd to think that a statue in the style of Michelangelo done today would be worth looking at compared to an original. So whatever effect Michelangelo's work is supposed to have on the viewer, it is inextricably tied to the specific physical objects he produced, rather than abstracted as an idea.
>people should be interested in whether food is good or bad.
Shouldn't you first define what is "good or bad"? What if I said that good food is anything that gives my body enough calories to continue functioning, and doesn't literally kill me? My body doesn't even have an innate sense of caloric value, so it has to use the imperfect proxy of "satisfied hunger" to determine that a meal was sufficiently nutritious.
Whether or not you like the taste of food is already a question of preference that has no bearing on its ability to satisfy your body's caloric needs, let alone the hunger proxy. You simply disagree with the food critic with how many extraneous qualities food has to have to qualify as good or bad, before even considering any of the individual qualities. That is your right, but a universal truth it ain't.
> My claim is that people should be interested in whether food is good or bad.
How, though, can you reduce the experience of eating food to "good or bad"?
In your essay you propose that a suitably double-blinded ideal spherical frictionless critic of unit mass in a vacuum might carry out some experiment that would result in some kind of meaningful objective rating.
I dispute that such a thing is possible. Food is not like physics or even like medicine.
I love mushrooms. My friend hates them. Catching a slight whiff literally makes her vomit. Are mushrooms good? Bad? If my steak comes with a mushroom sauce, does that make it better or worse? If a critic tells me the mushrooms were a 9.5 out of 10 on the objective good/bad scale, what have I learned? If they were a 0.5, have I learned anything more? I suggest maybe I learned something about the critic, but much less about the food.
To a first approximation, the entire nation of Japan loves natto. The stuff makes me vomit. Indeed, it looks, feels and smells like someone already has. Are they wrong or am I wrong? Is natto good or bad? What if someone made a natto mushroom risotto? A critic went and ate it double blind, and rated it 5.0. What have I learned from this?
We had some wine in a tiny restaurant in San Giminiano, right on top of the town wall, overlooking the fields. It was delicious. We bought three bottles and brought them home. We served them to our mushroom-hating friend, with great fanfare. It was utterly foul. My personal theory in retrospect is that it was chilled to be pleasantly cool in both cases; which over there meant 22 degrees C, and back here in ol' blightly meant +10 or so, and that's gonna make a difference to how it smells and tastes. But it might just have been the ambiance, who knows. Was the wine good? Was it bad? If I'd read a critic had rated it 8/10, what would I have learned?
I submit that the job of a restaurant critic is to answer the question: what is it like to go to this place and have a meal there? I can sit in my armchair and read a bunch of these and try the experiences on for size, and maybe see if any of them sound like something I want, or maybe just live vicariously through them like all the other media I voraciously consume. Just telling me whether they thought the food was good or bad is a tiny part of the story I want. The whole experience is a complex painting, not a single brush stroke. The critics - the good ones (twitch), at least - are not limiting themselves to painting a single objective perfectly measured black square, Malevich style. They are producing a full traditional masterpiece of writing. They pack the entire restaurant into the brute sparse medium of words so it can unpack itself in your brain and dwell there.
To ask them to be objective is to force them to make your most hated kind of modern art instead.
Distinguish between a restaurant critic and someone at a test kitchen testing recipes. That is a lot more like the drug trials--they're shooting for replicable results wrt the food quality (taste, texture, smell, appearance) in a context where they can't say anything about the ambiance or the experience.
> A 2017 survey by Nifty, a Japanese internet service provider, found that only about 62% of Japanese people actually enjoy nattō. It also revealed that 13% actively dislike the taste. Regardless, many eat it anyway because of the health benefits.
I... honestly don't know how to react to that, or whether those are surprisingly low or surprisingly high numbers. Try some natto, if you haven't. You can only have your first taste once.
Personally, I'll put it somewhere between "phoenix talons" (stewed chicken feet; all of the nope) and stinky tofu (super popular in Taiwan, you can smell the vendors from two streets away; actually not too bad if you don't breathe, a bit like eating very strong blue cheese). But I know people who like those things (not the same people all the things at once, AFAIK).
It's well worth trying things once, because you never know. Sometimes you get the chicken feet experience, but sometimes you discover you actually like whatever it is. I've little idea which of my likes would be surprising to others; they are normal and delicious to me now.
There might be some conclusion I should be drawing about out-of-your-comfort-zone art in there, I don't know. I'm just going to be over here curling up with my comfort read for now.
I would say I quite like natto, and did on my first taste of it, but my first taste of it was as part of a complete dish after I had read someone write in detail about how to prepare and serve it. While I don’t think the taste (or texture!) would be for everyone, if I had tried to just eat it as it was then I imagine I would have reacted like Americans trying marmite by sticking a spoon into the jar.
I love the idea of the owner/operator of a tiny restaurant in San Giminiano waiting patiently for the right opportunity to offload three bottles of awful wine to some tourists who can be convinced it's the same wonderful stuff they just drank at dinner and will be safely far away before they discover the horrible truth.
Or maybe it was the temperature. You believe what you want, I'll believe what I want.
I mean, it's not like it cost much. If it was a scam, it was at the sadder end of scams, and frankly they're welcome to whatever they made because they clearly need it.
"If a critic tells me the mushrooms were a 9.5 out of 10 on the objective good/bad scale, what have I learned? If they were a 0.5, have I learned anything more?"
If you hate mushrooms/mushrooms make you sick, it won't matter because you're never going to eat them. If I'm ordering a mushroom dish, it makes a big difference to me whether it's graded 9.5 out of 10 or 0.5 out of 10.
It well may be that I eat it and go "this is definitely not a 9.5 dish" and that's where subjective taste comes in, but if enough people agree "yeah this is a solid 7 out of 10" then I'll be more willing to try it than if everyone reviews it with "whatever you do, never order the mushrooms here".
How to turn second-class mushrooms into a popular dish:
I remember reading an argument that the only job of a critic is provide an honest account of their experiences. It's inevitable that people's tastes and what they want from an experience will differ, so there's no objectively correct rating to give something. But if you provide a genuine and comprehensive account of the experience, then that lets people decide for themselves whether the product or establishment is a good fit for them. That's where the true value of a review lies.
"My claim is that people should be interested in whether food is good or bad."
Oh sure, fancy ambience means little if the food is dreadful. But you're not going to get perfect replication in food as in drugs, unless we go to mass-market products like McDonald's where a lot of time and money and effort has gone into making it that "wherever you go, the Big Mac will be the same and you will get the same experience time after time".
Nobody thinks that makes McDonald's fine dining (though I will defend the honour of the Big Mac as palatable fast food when you're hungry and just want a big hunk of something you don't have to cook yourself).
But for restaurant cooking, it will depend very much on quality of ingredients (and that affects the price: you the customer are going to pay premium prices for premium dishes), seasonality (which means some ingredients may not be available at that time of year or, if available, not fresh but frozen/shipped in from overseas), technique of the chef, are they traditional or trying to innovate, etc.
If you got fifty chefs from all levels of food production and gave them all the same ingredients, in the same kitchen with the same tools, to the same recipe, then yeah you could then go "is the beef bourguignon cooked by family restaurant worse than, as good as, or better than the Michelin steakhouse?"
But that's not how it works in reality. Tastes also change as people get more access to different menus, better versions of traditional dishes, more accustomed to eating 'authentic' recipes and the likes. Something from 1950 that was wildly popular with the majority of ordinary people might now be considered bland and commonplace by the same majority of ordinary people.
This video going through the decades from 1920 to 2020s show how Michelin dishes changed over time.
CONTENT WARNINGS: If you're squeamish about dead animals from lobsters to chickens, better skip this or fast-forward through the "oh my God, that's the corpse of a formerly living creature there on show" bits. (BLOODMOUTH CARNIST DISCLAIMER: Not a corpse, a carcass, there's a difference):
The drug analogy seems explicitly wrong to me. More apt would be the effectiveness of a placebo... Then absolutely the context will matter. Packaging, sound and lighting could all affect the effectiveness of the Placebo pill
The packaging example here is a bit flippant. Imagine a drug that has demonstrated perfect efficacy in trials against (intractable severe depression or glioblastona or whatever) but that must be administered directly to the brain by specialized surgeons every three weeks indefinitely.
Efficacy has to be achievable and sustainable to even matter. Ease of use or minimal nuisance adverse events are, in some sense, less important than efficacy as treatment goals. But the hierarchy of treatment goals is platonic. It’s too much of a decoupled abstract to lean. You have to do the math every time for the drug on the table.
Yeah, you've got to separate a "restaurant" critic from a "food" critic. A restaurant is a place you're going to spend time in while the food cooks, and how that time feels is important.
Thank you. I would have made that point if nobody else had. The whole steakhouse section seems to be misunderstanding (on purpose?) why people go to restaurants.
The premise of the article that you should be able to decompose the restaurant experience OR the art experience into independently testable parts is ... questionable.
There is an issue on the is/ought barrier here. Yes, taste is probably a "conflation" of many things. Correct analysis, thank you Scott. It does not follow from there that this is a bad thing or that you "should" define your taste differently.
I mean, it is a valuable thing to note that Joe's Bar and Grill serves outstanding steaks, which cost 1/4 as much but are superior to the ones served by Sam's Snooty Steakhouse. But depending on what else you're looking for, you may prefer to take your date or clients you are trying to impress to Sam's. Or to Joe's, to impress them in a different way.
And a restaurant critic will usually talk about that! A good review makes clear whether this is a place that's worth it for the ambience and creativity even if the taste isn't great, or a place that has amazing food despite being a hole in the wall in a strip mall.
>The whole steakhouse section seems to be misunderstanding (on purpose?) why people go to restaurants
I mostly agree, but there are some restaurants that one goes to purely for the food. Jitlada in Los Angeles is an obvious example; amazing food, but painfully slow service and blah ambience.
Or, to take another {former) L.A. Thai restaurant, I once ate this dish:
>The pla lui saun, a profoundly delicious dish of fish stripped of its spine, turned inside out and fried to a golden block of pure crunch, buried under a mound of Thai herbs, drizzled with hot, sweet sauce, may be the single best thing on the menu. As you eat, the bones crackle under your teeth, the cool fragrance of the cilantro and the threads of kaffir lime leaf spark the salty oiliness of the fish, and a top note of gingered sweetness weaves through the composition like a silvery trumpet line: spectacular.
but the restaurant was a storefront in a mini mall next to a tire shop, and the ambience wasn't much better.
And some critics are read more for their reviews than to find out "is this restaurant any good?" because they develop a gimmick and a following. The late A.A. Gill was known for his, um, acerbic style and you would read his food writing to see how exactly he was going to excoriate (or rarely, praise) the latest restaurant to be the subject of his attention:
I also think Point 5 is underrated. A lot of what good literary criticism is doing is saying "what we see Character A doing in situation B, which at first may not make sense, is for reasons XYZ." You can see plenty of this on TVTropes' Fridge Brilliance page, but one specific case I found useful was Shamus Young's review of Final Fantasy X where he's discussing how Auron knows most of what's going on in the plot and carefully chooses what he tells of it, clarifying confusion into a complicated narrative of manipulation well-justified by the characters we meet on the story.
Now, this might not have anything to do with modern art, but...
Imagine a mystery author who serializes the story, publishing it chapter by chapter. Right before the scene which explains how the mystery is solved, the author dies.
There are then two reading experiences for the story. The first is for people who have solved the mystery and can understand all the hidden motivations of all the characters. The second is for people who haven't, and find everything everyone is doing confusing. The critic who explains whodunnit and why makes the book much more fun to reread.
What do we think of series where the author is still alive but has left the series at midpoint without a new entry for over a decade? I would suspect that there is no revelation that would vindicate the preceding entries, otherwise the author would have already written that.
I'm building off your idea. You imagine a scenario where the author dies, leaving the work unfinished. I'm thinking of multiple instances right now where the author isn't dead but the serialized work has been stuck incomplete.
In that case I think that, justly, in a world that worked like Scott's childhood dream of restaurant critics, a literary critic who could explain coherently what resolution was being foreshadowed would be providing a valuable service, and this would let you rate literary critic reliability should the latest book in the sequence actually show up. A literary critic who says "there's no way out" only to have the author find one anyway would be laughed out of work.
Wow, did not expect to see Shamus Young name dropped here. He's probably one of my most-lamented creator deaths. I've re-read most of his retrospectives half-a-dozen times minimum over the years. I still recommend his writing to people whenever one of the things he has covered comes up, and a lot of his concise criticisms of human behavior and cultural trends are still up there with the Sequences in forming the foundations of my ability to notice mental fail-states.
So that said - are there any writers/essayists/critics/whatever-he-was you'd recommend similarly?
As for the Fridge Brilliance topic itself, I've often pondered the meaning of things I enjoy re-reading, games where I discover new details I love coming back 300 hours in. "See someone's earlier scenes now knowing what they had planned" is a very archetypical example muddled by the fact that humans have memory. So it's possible when the reveal hits on your first reading to call pack to scenes you found confusing and have them clarified in retrospect. But you'll probably notice even more on a second reading. Would you find the experience more compelling if you simply read the critic walking you through the story, or if you had read it yourself first, having been confused by the unclear motivations, and THEN read the critic's explanation causing everything to click into place?
... It depends, probably. Alongside Shamus Young, The Dark Id is another long-form writer where if anything I preferred going "blind" on journies into what he was covering, trusting that he'd emphasize stuff as needed.
I feel like "do you prefer knowing/figuring out all that hidden stuff on a first pass" is a really individual thing. My mother is a prolific life-long speed-reader who tended to read the last few pages of a mystery first and is in it mainly for the prose. Other people love that moment of realization, and digging back (either mentally or on a straight re-read) and realizing the changed context for everything they've experienced.
Heck I'm a mechanics-focused game designer and this is still something I do a lot - that moment of being introduced to a new thing that forces you to re-evaluate existing things is a lot of fun!
I was actually first linked to SlateStarCodex from the comments section on Shamus' blog. I think it was referencing how Scott was another promoter of online civility. Definitely appreciated the link!
Same, definitely. Miss the guy a lot, he was brilliant.
For other recommendations... Websnark (Eric Burns-White) is definitely on the list but most of his stuff was eaten by the internet. I think Alexander Wales' fiction analysis is pretty good. I myself have done some fiction analysis but I am not on Shamus Young's tier.
Mostly I just deeply hunger for text-based deep dive analyses and nobody is making them any more.
I'll also throw Michael O'Church's name into the ring, although he's one if those thinkers who will spend ages chewing on niche topics (lately the publishing industry) and then, every once in a while, will emerge with something like his three-ladder class concept.
"there is a million-item checklist every modern book must follow not to get panned as “gauche” or “unsophisticated”, and almost no great book of the past followed any of these rules. The Iliad certainly didn’t"
I try hard to be productively grandiose and gauche, yet I feel like lately I have come dangerously close to following the rules. I must invest more in megalomania.
I would have thought the answer to the points about Chesterton etc. is the same as with the restaurants: it's a holistic experience. The restaurant experience includes not just food but the ambience, the chef's story etc. The experience of a Chesterton novel, in some sense, includes not just the novel itself, but the fact of Chesterton himself in all of his fatness, jolliness, Catholic-ness - just see the name "G. K. Chesterton" and you're probably picturing an image of Chesterton himself already (well, actually, I might be picturing Fiddler's Green from The Sandman, but it's all the same).
The context of political art includes the political situation of the day, perhaps in the way the artist doesn't mean - the extreme political statements of Rage Against the Machine now contrast against the relatively tranquil end-of-history vibes of the 90s in a way that suggests that RATM was tolerated precisely because communism was so defanged at the time, for instance. Art quite literally *cannot* happen in the void, even if you'd have a restaurant critic tasting it all as a RCT, that process itself would have a special ambience of its own that might affect the results.
Of course, that means there's also a specific process of experience and specific lessons to be learned from the fictional boomer sculptor and from AI Art. AI Art experience might be enchanced by the fact that it comes from the AI - what does it suggest that the computer is creating the sort of works that it creates? What does it suggest about our own sense of history if the form of sculpture can amaze us even if it is not actually ancient or medieval creation but a mass-market art product? What does it suggest if Duchamp can put an urinal in a show and have it appreciated? And so on.
I'm with Scott that sometimes it's helpful to be a little less holistic. Is there something about Chesterton's work that you can love and be transformed by even if you're encountering him for the first time with no idea about his personal history (or the deeply charming but not very Catholic Sandman version, for that matter)? If so, can that be allowed to have value independent of an awareness of Chesterton's context?
I've got nothing (at all!) against taking pleasure in art-as-discourse, art whose cleverness or appeal can only really be grasped if you understand its place in history. But I don't think all aesthetic experience reduces to that, or is enhanced by that. Sometimes the anti-holistic move -- splitting art's aesthetic appeal from its context -- is the right one.
I'm not necessarily saying that the experience of Chesterton when knowing about his background is superior or inferior to the experience of Chesterton without knowing anything about him, just that it's contextually driven in any case.
There's always context - even someone who doesn't know anything particular about Chesterton would, solely by the context of their name, have at least the context that they're most likely of Anglo heritage, which already drives at least some of the interpretation, especially when encountered in non-Anglo countries. One might then infer a number of other assumed characteristics, whether they're true or not.
Furthermore, I'm not sure if anyone who *does* know about Chesterton is truly as high-decoupling as to not let their image of Chesterton affect them at least a bit when perusing Chesterton's works.
And I'd suggest that "contextually *driven*" is stronger language than we should be using here. Context always exists -- none of our experience happens in a cultural or linguistic vacuum -- but context will often nuance rather than drive our experience. In some cases our awareness of context is so minimal that even nuance might be too strong a word.
If all you know about Chesterton is that he's writing in English and has an Anglo name, those are probably not major factors in your aesthetic reaction to his work. Even more so when you're responding to an image or sculpture or building without knowing its provenance.
It's cool to learn about the wider context of things. And I'm all for humanism of the "humani nil a me alienum puto" stripe --for trying to understand why other people have poured passion and resources into creating something that initially strikes you as ugly or unimpressive.
But at the end of the day, I don't believe in the superiority of art that you can really *only* appreciate with a laboriously-achieved awareness of its context -- Joyce's Ulysses or Eliot's Waste Land, for example, or architecture whose intentional ugliness is best defended by an excursus into history. Not saying it's inherently inferior, mind you. Just that the "holistic" experience of art-in-dialogue-with-other-art is neither inevitable nor superior to an aesthetic experience unmediated by awareness of that context.
I love Chesterton. I will yield to no man, woman, or beast on my love of him. But I would not say he was a great poet. A very good versifier and some of his poems are magnificent, but as a poet not in the first rank (and I think he'd agree, and he'd defend the second- and third-rank places as also having a place in the great scheme of things).
But if we're going to go "poems in the style of Chesterton" then I can only quote his own versions of "Old King Cole" written in the style of other poets as a funny and charming read:
Yeah, I raised a (snobby) eyebrow at that sentence about “the great poets, like Chesterton.” I can only name one of his poems and that because it’s been written about here! I don’t think I’ve ever seen his poetry anthologized, and I did my PhD in British literature of the period. Which could all suggest that academia is parochial, not that Chesterton stinks, of course. But it was funny seeing it taken as a given.
That Swinburne version rocks hard ! Now I want to read the full epic saga of King Cole, or at least watch a blockbuster movie based on it -- in the style of Christopher Nolan or perhaps Darren Aronofsky. It should be titled simply, "COLE".
Kind of convinces me even more that Yeats created some genius poetry even when I don't understand it. Even the parody sounds good, and it's impressive how Chesterton caught the technique and spirit.
I feel kind of the same way about Weird Al Yanckovic's "style parody" of DEVO, "Dare to be Stupid."
Obviously. I was talking more in the sense of major record contracts, co-operation with more moderate forces like Michael Moore, general cultural promotione tc.
Ok, but you see how it would be unbelievably bad and cringe if you actually wrote a Homeric epic in 2026 and expected it to be taken seriously as literature. Like a fedora wearing white guy wearing a samurai outfit—it doesn’t matter if it’s historically accurate, it doesn’t carry the same interesting/beautiful connotation as an actual in the same outfit in feudal Japan. Like it or not, part of what makes art good is the circumstance of its creation.
No, I don't see this. I'm not a good enough poet to make it work, and I think there's a bigger problem that there isn't much going on that the epic format is suitable to describe - even if someone in the Ukraine War wanted to write about their experiences, I don't think the circumstances of modern war afford the level of individual glory and heroism that the traditional epic form centers around, and I think it would be tough to either write a heartfelt war epic that didn't confront the unethicalness of war, or to bend the structure of the heroic epic so that it did confront it.
But these are all the sorts of obstacles that good artists prove their genius by finding ways to overcome. I refuse to believe that these sorts of practical matters force all books to be either sparse prose or collections of short free verse poems.
I've tried to write a couple of epics over the years to demonstrate my point, but never gotten anything to a point that I'm happy publishing. Maybe one day I'll change that and prove you wrong.
I don’t want to discourage you because I think it’s cool, but one problem is that even thinking about a modern person’s actions as ”epic” in the Homeric sense is adjacent to parody. That’s been true for hundreds of years, so the only real successful serious epic in English is a retelling of the Biblical story (which escapes the problem because it is mythical and deadly serious for believers).
Say more about why you think even thinking about a modern person’s actions as ”epic” in the Homeric sense is adjacent to parody and how that’s been true for hundreds of years?
Even in the 18th century the most famous epic style poems are satirical/comedic (the Rape of the Lock is probably the most famous example, worth looking up if you are unfamiliar).
Don Juan by Byron is also humorous.
Modern people are too self aware or something like that.
John Adams or Philip Glass could write an opera about Borlaug that would convey the right heroic magnitude. I don’t know about Homeric, but epic is achievable.
If a classic epic is about a hero's journey and individual behvaiour to be praised or condemned, then modern warfare is a particularly ill-suited setting for an epic. People have a good sense that modern warfare leaves little room for individual heroics. The human element even gets optimized out, as can be seen in Ukraine in its currently purest form.
If anything, superhero stories are our modern equivalent of classic epics because their entire premise is so divorced from reality that they allow for the kind of individualistic exploits that would considered laughable in a more grounded setting.
Counterpoint: George Lucas based a lot of Star Wars on WWII combat. The star destroyers, conceptually speaking, were just WWII battleships in space. Seems like he managed to cobble a worthy hero's journey together from it. Granted, that was SciFi/Fantasy, but it seems pretty obvious an imaginative person could write some Horatio Hornblower type stories, for example, in the context of WWII.
Fighter pilots are the last refuge of individual heroics in modern war, a single man with courage and skill doing meaningful damage to the enemy. And so the most recent successful war epic was Top Gun: Maverick.
Then again James Bond can also save the world on occasion by pressing a self-destruct button on the way out of a bad guy's lair.
Heroics aren't so much about the damage one can do; it's about the personal risk that makes it heroic. During the Western occupation of Afghanistan, for example, US drone operators were sitting in a control room in Ramstein AB, capable of inflicting a lot of damage but their greatest personal risk was spilling hot coffee over their uniform. Does that count as heroic?
Likewise, a modern fighter pilot presses a button to release a missile aimed by radar far beyond visual range, if it can be helped. The gun on the F-35, for example, is optional, and it's part of the design at all due to tradition more than a real expectation of dogfights; like bringing a backup knife to a gunfight. The next step in fighter evolution is probably more of a drone C&C platform, further removing the pilot from danger and therefore from classic "Red Baron"-style heroics.
Comics are often incredibly impressed with their own main characters and it serves them well. Sure, the kind of person who's obsessed with minimizing their novel's attack surface thinks that Absolute Wonder Woman is cringe and One Piece is for defective children. But they're successful, popular, and artistically worthwhile - despite, or more likely because of, the fact that they're consciously trying to be epics.
I agree that comic epics and religious epics are our best bet, but this makes me sad. The actions of Norman Borlaug or Mohandas Gandhi are surely greater than those of Achilles by the modern way of reckoning up greatness. Even George Patton was pretty epic in the literal sense of the term. Why *can't* we appreciate an epic that takes them seriously?
I think the answer is "people would mock it, mockery is corrosive to dignity, and we can only overcome that by the fact that ancient epics get an unprincipled exception to our tendency of mocking anything too sincere". But at some point, I think it becomes a specific goal of art to fight back against the haters and refuse to cede ground to them. Also, if you had a hundred good epics, eventually you would have established a new norm and mocking them would be harder.
Probably the biggest way we reckoned the greatness of Mohandas Gandhi and George Patton was by the way of an epic biopic, and while I'm not sure that would be the best form for Borlaug, I could see an epic miniseries.
>The Batrachomyomachia (“The Battle of Frogs and Mice”) is the only surviving complete ancient Greek epic parody, a humorous adaptation of Homer’s Iliad. Scholars place its composition sometime between the 6th and 4th centuries BC, or possibly later.
I agree, but somehow I feel that whatever Julian Jaynes and others identified as being different about Homeric heroes compared to modern people (ignoring the accuracy of the larger theory) is somehow importantly related to what makes ancient epics special.
I want to put up a heroic statue of Norman Borlaug, like if Boris Vallejo did the Collosus of Rhodes in bronze. 90 feet tall. Buck naked. Holding aloft a torch.
I think one could absolutely make an epic about a figure like Borlaug today, and have it be taken seriously, but it very obviously wouldn't be a _Homeric_ epic: Homer would probably not understand the heroism of Borlaug, and your comment above acknowledges that moderns have a conception of heroism in which Achilles is much diminished compared to how the ancients viewed him.
You would obviously have to change the plot, the characters, the nature of the drama and difficulties he would have to overcome; the nature of his interaction with fate/the gods, etc.
Even a war epic set in Ukraine would, as you note, be a poor fit for a straight-up Homeric epic: the nature of bravery/martial valour/etc are all different in modern war.
So the question becomes: if the plot, character, and themes will all have to adapt to modern context... What would be enough for you to consider it a Homeric epic? Written in hexameter? Extensive use of formulas?
Could I count the movie Oppenheimer as an epic about a heroic, Promethean figure? What about Schindler's List? Citizen Kane?
Is there something those movies are missing that keeps them from being the modern version of a Homeric epic?
Have you read The Wizard And The Prophet? Half of it is about Borlaug. To me it read like an epic, to be honest. Complete with story arc.
That is certainly in part due to my biased interest in such topics. It also probably helps that I don't need other people's opinions on whether it is an epic or not.
It's quite accurate as far as I remember. One quibble: He didn't really work in labs, his lab were the fields where he even pollinated wheat by hand to create new breeds. So if at all, the poem undersells his efforts.
On a slightly more solemn note, it also omits Borlaug's own insight that he felt he was just relieving a current emergency, but continuing population growth might outdo his efforts.
Hamilton counts as a solid attempt. The elite cultural consensus eventually turned on it, but there were a few years where its earnestness was broadly enjoyed rather than mocked, and today's nerds are still allowed to love it without shame.
In a non-doomed timeline, it would be interesting to see how Hamilton eventually gets ranked compared to more cynical awardwinning 2010s musicals.
That sounds like a political objection more than anything. Assuming that's a real problem, then replace the modern person with a modern idea, whatever it is the Kids These Days believe in. Write a Homeric epic about the rise of the Internet over old-fashioned broadcasting.
The Godfather. The Sopranos. Succession. Breaking Bad / Better Call Saul. There Will be Blood. These are all epics in the Homeric sense about recognizably modern people, and are not parodies.
I guess I just think the provenance of objects is meaningful by itself. Hence, an antique katana that saw action during a bunch of interesting battles is more interesting than a perfectly engineered one made by modern machines. And I think I can like the antique more, and still “like katanas”.
I agree with you that this is the natural popular perception, I just think it belies people's claim to actually like art. As in my statue for dentists in McMansions example, you can't say both "it's just interesting that this has a complex provenance" and "looking at this utterly transformed my very soul".
Seems to me like either or both could be true. The Sistine Chapel is awesome to behold and has interesting provenance. The Venus of willendorf has provenance but isn’t that special to look at. An aircraft carrier is awesome to behold but has no interesting antique provenance.
I guess it depends on the carrier. Exploring the museums on the Hornet or the Lexington (Essex-class, not their predecessors which lie at the bottom of the Pacific) definitely has a different feel to it than the one on the USS Midway. The Lexington and the Hornet actually fought in WW2, the Midway was launched after it had already ended.
And I admit I feel a tinge of sadness when thinking about the fate of the USS Enterprise(yorktown class).
The most decorated ship in the history of the US Navy, the "Lucky E" or the "Gray Ghost" was unceremoniously scrapped because not enough funds could be raised to turn it into a museum ship.
And if in some hypothetical future it were to be perfectly reconstructed it just wouldn't feel the same.
Provenance matters because having a profound emotional experience in response to the statue with a $20.00 sticker still under the base feels like getting conned. If someone's going to make me feel deep and profound, there should be something deep and profound happening at the other end (eg. a Renaissance master sweating and labouring away); if some garden furniture company can move my soul for pennies without a thought, what does that make me?
Thought experiment: if a psychotic person fled into a cave in the Arizona desert, scratched a Homer-quality epic poem into the walls and then ran into the sun to die, I can entirely imagine people saying it was one of the greatest works of literature ever. If he turned out to be still alive, and have done the cave thing as a marketing stunt for something that Claude wrote for him, it would cheapen it to the point that being moved by it would feel almost like a violation (even if you knew about the fraud before you read the poem) because the emotion is unearned on the artist's end.
This is also why modern art only works if it's fantastically expensive; being moved by the formaldehyde shark that costs millions feels far less tacky than being moved by your neighbour's dog that they got preserved at picklemypet.com. Quite literally, the low price tag and mass-producedness of it cheapens the experience.
I alsoI think some of people's attitudes about paying for sex is linked to all this, but I've not sketched out the details.
I think the way to make sense of this is that in art, the mechanism by which you have your soul utterly transformed can include provenance: what transforms you is not just your response to the object itself, but also your response to the effort, concentration, mastery of technique, attention to detail, etc, necessary to achieve it.
For Michelangelo, to create those human figures required a huge amount of effort, mastery, etc, and so when one looks at one of his statues and thinks about the obsessive study and work that went into it, one feels even more of a sense of transformation.
I suspect a lot of defenders of mainstream views on art and taste will just flat out reject the idea that your various components need to be unbundled, and only one of them identified as the true test of art.
As a kind of dumb analogy, imagine if someone asked, "why don't baseball fans think that a trebuchet is better than Babe Ruth? It can launch a baseball much further!" And insisting that baseball _must_ be decomposed into the component features that people enjoy about it, and only one of them can be what enjoying baseball is _really_ about.
I was going to say something similar. The provenance of something changes the sensory experience for me, or at least the way the sensory experience translates into an emotional reaction.
At the science museum in London, you can see up close one of the engines that powered the first airplane that crossed the ocean (https://photos.app.goo.gl/CfhC16Yu3AK58oja7, better photo of the same model of engine here: https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/rolls-royce-eagle-viii-v-12-engine/nasm_A19610135000). Separate from its relationship to historical events, I think it's interesting to look at, if not particularly memorable. And I find many things like engines _aesthetically_ pleasing (or at least aesthetically attention-grabbing), wherever they came from, not just intellectually interesting.
But looking at this particular engine was moving for me in a way it would not have been if I hadn't read the plaque. It's form and details and the way it sits on the stand just look different to me, knowing where it came from. I still think about it sometimes.
In some defense of Scott's point, I think there are some details of provenance and context that we do want to exclude as irrelevant to _aesthetic_ (as distinct from historical) appreciation. I just think he's wrong that "artistic merit" is best thought of as being a judgement that excludes _all_ context.
I think that the katana example conflates provenance and technique. True, today we can mass-produce pretty decent swords using modern metallurgy, and in fact it's possible that modern machetes are far superior to any historical katanas in terms of sharpness, corrosion resistance, edge retention, and other objective metrics. But the Ancient Japanese smiths who made those katanas did not have access to all of our fancy toys. They had to fold the steel thousands of times to manually hammer out the impurities, and the resulting product would be incredibly impressive even if it never did see military action.
Understood. That said though, I always thought of "provenance" as being the personal history of a specific object that is linked to famous people or events; i.e. a katana owned by Miyamoto Musashi would have provenance, whereas ten other katanas made in the same time period and stored forever in some basement would not.
> I guess I just think the provenance of objects is meaningful by itself.
When you walk into an art gallery, you are presented with the art, which has a label next to it with some writing on it.
I think there is an extreme condition where all of the actual art - the thing that triggers the internal experience you are seeking when you visit the gallery - is in the writing that is on the label and not in the object itself.
I am still waiting for a modern art exhibit which is just a label describing concept and provenance, next to an empty space; a visual equivalent of 4'33". Has someone already done this and I am simply unaware?
This exists. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum still "displays" the empty spaces formerly occupied by paintings stolen in the 1990 heist (https://www.gardnermuseum.org/about/theft).
I don't think it would work if the empty spaces didn't have an interesting provenance.
I think part of the reason why a Homeric epic written in the modern day would seem "cringe" is that Homer's ideas were so transformative as to become part of our culture. Thus seeing the same themes rehashed today would feel stale and cliche -- we are saturated by them. If you wanted to create an epic work in the modern day, you'd have to transform it, not merely ape the original. For example:
On the contrary. You can rehash Homer and point out explicitly that your work is a rehash of Homer, and people will love it and think it feels fresher than more modern work. People are mostly not already familiar with the source material.
> This musical project, released between 2022 and 2024, is a sung-through adaptation of the Ancient Greek epic poem Odyssey by Homer and takes inspiration from different musical genres as well as modern musical theater, anime and video games. It recounts the story of Odysseus as he tries to return from Troy to his island kingdom of Ithaca after the conclusion of the decade-long Trojan War.
> It has received widespread praise from reviewers and listeners for the emotional depth and narrative complexity it exhibits through its musical format.
Perhaps another reason is that (I'm guessing) while Odysseus was on his journey he didn't know if or when it would ever end, whereas the idea of embarking on a genuinely open ended journey today seems faintly ridiculous.
One modern novel which seems to tick most if not all epic boxes is "The Journeyer" by Gary Jennings, a fictional account of the travels of Marco Polo, in which he gets into all sorts of scrapes and, like Odysseus, must wonder if he will ever see his home again:
The deification of George Floyd? Renee Good and Alex Pretti who didn't quite achieve the same level of sanctification but are still heroes not to be criticised?
Seriously, look at the reaction to George Floyd and tell me this is not something out of a Greek play (probably about hubris):
"are informed, it seems, primarily by hateful assholes"
Now, now, Tír Eoghain, don't be so hard on yourself. Change is possible!
You seem to be a little confused as to your mental model of my views. It is entirely possible to hold *both* "Floyd was a petty criminal and not a tragic hero deliberately murdered by the fascist state" *and* "that encounter should not have resulted in his death" as opinions.
I think "Not your country, not your state, not the community you love" would be better directed to these compatriots of mine, as I was not out marching or protesting or signing petitions for anyone on any side:
> I don't think the circumstances of modern war afford the level of individual glory and heroism that the traditional epic form centers around
At the complete opposite end of the fame and respectability scale from Homer is a set of novellas called "Shoshimin Series", which has now been adapted into a cartoon.
These take the form of a series of very traditional fair-play whodunnits. They have all the components of it down to perfection. You have the setting, the puzzle pieces, the tension, the false theories, the big reveal, you the reader kicking yourself when you realise just how early you had all the pieces you needed for the correct solution (maybe that part is just me, IDK). But there are no stakes. No-one is murdered. The mysteries are things like "who ate the last muffin?" or "how did they make the hot chocolate without using the sink?"
There are many other examples, though that one is my current favourite. It is perfectly possible to explore the form separate from the content.
You want to write an epic about the present, but epics have usually been about the legendary past, not the present.
The Trojan War was 400 years old to Homer, and even more ancient to later Greeks and Romans, who continued to write epics and other works using that setting, for example the Aeneid or the Oresteia.
Throughout the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, countless epics were written about the Matter of France and the Matter of Britain, respectively the times of Charlemagne and Arthur, ancient at that point.
Fantasy itself stems from that tradition. There is a continuous production of Arthurian material throughout the last thousand years or thereabouts, and when someone today writes an Arthurian story, everyone calls it "fantasy".
There is even a connection through Tolkien, who (I believe) thought of himself as writing in the epic tradition. Indeed, his Middle Earth is explicitly the past of our Earth, his elves and dwarves the elves and dwarves of our world.
There are two ways to write an epic today and be taken seriously.
The first one is to make it "fantasy". I've always wanted to write one in an Arthurian setting, either wholly in verse, or in a mixture of prose and verse. It would be simultaneously an imitation of past works (by Renaissance authors writing about mythical dark ages, e.g. Orlando Furioso), and a contemporary fantasy. If Tolkien can have bits of verse in his novels so can any fantasy author, stretch that principle and you get a whole fantasy epic in verse. Fantasy fans would love it. The only reason I'm never gonna do it is that AI is already ending all human art, so there is no point.
The other way to be taken seriously is to rely on genres of poetry that thrive today, such as rap albums or musical drama. If you write an epic as a musical, you can even make it about present day themes.
When I was a young adult circa 2000, peak European power metal era, lots and lots of epic bands making epic albums about epic warriors, but none with a modern setting, I kept thinking: one day I'm gonna start a power metal band about WW2, it's gonna be different. Then Sabaton stole exactly my idea and that made them famous, even though they're nothing special and their songs all sound the same. I don't know if they've ever made any album with a single cohesive story, but if they did, it's an epic in verse.
So are many power metal albums. For example, the two parts House of Atreus album by Virgin Steele.
Gloryhammer is extremely derivative of Rhapsody (later rebranded Rhapsody of Fire).
I guess I'm a decrepit boomer (actually an early millennial), who listens to boomer bands, because I'm permanently astonished that nobody in Gloryhammer-related comment sections ever brings up Rhapsody or appears to remember the existence of that seminal band (even though the Gloryhammer songwriter has credited them explicitly).
There is a huge difference between the two bands though, because Rhapsody believed itself a very serious band that was very seriously doing the same thing Homer and Tolkien were doing. It was 100% unintentional that they come across as silly, in part due to having English as a second language (to win the black lord? surely they mean to defeat the black lord).
Gloryhammer took that silliness and ran with it, the difference is that in their case it's deliberate, Gloryhammer doesn't actually want to be serious. Gloryhammer is also making an epic, but it's a "mock epic" (Wikipedia: Mock-heroic, mock-epic or heroi-comic works are typically satires or parodies that mock the elevated style of common Classical stereotypes of heroes and heroic literature).
By Rhapsody (or "Rhapsody of Fire") I mean the classic era of the trio Staropoli-Lione-Turilli, during which they tell a single epic story in 9 albums, from Legendary Tales (1997) to From Chaos to Eternity (2011), then the band split up into a million splinter bands also named "rhapsody".
I feel like you shouldn't write like Homer because the Homeric epics aren't actually good, by modern standards.
I read the Odyssey recently for the first time since high school and my reaction was that it was ... super weird. Old-timey style aside, just as a story, if someone wrote it today you'd find it very strange and bad.
I'm willing to say that "by modern standards" isn't "books are better now" but "important context that makes it good gets lost in translation over 3,000 years", but you don't live 3,000 years ago or even know what it is that got lost in translation since then, so if you tried to ape its style, it would inevitably suck.
"Old-timey style"? did you read it in ancient Greek?
Someone here remarked that Hamilton is an epic poem. Imagine reading the script of Hamilton, translated into another language. It would be super weird. The beauty of a translated poem depends greatly on the translation.
I don't think this is true as a general rule. Epic poetry kept being written many centuries -even millennia!- after Homer, and people could accept it as art when the whole originating context (Dark Age Greece, Oral-Formulaic tradition, etc...) was gone. Of course, that meant the genre changed in significant ways. The Aeneid , The Divine Commedy and Renaissance epics like The Faerie Queen, Os Lusíadas or Paradise lost don't feel like a fedora wearing white guy wearing a samurai outfit.
Isn't the whole point of a Homeric epic that Homer didn't one day sit down and go "Right, time to write a Homeric epic, something that I, Homer, am known to do", but that it's meant to be epic poetry to be orally performed and written down kind of as an afterthought?
It is kind of odd in general how much of Western culture is based on *reading* works (Homeric epics, Shakespeare etc.) that are very much intended to be *performed*. I recently saw a comparison of reading Shakespeare to getting to know about Godfather by reading the script.
The Aeneid is also pretty good, and although I'm not a classicist my impression is that Virgil *did* sit down one day and go "Right, time to write a Homeric epic, something that I, Virgil, am known to do."
I had the impression that it was strongly hinted by Augustus that "Okay Virgil, write me a Homeric epic about the greatness of Rome, something you are known to do" and Virgil agreed. At the least, it was a project undertaken during a time of chaos in order to provide a sort of foundational mythology for Augustus bringing about peace and reconstructing Rome in the wake of the civil war, probably influenced by his patron Maecenas:
Lots and lots of epic poems were written in classical times, medieval, early modern, romantic and victorian times.
They have always been regarded as belonging to the same genre in which Homer was writing.
That may be because for thousands of years people didn't realize that Homeric poems originated as oral poetry. Still, at this point, that is what in our tradition we call "epic poetry". A long narrative heroic poem written by a poet, like Vergil, Dante, Spenser, Milton, Ariosto, Tasso, Byron...
Naomi Kanakia has been writing a series of tales in a style inspired by the Icelandic Sagas, except about random modern things, and they're kind of amazing.
There is a story I dimly remember but have not been able to find. There was some cynical late 19th century author who claimed there could never again be a genuine epic. The genre was dead, nobody had the correct beliefs anymore, they had all been supplanted. Thus, he wrote a deconstructionist ballad of some sort. A year or two later, Chesterton came along. Chesterton is very conservative, and he still had this old ballad spirit. He wrote The Ballad of the White Horse, a really great and totally genuine epic.
The circumstances then are the circumstances now, for some. If you have that old epic spirit, I think you could write an epic just the same.
Anybody remember Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, a somewhat mediocre-themed but engaging novel told gloriously in sonnet form? It was a huge hit back in the 1980s.
Reading this, and remembering some other posts you have written about art, I feel that because you ”have no taste in visual art” (I don’t really understand what this means), you are somehow overly preoccupied with what ”ultra sophisticated” critics say (the ones who claim to be fascinated by basketballs floating in water or whatever), instead of having your own areas of interest from which you approach the subject.
It’s as if someone who has no interest in clothes who thinks that reading about the most outré haute couture is the key to understanding why people like fashion.
Spot on. This is the first post that l have seen om Astral Codex. Idk much about the rationalist movement as I would consider myself actually a promoter of violating these taboos of reason such as putting some virtue in elimination of the placebo effect, which despite all your fancy arguments is just a great way of doing rigorous science that harms people. Shamans used the placebo effect to heal more effectively than the 17 pills I have to take brother. Why the fuck are you writing a huge lengthy piece a out something you clearly have no understanding of at all. Donny, you have no frame of reference here. This definitely sounds like it has been written by someone who has never had a transcendent experience of a y kind because he is too busy dissecting life. Which btw, kills what your are supposedly studying. Life. Get a book about holistic thinking and gaia so you can actually learn somethkng useful for the future instead of thinking that you can technology yourself out of the problems that rationalist technological thinking CAUSED. I mean I always introduced myself as the "smartest idiot you know". But I think if this was the only thing he had written he would have me beat by a mile. In both categories as I'm sure he is already far smarter than me. In the words of Tyler Durden "So how's that working out for ya"..."what?"...."you know, being clever, hows that working out for you". This is not an article that is going to attract a single person to your cause. Maybe that wasn't its purpose. But it looks like a lot of wasted effort that would be better used going for a walk in the woods or planting a garden. Keep on finding the "solutions" by all means team! While the world burns 🔥 everywhere you can see? This is fine. But what snobs think about art?! Now there is a problem that needs solving (if it exists at all). /endtruthrant
Apologies for typos. Real humans aren't computers and maybe us disabled folk struggle to communicate among such merry-go-round of steel men and straw men and while I use bayesian reasoning everyday. Following your feeling is a real thing guys. And from my experience it is a much simpler approach to life to just be a kind and gentle person and free your mind, and the rest will follow. As three wise women once said.
Thanks for sharing. Honestly, my main impression upon reading this is sadness, because I have found reading ACX to be quite complementary to living a meaningful life. And I think you have Scott Alexander completely backwards to say you think his dissection of life is destroying it; at least for a nerdy subset of the population, true understanding is how we appreciate life and make the world better. And you can arrive at truth through rationality.
As for placebos, no one wants to get rid of the placebo effect. We just don't want to rely on it. In clinical trials, the placebo effect can limit our ability to know whether a treatment works or not, so we want to avoid it during those trials. Afterward, treatment and placebo go together. Anyone who actually thinks the placebo effect is bad is not rational and would not fit in amongst rationalists, who are very consequentialist reasoners.
For the record, we only understand the placebo effect as such because of rational truth-seeking in medicine. So don't be too quick to suggest anti-rational approaches are better. What matters is rationality aligned with human values. Scott Alexander's "How Bad Are Things?" might show you what he actually cares about.https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/24/how-bad-are-things/
(Hint: pretty much what you care about as far as I can tell, in terms of human outcomes).
Okay, like, I agree with your opinion on art critique, but... what's the issue? Even if their desires are memetic and based on a shared delusion, the beauty and wonder they feel is just as real. Aren't you doing the same thing as them by claiming that their commentary is "bad"? The first step to rejecting memetic desire is to stop giving a shit about what other people think. You don't have to justify your wants to anyone. At the same time, you're not entitled to respect for having those desires.
Okay, but it does bother me that most of the new buildings around me are ugly, and whenever I ask why we can't make them prettier, people give me the sorts of arguments I try to rebut above.
Those are just your subjective opinion and values. People aren't obligated to agree with them. On the other hand, if you want to force your vision onto the rest of the world, you're free to do so. In fact, it seems the current administration shares your sentiments on modern architecture. Maybe you shouldn't have antagonized them so much.
I think the problem is that the standards of influential people inevitably get forced onto others, especially in architecture. If artistic taste is something purely individual and subjective, then why doesn't every single person's taste count equally? Why do we have awards, why do we have so much art theory and art history, and why does public funding go to the arts, especially if much of it has been going mainly to art the majority of taxpayers don't like?
What you're suggesting sounds like unilateral disarmament.
> If artistic taste is something purely individual and subjective, then why doesn't every single person's taste count equally?
Because we aren't equals. Some people have more power, influence, and capabilities than others, whether it's a product of genetics or circumstance. If it's inevitable that those above shape culture for those below, then it means that if you care about such things, you should try to seize as much power as possible.
I'm not proposing unilateral disarmament. I'm proposing trying to get what you want by any means necessary. If the issue is that other people don't like that you like certain things, then you can just ignore them. But if the issue is that society doesn't align with your interests, you need influence.
Isn't that basically the point of this post? Scott trying to increase his influence over our society's architecture and general aesthetic decisions?
Or are you saying that writing a blog post just has such a negligible amount of influence that it's a waste of time compared to the direct exercise of political power? I think that's true to a degree, but only to a degree. Writing can be the first step in a cascade that eventually affects more concrete factors. It took wars and laws to finally put a stop to slavery, for example, but books and pamphlets and sermons all played their role too.
> Isn't that basically the point of this post? Scott trying to increase his influence over our society's architecture and general aesthetic decisions?
Well sure, but it doesn't seem to provide an argument beyond "my interpretation of beauty is correct and everyone else is wrong". Looking at the comments, it doesn't seem people are changing their minds, or even being emboldened by this... At least make some arguments that modern art is morally degenerate or something.
The issue is that there is an active and politically relevant force looking to eliminate leftist influence on art, and Scott keeps working against them. It seems counterproductive, at least to me....
So if, for example, you were a very widely read blogger whose readers included a lot of relatively wealthy and influential people, you would influence these things by....
...Arguing that leftist art culture is morally degenerate, and that it is society's duty to restore proper beauty to this world. The same thing people did the last time this issue came up. If you argue for truth, you'll only end up at the conclusion that no one else has a reason to care about your preferences. If you make it a moral and cultural issue, you have the opportunity to shape people's preferences by tying it to other grievances.
In the case of architecture, it's mostly not influential people. It's a combination of market forces and regulation that leads to the buildings we see today. It's really bizarre how Scott thinks this is an artistic question.
The important thing is that we've found a way to dismiss all criticism of the bottomlessly ugly, crass, and banal art we're increasingly surrounded by.
I think Scott is working under the assumption that his tastes in architecture (concrete block bad) are somewhat universal, but that the people who say "concrete block good" are suffering from some sort of false consciousness, that they only think concrete blocks are good because someone has told them it is high status to appreciate them.
What Scott wants to do is to develop a theory of taste to help people decouple their true tastes, what they deep down really truly think is beautiful, from the things that they falsely like because they think it will bring them status, or the things that they falsely like because it aligns with their politics, or the things that they falsely like because their friends like it, and so forth.
I think it's a worthwhile endeavour for each of us to try to untangle our own true tastes from the things that we only think we like.
He's also working under the mistaken assumption that building designs are largely driven by ad-hoc artistic preferences, rather than by economics and regulation.
Buildings are a special case because everyone has to deal with them. When it comes to poetry or painting, I think we can just live and let live. Enjoy the ones we like and ignore the ones we don't. That doesn't work so well for architecture.
I also want there to be more good poetry! I agree it's sad and confusing that this doesn't exist when any random person could just sit down and write a good poem, but it seems like we should at least be talking about it!
I also feel the same way about craft in objects - you can't get a good Art Nouveau door anymore of the type that any upper-middle-class person in 1910s Paris would have obtained easily.
Wait, so good new poetry just plain doesn't exist?
I find that kind of hard to believe, on such a big planet. Easy to believe that the majority is bad or at least not to your taste, but...with this many people, someone must be doing your thing.
Similarly, craft is smaller objects doesn't seem hard to come by. Plenty of good pottery being made. But doors are part of architecture, and architecture is a problematic field.
It's easy to purchase a beautiful gate. I looked up doors, and it doesn't look that hard to buy beautiful doors, either. They're slightly different than what you could find in 1910s Paris, but of course they are! There's someone selling lovely custom furniture on the side of the road every week in my neighborhood. If I wanted to spend a thousand dollars on handmade wooden furniture, I could simply pull a truck up and buy some.
> any random person could just sit down and write a good poem
...any random person can just sit down and write a poem. I'm a random person, and I've done it. Most people have, when they were teenagers, I expect.
"Good", though, is doing a lot of work there. Can any random person just sit down and write a poem they are not embarrassed by the existence of ten years later, or indeed the next morning? I'm not confident of an answer to that.
> Can any random person just sit down and write a poem they are not embarrassed by the existence of ten years later, or indeed the next morning? I'm not confident of an answer to that.
> Virgil worked on the Aeneid during the last eleven years of his life (29–19 BC)
> After crossing to Italy by ship, weakened with disease, Virgil died in Apulia on 21 September 19 BC. Augustus ordered Virgil's literary executors, Lucius Varius Rufus and Plotius Tucca, to disregard Virgil's wish that the poem be burned, instead ordering it to be published
Disagreed. I refuse to believe anyone actually thinks Duchamp was a good artist rather than a scam artist. I refuse to think anyone looks at Angel Novelus and sees something beautiful rather than a deformed bucktoothed chicken.
That a person has lied to themselves so thoroughly that they believe the delusion of the emperor's new clothes does not make the clothes "real."
I never said the clothes were real, but you can't deny subjective experience. Even if it is a lie, and all of it meaningless, the beauty these people feel is entirely real. I don't feel anything looking at most classical art either, yet it'd be insane to deny that everyone is just lying about liking it.
I find it easy enough to believe that some people are wired differently, to interpret great piles of shit as beautiful. They are wrong and should not be allowed to have any influence on architecture or the selection of public sculpture.
I think people lie about their subjective experiences too. They will talk about how much they like food X, but if nobody's paying attention will spurn it for food Y. Hyperbolic language will spread not because our experiences are ascending to the top of a hyperbola, but instead because people aren't paying a penalty for their linguistic counterfeiting.
I do not believe "millions" of people enjoy Duchamp's urinal as art, or the Angelus, etc. I think that's a relative small crowd measured in the tens of thousands, and it's easy to believe because cultures develop bizarre purity spirals all the time! Poetry shrank considerably over the course of the 20th century, in part because it became too self-referential. Art also became overly self-referential.
>(for what benefit?)
The barbershop pole theory of status, primarily. Once it got off the ground, money laundering and other sophisticated financial games came into play.
Re your first paragraph, I won't quibble about the number. My point is that there are more than zero who legitimately like it, which was what you claimed.
Your second paragraph reminds me of the person I saw online who said, "No one really likes dark chocolate, everyone's just pretending in order to seem sophisticated." As if there was any status to be gained by buying an expensive chocolate bar at Erewhon and eating it alone at home. People go, alone, to see Dadaist or other abstract/conceptual art, and sometimes they don't even post about it on social media. They aren't getting any money or status from the experience.
>I do not believe "millions" of people enjoy Duchamp's urinal as art
It's not hard for me to imagine that millions have appreciated it as a witty "fuck you" to bougie tastes, and consider that to fall under the umbrella of "art". You're free to disagree with the categorization of course.
I don't think anyone describes the experience of Angelus Novus as "beauty". There are many things to appreciate in an artistic experience, and trying to flatten them all into "beauty" misses the point.
The existence and popularity of both flamin' hot cheetos and sour patch kids indicate that lots of people understand this.
Fair enough that Walter Benjamin does not use the word beautiful, but his description is A) beautiful and B) seemingly unrelated to the deformed chicken art.
>The existence and popularity of both flamin' hot cheetos and sour patch kids indicate that lots of people understand this.
Could you imagine that someone genuinely enjoys listening to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQHR_Z8XVvI (Schoenbergs Suite for Piano). I can assure you that I love this piece and really enjoy listening to it, especially the gigue, I've probably listened to it close to 100 times.
I find it enjoyable pretentious, but yes, I can easily imagine that!
In part I was doing a bit, but also I think art and architecture are in a meaningfully different category than, say, food and music. No one tries to gavage deconstructed nonsense down the public's throat: you buy and eat, or you don't. No one blasts Schoenberg on every streetcorner: you have to pay for a ticket to go to the concert hall, if anyone dares put it on.
But architecture and public art? The public gets no say and yet has to suffer the offenses!
Are the beauty and wonder real, though? You don't think there's some Emperor's New Clothes stuff going on (ie, people saying they like something just because they expect other people to do the same)?
I'm sure there's some, but humans have evolved for social interaction. We've transcended beyond lying for clout and we're capable of actually changing how we perceive things to make it just a little more believable.
The problem is that a large number of artists care about and cater to the tastes of a small number of elite and (in my subjective opinion) deranged art critics who don't share the common sensibilities of 90% of people. Their memetic influence is diverting the stream of talented people into creating weird art that is subjectively good to 0.01% of people instead of art that is subjectively good to 90% of people. Therefore there is less good art (in my and 90% of peoples' opinions). Hollywood makes garbage. Art museums contain garbage. Buildings look like garbage. There are good artists who make good art (in my and 90% of peoples' opinions), but they are rarer and harder to find than they ought to be. How many geniuses with the talent of Michelangelo and the educational opportunities of the modern era failed to actually produce Michelangelo-level work because they were taught in school that the pinnacle of art was formeldehyde sharks and spent their lives doing that instead? How many genius artists have made a small number of fantastic paintings instead of a large number because none of the art critics take them seriously or promote their works so they have to work a day job to make ends meet?
People respond to incentives. If art critique rewarded excellence, we would see more excellence. If it rewards weird art-history storytelling then we see more weird art-history stories.
> The problem is that a large number of artists care about and cater to the tastes of a small number of elite and (in my subjective opinion) deranged art critics who don't share the common sensibilities of 90% of people.
Why is that a problem? You and everyone else are free to try and persuade those people to actually care about what you like. The most direct path would be willing to be a patron of aspiring artists who share your sensibilities and show that there's money in being an artist for the 90%. Patreon is a thing and DeviantArt has lots of very traditional artists who make things lay people immediately like and call art.
I think that I do like art, and I do like seeing beautifully done impressionist paintings, even new ones. But I also will drive across town to see a Monet, and that's partly because *in addition to its being beautiful* (and probably more beautiful than that of most modern imitators), I have a sense of him as a person and his place in history, and the meaning and conversation, etc., etc.
I really don't enjoy ugly art (though I enjoy plenty of art that other people find ugly -- I don't find it so, though). But I do enjoy beautiful art more -- sometimes much more -- if it has the additional layers.
I think your closing section, about Gaudi, etc., actually captures this.
So, I agree with you that novelty isn't enough, especially after novelty-for-its-own-sake has already been done (you can only stack one meta on "novelty"), and there needs to be beauty; but I think the rest is highly important after that threshold is met. I'd feel the same about the Chesterton poem.
In the interest of peeling apart more conflations, I find it noteworthy that the initial list of 8 -- and in particular, the initial list of 3 -- contained nothing about *narrative*. The post is mostly about visual art (and cousins) but some of the discussion is about, and some of the examples are, narrative works. It seems to me that, like, an appreciation of various narrative-specific things (plot, character, etc) are an important part of what people are looking for, but it doesn't seem to fit into any of the categories that you laid down. (As well as questions regarding things like, do the formal elements of the work mesh with the narrative elements? Or perhaps deliberately contrast with them?) And this is before we get into any discussion of such ideas as games as art (what experience and feelings are conveyed by this system of incentives you choose to temporarily submit yourself to, and how does *that* mesh with the formal and/or narrative elements?)... that's obviously a bit newer. But narrative is pretty dang old so it seems odd to see it implicitly neglected, or conflated with non-narrative art!
> If you randomized-controlled-trialled art so mercilessly that all the novelty effects and context effects and pattern language effects got eliminated, would Beauty be what was left?
That just ends up as re-deriving Mr. Beast from first principles.
In my mind, Eurovision song contest (running since 1956, beats Superbowl by reach) figured out the best system to evaluate performances on a slop-to-snob axis.
The extreme outliers tend to be either 1) lowest-common-denominator slop with low barriers to entry, or 2) very technical or novel performances that only a few experts can enjoy.
So Eurovision polls both the viewers and the juries of experts, then combines two scores to pick the middle point on the pareto front: not the most popular entry, and not the most expert-approved, but something that scores well for both audiences.
I'm not saying you have to accept popular judgment. You could RCT what kind of art Harvard humanities professors like - you just have to blind them to source and context.
You will end up with various taste clusters - some small (art Harvard humanities professors like), some large (frontpage of youtube when you're logged out). But by itself those RCTs won't tell you what taste is "good" or "bad".
When people talk about "bad taste", they're putting these taste clusters on some kind of ladder from "good" to "bad". And while the clusterspace itself is free from source and context, the ladder surely isn't - it could be an ingroup/outgroup ladder, or a beginner/master ladder.
E.g. "now that AI is using em-dashes a lot, they're in bad taste" basically hashes out as "We put AI very low on our ladder, so whatever falls into AI's taste cluster, we rank low. And now em-dashes fall there".
Is good taste real to start with? Or is there just taste ?
For an intermediate position, maybe all tastes are equally valid, but some tastes reveal some things about the taster. Then, there is no good taste, but there is taste associated with good people
"In this essay I propose to try an experiment. Literary criticism is traditionally employed in judging books. Any judgement it implies about men’s reading of books is a corollary from its judgement on the books themselves. Bad taste is, as it were by definition, a taste for bad books. I want to find out what sort of picture we shall get by reversing the process. Let us make our distinction between readers or types of reading the basis, and our distinction between books the corollary. Let us try to discover how far it might be plausible to define a good book as a book which is read in one way, and a bad book as a book which is read in another.
I think this worth trying because the normal procedure seems to me to involve almost continually a false implication. If we say that A likes (or has a taste for) the women’s magazines and B likes (or has a taste for) Dante, this sounds as if likes and taste have the same meaning when applied to both; as if there were a single activity, though the objects to which it is directed are different. But observation convinces me that this, at least usually, is untrue.
...Some critics write of those who constitute the literary ‘many’ as if they belonged to the many in every respect, and indeed to the rabble. They accuse them of illiteracy, barbarism, ‘crass’, ‘crude’ and ‘stock’ responses which (it is suggested) must make them clumsy and insensitive in all the relations of life and render them a permanent danger to civilisation. It sometimes sounds as if the reading of ‘popular’ fiction involved moral turpitude. I do not find this borne out by experience. I have a notion that these ‘many’ include certain people who are equal or superior to some of the few in psychological health, in moral virtue, practical prudence, good manners, and general adaptability. And we all know very well that we, the literary, include no small percentage of the ignorant, the caddish, the stunted, the warped, and the truculent. With the hasty and wholesale apartheid of those who ignore this we must have nothing to do.
If it had no other defect it would still be too diagrammatic. The two sorts of readers are not cut off by immovable barriers. Individuals who once belonged to the many are converted and join the few. Others desert from the few to the many, as we often sadly discover on meeting an old schoolfellow. Those who are on the ‘popular’ level as regards one art may be deeply appreciative of another; musicians sometimes have deplorable preferences in poetry. And many whose responses to all the arts are trivial may yet be people of great intelligence, learning and subtlety.
...Still less is the status seeker. As there are, or were, families and circles in which it was almost a social necessity to display an interest in hunting, or county cricket, or the Army List, so there are others where it requires great independence not to talk about, and therefore occasionally to read, the approved literature, especially the new and astonishing works, and those which have been banned or have become in some other way subjects of controversy. Readers of this sort, this ‘small vulgar’, act in one respect exactly like those of the ‘great vulgar’. They are entirely dominated by fashion. They drop the Georgians and begin to admire Mr Eliot, acknowledge the ‘dislodgement’ of Milton, and discover Hopkins, at exactly the right moment. They will not like your book if the dedication begins with To instead of For. Yet, while this goes on downstairs, the only real literary experience in such a family may be occurring in a back bedroom where a small boy is reading Treasure Island under the bed-clothes by the light of an electric torch.
...Real appreciation demands the opposite process. We must not let loose our own subjectivity upon the pictures and make them its vehicles. We must begin by laying aside as completely as we can all our own preconceptions, interests, and associations. We must make room for Botticelli’s Mars and Venus, or Cimabue’s Crucifixion, by emptying out our own. After the negative effort, the positive. We must use our eyes. We must look, and go on looking till we have certainly seen exactly what is there. We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)
It is not only our own ‘ideas’ about, say, Mars and Venus which must be set aside. That will make room only for Botticelli’s ‘ideas’, in the same sense of the word. We shall thus receive only those elements in his invention which he shares with the poet. And since he is after all a painter and not a poet, this is inadequate. What we must receive is his specifically pictorial invention: that which makes out of many masses, colours, and lines the complex harmony of the whole canvas.
The distinction can hardly be better expressed than by saying that the many use art and the few receive it. The many behave in this like a man who talks when he should listen or gives when he should take. I do not mean by this that the right spectator is passive. His also is an imaginative activity; but an obedient one. He seems passive at first because he is making sure of his orders. If, when they have been fully grasped, he decides that they are not worth obeying—in other words, that this is a bad picture—he turns away altogether.
From the example of the man who uses Tintoretto as pornography it is apparent that a good work of art may be used in the wrong way. But it will seldom yield to this treatment so easily as a bad one. Such a man will gladly turn from Tintoretto to Kirchner or photographs if no moral or cultural hypocrisy prevents him. They contain fewer irrelevancies; more ham and less frill.
But the reverse is, I believe, impossible. A bad picture cannot be enjoyed with that full and disciplined ‘reception’ which the few give to a good one. This was borne in upon me lately when I was waiting at a bus stop near a hoarding and found myself, for a minute or so, really looking at a poster —a picture of a man and a girl drinking beer in a public house. It would not endure the treatment. Whatever merits it had seemed to have at the first glance diminished with every second of attention. The smiles became waxwork grins. The colour was, or seemed to me, tolerably realistic, but it was in no way delightful. There was nothing in the composition to satisfy the eye. The whole poster, besides being ‘of’ something, was not also a pleasing object. And this, I think, is what must happen to any bad picture if it is really examined."
That last, I think, is what is going on right now with AI art, the mass produced sepia-toned, cartoon-style, glossy slick surface, churned out by the yard, stuff.
> It is not only our own ‘ideas’ about, say, Mars and Venus which must be set aside.
Must they ? I'll take a relative nobody like Tom Parkinson-Morgan over Botticelli any day, what with Botticelli's flat lighting and flat composition and general flatness of everything. Am I objectively wrong ? Do I have too many ideas ?
The idea is, if you have all these thoughts about the subject of the painting and the characters and the way they're presented and the historical context, you're not looking at the painting as a painting. You're 'using' it for a whole set of different things (historical subjects, period of art, did X do the same theme better and so on).
You have to look at the painting as a painting and judge it. That's what you're doing with "flat lighting, flat composition, general flatness of everything".
If you're judging Botticelli and Parkinson-Morgan *on artistic ability* then you're doing it right: "What we must receive is his specifically pictorial invention: that which makes out of many masses, colours, and lines the complex harmony of the whole canvas."
After *that* we can get into "who is the more important, who is greater" discussion.
EDIT: But you have to be sure that that *is* what you are doing. I never heard of Parkinson-Morgan, looking him up he's a comic artist. Nothing wrong with that. But are you judging the works on artistry and not, even subconsciously, 'yeah this is more my style, this is what I grew up on, I want a story not just something to look at, I want action and ka-blam! pow! zokk! going on in the page or screen"?
Because to me, this also is 'flat lighting, flat composition, general flatness of everything':
There's an obvious failure point to Eurovision scoring, though, that has been popping up more and more in the actual result - the snobs deliberately start calibrating their votes to counteract the slobs (they can't know the actual slob vote, of course, but can make decent guesses on the basis of what the slobs have voted for in the past, what the media is saying etc.)
They keep modifying it though don’t they? I think I read they modified the scoring this year to counteract the way Israel’s supporters have tried to overwhelm the popular vote.
They're always messing around with Eurovision voting. It has become increasingly obvious in recent years that the professional jury votes and the public votes are very divergent.
I don't think Eurovision captures the snob pole very well. For most of my lifetime the contest was treated by any European who had a bone of snobbery in them with utter derision and mockery. Then people started watching it ironically. Then poptimism happened and you could sort of, kind of unironically be into Eurovision. But my impression is that poptimisim never went as far in Europe as it did in the US and this is still very much contested. Chances are still that you will be laughed out of the building when you start talking unironically and non-derisively about some ESC performance at a truly high brow Eurpean art or music event.
The point being: the expert jury at ESC are not snobs or at least not people who have status among the snobby classes and reflect their tastes. They are high-status proles.
Loss is unironically good art and I think that's a big part of the reason it became such a meme. It burrows into the mind and stays there, difficult to forget.
The bizarre tonal whiplash, the sudden attempt at artistic seriousness, totally undermines it in context. So it becomes funny. But the fact that it's incongruously good has given it its longevity; if it was crap, it would've been a flash in the pan.
Whether it's another Angelus Novus is up to you, the viewer. (Also whether a search for "loss" bringing up every "glossary" comic alongside it counts as well.)
Man, looking at those glossary comics makes it so clear why Loss became a joke.
You go to the site looking for the purest of schlock, the kind of comedy-shaped non-humour that might serve to stave off boredom for thirty seconds or so. Instead you get a crudely-drawn, but heartfelt and memorable, expression of pain. How could you possibly take it seriously?
Heh. I made the same joke about Angelus Novus on my Tumblr a couple years ago -- magnificent-sounding Benjamin's description, followed by the actual painting -- and for that I was called a fucking idiot, an antisemite, an anti-intellectual, and an American, and told to jump into an incinerator, before I simply stopped looking at the comments (though I did briefly see one raising the possibility that this was maybe a tad of an overreaction). I guess there are people who *really love* that particular painting!
Benjamin who wrote the description is. There were those who took the juxtaposition of his description with Klee's art as as criticism of his interpretation (indeed some highlighted commenters were doing this, tbf) rather than of the art piece itself.
As someone with {limited, underdeveloped} skill in some arts, my sticking point has become message vs craft. Part of how a lot of the old masters' works hold up is because they were very, very good at the technical part of their job (the craft) before moving on to boundary-pushing (the message). Picasso is a trite example, but the man demonstrably had the ability to paint a perfectly realistic, neoclassical painting and then used that skill to undo concepts like perspective.
What I see a lot of in post-modern (and post-post modern) art is, essentially, technical neophytes putting together poorly-made works backed by about a thousand pages of critical theory. Abstract or faux-junk sculptures made from shoddy castings or welded poorly together. Paintings where the brushwork us sloppy. Drawings with poor grasp of line work or composition.
There's a difference between the world's best poet flexing on the rest of us by discarding rhyme, and someone who can't rhyme to begin with.
Reminds me of Scott's point in the Lighthaven post about going on a mountaintop for thirty years to do nothing but write within the rules before discarding them completely.
I think this also explains why postmodernism had less of an effect overall on music and food than sculpture and painting - there's just no way to substitute message for craft in a way that lay people will even grudgingly accept. An ordinary person may go to an art museum, see a dissected shark and grumble a bit about kids these days, but otherwise carry on with life. But they will storm out of a restaurant if the chef serves reheated horse semen-and-blood soup to make a statement about the interplay of sex, violence and consumption. Unless the soup is very, very good.
I feel like the entire existence of whole genres of mass-market junk food proves you wrong. What is more postmodern than MTN Dew Baja Blast or doritos loco tacos? It's mere sensation packaged in novelty, without any sort of craft or meaning. (Though it sounds like you might also be conflating various forms of postmodernism with various forms of modernism.)
How are these postmodern? Do they playfully deconstruct, combine and interrogate past movements? Do they apply critical theory to understand and contextualise their relationship with the broader cultural milieu?
Or, alternatively, are they mass-market products capable of being criticised, contextualised etc but not capable of speaking on their own as intentional works of art?
They do playfully deconstruct and combine past movements! They don't apply critical theory, but instead deliberately eschew any theory. Their very rejection of intentionality as art is a big part of what makes them postmodern.
Well parried, but then I argue that they, in fact, represent a high level of technical skill due to the amount of food science that goes into making them super-palatable.
I think it's only postmodern if they intentionally reject intentionality. The fact that the comment I'm writing right now doesn't rhyme doesn't make it a modern poem, since it wasn't intended to be a poem in the first place.
That's probably true for some of it - the stuff that is just dialing cheesiness and umami up to 11, as well as things like Coca Cola Classic that are standardizing a product made out of real flavors. But at least some rounds of fast food flavoring really is postmodern in the way that it just seeks to push extreme experiences that are unlike the other extreme experiences you've had with food.
I think at least part of the explanation (that I'm pretty sure you have talked about before) is also that many art critics/artists have totally overconsumed art. This is most easily seen in music. Everyone has had the experience of a song being overplayed: you liked listening to it once, you've listened to it 500 times in the supermarket while browsing groceries and YOU CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE. Now if you are a critic you consume so much music, and also try to really pay attention to, most common patterns just get totally overplayed ("oh, pop song chords AGAIN?!"). And then you try other genres, more avant garde things, trying to find more novel patterns. And that's how you get Trout Mask Replica https://youtu.be/r9lpLm7jwQY?is=9i-3pFY7qR4jePQn (some consider this the best rock album of all time).
This is not really a criticism of this approach, I also have difficulty taking any enjoyment with a lot of pop music because of this. That's an authentic subjective experience. It's just a fact that the pre-condition for being a critic is to have consumed a lot of art while paying close attention to it.
That's definitely part of it, and Scott has touched on it in previous posts, for instance in Friendly and Hostile Analogies for Taste, in Category E: Taste Is Like BDSM Porn.
It's an important insight. The experience of being a critic or heavy consumer is inevitably going to shift your perceptions, sometimes in ways that don't necessarily always make your perceptions better, and this is going to apply no matter how principled you are.
I tend to read lit criticism for telling me why something is good, rather than just that it is, but I also use two vague pseudo-criteria: (1) will it still be good if I read another 1000 books (in genre), (2) will it be good if I re-read it 1000 times.
Those are pretty good criteria. I think the question is exactly what number of books in a genre is optimal for forming the best judgements. At a certain point you can reach a type of semantic satiation where the standard tropes are meaningless to you and you're just scanning the text for something new, whether in language or content. I think 1,000 could be enough to get you to this point, depending on genre.
And that's why architecture critics are a problem. Their hypertrophied tastes are inflicted upon the rest of us through the buildings we live and work in.
> Everyone has had the experience of a song being overplayed: you liked listening to it once, you've listened to it 500 times in the supermarket while browsing groceries and YOU CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE.
Note that this is not in fact an experience that everyone has had.
This plus how specific people's taste gets. E.g. I have the above but for really specific genres I like (e.g. slushwave or breakcore). I don't even care about the critical conversation or genre boundaries, I just know some of what I like and I like thinking about it and hearing more that might show me something new and/or good :3
Also, academics tend to overrate novelty. Basically the case since uhh 1900 or thereabout when art turned into an academic topic. Probably a lot easier to discuss than aesthetics, you lazy professors.
That's why the [most visible] way artists react to AI art is so disheartening: that's something new! It's their job to use it to explore what art is and try new things and push its envelope!
Instead, as far as I can tell, "artists" stay clear out of AI and most AI art created is slop. (Of course, msot of everything is slop, I don't fault that)
It's infuriating. I'm an artist. I always say that I started making art because I had ideas that I wanted to make physical, and AI can only help with that.
But I guess I am, like Scott says, a high-decoupling autistic spectrum kind of person because nearly everyone else is completely confounded by status issues.
Some of it may be status games, but I think a lot of what artists find uninteresting about AI art is that it doesn’t give the human artist fine-grained control of the output, so what is output is the average version of whatever was prompted. Part of what I find interesting about art is I feel like I’m communicating with the artist by consuming the art, and learning something about how someone else sees the world and thinks. Someone using AI to generate art is more like a customer commissioning a piece than an artist. Most people are not interested in decoupling art from the artist, because the communication is part of the point. Reducing art to being *just* pretty pictures is missing the point.
By the way, this isn’t just about AI art. This is also why “made by committee” commercial art often feels soulless or boring as well.
(I’m talking specifically about using image generators like Dalle here, I do think there can be artful ways to use AI, for example if an artist intentionally trained a custom model to produce a particular kind of output, in which case the model itself is the art. But that’s different than plopping a paragraph into Dalle.)
> I’m talking specifically about using image generators like Dalle here,
I think a big part of the problem is that there's not a lot of people who are good enough at AI to use all the systems like ControlNet to get the AI to do exactly what they want, and people who are good enough to art to know exactly what they want.
Personally, I train my own models and use the Krita plugin (as mentioned below). But these days I generally use the resulting image as a reference for a physical painting just because people get so damn weird about the AI thing. And people usually don't even believe you if you say you used AI if they can see the physical brushtrokes because they can't get their head around the fact that artists use studies and reference and don't just congeal art out of psychoplasm.
Compared to borrowing from google images, using AI for reference is arguably more ethical. No one can afford to pay models to 'cheat' like ye olde masters.
AI of various sorts can certainly help. But as Marcus Seldon notes, trying to make your ideas physical by using Midjourney or Nano Banana or any of the other text-to-image generators is going to be a lot like using an extremely powerful tool while wearing oven mitts. You can do a lot of things you could never do yourself, but you don't really have much control over it.
Obligatory shilling for Krita AI Diffusion. It's text-to-image, but you can at any point start drawing normally, and then go back to text-to-image. There's lots of possible workflows; I like doing a few dozen text-to-image runs to get a feel for the prompt and how the AI sees what I'm pointing at, and then dropping strength to 50% and mix-matching. At 50% the AI will make "small changes only"; this means you can move elements around, draw your own doodles, and the AI will do its level best to make your changes work with what was already there. Also if you're starting out as an artist, I think a good training method is to draw an image purely by hand, refine it at 50% with a weak prompt, then look in detail at what the AI changed and why its version looks better than yours, then try to apply these changes yourself.
Is there a way for me to try this out without going through the process of installing something on my computer? Perhaps more relevantly, is there a way I can give students in an AI literacy class (most of whom definitely don't have the skills to install something on their computer) a chance to try it?
Krita has a windows portable version. I'm not sure if it can install plugins, but if so it's two downloads and two clicks. The setup is definitely not as easy as it could be, downside of being a modification to an existing paint program.
For hosting, there is a cloud backend (I don't use it, so I can't comment on how well it works), or you can set up ComfyUI (the backend it uses) on a shared computer with a beefy GPU. Though it *will* be overloaded by a class using it simultaneously, so if you're going that route the cloud version is probably the way to go.
I think the point is that AI art is so specifically not new - it's a conglomeration of every piece of art that has come before it, with a lack of unique human story that might make it interesting.
Looking at the listed artworks (some are music), there's nothing new here. That's obvious, AI is trained on something and uses that as reference to make something else. AI can draw things not seen before, but not in some unique style that hasn't existed. Some are downright incomprehensible, but still from a style that already exists.
If you were an artist, the use of AI to "try something new" probably can't amount to more than experiencing new things. But that's not a strong reason for using AI - you can just browse existing public art websites. Hell, just ask an AI to maximize your opportunities for seeing new art styles.
I largely agree with this post, but I think it's too dismissive of the role of novelty. For instance, I can guarantee that I'm capable of producing a book just as good as Dickens. It begins as follows:
"It was the best of times; It was the worst of times."
I'm not sure how the rest goes yet but I can easily look it up and copy paste it here if anyone wants. In a double blind controlled trial, I can guarantee you that not a single person would be able to tell any difference between my novel and A Tale of Two Cities at a rate any higher than random chance. The beauty quotient would be objectively identical, and if beauty isn't what matters to you, then do you even like art?
This is a bit glib obviously, but my point is that directly copying something is far less of a contribution than inventing something new, so it doesn't seem odd to me that writing a work in the style of Dickens without directly plagiarizing him would fall somewhere in the middle, more impressive than my novel but less impressive than Dickens' original. And this isn't unique to mushy subjective fields, either. Doing research in a paradigm established by someone else is still valuable, but I wouldn't consider all modern scientists greater than Newton and Einstein, and I wouldn't consider all modern engineers greater than the Wright brothers. I might benefit on a day-to-day level more from generic and derivative drugs than originals, but I still have immense respect and gratitude to the people who developed the category of drugs in the first place, and I support the people trying to develop new types of drugs today.
I do agree that the emphasis on novelty and context in art has become too great at the expense of actual quality, trapping us in a world where creative endeavors become more and more a status ritual between insiders. Even worse, the alleged novelty isn't even what it's cracked up to be. Perhaps calling a urinal art was groundbreaking once, but calling a banana art, a hundred years later, isn't exactly immense progress. Architecture and literature are in a similar situation. It's an immense problem, and one that will take many, many years to solve.
I think what you're saying gets at a distinction between beauty and credit-assignment. Your book would be just as good as Dickens', you just don't deserve any credit for writing it.
I suppose what I think is that there's nothing wrong with conflating multiple factors into one holistic quality judgement, especially the first two factors, as long as we're entirely clear and honest about what we're doing.
Another way of viewing it is that there's clusters of "Dickensian works" and "Homeric works" centered on the works Dickens and Homer produced, but also containing works that most closely resemble them, as well as, if we want to overthink things, hypothetical works that people could theoretically write in the future or that Homer or Dickens could have written in parallel timelines.
It seems like a plausible heuristic to me that the best Homeric works we'll ever see in our reality are mostly the ones actually by Homer, and the best Dickensian works are mostly the ones by Dickens. They're the local optimum, if you will. If I write a Dickensian work, I have to either plagiarize, or I have to make changes that are almost guaranteed to make things worse, because I'm only imitating a style that I'll never truly master, in a dialect I've never even heard a real living person speak. So it follows that I should probably just move away from these clusters and focus on making Bobbersonian works. Will these be better than Homer and Dickens? Almost certainly not, but it seems like a more valuable contribution to literature.
I think the real question is exactly how far should the Bobbersonian cluster be from the Dickensian cluster? I don't think the distance should be zero, but I do think that modern literary sensibility demands an unreasonably far distance.
If Bob Bobberson's duplicate book is as good as Dickens' book, would that combination of words still be exactly as 'good' in your view if Victorian England had not existed? That is, if it was not about reality, but was some kind of sci fi work?
I ask in order to understand how you are attempting to separate one's experience of a work from the surrounding context, including very basic facts about a work (e.g. whether it is fiction or non-fiction, what genre it is in, how familiar we are with the general idea of what London was like at that time, which allows us to form strong mental pictures and expectations as we read ...).
I think art is, to a much larger extent than people usually realize, *about* credit assignment - art appreciation is as much about admiring the author as admiring the work itself. That's why the author's circumstances matter, and why a lot of people have no interest in AI art no matter how good it gets in isolation, and they may feel betrayed if tricked into liking it. (I don't feel that strongly myself).
"it doesn't seem odd to me that writing a work in the style of Dickens without directly plagiarizing him would fall somewhere in the middle, more impressive than my novel but less impressive than Dickens' original"
I think it would depend; a Dickens pastiche might be genuinely good work. Historical fiction is popular, and there are a ton of "crime mysteries set in Victorian era" which cover the ground all the way from 'low brow but fun', 'not particularly good' up to 'this is literary fiction' level. The worst ones are the ones which put modern characters with modern attitudes into the author's imagined version of 19th century England with little to no research of the period and churn out a standard plot.
On the other hand, you get genuinely excellent works like the 1990s Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker, set during the period of the First World War:
"Following the publication of Liza's England, Barker felt she "had got myself into a box where I was strongly typecast as a northern, regional, working class, feminist—label, label, label—novelist. It's not a matter so much of objecting to the labels, but you do get to a point where people are reading the labels instead of the book. And I felt I'd got to that point", she said in 1992. She said she was tired of reviewers asking "'but uh, can she do men?' – as though that were some kind of Everest".
Therefore, she turned her attention to the First World War, which she had always wanted to write about due to her step-grandfather's wartime experiences. Wounded by a bayonet and left with a scar, he would not speak about the war. She was inspired to write what is now known as the Regeneration Trilogy—Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995)—a set of novels that explore the history of the First World War by focusing on the aftermath of trauma. The books are an unusual blend of history and fiction, and Barker draws extensively on the writings of First World War poets and W. H. R. Rivers, an army doctor who worked with traumatised soldiers. The main characters are based on historical figures, such as Robert Graves, Alice and Hettie Roper (pseudonyms for Alice Wheeldon and her daughter Hettie Wheeldon) with the exception of Billy Prior, whom Barker invented to parallel and contrast with British soldier-poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. As the central fictional character, Billy Prior is in all three books."
I'm not familiar with those books so I can't pass judgement, but it sounds like they might fall into the "different enough from Dickens and high quality enough to be a worthwhile literary contribution, but too similar to Dickens or other old writers to attain the highest level of modern critical acclaim."
I think there are many books in that category, many largely unread, and many more unpublished or even unwritten, partly because of our stifling modern standards. Anything that seems too historical or speculative is too quickly assumed to be second rate.
Oh and by the way, the lowest circle of hell is reserved for people who write "historical fiction" where the characters have completely modern attitudes and accents. Calling it the worst type of historical is absolutely true, but it doesn't go far enough. It's like calling Hitler the worst person to ever apply to an art school in Vienna.
I think God gave us aesthetic intuitions so we’d have something other than Him to argue about.
More seriously, I think that the lack of any agreed-upon metric of aesthetic value means that, even if there was such a thing as objective beauty, we would have no way of recognising it. That universe would be identical to this one. And if you were to decide on an arbiter - say, popular opinion, or the opinions of those of a certain social status, or personal experience - you necessarily endorse that standard for all others.
I love the Screaming Popes and my grandmother hates them. Which of us is wrong?
I really enjoyed this. It has a classic SSC quality to it, and when I try to work out why, I think maybe it's because this is a topic on which you have strong opinions with enough emotional heft to get you engaged and punchy, but also genuine uncertainty and curiosity? Reminds me a bit of what I remember you saying in 'why I suck', about how some of your most popular writing came out of your own process of thinking things through, rather than offering fully crystalised opinions.
Like, imagine an AI Poetry Turing Test where some of the poems were actually excerpts cut off mid-stanza (the cropping), and also some of the words were misspelled (the colours)
It was more than that; I've just had a look through the results post, and of the 24 human paintings I found 7 that were noticeably cropped. Still a clear minority, but pretty significant in my opinion -- especially given that it includes Giant Ship, which you noted was the human picture most frequently misidentified as AI, and which IMO was pretty badly butchered.
Here's the full list (done fairly quickly, so if anyone wants to double-check and note any that I missed or wrongly included, please do):
- 'Saint In Mountains' (*St. Anthony Abbot Tempted By A Heap Of Gold*, by the Ozzervanza Master),
- 'Creepy Skull' (*Untitled (Skull)* by Jean-Michael Basquiat),
- 'Giant Ship' (*Victorian Megaship* by Mitchell Stuart),
- 'People Sitting' (*Tailor's Workshop* by Quiringh van Brekelenkam),
- 'Girl In White' ( *Portrait of Charlotte du Val d'Ognes* by Marie-Denise Villers),
- 'Serene River' (*Banks Of The Oise At Auvers*, by Charles-François Daubigny),
- 'Colorful Town' (*Entrance To The Village Of Osny* by Paul Gauguin)
(I didn't count 'Double Starship' (*Malabar*, by Wojtek Kapusta) as being cropped by you; the closest to an original that I could find was a set of (in the author's words) "rough render shots extracted during the process", one of which seemed to match your version.)
I also noticed some pretty significant colour discrepancies, but (apart from 'Saint In Mountains', which I mentioned in that old comment) I haven't followed up on those to see how justifiable the versions you used were.
For anyone who can't be bothered with all the details but just wants a taste of what I'm complaining about, here's the most misidentified actually-human work, as included in the test: https://imgur.com/a/za0dDXk
Also check out the cropping + colour discrepancy between the test version of Saint In Mountains and the original painting; colours are admittedly tricky, but when I looked into this, the test version seemed like a real outlier vs. other reproductions on the internet.
My question is always: why now? It is not like the past three millennia have seen a breakneck-speed sequence of artistic revolutions at the same pace as we have had since the 1900s. Artistic styles where happy to hang around for a few generations at the very least. Donatello was born in 1386, Michelangelo in 1475, and Veronese in 1528. While there is an evolution and substantial differences in style, I doubt anyone will argue that these were more jarring than the changes from Picasso (1881) to Warhol (1928), or from Warhol to Mr. Sharks in Formaldehyde (1965).
I cannot miss the parallel with progress in technology. Even if there is a continuous acceleration of changes, a discrete, qualitative jump happens the moment they take place faster than the generational replacement frequency. The notion of someone dedicating their life to a specific aspect of a craft (technological, or artistic) is gone. Is the art frenzy happening downstream of those technological changes? Building a cathedral was a work of centuries and several architect lifespans. The last such project is Sagrada Familia - every other current fever dream coming out of the mind of an avant garde architect is completed in mere years. But this is not true of paintings. So is there also some common cause - something something "elite overproduction"? I cannot find a good way to disentangle the effects here without running a counterfactual world in which there's not enough coal to power the industrial revolution. But at the very least the pattern is suspicious, and it should make us think a bit about whether what we're seeing is a memetic complex with rules (you must challenge the masters!) that are simply maladaptive in a much faster world.
There's a book called Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art that touches on this. It's mostly about how disturbingly variable each generation's idea of what the classical canon of art even was, but in later chapters it goes to the high turnover rate of contemporary artistic movements, sometimes to the bitter disappointment of their own creators.
The worst part of this is that art too focused on novelty is actually the least novel, because while the the exact implementation changes, the goal doesn't, so no matter how fast things move, the direction is ultimately circular.
I guess that "goal" should be just one among the several aspects that Scott lists (correctly imo) as being what is understood as "art". So the question then can also be reframed as, why the major shift to the specific goal of novelty, that as you say is much less stable than any of the others.
Not sure. I think originally the novelty served more of a purpose. I'd hate to live in a world without Van Gogh and Monet, but I think that type of earlier and more fruitful experimentation sort of established a precedent where you didn't want to be the last person producing outdated work under outdated assumptions. Each generation after that was incentivized to break from traditions earlier and earlier. Who wants to spend years struggling to master a style, and then, when you finally start to achieve results, everyone tells you you're irrelevant?
This is mostly just a mixture of my own prejudices against certain types of contemporary art and some half-remembered pieces from books I read years ago, so maybe someone else can give you a better answer.
Oh no, don't get me wrong, not saying the search for novelty is bad in and of itself. Just that the balance has changed, to it nearly dominating what it means to do art - at least from the artist's perspective.
Yeah I think we agree about this, novelty is one important factor of art that's gained exaggerated importance, resulting in counterproductive effects. And I to me it seems like one of the main reasons this happened is, in a word, Moloch.
> She would eat blindfolded (or be spoon-fed?) so the food’s appearance couldn’t distort her judgment either.
Actually the appearance of food, called "presentation", is an important aspect of cooking. Even if two dishes taste exactly the same, the one that looks like dog vomit should still lose.
This illuminates a larger point: most art can only be fully appreciated by someone well-versed in the details of its construction. For example, anyone can enjoy good-tasting food, but only someone familiar with cooking might be able to appreciate the clever technique the chef invented to julienne a carrot. Anyone can watch a movie and be entertained, but there are entire channels on YouTube dedicated to admiring particularly inventive and/or creative cinematography and VFX (to the point of going frame-by-frame). I myself have no musical education, and thus am unable to properly appreciate classical music. Acquiring such knowledge is IMO part of developing good taste.
I think we should try to draw a line between the good version of this, where the expert has learned things that unlock a 'deeper', genuinely richer appreciation, and the version that is basically just jadedness leading to desperation for novelty and outsized focus on trivial details. (Or at least, I personally draw that line, though it's pretty hard to argue that any of these value judgments are objectively correct or incorrect.)
The julienne technique example seems borderline to me: I can accept that it's a cool aspect of the craft that an expert will appreciate in ways I won't, and that they're genuinely having a slightly richer experience for it; but if they try to push the point much beyond that, I'll laugh at them.
You can often bootstrap a mostly objective evaluation from subjective evaluations via implicit democracy. If 90% of people share a subjective opinion, then that is the default objective standard, and anyone trying to go against it has the burden of proof that their way is better via some superior and non-subjective measure.
What context do you have in mind for this? When something is literally a matter of taste -- what's better, vanilla or chocolate -- I don't think we gain anything by saying that the (much) more popular thing is quasi-objectively better by default. If we're talking about a domain (literature, say) in which most of us feel that there really are 'true' standards of better and worse, I think we tend to do something along these lines, but it's less democratic and much more weighted toward the opinions of people who are (charitably) expert or (uncharitably) high status. Maybe they are meeting that burden of proof, though?
"(maybe the forger exhaustively trained and tested random members of the population, found that 5% of people could write as well as Chesterton if prompted correctly, and randomly sampled from that 5% to produce his fake book) then my crisis would be deeper"
Would the crisis be deeper still if the forger was an AI? I guess the questions might still apply - if it can 100% replicate, can we fine tune so it can be the 0.001% better... But do you just have to give up and enjoy reaching your saturation point with Chesterton prompted poetry.
*I also cannot believe that I'm making a point you hadn't thought of. Albeit its a word that has a long history of having a meaning before LLMs but you even write "prompt" - am I missing that you already answer this question in the essay?!
Ok so let me try and have a crack at explaining why the analogy with medicine doesn't really make sense to me. The experience of both dining at a restaurant and engaging with art depend on what Ernst Gombrich would call the 'beholder's share': there is a collaborative back-and-forth going on between the viewer/diner and the artwork/meal, in which a specific experience is created in the moment based on their own personal history, emotions, preferences, cultural narratives, etc.
The beholder's share is basically the art history version of Popper's argument that all observations are theory-laden (Gombrich and Popper were great friends). The point being that there is no such thing as a neutral observer: you must always start out with some problem you are trying to solve, even if you're not consciously aware of it.
So we can dissolve a lot of confusion by reminding ourselves that the 'problem situation' that each person finds themselves in will vary wildly. This is is easy to see with something like books or TV shows: my 2yo is working on very different problems than I am! But it is equally true of dining: it sounds like you are interested in solving the highly-constrained problem of "which food tastes best when consumed blindfolded in my own home, with zero other context or sensory data". Most other people's problem-situation will have terms for probably dozens or hundreds of other considerations. The food critic's review is therefore much more useful for solving other people's problems than it is for yours.
Circling back to medicine: the disanalogy is that everyone evaluating a certain drug is in almost the exact same problem situation: they want to cure their cancer (or whatever) with a minimum of side effects. So it makes total sense to be completely fixated on efficacy vs side effects, and give essentially no consideration to anything else.
I also think that e.g. snobbish critics may seem more monolithic than what full data would show, as many converge into Bushwick hipsterdom while many... stay in obscure circles that the Bushwick hipsters think are cringe.
I feel like you can reverse this, play up the uniqueness of medicine and play down the uniqueness of food. Like so: Everyone taking medicine has the "patents" share, different allergies, medical histories, DNA, that means everyone reacts to the medicine differently.
But everyone eating a meal wants the same thing: Taste and nutrition.
Yeah, your genes may partly determine whether Drug A is a good choice for you, in the same way that they may determine whether you like cilantro (and therefore whether you should order the salsa verde).
So technically you're right—everyone's problem-situation for medicine actually is unique, and in theory there must be a near-infinite number of solutions that perfectly take into account your personal biochemistry, contra-indications, cost, access, etc (i.e. the full set of molecules or treatments that don't violate the laws of physics).
But even if we lived in that fantastical world, there would still be many fewer dimensions that would go into the problem of 'which drug is right for me'. The cancer cells are either going to be killed, or not—the action mechanism of the drug is entirely unaffected by your perspective, your emotions in the moment, the people you're with, the lighting of the room, etc.
And that's what is not true of taste. It is impossible to consume art as a truly neutral observer, stripped of all context. The beholder's share is always present. You are always working on some kind of problem, or filtering your observations through some kind of perspective, and those kinds of problem-situations are wildly different from person to person.
One important aspect of artistic taste missing from the introductory list is something like celebration of humanity, or resistance to the flattening the creation and consumption of art into a legible, mechanistic process. It's the deeper of the two main motivations behind the second item in the list, the other being already covered by the first (sensory fatigue prompts search for fresh stimuli).
The inspiration that allowed me to verbalize this value of art is two SSC posts - Random Noise Is Our Most Valuable Resource, and The Phatic And The Anti-Inductive.
>my response to a really good poem is “I couldn’t write that in ten million years”.
You should definitely try, though. All those authors were people, and it's important to remember that kind of impact is reproducible. To imagine it's unreachable is to limit your growth.
I think everyone should make some kind of art, but it's okay to specialize in certain mediums and let others remain magic that you can fully appreciate
This is a much narrower thesis than the original, and I don't actually think it refutes many if the points Ozy makes, instead focusing on the easiest targets.
Does a story about say, the way-overdiscussed-asian-american-experience need to be written by an Asian American? Your argument seems to suggest no, but certainly part of what we are getting out of many stories (if anything) is its unique perspective on, well, something? To give a less social justice-y example, I really like the malazan books, but I kind of like them more knowing that Steve Erikson is an anthropologist who likes TTRPGs. I like the actual prose regardless, but I think the somewhat different perspective on world building and character development simply makes more sense if I understand it within its context. Could Claude someday write equally good prose? Perhaps. Would it give me any sense of peering into the soul of the author? Ah, probably not?
And yeah, I mean to be honest, some Michelin restaurants clearly are just trying to subvert your expectations in a way that gets to be not straightforwardly delicious. A lot of people in a blind test might just want a McDonald's cheeseburger. I was once asked when I made negronis for a party why I didnt make mojitos -- aren't those more crowd pleasing? And some people really are happy just reading exactly the one poet and eating exactly the one meal and having exactly the one drink. And other people like uh, whatever that angel painting is going on about.
Scott's childhood misunderstanding of restaurant critics resembles my childhood misunderstanding of anthropologists.
As a child, I was deeply impressed by how stealthy anthropologists must be. To observe life in remote villages in Papua New Guinea, to listen even to the conversations of the villagers inside their mud huts ... all without ever being seen! Because of course the subjects of their study could never be allowed to become aware of the anthropologists' existence, as this would bias their behaviour and invalidate the study.
I think one component you're missing here is that some people relate to history somewhat similarly to how you describe people relating to art. Seeing some historically significant thing can move them in a profound way. I'm not sure why -- I'm not generally one of those people. But for historic works this can create a response that looks like it's to the art, but if they thought it was my some gifted unknown it wouldn't hit the same, because the historical significance is what moves them.
This obviously doesn't solve the general question here. But I think it explains a lot of the "what does it matter whether the statue is by Michelangelo?" confusion.
It's not beautiful in any way, and it's basically the opposite of what a ballet theater should look like... but that's part of what makes it so *awesome*. I'd take this brutalist prison monolith over a dozen blandly pretty theater buildings with generic columns and awnings and whatnot.
I'll absolutely take it in a photograph! If I had to live near it, though, or regularly attend it, I would vastly prefer a blandly pretty alternative. I don't really agree that ugliness has its place in public architecture; that's putting the vanity of the architect and the remote appreciation of the counter-aesthete or tourist ahead of the daily lives of the people who are most affected by the ugliness.
Yeah, it often feels like when people praise Brutalism that they mean like, "oh, this would be a cool movie set," or like oh man what a neat villain lair. Okay, well the built environment is something we're all stuck with, most architecture is *very, very much* public art, and if I have to walk past this building every day I'd rather it not make me feel like a worthless ant.
> Yes, I do realize that. But he was good at it and you are bad. If you can’t figure out how to do it well, stick to the stale stuff within the existing horizon and wait however long it takes for the next genius to come along.
But how do you measure what is good and what is not? I used to be bored by classical music. Sure, there are some good pieces (you know, the popular ones), but you wouldn't see me checking out the philharmonic website to see if they were playing Mahler or Mozart or Chopin this month.
Then I heard some minimalist music, and it was a transformative experience for me. People around me were not moved at all, having the same pleasantly indifferent look I have when walking around Tate Modern, but I was sitting there totally dumbstruck.
It's not all the same. Adams' Phrygian Gates are meh, Shaker Loops are good. Reich's Music for 18 Musicians is sublime, Glass' Metamorphosis II arranged for the harp by Lavinia Meijer is divine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV2-zFh3tAU
But you *can* find me regularly checking out the philharmonic website now, going to every concert that sounds like it's something I might like.
I am willing to tolerate a lot of art people (me included!) say is ugly if telling us to shut up allows music like this to be written!
Art is supposed to say something about the creator. If music expresses great longing, that is because when I try to understand the music, it makes more sense if the composer is feeling great longing. Listening to great music is like writing poetry in strict metre: just as poetic metre doesn’t let you write a line until you find something new, great music doesn’t make sense until you understand the emotion that caused the music.
I think if someone did the experiment and 5% of the population could write music like one of the Renaissance greats, I’d be really interested in the training program, and what it expressed about the human condition. But if the participants could write the music *without feeling anything*, I’d enjoy the old music a lot less. I’d always be wondering if the composer’s emotions were worth understanding, or if they were phoning it in with the new method when they wrote, so I wouldn’t need to engage with it in the same way.
Sculpture is different. Michelangelo expressed the human body by paying great attention to it, so knowing that he cared enough to capture the amount of detail says something about how he feels. The fact someone can do the same with a camera and some software doesn’t change Michelangelo’s options, so it doesn’t change how I relate to it.
That’s one of the only pieces of Latin chant that made it big in the 20th century. Most of the time, if you follow the rules of harmony they describe, you don’t get something that good. It depends a lot on the underlying melody, and also the video mentions better and worse harmonisations. I stand by “pretty pleasant” doing a lot of the work.
I’m not sure how to take this. Is it better that art exists at all, than that we just have blank walls and a plain-text internet? If so, then that art does have a justification. I’m not saying art needs a justification, but being *good* art means it is good *in some way*. I’m not saying the only way art can be good is if people engage with it as I described, but I think the way I described is a significant way in which art can be good.
Sure, but you can make some reasonable assumptions about the authors based on the poems or cathedrals themselves. None of these anonymous cathedrals were sealed in time capsules for a random number of centuries so you didn’t know what social contexts they were built in.
But the way they design the cathedral tells you something about how they think about God. Is it ornate? Austere? Each of those choices says something about what the designer thinks.
To take a food analogy, if you take an American from 1950 and give him real Thai food - not the touristy stuff - the food is bad. It is too spicy, too much rice, and where are the potatoes and meat?
Of course, this is entirely a matter of taste. When an Thai comes to the US and opens a restaurant, he adjusts the food to the local tastes, with Thai influences. Use some of the spices, enough to give a sense of something new, but that would still appeal to local tastes.
Same with art. There are some common truths, I guess, but writing poem in Spanish or English is different. You can expect your audience to know different things. The U.S anthem can bring grown man to tears, and so do the Tikva (Israeli anthem), but probably not the same people.
You cover a fair bit of ground here, but one of the questions you address is this: when we appreciate and evaluate art, how much of our assessment is truly in the artwork itself, and how much is due to other things we believe about it? Or, if you will, how much does aesthetic judgement rely on the data (the artwork) and how much relies on metadata (what you believe about it). Using your examples, metadata covers who the creator was, whether they were the first to do this, whether this artwork is part of an ongoing "conversation" etc.
Elsewhere, I've proposed a scale (the Barthes Scale) to measure this, i.e. for a particular person and a particular artwork, how important is the metadata to appreciating the artwork itself? For example, historical documents like Anne Frank's diaries rank high on the scale - the metadata is critically important, because their value depends on them being genuine and they can only be appreciated in a historical context. Whereas, consider the editing of a motion picture - this is low on the scale because (nearly) no one cares how it was done or who did it, they just care about the result.
Now sometimes it's legitimate to value metadata highly (e.g. my Anne Frank example before) and sometimes it isn't - the example I use in my piece is the connoisseur who can't pronounce judgement on a wine they're tasting until they've seen the label on the bottle.
>the placard was a prank, and the sculpture was by Michelangelo after all?
While I Cannot Condone This, it'd also be very funny, just like other famous hoaxes such as Ern Malley. And I do think this was one of the key missing points in your earlier post about the AI sequoia picture: the feelings of profundity are real, no matter the provenance, but there's definitely *something* lost when such reactions are predicated on a deception. Like yeah, one could galaxy-brain that "a clever lie is just part of the experience", but there's a reason no one actually does the BAHP thing of making a restaurant where banal dishes are described in the ambrosial terms that royalty of yesteryear would have viewed them. (Or was that an Eliezer joke?) Once you let people in on the joke, it's not funny anymore, and whatever positive valence one had for the art is erased by negativa for getting successfully pwned. "Is this really the room where Allan Ginsberg wrote Howl?" "Why not?"
I do have to wonder if there isn't a failure of typical-mind here though. Like, do you genuinely...only taste "the real food" in food, regardless of context, ambivalent of ambiance? I know I'd enjoy my favourite dishes a lot less if I had to eat them in an overstimulating, dirty, crowded restaurant jonesing for a health code violation. Whereas the "objectively" simple fare on offer at a greasy dive bar ends up being great, precisely because one is conditioned by the social cues and atmosphere to have a good time and grade generously. Similarly, hunger is the best spice: water tastes incredible when you're dehydrated, plain bread is food of the gods after running on empty all day. The smell, the appearance, the lighting, the mouthfeel, the crackle and sizzle, who you're eating with...all of these contribute to gustatory satisfaction. Without loss of generality, this applies to many other domains of "art" as well. I find it strange to argue that we ought to evaluate such phenomena in isolation, and not consider the attendant epiphenomena as well. C.f. the objectively best music is just whatever you listened to as a teen/young adult. Everybody Knows about this bias, but it's hard to break anyway!
It'd also be remiss not to mention the "Michelin Curse", that restaurants so starred not-infrequently experience a precipitous decline in quality afterwards, sometimes even closing outright. Whether this is mere regression to the mean, or a sort of reverse Streisand Effect (that is, an undiscovered gem stops being a gem when the masses discover it) paired with not being able to perform under heightened scrutiny and expectations, is left as an exercise to the psychology undergrads and/or Tyler Cowen. Hanging the argument on this central recurring motif is thus necessarily fraught, since it self-disproves often enough that I now consider Critics Are Thumbin' In Awe as an anti-signal of Quality (and certainly ROI). Don't dine where the professional critic says to dine, dine where diners like you say to dine. Taleb probably has a pithier way to phrase that...
Same with aspic and gelatine (jello in teh USA, jelly in the UK). People often express surprise online about old cook books and "why was everything in the 50s coated in jello?"
Well, because the original version was aspic, which was labour-intensive to produce. Then commercially available food gelatine was sold, and now you didn't have to boil and strain things for hours:
But of course, the new product doesn't taste exactly the same as aspic, so it fell out of fashion. Also, we have better methods of food preservation and the use isn't the same. And now we've moved on in our tastes, so even dishes using aspic often are not popular when made and tasted.
One of Nietzsche's 'untimely meditations' gives a helpful typology of approaches to history: Monumental (inspiring examples); Antiquary (reverent, linked to community - maybe encompasses the more pedantic 'here's the first impressionist painting'); and critical (radical, liberating). Think it can be read across to taste. One of the things I like about it is that it values all of these approaches. I think a technical, historical appreciation - connoisseurship, if you like - adds to the experience. Even bad art can give subjective experience of being inspired and changed, but deeper sustained engagement benefits from technical appreciation and historical understanding, which I think this piece dismisses too hastily.
Pirsig's "Metaphysics of Quality" provides a metaphor, and maybe even a vocabulary, relevant to this. Pirsig said that everything is made of Quality. Quality is divided into Dynamic Quality - generative, new, exploratory - and four kinds of static quality: physical, biological, social, intellectual.
I'd argue that art, as distinct from craft, has to contain Dynamic Quality. But only an interpreter with a context can tell the difference between Dynamic Quality (which, I think, must be connected to static quality) and random noise - or, indeed, between Dynamic Quality and static quality that they've never personally seen.
Also, there are multiple kinds of static quality, and there are multiple kinds of art, from Michelangelo's David to "Piss Christ" to "White on White" to Madonna or Warhol's work.
I think this translates into "Art must contain genuine novelty, and must build on something so the viewer can connect to it" - which is extremely broad, maybe overly broad, but it feels useful.
Separately, Scott, I'm really curious how you'd explore or react to the possibility of an LLM that could produce new Chesterton or Bach works - not just pastiches, but following the same deep structure into new places.
Separately, here's anecdata about modern art: I used to laugh scornfully at it. One day I stumbled into a Robert Ryman exhibition (the "White on White" artist) and spent an hour going "This is stupid" - and then I understood what he was doing, and went "This is brilliant" and resolved that I would never again criticize a piece of modern art until I understood it.
> Dostoevsky says that “the world will be saved by Beauty”. I’m busy trying to save the world through Truth, so I can’t personally work on Dostoevsky’s project, but I think it deserves the same level of dignity.
Is quoting Ode on a Grecian Urn too low hanging a fruit, here?
Regarding the rest, sometimes it feels like you're getting too much of your impression of contemporary art from people talking about art, rather actually experiencing it yourself. As an aesthetic-beauty first person who is also highly skeptical of Fine Art transgressive dumb thing, I still find lots of beautiful art to appreciate, and even like to think I make some, from time to time. Personally, it feels like the Fine Art/MFA/tax evasion evasion world co-opted the traditional art disciplines through academic institutionalization and financialization.
Outsider art is where it's at for sensory delight, these days, and Burning Man is the ne plus ultra for that. However, there is increasing pendulum motion back towards that in the financialized art world, as newly minted high net worth individuals with more traditional aesthetic sensibilities start throwing their weight around, especially in the Bay Area - see eg the Bay Bridge Lights, the Salesforce Tower Top, the Sijbrandij foundation's Big Art Walk project, etc.
One is novelty from the audience's perspective. Being awed and transformed by a renaissance statue.
But another is novelty from the artist's perspective. Effort and struggle to produce something original and personal. I have had such transcendent experiences of struggle (both as a researcher as well as an amateur artist), and it makes me feel connected to this person, who I don't know, but who shares my experience of transcendence. It triggers my pro-civilization "good people living good lives" instinct.
In that case, the plaque that says it was a boomer in Ohio does turn my perception on its head, and quite legitimately so! Unless he's the one person on earth who somehow never saw a renaissance statue in their life and re-discovered this style independently.
We can take this too far of course. In the "high art" world, there is a certain worship for art that is "naive" and "genuine", to the point where artists play into that perception. It's an anti-inductive problem. I agree that this kind of consideration is orthogonal to sensory delight, which is still the most important aspect of art to me.
“In 1940, Beaux-Arts and Frank Lloyd Wright were the heights of American architecture. By 1950, nobody who was anybody was doing Beaux-Arts or Prairie; it was all International Style. “
Doesn’t this reflect the oversized influence that European refugees from fascist Europe had on American taste in the 1940s/50s? Americans still had an intellectual inferiority complex and were far too susceptible to European “sophistication”.
Broadly agree with the thrust of this (thanks for writing it!), but would like to pick a nit, if I may: "Anyone who says such a thing obviously doesn’t like poetry, they like - I don’t know, the experience of affiliating themselves with cool famous poets." I think an alternative is that our attention bandwidth is limited and you absolutely can choose to ignore other poets if you've not even exhausted the one you like the most historically, even if they're not the only one to write in that style.
I would say this is possibly not usually what people mean when they combine phrases that look like your mock example there, but *I* recognise I've said things that have a similar shape *and* meant precisely that (basically, there are just too many things I'm interested in, and for many of those things I prefer to keep them (artificially) narrow, and in that sense "I don't care" about the other artists, even if objectively I would enjoy them). Though, just to be clear, I've also said the opposite where I did want to widen my scope, this isn't a fundamental thing that happens all the time.
> You can’t fully appreciate Animal Farm unless you know the history of Soviet communism and recognize the book as an allegory for that history.
There's plenty of room between knowing specific historic examples of a theme and thinking it's literally a story about talking animals. The core concepts are that oftentimes people who say they want equality are just lying for personal gain, or that good intentions become corrupted by degrees. It doesn't take a genius to learn those lessons directly from just a modicum of life experience and see them reflected in allegory, even without a historical background.
Yes, I thought of this as well. If it can ONLY be appreciated as an allegory to Stalinist Russia, wouldn't a history of Stalinist Russia written at an 8th grade level be superior, since it conveys the same information in a more comprehensible way?
I don't find it hypocritical at all to find the painting less impactful when you learn it's from 1995. Part of the fun of historical artwork is finding meaning that's so universal it's lasted for all these years. That lends it some weight, the same way a prediction from 1900 is more interesting than one from 2015.
Even worse, when a deep and meaningful interpretation is dashed by an errant placard. That's just manipulative.
"If you can’t figure out how to do it well, stick to the stale stuff within the existing horizon and wait however long it takes for the next genius to come along."
Why? From what angle are you asserting leverage over other people's behaviour?
I assume that you're not taking dictator-like powers, so they're not understood to listen to you because you force them to.
If you're talking about your patronage of the arts, are you in fact going to patronise low quality conservative art, but not low quality radical art? That would be fine, and it is in fact how commercial art markets work... I don't think this mechanism needs your input.
But I don't think either of those are true. I assume you're talking about something like cultural discourse, and saying: I think it is bad that you people who do cultural discourse repeatedly claim quality for bad radical art because this discourse is annoying... This opinion should be targeted more at the critics than the artists.
Artists need to practice, and lots of art is bad. This is fine, and I think you should not bother telling the bad artists that. Lots of criticism is also bad, and it sounds like you're just reading bad critics. Good critics will not waste your time telling you that bad radical art is good.
Oh, yes, I see. Sorry, I was reading too quickly and didn't spot that Benjamin was the source of that paragraph.
Like I say, I dunno. I have no particular reason to think Benjamin is good or bad, except he's famous. It wouldn't shake my world to hear that he has lots of bad ideas.
Animal Farm: I think it can be appreciated as satire about revolution without knowing it's specifically about the Russian Revolution.
The problem with your ideal blinded restaurant criticism is that almost all the food needs to be fresh from the kitchen, not brought to someone's home. Maybe in your ideal world, restaurants would have identical small rooms for critics. I think I wouldn't go for a "just the food" approach, I would want to know whether the restaurant was a convivial place to eat, but that could be a separate review.
I find I like Angelus Novus-- it's a pleasant emotional jolt. Not the best thing ever, not the kind of art I want to live on, but I'm glad to have seen it.
Possibly related to art as conversation: A lot of ancient art looks modern because a lot of modern art was based on archaeological finds. I find this satisfying to know.
Surely some tastes are real. If person A's favourite show is The Sopranos and person B's favourite show is The Big Bang theory. Am I suppose to think that's just a neutral fact and doesn't tell me anything about them, except that maybe person A is more in touch with some taste/status meta-game.
The Sopranos just feels like it touches on more complex themes, has more complex dialog and plotting etc.
Probably person A is more likely to be an adult and person B is more likely to be a teenager. Or person A is more likely to be more educated than person B, etc.
i guess art, and i presume food in a fancy restaurant, is not made outside context. Context can make you see more in the work, but shouldn't be a prerequisite for appreciating it.
How do you feel about Chesterton fan fiction? What I imagine is that people who understand visual art (I don't) look at modern impressionist paintings and see fan fiction which they can easily tell apart from the real thing.
This is exactly right, I think. People too easily generalize their own level of Paying Attention/Pattern Language and assume that if they can't see a difference between X and Y, no one can.
I think there's still some conflation here. On the one hand there are personal value judgments made in a vacuum ("this is good" said about some painting in a museum or something) - these should be taken as basically personal opinions, and any high-falutin modern art critic who's not playing some silly social game will admit as much. If you like literally none of the art in the Tate Modern, obviously go do something else with your time. (And similarly I don't get why people keep whining on and on about the style of modern literature they don't like - just don't read it, there's plenty of different books out there)
On the other hand there's some idea of cultural value that "we" as a society are supposed to all agree on, and it ties into notions of fairness and unfairness because cultural appreciation in this sense comes with social capital. Hence all the people who work themselves up over "why does THIS belong in a museum???" and "it's not ART it's literally SHIT".
And that is why you keep coming back to architecture: artistic judgment in the first sense will never be commensurable with cultural value in the second sense, it's just a different game playing out in a different sphere. Yet you insist on conflating them, and so architecture provides the way out, because it simply takes on so much room in the public space and costs public money and whatnot, surely something should be done there so the general public will be able to find aesthetic enjoyment in something they cannot avoid and are also paying for...
And in the case of architecture I completely agree - but that is the only sphere of culture as far as I can see where this applies, and the reasoning that holds for architecture doesn't hold for e.g. literature and easel paintings. Just go read something you like, go to an exhibition of amateur renaissance imitators, write a Homeric epic about whatever (which I gather you do every now and then).. It's your own responsibility to search out the art you enjoy, instead of somehow trying to goad the mass-culture taste selectors to adapt in the direction of your tastes.
Most people like art almost entirely in a social sense - all the way from small talk with boring coworkers about lowbrow TV to a highbrow salon of connoisseurs talking about the latest thing in their specialized world. The art can be good, bad or indifferent - shared enjoyment is what counts.
Now let’s examine from the perspective of someone who cares about rationality, judgement, objective taste, etc. This perspective is common here, rare elsewhere. Even if some of us are perhaps a teeny bit autistic, we still care about sharing experiences, connecting with others, the feeling of being part of a group or a culture, being able to have meaningful conversations with shared assumptions and reference points. So if the cultural touchstones of our community are crap - eg I go on a date to the big fancy art museum and the art is literal piles of shit, or I go to dinner with coworkers and the chat is all about some reality TV slop - this is irritating. Sure I can go alone to the weird basement gallery that no one has heard of and see a piece of art that I love - I can even drag along a close friend or a spouse - but this is irrelevant to the broader culture where I also spend time. I can go research obscure punk bands - even find other fans online - but if the band broke up 10 years ago because no one came to the shows and no one I meet has heard the songs, then this fandom is a lonely and dead-ended pursuit.
>I don't get why people keep whining on and on about the style of modern literature they don't like - just don't read it, there's plenty of different books out the there
There will always be plenty of anything, there's always someone willing to self-publish their prose-maximalist, risky novel, and many no-name painters selling their classical style works online, but you may concede that an important part of art is its visibility, and our access to it. If only these very particular examples of what critics deem 'great art' are occupying the visible and accessible spaces we will be persuaded to believe that for the most part, only this kind of art exists or that only this kind of art is worthy.
These contraints that critics create around what makes 'good' art do influence what gets created. Everyone wants to make good art. And the visibility will go to the art that is deemed 'good' critically. Except in music, where critics have no power.
This is such a "high-decoupler" version of perception to witness that it's a wonder to behold. You even touch on it with the medical trials example. But art appreciation is almost the canonical "low decoupling" activity. The people who like and appreciate art at the level of art history and criticism are probably some of the lowest decouplers around! Funny to see this anthropological interaction between two wildly opposite extreme cultures.
I think the issue here is that most of Art is made by and gatekept by the low decoupler clique which *utterly pisses off and disgusts/ bores* not only high decouplers but basically everyone outside of that clique.
I don’t care if making an ornamented building is not original. I just want something visually pleasing to look at, along with the vast majority of people.
Which I think is the major thrust of this post - if Art for this minority is by necessity not enjoyable by the majority, please for the love of all that is beautiful, please stop pushing it as the only acceptable form.
It's a separate issue. Traditional representational art appreciation is low-decoupling, too—that's why art forgery is a thing. If a work by Rembrandt is about to fetch a high price at auction and then it turns out it's not by Rembrandt, no one would say "well, it's worth just as much to me since it looks exactly the same regardless of who made it."
There are too many meanings of the word "Art", please remove three.
But seriously, using the same word for propensity to provide visual (or otherwise) pleasure, participate in a highbrow discussion between fellow practitioners, serve as speculative investment and be a store of value (and probably more!) does not help here.
Were it possible to do, I would advocate that visual pleasure part be henceforth renamed as 'Pretty' and all public procurement banned from funding Art, only Pretty.
To make it abundantly clear - I don't give a flying flamingo whether a government building is build in a repetitive or uninteresting manner making it bad Art by some metrics, or whether that makes it less likely to be then put on some preservation list 200 years from now. I want the Pretty. I expect vast majority of people wants the Pretty. Pretty is not universal and hard to pinpoint, so the solution to procurement usually goes through Serious People supposedly specialising in Pretty. To have those Serious People exist in the absence of the rich funding them, public historically invested in their education with the goal of providing some good authoritative source of Pretty (although I'll admit I have no idea whether that happens in US), and specialists thereof, to be able to then hire said specialists and have Pretty that works for most people.
Sadly, the whole public funding was under the overloaded term "Art", probably because specifying that "we really mean Pretty, but serious, not childlike, you know", was hard. Specialists then decided they don't care about the Pretty part of the term under which they got taught (Art) and ran away to do every other meaning of the word Art.
Public feels cheated, since they wanted Pretty, but they got no Pretty, only admonishments that it's shallow and tasteless and the drab concrete boxes are interesting commentary on (...)
So yes, maybe appreciating Art is low-decoupling thing. I don't think high-decouplers are somehow unable to appreciate Pretty. I don't think uneducated masses are somehow unable to appreciate Pretty. In particular, both of those camps seem to want more Pretty. There is no more Pretty, because the whole edifice supposed to produce Pretty produces no Pretty. This state of affairs is somewhat frustrating, especially when combined with the inevitable miscommunications happening due to how overloaded the term "Art" is and how unfortunate it is that we're discussing all of it under that term.
Agreed, for many categories, those where procurement of Pretty is on a personal basis, there's both plenty of Pretty and plenty of different options for different tastes. It's great! I don't think this is relevant to the discussion, though, as contents of the DeviantArt and ArtStation are not subsidised by government as part of "culture" spending nor selected by any committee to be shown in public spaces for the next however many decades.
I'll freely admit that in my initial comment I meant Art in that form of public good, not personal consumption product. Yes, of course there is a lot of Pretty available if one wants to look for it, basically regardless of preferences.
No, what I was pointing at is that 'taste' and 'artistic value' are criteria for public works - either in the form of lead architect choices for public buildings or public funding for art - which inevitably end up not Pretty for vast majority of people. That seems suboptimal.
Not everyone feels transports of joy listening to Beethoven's Ode to Joy. It makes me feel almost physically sick as it reminds me of the EU (who pinched it for their anthem) ! Besides the Moonlight Sonata, which I do quite like, Beethoven's music seems to have a relentless, obsessive quality which I find disagreeable.
>“I could draw that with a bucket of crayons and ten minutes”,
1. I tried to do a Basquiat-style painting once. It was vastly inferior to the real thing. Ditto the work of a professional artist I knew who worked in the same style.
2. OTOH, I could probably do this, but that doesn't make it less beautiful: https://beyondproject.weebly.com/rowan-leaves-and-hole.html And a big part of work like that is the creativity involved. I could do it, but it never would have occurred to me to do so.
I googled Angelus Novus before you linked it and had the same disbelief and confusion reaction everyone describes. I had to double-check the author's name, etc. But I also absolutely love the image, to the point that I think I am going to order a physical copy and hang it in my apartment. I want to defend it as a purely sensory experience.
I don't know anything about the painter, maybe he did justify it as some complicated response to a critique to a bla bla. If so, I would be disappointed, but I would still love looking at Angelus Novus, the same as if you revealed it was a five-year-old's chicken scratch. I completely agree with how you describe what you find valuable in art. I've been to a few art museums with friends, and they always find it weird how I will just walk to a picture I think is beautiful and watch it rather than talk about each one and read the descriptions. I think I have very simple feelings about paintings, books, or songs; I either want to experience them more or I don't.
I have a strong urge to signal that I don't enjoy the painting out of pretense or that cluster of emotions that surrounds art critique. I feel a vicious and probably inordinate amount of contempt for the idea of people waxing lyrical about how a banana taped to a wall is a worthwhile contribution to human experience.
I can shift my perspective back and feel the initial "what the fuck is this" feeling I had, but the more I look at Angelus Novus, the more everything feels so perfectly... wrong, disgusting, innocent. Like a creeping horror movie, sure, it is not sensory delight from happy or heroic emotions, but I think you can be drawn to intensely sad or cathartic art purely for the sensory experience. Angelus Novus feels similar to Zdzisław Beksiński's paintings(https://www.wikiart.org/en/zdzislaw-beksinski), they are objectively disgusting, but the specific contours of the negative emotion they evoke also make me fascinated and entranced to a degree. Obviously, his work is far more technically sophisticated than Angelus Novus, but I don't enjoy technical sophistication purely for its own sake.
There is this particular mounting horror I love in fiction that I get from Angelus Novus. The scp There is no Antimemetics Department evokes it. I have a few specific memories of backpacking at night, particularly after midnight when I haven't seen any people for days. One where I am hiking along a series of desolate beaches with black water illuminated by a full moon is particularly vivid. I remember this overwhelming, profound feeling of helpless smallness. It was peaceful, I could see the beauty in every bit of my experience, but there was this horror, this twisting tension in my gut. Lovecraft definitely taps into this feeling as well.
For example, something about the mouth on Angelus Novus is so wrong, it is asymmetric, the teeth look rotting. I didn't even notice the tongue until writing this part. Looking at it too long makes me physically want to shower. But it is smiling, not just smiling but it feels innocent, like the joy of a particularly disgusting child happy to see a parent. The mouth and eyes give me such an incredible uncanny valley feeling of something half of me finds incredibly cute, and I want to care for it, while the other half is repulsed by it and wants to burn it. But that urge to burn it is so profoundly sad and tragic to the part of me that wants to protect it.
I have an odd relationship with negative qualia and disgust in particular, which is probably why this piece speaks to me. But to extend the food critic example, I don't think Angelus Novus is lukewarm slop justified as a response to some famous meal in 1974, adding commentary to the debate between pasta and lasagna. It is more like a restaurant selling a glass of pure lemon juice. I agree it would be a critic's job to point out that most people won't like the overwhelming sourness and describing this image as the sweeping epic Benjamin does is misleading. But there are people who really like pure lemon juice and making a restaurant that caters to them doesn't have to come from the weird masturbatory status games art critic spirals into.
I suppose I am fine with this, it's the type of thing that sorts itself out through free association. If enough people like the particular uncanny feeling I get from Angelus Novus, it survives; if they don't, it doesn't. A lot of people don't like horror movies, but they are also currently one of the most profitable genres, so clearly enough people also like them.
The status games around high art and art criticism feel different. The way critics talk about the banana taped to a wall or toilet in a gallery feels more parasitic. Art has cultural cachet because of the experiences people have with it, and the way criticism is done feels more like elites competing to extract status from it rather than contributing to it or indexing information about it.
Maybe another food analogy would be Angelus Novus feels like pickled herring while the toilet in a gallery feels like Salt Bae. He is cashing in on the reputation of south American steak houses and not delivering on the experience. It just feels cynical in a different way
> I suppose I am fine with this, it's the type of thing that sorts itself out through free association.
I don't think free association is doing a very good job here.
Lets say that the average architect looks at brutality architecture and thinks.
"This really speaks to me about the bleakness and futility of existence. Wow. Build more like this"
And the average person looks at the same building and thinks "grey miserable concrete cube, knock it down".
The tastes of the elite art creators are different from the tastes of everyone else. This may partly be due to self selection. And maybe partly due to, once the distinction is established, the artistic elites looking down on anyone with more average tastes.
Well there is a sense in which if fine arts culture is off making art that only fine artists want to look at, then someone somewhere (eg comic book artists) will make art for the average person.
A beautifully written post, which irony I only saw after finishing. Take the paragraph on Dostoyevsky. It's pure joy! After reading it on the train I had to stop and look out the window for a few seconds to cool down. But then after stopping and thinking about it for a bit longer: it's not remotely true.
Take Scott's own writing as art. It's very aesthetically pleasing, funny, novel, "engaging in a conversation". I'm convinced his best pieces are there primarily for the Beauty reasons: Mediations on Moloch, the cactus person, I can tolerate anything except the outgroup (which incidentally also hits with the self-aware meta-commentary I'm trying to point out here).
SSC/ACX is not focused on discovering the truth (compared to eg academic research or, I don't know, Robin Hanson's blogging) as much as it is on conveying or rephrasing it - I think this argument has been made in "Why do I suck". It is inspiring, and I can honestly say the cringe phrase about it transforming my life. But it's funny Scott himself doesn't recognise that.
I am a simpleton. If a work makes me think or feel something new or powerful, I deem it good art. For the most part, who the artist is, when it was made, or what other people think doesn't have any bearing on the matter for me.
Scott, you really, really should do what the Synthetic Opposition link recommends and read An Experiment in Criticism. Lewis was a very literary person who Actually Cared about literary experiences, and it's a fantastic account of what valuable thing all these discussions about taste are trying to get at.
Angelus Novus is excellent art in the same way a trolling comment or greentext can be excellent art. It takes you on a journey of expectation and surprise. The value of Angelus Novus is not just the painting itself, but the truly beautiful paragraph prepping you for something divine, only to have your expectations shattered, which is in itself an interesting experience.
The description prepping you for the visual medium is itself part of the art piece. It completes it to a level far above the painting alone.
But wasn't the picture created first, and then the paragraph created afterward by a different person? I wouldn't ascribe Scott's post on "My Immortal" to the original author, treating them together as one work.
The art was terrible until the bait and switch. Like all good art, it’s in part a reaction to what has come before. In this case the pompousness and beauty of the text juxtaposes well with the terrible painting. Like a good joke, it subverts expectations.
This is a fantastic essay, much food for thought, just exactly what I come here for. And even though seeing it made me laugh: Angelus Novus is a dog shit painting.
"Imagine how I felt when I actually read restaurant criticism. It was all stuff like “Oh, the ambience here is very nice; I had a great conversation with the chef who told me about how his childhood in Sardinia motivated new takes on traditional dishes.” How can you be sure the chef’s personable manner isn’t influencing your impression of the food?! Haven’t you ever heard of the Pepsi Paradox in psychology? Aaargh!"
"Even if you think that dialectic and “being part of the conversation” is important, it’s obnoxious and in some sense parasitic to demand that it occupy the same part of semantic space as sensory delight."
I think that answers young Scott's objection to food critics praxis. We have a couple of fancy fine-dining establishments in my town (the doors of which I will never darken because I'm nowhere sophisticated enough to be their clientele) and after watching a lot of cooking videos, what I've come to realise is that the ambience *is* part of the entire experience. You could go to a Michelin-star restaurant that is a concrete box where everyone stands in the middle of the floor and the food is served on paper plates, but that's not why you go to a fancy restaurant. You go for an experience as much as for the food. That's why presentation matters (and I had a hard time wrapping my head round this, given that I lived through the nouvelle cuisine trend where it was 'two shredded blades of chives and three drops of basil oil, that will be fifty quid please') and why the quality of the ingredients, how and where the chef was trained, and what they're attempting does matter.
"We eat first with our eyes" is attributed to the famous Roman gourmand Apicius, and studies show (as they say) that visual stimuli do make a difference. Young Scott was on to something with his idea of blindfolds!
While the senses of taste, smell, and vision are distinct, visual stimuli have been shown to alter the perception of taste, smell, and flavor. Color may be the most obvious visual cue, but expectations through learned associations are set by other visual cues as well, including gloss, evenness, and shape. These expectations exert cognitive top-down influences that can and sometimes do alter assessments of taste and flavor."
Chefs often say, “You eat with your eyes first.” This means that, while taste, smell, and vision are distinct senses, visual stimuli generate expectations through learned associations, and these expectations exert cognitive top–down influences that can and sometimes do alter assessments of taste and flavour. This study investigates the intangible values associated with the visual assessment of high-end pastry cakes among individuals from diverse food cultures. Using word association, the study explored the emotions, sensations, and impressions evoked by the visual representation of five high-end pastry cakes. Thematic content analysis was conducted to interpret and group the evoked words into dimensions. Across all cultures, “Organoleptic properties” emerged as the most highly rated dimension, aligning with expectations for food product visual assessments."
It *does* make a difference if the chef is making a modern twist on "this is the dish granny cooked every Sunday where I grew up in Sardinia" versus "I read about this recipe on a travel blog and decided to do a fusion version of it but I've never eaten the real thing".
Also, food critics have probably eaten about a hundred versions of the same dish, so if a chef produces a whole new novel twist on, say, mac and cheese, they'll applaud it and review it favourably even if most people would go "the hell is this, I just wanted mac and cheese!"
Your points (2: novelty) and (8: transformation) are connected to the idea of the sublime. Sublimity is not just extra beauty, but something terrifying, amazing, and beyond comprehension. I think it has to do with breaking predictive processing (which I argue for here: https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/hyperspace-of-perception?) Great artists of the past did something that audiences of their time could not have predicted, but was astonishing. It blew their minds. But now we have all absorbed that new artistic language (impressionism, prairie architecture, heroic hexameter, etc.) and while it still is great, it is no longer mind-blowing. It is part of what we are able to predict art can be. So modern artists keep trying to find the sublime by doing dumbass things like duct-taping bananas to walls, or sticking a pancreas on a dolphin and hoping that they break predictive processing.
One of your points is that Transgression alone is not enough. The introduction of Transgression as a valid mode of expressing creativity arguably only worked on its own once, with Duchamp’s museum exhibit of a urinal. Every (solely) transgressive gambit since then has lacked the charge of the original. They’re all derivative of the Dadaist emphasis on the jarring juxtaposition of unlikely elements, to conjure novelty. And to scandalize the overly judgemental, who are easily scandalized.
But after that initial punching through of social taboos, there’s only boredom. The vapidity of jadedness. Or the sort of decadence that pursues Transgression for its own purposes, which are no longer esthetic, or even creative. Transgression for the sake of transgression is as predictable as sado-dungeon scripts. The unpredictability of unexpected surprise and delight have left the room. Replaced by cliche.
It’s akin to the Guerrilla Theater of the 1960s, which only worked once. Throwing dollar bills into the pit of the stock exchange was brilliant- in 1970. Situationism is brilliant as critique of the “art-appeal”, “entertainment” tactics of State propaganda and Market propaganda (i.e., commercial advertisement. But, like Marxism, what’s brilliant as diagnosis is terribly flawed as cure. The Situationists attempted to subvert Advertising Propaganda Technique for the purpose of exposing its manipulations. What they eventually got was Che Guevara t-shirts. The didactic value of Situationism had shot its wad in the first round.
I think Marx got more right than wrong, about the problems of making private capital accumulation the arbiter of so many other features of society. including the corrosion of values that results when markets are elevated to the status of an Ideology, an Ism. The elevation of market values- transactionality, commodification- has a way of developing a momentum that subordinates all other concerns to the pursuit of more money. Even practical good sense gets lost once an economic system prioritizes short-term parlays over traditional values like thrift, conservation, local relationship with natural resources, community stability, and the ideals of Enough and Other People.
This is really a topic for a different discussion. Although the aspects of the way various artistic endeavors are valued economically has some relevance. It’s worth noting that Marx’ “labor theory of value” pretty much collapses when applied to the efforts of artists. But viewing artistic effort simply in standard market terms is a debasement of the entire concept of art as carrying a meaning beyond its monetary valuation in the moment, under mundane considerations like “supply and demand.”
But the market doesn't actually value "short term" over long term to that extent. Massive amounts of money are invested in long-term payoffs. Amazon didn't start making profits until relatively recently, and was able to be funded by investors buying its stock anyway. Marx didn't predict anything like this would happen, he thought there would be falling profits, immiserated workers developing class consciousness, and escalating crises until the proletariat overthrew the system to adopt socialism and then communism.
You’re using an example of an investment in a concern that happens to have worked exactly as Marx predicted: to lead to a massive economic sector consolidated and run by the controlling interest of a handful of wealthy people for their own private ends. That’s the paradox of inertial capitalism: it works to replace diverse independent business enterprises in favor of getting as close to monopoly as possible.
That’s what made Amazon’s business plan such a low-risk investment: 1) Amazon grew by exerting a power designed to be hegemonic, to convert tens of thousands of independent e-commerce enterprises into its indentured clients; 2) Amazon founded its business as an e-commerce advertising platform facilitating the transfer and transportation of goods without the complications of manufacturing them; and 3) the original basis of Amazon’s (since diversified) revenues is commerce in actual, physically real, tangible weight material goods. The traditional basis of commerce.* That's how investors were persuaded that Amazon was a safe investment that was bound to succeed eventually. The front-loading of investment was directed toward expansion of a business model that was already proven. But my original comment wasn't directed at examples of how long money is able to wait until it gets more money. It was directed at all of the sustaining values put at risk by a paradigm with the power to subordinate every other activity of life to the goal of getting more money, Preferably as fast as possible, because that is what best enables the pursuit of even more money.
Marx also outlined the way that economic rules dominated by short-term gain capitalist priorities would inevitably lead to the macroeconomic paradigm of neoliberalism, which for all practical purposes ended up mandating that practically all American retail consumer products be manufactured in foreign countries, along with a substantial number of material goods with shall we say “strategic” value.** This overhaul of the American economy was accomplished in less than 20 years.
Like I said, at this point we aren't really discussing the topic at hand. But I can't let your reply stand unchallenged, either.
I assure you, for every example you can cite as evidence that CapitalISM has some innate wisdom or inherently moral character in its functioning, I can point out features of our economic system and events in economic history that prove that it’s a blind machine.
I’m not even opposed to market enterprise. I think independent small businesses are vitally important to maintaining all sorts of benefits for a society, with their diverse means of value addition. I just see what happens when market economic practices are formulated into an Ideology, as Capital ISM. Getting more money becomes more important than anything else. More important than clean water and air. More important than personal health. Leaving a fortune in money gets to be held as the key to providing a better future for ones offspring, instead of leaving a healthy planet for them. As an ideology, CapitalISM acts as an inertial force that’s unalterably opposed to the concept of Enough, and also entirely capable of disregarding any priority beyond accumulation through commodification, to serve exclusively private ends.
Market enterprise requires governors, brake pedals, and the feedback loops of common interest (including respect for sustaining a healthy natural environment, the underpinning of life on the planet.). To the extent that Marx's predictions have been refuted, most of the time it's been due to the introduction of those checks and balances on the ambitions of private interests seeking to maximize their private gain for their private ends.
(*An aspect not shared by the "unlimited vaporware" promises of AI, with its massively front-loaded investment plan. Which also includes quite a chunk of "public funding" already, as it happens.)
(**Autarky is not a workable economic platform when viewed dogmatically as a requirement by a national government, but there are available examples of nations who have insisted on maintaining at least a few sectors of their economy as domestic proprietary concerns, for the benefit of their people. . And if any country in the world could have insisted on maintaining a thrifty attitude toward their national resource trove and a healthier domestic manufacturing base than the one we have today, it’s the US. But the blind machine of globalization-without-a-brake-pedal demanded otherwise. And now a regime of "socialism with unique national characteristics" has responded to the conversion of the US economy to debt-fueled consumption, meeting that demand by sticking a hose in our mouth.
I don't know what Marx would have had to say about a command economy nation owning so much of the means of production that supplies US market consumer demand. Ross Perot had some prophetic insights to share on that prospect, though. Those1992 debate transcripts make for some eye-opening reading. ]
Matthew Yglesias used to quip that Amazon was a charity run by the stock market for the benefit of consumers. That was because the prices were so low (related to the lack of profit). Amazon still doesn't set prices monopolistically, as it's not actually a monopoly.
> Marx also outlined the way that economic rules dominated by short-term gain capitalist priorities would inevitably lead to the macroeconomic paradigm of neoliberalism
No, he didn't. The concept of "neoliberalism" didn't even exist back then. It was coined in the 20th century by Marxist & nationalist/proto-Nazi German critics of liberals like the Austrian School economists.
> I assure you, for every example you can cite as evidence that CapitalISM has [...] inherently moral character in its functioning
I don't believe in objective morality. I am discussing Marx's descriptions & predictions, which can be evaluated empirically.
> including respect for sustaining a healthy natural environment, the underpinning of life on the planet
I don't think that's a major theme of Marx's writing, fitting with how actual Marxist regimes don't prioritize the environment.
As genAI gets more common, and as capitalism reaches deeper and deeper into social/cultural relations via it, the pressure is ramping up for people to basically "prove" that they're human and/or "authentic" (paying attention to their own outputs, and not tricking you / merely selling you shit while pretending to be your friend).
Unfortunately this has increased demand for cliquey dynamics like above, but luckily the "niche-ification" of culture makes this weirdly easy for us weirdos to get involved in.
I.e. the cultural conversation is less prone to "Alberti's famous meal of 1974" if the "culture" at hand is, say, the size of the rationalist community, or the rave music community, or the RYM cluster #4189376: Stimulation Level 738 community, or the Brony community, or...
Basically smaller tribes that only occasionally (if ever) "breach containment" into wider awareness, like a video game reference that goes viral to people who've never played the game.
"My understanding of this, from the little art history I’ve read (including this review) suggests that artists thought the traditional forms were played out. There was nowhere left to go with poetry that rhymes - nowhere left to go with heavily ornamented buildings - nowhere left to go with representational painting."
this reductive story never makes much sense once on starts to look at particular modernist movements in detail. think, for example, of the viennese early 20th century sensibility. surely, what bothered, say, Adolf loos, karl Krauss or Wittgenstein was the combined ethical/political/aesthetic lie that continuing with past artistic languages would have entailed. to offer a similarly reductive, but more correct, alternative slogan: something had changed about human life, or at least european life, to such an extent that whatever made the output of previous artistic approaches into something more than decorative fluff couldn't be relied upon anymore. to avoid degenerating into kitsch, then, an artist had to make do without the pre-modern background that constituted the horizon of intelligibility of past art. different modernisms then understood the act of replacing or circumventing that background in various ways, giving rise to distinct schools and movements.
to give further credibility to this bird's eye view, note that Walter Benjamin elaborated upon something very much like it in several of his most influential essays. I think an account that makes Benjamin out to be what he obviously seems to be (a superhumanly keen interpreter of artistic movements and new forms of expression, at the moment of their birth) is pro tanto to be preferred over one that doesn't.
certainly, but a philosopher who participated in a pretty distinctive intellectual culture in which many others were artists (and people on substack are more likely to be familiar with Wittgenstein's views than those of the artists within this cultural milieu).
'The forms allowed for the modern novel have been constricted over the course of the century, so that now every book that “makes it big” in the critical world is a slight variation on the same form... There is a million-item checklist every modern book must follow not to get panned as “gauche” or “unsophisticated."'
It's only possible to think this if your only exposure to contemporary literary fiction is people online making generalisations about it. The book that won the Booker Prize in 2022 was about a ghost who tries to solve his own murder in 1980s Sri Lanka. In 2023, a near-future dystopian novel about totalitarian Ireland told in a single sentence. In 2024, a short novel that follows six astronauts on the International Space Station over 24 hours. In 2025, yes, OK, the kind of book you're thinking of here, an austere book about an emotionally-detached everyday guy (but Szalay is a wonderful writer). It is true that a certain kind of autofiction has been *especially in fashion* in recent years, and that has been tiresome for people like me who are bored by it, but all kinds of other books are published, praised and read, as they always have been.
With regard to the question of derivative work ("Okay, but do you like art?"), I think we should draw a distinction between the impact of a work on the individual, and the amount of credit or social respect that the artist deserves.
As far as an individual viewer's response is concerned, it makes sense that the strongest response to impressionism may be evoked by the first good impressionist works that one encounters. As long as the artist has done a competent job executing the conventions of the genre (not trivial), it is entirely reasonable that the result should have the same emotional effect on a naïve viewer as the original works of Monet would. In both cases, the experience is that of discovering impressionism for the first time.
On the other hand, even if the derivative artist's work is just as good as Monet's, it makes sense that Monet gets more credit. Monet (and contemporaries) had to invent the style of impressionism and figure out how to execute it without existing examples to copy or refer to. Even if there are many people who each have their own favourite impressionist works, or even if your real favourite artist is the AI image generator that can spit out impressionist versions of whatever scene you request, it makes sense that you and all other impressionist fans can agree to revere Monet as a founder of the movement you enjoy and as the inspiration without whom your favourite works might not exist in the same form.
This is a matter of coordination. It wouldn't be socially possible to coordinate the same level of respect and reverence for other derivative impressionists because there are too many of them and which one made the most impact on someone probably depends idiosyncratically on the order one encountered them.
Then again, among devoted fans of a genre or style, it makes sense that originality may be less important than sheer quality. All impressionism fans already know Monet and his work is no longer novel or exciting to them. So if some new artist comes along doing equally good work, it is natural that the new artist may be celebrated within that niche community. And I think this actually does happen. I don't know too much about the Impressionism appreciation community, but for example with music fans or video game fans, there can be lots of excitement about new releases within a specific genre, even though it's unlikely that the new release will get the same widespread acclaim as the defining works of the genre. And if the new releases are unique or innovative in some way, then they may themselves inspire imitators and become new definitive benchmarks for their own niche.
In fact, one could argue that if the restaurant critic is influenced by the reputation of the restaurant, that should be okay, because the people dining there will also be influenced and enjoy the experience more than in a less reputable place. The famous experiment about cheap and expensive wine shows this. But this opens up possibilities to corruption, and ultimately raises the question where does the line between real and fake is drawn? Can we just tape bananas to walls, make the critics hype it up, everybody is happy and worships the banana, and no one notices the next Michelangelo? It is very much 1984 and Brave New World kinds of questions. Can reality be infinitely distorted? Should it be? Should everything be subjective?
What is the critic adding then? Shouldn't they be telling the reader something they don't already know, so they may choose a good restaurant to go to? Reviewing a place with no reputation whatsoever would seem to be the most useful thing a critic can do.
I think a lot of this is due to leakage between communities, and communities vs their underlying conversations. Hipster rock critics and hyperpop critics have their own separate conversations, but things get weird when both their reviews are in Pitchfork. Brutalist architects and ornamental architects have separate conversations, but one has recently had budgets and political power while the other hasn't. (Buildings, much much more so than underground music, require funding and permissions under the current system.)
I fully agree with the post. I do like art--my cubicle is covered in photographs and paintings, and I've memorized The Darkling Thrush--but I'm more of a history guy. I think modern art fails on all counts. A story:
I live in Providence, and I've been to the RISD Art Museum a few times. There are some good rooms--they've got at least one Monet, and some of the historical pieces are of historical interest (though ugly and therefore not good as art)--but a lot of the larger galleries are student-made modern slop.
One piece which has bothered me ever time I've gone is a collection of drums hanging on the wall, arranged around a chair. The first time I saw these, I was curious. I became intensely interested when I heard a slight rumbling noise coming from the drums. I thought "My God, somebody's gone and worked out the acoustics to make the sounds of footsteps reverberate within the drums! This is a really clever bit of design!". It was only for that reason that I read the plaque.
The sound was a tape recording of a washing machine, played from a speaker inside the chair. The piece was supposed to be a commentary on women's role in the domestic sphere or something to that effect.
I used to volunteer at the Antique Gas Engine Museum in Vista, CA. This was a living museum: the goal was to keep all this stuff running and doing its job. The place grows corn, winter wheat, sorghum, &c., and processes it on actual historical equipment.
Anyway, during the show days, somebody would bring a collection of antique, gas-powered Maytag washing machines and run a few of them. These were more aesthetically pleasing than a random arrangement of drums up on a wall (if only for being more coherent), and I struggle to think of a more powerful way to make a point about women's domestic labor or whatever that student was trying to convey.
2. Information about the various dimensions increases one's ability to judge each dimension.
3. How much importance one places on each dimension is subjective.
4. There are perhaps hundreds of factors which create this subjectivity, including such varied ones as gut reaction, desire for social status, and marginal utility.
So whether you ask, "Is it good?" or "Do you like it?", the answer could be yes, no, no, yes, ...
Maybe I am misunderstanding, but I found the comparison between art and medicine confusing. Medicine is supposed to fix a discrete issue. Art is (among other things) is supposed to expand your mind.
These functions are fundamentally different — medicine takes you from a point below your baseline back to your baseline, while art is supposed to somehow elevate you from beyond your baseline. It feels to me that using the logic of science to think about art is completely wrong: the point of it isn’t to create things that maximally activate awe (or even novelty, or anything else that can be maximized) in the same way that medicine is supposed to maximize health.
Art operates in a less well-defined space than science does, so I think they need to have different logics. I don’t know what art’s is or should be, but I think it lacks a well-defined outcome, making RCT logic incomprehensible.
Why do you say art has to expand your mind? There's great art that is repetitive (such as Wodehouse moves where the themes and plots repeat). You are assigning a social activism role to art here.
What do you mean when you say medicine can be art? What would be an example?
I don't think it's a contradiction to say that repetitive art can expand your mind. If Wodehouse literally repeated his jokes we wouldn't laugh. The stable plots and themes provide a steady baseline which make the variations and surprises more effective.
I think maybe a better way of saying what I was trying to say before is that the goals and methods of science, while still complex and fuzzy in lots of ways, are more clearly-defined than art. I know I said art is supposed to expand your mind, but it's also kind of incomprehensible to say what art is "supposed" to do. That's part of what art does: evoke some emotion or idea in you, create new sensations, make you see the world in a way you might not otherwise (whether through repetition or not).
I think the inherent fuzziness of the goals of art makes it hard to think about art in the way that rationalists approach the world (in terms of outputs that can be tested, measured, or optimized for). That's why comparing art to medicine feels weird to me. We could debate whether acting intuitively makes something art or not, but doctors have a clear goal that can be optimized: cure the patient. The goal of art is very unclear, and may not even be something that can be defined in as consistent a way as health can be defined.
Not every question is of a scientific type. Art involves emotions.
It cannot be studied honestly using the scientific method. The mind is too complex. There are too many factors affecting it, many of them unknown, many unknown unknown factors.
We can't even define art unambiguously. How can we then understand it using science?
Some of the most interesting things in life cannot be studied using science - happiness, art, love…
You seem to be re-inventing the wheel here. Over a half-century ago I took a philosophy course titled aesthetics that dealt with a number of the issues you address here (I don't recall all the names, but Arthur Danto and Nelson Goodman come to mind). I understand that dealing with the issues initially on your own may accelerate your progress when you do read what others have written, but is there any point to sharing them with others? Seems more appropriate for one of those late night college bull sessions that play a role in various pundits' imaginations.
I like the following definition of great art : it is art that evokes complex emotions in me. If it evokes only simple emotions, it is *probably* not great art. I shouldn't have used the term "definition", because it's not a science.
Now do psychoacoustics and the High End Audio Wars.
I have always thought that, if the sound coming from the speakers fools the listener, then the engineering and whether or to what extent the sound duplicates the original acoustic event or the master tape is irrelevant.
Once again, if you love scifi, I can’t push Christopher Ruocchio hard enough if you want to see a true artist of the form. (Relevant enough and I think people should risk glazing artists doing good work more)
I'm surprised you don't mention outsider art here, which gets at some other related level of this conversation. Henry Darger's art is not objectively amazing as a piece on its own, and the bit of his writing I've read is not for popular consumption, but I find everything he did totally fascinating because of his mind set and I don't think that's just "wanting to be associated" with the artist and his mind. The fact that he did all of this in total isolation over decades sets what he created into an obsessive point of view from the perspective of the observer, which changes the art itself.
I get you've already addressed context changing the art like 7 times here, but it just really does in a way I just can't buy any of your counter arguments. The mind set of the creator is not always important, but sometimes it's absolutely critical to the appreciation of the art and I can't hand wave it away with logic and hypotheticals. I love looking at Henry Dargers art because of who he was and imagining myself inside his mind. I wouldn't if he had lived some other life.
I'm astonished that Scott can postulate these imaginary cases of latter-day imitations of great art without discussing the real-life example of Vermeer and the forger Han van Meegeren.
Re the steakhouse parable. This is funny. I spend time up in the Catskills in a small town that essentially has two restaurants and both are owned by the same man . One of them is a bar/restaurant/pizzeria and the other one just down the street is a steak house. Seeing as the fellow owns both restaurants, he orders all his meat from one place. The steak you can get in the bar/cafe is the same steak you can get in his steak house but it sells for a lot less money. So seeing as the ambiance of his steakhouse is a lot like what might be a mall restaurant in the Midwest, I prefer a cheaper steak surrounded by six flat-screen TVs, a jukebox, and a lottery machine.
How much of the Western idea that great art must be beautiful, inspiring, etc., is downstream of the fact that, historically, the works of those whom we celebrate as great artists was commissioned by elites, and that is the type of art they were interested in supporting?
Interestingly, in contrast to other visual art, we don't assume that a film must be beautiful and inspiring in order for it to be great.
For a whole inquiry into this issue I highly recommend a book by Otto Rank called "Art and Artist." it is a little obscure and a bit dense but it’s a good read,, especially if you’re interested in a psychoanalytic perspective from the 20s written by an analyst who had a lot of artists as clients. Henry Miller for example. It’s also quite sweeping in it’s historical scope. There’s a lot of anthropological investigations to do with burial sites and decoration, etc..
I've spent a lot of time reviewing modern classical music, some of it experimental, some more user-friendly. In both cases I base my judgment on whether it seems to me "cool" or vapid. One piece of modernist music can make me think "That's really neat" and another can make me think "This is empty scribbling." And that's not always related to the fame of the composer: I am convinced that the renowned Elliott Carter may have lots to say to the performers, but absolutely nothing to say to the audience. The critics who admire him are mostly performers, or have been trained as performers. I was trained as a listener.
My candidates for the finest classical composers currently writing are Caroline Shaw and Anna Clyne. My advice to start with Shaw are her remarkable Pulitzer-winning piece for unaccompanied choir, "Partita," which sounds like nothing else on earth, and her collected music for string quartet. For Clyne my favorite work is a dark and turbulent piece for orchestra called "Night Ferry," inspired by Schubert she says, and I can see the structural resemblance, but it sounds more like Sibelius. Among other composers, a favorite work of mine that's no .longer quite so new, though the composer is still living, is "Ash" by Michael Torke, which sounds more like Beethoven than anything else that's not by Beethoven. I am also very fond of immersing myself in long pieces by Steve Reich.
"there is a million-item checklist every modern book must follow not to get panned as “gauche” or “unsophisticated”, and almost no great book of the past followed any of these rules. The Iliad certainly didn’t”
This is a poor time for passive voice — I don’t know who is panning as gauche. I haven’t run into anyone panning anything as gauche in the last couple years, so the guess I lean towards is that some algorithm is finding the six people whos opinions best rile you up and showing you their snooty book reports. A sentence subject should clear me of this delusion!
I pretty much agree with all you've said. One thing I'll say is that I think you discount a bit too much the connection element behind art though. One of the strongest, most "mystical" experiences I've had with art for me was in a Roman villa near Pompeii. It was unusually well-preserved and allowed the visitors to look at it without much cordons or checks (I assume thanks to how relatively little known it was). And on a wall of this villa, among all its frescoes, was a painting of a little bird, like a sparrow or a robin. And for some reason that shook me up because I got to look at it from up close and I saw how beautifully accurate at was, which got me feeling that whoever painted it must have looked at a little bird, and looked at it well, and thought it was cute, and rendered lovingly every single feature of it. Such a familiar feeling, such an abyss of time between us - completely different lives and worlds, we would have hardly understood each other (my Latin isn't that good) - but this one thing, this insignificant thing of thinking "hey, little birds are cute" may have connected us.
So in a sense I think that with art, those feelings of connection throughout vast cultural and temporal barriers, as well as admiration for craft and dedication, are an element. That's not about art in itself, but about art as artefact, as proof of work and life of someone else, often someone long gone.
My favourite music makes me feel like I’ve been taking drugs. My favourite buildings make me feel humble - they make me feel placed in the world. Poetry and painting work on me in yet different ways.
I’m an architect. For me, architectural beauty depends on at least three things: truth to materials, truth to ritual, and novelty in relation to both. Kahn’s brick wants to be an arch. But a restaurant also wants to be a restaurant, not a self-service counter with better lighting. A courthouse, church, house, library, pub, or street each has a ritual structure which must be thoroughly satisfied before it connects.
The best buildings bring material truth, ritual and invention into equilibrium (all of this can be measured, btw).
A lot of keen minds have written about this: Kahn, Ruskin, Semper, Loos, Alexander, Scruton, Zumthor, and many others. Let’s all read and reconvene.
Notably, Wikipedia's page on Angelus Novus reprints the exact paragraph you did. And if you subtract the blockquote, the page still contains more text about Benjamin than about Klee. I think it would not be too far of a reach to say that there is a beautiful piece of art called Angelus Novus and its author is Walter Benjamin. There was a painting involved at some point, the same way that there is a tree involved in a beautiful piece of art consisting of a photograph of a tree; there is absolutely no point in visiting the site the photograph was taken and seeing if the tree was anything special. Perhaps modern art is deliberately designed to turn art critique into an art form, since the less a piece intrinsically says, the more you can say about it.
While there are many ways to respond to this as someone who has indoctrinated undergraduates into understanding contemporary art for years ill touch on the idea that Buildings don't look good anymore and technically Masterful Renaissance paintings.
They both suffer from market conditions of the times they exist in. Renaissance paintings were not made in isolation by suffering geniuses, they were made by large workshops (bottegas) with deep patronage. It was a technological investment in image making, and there historical mastery is unmatched because this investment ceased or reached its zenith (technologically). There is a great Raphael show at the MET in NYC right now. Of note because Raphael was considered such an apex painter that he inspired an entire movement called Pre-Raphaelite, which sought to return to a time before his innovation to find areas where paintings could still be made. The suffering genius idea, which would eventually lead to figures like Klee, sets off around impressionism and relies as much on commercially available tubes of paint as any other factor. The context of art, and how it both situates in history and extends into the future, is its real pleasure and what contemporary art enjoyers like most. The idea art is a reflection of its time is relevant beyond just responding to a feeling of a time, all the way down to the constraints of a time. If beauty is missing from art today or from the buildings you see and dislike its because the constraints of today is preventing it. But that doesn't mean that artists especially are not attempting to prod at those constraints to find gaps.
I'm not sure I have ever been Deeply Moved by visual art, let alone Transformed. There are poems, books, movies I can point to for that, but when people describe having such strong reactions to paintings, I feel like I'm reading Benjamin's description of Angelus Novus. "Uh-huh, interesting, well show it to me then and- what? That's all? Is this a prank?"
I mean they're usually quite nice paintings or statues or whatever, but I don't think I've ever heard anyone say they were Transformed by eating a meal. If someone did say that, and you ate the same meal, finding it merely quite nice, you would be as confused as I am about visual art. Someone explain this to me.
Some masterpieces choreograph dances between many types of visceral and analytical meaning. For these works, many angles of observation are meaningful, including synthesis of the angles into a... tesseract of sorts.
I say "tesseract" because past a certain point it becomes hard to believe that a work so complex, which strained so many realities through human brains into a single sensory experience, can exist. It shouldn't be possible for that many dimensions to manifest in reality.
An absurdity like Watchmen can be enjoyed from seemingly every visceral and analytical angle at once. It's visual and logical and philosophical and emotional and even musical; every page is defined by its historical context; it's every genre of fiction at once. And these angles form Watchmen by structurally reinforcing each other's greatness. Thus Watchmen's worth is assembled from every definition of "art" you could name - including this artful dance of perspective, in itself.
And I love this dance, wherever it flows, as much as it's possible for anyone to love anything.
This might be the closest I can get to defining the difference between the greatest art and Dolphin Pancreas Baby that Scott is having trouble articulating.
If you love good prose and can enjoy someone writing beautiful prose about (actually) beautiful art, I recommend anything written by Simon Schama. I didn't really have much use for art history either until I read a few of his books (and later watched some of the documentaries he narrates or hosts). He's become one of my favorite historians.
Is there one book you could recommend as a starting point? (The Power of Art seems like the obvious one, except that it's the companion piece to a TV miniseries, which makes me wonder if it's less good than his standalone books.)
My favorite books of his are Citizens (about the French Revolution) and The Embarrassment of Riches (about the culture of the Dutch Golden Age). These are not just about art, but he uses art a lot to make his points. The Embarrassment of Riches is much heavier on art than Citizens is.
I enjoyed pretty much all the documentary series I've seen of him as well so I wouldn't really take that as too much of a mark against a book. Those tend to be more general, but I wouldn't say they are bad quality. Many of them are available on PBS which you can watch with PBS Passport or as an Amazon Prime channel for like $5 a month. Others are on the BBC.
He can tend towards the grandiloquent, but I feel like he earns it. His prose is excellent but very dense.
I went and looked for other art by Paul Klee and it was equally bad as Angelus Novus.
This causes me to lean away from "Paul Klee is deliberately emulating a low-skill art style as a way to generate a specific reaction" and towards "Paul Klee just does not have much technical skill as an artist."
In some sense this should be irrelevant, of course. We should be able to say that a painting is bad based purely on the painting itself, without looking at context. But the praise made me wonder if there was something about the art that I wasn't getting -- if maybe Paul Klee was a technical genius who had *carefully arranged* those sparse lines. After doing the research, I think the answer is no.
Think of Art as a flow of Shannonian information, bits, that a receptor with limited processing power has to parse. Abstract concepts such as "Impressionism" or "pacing" work as filters which help you group bits of information into "chunks" which are easier to parse. The endgame is not to reduce all information to just one easy-to-parse concept, because that just gets boring. Oh, it's just Impressionism, whatever. But it's also not to trascend the need for abstract concepts. Because if the information is too much for you then you may get overloaded or anxious. No good. You want to get to that sweetspot, that Mihály-Csíkszentmihályi-flow-state of aesthethic contemplation where it just clicks. Where it's still challenging, but you feel like you have the tools to make sense of it.
Notably, different filters break down information in different ways. Some abstract paintings require specific filters to be appreciated. Breaking them down with the wrong filter just produces a boring picture. Oh, my five year old could've paint that. Whatever. Also, the space you phisically occupy and your psycho-sensory state and profile also act like filters. If you're high or are autistic you just see a different work of art. The music of a string quartet gets lost in an open field. You need a quiet, enclosed space to really appreciate it. Pop music with simple melodies and simple lyrics needs a show of lights and dancing and costumes and set pieces (more information) to not bore it's audience.
Great art which persists over the centuries sort of automatically adjusts to where you are. If you know nothing, then just the immediate big picture is pleasant and its complexities are safely hidden away. But as you learn more, it grows with you. You, again, literally see a different work of art that someone who knows nothing. You don't grow past Shakespeare, as you would with, say, Harry Potter. Harry Potter gets destroyed by all sorts of conceptual filters. Shakespeare gives you interesting returns basically no matter which filters you apply to it. Even filters which didn't exist when the work was created. Feminism, psychoanalysis, bear biology.
A skillfully done painting in the style of Van Gogh, if known to be done by a modern artist (or AI), will be worth very little in the market. If, on the other hand, it is a newly discovered painting by Van Gogh, it will be worth millions. Why? Because if a connection to Van Gogh can be established it gives the painting magical properties, like a hat that belonged to Lincoln, or a Honus Wagner baseball bat, or a ring worn by Marilyn Monroe, or a flag that was taken to the moon. People believe in magic and will pay a lot for it.
What counts as "art" to normal people is probably different than what counts as art to "experts" at critiquing art. Normal people can use "made me feel something" as a heuristic but just like a surgeon is numb to gore, experts "feel things" that normal people would see as some kind of weird fetish.
I've been working in marketing and advertising for a long time, for 17 years now, and this touches on something: when is value created?
If you look at brand advertising, like jeans or jewelry or whatever, the advertising, in some sense, actually creates the value. People are willing to pay more because they associate that clothing with high status or certain identity and that identity comes from the advertising, which is essentially custom-made art to promote a product.
One could say that all art is a waste of utility and I'd be inclined to agree with that. It's why I made my career in business-to-business advertising instead of consumer advertising. but it's also a fact that that story or connection is something that people really want and it can make them happy.
For me, taste = Paying Attention/Pattern Language. My Sensory Delight is one or two orders of magnitude greater in realms where I have some grasp of PA/PL, and my appreciation of Novelty is basically nil except where I can integrate that novelty into a broader understanding of PA/PL.
Scott's posts on this topic endlessly frustrate me because he, not grasping the PA/PL of architecture/art sufficiently to have skin in the game, nevertheless insists on throwing uninformed tomatoes at the artists and architects--even though he understands other aesthetic fields, e.g. prose, well enough to KNOW that there's much more going on from inside perspective than a glib outsider would suspect.
(I say this as someone who is probably 70% sympathetic to his views on modern architecture and 20% sympathetic to his views on modern art.)
I think there’s a sense in which good art is still made, we just don’t really call it art first.
Most video games, people taking photos for photo shoots, and some movies about aesthetics are trying to make good art that is pleasing to look at in the mundane sense that you would expect.
I think your architect example is worse for us as consumers because we can’t choose to not consume, as in look at, the buildings around us. Maybe the thing is that the more voluntary people’s consumption of your art and the more that you’re judged on making other people feel good, the more your art is driven towards looking good.
In your modern art examples, you end up hating it and thinking it looks bad because you can’t voluntarily consume your own version of museum art. You’re not the person the modern art is being sold to. I hate it too, but I mostly just think it’s stupid.
Could you imagine an entire community disappearing up its own ass about more and more refined versions of its peculiar interest until it’s totally incomprehensible to outsiders? Strange to believe, but I bet that’s how most people feel about rats solving AI with Bayes or whatever is most upvoted on lesswrong
If I had a positive reaction to what turned out to be mass produced fake art, I'd conclude "producing fake art requires copying real artists, and it was actually the creativity of those real artists, filtered through the fake, that I had a reaction to".
There's also the possibility that in making the fake art, someone made a random and noncreative decision that happened to also be a good creative decision by pure chance (especially if it makes the work seem fresh compared to other works) and this is on top of the creativity copied from other artists.
No, for the same reason that I wouldn't consider someone who takes a photograph of the Mona Lisa to be one of my favorite artists. The copycat brought the art to me, but did not contribute to its artistic content other than possibly by chance.
There are multiple ways to take it from here, and multiple things you might be interested in related to these ideas.
1: According to Heidegger, Being (with a big B, it refers to human "being") is also inherently Being-towards-death. He views Being as each human not just existing in the now, but always existing within a social structure and always projecting themselves into an abstract future "possibility-space". You're not just "Being" now, you're also at all times partially existing in the futures you see for yourself.
Part of always projecting yourself into the future like this is the understanding that all of your projected futures lead to the same point, death. This means that Being is also always being-towards-death. This is what art (and much more) derives a lot of meaning from.
I probably did butcher Heidegger, considering he's notoriously difficult to comprehend, but a lot of his ideas are very interesting and worth thinking about.
2: Semiotics and how symbols relate to meaning. Unfortunately I don't have time to write how this relates to the post right now, but hopefully I'll remember later.
If we imagine the commentary from Benjamin as being a description of the art he envisioned and Angelus Novus merely an implementation, we should be able to create a piece of art that evokes the same reaction in more than just one person. We could perhaps judge the art’s success based on how many people felt what Benjamin felt on seeing it.
Surely, then, we could give Walter’s description to the median machinery of man, and have it crank out the most plausible representation of the masses’ expectations; hopefully an isomorphism for the majority of people.
But it doesn’t work. You can feed the Angelus Novus description into AI all day and only get back trite stupid images that evoke nothing. At least with the real Angelus Novus image I felt a sense of weirdness and somewhat unsettled.
So the closest visual rendition of the prose remains the original, as we know it can engender Benjamin’s sentiment in at least Benjamin.
This piece treat sensory awe as a property of the object alone — strip provenance and what's left is the real thing. But the Chesterton-grade "I couldn't write this in ten million years" awe depends on registering that a being like you did something you couldn't. A sunset is beautiful; it isn't artistically awe-inspiring in that sense. AI is the test, and the images that floored people in 2023 look generic now in a way that has nothing to do with technical improvement. The depth was novelty all along. Your framework predicts the awe outlasts the novelty. It hasn't.
The piece also reads like a rhetorical move. The occasion is the AI Art Turing Test, the conclusion you keep walking up to without stating is "so AI art is fine," and keeping the argument abstract lets the framework persuade without you defending the application.
I enjoy spending a day in a museum, so I'm going to try to describe what the plaques (the "backstories") do for me, someone who likes visual art but never studied art history and in fact leaves museums with a bunch of open tabs about art history and techniques.
What I like about the museum experience is the flow state I can access, looking carefully at each object. I try to look at objects before I look at their plaques, so that each object stands totally alone and I evaluate it based on my naive reaction.
Part of the exercise is also to suppress the judgment function and force myself to see what is there. In doing so, I can derive at least some delight from looking at every item when I notice myself noticing something; if I stay in the judgment mode, I can judge all items as "insufficiently delightful" just from being in a bad mood. In cooking, where I have more expertise, I'm *more* capable of suppressing my judgment and describing what a food objectively "is". Neither as a taster nor a viewer am I capable of doing an objective chemical analysis on the spot. I can say that a cookie is slightly burnt on the outside and dense inside, a pattern that often appears when something was baked at a higher temperature and for less time than the recipe likely called for; that it seems to have been made with white sugar, flour, egg, and a combination of butter and shortening. I can say all this before I get to whether I liked the cookie or not.
Notice that even in that value-neutral analysis, I called on my knowledge of how baking works and what's likely to happen to a cookie. If someone told me that the cookie had been constructed in a 3D printer, atom by atom, I would in some sense be wrong (the fat composition wouldn't be "butter and shortening", it would be a combination of triglycerides not derived from milk or plants). I would also be kind of disappointed: if you can print any food, why print this?
Plaques do something similar for me: good museum writing gives me a sense of what techniques were common and available to artists at the time, which lets me notice more things through giving me more buckets in which to put observations. I can notice that the pattern of glazing on pottery looks random, and a plaque can lead me to think "oh, it is random because it's poured" or "it's painted on, so perhaps it isn't random. Oh, I see brushstrokes." An audioguide that describes all the characters in a painting lets me home in and notice more things about them than if they had been anonymous, the same way that we notice more about our friends than about strangers. Being able to notice more detail makes me, at least, capable of having a stronger reaction to the art.
Something that undermines your arguments and that you've consistently failed to consider (to my recollection) in these posts about art and taste you've done is that, when it comes to the artistic mediums of which you're critical, you seem ignorant about them, and your taste is not a good referent.
I remember you've sort of acknowledged this after one of the architecture posts, where you noted that a number of commenters disagreed with you about some modernist buildings being ugly, and that is a recurring issue in your posts on the subject, you, personally, dislike the examples you give of bad art, and base a large part of your reasoning on these examples being bad art, but if you're in fact wrong, and they are in fact good art, a large part of your argument falls apart.
Here you treat the example of Angelus Novum as being obviously, barefacedly bad, but if you were wrong about it being bad, your conclusion that people saying it's good just because of cultural context, because of "the conversation", might be wrong too, and your notion that we're calling "philosophical point scoring" by the same name as "creating beautiful things" might be wrong too, if it's the case that the examples you think are bad, are actually good, in the "beautiful things" sense. You have an extremely narrow taste on other mediums, and this blinds you to what might be good about them, you might be a victim of your own lack of literacy in the mediums which you criticize. I'm not personally that literate in visual arts either, but I think I have a broader taste than you do, and can notice some artistic elements that are good about Angelus Novum, like it's neat that it puts emphasis on more bare geometric shapes, so there's a contrast between the bareness of the shapes and how they're put together to make a recognizable figure, and it's neat how it's coloured with really subtle shading differences that help define the body parts, and it's framed with a dark uneven colour, kind of surrounding it in a dark mist, and it's neat how its body is really disproportionate, like really big eyes and head, which together with the geometric shape construction makes it kind of monstrous... I don't know, as I said I don't really have the technical language to say much about it, but I can see there's neat things about it regardless. Similarly with your disdain for brutalist architecture, you summarize it as "concrete cube", but it's more about giving more emphasis to geometric shapes and making a construction out of geometric shapes, which I also think is really cool, I'd love to live somewhere with a lot of brutalist buildings around, because they're not just "concrete cube", they have a lot of varieties of shapes that you don't get with older architecture. Maybe you should try to grapple with the ways in which these art pieces you don't like might be good in ways you don't currently understand?
You're knowledgeable and probably have good taste in the medium of writing, then, in that medium, do you notice that other people think things are bad, where you, armed with your knowledge, think they're good? Like you sing praises to G. K. Chesterton's writing, but now imagine hypothetical blogger Alett Scoxander comes along with a blog post about how modern writing is bad, but they have a very narrow taste in writing, and they have this example where they saw a beautiful painting, let's say in a kind of Caravaggio chiaroscuro style, which was inspired by a passage by Chesterton, and they saw the painting first, and read the passage after, and think there's a huge contrast between how beautiful the painting is, against how horrid the writing that inspired it is, saying that it pales before the likes of Shakespeare and how modern writing is bland and simplistic, and without understanding Chesterton's writing they draw conclusions about how the people that praise it must be for some cultural reason (I checked while writing this, and found out that funnily, Chesterton and Klee were contemporaries... they lived almost the same actually, just shifted like 4 years, so a pretty appropriate comparison). With your writing experience you'd probably consider it bollocks, but then how would you communicate this failure to Alett Scoxander, for whom their conclusions make perfect sense? I guess a thing to keep in mind, since we're all fans of rationalism and Bayesianism here, is how certain can you be about a judgement of some art form, given how much you know about it. Like you know a whole lot about writing, you've spent your whole life writing and studying writing, so you can be pretty certain about your judgements, and can give a whole lot of arguments to justify some writing judgement. Given that point of comparison, how certain can you be about your judgements regarding visual arts and architecture? how much do you estimate you'd have to study to reach a high enough certainty that what you say about them is right? and certainly, you should weight your judgements about those forms according to your uncertainty.
Artists study and work a whole lot to deepen their understanding of their art, and be able to wield it effectively, and while the analogy with medicine is not entirely adequate because art is a lot broader and softer, there's still a lot of knowledge of technique and function in art that makes judging it a more precise affair, so artistic knowledge is somewhere in the middle between not knowing anything and just making guesses, and the precise, strict knowledge of a hard science. How far do you have to go in that knowledge scale to trust your judgements? How close to the hard science end of the scale do you think you are when it comes to writing knowledge and judgements? Even if artistic knowledge doesn't hit the hard science end of the scale, it's a lot closer to it than what you get from just absorbing pieces of art casually and doing a little bit of thinking about it, it's a hard discipline, so how much would you have to study to get a decent certainty about artistic judgements?
Tangentially, I'm actually curious about what you think about modern writing, here you mentioned the popular end of it, but what about the more avant garde part of it, that's maybe more comparable to the modern pieces of art you're critical of? like I've seen some writers be critical of writing like James Joyce's style, saying it's comparable to this kind of modern trend of getting more abstract and conceptual to the detriment of artistic beauty. Are you critical of this kind of modern writing? If you don't like Joyce, with your knowledge of writing I'd be really curious seeing you criticise that kind of modern art, seeing what'd be your technical arguments for disliking it. Then again, maybe you think that kind of modern art is good?
Agreed that there is good and bad art, and therefore there are probably better and worse cave paintings. But the most technically proficient and “best” cave painting made today wouldn’t come close to my awe at the shittiest cave painting from prehistory, and I would viscerally distrust anyone telling me I shouldn’t care about that.
I get not liking novelty for the sake of novelty, but what’s missing from this piece is a sense of awe at human history. Great art can inaugurate or represent a new age, like cave paintings or the early Soviet avant garde work of Kandinsky.
If you find our modern age of formaldehyde sharks and dolphin pancreas/marmoset novelty/tax evasion art to be wanting…might I suggest that you find our age of late capitalist slop to be wanting? There may be parallels here to the trajectory of Soviet avant garde abstract art of the 1920s descending into crappy Soviet socialist realism. A stagnant society will produce artistic stagnation masquerading as novelty.
I started going to sushi restaurants recently. One of my favorite items was the red snapper sashimi. Then a few weeks ago I learned that “red snapper” in an American sushi restaurant actually means “tilapia”.
I didn’t immediately stop ordering it, but now it just doesn’t feel the same.
I had to look it up. Interestingly Oreochromis spp. should be advertised as AFFRTAT, a fish formerly referred to as tilapia. There seems to have been a taxonomic revision in 2013.
I agree with Scott that art that exists to question "what is art" isn't that interesting. However, I feel that he overestimates the amount of modern art that does this.
Instead, I would posit that 3) Pattern Language and 7) Political And Ideological Point-Making are, and have been for a very long time, the primary driving forces behind art, both modern and pre-modern.
If you look at art critics from the period, most of their main criticisms were about the subject matter and how it was depicted (3 and 7) -- due to the academy systems, the top artists all had pristine technique. There was a shared language of art, mostly based on Biblical and mythological scenes. For each artist, political and personal interests are mostly expressed through this shared language of myth. (At art museums, I recommend spending the most time on religious paintings when looking at art from this period -- notice which characters are highlighted or de-emphasized, how they interact, how they're emotionally reacting to what's happening in the scene and how it might compare to the classic readings of Bible stories)
In the modern period, the arts became more and more de-institutionalized and culturally the focus was shifted more towards the individual. Public interest in myth and religion waned. The modern artist doesn't use a shared language -- they develop a personal language and system. This language may be intertextual (4), but renowned artists are usually primarily concerned with developing their own coherent language.
Because modern artists try to build a personal language, if you take any of their pieces and A/B test them like Scott suggests, they're likely to fall flat. This is expected, because you haven't learned how to read the work yet. If you look across the artist's ouvre, things will usually make a lot more sense, even if you don't like it.
It looks like nothing. It looks like shit. But, it makes a lot more sense if you see his other works, and realize that one of his primary concerns is with the relationship between visual arts, writing, myth, and the process of symbolization. We see the caligraphy-like looping markings, and the splashes of color evoke a sense of movement and violence. In the corner, there's a window, which is a motif across his work. Out of the cloud of scribbles, you see heart shapes.
Do I *like* it? No, I actually don't, I'm not a fan of his. But I understand and appreciate what he's doing here with his personal language, and my girlfriend, who has spent much more time with his works, loves him. My point here is that Cy Twombley is *not* making art about art. He's making art about violence, gendered violence, about storytelling and myth -- just with an idiosyncratic personal language.
You can say that this idea of "personal artistic language" sucks and we should stop doing it. That would be fine. But I don't think that a conformity-driven spiral of criticism is what you don't like about modern art, and I don't think that there's been any fundamental break (other than some exceptions like Dada) in how artists and critics make and value art.
(Anecdotally, I've heard multiple people say that they didn't like particular artists or modern art in general until seeing a particularly well curated exhibit which "teaches" you how to "read" an artist)
For me, this is the real pleasure of modern art: looking across an artist's work, deciphering their project, and seeing where it ends up.
I've thought before that we should take things like Duchamp's urinal and classify it not as art but as "commentary." Like "wow, what a great piece of commentary!" The main distinction being that art is beautiful and commentary is not (and commentary is also is transgressive to the form of art). But this may mean Hieronymus Bosch's works would be considered "commentary." And so would some Dali and Picasso, and probably a lot of works that intuitively feel like good and proper art. So this distinction is still in the works.
I think it clarifies things to regard Art as a cluster of fandoms that, partially for contingent historical reasons, have attained and preserved a kind of luxury branding. Fandoms emerge when something turns out to have a strong, persistent appeal to a quorum of people with obsessive/compulsive tendencies (in the ordinary, not necessarily clinical, sense). There may certainly be crossover appeal to other types of people, but those people don't sustain the fandom. Typical fandom behaviors include stuff like memorizing names of important figures, memorizing a bunch of history, wanting to talk a lot about the thing every single day even when not much new has happened, ranking different aspects of the thing, getting mad at "fake fans", creating amateur variations on the thing and tributes to it, etc. By the nature of obsession/compulsion, people in their grips can't readily explain why they're so enthralled, because the initial enthrallment happened outside of their conscious processing. They're even worse at convincing neutral or hostile third parties why they should be interested. They'll confabulate answers, but My 9-year-old daughter has gotten really into K-pop recently, and I happily listen to songs with her, but, though I'm absolutely not a musical sophisticate, I can't help but feel that I don't "get" it. My father recently confessed to me that he was always baffled by Star Wars, which at one point I loved. I tried to make my kids watch it, but they had basically no interest. So it goes.
A lot of the recurring High Art discourse attractors are just variations on generic fandom discourse. E.g. "art for art's sake" that just seems to exist to participate in some dialectic that, from the outside, seems ungrounded in anything broadly human…that's just "fan service", "easter eggs", etc. Many fans get a little thrill out of this sort of thing even as others roll their eyes. Obsessive fans get mad at others "pretending" to like a show or creator when they just like the popular stuff and don't even know about the obscure stuff…well, that's just the same as art lovers having the urge to roll their eyes at The Starry Night or the Mona Lisa.
A big difference, of course, is that no one feels beset upon by the judgment of, say, professional-wrestling fans or hunting enthusiasts, even though you could certainly spin up a little parable about how appreciating the self-conscious spectacle of violence or the confrontation of man and the wild tap into deep elements of the human experience, blah blah. But I think we should just be totally reductive and simple-minded here: we empirically observe that high-minded American adults will scold the young for being dismissive or philistine toward Jackson Pollock etc. and also scold the young for being obsessed with Pokémon. There is no superego voice in our heads saying, "What's wrong with you? Why don't you appreciate Pokémon?!" so, if we are the kinds of people who are troubled by superego voices, we won't waste a second wondering why we don't care about Pokémon, but the fact that we may not "get" the latest sophisticated Art will feel like a rock in our shoes…
A helpful view. I especially like the thing about professional wrestling. Seriously competetive sports often also have aspects of art, recognizable by conaisseurs. High competence and high effort with a bit of creativity and sometimes beauty.
A framing about taste I like- viewing art is about empathy with the artist. When I view at a great work, my awe comes from feeling the amount of work in piece, and further, the amount of work that was put into becoming the kind of person who could produce such a piece. This effect is far greater if you are a craftsperson of the same genre; when I look at the Mona Lisa I can guess it might have taken a while, but a trained painter has a sense of the monumental effort. G. K. Chesterton is far more exciting to Scott then to me, because Scott has a sense of the kind of mind state that is required to write poetry like that. This also explains why novelty becomes exciting. The mind state required to come up with a radically new idea is one worthy of awe and is something many people aspire to. Also explains why people find AI art uncompelling, as it does not represent any real work on behalf of artist. Seeing people stretch their capacity as a human illuminates to us that we are also capable of such feats, that the door they went through is an option to us as well, which is a wonderful feeling whether we take it or not.
While I appreciate bringing thoughtful attention to visual art, this piece is doing what it criticizes, focusing on The Conversation, critics, philosophy, Klee, and Duchamp. Is it because they have recognizable names, which makes them easy to talk about?
Rather than retreating from ambiance into treating aesthetic experiences as something that might benefit from blinded studies, we should go the opposite direction, as most of our ancestors have done, and place the art within liturgical contexts. The Sistine Chapel is beautiful even now, even pictures of it are beautiful, but surely it was even more beautiful when people were praying and singing, than as a museum. The mosaics in the Hagia Sophia are still beautiful, in a tragic kind of way, but it must have been more beautiful with the Emperor and court attending, the bishops, with chanting, incense, and prayers.
Khinkali are delicious. They taste good, have good texture, and when they start getting cold, they can be fried up and reserved. But they are just OK in isolation. Within a supra, surrounded by toasts, they become magnificent. The women who made them are proud of their work! They go on about their house wine and thank those who helped them with the cooking. This is important! It is not mere decoration!
Flia is... I don't necessarily care for it. But it's an activity as much as it is a food, and the activity is fun. It's about having your mom and sister and aunts about, talking and "making flia." You might think that flia could be replaced with not making anything, or with some other better tasting food, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Empericially, it's an important part of the event.
Angelus Novusis interesting. The description above is unhinged, but other descriptions are about the printmaking process, and I would absolutely be excited to attend a printmaking workshop with Klee of his students.
The thing that's most missing on contemporary art is participation. Even immersive art spaces like Meow Wolf are beloved, because the viewer is involved. It's more true of poetry than novels, which is related to the relative popularity of novels over poetry this century. I don't like reading poems alone, but do enjoy book clubs where we read poems aloud, and live poetry readings.
I follow Otto Rank's psychological understanding about our primary dilemma (we can imagine having it all but we know we will die). His basic thesis is that development in the meaning of art forms parallels development in soul belief. The artist expresses individual personality in dead materials (bones, clay, ink) for the collective soul belief. Periods follow prehistoric mysticism, Greek idealism, Christian cathedrals and our modern individual psychology. Strong ideologies produce what we call "genius"; Homer, Michelangelo, Picasso. Much more can be said about this relation of an individual to the society from his Art and Artist, Creative Urge and Personality Development which is itself a work of art (also contains one of the earliest references to "impressionism" as it was published in 1932 Paris hanging-out with Anaïs Nin - who wrote a Preface - and Henry Miller).
Camerom Harwick argues that it's about (in)exploitability: a "tasteful" thing must be difficult to make more of, or someone will make lots more of it and you will keep consuming it. In this view, the food critics work because it's easy to make hyperpalatable food (just mix bear fat and salt) but not easy to make ambience and reputation; the mass-manufactured 1995 sculpture actually is in some sense worse; the highest art has to keep becoming more ridiculous as people work out how to make nice paintings and such.
Any artifact which is easy to make more of, will be spammed to hell. As a result, if something is easily duplicated, you won't be able to look at the same instance of it as the rest of humanity and without that connection to culture it's mostly valueless
Connection to the rest of culture, by everyone looking at the same thing, is fundamentally unduplicatable, which is why it's a powerful element of tastefulness
A Warhol canvas being shot with a gun only increases it's value; Michelango's Pieta being smashed is only a tragedy. There is something illuminating in the difference.
Lerner notes towards the end that when art is damaged in a way that the insurer feels is beyond and/or not worth repair, the insurer pays the artist - and then puts the damaged piece in warehouse somewhere, after which it is 'legally' of zero value. He has a chance to view some of these written off pieces, many of which are not visibly damaged. As they are now worthless he's allowed to handle them - they cannot legally be returned to society, no matter how famous the artist or the piece. This says more to me about modern art than pages of critical theory.
My favorite bit - referring to a broken Koons balloon dog : "I admit I felt a frisson of transgression getting to handle the fractured sculpture, an icon I have wanted, in my more childish moments, to smash."
"But some people say they come away from art transformed, in a way which is neither just sensory delight nor just political ideology."
I always assumed this was just hyperbole. Are there any prominent examples of people being appreciably changed by art? Like where the person's behavior actually noticeably changed? IE, reconciled with some estranged family member, stopped eating meat, switched cigarette brands, etc?
I think this essay has an unacknowledged normative premise, and the eight categories you list might not be separable in the way you want. The piece assumes the sensory-delight game has priority over the dialectical-coordination game, and that players of the latter who claim to be playing the former are doing something illegitimate. But if aesthetic pleasure is an evolved heuristic for coordination utility, and coordination is what cultural selection filters for, then the games aren’t really separable, they’re just nested layers of the same process. The chef referencing Alberti 1974 is playing the game correctly, just on a different wavelength than you might prefer.
To be clear, I don't think these are really rival accounts, since the the descriptive claim and the normative one don't dissolve each other. It's possible to believe that the conflation is structural and still prefer to live in a world with more pure-sensory critics in it.
I kepr waiting for you to mention the poems of Ossian, who were the work of Scott Macpherson, a Scottish man who wanted to write epic poetry in the 1760s and so pretended to have discovered an ancient oral tradition passing down the poems of Gaelic Homer. When he was unmasked as a fraud, the whole critical apparatus that had assessed him had to reassess itself.
On the care for provenance, this seems like the same kind of error as thinking food critics should eat blindfolded.
I get thinking the critic should not know the restaurant, or not have a conversation with the chef. But presentation is part of the food. Like, if you could eat gray mush that tastes (and textures) exactly like a good steak, or a good steak itself, I have a hard time thinking anyone would choose the gray mush, and I even have a hard time thinking anyone would not care either way.
If you see a beautiful sculpture, and you learn that it was made by someone putting "beautiful sculpture" into some AI and having it 3d printed, that *should* hit you differently than if you learned it was made by a one armed blind person, who had never seen the human form but nonetheless captured every detail of it.
If you said "I'll have the 3d printed one because I mostly care about how it looks, and that one's cheaper" I'd understand. But if you said "I see no difference in these two, they give me the same sense of awe." I'd be confused. When you talk about a good poem giving you the sense of a god proving his superiority to mortals, isn't the second one closer to that than the first? Isn't a god saying "I can create visual beauty without ever having experienced it myself, with one hand tied behind my back" proving his superiority better than a god saying "I can type 'beautiful sculpture' into a diffusion model"?
And I think the "first Impressionist painting" has a whiff of this. It says "I can do Impressionism without having experienced it first." The modern one doesn't.
You made me look up blind sculptors. Turns out, there is in fact a famous one-armed blind sculptor, Michael Naranjo: https://www.dreamtouchbelieve.com/
He went blind at 23 in Vietnam, so it's not like he has never seen anything, but his artistic career and most of his adult life came after.
Many of the articles I found online about blind sculptors are specifically about religious art:
You may find Dr. Ramachandran's treatment of art in his book The Tell-Tale Brain interesting. I think it's the most convincing takes on the universal bedrock of aesthetic taste - that is, the neurocognitive primitives that seem to underlie our experience of art. These are things like grouping, peak-shift, contrast, isolation, perceptual problem solving, etc... Might be worth a read to develop your thinking on this further...
Now, I think this is a set of universal constraints on aesthetics... but of course doesn't really say anything about the nature of art or beauty. That is, art may choose to adhere to these, or to purposefully violate them, etc... but I do think it's "new ground" to tread, that is - a more sophisticated understanding of the mechanisms of perception and taste.
I imagine an enterprising artist might be able to leverage this into novelty... and indeed many already are.
But I guess on the broader point of the *project* of art, and its restless, shifting nature... something I've been thinking about a lot lately, and been meaning to write about is that human nature is incoherent. So ultimately I feel like there's not a *there* there... our humanity ties us to the here and now, to acting from local information. We have some limited, slow machinery of logic and reason to perceive the grander shape of things, but that shape is absurd, and lacking any sort of satisfying structure that satisfies our innate desire to seek patterns and problem solve. So art is this - a local and ultimately incoherent phenomenon.
I think there's a baseline flaw in doing art criticism as Ranking.
Paradoxically, this is not to say that every artifact or depiction touted as a work of art is of equal value. That would be like insisting on a position that there's no art at all.
The problem is that it's just too difficult to conceptualize an effective rubric as a template to reliably evaluate artistic quality. The best artistic works are a singular result. So singular that it’s incomparable (which is not to be confused with “#1 The Best Evar”, etc.) Artists tend to gain recognition and approval for expressing a concept that's personally unique, that adds their signature stamp as a contribution to the record of artistic creation. But there's also a lot of artistic work that's idiosyncratic and not very good. There's also a lot of art that's recognizable as homage or imitation that's quite good, even if it isn't the last word in creativity (so to speak.) Artistic masterpieces aren't even necessarily individual visions. And artistry takes so many forms.
So, it's complicated. There's no accounting for taste.
The fact that there can never really be a certain reliable linear order ranking does not mean that it isn’t fun to try, however. It has a way of making for a really fun conversation, and even an instructive one. Just not a definite one, a conclusive one.
I’d venture that the conversations can even serve a valid purpose, if they’re carried on both within and without the realm of critical professionalism, as group exercises over time. I think that the worth of artistic creations is associated with an enduring quality. That they’re built to last, on their own merits. Not dependent on the support of some outside official credentialing orthodoxy. A signature set of creative and esthetic aspects that isn’t to be confused with its short-run auction price.
I have to admit, the Substacker I've linked is one phenomenally talented portrait artist. If it's real.
I'm actually still hold some skepticism that it's real, even though one of the posts is a is a sped-up videoclip of him working on one of his drawings. Simply in terms of the ability to reproduce the seen- the scene beheld by his visual sense- so flawlessly with his hand. The superb level of fine motor coordination of it. The eye-hand coordination. The compositional detail.
Let me stir the pot with this recent video on Frank Lloyd Wright: Were his buildings in good taste. As the presenter makes clear, architecture is art with a function for serve.
I love modern art and architecture, and I assure you that I'm not just making some exotic snobbish intellectual judgement. I feel preconscious sensory delight from modern art.
I've never seen Michelangelo's David in person and I think it's unfair to judge from photos, but I've seen several stylistically similar sculptures in museums, and my reaction has always been, "Yeah, looks like a naked person. I've seen those before. Neat, I guess." I can intellectually appreciate that the sculpture took profound skill, and is embedded in a rich historical context. But if I want to like the statue, I have to cultivate my appreciation by telling myself how impressive and sophisticated it is. Ditto for cathedrals, bar maybe the Sagrada Familia. I do like the Ode to Joy, though not as much as a lot of experimental modern music that would probably horrify you.
I feel preconscious sensory delight when I walk through a gorgeous cluster of skyscrapers, particularly when their mirror facades dissolve into the sky, or when they light up in the night with dancing LEDs. I still remember this sculpture I encountered while passing through Seattle:
I didn't have to choose to like it. I was simply struck by awe. I felt like I had been transported to an alien planet, or shrunk into the world of microfauna, suddenly humbled by a beautiful thing I had yet to understand. I love how it contains enough structure to invite the imagination, but remains abstract enough to not spoil the effect by imposing too specific of a vision. I also love this sculpture in San Francisco:
When I first saw it, I grinned like an idiot. How eerie, charming, and plain cool. Of the many traditional sculptures I've studiously taught myself to appreciate in museums, not a single one has left enough of an impression that I can remember to bring it up now.
I enjoy a broader array of "modern art" than what I've brought up here, it's not just organic sculptures. Weirdest thing I can claim is that I love how highways look from above, these vast concrete arteries pulsing with life, and nobody ever even designed those for aesthetics. Point is, Scott, I think modern art appreciators mostly do actually like art, they're not just being pretentious.
I have an interesting experience reading Scott's essays about taste: When I read his abstract discussions about stuff like context, novelty, history of the medium, etc, my response is something like "No Scott, you're wrong, those things are important and you shouldn't dismiss them in favor of pure aesthetic impression!" But then I get to some of the specific examples that Scott gives near the end of the essay and I agree with him that they seem kind of crappy. I was just as disappointed by "Angelus Novus" as he was. I also think modern architecture looks pretty bad.
I think I might have figured out what was going on when I thought of examples of "tasteful" art that I personally enjoy and appreciate. Most art like that I enjoy works on two levels, it does all the stuff that "tasteful," "fine art" does, but it also functions well as "regular" art. For example "Final Crisis" by Grant Morrison is a meditation on the nature of stories that draws influence from multiple historical sources and uses many creative types of symbolism. However, it's also a story where Darkseid tries to conquer Earth and the Justice League beats him up. "Evangelion" is a piece of postmodern experimental film full of deep symbolism about depression and loneliness. However, it's also a cartoon about teenagers piloting giant robots to kill big monsters that are trying to destroy Tokyo.
I think the types of art that seem to be the primary target of Scott's ire are those where most of the "normal aesthetic" stuff is completely stripped away and all that is left is the "tasteful" stuff. To use Scott's "steakhouse" example, they are the equivalent of a steakhouse with the most beautiful building ever, coolest ambience ever, and most interesting chef ever, that serves steak that literally tastes like dog shit. I share Scott's dislike for that type of art, even if I think his criticisms of taste go too far.
"Might this transgressive thing be art?" quoth the Raven
But what's transgressive about a dolphin placenta on a baby? We've seen the banana taped to the wall, the unmade bed, the urinal, the shark in formaldehyde. The random stuff art genre is not transgressive, its passé.
But there is an art style that is truly transgressive. Its got striking visuals that can impress a layman but is sure to drive an art critic to outrage. It is AI Art!
So if you, art critic don't want to become one of those Philistines who criticised the Impressionists or Van Gough before everyone realised their transgression was transcendent. I present, for your glowing approval, my work: Big Titted Catgirl in JPEG!
But I am serious that if transgression is art, AI art is the new heresy that will likely be tomorrow's standard.
Scott, your only point seems to be - the people who espouse taste never provide coherent objective measure to justify their claims.
You seem to concede what's good is subjective, you seem to concede what's good is contextual, you seem to concede that exposure and repetition lessens the impact, and every time your comeback is - okay, but look at the critics and tastemakers, they're clearly just full of shit.
Well, the response to that is that tastemakers are in fact full of shit, gatekeeping and playing status games and all. Everybody knows that (and just ignores them for the most part). We still think taste is a meaningful thing to speak about. Existence of something does not depend on whether there's a validated and agreed upon way to measure it. It's a very basic fallacy to claim otherwise.
There are some modern artists who embrace beauty and novelty together. I went to an amazing exhibition several years ago at the Tate Modern of works by the Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. You can see some of his art here: https://olafureliasson.net/artworks/
but it really can't be conveyed through a screen, because most of the one exhibit I saw was about experiencing the play of light through mist, various kinds of kaleidoscopy in space, and other things like that. It's a rare set of artworks that is both easy for a naive visitor to appreciate on a surface level and gets critical acclaim.
>It's a rare set of artworks that is both easy for a naive visitor to appreciate on a surface level and gets critical acclaim.
Art that a naive visitor can't appreciate is pretentious twaddle. If you need a degree in *schniff schniff* AHHHHT to appreciate it properly, any artistic component has been replaced with a status game.
That's one perspective, but it seems to just immediately discard almost all art produced by anyone in any culture, given how much cultural baggage there is in almost all of it. The average person won't get Norman Rockwell or Beethoven unless they've grown up in the United States or listening to tonal music.
I think that the best art works on multiple levels. A layman can view it and appreciate it for its beauty, or its entertainment value, or just for some vague ineffable feeling it generates. Someone more versed in this kind of art can do that as well, but he can also appreciate the historical and cultural context, seeing the additional message in the artwork. And someone familiar with how this kind of art is made can appreciate the skill and creativity that went into the process: particularly fine brushwork, a clever bit of VFX compositing, audio distortion used as melody, etc.
I think the problem with (most) modern art is that it focuses solely on those additional layers, and ignores its core mission: to make something people can appreciate for what it is, not for its history or provenance or technical skill.
I think that's often right. Though I don't think that the pure surface layer that is accessible to someone with no cultural context is any more important than any of the more intellectualized layers, given how few potential audiences really come in without any cultural context. Any particular work of art is unlikely to emphasize all these layers equally. I do think it's a problem that high modernism particularly denigrated a few layers and ended up aiming at layers that often don't travel well at all. But the populist-slopulist take that some others have in this thread (and Scott flirts with), that these few layers are *all* that matters, is at least as problematic.
In the past artists dealt with the expressive forms available to them, and this was the extent of the "narrative". When they pushed the limits, it may or may not have been appreciated at the time, Bach had to be rediscovered, for example, and would not have considered his work "art" in the modern sense. So defining art has largely been about retroactive appreciation, we have needed to understand that something actually happened and what it was. But now the art world and larger culture is dominated by a huge 'narrative industrial complex' that is trying define or manifest the flame before it is lit, and with that, the nature of the project has changed.
Reflecting and relating to context has become an end in itself, in stead of being the necessary starting point. And this has in fact made it much easier to claim that we are in the presence of art. When I walk through a modern commercial art show, a surprising number of works are completely narrative dependent, to the point that a code or manual has to be provided, this being the new standard that the "taste" is excellent.
The original vs. copy or fake problem is simply a version of not wanting to be fooled, and giving credit, such as emotional investment, where it is due. So when someone calls AI products art, for example, they are advocating for being fooled, given that art, if it is anything at all, is a project of profound human to human communication.
So maybe art is something that cannot survive being problematized.
I think the cultivation of taste needs repeated exposure to develop an awareness of what you like, and to deepen the appreciation of great works of art. Maybe music is an outlier in this respect.
I'm confused by the emphasis on novelty - my appreciation of e.g. Beethoven's 9th symphony is deepened by hearing it repeatedly. In fact, before I go to a concert, I will often listen to a recording of the piece in advance. On the first listening most things are going to be overwhelming, and if I don't know what to listen for, I miss out on much of the enjoyment. I guess that at a certain point it could become stale, but if I listen to the symphony now, I'll hear foreshadowing of themes between the movements, I'll listen out for counterpoint and fugue, and all that gives intellectual satisfaction.
There's also an emotional level - there are moments that can send a tingle down my spine even on a low quality YouTube recording, if I pay attention, but the experience in concert is an order of magnitude more intense. I guess it would be reduced by repeated exposure, but for a performance that requires 100-odd highly skilled musicians, it's not likely to happen. I experience this most strongly with the music of Mahler and Brahms, which I seek out when I can, but I can develop enough awareness of a C20th piece (say Bartok, Stravinsky, etc.) to appreciate them.
This seems not limited to music: people will read the same poems repeatedly, watch the same films over, and so on. Is it that people respond well to being reminded of the complexity of art?
Angelus Novus was certainly a letdown after that buildup (saw it before the reading but still, massive letdown).
I think your analogy to grammar was best. Grammar and aesthetic taste are general rules to make sure language and art convey what they should (meaning and experience, respectively and broadly). Having good grammar or good taste helps you to convey and understand things put in front of you. But they are rules to be held to lightly and can be broken from and many who hold to them too tightly grow snobbish and absurd, potentially in contradictory ways.
What does the cultural critique community of Astral Codex Ten think of harsh noise music? It is “music” that literally just consists of loud, screeching, cacophonous noises with no melody, harmony, or rhythm. On the one hand, you could look at it from a point of view of “wow, this really challenges what it means to be music! If you analyze the commentary it makes on the compositional process, you can find bla bla bla…” But that’s not the angle I’m coming from when I say I like it. I genuinely enjoy the harsh sounds for the sake of harsh sound, for the unpleasant but fascinating place they occupy in aesthetic-space. It’s like the aural equivalent of eating ridiculously spicy food, it isn’t fine art, but it has a certain appeal in just how much it overloads the senses. So even if you ignore the pretentious “commentary on music” angle, I find harsh noise appealing for exactly what it is, really loud and unpleasant sounds that evoke a certain masochistic aesthetic pleasure. What do all of you think of this? Does harsh noise count as music, either as sophisticated commentary or as weird shit that just sounds cool? Does the fact it takes basically zero skill to make play into this at all? Here are some examples of harsh noise, if you need some reference:
I ended up listening to Everywhere at the End of Time during the pandemic, when online communities were into organising listening to things together; it seems like something you might get on with? Skip straight to stage 4 or so, if you go from the start it won't at all be obvious why I'm suggesting it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJWksPWDKOc This is someone who strongly feels they have something specific to express, via the medium of noise.
I'm familiar with Everywhere at the End of Time, I haven't listened to the whole thing but I appreciate the concept and think it's a cool project. As for "motorbike engine style beat with little else," I assume you're talking about loud, repetitive percussion, and I enjoy lots of extreme metal styles of drumming, especially stuff with constant double kick bass drums. A good example of fast, monotonous drumming I like is on this Burzum track: https://youtube.com/watch?v=vfBmYfnjLho
And it has completely overturned wine's critical establishment, showing that extremely expensive wines do barely any better than cheap wines when their price and context is hidden. Look up the "Judgement of Paris" (not the one that started the Trojan War), where a blind tasting had California wines do better than French wines, totally upending the established regional hierarchy within wine criticism.
I personally find it very hard to care what art critics think about anything, on any level. I have never in my life gone to a restaurant, read a novel, or or purchased a product based on a critique. A *description*, yes, but a critique, no.
I am currently writing a review of "A World Appears" by Michael Pollan. We'll see how that goes.
If I had the experience of seeing a piece of visual art I thought was really great and found out it was by "made by some nobody in the past 50 years to sell on the mass market", I'd conclude that said nobody probably did have a lot of skill and/or talent at making art in that style, but achieving that level of skill today probably doesn't actually require being a 1-in-a-million genius and the mass market is just who actually buys art in that style.
Yes you are of course right. And this wasnt the first I have read of Scott's work, and I actually do respect him and his message tons. My reaction was also really sadness. Because I thought it was a waste of time for a beautiful mind to pontificating on the wrong subject. One in which he was clearly a fish out of water, and in my view, retracted from his credibility when he could have just not written, and I would still think he was 99% correct all of the time. Don't get me wrong just because I was so worked up in reaction to this one piece. Im general I appreciate rationalism but I think it too often can devolve into mental masturbation in a way that this piece was reminiscent of. If it wasn't 3:30 am when I wrote it, I would have been more considerate and respectful, which is how I actually do feel. My tackles were just raised and it was a post of emotional reaction. Oh amd I was talking about Scott's analysis, just the simple often ignored fact that I know as a life long biologist. If you seek to understanding something by dissecting it, all you really get is a fraction of knowledge, but most consequentially and often ignored, the bird or shark or whatever, is no devoid of the thing smyou supposedly studying- life. So what did you really LEARN about life by killing it? I believe that a balance between the judicious use of intuition when appropriate and rationalism when appropriate is the best path to a better future. Respect the call out to the negative Nelly nature of my comment. In general, I have nothing but respect for Scott and this whole community. Im just not big on swimming downstream so I will contrarian the shit out of every! Thanks for listening to this particular ape man for a sec. Be well yall!
I am late to the party here but let me propose this synthesis.
1. People are totally genuinely interested in beautiful things, but
2. People genuinely have a lot of trouble disentangling their own views on what is beautiful from the views of others, especially people they like or admire.
- They actually have made art since the Eisenhower administration. A lot of it re-embraces beauty. I particularly enjoy Pierre Huyghe's sculpture. Even Mehretu's "modern art" has scooted back towards beauty. Curiosity is a good thing.
- Why do Chesterton like poems suck? Why can't we reprint his form for infinite genius? Because you did not live in turn of the century London, you didn't smell the horse shit, you didn't smoke his cigars. And the memory of these things will only grow fainter. If culture or what it's like to be Chesterton contributes 5% to genius, that's a deal breaker. You have to write your own poems Scott.
I don't know if this is responding to the post at all or simply a comment on art generally, but I've found art most edifying when I think of it as a form of empathy.
What I, and I think many people, often desire from art is some form of transcendental experience, where you encounter art that seems to partially part the veil, and you emerge from that experience transformed in some small (or large) way, after seeing capital-B Beauty. And while we're right to seek out and treasure those experiences, they're, in my experience, somewhat rare.
What I also value is trying to see art through an empathetic lens. Angelus Novus is a great example of that. Without having read that one person's description I probably wouldn't have put much thought into that work, and I'm not going to go out and buy a print or anything, but seeing it after reading the description connects me to that critic. Criticism, at its best, is a sort of shared sight. The critic "sees" something in the art that they try to communicate, and by viewing art in light of that communication, we can better see what they're seeing. Even if we ultimately believe that what they see isn't entirely justified by the art itself, we've still engaged in an act of empathy. In addition to stretching that empathetic "muscle" we also gain a greater vocabulary for how other people might see art and the world.
Maybe doing this we are occasionally duped by a dishonest and insincere critic or artist, but I think that's a fine price to pay for entering into the collective conversation of art/beauty/aesthetics.
Even if we aren't examining art in light of what someone else has said about it, we can practice seeing art in this way. I try to make it a habit, now, whenever I go to an art museum, to pick a couple of pieces and really look at them. Stand in front of them for 10, 15 minutes, and try to experience that piece in a number of different ways. For a painting I might spend some time thinking about the technical aspects--what do I see in terms of the brush stroke, or the colors used, or the composition? Then go to wherever my mind takes me to try to get into the artist's headspace. Why would someone pick this subject to paint? Look at faces. What do the expressions on the faces tell us about those people? What background details can I see? What do I know about this artist and their place in the history of art? What political, religious, or social topics might have been on their mind at the time? And so on and so forth
I've found that nearly every time I've done this I've not felt it to be a waste of time. Even if most of the answers to the questions I ask myself are, "I have no clue" or "this is confusing", the very act of genuinely spending time with the art is meaningful. For maybe only a brief moment I've tried to step outside myself and see something as someone else might have seen it.
1) Grand, Unified Theory of _____ is always wrong; anything approaching an attempt to analyze individual, subjective experience across multiple domains for both different individual and combinations of senses in a grand, unifying theory is not-even-wrong.
2) You shouldn't need to be told that "having taste" and "reaching the top of a nominally-taste-based status-hierarchy" are two very different things.
3) Others have already pointed this out, but I'll add my own non-expert explanation, as you often do: Taste-testing restaurant food in a controlled environment and experience-testing restaurants with controlled food would help design better restaurants, but it wouldn't be a good way to review restaurants.
4) Re-read your own "Lines Composed In A Fake Sequoia Forest" to remind yourself of how you responded to a kinda-sorta analog of your sculpture hypothetical and insight into how the context/history of a work of art affects appreciation: I don't think AI art is necessarily bad, but I think "Why did a human create this" and "Why did an AI create this" are questions that are interesting in very different ways. If that makes sense to you, add context-based qualifiers to multiple possible human artists. For a real example, two of my favorite musicians are virtuosos of the same instrument who have played closely related music. One combines A-list-level creativity with superhuman chops and has a bombastic style, while the other has "merely" elite chops, but is one of the most inventive and well-rounded musicians of his generation and has an extremely cerebral, understated style. I marvel at both of them, but my appreciation of the former isn't as deep as my appreciation of the latter; I'll hear the latter play something peculiar and think, "Why would he play THAT," then answer my own question, "Why would he play anything else?" Do you ever find yourself thinking about art (in any medium) like this?
5) To what extent do you think "taste" is a reflection of one's ability to notice and explain "once you see it, you can't unsee it" type things? [eg, the AI art "gateway ruin" that was superficially competent but had no underlying logic to either its original form nor its weathering (https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/151145038/5-but-others-might-genuinely-be-on-a-higher-plane-than-the-rest-of-us) or jsanilac's anti-attached-garage manifesto (https://www.jsanilac.com/garage/)] Similarly, putting "je na nais qua" into words (Leonard Bernstein said something along the lines of each note in Beethoven's Eroica being both surprising, when we first hear it, and then having felt inevitable, after we've heard it, which is an example of this I love)? You seemed to hint at these ideas of taste in your recent writing advice.
6) Do you know if there's any research on altered perception of visual art by people with face blindness?
I think 5 is definitely important. One definition I've heard of a great book is one that can be read with pleasure by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure. I don't think it's a perfect definition but there's something to it. I've found that AI art and writing are impressive at first but get worse the longer you look at them and the closer attention you pay, which is why I don't put a ton of stock in Scott's "look at a thumbnail of a picture for 5 seconds and if you can't immediately tell whether it's AI, that means your taste is fake" test.
(To be clear I'm not commenting on the future trajectory of AI art, just on what I've seen so far. It's inevitable that it will get better, the question is: how much better?)
I'm reminded of this Alan Watts quote "What is reality? Obviously, no one can say, because it isn't words..." So much of this post and the previous is focused on the critic's side of the equation, and the tool of the critic is words. Reviews of a restaurant are expressed in words, the Angelus Novus commentary is words, and as a blogger your tool is words. But none of it is the art itself. You're trying to pin down art into something objective, something agreed upon, something with a definition, and as you briefly alluded to this is in the tradition of the dialectic. That all fits into the rationalist community and fits into critique and fits into your selected medium, but the symbol of a thing is not the thing itself.
Take genre. What really is the purpose of genre? To say that something is punk or postmodern-classical or dubstep is really only a symbolic representation of the music itself. It's only useful in the context of words, either written or spoken, to give someone an idea or expectation of the music you're talking about. And it's also only useful if the listener/reader is aware of music they've heard in that genre before and can map their general idea to the words you're using. Genre is a tool of communication only in words. It can serve as location on a map that is unique to every single person that has created their own internal understanding of music. But once you actually hear the music, genre is completely irrelevant. The music is self evident. A combination of genres, or something so strange you say "I'm not sure what this is" may be outside your current internal map, but that doesn't make it bad or good, it just means you don't have an existing taxonomy to describe it in words. Good news is you don't have to, you just have to listen!
The commentary of Angelus Novus obviously isn't the same as the work itself, a restaurant review isn't the same thing as the food, even a review of art in the same medium such as a book isn't the same thing as the book. The only way to determine what art is great is to experience the art. Then we all come together and categorize/debate/symbolize our collective experiences with the same work but all we are really doing is checking what everyone else's experience was. Sometimes a lot of people think it was great, sometimes only the critics think it was great, sometimes it takes years of future experiences and context to collectively conclude something was great. The metrics, the words, the symbols we use for greatness are largely irrelevant. The exact number of people who think it's great is irrelevant. If you ever look up what the most popular song on any particular date was more often than not you won't have any idea what the song was, yet there are songs that never charted that tens of millions remember decades later.
LLMs are terrible at describing love. They are trained on a bunch of words, none of which are love itself, and all of which are descriptions of everyone's own representation of their experience of love. The average response the LLM targets doesn't get close to any of it, and the LLM has never experienced love. Love isn't words, it's an experience. And if you want to get super technical about it and say love is a complex collection of neurological processes then you're really missing the point because the description of all those processes still isn't the same as the process itself. Love is an experience with all the context of every experience you've ever had to bring you to this point and feel this specific feeling. Immeasurable; undefined. How else could we continue making new art about love for thousands of years if it wasn't so specific yet so universal?
Taste or greatness will never be defined, can never be quantified (and if it is we have a Goodhart's law situation), and will never stay the same. As opposed to sports where greatness can be measured such as running a set distance in less time than anyone else, art isn't a competition. The best any of can do is to experience the art, to experience reality, to experience the feeling inside (even if we are horrified or disgusted), and to continue on. Sometimes we are moved, sometimes we are indifferent. Once you are moved, you can never be un-moved. Even if you despise the art, you were still moved. Sometimes many people are all moved in a negative way and we call it greatness.
You hit on a pet peeve of mine. I first encountered the idea that art should be evaluated as divorced from context back in a music theory elective I took in college, and it’s sat uneasy with me ever since.
I think it’s because I believe personal transformation is, in fact, inextricably tied to the context in which you encounter the art, (your understanding of) the history that preceded it, and (yes) how novel it is, at least to you.
Let me give an analogy to this blog. At the risk of offending our host, the book review contests gave some of the best content ever published here. A lot of them have stuck with me and have since formed fundamental building blocks of my thought process.
For me, the ones that did this most successfully were the ones that took a scholar’s life work and gave a distilled, accessible introduction to them. After reading Lars Doucet’s review of Progress and Poverty, I can no longer look at the vacant storefronts of San Francisco without thinking “Land value tax would fix this!”. After reading Brandon Hendrickson’s The Educated Mind review I can exactly pinpoint (at least part of) what separated my mediocre teachers from my excellent ones: the best ones looped in Mythic and Romantic elements (including historical stories) to make their lessons much more memorable, like my civil engineering professor telling us about Robert Hooke’s secret anagram “ceiiinosssttuv” as a way to make Hooke’s law memorable.
I think great art often does this as well. It leaves you with a fundamental building block that directly affects your thinking from then on, like the base nutrients in a meal going on to permanently be part of your body. The sensory delights, then, are the seasonings, the spices, the sugar on top of that, which makes the whole dish palatable, and harmonizes with and complements the fundamental flavour of the meal.
If a dish is mostly spices and sugar, it’s just empty calories. It’ll be enjoyable in the moment but is unlikely to stick with you.
A couple of examples:
Fans of this blog might know the online author Wildbow, famous for his online serial “Worm”. But I’ve been reading through a more recent serial of his, “Pale”, a magical fantasy set in contemporary times which I think is actually his best work.
One thing it explores is the concept of the “Faerie-Goblin dichotomy”. In his world, the Faerie are beings of artifice, of glamour, of presentation and poise and status. If Instagram was a fantasy race it would be the Faerie. The goblins, on the other hand, are the dregs of humanity: shit, piss, drunkenness, crass violence, and the grossest parts of sex. Naturally, they hate each other.
Through the Faerie, it explores how living for artifice eventually leads to a sort of self-Flanderization, where one aspect of your public image ends up taking over how you’re seen and ultimately how you see yourself. Through the Goblins, it explores how their grossness can be its own sort of falseness and artifice and status game, meaning the two ends of the spectrum aren’t that distant. One of the human characters is trained by both a Fae and a Goblin, and ends up combining both techniques.
And it wraps all this (and more) in a murder-mystery-slash-coming-of-age story with characters that are stronger and more memorable than in Worm. (And that’s saying something.) That’s the spice.
One of my favourite books is Michael Ende’s “The Neverending Story”. Its core, or at least the part that sticks with me, is that it’s often hard to know what you truly want out of life. It can sometimes take a lifetime of exploration to really figure it out, and some people never even get there in time to achieve it.
It wraps that in a beautifully complementary fantasy story with metafictional elements that hook you into the fundamental mysteries behind its world and makes it clear that a lot of this is, in fact, about you, the reader.
(If you only ever saw the movie, you never caught this part. The first movie is only half the book. Read it, and see if you can find a paper edition that preserves the original red-and-green text colouration, which is a core part of the experience.)
In music, your typical “good sounds” are traditional harmony, ratios of frequencies that sound pleasing to the ear. Its opposite is chromaticism, notes so close to each other that their ratios are out of whack: not a nice 1:2 or 1:3 ratio of frequencies but something like 16:15. There’s a string piece by Krzysztof Penderecki that is absolutely awful to listen to, because it sits on those chromatic chords for minutes on end, ear-piercing screeches making you sick to your stomach until you beg to make it stop.
Then you learn that the title of the piece is “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” and you realize all of that was intentional. The horror you’re feeling is a fraction of the horror those victims felt.
This one, admittedly, has fairly little seasoning. But put it in the right context, prepare yourself for what you’re about to listen to, and it can be transformative nonetheless.
The context can even serve to help bring unusual artistic ideas to a broader audience. The internet has recently gotten kind of obsessed with Angine du Poitrine, a band making microtonal rock music: https://youtu.be/0Ssi-9wS1so
Microtonality is the final boss of chromaticism. Forget the 16:15 semitone, you’re now playing even more dissonant 35:36 quarter-tones which sound even harsher to the ear. How the hell do you make that pleasant enough to listen to that it goes viral?
First, you present yourself as literal aliens bringing strange new music to humanity. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these folks went viral through video rather than audio. They have polka dot skin paint and masks, bare feet to manipulate their instruments, and a triangle emblem that may or may not be a religious symbol. This gets people into a mood where they say “I don’t understand this yet, but I’m going to keep watching to figure it out, because it’s fascinating.”
Then, you give just enough familiarity for listeners latch onto. In their case, it’s traditional rock vibes that usually come in strong a few minutes into each song. If you’re listening to that link above, give it like 4-5 minutes before writing it off completely. For me, that’s when the fascination turned into enjoyment.
So what’s its core nutrient? In my view, it’s that microtonality and chromaticism can actually sound fun and catchy, even if strange. One of the comments on that YouTube video summed it up best: “The elites don’t want you to know this, but you can just make up your own notes.”
But if that were common in the majority of the music industry, it would not be so fascinating, and that lesson would not be interesting or memorable. We’d have already internalized it. I suspect some Indian or middle-eastern listeners probably already have, and are less likely to be fascinated by Angine du Poitrine.
Returning to my university experience, that music theory class gave us a bunch of tools to analyze music, and had us write a paper using those tools to analyze a song we picked from a list. Context was one of them, but was called out as controversial, for reasons similar to those expressed here.
For that paper, I initially picked some boring orchestral song where I could felt like I could use all the tools. But I couldn’t make it come together. I could talk about the timbre and melody and so on, but it felt like what I had to say about those didn’t cohere into an interesting whole.
So I ultimately dropped it the night before the paper was due and feverishly wrote about the song that actually spoke to my heart, Franz Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade”, a song for vocals and piano based on a scene in Goethe’s “Faust”: https://youtu.be/kxhpNRZZ7vs
I couldn’t use all the tools as easily, but I brought in the context and it served as the core of the essay: that this is a love song where the love is a BAD thing, which both the lyrics and the musical choices emphasize, all backed by the cyclical sounds of Gretchen’s spinning wheel in the background.
And that’s the core of the song: that love is not always beautiful and healing, but can be dangerous and destructive. I’ve since seen friends fall into that trap and I wish I could have spared them from that fate.
I’m not a poetry buff nor am I familiar with the works of Chesterton. But my suspicion is that part of why you like his poems is that he puts something valuable to you into their core. Maybe a kernel of his principled Christian moral philosophy? And I think more Chesterton poems would add more texture to that, more dimensions, maybe more lessons.
And hopefully, because it’s from the same author at a different point in his development of thought, those lessons don’t really repeat themselves more than they have to. I’m not sure a forgery or someone aping Chesterton’s style would do this.
Artists evolve, they refine their messages, they change their minds and advance their skills. Even Michelangelo had this: the early to mid Sistine chapel paintings had much more optimistic and brighter messages than the later ones, because the later ones were painted when the Protestant reformation was threatening the power of the Catholic church. Hence why “The Last Judgement” depicts a strong, muscular Christ passing final judgement on a world full of sinners.
I’m not sure I’m going to listen to much more Angine du Poitrine, in contrast. A few songs of theirs are enough to get the core message across. (Though who knows, maybe they’ll surprise me.)
Which is also why I agree with you on modern art. I agree that the core message of “Haha, can you believe I can call this transgressive and ugly thing art?” was already played out by the time of the Dadaists, and has no place in something as permanent as architecture. I think it’s time for the pendulum to swing back, even in ways that might seem a bit cringe.
(Even the Renaissance was named such because they felt like they were re-birthing the artistic and scientific spirit of the ancient Romans and Greeks. Maybe it’s time for another one?)
The tricky thing, though, is that this core of value is always relative to the viewer. A kid’s show that says “The true treasure is the friends we made along the way” is horribly cliché and boring, unless you’re a five-year-old that has never seen that message expressed before. That five year old does in fact need to learn that connections to people can sometimes be far more meaningful than material wealth. This is another reason why context, why knowing the target audience, matters.
I cannot defend Angelus Novus, I think it’s weird and kind of ugly. But I suspect that Benjamin is being honest about his praise of it. His Angelus Novus is not the same one we see, because he’s seeing it tinted by his life experience, frameworks, and biases. He’s projecting his own concerns about progress onto the painting, the same way I projected my concerns about life onto “The Neverending Story”. It could just as easily have been a blank canvas, if he were the kind of person to project those concerns onto literal nothingness.
As an artist, you have to pick your audience and meet them where they’re at. What is the core of your art going to target, and who’s going to pay you for making it? The people that have never seen that message before, the people who have seen some of it and want more, or the people who’ve seen a lot of it and think it’s played out, and are hungry for variety?
If you want to draw an analogy to science here, medicine is the wrong analogy. You want to look at social science, especially social science of perception, like the infamous “Dress”.
No one can agree on whether The Dress in that picture is white/gold vs. blue/black because what you see is dependent on whether you’re a morning or evening person, whether you’re used to seeing items illuminated by yellow indoor lighting or blue noonday sunlight. The Dress has a factual answer: it’s black and blue. Art does not.
Art doesn’t exist on the canvas. It exists in the mind of the person viewing it.
Art is the perception of art.
I don’t think it’s possible to scientifically segment out good art as separate from the context the viewer brings to it. The best you can maybe do is to say which contexts and interpretations are most common in your society and tailor your art towards that. (Architecture in particular could probably benefit from this.)
But if you do that, expect a lot of people on the fringes, especially people who consume a lot of art, to complain that art is boring now and nothing is new. Which frankly doesn’t look too different from what we have today.
1. There is still far more straightforwardly sensory pleasing art than deliberately ugly art. It might not always be hanging on the walls of a museum, but pretty landscapes are definitely more common on the whole than animals drowned in exotic fluids. The point being that not everything has to be for everyone, and there is plenty of straightforward art available if you don't like moist creature cadavers.
2. I really think you underestimate the drive for novelty. I mean, ice cream, pizza, and hamburgers are probably the most delicious foods in some imaginary objective sense. It's not surprising that kids (and many adults) overwhelmingly prefer them. But many people just have a drive to try something different. I like sushi, for example, but I couldn't argue that it actually tastes better than burgers. But I am overall happier having sushi some nights and burgers on other nights.
On the point of the chefs and the architects, my impression is that the discussions they are having with each other via tortellini and buildings are more important than you give them credit for. Even though common folk like us won't have a semantic understanding of what is going on here, we can still sense the perspective and intention and craft in the final product. To me, this is a major part of what causes the subjective experience of beautiful design.
All works of art are novel to a person just learning about them.
It's interesting that taste requires that your sensitivity be numbed by a barrage of works. One wonders if that really is a good way to tell the good from the bad.
I am an art snob that likes Resnais movies and modern art. I actually grew up as a Letterboxd kid.
If I were to probe my subconscious enough, I would probably define a 'good' work of art as a work of art that accurately represents people and psychological dynamics and a 'bad' work of art as a work of art that does not do this. Meaning, even if the world is fake and fantastical: are the psychological profiles of the characters congruous? Could they be people that existed in the real world? Do the decisions they make over the course of the work stay 'in character'? In a movie, do their living spaces fit what they 'are like'? In a novel, do the emotional tendencies of how they think match how they behave around others? Do the characters have the depth and emotion that every person in the real world has in some capacity?
In this frame, the great artists just do accurate representation with hard-to-understand or alien psychologies. Stanley Kubrick accurately represents a sociopath in A Clockwork Orange. Alfred Hitchcock renders a perverted romantic obsessive with high fidelity in Vertigo. Dostoevsky consistently writes depressive, brooding, and narcissistic characters in a way that is vivid enough to where it strikes home for anyone who has had phases like that in their life. This naturally skews negative, as alien psychologies more often lead to suffering than pleasure, but in theory if someone wrote some sweeping 800-page postmodern novel about some rigid and polyamorous Effective Altruist this would also qualify.
Musicians and painters just do this on a smaller scale. Instead of rendering people in fictional worlds, artists and painters are just tasked with invoking feeling. The best people in the world at doing this try to use their skill to invoke hard-to-access or strange feelings. Van Gogh paintings invoke an odd mixture of melancholy and serenity. Jackson Pollock paintings are kind of odd to look at, but they definitely engender some form of unique feeling.
There is a tension between the artist and the public here. The artist naturally wants to push their craft as far as possible: try to fictionally write or film the hardest to understand people, try to invoke the hardest to access feelings. The public only wants to feel feelings that feel pleasurable: the brutalist architecture definitely makes them feel something, but that feeling is negative, so they dislike it.
I'm also a decoupler. But I'll admit that art makes it hard.
There's a story, partially apocryphal, which has gained in brevity and wit as passed from mouth to mouth.
It is told about Werner Herzog, who upon being astonished by "The Act of Killing" warns a young Joshua Oppenheimer that "Art never changes anything". Years later, after the film forced a reckoning with the evils of the past, Herzog met with the director again, this time saying "Art never changes anything... until it does".
Were the film fictional I'd enjoy it. That it's a documentary makes it extraordinary. That it's transformative makes it transcendent.
But somehow, for me, the anecdote above, though fast and loose with the truth, makes it perfect.
Whatever function couples the element of art together, it's mysterious, and nonlinear.
This essay makes the good point that a lot of art/lit/steak criticism is bad because it shows little interest in the art itself, only in the dialectic of criticism. You detected this point because you, a critical essayist, have developed a refined taste for critical essays.
But what does this have to do with taste in art?
I have decent taste in painting. I scored at 90% on your art Turing test for most genres, with the only exception being ones I personally hate like expressionism. I developed this taste by spending hundreds of hours in museums, including in Jerusalem where I absolutely loved Angelus Novus.
I could explain to you how that painting makes me feel and what's captivating and exciting about it, but this will have marginal effect at best on your own taste in art. You develop taste by tasting things, and only occasionally reading a bit to help you conceptualize and contextualize them better. The fact that a lot of criticism contributes 0 to developing good taste as opposed to the little bit it was supposed to doesn't deny taste itself.
This entire series is Scott expressing his aesthetic tastes and arguing against "taste" being gatekept by some self-appointed guild. It should be called "with everyone (except credentialed blowhards) on taste"!
Imhbho: The greatest art that takes under 5 minutes is a certain music-video. As it is the most reacted to, as the reaction-videos get the most views, as the reactors show the strongest emotions ("beautiful", "sad", "hit me harder than a car, and I was hit by a car", "10 out of 5") and many are moved to start talking about deeply personal memories; of course nearly all cry, most bawl, the men on average even more than the women. 'Only difference is this one is true'.
"Monsters - the official video" by James Blunt (sure, I agree "Hurt" is in the top 3, too)
As for literature: "Literature has really just two topics: Love and death. All else is mumpitz." (MRR, Jewish-Polish literature critic.)
The problem with the steakhouse RCT analogy is xkcd.com/1462. People who go to a steakhouse aren't primary buying the taste of the food! They really are buying the experience, along with the personal feelings of luxury and the social status that come with it.
And similarly visual art has been primarily a way to turn wealth into status and legitimacy via a bunch of cliquey amateur philosopher fashionistas for centuries now. I'm in strong agreement that beauty and its appreciation are worthwhile in themselves but "art" as a term for that, as opposed to the other stuff, isn't worth reclaiming at this point.
As it happens I've been rereading Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory just now (courtesy of my second grader developing a grisly interest in that war via the Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales series; IYKYK). It's interesting on a bunch of levels and is just a hell of a book, but one of the angles that's really grabbing me that Fussell at least thus far hasn't really put forward is how closely the war coincides with the end of traditional poetry and its replacement with the stuff most of us ignore.
There are two obvious stories you can tell here (and I feel like they both have to be somewhat true). One is that the modern communication media that were about to displace poetry from mass culture were just hitting. Movies were in their infancy; the commercial gramophone was moving towards being a mass product; radio was soon to follow. Obviously this could steal the audience and leave the poets talking to themselves with no commercial incentive to produce stuff anyone else liked.
There's also the extent to which the war clearly shattered the entire cosmology of the participants, and left them grappling for new ways to express what they'd experienced. Dulce et Decorum Est is a fascinating blend of old and new, old allusions...but contradicted; old form...but with the rhyme scheme disrupted; unapologetically ugly subject matter and outspoken anger at the people who were using the old forms to write patriotic propaganda.
Fussell is particularly interested in a different work, In Parenthesis, which I now need to read; a mixed prose and poetic narrative of a soldier's experience from training to the Somme, which explicitly tries to reach back to Arthurian and mythological themes. Fussell's read is that Jones (the author) is trying to render the war comprehensible by fitting it into the old narrative tradition, but that the reality of life under artillery and machine gun defeat the effort; from searching around it seems that other people disagree about quite what Jones was trying.
In either case, you can see the outlines of a causal narrative; survivors of the war couldn't express that uniquely modern hell in the old forms, and since the art of the ensuing years was obviously going to be heavily concerned with processing the civilization's near self-immolation, things were going to move in a new direction.
(Side note: Fussell is sort of comically dismissive of the Americans, who both in his eyes lack the kind of strong national canon the Brits had and also didn't experience anything like the horrors the British did; he specifically roasts EE Cummings for seeming pleased with himself for being aware enough of Pilgrim's Progress to allude to it - incorrectly, Fussell feels.)
Which of these stories is right? Probably both, and you could probably loop them together into some broader "new media displaced the old popular media, new weapons created new horrors that called out for new modes of depiction" but it really does seem a hell of a coincidence when you put it like that.
I think this essay is mostly about splitting "art" into something like:
1) things that give sensory pleasure (a medium rare ribeye, a gif of a cat fitting into a box) which have the essential characteristic that they can succeed despite being predictable
2) things that play or advance a "fashion game" where the rules and goals of the game cannot be separated from the people playing them (sharks in formaldehyde, literal fashion e.g. lady gaga meat dress)
3) things that identify novel sources of meaning (which is very hard and so most people are bad at it, but when this occurs we rightfully call it art)
A common pattern is for people to confuse (perhaps intentionally) the fashion game with the novel source of meaning approach. And because many novel sources of meaning DO eschew "predictable sensory pleasure", many fashionistas who want to appear as artists will put sharks in formaldehyde or serve you molecular chicken foam on toast.
AMEN. Some of my favorite SSC/ACT posts are ones where I learn almost nothing because it's Scott saying exactly my own opinions but phrased way more eloquently, coherently, and to a much wider audience. I say "almost" nothing, because hopefully this helps me learn how to better refine my thinking into words so I can get better at conveying ideas like this. But mostly I think enjoy these out of narcissism. I feel validated that such an intelligent and well-respected person agrees with me and is so obviously correct, at least on this issue.
AMEN. Some of my favorite SSC/ACT posts are ones where I learn almost nothing because it's Scott saying exactly my own opinions but phrased way more eloquently, coherently, and to a much wider audience. I say "almost" nothing, because hopefully this helps me learn how to better refine my thinking into words so I can get better at conveying ideas like this. But mostly I think enjoy these out of narcissism. I feel validated that such an intelligent and well-respected person agrees with me and is so obviously correct, at least on this issue.
I'm not sure I trust food critics more than you do as a practical matter (Concretely my preference for restaurants go something like Yelp stars -> what I liked in the past [1] -> my friends' recommendations -> nothing). I don't think I have ever in my life chosen a restaurant based on a food critics' recommendation.
But as a practical matter I think it's very reasonable that a food critic should be reviewing the entire experience of eating at a restaurant rather than the blinded taste test. Your experience of eating, and indeed even the physical taste of the food, is not independent of the rest of the experience.
In most areas of human endeavor that use experimental studies other than medicine, we care a lot about "ecological validity." And (as someone with nonzero experience in food science), the ecological validity leakage between "this slice of plant-based meat tastes really good in a lab compared to alternatives" to "people will actually like this in a fancy restaurant served by a fancy chef" is massive.
One of my all-time favorite quotes: “If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man's soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left.”
"If someone who knew nothing about this liked it as a cute story about talking animals" Based on my recollections of childhood and my observations of my kids' co-op preschool, I think anyone can relate to the cycle of, "let's take things and distribute them fairly" proceeding to "it's only fair that we keep all the things". And there's zero cuteness. The resonance of this childish behavior with Communism is frosting, not cake.
Very interesting post and I agree on almost all points. One complicating thing to the conclusion: I think that a lot of the modern art people are deliberately trying to create a negative sensory experience in order to make people feel bad about the state of the world. So criticizing them for not creating beauty doesn't really work because they're largely doing it on purpose.
There are some people who say that art inspired them to be a better person. I once saw a comment somewhere by someone saying they were an asshole until a really good rpg videogame inspired them to be good. I don't know how accurate these claims are, but I do know that a lot of art tries to do this, like Scott's own Meditations on Moloch and The Goddess of Everything Else. This seems like a valuable aspect of art that doesn't get a lot of talking about.
I also think that sticking a urinal in a museum and calling it "art" is extremely unlikely to help at all and so dismiss things like that.
> Suppose you go into a museum and you see a Renaissance-style sculpture. It fills you with awe, and you feel changed by what it tells you about the vitality and divinity of the human form.
Now suppose you read the placard, and it says “made c. 1995 by a Boomer from Ohio, who mass-manufactured it and sold copies to rich dentists to put in their McMansions.”
> You move next to the painting to read the plaque, hoping to learn about the artist's inspiration. Instead you read: "Morning Light on the Valley by Sarah Williams (c. 1885). Scholars now believe many elements were lifted directly from an earlier painting by Agnes Dubois." The serene valley you admired a moment ago now feels… compromised? It's still pretty, but knowing it's largely borrowed deflates the sense of originality and genius.
---
Simply, my interpretation is that what you see is already shaped by what you know, remember, expect... The aesthetic experience is the total thing, context included, and that's what an artistic judgment has to work with, not some idealized version with the context stripped out.
Looking at the often deeply emotional debate about AI-in-art and AI-as-art, it's pretty clear that there are enormous gaps between what people actually enjoy and why they enjoy it, and what they _claim_ to enjoy and why they _claim_ to enjoy it.
These four things all inform each other somewhat, but often maybe not. Also, distaste is at least as important as taste for many. There is no consistency or coherence here, just everyone's attempts at striking a balance between whatever makes one's spine tingle and one's desire to be perceived as a person of taste and culture - if only in their own eyes.
Definitely food for thought. Perhaps it helps to compare art to history.
If you read a book about history and it explains some aspect of the Roman Empire, then you want it to be true. So, if you read it and enjoy it, and afterwards someone tells you that it was all made up, you feel betrayed.
Going further, some people are really interested in the Roman Empire, and perhaps they travel to Rome to see some monument that was build specifically for some victory of Trajan or so. And they see it and feel good. Now assume that they learn afterwards that the monument was actually erected in the 20th century and wasn't linked to Trajan at all. Then they are disappointed. Probably we would say righteously so. Truth is a important aspect of our expectation here.
But that is really close to how people feel when they visit art exhibitions of old pieces of arts. They don't care so much about the piece itself, they care about the historical context. So if it is made up, they have as much right to feel betrayed as someone who studies history.
Possibly, this is also true for new art: if I am interested in art that is 100 years old, in the context of its history, why shouldn't I be interested in art that came out yesterday, in the context of its own history, even though a lot of it is yet to happen?
All this is orthogonal to what Scott calls Beauty stripped of the placebo effect. But if you think that people neglect Best Art in Terms of Beauty, regardless of its context, then you should also promote the search for the Best History, regardless of its truth. Do you value the latter as highly as the former? If not, then why not?
I think there are a few reasons why people don't just "write like Homer (or Chaucer etc.)":
1) As others mentioned, Homer probably wrote in a style he didn't invent in a flash of genius, but it was synthesized from the tradition of his time. Contemporary authors work similarly. If we compare the literature canon against current books, we have to remember that we are comparing centuries against years. We are impatient to see change without realizing that time in the present flows slowly compared to history lessons. Also unlike economic output, literary output is not so easily sped up with inventions.
2) We also remember the best authors, most of the mediocre ones aren't discussed or are even lost to time as their works weren't copied so much. Ask an archeologist about what the typical inscription or text looks like, and they'll tell you it's extremely formulaic, to the point a missing paragraph can be reconstructed from a few letters.
3) This is something one could struggle against, but people have similar inputs due to globalization. Even if one author is an American conservative and the other is a Chinese liberal and they consume different media, those media are aware of each other and have accommodated each other's viewpoints and ideas, whether by accepting or refuting them. Every idea now is "poisoned" by the knowledge of the other ideas, unlike ancient times, where people not so far apart could have almost disjunct information sources.
Years ago, I tried to write science fiction stories. There was a local writing competition that also had some actual (i.e. mainstream) literary critics in the jury. Their decisions were often annoying. Like, in general, their taste was positively correlated with something being a good sci-fi story, but also once in a while they highly praised something that didn't make sense to anyone else.
From our position, they were just crazy. From their position, we (the authors disagreeing with their taste) simply didn't know what true art was.
So one year I decided to go full Sokal on them. Instead of trying to write the kind of story that I would like to read, I tried to optimize for their taste.
First, there was a guy who was among the winners practically every year. The competition was technically anonymous, but this one guy had a very specific style, recognizable immediately. From my perspective, he was just using the same pattern over and over again, and the critics were always impressed with the originality or something of his art. So this year I decided to write a story following exactly his template from the previous years.
Second, the critics always appreciated stories from new young authors, regardless of how technically badly written they were. So for my second entry that year, I tried to emulate a retarded teenager, and wrote a sci-fi poem containing the worst cliches I could think about. Added a sprinkle of patriotism, because that was another thing that some of the jury members valued highly.
Unfortunately, my first project failed, because not only the guy didn't contribute that year; he also wrote a letter to the jury apologizing for being too busy. So it was immediately clear that there was an impostor, and suddenly the template wasn't so artistic anymore. (One jury member admitted that before receiving that latter, he actually believed that it was that guy's story.)
Fortunately, the retarded poem made it to the finalist round, and got published in a book. We laughed about it a lot.
The long-term impact of my experiment was similar to Sokal's. The competition changed the rules, and the stories are no longer sent anonymously. That ended my participation.
Late to the party as I see you already posted a followup, but I wanted to add my two cents on restaurants. At a fundamental level, the system you describe where a restaurant critic has the food delivered in and eats it blindfolded is just missing major components of the experience. If how our taste buds reacted was truly all that mattered, people could just go about making the most delicious baby-food slurry and be content eating that. But you don't see products like Soylent transforming the eating experience. As a whole, society has not jumped on that bandwagon.
So in the first place, the visual presentation of food does matter. A perfectly browned, roasted chicken may be equally delicious to a pallid, beige chicken chili but one looks very appealing and one... does not. I've certainly seen many buffets or picnics where someone brought some casserole or side dish and absolutely no one takes it because it looks like cat vomit, which is a shame because it was probably delicious.
In the second place, your plan of restaurant critics having food delivered would - well, there's a vast difference between takeout and eating food that was made an hour ago or more and food that was made five minutes ago. You're going to get a severe downgrade in quality from that alone.
I thought your point about the diner food versus the critic rated steakhouse struck me as very funny because if you follow the great chefs, they are always talking about how the best steak sandwich they ever had was some hole in the wall in Bratislava or something. And they're inspired to recreate it in their restaurant but actually what they do is elevate it, deconstruct it, modernize it, and end up with something that seems to me totally opposed to both the substance and the spirit of this dish that they admired so much.
Now where I will slightly agree to your point is that on the whole, restaurant critics are reviewing Michelin starred restaurants, a breed known for their pretentiousness. When you eat at a Michelin starred restaurant, it's not just about sustenance or nutrition, it's not just about how the food tastes. Because you can get a perfectly good sandwich or whatever for 10 bucks. People who dine at those places are specifically going for the plating, the experience, the vibe, the artistry. When you're paying that much for one meal, they have got to pull out all the stops to deliver on very high expectations. They're not meant to be enjoyed by the common people who just care if something tastes good. A lot of us common folk just find those places pretentious and overpriced and don't understand the appeal. So it's a very good analogy to postmodern art in that there's a class of people who take it all very seriously and compare notes and pontificate about the symbolism or whatever, while a bunch of us look on in bewilderment.
An interesting example of this from The Rest Is History this morning. When the Mona Lisa was first painted everybody was blown away by how good it influenced other artists. But as time passed Renaissance art became déclassé and everybody knew that stuff by Leonardo couldn't be any good and it ended up collecting cobwebs. But when the French Revolution happened all the old art stored away for the royalty was put on display for The People who didn't know they weren't supposed to like Leonardo and it became a huge hit again. An interesting illustration of the battle between genius versus fashion.
From an evolutionary psychology perspective, art must serve some practical function in the human animal, assuming no divine creation.
Humans are intensely social, and many individual experiences simultaneously serve group-level functions: displaying status, defining norms, demarcating in-groups and out-groups, and aligning people toward common goals.
Religion is the clearest example. Individual experiences of rapture, guilt, and fear bind a society together; religious leaders direct the group; norm violations bring punishment or excommunication; dietary laws reinforce identity. It’s no coincidence that art is universally associated with religion: music, dance, architecture, sculpture, scripture, hymns, epics.
My argument: what we call “fine” or “high” art is effectively religious art for secular society. In our modern world, conventional religious functions are distributed across the state, academia, and cultural media—and are currently hotly contested.
While art has some inherent physical grounding (symmetry, mathematical relationships between musical intervals), taste is largely a social game. High-status individuals define it; others follow to signal belonging or avoid stigma. Taste ultimately orients a group toward its highest ideals—and away from what it condemns.
(Yes, I used Claude to refine my initial draft and make it more readable. I am aware that I am signaling poor taste!)
Congratulations. Throwing that description of Angelus Novus at us and then having to go look at the painting was a unique artistic experience. Or was it comedy? Is comedy art? I laughed. Were you making the point that if art is truly about novelty, then comedy is the highest form of art?
I decided long ago that there is just one truth: there is stuff I like, and all critics who say it's bad are wrong and stupid, and if I can get more stuff I like, that's just great, no matter how "derivative" someone may call it. If I ever happen to be a dictator of some country (presently unlikely, but who knows) I will do all in my power to support the kind of art I like, and damn the consequences (but I would avoid banning most stuff I don't like, aside from maybe rap, because banning stuff just makes it more popular, especially when ban is hard to enforce totally).
For your Chesterton example, I can just substitute my very real musical example. I love 50's rockabilly (music that sounds like Bill Haley, Elvis Presley etc.). A few years ago, I discovered a modern, little known artists called Mario Bradley, who used studio techniques to make his songs sound almost exactly like 50's rockabilly (especially "Bip Bop Baby"). In terms of music, which evolved rapidly over 20th century, he's writing a new "Illiad" in ancient Greek. And I absolutely love every second of that song, and will vehemently argue that this is great art, and Mario Bradley is a very good musician that deserves more recognition than he gets, precisely because he manages to achieve that 50's sound, not only on his instruments, but also with his voice. If I found this song on a bootleg CD where it was mis-attributed to e.g. Johnny Powers (it shares some similarities with his "Long Blonde Hair", I think), would I love it less if I discovered it's a "modern replica"? Hells, no!
I think this actually happened a few times, because I love to get a big pile of songs and listen to every single and rate them for my own reasons, and I once got a pirate 100cd collection of rock'n'roll from the net, and you can imagine it wasn't entirely well-labelled. I can assure you I made no distinction between "true, old" rock'n'roll and "modern replicas" when deciding what to leave in my playlist.
one thing that always tripped me up about my music "taste" was the fact that familiarity makes you like something more, regardless of how "good" it was to begin with. songs that i felt mediocrely about (or even disliked) i later liked, and was even emotionally moved by. the emotions then were real, but the lack of emotion (or negative emotion) i initially felt was also real. the only strong correlation in my music taste seemed to be how much i had happened to listen to a specific song. it didn't feel like i had much of a taste or opinion at all, and i thought there was something wrong with me!
i don't really have an answer for that one, besides the fact that this is a fact true of most people and not unique to me, and i stopped thinking about it.
another one (for visual art specifically) is the skill required to portray something as lifelike, especially for something as rich and complicated as skintone. i've never felt moved much by paintings or drawings, despite doing it a lot myself. i find it to be a meditative activity to try to make my piece of paper look like that thing over there, but never aspired to portray a Message or Feeling or anything. but my appreciation of oil paintings has gone up because of my experience painting - i think about the specific layers and what colors i would use if i wanted to achieve that effect (and that i don't have the ability to replicate that). but should the goodness of a painting be just how difficult it is? probably not, no
> But he was good at it and you are bad. If you can’t figure out how to do it well, stick to the stale stuff within the existing horizon and wait however long it takes for the next genius to come along.
Thank you for saying obvious truths form a public platform, that has always has the best part about this blog and SSC before.
I wholeheartedly agree with almost every single part of this post. the only disagreement I have is I actually genuinely think modern architecture and brutalist architecture look really cool. not as some kind of galaxy brain "this is a response to the Whateverist school of architecture demonstrating the contrast between whatever and whatever else" sense, but I actually just enjoy looking at modern/brutalist architecture. I don't know what to make of this - perhaps there are people out there who look at Angelus Novus and feel the same way i do when i look at the Barbican center or whatever.
The RCT critic is a bit like how BBQ competitions are judged. You are at a table with six or so other judges, there's a class for judging technically though it's admittedly not that strict. You are blinded to what team made each dish and you compare them against one another. You aren't blindfolded but you are supposed to disaggregate taste from appearance in ratings and they are probably correlated a little but you can just run a regression to see how much that is polluting rankings and reverse if you cared, I suspect it's not that big a deal. You average the scores of many judges against each other which... honestly maybe it'd be interesting to see all the raw data, maybe some dishes are high variance and that would be interesting.
It's not absolutely perfect but goes a long way. And I would say that the competition winning barbecue usually signals someone's restaurant will have enduring popularity (sure in part because the accolades, hard to disentangle that), and competition winners can shift styles when they introduce new concepts, like a fruitier bbq sauce will become a thing for a while, or mustard based sauces.
Most of the problems in this post come down to refusing to admit that "art" is not a single phenomenon but rather a loosely related series. Duchamp's fountain is not an artwork in the same sense that a Wordsworth sonnet is. It is not possible to get the same enjoyment from the two things. The fountain really is dependent on knowing the history. The Wordsworth only depends on fluency in English and a sensitive ear--it is not the same kind of phenomenon.
I'm really trying to avoid ad hominems here, but from having read your posts over the years I am left with the suspicion that you have not had what most people have when they talk about an "aesthetic experience." This isn't a value judgment--it makes me think of the Freud letter where he describes never having had the "oceanic feeling" that religious mystics get. An aesthetic object is not something that you can simply drink dry. It has an effect which is inexplicable and which tends to grow with deeper consumption. If you look at the accounts of the people who most know about literature, say, which is great writers, they almost always talk about how they return to the same author over and over and over. This is the closest to a universally accepted view among artists that I'm aware of.
Scott, I can't help but think of your earlier post "What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?"
See, I'm the guy who, when a waitress at a fine dining restaurant asks me, "how is everything tasting?", immediately think they must have learned to wait tables at Applebee's, because obviously the whole experience is what I'm there for, not just what I'm tasting.
That younger you would have even came up with the idea of a blinded food critic makes me think there's a "universal" human experience you're missing out on. Your comment about decoupling reinforces this. I'm a decoupler too, but I've also had formal culinary training and decades of what I'll call dedicated study of the art. I also have a PhD in biomedical science, which I think makes me uniquely qualified to say that aesthetics are not decomposable into components like a drug. There are groups that study hedonics and isolate things like how ambient scents or sounds affect the enjoyment of a meal, but the enjoyment itself remains whole.
I think you probably can see what I'm pointing at. When you write a great post, and you know it's good, do you know it's good because you used this one specific word or one specific technique? Your Inkhaven writing tips didn't decompose great working in the way you seem to expect to be able to decompose culinary art.
I agree taste is very important - I think the lack of it is a key pathology of why social media and AI have the downsides they do & they even use food language when criticizing it ("slop") - and I've thought food could be a gateway to developing taste in the broader sense.
What do you think? How do we bring the "taste of food -> enjoyment of the total package of the dining experience" to other kinds of taste which have components people might be blind to?
Scott, if you want to try the kind of food you described in your example, I hear it's a popular thing in authentic Chinese food. Some chefs specialize in food that has crazy, never before seen textures, but it's also tasteless. You're right that they advertise themselves that way though.
I don't understand why you keep saying you have no taste in visual art... Aren't there things you like or dislike? Are you indifferent to how everything looks?
If to summarize: art museums are terrible places to experience art because by their nature as musuems they have to catalog the great influences over the history of art not what is actually likely to amaze or astound the visitor.
I think you're close, but you're circling around some blind spots, so I think you should try to put your asks at the top and work through them. I loved the descriptive aspects of your post, and I appreciated your artful attempts at prescription, but I had to dig through the comments and make some inferences to figure out exactly what you wanted to be the case. So, here's my attempt:
Ask: I don't want to be surrounded by ugly buildings
Planned communities and Levittowns are pleasing to the eye. They're calming to drive around. And many of them do the patterned language well, in terms of you giving a feeling like, "this is a good home." But then, when I'm away from the suburbs, I end up in conversations where we mock the 'burbs for their conformity. We have songs like "Little Boxes" by Malvina Reynolds that expound on this theme. And after reading your post, I wouldn't go back and edit those conversations. I'm trying to figure out why, and I don't have a full understanding yet, but I think it goes like this: the upside of people taking out mortgages toward their own tastes in art, based on whatever combination of the 8 reasons you described above, in a decentralized manner, has a better net effect. You end up with places like the canals of Venice, CA, or the houseboats in Sausalito, or the flurry of modern homes in South Austin. These places have not only the sensory delight you're looking for, but a sophisticated pattern language that can only be achieved through this free economy of taste. And they also this other wabi-sabi thing that the Japanese talk about. (Interestingly, umami is also a Japanese word.)
Ask: I want food critics to be more RCT
Do you? There are plenty of options for all of the 8 types of aesthetics you described. Food critics earn a living by successfully guiding people to good food experiences. I don't want to interfere with the free market process there. Personally, I don't give a rat's ass about context when I'm eating good food. Or I take that back. If, after swallowing food, someone then told me something weird about the provenance of it, it could seriously alter my experience and cause indigestion. I could theoretically hold fast and say, "Okay, before you told me that, I really enjoyed the taste of it," but I would not go back to that restaurant.
Would I want to shake people out of their appreciation of context when it comes to food? I don't think so. People can like food for all sorts of reasons. Maybe they're rich and bored. Is there a Tragedy of the Commons like ugly building thing? I don't think there's a shortage of good food at the mid-range in Austin. Maybe in the Bay Area, but I don't think that's because of food critics.
I have two questions Scott, first, doesn't the link you provided for the Pepsi paradox link to an article that says there is not enough proof for the Pepsi paradox? 2 in your metaphor about medicines and that they work uninfluenced by the context, isn't that often not the case? Especially for psychopharmacology? (I might be wrong on that, but who best to ask then a psychiatrist?)
I was agreeing with pretty much all of this until I got to the part where you think Angelus Novus is lukewarm slop. There's just something off here. It is a beautiful moving painting.
I agree with most of what you said, which also puts me in opposition to a lot of people. Specifically regarding the distinction of contextual beauty and aesthetic beauty. But the big difference it seems is that I greatly appreciate the context, and it seems you don't at all.
When I hiked Mt. Kilimanjaro, I grabbed a black molten rock at the summit. It was so brittle that when I got home, it broke into two halves. So now I have two rocks. Both of pretty equal value to me. But what if it didn't break? What if instead of it breaking, I came back home, picked up a similar-looking black rock out of my backyard, and set it next to the one intact I collected from the summit? Would they be of equal value? Would they mean the same to me? They look the same. They have the same aesthetic value. They are both as 'beautiful'. But clearly one I hold more dear. Would you?
In terms of status games, there's a field that might beat out even modern art: luxury. And if you know anything about luxury, you know about Hermés. Hermés is the number one luxury brand in market cap, and probably the most prestigious. If you don't know anything about them, you might think it's fashion fad nonsense; rich people clinging to whatever is the highest perceived value. And to an extent, you'd be right. But there's a much deeper reason that Hermés is held in such profound esteem: they handcraft every single leather bag produced. And have for their entire 190 year existence. When you buy one, you know you are getting something that has heart put into it. You might disagree with me here but when you buy it, it's not just a bag - it's part of a story, a history. And no matter how much you might not want it to be true, participating in that is fundamental to human nature.
Does that mean I'm going to go buy a $10,000 leather bag? Hell no. I care about the story but not to that extent. It does mean, however, that when I receive a drawing of my family from my future child, I won't immediately say "this is shit" and throw it away. I'll cherish it for the rest of my life. That might seem like a dumb example but you come off as so extreme in this article that I don't know how extreme to take it. Clearly with that example, the context matters. So why doesn't it when you go to an art museum?
This is a very well-done post, but I do have one comment:
Angelus Novus creeps me out. Like, creeps me out unusually. I would never deliberately choose to look at it, but I am not surprised that some other art critic, who has seen so much beautiful art that he lost the ability to feel anything from beautiful art, might go "I can feel something! Astounding!" after Angelus Novus creeps him out in spite of his shields.
Thanks, that's a different take on it that I'll have to think about. I'm not sure I get the same effect as you, but it's something I can imagine.
“The 1937 Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich featured over 650 works of modern, expressionist, and abstract art confiscated by the Nazis from German museums, aiming to ridicule artists such as Paul Klee, Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Marc Chagall, and Wassily Kandinsky.”
Yes, and note that much of that art was very much not beautiful and awe inspiring, but rather sought to depict things like the horrors of WWI and the alienation of modernity. I don't see why that can't be great art.
Interesting that people still have that misconception that it was all paintings of the German Expressionist nihilistic variety. Chagall's picture of a Rabbi carrying a Torah was there. Some of Kandinsky's early abstracts (some were joyously colorful), one of Paul Klee's fish paintings. Klee and Kandinsky were singled out for having taught at Bauhaus. I'd love to see that exhibition recreated today, because there was some fantastic art there! Some of it was destroyed by the Nazis and the winds of war, though.
I was lucky enough to see a recreation at the LA County Museum of Art years ago. There is a companion book, if you are interested. https://www.amazon.com/Degenerate-Art-Fate-Avant-Garde-Germany/dp/0875871585
Picasso's Guernica might be an effectively horrific depiction of war. Angelus Novus is not.
When did I say otherwise?
NB: Benjamin didn't mention this (or he may not have known), that there was a whole history of weird angel etchings from the 16th and 17th Centuries that tried to depict the angels as described in the Torah (some of them were distinctly weird and disturbing). Although I don't think we have any clear evidence that Klee saw these etchings, some have suggested that Klee's Angelus Novus was a modernist riff on these.
You can't just say this and not link to the 17th century weird angel etchings!
I can't find the one that reminds me of Klee's angel, but here are a few of Ezekiel's wheels...
https://x.com/the_culturist_/status/1877426401294336451?s=20
https://thevcs.org/great-wheels-fire#fire-between-whirling-wheels
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/543457880051822264/
Plus, William Blake did some gnarly angelic creatures...
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1727170988713479&set=a.495383378558919
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Painting-William-666-Picture-Canvas-Posters-Frameless/dp/B0B344BSW2
Amusingly enough, the angel depictions in Bayonetta are probably more Biblically accurate than most modern religious imagery...
"that tried to depict the angels as described in the Torah."
Ezekiel isn't a part of the Torah and those etchings and paintings you linked aren't anything like the horror that is Klee's work. They are beautiful, if fantastical, works. No one said beauty couldn't have a little cosmic horror as a treat.
D'oh! Right, it's in the Nevi'im—the Prophets. I meant to write Tanakh instead of Torah. That's what happens when I'm distracted while dealing with life-impacting distractions.
But I find the wheel-within-wheel angelic beings to be much more terrifying than Klee's angel. I've dreamed about them, and while I wouldn't call those dreams nightmares, I find those dreams disturbing—especially since I can't understand what they're saying in my dream version of Hebrew or Enochian.
What is it about Klee's drawing that evokes a fear response in you?
I contend that this, and the fact that artists' primarily get draft feedback from other artists, is a major force shaping art.
You might enjoy this song about the angle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGL2Ne0V9mI
I think this may also be why critics loved The Last Jedi.
I'm a rando who unironically liked it because it did something besides have someone named Skywalker blow up the Death Star yet again.
Masturbatory repetition is a resounding problem in fandom. Probably because fandom tends to be dominated by people with autistic tendencies.
I think Scott's last paragraph sums up my experience. Yes, Johnson tried something different, but it wasn't good. (IMHO, of course - it's totally OK if someone else liked it!)
That's also my answer for why so much storytelling is repetitive, whether corporate or fanfic - it's really hard to come up with a good idea or a popular one, so mimicry is at least as remunerative a strategy as creativity, at least for a while.
My pithy view of TLJ is that it's a good movie and it's good Star Wars, but the parts that are a good movie are not good Star Wars and the parts that are good Star Wars are not a good movie. The film as an introspective critique of the universe and its genre conventions conflicted with its role as 'genre fic' that needed to unironically embody those same conventions.
This relates back to the main post because of expectations. If art is in the experience, then the viewer's expectations are central rather than peripheral. The naif who has never seen a Michaelangelo before will be wowed by their first experience of the form, whereas a seasoned art-appreciator will be inured to the general style and will either appreciate the history of the originals or novel takes on the form.
This makes art criticism and communication a hard problem. A competent critic must be dealing with their medium as a seasoned professional, so their opinion will not necessarily be that of their average audience member. Level-1 criticism just repeats the critic's view, and it takes good criticism skill (distinct from good medium-appreciation skill!) to ascend to the next level and offer a useful opinion-prediction to the audience. (Alternatively: critique as its own experience, dissecting what works and what doesn't about something in an educational context; this offers the audience a leg up on that entire 'genre context and appreciation' thing.)
> The film as an introspective critique of the universe and its genre conventions conflicted with its role as 'genre fic' that needed to unironically embody those same conventions.
But why did it need to do that? It seems to me that it was basically just good and Star Wars fans basically just have bad taste (which is why they like Star Wars). The fact that Marvel fans demand the same thin gruel again and again doesn’t mean that there’s any merit in giving it to them, nor any demerit in giving them something better.
Marvel films usually don't outright suck, they just got repetitive. The audience got bored.
That is a reason for a director who considers such films bad not to agree to make them.
Actually, as a writer and historian, I think that *A New Hope* had some truly spectacular implicit worldbuilding - all the hard science stuff is nonsense, but the Evil Boardroom scene near the beginning does a really spectacular job of showing how and why the villains do what they do and what the rules and stakes are, while staying interesting on its own merits.
Now, all Star Wars movies after that have been worse (sorry, Empire fans, it's a good movie but it's less coherent than ANH), but it's hardly surprising that they revert to the mean over time.
That seems odd to me, since the Marvel comic books kept readers interested for many decades, publishing dozens of comics books each year.
And yet, the movies fizzled out after much less material and stories.
Was it all that Stan Lee was an unmatched genius at super hero storytelling?
> But why did it need to do that?
Because commercial art has a patron – the wealthy noble or the paying customer. The artist's role is mixed, balancing artistic merit with giving the patron what they want. Sometimes they know what the patron wants better than the patron does themselves, but that's always a risk.
There is room for subversion inside genre fiction, but it needs to be done carefully. It ideally comes from a love of the genre rather than disdain for it. Star Trek: Lower Decks is a good example in my book, where it works simultaneously as a mild satire of the Star Trek formula and one of the most loving, true incarnations of it.
The thing is that the quasi-philosophical stuff and almost Greek tragedy elements is about the only thing that makes (movie) Star Wars anything but a boilerplate (and fairly crappy post original series) Chosen One pulpy space opera story on a never-ending loop. This is exactly what made the original notable at all from a storytelling point of view and exactly what fans tend to rebel against now. The other thing that made it distinctive was pioneering special effects, but I haven't heard anyone argue that what TLJ needed was more explosions and CGI. I have no specific issue with the existence of stuff like this, but there's reasons why it gets very old after the 50th time that the Joker escapes from Arkham and Batman has the same mental crisis or whatever and only True Fans are the ones who stay on that train forever.
If you think genre fic and even space opera can't meaningfully engage with something besides "plucky Chosen One underdog saves universe," we've been reading/watching/playing very different sci-fi and fantasy. There's a very big pile of TV sci-fi that has consistently engaged with themes beyond this and done well (Star Trek, The Expanse, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, Dr Who even which oscillates between being extremely camp and fun and trying out all kinds of weird interesting things - the episode Midnight in the newer series off the top of my head as an example). And that's to say nothing of sci-fi novels or games.
I've also seen Star Wars itself do this well so I know it can. All the best Star Wars things I've encountered in the last 30 or so years have broken with the "plucky hero" formula in pretty meaningful ways by either going hard on the quasi philosophical/moral components or dropping the centrality of Skywalker/Empire conflicts altogether and going out exploring in the wider universe (The Mandalorian -at least season 1, the assorted Knights of the Old Republic games, etc.)
"plucky Chosen One underdog saves universe,"
It's funny, because Star Wars was already ripping off Dune, which was all about subverting that same chosen one plot.
Star Wars already draws elements from it's own subversion. Star Wars was loved, because it played it straight.
My favorite critic put it well:
"""
The obvious praise first: Star Wars: The Last Jedi swings for the fences, and of course that's something to be grateful for. Particularly for a film that costs this much; particularly for a film made by such a challenge-averse company as Disney; particularly for the sequel to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, one of the most cautious bunts in the history of commercial cinema. [...]
On the other hand:
Sometimes, bunting wins the game. And sometimes, you swing for the fences and miss, and the bat goes flying out of your hands and into the grandstand, and it smacks somebody's nice old grandma in the head and she has to go to the hospital.
"""
> Probably because
Having seen how the sausage is made from the other end, I can reveal the true cause (or at least a large chunk of it, for expensive-to-make media): venture capital sees repetition of a successful recipe as very low risk, and is by and large much happier to fund endless repetitions / reboots than new things.
I accuse fandom of masturbatory repetition due to autistic tendencies because I myself have them and have spent a lot of time in fandom and have observed it firsthand. I don't doubt this other thing matters as well - but you also see this repetition in spaces that aren't dominated by giant risk adverse corporations. It's just as true in cult fandoms dedicated to somewhat fringe novel series.
I don't actually autistic people form a large enough portion of the audience to direct funding to target them.
They are a disproportionate buyer of merchandise. Sure, kids may buy a few actions figures, but adult nerds are a bigger and more reliable revenue stream. The average adult with fond memories of Star Wars as a kid does not buy action figures and the like. Claude has this to say:
"
Claude finished the response
You said: How much Star Wars merchandise is bought by kids as opposed to adult fans?
How much Star Wars merchandise is bought by kids as opposed to adult fans?
10:25 AM
Claude responded: There isn't a clean public number for Star Wars specifically, since Disney and Hasbro stopped breaking out franchise-level sales by demographic years ago.
Synthesized industry data revealing adult-collector dominance in Star Wars merchandise
Synthesized industry data revealing adult-collector dominance in Star Wars merchandise
There isn't a clean public number for Star Wars specifically, since Disney and Hasbro stopped breaking out franchise-level sales by demographic years ago. But the picture from earnings calls and industry analysts is pretty consistent: Star Wars merchandise skews much more toward adults than the toys-in-an-aisle imagery suggests.
A few useful data points:
Industry context. "Kidults" — defined by research firm Circana as anyone 12 and older — are responsible for about one-fourth of all toy sales in the U.S., roughly $9 billion a year, and they're the biggest source of growth in the industry. Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks told the Wall Street Journal in 2023 that adults drive about 40% of Hasbro's annual revenue, and he expected that figure to climb toward 50% within five years. Star Wars is one of the brands that pulls that average up.
CNBC
The Current
Star Wars in particular. Toy industry consultant Richard Gottlieb of Global Toy Experts has said much of the Star Wars merchandising boom has nothing to do with kids — it's driven by Baby Boomers, Gen X, and millennials who grew up on the franchise and have money to spend on it. He calls Star Wars "very much a nostalgia brand."
PYMNTS.com
The Hasbro lines split fairly cleanly. On a 2020 earnings call, then-CEO Brian Goldner described growth in the Black Series and Vintage Collection as separate from "child items," with the kids' business driven by lightsabers and the Mission Fleet vehicle line — essentially confirming what collectors had long assumed: the detailed action-figure lines are bought almost entirely by adults, while roleplay toys and basic vehicles are the kid-facing piece. Lego Star Wars sits in between, with serious adult sets (UCS Millennium Falcon, etc.) sold alongside kid-targeted ones.
Jedi Temple Archives
The pattern under Disney. In 2015 and 2016, Star Wars was the top-selling toy brand in the U.S. with more than $700 million in sales, but analysts at the time noted that adult collectors buy heavily at launch and then demand fades, while kids weren't picking up the slack — one reason sales cratered after Rogue One and The Last Jedi. The 2019 Baby Yoda phenomenon swung that back somewhat by giving the franchise a genuinely kid-appealing character again.
Fortune
WDW News Today
So a fair summary: there's no published "X% kids vs. Y% adults" figure for Star Wars merchandise, but the evidence points to adults being the dominant buyers by revenue — especially for collectibles, apparel, Lego, and detailed figures — with kids concentrated in lightsabers, role-play items, basic toys, and apparel sized for children. The industry-wide kidult share of about 25% likely understates Star Wars specifically, given how heavily it leans on the nostalgia market."
I respect that people enjoyed the movie in ways that I did not.
It's tiring that people can't dislike the movie without either being accused of sexism or being some uptight fan who's terrified of a story being different or whatever else gets thrown around in these discussions.
I'm fine with change, I complained that the Force Awakens was far too "safe" (though still found it to be a functional story that *could* have worked as the beginning of a more interesting story), I enjoy when a story "subverts my expectations".
But it can't *just* subvert my expectations, it actually has to replace my expectations with something better (or at least, as good). You can't just say "ah ha, a boring concrete cube when you were expecting a beautiful building, expectations subverted, 10/10".
Force Awakens was pure reheated mediocrity doing bits from A New Hope with a new younger cast, but tying in old cast so the audience can recognize them. Last Jedi repeatedly seems like it's going to do something different and interesting before then failing to pay them off as anything worthwhile.
The one good thing I'll say about TLJ is that it clearly understands what was wrong with TFA. And it goes out of its way to highlight them, even if it does nothing to fix them, and then drives the plot into a ditch in protest.
A smarter approach, I think, would've been not to highlight the problems in TFA at all, but to improve upon them. It's also why I don't like Johnson's Knives Out movies (the first two; haven't seen the latest): He has this attitude shared by others in his generation that one must be seen first pointing out the flaws and then pointing at one's self for being clever in how one subverts those flaws.
To take a less controversial franchise, and one that I don't care about at all, Toy Story 4 was such a gross display of contrarianism that I felt offended on behalf of the fans. Not everything needs to be deconstructed/exposed by the "smarter" next generation. It's OK to let a celebrated thing be what it is, and, if there absolutely has to be a sequel, find a new way to be that same thing in the same way that made the first one special.
Blame other fans, the general level of critique of the Last Jedi is pretty low, and mostly comes from a place of imagining a different movie they would have preferred (something nerds tend to struggle with when doing criticism generally). Whereas the arguments for why TLJ are *good* actually, are generally better written and articulated more specifically. Even this comment section seems like a pretty good example. Whether this is indicative of actual merit in the movie, or just a side effect of people, even smart, articulate people finding it easier to articulate why they like something then why they dislike something is an open question. I think the movie was genuinely brilliant, and can happily explain why, but I have also been in the position of disliking a movie and finding it really hard to put my finger on why.
The level of critique of the critique of the Last Jedi was also extremely low, again, mostly just making assumptions about the people who dislike it. I do not think "blame other fans" is a reasonable response.
Of course some people are going to dislike something for badly articulated or even objectionable reasons, but that doesn't actually mean the thing is not bad.
And, yes, I do think articulating the flaws is tricky. Much easier to say "it's good because it's different" or "it's good because you're just a fanboy". I left the theater confused about why I really disliked it, and it took a lot of discussion and reading other people's takes to really figure out the autopsy of what killed it for me.
(And it's not *all* bad; I actually like Luke's characterization here, mostly... but basically everything involving the rebel fleet which was most of the movie? Nah.)
One of the better writeup for me is historian blogger Bret Devereaux's writeup: https://acoup.blog/2019/12/29/miscellanea-the-latest-jedi/ - but even this just scratches the surface for me.
Ultimately, I think the real blame lies at the whole idea of having a trilogy with no plan, with two directors who apparently did not coordinate and did not respect what the other wrote... but TLJ is where that disrespect became really obvious and I think put Rise of Skywalker in a very difficult position, having thrown out all the plot-hooks that Force Awakens established. Rise of Skywalker was not good, (and had some unforced errors) but it would have taken a miracle for it to be good.
Well originally there were three directors, but yes, I suppose if you were expecting a concise trilogy of films reflecting a complete story that's set up in the first movie and paid off in the last movie then sure, TLJ is already set up to disappoint you. I might point out that that entire expectation is based on a retcon of the original trilogy, where it all somehow fits together when in fact its very clear that all the set ups don't show up until the second movie and even in the third, the payoffs were being figured out on the fly. Maybe someone should have told JJ Abrams that if he wasn't going to be executive producer of the entire sequels, he shouldn't spend all of the Force Awakens setting up dangling threads and then obliging someone else to pick them up.
But beyond that, I can't help but notice that the link you cited is doing exactly what I said it would, he starts off by saying "this is what the movie does" and then moves on to "here's how it could have done it differently and it would have been good actually." But all of his *fixes* imply that he understands what the movie was going for when clearly he did not. His analysis of what Poe's journey is supposed to be about shows he does not. And this goes back to what I was saying before, people who don't like the movie generally seem to have not gotten what the movie was trying to say, which makes them look pretty universally stupid when they try to critique it. TLJ is a narratively dense film, arguably its greatest sin is expecting that people will treat it like a cinematic text as opposed to a popcorn delivery device, ie, having too much respect for its audience. People can't figure out the theme, so instead of meditating on that, they decide the film is just bad at storytelling and worldbuilding, which is the other part of this guy's critique. Any analysis of the Last Jedi which spends time harping on how the logistics of space combat work and how it is portrayed inconsistently compared with the other films is proving that they have spent so much time thinking about canonicity that their brain has rotted.
One day, I will meet someone who actually got everything the Last Jedi was going for and says "still not for me" and that person I will actually respect. But it hasn't happened yet (although Majiromax above comes pretty close).
ESB already was original in that sense, and TLJ was largely a clone of ESB. If it were truly original, I would have probably liked it, but it's not.
ESB ends with Han Solo being frozen in carbonite and Luke losing his hand. TLJ doesn't permanently harm any of its core cast (Finn's attempt at a suicide-run is sabotaged by Rose, in a move I thought also risked both their lives), but instead kills off Snoke. It is funny that it's sense of being original is to transplant the Hoth opening of ESB to a salt planet at the end of the film.
"Masturbatory repetition is a resounding problem in fandom."
Given that the hero's journey has been around for thousands of years, doesn't that mean most literary fiction ever produced is bad by that standard?
Most literary fiction is not The Hero's Journey. Not that many books are, and even not that many movies were, until 1977.
Well there's many movies out there that have something other than someone named Skywalker blowing up the Death Star again.
But what TLJ does have is: (a) a young Jedi apprentice goes to learn from a wisened Jedi master living alone on a secret planet, (b) the bad guys in their giant spaceships chasing the fleeing good guys through space for most of the movie, (c) a big battle where the good guys use tiny speeders to try to defend their base against AT-ATs on a planet covered with white powder, and (d) a climactic throne room scene where the secondary bad guy kills the biggest bad guy to save the young Jedi.
So I'm not sure where the idea that it has a lot of unexpected stuff comes from, the major plot points are basically just cribbing Episode 5 and 6 in the same way that 7 cribbed 4, but changing it a tiny bit ("it's salt!")
I loved The Last Jedi, but I think I loved it for the things that Star Wars fans hated about it.
Angelus Novus seems like an alright painting. Superficially, it reminds me of ancient cave paintings – is that not what Scott wanted more of, emulation of older styles? It reminds me of that one SCP that teleports to you when you look away from it. But I don't see the rubble or the storm or anything.
Emulation of the older styles that are good, specifically, I think is his request
Yeah, I couldn't figure out where to place a ":P" in my comment.
The ancient cave paintings I like best look much better than this. The beauty of ancient cave paintings is similar to that of Japanese brush stroke art - that they can be as simple as mere silhouettes and still capture deeply the essence of what they represent.
That said, I think Scott significantly underestimates the connection element, because of course the thought that those images evoke me of some ancient human doing it with their fingers on a lamp-lit cave wall so much time ago the mind boggles at understanding it is a part of what makes them impactful.
Yeah, the ancient cave paintings are very much a case where a modern recreation couldn't be as good, because half of the greatness of the art is in the sheer amount of time it continued to exist and how different the artists were from anyone looking at their work now.
I think there's a distinction here between art as information Vs art as object. At any time before the digital era these two were essentially inseparable, but they are different things. There is added value to Michelangelo's David than to a perfect micrometer resolution 3D scan of Michelangelo's David.
You should read Walter Benjamin on this. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” IIRC that essay is the source of the Angel of History quote in this one.
I, too, was vaguely reminded of SCP-173, which had its image originally appropriated from a wooden sculpture by Izumi Katō.
I doesn't teleport, by the way, just moves very, very fast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCP-173
Renaissance painters were genuinely more talented than cave painters in that they were capable of making images that cavemen could not.
It reminds me of the neurological homunculus
>I can feel something! Astounding
I think this misses the point. Art that is unsettling can be just as great as art that is beautiful. Humans experience different emotions. Guernica is unsettling. So is The Scream. So is this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman_with_Dead_Child and this https://www.noguchi.org/museum/exhibitions/view/birth-and-death/ and this https://www.artchive.com/artwork/the-state-hospital-interior-ed-kienholz-1966/
> Art that is unsettling can be just as great as art that is beautiful.
Imagine a group of chefs that decided "cooking that tastes nauseating can be just as good cookery as cooking that tastes good. "
Perhaps that is the wrong analogy? My kids would consume nothing but Hershey bars and pink lemonade if I let them, but feed that stuff to an adult for three meals straight and eventually the adult will ask for a nice dish with the stringency of onions and pungency of garlic and burn of jalapenos: all things my kids currently find unpleasant. For another example: I enjoy a good romcom as much as the next person, but if I had to watch nothing but Nora Ephron movies for a month, I would be begging to watch a bunch of dudes get brutally murdered in Antarctica in John Carpenter's version of The Thing. Same goes for pop music vs heavy metal.
Yes, this is a good analogy. Sometimes art helps you become more resilient by normalizing small amounts of pain, or helping you process difficult things, or showing you that you're not alone in them.
I still don’t like pain. I guess I should seek out more ugly art. Fortunately there seems to be plenty.
Yeah, TBH during more angsty or chronic pain-infused times of my life, I've appreciated darker art; whereas during the times I've been really happy (and when I lived in places with lots of sun!), such things seemed totally unnecessary, and I liked that.
Having seen both sides now, when I see ugly art, I mostly think "what a bummer for them."
This just shows the poverty of the analogy between food and visual art. Are any of the examples I gave bad art, in the way that nauseating food is bad food?
Yeah, to be a bit reductive, great food makes you feel between zero and one emotions, depending on whether you count “delicious” as an emotion, and provokes little in the way of thought other than, perhaps, thoughts about cooking or cuisine. . That’s obviously not the case with a great novel, film, or painting.
Exactly.
Examples of unsettling food: Surstromming. Casu marzu. Balut.
People think these are great, allegedly.
I should have known better than to look these up. Sigh.
Say 'pet maak' in a Thai restaurant, hoo boy.
I guess you never ordered the Hákarl appetizers in one of the Reykjavik locavore restaurants.
If there was an audience for "nauseating" food the way there's an audience for sad, tragic fiction such as Hamlet or Neon Genesis Evangelion, then that would probably be true.
Wouldn't the equivalent for food just be spicy food? "Spicy" isn't even an actual flavor, it's just pain. But pain brings its own unique pleasures.
In this case, activating the relevant pain nerves is interpreted by the brain as intense heat rather than the feeling of, say, accidentally biting your tongue. But yes.
Although "pain" and "nausea" are also two different sensations. Perhaps a better comparison is durian fruit?
Food has a utility (nutrition) aside from its aesthetics. Our sense of taste is related to that utility, as it has evolved for that purpose. However, it is the case that people can develop a taste for food that is spicy or bitter.
Unpleasant tastes are a big part of cooking. Heat (in the chili pepper sense) is the most obvious. You are causing literal pain in order to sensitize the tongue. Bitterness and putridity (like in ripe cheeses) are also used in cooking.
See, I don't feel that it misses the point, I feel that it says "I acknowledge your point but don't care about your point." Possibly I should've been more explicit about that (though I was pitching it to Scott, who I think is even further off your position than my position), but overall I'm not sure.
Because this is where we get into questions about what art is for and why people want it, isn't it? Unsettling art that is well done has power, sure. It can make you feel things; it can have effects on the psyche. But I've never felt such an overwhelming urge to feel Something Anything that I ate a ghost pepper and I've never desired an effect on the psyche sufficiently that I took LSD.
So, why call unsettling art great? Because it has an impact? But things that have impacts are cheap; a hammer has an impact. Because it gets you something you want? Well, fair enough, but it doesn't get me something I want.
What I want out of a critic is mostly to point me to things where, afterwards, I will go, "wow, that was a great recommendation." The thing that makes me do that isn't emotional power; If I feel like a novel or movie is overtly manipulating my emotions, I feel sick like I ate too much sugar; it feels wrong and bad. It's something more and different than that, but in my experience whatever the thing is usually involves feeling good while I experience the artwork, not just feeling.
>So, why call unsettling art great? Because it has an impact?
Why call art that inspires positive emotions great? Because it has an impact?
You are definitely missing the point. The point is not that unsettling art is great per se. It is that unsettling art can be great; i.e., that art need not evoke positive emotions to be great.
>If I feel like a novel or movie is overtly manipulating my emotions, I feel sick like I ate too much sugar; it feels wrong and bad
Me, too. But such a work actually LACKS emotional power.
>in my experience whatever the thing is usually involves feeling good while I experience the artwork
That's YOU. Which is fine. But others feel differently. That's the point: your personal preference does not define the universe of great art.
You think I'm missing the point, I think you're missing the point. What you're saying is true, it just seems totally irrelevant to questions like "are art critics doing their jobs properly or not."
> Me, too. But such a work actually LACKS emotional power.
I think in order to actually have a conversation that's useful, we need to start playing Rationalist Taboo or else just defining our terms really, really carefully. You apparently want to define "emotional power" differently than I do, and I don't think we can have a useful conversation without that.
>it just seems totally irrelevant to questions like "are art critics doing their jobs properly or not"
It is absolutely relevant to your specific claim that "some other art critic, who has seen so much beautiful art that he lost the ability to feel anything from beautiful art, might go "I can feel something! Astounding!" after Angelus Novus creeps him out in spite of his shields"
>You apparently want to define "emotional power"
I don't think so. A work that comes across as overtly trying to manipulate emotions is ineffective and hence lacks power.
And, btw, your assumption that a work of art that is unsettling or has emotional power must be overtly manipulating emotions is wrong. See, eg, The Zone of Interest.
> It is absolutely relevant to your specific claim that "some other art critic, who has seen so much beautiful art that he lost the ability to feel anything from beautiful art, might go "I can feel something! Astounding!" after Angelus Novus creeps him out in spite of his shields"
... I... don't think so? I came up with a theory for why someone might like it. Other theories for why someone might like it can indeed be raised, but aren't evidence it's false.
> I don't think so. A work that comes across as overtly trying to manipulate emotions is ineffective and hence lacks power.
Nah, I can have my emotions manipulated and feel the power of the raw emotional manipulation while also feeling annoyance and a desire to stop. These are totally compatible.
> And, btw, your assumption that a work of art that is unsettling or has emotional power must be overtly manipulating emotions is wrong. See, eg, The Zone of Interest.
When did I ever say that? I thought I implied the opposite.
Let's try a concrete example.
Is the scene where Bambi's mom dies an example of overtly manipulating emotions? Does it have emotional power?
I don't know, I haven't seen the movie since I was six or so.
What I tend to think of as "has emotional power but overtly manipulates my emotions so that I end up net disliking it" is things like Play Sad Music or Play Scare Chords, as content rather than augmentation for the content. That still has an impact on me, because I only rarely watch movies.
What tries to do that, but doesn't, is usually writing a character as The Most Annoying And Despicable Man so that we are supposed to want the hero to punch him, but then I mostly end up feeling sorry for The Most Annoying And Despicable Man who is victimized by his author. But I may well be unusual in this sense.
To be fair, movies are wholly the manipulation of emotions to some degree.
I think there is a difference between cheap manipulation of emotions -- take something like A Fault in Our Stars -- and the richer manipulation of emotions. Maybe "Me, Earl and the Dying Girl" is a good counterpoint, as both movies center on a teenager dying from cancer.
In AFIOS, the movie is very much on the surface: What do you say about a girl who is 16 and died? It's sad. That's about the extent of it. A movie that simple can still work if the actors are charming enough (I can't remember if they are) and the director puts in the right music in the right places. It can easily make a baseline empathetic person cry with the most basic manipulation. When the emotional response is over, little is left behind.
In MEATDG, there's a lot more going on. The movie is more about how a closed-off teenage boy, whose life is encased in protective irony, handles the death of his friend. And he deals with it badly. The point of the movie is not that it's sad when a teenager who looks like a movie star dies; it's about how people build these elaborate defense mechanisms around themselves to protect from relatively mundane trials, and how poorly those mechanisms cope with real tragedy. The emotional breakthrough, when it happens, is profound and illustrates something complex about humanity. That's a rich manipulation that leaves more than just the temporary welling of emotion.
"Love Story" literally opens with the question "What can you say about a [number]-year-old girl who died?".
Of course it does. :)
Nitpick: *The* Fault In Our Stars. Also you might want to refresh your memory of which characters die.
Fair. I haven't seen it since it was new on DVD. I just recall it as a prime example of effective but cheap sentimentality with no substance to it.
I have my laptop backgrounds and lock screens set to a 1-minute slideshow of the most expensive paintings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_paintings#List_of_highest_prices_paid
It looks to me more like a comical cartoon lion, drawn not very expertly on a flat bed plotter, with code that neglected to raise the pen most times when it should! But when it comes to modern art, I'm the biggest Philistine since Goliath and have probably missed all kinds of subtle nuances!
I thought "goat" instead of "lion", but my reaction was similar.
Dog
It's probably a personal thing but for me, Angelus Novus doesn't even creep me out. I don't mean that only some very accurate figurative oil painting depiction of an Ophanim would have managed to creep me out. But that even if you tried to depict the incomprehensible and baffling non-Euclidean image of an angel by purposefully using only abstract and non-figurative techniques to shake me to my soul, I don't know what that would look like, but it wouldn't be a goofy sketch with a Funko Pop sized bobble head.
All of Klee's works have this effect on me, which is why I like him even if I don't quite "understand" him. As I understand it, Klee was very interested in children's drawings as a way to access deeper layers of the unconscious. Klee's unsettling effect, for me, has to do with this naive style applied to adult concerns, all with a bit of a sinister edge.
I think his more mechanical drawings are a bit easier to get.
I have a print of his Alter Dampfer (https://api.nga.gov/iiif/c33297dc-45d8-441c-b09e-36944e33f61c/full/!800,800/0/default.jpg) on my wall. You might imagine a child gazing at a steamboat, or any modern contraption and rendering something like this, where the mechanical components are recognizable but their connections and functions are mysterious. You could say this is a metaphor for man in modernity.
Another favorite is Twittering Machine (https://www.moma.org/collection/works/37347). Birds are mechanized, hooked to a crank, made to sing their song on command. Do they look happy? Tortured? It's hard to say. And on top of it all, there's the childish playfulness of the style -- the Twittering Machine is perhaps fun to use!
I came into this thread fully prepared to be a hater but dammit you've convinced me. Wow that is so interesting, and now I'm looking at Angelus Novus anew, as if the Angel of History is trapped within the unconscious and can only look out in horror...
That sounds about right.
>It's hard to say.
This gets at another way that art can be great: It can be intriguing or thought provoking.
The Alter Dampfer feels interesting, like it catches some of the phenomenology of what we might actually see when we think that we see a ship. Both the angles and the birds just make laugh (which to be fair is a pretty cool effect as well). However, I love the description of the angle and the song by Laurie Anderson (Dream Before https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGL2Ne0V9mI) and really want someone to draw an angle that makes me cry not laugh.
Yeah my take is that someone's trying to curse me. If I saw it sudden etched into my wall I might try to exorcise it
Yeah my take is that someone's trying to curse me. If I saw it sudden etched into my wall I might try to exorcise it
Disgust is the easiest emotion to evoke. It's the lowest hanging fruit.
Angelus Novus creeps me out in the same way that some of my own doodles and certain children's drawings creep me out. And reddit creepy posts are a dime a dozen. If you do or look at a lot of weird freehand drawing, the feeling isn't unusual. I grant that it's still *something*.
it just made me laugh out loud. because it was so ridiculous after reading that poetic description. not even saying it's bad art per se, it's just a funny juxtaposition of the critic's essay except and then the goofiness of the actual artwork.
Works usually have conventional boundaries, like a picture frame or a book cover. One way of looking at art is to confine your observations to what's inside the boundary. On this way, importing assumptions about what the author was trying to do or the conversation they were in dialogue with might be art history, but it's not art appreciation. It's not an aesthetic experience.
Art history might give you more things to see inside the frame, more references to structural patterns and conscious or unconscious ideas. But the work of art is a little volume in the Library of Babel, which admits of all interpretations and none. You think that's English you're reading now?
When I was a kid I went to the Tate Modern art gallery in London with my mum and her friend. I must have been 7 or 8 - this is not the optimal day out for a 7 year old child and I was pretty bored. Then, I saw a sign for an exhibit called Brontosaurus. I was dinosaur mad at that point, so I finally found something I was excited about. This excitement lasted about 25 seconds until the moment I actually saw the thing.
Brontosaurus was a dark tunnel, in the centre of which was a projector displaying a film of a fully nude man helicoptering his flaccid penis wildly put on rotation like a gif image. In the corner of the image was a tiny plastic… stegosaurus. I hated it and was incredibly disappointed.
I can safely say that of my early childhood experiences this is probably the one I think about the most. I now work as a musician - as a performer, a composer, and (mostly, nowadays) an arranger. In case you don’t know, the job of a musical arranger is to create orchestral versions of other people’s music to accompany commercial artists - to do so one needs to be aware of and skilled in replicating the essence of as many different musical styles and idioms as possible.
I encountered Brontosaurus before I even played an instrument or had any engagement with music; but the message it gave me has stuck with me through everything else I do as a professional - by counterexample. Whatever I do in music, it needs to be the exact opposite of the sort of vacuous pseudo-profound nonsense that can’t even get the name of the plastic dinosaur right!! In a sense, this art therefore had a (small) real world impact, and I guess therefore fulfilled some sort of purpose? But it feels like a bit of a bait and switch if the only purpose your art can fulfil is to make everyone who sees it disgusted by the concept of your style of art…
"Brontosaurus" *changed my life.* I honestly can't even believe that somebody else on here also saw it and remembers it. I went to the Tate also, and was only a few years older than you -- exactly fourteen, I happen to know. I can totally understand why it struck you that way, especially at eight. But to me, it felt like the artist was speaking directly to me. It said something about the human form -- *my* human form -- and that it was OK to be confused by it and to want feel strange things and have urges that didn't correspond to what everyone else was talking about. And somehow, the "brontosaurus" made it more explicitly about our human place as embodied creatures, animals, in a long tale of evolutionary history. Even the fact that it was mislabeled landed -- it seemed to be saying that the dinosaur there had been misnamed, and so, inevitably, would the man be (and so would I be). But yet its existence -- like mine -- was a fact, a stubborn fact about reality that no amount of misunderstanding or misnaming could ever negate.
Actually, none of that happened. It sounds like total garbage. I'm glad you took the lesson you did!
Worth it for the punch line. Well done!
So plausible I don't even feel taken in. Feels like something like that assuredly happened to some other 14-year-old!
I, too, choose this guy's killer trolling.
Amazing.
Though in all honesty I have had enlightening experiences at art galleries examining bad art and figuring out why it's bad.
I too had an upsetting experience with modern art at the Tate*! Fiona Banner had taken two fighter jets and hung them in weird positions. The artist's commentary was "It's hard to believe that these planes are designed for function, because they are beautiful. But they are absolutely designed for function, as a bird of prey is, and that function is to kill. That we find them beautiful brings into question our very notion of beauty, but also our own intellectual and moral position."
My reactions were: (1) a bird of prey is 'designed' (well, actually, evolved) to reproduce, killing is a just a necessary component of its reproductive pattern; (2) fighter jets aren't designed to kill, they are designed to assure air superiority, and killing is a necessary component of that; (3) many functional things are beautiful, many beautiful things have some sort of function, and Kelly Johnson (who, you know, designed jets rather than hung them from ceilings) for one insisted that beauty and function could not be separated.
*Regular Tate, not Tate Modern
"The artist's commentary was "It's hard to believe that these planes are designed for function, because they are beautiful. But they are absolutely designed for function, as a bird of prey is, and that function is to kill. That we find them beautiful brings into question our very notion of beauty, but also our own intellectual and moral position."
Now that is odd, because I agree with her up to a point: I too find fighter planes beautiful, in the same way a bird of prey is beautiful, and that their function is the same - to kill. But that doesn't make me question my notion of beauty, because if we can find the birds beautiful without attributing moral blame to them, since they do what their function is by nature, then finding fighter jets beautiful is neutral. We can question the morality of war and violence and politics and so forth, but that is going back to the human part of the equation, not the appearance of the jets.
Indeed, we may go on to deeper questions about reality along the lines of "if, by the processes of nature, the most functional design is also beautiful, and destruction/violence requires the most functional design, what do we say about this world we live in?" Death of God, nature red in tooth and claw, Original Sin and the Fall of Man and other subjects of philosophy.
But that does not change that raptors and fighter jets are both beautiful and designed for destruction. Is beauty a necessary part of that, or are we finding beauty even in the worst places because ultimately hope is the virtue and not despair?
Beauty is still beauty, even if linked to the terrible.
Now here is Ted Hughes' "Hawk Roosting":
Hawk Roosting
I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.
The convenience of the high trees!
The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth's face upward for my inspection.
My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot
Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads -
The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:
The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.
This is a really good bit of prose, thank you!
that's actually so good, thank you
Things which are shaped by aerodynamics and hydrodynamics are beautiful.
Hawks are beautiful in a way that owls are not, though owls can still be a pleasure to look at.
She is not the only one to make this observation !
"Before them, in the valley, lay the thunder chariot. Slim and unadorned, the color of bronze, though it was not bronze, it stood upon a wide, grassy plain. It looked like a fallen prayer tower or a giant's house key or some necessary part of a celestial instrument of music that had slipped free of a starry constellation and dropped to the ground. It seemed to be somehow incomplete, although the eye could not fault its lines. It held that special beauty that belongs to the highest orders of weapons, requiring function to make it complete."
I love Zelazny. Although the first thing that always comes to mind when I think of him is that one multi-page setup to a terrible pun.
I recall (possibly incorrectly) that in some interview, he claimed to have written the entire book just for the sake of that pun. I wouldn't put it past him.
Fighter jets are designed to fly fast and be maneuverable. Actually killing is the job of the attached bombs and missiles, which are not beautiful.
I wish we lived in a world where it was economically practical to have fast maneuverable single seater jets just for flying around for fun. I bet those would be even more beautiful than fighter jets.
Fun fact: I looked up "Brontosaurus" and learned the artist later directed "Fifty Shades of Grey" (as well as "Nowhere Boy" and "A Million Little Pieces").
I tried looking it up on Wikipedia, but it didn't have an entry. The artist who directed those films is Sam Taylor-Johnson. She did apparently direct the quasi-pornographic short film "Death Valley" as part of the anthology "Destricted", but her page doesn't mention "Brontosaurus".
Surely the titular brontosaurus is the man's penis? Because, y'know, a dick and balls look kind of like a brontosaurus.
I can't say I'd have appreciated such an elaborate yet tasteless dick joke at 7, but probably a little more than I would now (assuming I didn't find it traumatic being unexpectedly shown a video of a naked man waving his dick.) It's a very 7-year-old thought to have. It *does* kind of look like a brontosaurus.
I'm not sure any dick joke could live up to the expectation of a proper brontosaurus when you're seven, though.
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/taylor-johnson-brontosaurus-t07545 - from the Tate website. If only it were just a dick joke it might be less insufferable!!
Holy shit, the artist has an OBE!
Personally I find myself almost never seriously emotionally moved by paintings and similar visual art. In contrast, I find music and the written and spoken word moves me deeply all the time. Sometimes I am also moved similarly by natural landscapes, or the combination of all of these things in something like a film. But the one thing I think is consistent for me is that I almost never find art that is purely intellectual moving in any sense, and I’m frustrated by art that can only really be engaged with if you read the little blurb next to it, which reveals that the squealing sound coming from the Found Object is actually the exact frequency of blah blah blah.
I don’t know how close to the mean I am in that regard.
As for criticism, I think critics these days have vastly less influence as tastemakers than they used to, now that culture is so much more fragmented. It increasingly seems like the sort of defensive insularity you get from things that are dying. Status games also always get more savage as the status being fought over becomes more and more diluted. Perhaps we’ll cherish snobbish critics more when we get a better idea of what culture will be like when their grip on the reins slips completely!
It's interesting how avant garde music, while very much a thing, is much, much less of a thing than avant garde art. Market effects? A rich wanker can buy a visual artwork, but music makes money by being popular.
I mean, you'd need some way to purchase limited edition music. That seems harder to make into an item? It seems easier to just purchase items associated with the music. And we see that.
David Gilmour (Pink Floyd) - guitar: $14.55 Million
Eric Clapton guitar: $3.003 Million
John Lennon guitar: $2.86 Million
I mean, granted these are all pop musicians like you predicted and not some avant garde niche.
Here's a deepseek search on sale of musical items related to avant garde musicians.
Karlheinz Stockhausen: 'Hymnen' Sketches (Six-Figure Range): The monumental archive of sketches for electronic work "Hymnen" sold by Bonhams, with the auction results for avant-garde composer manuscripts typically reaching tens of thousands.
Pierre Boulez: 'Le Visage Nuptial' Manuscript (Six-Figure Range): Manuscript by the French composer and conductor surfaced at auction in Paris, expected to reach tens of thousands of euros (50k−50k−120k).
Kraftwerk: Custom Sennheiser VSM-201 Vocoder ($256,000): The voice of "Autobahn" and "The Man-Machine," this rare vocoder is arguably the most quintessentially "avant-garde" item on the list, shaping the band's iconic sound through custom-built electronics.
Aphex Twin: Yamaha GX-1 Synthesizer (£99,950 / ~$125,000): A legendary synth owned by Richard D. James, one of only 100 ever made, that helped define the sound of 1990s IDM and electronic music .
John Cage: Rare Manuscripts (Mid Five-Figures): Autograph musical leaf from his revolutionary "Concert for Piano and Orchestra" can fetch between 10,000−10,000−15,000, while a manuscript from his 'Diary' series can be found in the £10,000 - £15,000 (12k−12k−18k) range.
Florian Schneider (Kraftwerk): EMS Synthi A Synthesizer ($115,200): The portable synth synonymous with Kraftwerk's groundbreaking live sound far exceeded its estimate, selling for over fourteen times the expected price.
And there's also mass market visual art. Look at what Pixar pulls in for an animated movie or what Industrial Light and Magic is worth. There's plenty of mass market art.
Is there a market for e.g. Picasso's paint brushes?
Interesting question. I'm far from an expert on this topic so I did a little reading. There doesn't seem to be a market for brushes, specifically. They're too ephemeral, maybe? But *pallets*, which last longer and are a bit more information rich and iconic and rare, seem to have a good market.
From an unverified DeepSeek query;
" Pablo Picasso (Sotheby's, 2020): A palette Picasso used in 1961, dated and directly linked to his masterpiece Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, sold for £56,250 (approx. $70,000). This was over eleven times its estimate, after 39 bids, driven by its direct connection to a seminal work. A small cardboard palette he used for painting Femme sold for £16,250, and a ceramic palette used for Hibou fetched £12,500.
Sir Stanley Spencer (BBC, 2025): One of his palettes sold for £3,048 at auction.
To put the Picasso sale in context, David Bowie—an art collector himself—purchased a Sir Stanley Spencer palette at auction in 2016 for £11,000, showing that these objects are sought after by discerning collectors who appreciate their unique artistry. Also, in 1993, a Lucian Freud palette was gifted to Nicola Bowery after he used it to complete the painting And the Bridegroom. While not a public sale, this highlights the deep personal and historical value attached to these objects, further supporting their status as artifacts of creative genius."
I paint in oils, and if I had the finances, I'd purchase a Picasso palette from his later life. Damn! The things I could learn from seeing how he mixed colors.
Also, at my one and only exhibition (in a minor small-town gallery), I displayed a bunch of my old palettes arranged in interesting ways upon a sheet of plexiglass. They made an interesting abstract composition.
Are we going from art to memorabilia collection as if…
Memorabilia was the closest thing that I could think of which was rare, marketable, and music-or-music-adjacent. I'd welcome the suggestion of something else which fits that criteria better.
Though I do think that there's a fair bit of overlap between collecting memorabilia and collecting art, enough to be worth considering.
A poster of the Mona Lisa is cheap, after all. And even a good replica would be far cheaper than the original. So hopefully we can agree it's not the aesthetic that people are primarily looking for when they pay huge amounts of money at auction.
No, I was just being clever. I understand the connection of something someone owned, but it's not an artistic question, really, although one follows from the other, I suppose. Limited edition music would be absurd. I would consider it a violation of humanity.
Part of it is surely that "digital goods have zero marginal cost", no? I don't know what the NFT equivalent of a music piece would be. For any given recording though, you can't really charge more than a couple dozen bucks maybe, and that's still fairly rare. How many people actually buy tracks on Bandcamp rather than stream on Spotify? Like I'm happy to throw money at Boris, but no one's getting filthy rich off $10 digital albums. Whereas if the only way to hear them was a live concert, well, now we're talking real money. But then I'd probably never have discovered them in the first place.
Since an NFT is basically a link, I suppose you could sell NFT versions of music as MP3, just as you sell NFT versions of JPGs.
Of course, whether anyone would purchase one is another matter.
Avant garde music is *massive*, it just doesn’t occupy the same kind of place in culture as avant garde visual and physical art
Perhaps this is one of those things were the boundary drawing determines the answer. There seems to be a lot of music labelled avant garde, but very little of it is, say, atonal music. If traditional music is a landscape painting and and properly avant garde music in my sense is a shark preserved in Formaldehyde or a banana taped to a wall, most so called avant garde music seems closer to the former than the later. But when I refer to avant garde music I am thinking of the audible equivalent of a preserved shark. 4:12 and air raid sirens, not industrial house or experimental jazz.
That level of weirdness seems more common in visual art.
I’m not thinking necessarily of industrial house or experimental jazz, but maybe for example noise music like Pharmakon or Merzbow, though they have more specific aesthetic project in a way I think an artist doing shark in formaldehyde might not. Throbbing Gristle, idk. Another take on this would include something like Captain Beefheart. Similarly, The Shaggs are a bit like Naive art. And I’m sure there are still people doing stuff like Monk: Our Lady of Late. Maybe Meredith Monk herself. That, alongside Cage and early electronic bleep bloops are probably what I first think of as ”avant garde” though it’s more clearly musical than Merzbow and sort of in the past.
Note that I respect the people mentioned here a lot more than the formaldehyde shark caricature.
may I recommend Dror Feiler
I actually know of him for entirely different reasons, and might even have met him briefly many years ago, but am checking out his music too now. Had no idea what kind of music he did before now! Thanks for the rec!
You gotta meet someone from your local DIY scene and ask them when the next noise show is
Atonal? Avant-garde? Björk is composing atonal music nowadays, and for all the weird acommercial stuff she's been doing, we're still talking about a bona fide pop star here.
So, yes, boundary determining the answer. You're probably looking specifically for [things nobody listens to], and I don't think there's much of that left. People actually love listening to weird shit! Well, not your generic radio consumer, but still a significant market niche.
Yoko Ono?
4'33'' by John Cage? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3
What you said may be ahistorical.
There was avant-garde music not long ago, it did silly things like record everyday sounds and make buzzes with electronics and claim it can be called music, and was so thoroughly vindicated we don't perceive what it pioneered as avant-garde anymore (in other words, it was actually, literally avant-garde). I'm sure there are still some "avant-garde" musicians, but I'm not sure where the current would even go from there, humanity at large simply agreed with them to a degree that dissolved most boundaries between (non-classical) art and popular music.
It was a bigger thing at the beginning of the 20th Century. The audience rioted the first time that Stravinsky's Rite of Spring was performed. Nowadays, we find the piece to be innocuously beautiful. But it sounded dissonant and a-rhythmic to the audience. A year later, it was performed again, and the critics and music audience had come around to it.
I think you might enjoy these excerpts from Jennifer Homans' "Apollo's Angels," (p.317–8) on the opening night of The Rite of Spring:
"Although firsthand accounts vary wildly and the events of that evening were almost immediately obscured by the fog of the ballet's own myth, we know that Diaghilev—no stranger to the commercial value of controversy—deliberately stocked the house with the adherents of rival and feuding artistic factions who could be counted on to create a ruckus."
"Shouting, yelling, pitching chairs, and police: the outcry was loud and physical. Those who were there that first night (and even some, such as Gertrude Stein, who thought they had been there but were not) never forgot it. Indeed, the show in the house was at least as impressive and unnerving as the show onstage: the theater, it was said, was "shaken like an earthquake" and seemed to "shudder." When the dancers held their cheeks in a strange pose, people cried out, "Un docteur! Un dentiste! Deux dentistes!" and one man was reportedly so engrossed that he compulsively beat the rhythms of Stravinsky's music on the head of the critic standing in front of him."
I particularly like the detail that Gertrude Stein somehow convinced herself that she attended?
There are people who went to Palo Alto High School in the mid 1960s who insist the saw the Warlocks play there (the Warlocks being the first incarnation of the Grateful Dead). They never did, but people remember it.
I don't think most people would find the rite of Spring beautiful. Maybe they would agree that the opening solo sounds kind of nice, but generally I don't think they would enjoy the piece.
Somebody must like it a lot, because it's listed as one of the most recorded pieces of classical music, with over 200 versions — including the soundtrack to Disney's Fantasia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rite_of_Spring_discography
Gemeni says the only classical pieces with larger discographies are...
1. Vivaldi: The Four Seasons
2. Beethoven: Symphony No. 5
3. Beethoven:Symphony No. 9 ("Choral")
4. Mozart: Eine kleine Nachtmusik
5. Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker Suite: Highly popular repertoire
6. Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1
7. Bach: Mass in B minor:
8. Mahler: Symphony No. 5
(It surprised me that Mahler's Symphony No. 5 is on this list. I remembered hearing it and thinking it terribly pretentious, and I half way through it again as I write this, and I still think it's pretentious.)
Is it much less of a thing? Or are you just less likely to encounter it?
If you're a normal sort of person then you'll eventually encounter some avant-garde art because you'll go to an art gallery to see some of the things you like and you'll eventually come across a banana taped to the wall or whatever and you'll say "oh that's dumb". But most normal people will go their whole lives escaping ever hearing Stockhausen's Hymnen ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDxpa-XPMTo )
Social justice. There are still academic musicians doing weird stuff that nobody has ever heard of, but they aren't blacks from poor background.
And voila! While not classical musicians, I present to you Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor.
>I will instead take the bold stand that conflating many different things is bad
I think there's a common thing they share that elevates them as art: specialness/rareness.
Sensory delight is rare, personal transformations are rare, technical craft is rare, groundbreaking observations are rare. Michaelangelo created technical masterworks, and Warhol made statements that only he could make. Despite their incredible differences, they're united as artists by the scarcity of what they had to offer. I guess that's the theory?
Yes, there are edge cases (a string of random numbers may be unique/rare in some sense but nobody finds that interesting) and we might specify "intentional, aesthetic specialness/rareness", but art is broadly a way we "make special" the world (odd that there doesn't seem to be a word for that). This seems to connect most of the things on your list.
>The type of critic young Scott dreamed of could make true discoveries. They might learn that the family restaurant down the street makes a steak that beats the $100-a-plate Michelin-starred steakhouse. Probably the average claim like this isn’t true. But probably there’s some claim like this which is true, and they could learn it. The real-world restaurant critic who writes stuff about “ambience” never will.
So you don't think that decor and ambience matter at all when eating out a restaurant? Critics should discuss only the food and nothing else?
Scott...I thought you were sensitive to sound! If a restaurant's floor was carpeted in loud popping bubble-wrap and everyone sat on rolling chairs, wouldn't you consider this important information when deciding whether to go there?
My problem with the scarcity explanation is that it suggests we either shouldn't bother going to see Michelangelo exhibits (because technically masterful statues are no longer scarce) or we should be equally interested in having other people continue to make masterful statues.
My claim is that people should be interested in whether food is good or bad. If a drug is in extremely inconvenient packaging, that matters a lot for patients, but anything which conflates it with the drug's effectiveness is doing a disservice.
Might be instructive to compare with the great scientists of history.
The average modern physicist has a much better and more complete understanding of the physical world than Newton did, and a standard textbook explains Newtonian physics better than Newton could. But we revere Newton for very good reason. And we still do the scientific equivalent of going to Newton exhibits.
A lot of art appreciation is history appreciation in disguise.
But that does get to an important difference. Despite the fact that most people with an interest in physics hold Newton in high esteem, very few would say that Newton's writings are the best way to explain his ideas. We've decoupled the value of what Newton was trying to communicate from the form which he used to communicate it. But most people with an interest in art would find it absurd to think that a statue in the style of Michelangelo done today would be worth looking at compared to an original. So whatever effect Michelangelo's work is supposed to have on the viewer, it is inextricably tied to the specific physical objects he produced, rather than abstracted as an idea.
>people should be interested in whether food is good or bad.
Shouldn't you first define what is "good or bad"? What if I said that good food is anything that gives my body enough calories to continue functioning, and doesn't literally kill me? My body doesn't even have an innate sense of caloric value, so it has to use the imperfect proxy of "satisfied hunger" to determine that a meal was sufficiently nutritious.
Whether or not you like the taste of food is already a question of preference that has no bearing on its ability to satisfy your body's caloric needs, let alone the hunger proxy. You simply disagree with the food critic with how many extraneous qualities food has to have to qualify as good or bad, before even considering any of the individual qualities. That is your right, but a universal truth it ain't.
> My claim is that people should be interested in whether food is good or bad.
How, though, can you reduce the experience of eating food to "good or bad"?
In your essay you propose that a suitably double-blinded ideal spherical frictionless critic of unit mass in a vacuum might carry out some experiment that would result in some kind of meaningful objective rating.
I dispute that such a thing is possible. Food is not like physics or even like medicine.
I love mushrooms. My friend hates them. Catching a slight whiff literally makes her vomit. Are mushrooms good? Bad? If my steak comes with a mushroom sauce, does that make it better or worse? If a critic tells me the mushrooms were a 9.5 out of 10 on the objective good/bad scale, what have I learned? If they were a 0.5, have I learned anything more? I suggest maybe I learned something about the critic, but much less about the food.
To a first approximation, the entire nation of Japan loves natto. The stuff makes me vomit. Indeed, it looks, feels and smells like someone already has. Are they wrong or am I wrong? Is natto good or bad? What if someone made a natto mushroom risotto? A critic went and ate it double blind, and rated it 5.0. What have I learned from this?
We had some wine in a tiny restaurant in San Giminiano, right on top of the town wall, overlooking the fields. It was delicious. We bought three bottles and brought them home. We served them to our mushroom-hating friend, with great fanfare. It was utterly foul. My personal theory in retrospect is that it was chilled to be pleasantly cool in both cases; which over there meant 22 degrees C, and back here in ol' blightly meant +10 or so, and that's gonna make a difference to how it smells and tastes. But it might just have been the ambiance, who knows. Was the wine good? Was it bad? If I'd read a critic had rated it 8/10, what would I have learned?
I submit that the job of a restaurant critic is to answer the question: what is it like to go to this place and have a meal there? I can sit in my armchair and read a bunch of these and try the experiences on for size, and maybe see if any of them sound like something I want, or maybe just live vicariously through them like all the other media I voraciously consume. Just telling me whether they thought the food was good or bad is a tiny part of the story I want. The whole experience is a complex painting, not a single brush stroke. The critics - the good ones (twitch), at least - are not limiting themselves to painting a single objective perfectly measured black square, Malevich style. They are producing a full traditional masterpiece of writing. They pack the entire restaurant into the brute sparse medium of words so it can unpack itself in your brain and dwell there.
To ask them to be objective is to force them to make your most hated kind of modern art instead.
Distinguish between a restaurant critic and someone at a test kitchen testing recipes. That is a lot more like the drug trials--they're shooting for replicable results wrt the food quality (taste, texture, smell, appearance) in a context where they can't say anything about the ambiance or the experience.
The food resulting from this process is maximally fit for their purpose. But is it good?
Judge for yourself:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RC2jzJfMBKE
https://www.tiktok.com/@fallowchefs/video/7467864820516261152
>To a first approximation, the entire nation of Japan loves natto.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20200727-japans-most-polarising-superfood
> A 2017 survey by Nifty, a Japanese internet service provider, found that only about 62% of Japanese people actually enjoy nattō. It also revealed that 13% actively dislike the taste. Regardless, many eat it anyway because of the health benefits.
I... honestly don't know how to react to that, or whether those are surprisingly low or surprisingly high numbers. Try some natto, if you haven't. You can only have your first taste once.
Personally, I'll put it somewhere between "phoenix talons" (stewed chicken feet; all of the nope) and stinky tofu (super popular in Taiwan, you can smell the vendors from two streets away; actually not too bad if you don't breathe, a bit like eating very strong blue cheese). But I know people who like those things (not the same people all the things at once, AFAIK).
It's well worth trying things once, because you never know. Sometimes you get the chicken feet experience, but sometimes you discover you actually like whatever it is. I've little idea which of my likes would be surprising to others; they are normal and delicious to me now.
There might be some conclusion I should be drawing about out-of-your-comfort-zone art in there, I don't know. I'm just going to be over here curling up with my comfort read for now.
I would say I quite like natto, and did on my first taste of it, but my first taste of it was as part of a complete dish after I had read someone write in detail about how to prepare and serve it. While I don’t think the taste (or texture!) would be for everyone, if I had tried to just eat it as it was then I imagine I would have reacted like Americans trying marmite by sticking a spoon into the jar.
I love the idea of the owner/operator of a tiny restaurant in San Giminiano waiting patiently for the right opportunity to offload three bottles of awful wine to some tourists who can be convinced it's the same wonderful stuff they just drank at dinner and will be safely far away before they discover the horrible truth.
Or maybe it was the temperature. You believe what you want, I'll believe what I want.
I mean, it's not like it cost much. If it was a scam, it was at the sadder end of scams, and frankly they're welcome to whatever they made because they clearly need it.
Oh, very well then:
https://theonion.com/european-men-are-so-much-more-romantic-than-american-me-1819594261/
"If a critic tells me the mushrooms were a 9.5 out of 10 on the objective good/bad scale, what have I learned? If they were a 0.5, have I learned anything more?"
If you hate mushrooms/mushrooms make you sick, it won't matter because you're never going to eat them. If I'm ordering a mushroom dish, it makes a big difference to me whether it's graded 9.5 out of 10 or 0.5 out of 10.
It well may be that I eat it and go "this is definitely not a 9.5 dish" and that's where subjective taste comes in, but if enough people agree "yeah this is a solid 7 out of 10" then I'll be more willing to try it than if everyone reviews it with "whatever you do, never order the mushrooms here".
How to turn second-class mushrooms into a popular dish:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Pu7cZjXuz7w
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8af8Y4nD0w0
You get it!
this is a brilliant comment, bravo
I remember reading an argument that the only job of a critic is provide an honest account of their experiences. It's inevitable that people's tastes and what they want from an experience will differ, so there's no objectively correct rating to give something. But if you provide a genuine and comprehensive account of the experience, then that lets people decide for themselves whether the product or establishment is a good fit for them. That's where the true value of a review lies.
"My claim is that people should be interested in whether food is good or bad."
Oh sure, fancy ambience means little if the food is dreadful. But you're not going to get perfect replication in food as in drugs, unless we go to mass-market products like McDonald's where a lot of time and money and effort has gone into making it that "wherever you go, the Big Mac will be the same and you will get the same experience time after time".
Nobody thinks that makes McDonald's fine dining (though I will defend the honour of the Big Mac as palatable fast food when you're hungry and just want a big hunk of something you don't have to cook yourself).
But for restaurant cooking, it will depend very much on quality of ingredients (and that affects the price: you the customer are going to pay premium prices for premium dishes), seasonality (which means some ingredients may not be available at that time of year or, if available, not fresh but frozen/shipped in from overseas), technique of the chef, are they traditional or trying to innovate, etc.
If you got fifty chefs from all levels of food production and gave them all the same ingredients, in the same kitchen with the same tools, to the same recipe, then yeah you could then go "is the beef bourguignon cooked by family restaurant worse than, as good as, or better than the Michelin steakhouse?"
But that's not how it works in reality. Tastes also change as people get more access to different menus, better versions of traditional dishes, more accustomed to eating 'authentic' recipes and the likes. Something from 1950 that was wildly popular with the majority of ordinary people might now be considered bland and commonplace by the same majority of ordinary people.
This video going through the decades from 1920 to 2020s show how Michelin dishes changed over time.
CONTENT WARNINGS: If you're squeamish about dead animals from lobsters to chickens, better skip this or fast-forward through the "oh my God, that's the corpse of a formerly living creature there on show" bits. (BLOODMOUTH CARNIST DISCLAIMER: Not a corpse, a carcass, there's a difference):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEaMp5tzrHU
The drug analogy seems explicitly wrong to me. More apt would be the effectiveness of a placebo... Then absolutely the context will matter. Packaging, sound and lighting could all affect the effectiveness of the Placebo pill
The packaging example here is a bit flippant. Imagine a drug that has demonstrated perfect efficacy in trials against (intractable severe depression or glioblastona or whatever) but that must be administered directly to the brain by specialized surgeons every three weeks indefinitely.
Efficacy has to be achievable and sustainable to even matter. Ease of use or minimal nuisance adverse events are, in some sense, less important than efficacy as treatment goals. But the hierarchy of treatment goals is platonic. It’s too much of a decoupled abstract to lean. You have to do the math every time for the drug on the table.
Yeah, you've got to separate a "restaurant" critic from a "food" critic. A restaurant is a place you're going to spend time in while the food cooks, and how that time feels is important.
Thank you. I would have made that point if nobody else had. The whole steakhouse section seems to be misunderstanding (on purpose?) why people go to restaurants.
The premise of the article that you should be able to decompose the restaurant experience OR the art experience into independently testable parts is ... questionable.
There is an issue on the is/ought barrier here. Yes, taste is probably a "conflation" of many things. Correct analysis, thank you Scott. It does not follow from there that this is a bad thing or that you "should" define your taste differently.
I mean, it is a valuable thing to note that Joe's Bar and Grill serves outstanding steaks, which cost 1/4 as much but are superior to the ones served by Sam's Snooty Steakhouse. But depending on what else you're looking for, you may prefer to take your date or clients you are trying to impress to Sam's. Or to Joe's, to impress them in a different way.
And a restaurant critic will usually talk about that! A good review makes clear whether this is a place that's worth it for the ambience and creativity even if the taste isn't great, or a place that has amazing food despite being a hole in the wall in a strip mall.
>The whole steakhouse section seems to be misunderstanding (on purpose?) why people go to restaurants
I mostly agree, but there are some restaurants that one goes to purely for the food. Jitlada in Los Angeles is an obvious example; amazing food, but painfully slow service and blah ambience.
Or, to take another {former) L.A. Thai restaurant, I once ate this dish:
>The pla lui saun, a profoundly delicious dish of fish stripped of its spine, turned inside out and fried to a golden block of pure crunch, buried under a mound of Thai herbs, drizzled with hot, sweet sauce, may be the single best thing on the menu. As you eat, the bones crackle under your teeth, the cool fragrance of the cilantro and the threads of kaffir lime leaf spark the salty oiliness of the fish, and a top note of gingered sweetness weaves through the composition like a silvery trumpet line: spectacular.
but the restaurant was a storefront in a mini mall next to a tire shop, and the ambience wasn't much better.
I have eaten in all kinds of places, and the best food I ever have had came from a third tier strip mall Vietnamese place in Muscatine, Iowa.
Yeah, that is often the case. The aforementioned Jitlada is also in a strip mall.
And some critics are read more for their reviews than to find out "is this restaurant any good?" because they develop a gimmick and a following. The late A.A. Gill was known for his, um, acerbic style and you would read his food writing to see how exactly he was going to excoriate (or rarely, praise) the latest restaurant to be the subject of his attention:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._A._Gill
I also think Point 5 is underrated. A lot of what good literary criticism is doing is saying "what we see Character A doing in situation B, which at first may not make sense, is for reasons XYZ." You can see plenty of this on TVTropes' Fridge Brilliance page, but one specific case I found useful was Shamus Young's review of Final Fantasy X where he's discussing how Auron knows most of what's going on in the plot and carefully chooses what he tells of it, clarifying confusion into a complicated narrative of manipulation well-justified by the characters we meet on the story.
Now, this might not have anything to do with modern art, but...
Imagine a mystery author who serializes the story, publishing it chapter by chapter. Right before the scene which explains how the mystery is solved, the author dies.
There are then two reading experiences for the story. The first is for people who have solved the mystery and can understand all the hidden motivations of all the characters. The second is for people who haven't, and find everything everyone is doing confusing. The critic who explains whodunnit and why makes the book much more fun to reread.
What do we think of series where the author is still alive but has left the series at midpoint without a new entry for over a decade? I would suspect that there is no revelation that would vindicate the preceding entries, otherwise the author would have already written that.
I really don't understand why you're changing the topic like this.
I'm building off your idea. You imagine a scenario where the author dies, leaving the work unfinished. I'm thinking of multiple instances right now where the author isn't dead but the serialized work has been stuck incomplete.
Fair enough, sorry.
In that case I think that, justly, in a world that worked like Scott's childhood dream of restaurant critics, a literary critic who could explain coherently what resolution was being foreshadowed would be providing a valuable service, and this would let you rate literary critic reliability should the latest book in the sequence actually show up. A literary critic who says "there's no way out" only to have the author find one anyway would be laughed out of work.
(Patrick Rothfuss, I'm looking at you!)
Wow, did not expect to see Shamus Young name dropped here. He's probably one of my most-lamented creator deaths. I've re-read most of his retrospectives half-a-dozen times minimum over the years. I still recommend his writing to people whenever one of the things he has covered comes up, and a lot of his concise criticisms of human behavior and cultural trends are still up there with the Sequences in forming the foundations of my ability to notice mental fail-states.
So that said - are there any writers/essayists/critics/whatever-he-was you'd recommend similarly?
As for the Fridge Brilliance topic itself, I've often pondered the meaning of things I enjoy re-reading, games where I discover new details I love coming back 300 hours in. "See someone's earlier scenes now knowing what they had planned" is a very archetypical example muddled by the fact that humans have memory. So it's possible when the reveal hits on your first reading to call pack to scenes you found confusing and have them clarified in retrospect. But you'll probably notice even more on a second reading. Would you find the experience more compelling if you simply read the critic walking you through the story, or if you had read it yourself first, having been confused by the unclear motivations, and THEN read the critic's explanation causing everything to click into place?
... It depends, probably. Alongside Shamus Young, The Dark Id is another long-form writer where if anything I preferred going "blind" on journies into what he was covering, trusting that he'd emphasize stuff as needed.
I feel like "do you prefer knowing/figuring out all that hidden stuff on a first pass" is a really individual thing. My mother is a prolific life-long speed-reader who tended to read the last few pages of a mystery first and is in it mainly for the prose. Other people love that moment of realization, and digging back (either mentally or on a straight re-read) and realizing the changed context for everything they've experienced.
Heck I'm a mechanics-focused game designer and this is still something I do a lot - that moment of being introduced to a new thing that forces you to re-evaluate existing things is a lot of fun!
I was actually first linked to SlateStarCodex from the comments section on Shamus' blog. I think it was referencing how Scott was another promoter of online civility. Definitely appreciated the link!
Same, definitely. Miss the guy a lot, he was brilliant.
For other recommendations... Websnark (Eric Burns-White) is definitely on the list but most of his stuff was eaten by the internet. I think Alexander Wales' fiction analysis is pretty good. I myself have done some fiction analysis but I am not on Shamus Young's tier.
Mostly I just deeply hunger for text-based deep dive analyses and nobody is making them any more.
I'll also throw Michael O'Church's name into the ring, although he's one if those thinkers who will spend ages chewing on niche topics (lately the publishing industry) and then, every once in a while, will emerge with something like his three-ladder class concept.
Agreed, Shamus' death was tragic, and tragically American - i.e. the healthcare system caused him to delay treatment until the damage was terminal.
His family collectively keeping the site alive as a sort of living memorial is something I find touching.
"there is a million-item checklist every modern book must follow not to get panned as “gauche” or “unsophisticated”, and almost no great book of the past followed any of these rules. The Iliad certainly didn’t"
I try hard to be productively grandiose and gauche, yet I feel like lately I have come dangerously close to following the rules. I must invest more in megalomania.
Based
I would have thought the answer to the points about Chesterton etc. is the same as with the restaurants: it's a holistic experience. The restaurant experience includes not just food but the ambience, the chef's story etc. The experience of a Chesterton novel, in some sense, includes not just the novel itself, but the fact of Chesterton himself in all of his fatness, jolliness, Catholic-ness - just see the name "G. K. Chesterton" and you're probably picturing an image of Chesterton himself already (well, actually, I might be picturing Fiddler's Green from The Sandman, but it's all the same).
The context of political art includes the political situation of the day, perhaps in the way the artist doesn't mean - the extreme political statements of Rage Against the Machine now contrast against the relatively tranquil end-of-history vibes of the 90s in a way that suggests that RATM was tolerated precisely because communism was so defanged at the time, for instance. Art quite literally *cannot* happen in the void, even if you'd have a restaurant critic tasting it all as a RCT, that process itself would have a special ambience of its own that might affect the results.
Of course, that means there's also a specific process of experience and specific lessons to be learned from the fictional boomer sculptor and from AI Art. AI Art experience might be enchanced by the fact that it comes from the AI - what does it suggest that the computer is creating the sort of works that it creates? What does it suggest about our own sense of history if the form of sculpture can amaze us even if it is not actually ancient or medieval creation but a mass-market art product? What does it suggest if Duchamp can put an urinal in a show and have it appreciated? And so on.
I'm with Scott that sometimes it's helpful to be a little less holistic. Is there something about Chesterton's work that you can love and be transformed by even if you're encountering him for the first time with no idea about his personal history (or the deeply charming but not very Catholic Sandman version, for that matter)? If so, can that be allowed to have value independent of an awareness of Chesterton's context?
I've got nothing (at all!) against taking pleasure in art-as-discourse, art whose cleverness or appeal can only really be grasped if you understand its place in history. But I don't think all aesthetic experience reduces to that, or is enhanced by that. Sometimes the anti-holistic move -- splitting art's aesthetic appeal from its context -- is the right one.
I'm not necessarily saying that the experience of Chesterton when knowing about his background is superior or inferior to the experience of Chesterton without knowing anything about him, just that it's contextually driven in any case.
There's always context - even someone who doesn't know anything particular about Chesterton would, solely by the context of their name, have at least the context that they're most likely of Anglo heritage, which already drives at least some of the interpretation, especially when encountered in non-Anglo countries. One might then infer a number of other assumed characteristics, whether they're true or not.
Furthermore, I'm not sure if anyone who *does* know about Chesterton is truly as high-decoupling as to not let their image of Chesterton affect them at least a bit when perusing Chesterton's works.
And I'd suggest that "contextually *driven*" is stronger language than we should be using here. Context always exists -- none of our experience happens in a cultural or linguistic vacuum -- but context will often nuance rather than drive our experience. In some cases our awareness of context is so minimal that even nuance might be too strong a word.
If all you know about Chesterton is that he's writing in English and has an Anglo name, those are probably not major factors in your aesthetic reaction to his work. Even more so when you're responding to an image or sculpture or building without knowing its provenance.
It's cool to learn about the wider context of things. And I'm all for humanism of the "humani nil a me alienum puto" stripe --for trying to understand why other people have poured passion and resources into creating something that initially strikes you as ugly or unimpressive.
But at the end of the day, I don't believe in the superiority of art that you can really *only* appreciate with a laboriously-achieved awareness of its context -- Joyce's Ulysses or Eliot's Waste Land, for example, or architecture whose intentional ugliness is best defended by an excursus into history. Not saying it's inherently inferior, mind you. Just that the "holistic" experience of art-in-dialogue-with-other-art is neither inevitable nor superior to an aesthetic experience unmediated by awareness of that context.
I love Chesterton. I will yield to no man, woman, or beast on my love of him. But I would not say he was a great poet. A very good versifier and some of his poems are magnificent, but as a poet not in the first rank (and I think he'd agree, and he'd defend the second- and third-rank places as also having a place in the great scheme of things).
But if we're going to go "poems in the style of Chesterton" then I can only quote his own versions of "Old King Cole" written in the style of other poets as a funny and charming read:
https://www.babelmatrix.org/works/en/Chesterton%2C_Gilbert_Keith-1874/Variations_of_an_Air
Variations of an Air (English)
Composed on Having to Appear in a Pageant as Old King Cole
Old King Cole was a merry old soul,
And a merry old soul was he;
He called for his pipe,
He called for his bowl,
And he called for his fiddlers three.
after Lord Tennyson
Cole, that unwearied prince of Colchester,
Growing more gay with age and with long days
Deeper in laughter and desire of life
As that Virginian climber on our walls
Flames scarlet with the fading of the year;
Called for his wassail and that other weed
Virginian also, from the western woods
Where English Raleigh checked the boast of Spain,
And lighting joy with joy, and piling up
Pleasure as crown for pleasure, bade me bring
Those three, the minstrels whose emblazoned coats
Shone with the oyster-shells of Colchester;
And these three played, and playing grew more fain
Of mirth and music; till the heathen came
And the King slept beside the northern sea.
after Swinburne
In the time of old sin without sadness
And golden with wastage of gold
Like the gods that grow old in their gladness
Was the king that was glad, growing old:
And with sound of loud lyres from his palace
The voice of his oracles spoke,
And the lips that were red from his chalice
Were splendid with smoke.
When the weed was as flame for a token
And the wine was as blood for a sign;
And upheld in his hands and unbroken
The fountains of fire and of wine.
And a song without speech, without singer,
Stung the soul of a thousand in three
As the flesh of the earth has to sting her,
The soul of the sea.
after Robert Browning
Who smoke-snorts toasts o' My Lady Nicotine,
Kicks stuffing out of Pussyfoot, bids his trio
Stick up their Stradivarii (that's the plural
Or near enough, my fatheads; nimium
Vicina Cremonce; that's a bit too near.)
Is there some stockfish fails to understand?
Catch hold o' the notion, bellow and blurt back "Cole"?
Must I bawl lessons from a horn-book, howl,
Cat-call the cat-gut "fiddles"? Fiddlesticks!
after W.B. Yeats
Of an old King in a story
From the grey sea-folk I have heard
Whose heart was no more broken
Than the wings of a bird.
As soon as the moon was silver
And the thin stars began,
He took his pipe and his tankard,
Like an old peasant man.
And three tall shadows were with him
And came at his command;
And played before him for ever
The fiddles of fairyland.
And he died in the young summer
Of the world's desire;
Before our hearts were broken
Like sticks in a fire.
after Walt Whitman
Me clairvoyant,
Me conscious of you, old camarado,
Needing no telescope, lorgnette, field-glass, opera-glass, myopic pince-nez,
Me piercing two thousand years with eye naked and not ashamed;
The crown cannot hide you from me,
Musty old feudal-heraldic trappings cannot hide you from me,
I perceive that you drink.
(I am drinking with you. I am as drunk as you are.)
I see you are inhaling tobacco, puffing, smoking, spitting
(I do not object to your spitting),
You prophetic of American largeness,
You anticipating the broad masculine manners of these States;
I see in you also there are movements, tremors, tears, desire for the melodious,
I salute your three violinists, endlessly making vibrations,
Rigid, relentless, capable of going on for ever;
They play my accompaniment; but I shall take no notice of any accompaniment;
I myself am a complete orchestra.
So long.
A lover of verse pastiche, I'd never read this. Thank you for sharing it!
Yeah, I raised a (snobby) eyebrow at that sentence about “the great poets, like Chesterton.” I can only name one of his poems and that because it’s been written about here! I don’t think I’ve ever seen his poetry anthologized, and I did my PhD in British literature of the period. Which could all suggest that academia is parochial, not that Chesterton stinks, of course. But it was funny seeing it taken as a given.
That Swinburne version rocks hard ! Now I want to read the full epic saga of King Cole, or at least watch a blockbuster movie based on it -- in the style of Christopher Nolan or perhaps Darren Aronofsky. It should be titled simply, "COLE".
Oh, that's just about the funniest Whitman parody I've ever seen. :) Genius.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Kind of convinces me even more that Yeats created some genius poetry even when I don't understand it. Even the parody sounds good, and it's impressive how Chesterton caught the technique and spirit.
I feel kind of the same way about Weird Al Yanckovic's "style parody" of DEVO, "Dare to be Stupid."
RATM was "tolerated" because we have the First Amendment.
Obviously. I was talking more in the sense of major record contracts, co-operation with more moderate forces like Michael Moore, general cultural promotione tc.
The Black Panther Party were feted by Leonard Bernstein in 1970, well before communism was defeated.
Ok, but you see how it would be unbelievably bad and cringe if you actually wrote a Homeric epic in 2026 and expected it to be taken seriously as literature. Like a fedora wearing white guy wearing a samurai outfit—it doesn’t matter if it’s historically accurate, it doesn’t carry the same interesting/beautiful connotation as an actual in the same outfit in feudal Japan. Like it or not, part of what makes art good is the circumstance of its creation.
No, I don't see this. I'm not a good enough poet to make it work, and I think there's a bigger problem that there isn't much going on that the epic format is suitable to describe - even if someone in the Ukraine War wanted to write about their experiences, I don't think the circumstances of modern war afford the level of individual glory and heroism that the traditional epic form centers around, and I think it would be tough to either write a heartfelt war epic that didn't confront the unethicalness of war, or to bend the structure of the heroic epic so that it did confront it.
But these are all the sorts of obstacles that good artists prove their genius by finding ways to overcome. I refuse to believe that these sorts of practical matters force all books to be either sparse prose or collections of short free verse poems.
I've tried to write a couple of epics over the years to demonstrate my point, but never gotten anything to a point that I'm happy publishing. Maybe one day I'll change that and prove you wrong.
I don’t want to discourage you because I think it’s cool, but one problem is that even thinking about a modern person’s actions as ”epic” in the Homeric sense is adjacent to parody. That’s been true for hundreds of years, so the only real successful serious epic in English is a retelling of the Biblical story (which escapes the problem because it is mythical and deadly serious for believers).
Say more about why you think even thinking about a modern person’s actions as ”epic” in the Homeric sense is adjacent to parody and how that’s been true for hundreds of years?
Even in the 18th century the most famous epic style poems are satirical/comedic (the Rape of the Lock is probably the most famous example, worth looking up if you are unfamiliar).
Don Juan by Byron is also humorous.
Modern people are too self aware or something like that.
John Adams or Philip Glass could write an opera about Borlaug that would convey the right heroic magnitude. I don’t know about Homeric, but epic is achievable.
Yes, I could imagine that.
What about an epic about WWII? It is very mythologized and serious to most modern people.
If a classic epic is about a hero's journey and individual behvaiour to be praised or condemned, then modern warfare is a particularly ill-suited setting for an epic. People have a good sense that modern warfare leaves little room for individual heroics. The human element even gets optimized out, as can be seen in Ukraine in its currently purest form.
If anything, superhero stories are our modern equivalent of classic epics because their entire premise is so divorced from reality that they allow for the kind of individualistic exploits that would considered laughable in a more grounded setting.
Counterpoint: George Lucas based a lot of Star Wars on WWII combat. The star destroyers, conceptually speaking, were just WWII battleships in space. Seems like he managed to cobble a worthy hero's journey together from it. Granted, that was SciFi/Fantasy, but it seems pretty obvious an imaginative person could write some Horatio Hornblower type stories, for example, in the context of WWII.
He still had to add magic and make up a completely contrived reason why one random farmboy could singlehandedly defeat the entire Empire.
The parts of Star Wars that "work" as a hero's journey were not at all based on WW2.
Fighter pilots are the last refuge of individual heroics in modern war, a single man with courage and skill doing meaningful damage to the enemy. And so the most recent successful war epic was Top Gun: Maverick.
Then again James Bond can also save the world on occasion by pressing a self-destruct button on the way out of a bad guy's lair.
Heroics aren't so much about the damage one can do; it's about the personal risk that makes it heroic. During the Western occupation of Afghanistan, for example, US drone operators were sitting in a control room in Ramstein AB, capable of inflicting a lot of damage but their greatest personal risk was spilling hot coffee over their uniform. Does that count as heroic?
Likewise, a modern fighter pilot presses a button to release a missile aimed by radar far beyond visual range, if it can be helped. The gun on the F-35, for example, is optional, and it's part of the design at all due to tradition more than a real expectation of dogfights; like bringing a backup knife to a gunfight. The next step in fighter evolution is probably more of a drone C&C platform, further removing the pilot from danger and therefore from classic "Red Baron"-style heroics.
Then write pure fiction.
Comics are often incredibly impressed with their own main characters and it serves them well. Sure, the kind of person who's obsessed with minimizing their novel's attack surface thinks that Absolute Wonder Woman is cringe and One Piece is for defective children. But they're successful, popular, and artistically worthwhile - despite, or more likely because of, the fact that they're consciously trying to be epics.
The epic style is probably more accessible in graphic novels or films, I agree.
cf. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60316971-bea-wolf
I agree that comic epics and religious epics are our best bet, but this makes me sad. The actions of Norman Borlaug or Mohandas Gandhi are surely greater than those of Achilles by the modern way of reckoning up greatness. Even George Patton was pretty epic in the literal sense of the term. Why *can't* we appreciate an epic that takes them seriously?
I think the answer is "people would mock it, mockery is corrosive to dignity, and we can only overcome that by the fact that ancient epics get an unprincipled exception to our tendency of mocking anything too sincere". But at some point, I think it becomes a specific goal of art to fight back against the haters and refuse to cede ground to them. Also, if you had a hundred good epics, eventually you would have established a new norm and mocking them would be harder.
Probably the biggest way we reckoned the greatness of Mohandas Gandhi and George Patton was by the way of an epic biopic, and while I'm not sure that would be the best form for Borlaug, I could see an epic miniseries.
You might be suffering from survivorship bias there. Mockery isn't a modern invention.
https://greekreporter.com/2025/10/10/ancient-greek-parody-homer-iliad/
>The Batrachomyomachia (“The Battle of Frogs and Mice”) is the only surviving complete ancient Greek epic parody, a humorous adaptation of Homer’s Iliad. Scholars place its composition sometime between the 6th and 4th centuries BC, or possibly later.
I agree, but somehow I feel that whatever Julian Jaynes and others identified as being different about Homeric heroes compared to modern people (ignoring the accuracy of the larger theory) is somehow importantly related to what makes ancient epics special.
> The actions of Norman Borlaug or Mohandas Gandhi are surely greater than those of Achilles by the modern way of reckoning up greatness.
I don't think this is true. There is an official orthodoxy that says Gandhi's actions are more impressive and more admirable than Achilles'.
But modern people don't believe that. The orthodoxy simply doesn't express the modern way of reckoning greatness.
I want to put up a heroic statue of Norman Borlaug, like if Boris Vallejo did the Collosus of Rhodes in bronze. 90 feet tall. Buck naked. Holding aloft a torch.
And next to him, a plastic Stegasaurus.
You've got the pose all wrong. He needs to be slaying the embodiment of Famine with a scythe.
Why not one of each?
Here's a ChatGPT gen on a similar theme
https://chatgpt.com/c/6a031ccb-e550-832e-9940-aacfb74bac6d
I think one could absolutely make an epic about a figure like Borlaug today, and have it be taken seriously, but it very obviously wouldn't be a _Homeric_ epic: Homer would probably not understand the heroism of Borlaug, and your comment above acknowledges that moderns have a conception of heroism in which Achilles is much diminished compared to how the ancients viewed him.
You would obviously have to change the plot, the characters, the nature of the drama and difficulties he would have to overcome; the nature of his interaction with fate/the gods, etc.
Even a war epic set in Ukraine would, as you note, be a poor fit for a straight-up Homeric epic: the nature of bravery/martial valour/etc are all different in modern war.
So the question becomes: if the plot, character, and themes will all have to adapt to modern context... What would be enough for you to consider it a Homeric epic? Written in hexameter? Extensive use of formulas?
Could I count the movie Oppenheimer as an epic about a heroic, Promethean figure? What about Schindler's List? Citizen Kane?
Is there something those movies are missing that keeps them from being the modern version of a Homeric epic?
Have you read The Wizard And The Prophet? Half of it is about Borlaug. To me it read like an epic, to be honest. Complete with story arc.
That is certainly in part due to my biased interest in such topics. It also probably helps that I don't need other people's opinions on whether it is an epic or not.
I did, but I think it's pretty clearly intended as a more journalistic, non fiction work that I don't think counts as an epic in a literary sense
Me: Please write an epic poem celebrating Norman Borlaug
ChatGPT:
Edit: I can't format this properly as much as I try. It should be four lines, empty line, four lines, empty line, until the end.
Sing now of furrowed kingdoms and the patient hand of grain,
Of winds that crossed the prairie lands and carried both dust and rain;
Of famine stalking barefoot through the valleys of the earth,
Until a quiet scholar rose to reckon hunger’s worth.
Not mailed in bronze or jeweled silk came he who changed the field,
But clad in sunburnt workman’s cloth with notebooks for a shield.
From Norman Borlaug the furrows learned
That hope may grow where science and compassion both are earned.
In northern plains where winters carve their laws in ice and stone,
A child once walked through humble rows his family called their own.
He heard the threshing engines roar beneath the harvest moon,
And learned that want may visit fast when crops fail all too soon.
Then came the years of ash and drought, the blackened skies of need,
When nations learned with bitter mouths the fragileness of seed.
The old world’s granaries grew thin; the poor ate grief for bread;
And prophets whispered countless more would soon be counted dead.
Yet not with sword nor throne he fought that vast devouring night.
He entered laboratories lit by pale electric light.
He crossed the mountains southward where the Mexican fields lay dry,
And studied every rusting stalk beneath the blazing sky.
There in the heat he forged a grain no tempest could disgrace,
A wheat that bent beneath the wind yet rose in strength and grace;
Short-stemmed, stubborn, golden-crowned, with harvests rich and vast,
A quiet revolution born from patience unsurpassed.
The skeptics mocked. “The earth is fixed. Its hunger none can tame.”
But Borlaug drove through dust and rain with fire beneath his name.
He taught the weary soil to yield beyond its ancient scale,
And watched as barren acres answered like a swelling gale.
Then India called through monsoon clouds; then Pakistan through fear,
For famine’s horse stood at the gate and winter hovered near.
The ships arrived with precious seed; the anxious nations sowed;
And suddenly the plains erupted bright with living gold.
The granaries thundered open wide. The markets filled with grain.
Where children once knew swollen want, new harvest songs would reign.
The fields became green oceans under dawn’s triumphant flame,
And millions lived who otherwise had vanished without name.
No conqueror returning home with banners stained in red
Could equal what one scientist achieved with wheat instead.
For every loaf on humble tables, every village spared,
Bore witness to the stubborn faith this tireless man declared:
That peace is not mere treaty ink nor cannons laid aside,
But full bowls set before the poor with human care as guide.
For hunger is the oldest war, the first despairing cry;
To feed the world is nobler far than teaching men to die.
So honor now the patient hands that worked without acclaim,
The fields that rose in emerald waves and sanctified his name.
Let kings remember, when they boast of monuments that soar,
The man who armed the earth with bread and asked for little more.
And when the evening settles soft on every sown domain,
When tractors sleep beside the barns and dark consumes the plain,
Still through the whispering wheat there moves a steadfast, living lore:
That one man’s labor fed the earth — and taught it hope once more.
----------
I don't know if its great art or if its accurate to his life, but I'm a sucker for epics about scientific acomplishemnt. I teared up reading it.
Kudos to ChatGPT for doing the work that humans won't do.
It's quite accurate as far as I remember. One quibble: He didn't really work in labs, his lab were the fields where he even pollinated wheat by hand to create new breeds. So if at all, the poem undersells his efforts.
On a slightly more solemn note, it also omits Borlaug's own insight that he felt he was just relieving a current emergency, but continuing population growth might outdo his efforts.
Hamilton counts as a solid attempt. The elite cultural consensus eventually turned on it, but there were a few years where its earnestness was broadly enjoyed rather than mocked, and today's nerds are still allowed to love it without shame.
In a non-doomed timeline, it would be interesting to see how Hamilton eventually gets ranked compared to more cynical awardwinning 2010s musicals.
That sounds like a political objection more than anything. Assuming that's a real problem, then replace the modern person with a modern idea, whatever it is the Kids These Days believe in. Write a Homeric epic about the rise of the Internet over old-fashioned broadcasting.
The Godfather. The Sopranos. Succession. Breaking Bad / Better Call Saul. There Will be Blood. These are all epics in the Homeric sense about recognizably modern people, and are not parodies.
I think they're more like Oedipus than Homer's heroes. Although Succession is King Lear.
Who in Succession is Cordelia?
Googling turned up these:
https://flora.substack.com/p/kendall-cordelia-thesis
https://www.tumblr.com/pynkhues/668096558887239680/in-terms-of-king-lear-succession-i-always-see
I think it would be fair to call Ulysses “parody” of the epic, in a sense, but that doesn’t mean it fails as art, and epical art at that.
I guess I just think the provenance of objects is meaningful by itself. Hence, an antique katana that saw action during a bunch of interesting battles is more interesting than a perfectly engineered one made by modern machines. And I think I can like the antique more, and still “like katanas”.
I agree with you that this is the natural popular perception, I just think it belies people's claim to actually like art. As in my statue for dentists in McMansions example, you can't say both "it's just interesting that this has a complex provenance" and "looking at this utterly transformed my very soul".
Seems to me like either or both could be true. The Sistine Chapel is awesome to behold and has interesting provenance. The Venus of willendorf has provenance but isn’t that special to look at. An aircraft carrier is awesome to behold but has no interesting antique provenance.
I guess it depends on the carrier. Exploring the museums on the Hornet or the Lexington (Essex-class, not their predecessors which lie at the bottom of the Pacific) definitely has a different feel to it than the one on the USS Midway. The Lexington and the Hornet actually fought in WW2, the Midway was launched after it had already ended.
And I admit I feel a tinge of sadness when thinking about the fate of the USS Enterprise(yorktown class).
The most decorated ship in the history of the US Navy, the "Lucky E" or the "Gray Ghost" was unceremoniously scrapped because not enough funds could be raised to turn it into a museum ship.
And if in some hypothetical future it were to be perfectly reconstructed it just wouldn't feel the same.
Provenance matters because having a profound emotional experience in response to the statue with a $20.00 sticker still under the base feels like getting conned. If someone's going to make me feel deep and profound, there should be something deep and profound happening at the other end (eg. a Renaissance master sweating and labouring away); if some garden furniture company can move my soul for pennies without a thought, what does that make me?
Thought experiment: if a psychotic person fled into a cave in the Arizona desert, scratched a Homer-quality epic poem into the walls and then ran into the sun to die, I can entirely imagine people saying it was one of the greatest works of literature ever. If he turned out to be still alive, and have done the cave thing as a marketing stunt for something that Claude wrote for him, it would cheapen it to the point that being moved by it would feel almost like a violation (even if you knew about the fraud before you read the poem) because the emotion is unearned on the artist's end.
This is also why modern art only works if it's fantastically expensive; being moved by the formaldehyde shark that costs millions feels far less tacky than being moved by your neighbour's dog that they got preserved at picklemypet.com. Quite literally, the low price tag and mass-producedness of it cheapens the experience.
I alsoI think some of people's attitudes about paying for sex is linked to all this, but I've not sketched out the details.
I think the way to make sense of this is that in art, the mechanism by which you have your soul utterly transformed can include provenance: what transforms you is not just your response to the object itself, but also your response to the effort, concentration, mastery of technique, attention to detail, etc, necessary to achieve it.
For Michelangelo, to create those human figures required a huge amount of effort, mastery, etc, and so when one looks at one of his statues and thinks about the obsessive study and work that went into it, one feels even more of a sense of transformation.
I suspect a lot of defenders of mainstream views on art and taste will just flat out reject the idea that your various components need to be unbundled, and only one of them identified as the true test of art.
As a kind of dumb analogy, imagine if someone asked, "why don't baseball fans think that a trebuchet is better than Babe Ruth? It can launch a baseball much further!" And insisting that baseball _must_ be decomposed into the component features that people enjoy about it, and only one of them can be what enjoying baseball is _really_ about.
I was going to say something similar. The provenance of something changes the sensory experience for me, or at least the way the sensory experience translates into an emotional reaction.
At the science museum in London, you can see up close one of the engines that powered the first airplane that crossed the ocean (https://photos.app.goo.gl/CfhC16Yu3AK58oja7, better photo of the same model of engine here: https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/rolls-royce-eagle-viii-v-12-engine/nasm_A19610135000). Separate from its relationship to historical events, I think it's interesting to look at, if not particularly memorable. And I find many things like engines _aesthetically_ pleasing (or at least aesthetically attention-grabbing), wherever they came from, not just intellectually interesting.
But looking at this particular engine was moving for me in a way it would not have been if I hadn't read the plaque. It's form and details and the way it sits on the stand just look different to me, knowing where it came from. I still think about it sometimes.
In some defense of Scott's point, I think there are some details of provenance and context that we do want to exclude as irrelevant to _aesthetic_ (as distinct from historical) appreciation. I just think he's wrong that "artistic merit" is best thought of as being a judgement that excludes _all_ context.
I think that the katana example conflates provenance and technique. True, today we can mass-produce pretty decent swords using modern metallurgy, and in fact it's possible that modern machetes are far superior to any historical katanas in terms of sharpness, corrosion resistance, edge retention, and other objective metrics. But the Ancient Japanese smiths who made those katanas did not have access to all of our fancy toys. They had to fold the steel thousands of times to manually hammer out the impurities, and the resulting product would be incredibly impressive even if it never did see military action.
This is part of provenance IMO (or at least I meant it as such)
Understood. That said though, I always thought of "provenance" as being the personal history of a specific object that is linked to famous people or events; i.e. a katana owned by Miyamoto Musashi would have provenance, whereas ten other katanas made in the same time period and stored forever in some basement would not.
> I guess I just think the provenance of objects is meaningful by itself.
When you walk into an art gallery, you are presented with the art, which has a label next to it with some writing on it.
I think there is an extreme condition where all of the actual art - the thing that triggers the internal experience you are seeking when you visit the gallery - is in the writing that is on the label and not in the object itself.
I am still waiting for a modern art exhibit which is just a label describing concept and provenance, next to an empty space; a visual equivalent of 4'33". Has someone already done this and I am simply unaware?
You might want to read the book, The Painted Word, by Tom Wolfe.
If not, you should do it and sell the empty space to some rich person for tax evasion purposes ! Counterfeiting may become an issue, however. :-)
This exists. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum still "displays" the empty spaces formerly occupied by paintings stolen in the 1990 heist (https://www.gardnermuseum.org/about/theft).
I don't think it would work if the empty spaces didn't have an interesting provenance.
The Gardner Museum conspicuously lacks any labels!
I think part of the reason why a Homeric epic written in the modern day would seem "cringe" is that Homer's ideas were so transformative as to become part of our culture. Thus seeing the same themes rehashed today would feel stale and cliche -- we are saturated by them. If you wanted to create an epic work in the modern day, you'd have to transform it, not merely ape the original. For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Warriors_(film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabasis_(Xenophon)
On the contrary. You can rehash Homer and point out explicitly that your work is a rehash of Homer, and people will love it and think it feels fresher than more modern work. People are mostly not already familiar with the source material.
Compare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic:_The_Musical
> This musical project, released between 2022 and 2024, is a sung-through adaptation of the Ancient Greek epic poem Odyssey by Homer and takes inspiration from different musical genres as well as modern musical theater, anime and video games. It recounts the story of Odysseus as he tries to return from Troy to his island kingdom of Ithaca after the conclusion of the decade-long Trojan War.
> It has received widespread praise from reviewers and listeners for the emotional depth and narrative complexity it exhibits through its musical format.
Perhaps another reason is that (I'm guessing) while Odysseus was on his journey he didn't know if or when it would ever end, whereas the idea of embarking on a genuinely open ended journey today seems faintly ridiculous.
One modern novel which seems to tick most if not all epic boxes is "The Journeyer" by Gary Jennings, a fictional account of the travels of Marco Polo, in which he gets into all sorts of scrapes and, like Odysseus, must wonder if he will ever see his home again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Journeyer
We are still creating epics, though in different forms to the poetic style. Movies?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Battle_After_Another
The deification of George Floyd? Renee Good and Alex Pretti who didn't quite achieve the same level of sanctification but are still heroes not to be criticised?
Seriously, look at the reaction to George Floyd and tell me this is not something out of a Greek play (probably about hubris):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcF6g4aYS18
Getting political leaders to wear your colours and kneel before you?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZgVBFYM2qk
Were you a little less proudly partisan, you might also have mentioned the right wing's beatification of Kirk.
https://www.youtube.com/live/4AKWzUIpX6U?t=13610s
Kirk at least is known for the things he did other than getting killed.
Aw, thanks for the compliment! "Proudly Partisan" is something I'd put on a T-shirt, did I wear T-shirts!
Interestingly, despite the recent years, I would guess someone wearing a "Proudly Partisan" T-shirt is a lefty.
Not your country, not your state, not the community you love.
You live 4,000 miles away and are informed, it seems, primarily by hateful assholes on social media. I’ll give your opinion the weight it merits.
"are informed, it seems, primarily by hateful assholes"
Now, now, Tír Eoghain, don't be so hard on yourself. Change is possible!
You seem to be a little confused as to your mental model of my views. It is entirely possible to hold *both* "Floyd was a petty criminal and not a tragic hero deliberately murdered by the fascist state" *and* "that encounter should not have resulted in his death" as opinions.
I think "Not your country, not your state, not the community you love" would be better directed to these compatriots of mine, as I was not out marching or protesting or signing petitions for anyone on any side:
https://www.rte.ie/archives/2025/0522/1514351-black-lives-matter/
It took a while to figure out Tír Eoghain. First guess was an obscure Tolkien character.
> I don't think the circumstances of modern war afford the level of individual glory and heroism that the traditional epic form centers around
At the complete opposite end of the fame and respectability scale from Homer is a set of novellas called "Shoshimin Series", which has now been adapted into a cartoon.
These take the form of a series of very traditional fair-play whodunnits. They have all the components of it down to perfection. You have the setting, the puzzle pieces, the tension, the false theories, the big reveal, you the reader kicking yourself when you realise just how early you had all the pieces you needed for the correct solution (maybe that part is just me, IDK). But there are no stakes. No-one is murdered. The mysteries are things like "who ate the last muffin?" or "how did they make the hot chocolate without using the sink?"
There are many other examples, though that one is my current favourite. It is perfectly possible to explore the form separate from the content.
You want to write an epic about the present, but epics have usually been about the legendary past, not the present.
The Trojan War was 400 years old to Homer, and even more ancient to later Greeks and Romans, who continued to write epics and other works using that setting, for example the Aeneid or the Oresteia.
Throughout the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, countless epics were written about the Matter of France and the Matter of Britain, respectively the times of Charlemagne and Arthur, ancient at that point.
Fantasy itself stems from that tradition. There is a continuous production of Arthurian material throughout the last thousand years or thereabouts, and when someone today writes an Arthurian story, everyone calls it "fantasy".
There is even a connection through Tolkien, who (I believe) thought of himself as writing in the epic tradition. Indeed, his Middle Earth is explicitly the past of our Earth, his elves and dwarves the elves and dwarves of our world.
There are two ways to write an epic today and be taken seriously.
The first one is to make it "fantasy". I've always wanted to write one in an Arthurian setting, either wholly in verse, or in a mixture of prose and verse. It would be simultaneously an imitation of past works (by Renaissance authors writing about mythical dark ages, e.g. Orlando Furioso), and a contemporary fantasy. If Tolkien can have bits of verse in his novels so can any fantasy author, stretch that principle and you get a whole fantasy epic in verse. Fantasy fans would love it. The only reason I'm never gonna do it is that AI is already ending all human art, so there is no point.
The other way to be taken seriously is to rely on genres of poetry that thrive today, such as rap albums or musical drama. If you write an epic as a musical, you can even make it about present day themes.
When I was a young adult circa 2000, peak European power metal era, lots and lots of epic bands making epic albums about epic warriors, but none with a modern setting, I kept thinking: one day I'm gonna start a power metal band about WW2, it's gonna be different. Then Sabaton stole exactly my idea and that made them famous, even though they're nothing special and their songs all sound the same. I don't know if they've ever made any album with a single cohesive story, but if they did, it's an epic in verse.
So are many power metal albums. For example, the two parts House of Atreus album by Virgin Steele.
If Gloryhammer's discography isn't an epic, I don't know what is.
Gloryhammer is extremely derivative of Rhapsody (later rebranded Rhapsody of Fire).
I guess I'm a decrepit boomer (actually an early millennial), who listens to boomer bands, because I'm permanently astonished that nobody in Gloryhammer-related comment sections ever brings up Rhapsody or appears to remember the existence of that seminal band (even though the Gloryhammer songwriter has credited them explicitly).
There is a huge difference between the two bands though, because Rhapsody believed itself a very serious band that was very seriously doing the same thing Homer and Tolkien were doing. It was 100% unintentional that they come across as silly, in part due to having English as a second language (to win the black lord? surely they mean to defeat the black lord).
Gloryhammer took that silliness and ran with it, the difference is that in their case it's deliberate, Gloryhammer doesn't actually want to be serious. Gloryhammer is also making an epic, but it's a "mock epic" (Wikipedia: Mock-heroic, mock-epic or heroi-comic works are typically satires or parodies that mock the elevated style of common Classical stereotypes of heroes and heroic literature).
By Rhapsody (or "Rhapsody of Fire") I mean the classic era of the trio Staropoli-Lione-Turilli, during which they tell a single epic story in 9 albums, from Legendary Tales (1997) to From Chaos to Eternity (2011), then the band split up into a million splinter bands also named "rhapsody".
Speaking of derivative power metal, Angus McSix has a new album!
I don't think the Illiad is an accurate depiction of the tactics of the time it's about.
I feel like you shouldn't write like Homer because the Homeric epics aren't actually good, by modern standards.
I read the Odyssey recently for the first time since high school and my reaction was that it was ... super weird. Old-timey style aside, just as a story, if someone wrote it today you'd find it very strange and bad.
I'm willing to say that "by modern standards" isn't "books are better now" but "important context that makes it good gets lost in translation over 3,000 years", but you don't live 3,000 years ago or even know what it is that got lost in translation since then, so if you tried to ape its style, it would inevitably suck.
"Old-timey style"? did you read it in ancient Greek?
Someone here remarked that Hamilton is an epic poem. Imagine reading the script of Hamilton, translated into another language. It would be super weird. The beauty of a translated poem depends greatly on the translation.
I don't think this is true as a general rule. Epic poetry kept being written many centuries -even millennia!- after Homer, and people could accept it as art when the whole originating context (Dark Age Greece, Oral-Formulaic tradition, etc...) was gone. Of course, that meant the genre changed in significant ways. The Aeneid , The Divine Commedy and Renaissance epics like The Faerie Queen, Os Lusíadas or Paradise lost don't feel like a fedora wearing white guy wearing a samurai outfit.
I offer you Omeros: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omeros
Isn't the whole point of a Homeric epic that Homer didn't one day sit down and go "Right, time to write a Homeric epic, something that I, Homer, am known to do", but that it's meant to be epic poetry to be orally performed and written down kind of as an afterthought?
It is kind of odd in general how much of Western culture is based on *reading* works (Homeric epics, Shakespeare etc.) that are very much intended to be *performed*. I recently saw a comparison of reading Shakespeare to getting to know about Godfather by reading the script.
The Aeneid is also pretty good, and although I'm not a classicist my impression is that Virgil *did* sit down one day and go "Right, time to write a Homeric epic, something that I, Virgil, am known to do."
I'm stuck on how Homer-Simpson-like "Time to write a Homeric epic, something that I, Homer, am known to do", sounds now.
Well, he wasn't known to do that at the time. He was known for it afterwards, when it was in fact something that he'd done.
Wikipedia suggests that the Aeneid was commissioned, not something that he spontaneously chose to work on.
Yeah, the modern equivalent would be a poet laureate being commissioned by a billionaire to write in a genre he wasn’t famous for.
I had the impression that it was strongly hinted by Augustus that "Okay Virgil, write me a Homeric epic about the greatness of Rome, something you are known to do" and Virgil agreed. At the least, it was a project undertaken during a time of chaos in order to provide a sort of foundational mythology for Augustus bringing about peace and reconstructing Rome in the wake of the civil war, probably influenced by his patron Maecenas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_commentary_of_the_Aeneid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Maecenas
I think Virgil had a very definite end in view when writing the Aeneid, not simply to create a great work of poetry.
Lots and lots of epic poems were written in classical times, medieval, early modern, romantic and victorian times.
They have always been regarded as belonging to the same genre in which Homer was writing.
That may be because for thousands of years people didn't realize that Homeric poems originated as oral poetry. Still, at this point, that is what in our tradition we call "epic poetry". A long narrative heroic poem written by a poet, like Vergil, Dante, Spenser, Milton, Ariosto, Tasso, Byron...
The Godfather began as a novel.
Maybe Homer wasn't known for epics when he first came up with the Illiad, but when he did the sequel everyone must have known his deal.
I believe nowadays the technical term for this is "larping".
The Silmarillion was a Bible / Prose Edda mash up, and it's one of my favourite books.
Naomi Kanakia has been writing a series of tales in a style inspired by the Icelandic Sagas, except about random modern things, and they're kind of amazing.
Samurai armor is less useful than modern bulletproof & stabproof fabric.
There is a story I dimly remember but have not been able to find. There was some cynical late 19th century author who claimed there could never again be a genuine epic. The genre was dead, nobody had the correct beliefs anymore, they had all been supplanted. Thus, he wrote a deconstructionist ballad of some sort. A year or two later, Chesterton came along. Chesterton is very conservative, and he still had this old ballad spirit. He wrote The Ballad of the White Horse, a really great and totally genuine epic.
The circumstances then are the circumstances now, for some. If you have that old epic spirit, I think you could write an epic just the same.
Anybody remember Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, a somewhat mediocre-themed but engaging novel told gloriously in sonnet form? It was a huge hit back in the 1980s.
Reading this, and remembering some other posts you have written about art, I feel that because you ”have no taste in visual art” (I don’t really understand what this means), you are somehow overly preoccupied with what ”ultra sophisticated” critics say (the ones who claim to be fascinated by basketballs floating in water or whatever), instead of having your own areas of interest from which you approach the subject.
It’s as if someone who has no interest in clothes who thinks that reading about the most outré haute couture is the key to understanding why people like fashion.
Spot on. This is the first post that l have seen om Astral Codex. Idk much about the rationalist movement as I would consider myself actually a promoter of violating these taboos of reason such as putting some virtue in elimination of the placebo effect, which despite all your fancy arguments is just a great way of doing rigorous science that harms people. Shamans used the placebo effect to heal more effectively than the 17 pills I have to take brother. Why the fuck are you writing a huge lengthy piece a out something you clearly have no understanding of at all. Donny, you have no frame of reference here. This definitely sounds like it has been written by someone who has never had a transcendent experience of a y kind because he is too busy dissecting life. Which btw, kills what your are supposedly studying. Life. Get a book about holistic thinking and gaia so you can actually learn somethkng useful for the future instead of thinking that you can technology yourself out of the problems that rationalist technological thinking CAUSED. I mean I always introduced myself as the "smartest idiot you know". But I think if this was the only thing he had written he would have me beat by a mile. In both categories as I'm sure he is already far smarter than me. In the words of Tyler Durden "So how's that working out for ya"..."what?"...."you know, being clever, hows that working out for you". This is not an article that is going to attract a single person to your cause. Maybe that wasn't its purpose. But it looks like a lot of wasted effort that would be better used going for a walk in the woods or planting a garden. Keep on finding the "solutions" by all means team! While the world burns 🔥 everywhere you can see? This is fine. But what snobs think about art?! Now there is a problem that needs solving (if it exists at all). /endtruthrant
Apologies for typos. Real humans aren't computers and maybe us disabled folk struggle to communicate among such merry-go-round of steel men and straw men and while I use bayesian reasoning everyday. Following your feeling is a real thing guys. And from my experience it is a much simpler approach to life to just be a kind and gentle person and free your mind, and the rest will follow. As three wise women once said.
Hi Jason,
Thanks for sharing. Honestly, my main impression upon reading this is sadness, because I have found reading ACX to be quite complementary to living a meaningful life. And I think you have Scott Alexander completely backwards to say you think his dissection of life is destroying it; at least for a nerdy subset of the population, true understanding is how we appreciate life and make the world better. And you can arrive at truth through rationality.
As for placebos, no one wants to get rid of the placebo effect. We just don't want to rely on it. In clinical trials, the placebo effect can limit our ability to know whether a treatment works or not, so we want to avoid it during those trials. Afterward, treatment and placebo go together. Anyone who actually thinks the placebo effect is bad is not rational and would not fit in amongst rationalists, who are very consequentialist reasoners.
For the record, we only understand the placebo effect as such because of rational truth-seeking in medicine. So don't be too quick to suggest anti-rational approaches are better. What matters is rationality aligned with human values. Scott Alexander's "How Bad Are Things?" might show you what he actually cares about.https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/24/how-bad-are-things/
(Hint: pretty much what you care about as far as I can tell, in terms of human outcomes).
I would also recommend "My Heart of Hearts", https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-heart-of-hearts.
There's a conspiracy theory that Linus Pauling promoted hyperbolic claims about the benefits of Vitamin C as a way of exploiting the placebo effect for good https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2009/03/11/self-experiment/ A less prestigious physicist, Greg Cochran, argues that the supposed effect is really just regression to the mean, and those shamans weren't helping anyone other themselves https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/03/31/medicine-as-a-pseudoscience/
Okay, like, I agree with your opinion on art critique, but... what's the issue? Even if their desires are memetic and based on a shared delusion, the beauty and wonder they feel is just as real. Aren't you doing the same thing as them by claiming that their commentary is "bad"? The first step to rejecting memetic desire is to stop giving a shit about what other people think. You don't have to justify your wants to anyone. At the same time, you're not entitled to respect for having those desires.
Okay, but it does bother me that most of the new buildings around me are ugly, and whenever I ask why we can't make them prettier, people give me the sorts of arguments I try to rebut above.
Those are just your subjective opinion and values. People aren't obligated to agree with them. On the other hand, if you want to force your vision onto the rest of the world, you're free to do so. In fact, it seems the current administration shares your sentiments on modern architecture. Maybe you shouldn't have antagonized them so much.
I think the problem is that the standards of influential people inevitably get forced onto others, especially in architecture. If artistic taste is something purely individual and subjective, then why doesn't every single person's taste count equally? Why do we have awards, why do we have so much art theory and art history, and why does public funding go to the arts, especially if much of it has been going mainly to art the majority of taxpayers don't like?
What you're suggesting sounds like unilateral disarmament.
> If artistic taste is something purely individual and subjective, then why doesn't every single person's taste count equally?
Because we aren't equals. Some people have more power, influence, and capabilities than others, whether it's a product of genetics or circumstance. If it's inevitable that those above shape culture for those below, then it means that if you care about such things, you should try to seize as much power as possible.
I'm not proposing unilateral disarmament. I'm proposing trying to get what you want by any means necessary. If the issue is that other people don't like that you like certain things, then you can just ignore them. But if the issue is that society doesn't align with your interests, you need influence.
Isn't that basically the point of this post? Scott trying to increase his influence over our society's architecture and general aesthetic decisions?
Or are you saying that writing a blog post just has such a negligible amount of influence that it's a waste of time compared to the direct exercise of political power? I think that's true to a degree, but only to a degree. Writing can be the first step in a cascade that eventually affects more concrete factors. It took wars and laws to finally put a stop to slavery, for example, but books and pamphlets and sermons all played their role too.
> Isn't that basically the point of this post? Scott trying to increase his influence over our society's architecture and general aesthetic decisions?
Well sure, but it doesn't seem to provide an argument beyond "my interpretation of beauty is correct and everyone else is wrong". Looking at the comments, it doesn't seem people are changing their minds, or even being emboldened by this... At least make some arguments that modern art is morally degenerate or something.
The issue is that there is an active and politically relevant force looking to eliminate leftist influence on art, and Scott keeps working against them. It seems counterproductive, at least to me....
So if, for example, you were a very widely read blogger whose readers included a lot of relatively wealthy and influential people, you would influence these things by....
...Arguing that leftist art culture is morally degenerate, and that it is society's duty to restore proper beauty to this world. The same thing people did the last time this issue came up. If you argue for truth, you'll only end up at the conclusion that no one else has a reason to care about your preferences. If you make it a moral and cultural issue, you have the opportunity to shape people's preferences by tying it to other grievances.
In the case of architecture, it's mostly not influential people. It's a combination of market forces and regulation that leads to the buildings we see today. It's really bizarre how Scott thinks this is an artistic question.
If he thought people were "obligated" to agree with him, he wouldn't need to make an argument.
The important thing is that we've found a way to dismiss all criticism of the bottomlessly ugly, crass, and banal art we're increasingly surrounded by.
I think Scott is working under the assumption that his tastes in architecture (concrete block bad) are somewhat universal, but that the people who say "concrete block good" are suffering from some sort of false consciousness, that they only think concrete blocks are good because someone has told them it is high status to appreciate them.
What Scott wants to do is to develop a theory of taste to help people decouple their true tastes, what they deep down really truly think is beautiful, from the things that they falsely like because they think it will bring them status, or the things that they falsely like because it aligns with their politics, or the things that they falsely like because their friends like it, and so forth.
I think it's a worthwhile endeavour for each of us to try to untangle our own true tastes from the things that we only think we like.
He's also working under the mistaken assumption that building designs are largely driven by ad-hoc artistic preferences, rather than by economics and regulation.
Buildings are a special case because everyone has to deal with them. When it comes to poetry or painting, I think we can just live and let live. Enjoy the ones we like and ignore the ones we don't. That doesn't work so well for architecture.
I also want there to be more good poetry! I agree it's sad and confusing that this doesn't exist when any random person could just sit down and write a good poem, but it seems like we should at least be talking about it!
I also feel the same way about craft in objects - you can't get a good Art Nouveau door anymore of the type that any upper-middle-class person in 1910s Paris would have obtained easily.
Wait, so good new poetry just plain doesn't exist?
I find that kind of hard to believe, on such a big planet. Easy to believe that the majority is bad or at least not to your taste, but...with this many people, someone must be doing your thing.
Similarly, craft is smaller objects doesn't seem hard to come by. Plenty of good pottery being made. But doors are part of architecture, and architecture is a problematic field.
Good new poetry is all over, being constantly produced in massive quantities. It is of major economic significance everywhere.
Try this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-IWfLcdSoo
Thank you for that example of your point, it was beautiful and made my morning
It's easy to purchase a beautiful gate. I looked up doors, and it doesn't look that hard to buy beautiful doors, either. They're slightly different than what you could find in 1910s Paris, but of course they are! There's someone selling lovely custom furniture on the side of the road every week in my neighborhood. If I wanted to spend a thousand dollars on handmade wooden furniture, I could simply pull a truck up and buy some.
> any random person could just sit down and write a good poem
...any random person can just sit down and write a poem. I'm a random person, and I've done it. Most people have, when they were teenagers, I expect.
"Good", though, is doing a lot of work there. Can any random person just sit down and write a poem they are not embarrassed by the existence of ten years later, or indeed the next morning? I'm not confident of an answer to that.
> Can any random person just sit down and write a poem they are not embarrassed by the existence of ten years later, or indeed the next morning? I'm not confident of an answer to that.
This question doesn't seem relevant. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil#Poetic_career :
> Virgil worked on the Aeneid during the last eleven years of his life (29–19 BC)
> After crossing to Italy by ship, weakened with disease, Virgil died in Apulia on 21 September 19 BC. Augustus ordered Virgil's literary executors, Lucius Varius Rufus and Plotius Tucca, to disregard Virgil's wish that the poem be burned, instead ordering it to be published
California does have a strong woodworking tradition, it's just more Spanish inspired than it is French. La Puerta looks nice, for instance.
>the beauty and wonder they feel is just as real
Disagreed. I refuse to believe anyone actually thinks Duchamp was a good artist rather than a scam artist. I refuse to think anyone looks at Angel Novelus and sees something beautiful rather than a deformed bucktoothed chicken.
That a person has lied to themselves so thoroughly that they believe the delusion of the emperor's new clothes does not make the clothes "real."
I never said the clothes were real, but you can't deny subjective experience. Even if it is a lie, and all of it meaningless, the beauty these people feel is entirely real. I don't feel anything looking at most classical art either, yet it'd be insane to deny that everyone is just lying about liking it.
I find it easy enough to believe that some people are wired differently, to interpret great piles of shit as beautiful. They are wrong and should not be allowed to have any influence on architecture or the selection of public sculpture.
Of course. That's not the argument Scott is making though.
I think people lie about their subjective experiences too. They will talk about how much they like food X, but if nobody's paying attention will spurn it for food Y. Hyperbolic language will spread not because our experiences are ascending to the top of a hyperbola, but instead because people aren't paying a penalty for their linguistic counterfeiting.
Yes, but usually if someone says they enjoy a terrible food, they do enjoy it an don't care that you think it's terrible.
I still go by revealed preference: whether people enjoy it is seen by whether they choose to eat it rather than whether they say they enjoy it.
Why is it more likely that millions of people are lying to others and themselves (for what benefit?) than that some people like things you don’t like?
I do not believe "millions" of people enjoy Duchamp's urinal as art, or the Angelus, etc. I think that's a relative small crowd measured in the tens of thousands, and it's easy to believe because cultures develop bizarre purity spirals all the time! Poetry shrank considerably over the course of the 20th century, in part because it became too self-referential. Art also became overly self-referential.
>(for what benefit?)
The barbershop pole theory of status, primarily. Once it got off the ground, money laundering and other sophisticated financial games came into play.
Re your first paragraph, I won't quibble about the number. My point is that there are more than zero who legitimately like it, which was what you claimed.
Your second paragraph reminds me of the person I saw online who said, "No one really likes dark chocolate, everyone's just pretending in order to seem sophisticated." As if there was any status to be gained by buying an expensive chocolate bar at Erewhon and eating it alone at home. People go, alone, to see Dadaist or other abstract/conceptual art, and sometimes they don't even post about it on social media. They aren't getting any money or status from the experience.
>I do not believe "millions" of people enjoy Duchamp's urinal as art
It's not hard for me to imagine that millions have appreciated it as a witty "fuck you" to bougie tastes, and consider that to fall under the umbrella of "art". You're free to disagree with the categorization of course.
I don't think anyone describes the experience of Angelus Novus as "beauty". There are many things to appreciate in an artistic experience, and trying to flatten them all into "beauty" misses the point.
The existence and popularity of both flamin' hot cheetos and sour patch kids indicate that lots of people understand this.
Fair enough that Walter Benjamin does not use the word beautiful, but his description is A) beautiful and B) seemingly unrelated to the deformed chicken art.
>The existence and popularity of both flamin' hot cheetos and sour patch kids indicate that lots of people understand this.
What a strange analogy.
Could you imagine that someone genuinely enjoys listening to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQHR_Z8XVvI (Schoenbergs Suite for Piano). I can assure you that I love this piece and really enjoy listening to it, especially the gigue, I've probably listened to it close to 100 times.
I find it enjoyable pretentious, but yes, I can easily imagine that!
In part I was doing a bit, but also I think art and architecture are in a meaningfully different category than, say, food and music. No one tries to gavage deconstructed nonsense down the public's throat: you buy and eat, or you don't. No one blasts Schoenberg on every streetcorner: you have to pay for a ticket to go to the concert hall, if anyone dares put it on.
But architecture and public art? The public gets no say and yet has to suffer the offenses!
Are the beauty and wonder real, though? You don't think there's some Emperor's New Clothes stuff going on (ie, people saying they like something just because they expect other people to do the same)?
I'm sure there's some, but humans have evolved for social interaction. We've transcended beyond lying for clout and we're capable of actually changing how we perceive things to make it just a little more believable.
So...wholesale substitution of high status people's opinions for one's own? That's even worse.
The problem is that a large number of artists care about and cater to the tastes of a small number of elite and (in my subjective opinion) deranged art critics who don't share the common sensibilities of 90% of people. Their memetic influence is diverting the stream of talented people into creating weird art that is subjectively good to 0.01% of people instead of art that is subjectively good to 90% of people. Therefore there is less good art (in my and 90% of peoples' opinions). Hollywood makes garbage. Art museums contain garbage. Buildings look like garbage. There are good artists who make good art (in my and 90% of peoples' opinions), but they are rarer and harder to find than they ought to be. How many geniuses with the talent of Michelangelo and the educational opportunities of the modern era failed to actually produce Michelangelo-level work because they were taught in school that the pinnacle of art was formeldehyde sharks and spent their lives doing that instead? How many genius artists have made a small number of fantastic paintings instead of a large number because none of the art critics take them seriously or promote their works so they have to work a day job to make ends meet?
People respond to incentives. If art critique rewarded excellence, we would see more excellence. If it rewards weird art-history storytelling then we see more weird art-history stories.
> The problem is that a large number of artists care about and cater to the tastes of a small number of elite and (in my subjective opinion) deranged art critics who don't share the common sensibilities of 90% of people.
Why is that a problem? You and everyone else are free to try and persuade those people to actually care about what you like. The most direct path would be willing to be a patron of aspiring artists who share your sensibilities and show that there's money in being an artist for the 90%. Patreon is a thing and DeviantArt has lots of very traditional artists who make things lay people immediately like and call art.
You mean "mimetic", not "memetic". They are different (though not entirely unrelated) things. (Very confusing that these words are so similar!)
I love the ending.
I think that I do like art, and I do like seeing beautifully done impressionist paintings, even new ones. But I also will drive across town to see a Monet, and that's partly because *in addition to its being beautiful* (and probably more beautiful than that of most modern imitators), I have a sense of him as a person and his place in history, and the meaning and conversation, etc., etc.
I really don't enjoy ugly art (though I enjoy plenty of art that other people find ugly -- I don't find it so, though). But I do enjoy beautiful art more -- sometimes much more -- if it has the additional layers.
I think your closing section, about Gaudi, etc., actually captures this.
So, I agree with you that novelty isn't enough, especially after novelty-for-its-own-sake has already been done (you can only stack one meta on "novelty"), and there needs to be beauty; but I think the rest is highly important after that threshold is met. I'd feel the same about the Chesterton poem.
In the interest of peeling apart more conflations, I find it noteworthy that the initial list of 8 -- and in particular, the initial list of 3 -- contained nothing about *narrative*. The post is mostly about visual art (and cousins) but some of the discussion is about, and some of the examples are, narrative works. It seems to me that, like, an appreciation of various narrative-specific things (plot, character, etc) are an important part of what people are looking for, but it doesn't seem to fit into any of the categories that you laid down. (As well as questions regarding things like, do the formal elements of the work mesh with the narrative elements? Or perhaps deliberately contrast with them?) And this is before we get into any discussion of such ideas as games as art (what experience and feelings are conveyed by this system of incentives you choose to temporarily submit yourself to, and how does *that* mesh with the formal and/or narrative elements?)... that's obviously a bit newer. But narrative is pretty dang old so it seems odd to see it implicitly neglected, or conflated with non-narrative art!
> If you randomized-controlled-trialled art so mercilessly that all the novelty effects and context effects and pattern language effects got eliminated, would Beauty be what was left?
That just ends up as re-deriving Mr. Beast from first principles.
In my mind, Eurovision song contest (running since 1956, beats Superbowl by reach) figured out the best system to evaluate performances on a slop-to-snob axis.
The extreme outliers tend to be either 1) lowest-common-denominator slop with low barriers to entry, or 2) very technical or novel performances that only a few experts can enjoy.
So Eurovision polls both the viewers and the juries of experts, then combines two scores to pick the middle point on the pareto front: not the most popular entry, and not the most expert-approved, but something that scores well for both audiences.
I'd say it's been working decently well.
I'm not saying you have to accept popular judgment. You could RCT what kind of art Harvard humanities professors like - you just have to blind them to source and context.
Sure, that's basically describing marketing stratification research.
You will end up with various taste clusters - some small (art Harvard humanities professors like), some large (frontpage of youtube when you're logged out). But by itself those RCTs won't tell you what taste is "good" or "bad".
When people talk about "bad taste", they're putting these taste clusters on some kind of ladder from "good" to "bad". And while the clusterspace itself is free from source and context, the ladder surely isn't - it could be an ingroup/outgroup ladder, or a beginner/master ladder.
E.g. "now that AI is using em-dashes a lot, they're in bad taste" basically hashes out as "We put AI very low on our ladder, so whatever falls into AI's taste cluster, we rank low. And now em-dashes fall there".
Is good taste real to start with? Or is there just taste ?
For an intermediate position, maybe all tastes are equally valid, but some tastes reveal some things about the taster. Then, there is no good taste, but there is taste associated with good people
Maybe we should all go read C.S. Lewis' "An Experiment in Criticism":
https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20140725/html.php
"In this essay I propose to try an experiment. Literary criticism is traditionally employed in judging books. Any judgement it implies about men’s reading of books is a corollary from its judgement on the books themselves. Bad taste is, as it were by definition, a taste for bad books. I want to find out what sort of picture we shall get by reversing the process. Let us make our distinction between readers or types of reading the basis, and our distinction between books the corollary. Let us try to discover how far it might be plausible to define a good book as a book which is read in one way, and a bad book as a book which is read in another.
I think this worth trying because the normal procedure seems to me to involve almost continually a false implication. If we say that A likes (or has a taste for) the women’s magazines and B likes (or has a taste for) Dante, this sounds as if likes and taste have the same meaning when applied to both; as if there were a single activity, though the objects to which it is directed are different. But observation convinces me that this, at least usually, is untrue.
...Some critics write of those who constitute the literary ‘many’ as if they belonged to the many in every respect, and indeed to the rabble. They accuse them of illiteracy, barbarism, ‘crass’, ‘crude’ and ‘stock’ responses which (it is suggested) must make them clumsy and insensitive in all the relations of life and render them a permanent danger to civilisation. It sometimes sounds as if the reading of ‘popular’ fiction involved moral turpitude. I do not find this borne out by experience. I have a notion that these ‘many’ include certain people who are equal or superior to some of the few in psychological health, in moral virtue, practical prudence, good manners, and general adaptability. And we all know very well that we, the literary, include no small percentage of the ignorant, the caddish, the stunted, the warped, and the truculent. With the hasty and wholesale apartheid of those who ignore this we must have nothing to do.
If it had no other defect it would still be too diagrammatic. The two sorts of readers are not cut off by immovable barriers. Individuals who once belonged to the many are converted and join the few. Others desert from the few to the many, as we often sadly discover on meeting an old schoolfellow. Those who are on the ‘popular’ level as regards one art may be deeply appreciative of another; musicians sometimes have deplorable preferences in poetry. And many whose responses to all the arts are trivial may yet be people of great intelligence, learning and subtlety.
...Still less is the status seeker. As there are, or were, families and circles in which it was almost a social necessity to display an interest in hunting, or county cricket, or the Army List, so there are others where it requires great independence not to talk about, and therefore occasionally to read, the approved literature, especially the new and astonishing works, and those which have been banned or have become in some other way subjects of controversy. Readers of this sort, this ‘small vulgar’, act in one respect exactly like those of the ‘great vulgar’. They are entirely dominated by fashion. They drop the Georgians and begin to admire Mr Eliot, acknowledge the ‘dislodgement’ of Milton, and discover Hopkins, at exactly the right moment. They will not like your book if the dedication begins with To instead of For. Yet, while this goes on downstairs, the only real literary experience in such a family may be occurring in a back bedroom where a small boy is reading Treasure Island under the bed-clothes by the light of an electric torch.
...Real appreciation demands the opposite process. We must not let loose our own subjectivity upon the pictures and make them its vehicles. We must begin by laying aside as completely as we can all our own preconceptions, interests, and associations. We must make room for Botticelli’s Mars and Venus, or Cimabue’s Crucifixion, by emptying out our own. After the negative effort, the positive. We must use our eyes. We must look, and go on looking till we have certainly seen exactly what is there. We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)
It is not only our own ‘ideas’ about, say, Mars and Venus which must be set aside. That will make room only for Botticelli’s ‘ideas’, in the same sense of the word. We shall thus receive only those elements in his invention which he shares with the poet. And since he is after all a painter and not a poet, this is inadequate. What we must receive is his specifically pictorial invention: that which makes out of many masses, colours, and lines the complex harmony of the whole canvas.
The distinction can hardly be better expressed than by saying that the many use art and the few receive it. The many behave in this like a man who talks when he should listen or gives when he should take. I do not mean by this that the right spectator is passive. His also is an imaginative activity; but an obedient one. He seems passive at first because he is making sure of his orders. If, when they have been fully grasped, he decides that they are not worth obeying—in other words, that this is a bad picture—he turns away altogether.
From the example of the man who uses Tintoretto as pornography it is apparent that a good work of art may be used in the wrong way. But it will seldom yield to this treatment so easily as a bad one. Such a man will gladly turn from Tintoretto to Kirchner or photographs if no moral or cultural hypocrisy prevents him. They contain fewer irrelevancies; more ham and less frill.
But the reverse is, I believe, impossible. A bad picture cannot be enjoyed with that full and disciplined ‘reception’ which the few give to a good one. This was borne in upon me lately when I was waiting at a bus stop near a hoarding and found myself, for a minute or so, really looking at a poster —a picture of a man and a girl drinking beer in a public house. It would not endure the treatment. Whatever merits it had seemed to have at the first glance diminished with every second of attention. The smiles became waxwork grins. The colour was, or seemed to me, tolerably realistic, but it was in no way delightful. There was nothing in the composition to satisfy the eye. The whole poster, besides being ‘of’ something, was not also a pleasing object. And this, I think, is what must happen to any bad picture if it is really examined."
That last, I think, is what is going on right now with AI art, the mass produced sepia-toned, cartoon-style, glossy slick surface, churned out by the yard, stuff.
> It is not only our own ‘ideas’ about, say, Mars and Venus which must be set aside.
Must they ? I'll take a relative nobody like Tom Parkinson-Morgan over Botticelli any day, what with Botticelli's flat lighting and flat composition and general flatness of everything. Am I objectively wrong ? Do I have too many ideas ?
The idea is, if you have all these thoughts about the subject of the painting and the characters and the way they're presented and the historical context, you're not looking at the painting as a painting. You're 'using' it for a whole set of different things (historical subjects, period of art, did X do the same theme better and so on).
You have to look at the painting as a painting and judge it. That's what you're doing with "flat lighting, flat composition, general flatness of everything".
If you're judging Botticelli and Parkinson-Morgan *on artistic ability* then you're doing it right: "What we must receive is his specifically pictorial invention: that which makes out of many masses, colours, and lines the complex harmony of the whole canvas."
After *that* we can get into "who is the more important, who is greater" discussion.
EDIT: But you have to be sure that that *is* what you are doing. I never heard of Parkinson-Morgan, looking him up he's a comic artist. Nothing wrong with that. But are you judging the works on artistry and not, even subconsciously, 'yeah this is more my style, this is what I grew up on, I want a story not just something to look at, I want action and ka-blam! pow! zokk! going on in the page or screen"?
Because to me, this also is 'flat lighting, flat composition, general flatness of everything':
https://bigcomicpage.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/ksbdcoverchapter1.jpg
If you ask me to choose between that and this, I'm gonna pick this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallas_and_the_Centaur#/media/File:Pallade_col_Centauro,_Sandro_Botticelli_(1482).jpg
I think this is going on with *bad* AI art.
"You could RCT what kind of art Harvard humanities professors like - you just have to blind them"
Fixed that for you, as the kids say.
There's an obvious failure point to Eurovision scoring, though, that has been popping up more and more in the actual result - the snobs deliberately start calibrating their votes to counteract the slobs (they can't know the actual slob vote, of course, but can make decent guesses on the basis of what the slobs have voted for in the past, what the media is saying etc.)
They keep modifying it though don’t they? I think I read they modified the scoring this year to counteract the way Israel’s supporters have tried to overwhelm the popular vote.
They're always messing around with Eurovision voting. It has become increasingly obvious in recent years that the professional jury votes and the public votes are very divergent.
I genuinely thought Eurovision scoring was a random number generator + politics of the moment.
I don't think Eurovision captures the snob pole very well. For most of my lifetime the contest was treated by any European who had a bone of snobbery in them with utter derision and mockery. Then people started watching it ironically. Then poptimism happened and you could sort of, kind of unironically be into Eurovision. But my impression is that poptimisim never went as far in Europe as it did in the US and this is still very much contested. Chances are still that you will be laughed out of the building when you start talking unironically and non-derisively about some ESC performance at a truly high brow Eurpean art or music event.
The point being: the expert jury at ESC are not snobs or at least not people who have status among the snobby classes and reflect their tastes. They are high-status proles.
The jury made the ESC worse. The ESC was never supposed to be highbrow. The jury helped no one; it did not solve any problem that needed solving.
Is this Death of the Author, but applied to restaurants?
Is this Loss?
</joke>
(I do very much like the post.)
Loss is unironically good art and I think that's a big part of the reason it became such a meme. It burrows into the mind and stays there, difficult to forget.
The bizarre tonal whiplash, the sudden attempt at artistic seriousness, totally undermines it in context. So it becomes funny. But the fact that it's incongruously good has given it its longevity; if it was crap, it would've been a flash in the pan.
Well said.
I feel like this should have a link.
https://cad-comic.com/?s=loss
Whether it's another Angelus Novus is up to you, the viewer. (Also whether a search for "loss" bringing up every "glossary" comic alongside it counts as well.)
Man, looking at those glossary comics makes it so clear why Loss became a joke.
You go to the site looking for the purest of schlock, the kind of comedy-shaped non-humour that might serve to stave off boredom for thirty seconds or so. Instead you get a crudely-drawn, but heartfelt and memorable, expression of pain. How could you possibly take it seriously?
I'm pretty sure I was just Rick Rolled by @Scott with https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/Paul_Klee_~_Angelus_Novus_~_1920.jpg/1280px-Paul_Klee_~_Angelus_Novus_~_1920.jpg
Hm, a chance to introduce angelrolling...
Heh. I made the same joke about Angelus Novus on my Tumblr a couple years ago -- magnificent-sounding Benjamin's description, followed by the actual painting -- and for that I was called a fucking idiot, an antisemite, an anti-intellectual, and an American, and told to jump into an incinerator, before I simply stopped looking at the comments (though I did briefly see one raising the possibility that this was maybe a tad of an overreaction). I guess there are people who *really love* that particular painting!
Was Klee Jewish? His wikipedia page didn't indicate that.
Benjamin who wrote the description is. There were those who took the juxtaposition of his description with Klee's art as as criticism of his interpretation (indeed some highlighted commenters were doing this, tbf) rather than of the art piece itself.
As someone with {limited, underdeveloped} skill in some arts, my sticking point has become message vs craft. Part of how a lot of the old masters' works hold up is because they were very, very good at the technical part of their job (the craft) before moving on to boundary-pushing (the message). Picasso is a trite example, but the man demonstrably had the ability to paint a perfectly realistic, neoclassical painting and then used that skill to undo concepts like perspective.
What I see a lot of in post-modern (and post-post modern) art is, essentially, technical neophytes putting together poorly-made works backed by about a thousand pages of critical theory. Abstract or faux-junk sculptures made from shoddy castings or welded poorly together. Paintings where the brushwork us sloppy. Drawings with poor grasp of line work or composition.
There's a difference between the world's best poet flexing on the rest of us by discarding rhyme, and someone who can't rhyme to begin with.
Reminds me of Scott's point in the Lighthaven post about going on a mountaintop for thirty years to do nothing but write within the rules before discarding them completely.
I think this also explains why postmodernism had less of an effect overall on music and food than sculpture and painting - there's just no way to substitute message for craft in a way that lay people will even grudgingly accept. An ordinary person may go to an art museum, see a dissected shark and grumble a bit about kids these days, but otherwise carry on with life. But they will storm out of a restaurant if the chef serves reheated horse semen-and-blood soup to make a statement about the interplay of sex, violence and consumption. Unless the soup is very, very good.
I feel like the entire existence of whole genres of mass-market junk food proves you wrong. What is more postmodern than MTN Dew Baja Blast or doritos loco tacos? It's mere sensation packaged in novelty, without any sort of craft or meaning. (Though it sounds like you might also be conflating various forms of postmodernism with various forms of modernism.)
How are these postmodern? Do they playfully deconstruct, combine and interrogate past movements? Do they apply critical theory to understand and contextualise their relationship with the broader cultural milieu?
Or, alternatively, are they mass-market products capable of being criticised, contextualised etc but not capable of speaking on their own as intentional works of art?
They do playfully deconstruct and combine past movements! They don't apply critical theory, but instead deliberately eschew any theory. Their very rejection of intentionality as art is a big part of what makes them postmodern.
Well parried, but then I argue that they, in fact, represent a high level of technical skill due to the amount of food science that goes into making them super-palatable.
I think it's only postmodern if they intentionally reject intentionality. The fact that the comment I'm writing right now doesn't rhyme doesn't make it a modern poem, since it wasn't intended to be a poem in the first place.
I think mass-market junk food is just modern rather than post-modern.
That's probably true for some of it - the stuff that is just dialing cheesiness and umami up to 11, as well as things like Coca Cola Classic that are standardizing a product made out of real flavors. But at least some rounds of fast food flavoring really is postmodern in the way that it just seeks to push extreme experiences that are unlike the other extreme experiences you've had with food.
What would be examples of that?
I think at least part of the explanation (that I'm pretty sure you have talked about before) is also that many art critics/artists have totally overconsumed art. This is most easily seen in music. Everyone has had the experience of a song being overplayed: you liked listening to it once, you've listened to it 500 times in the supermarket while browsing groceries and YOU CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE. Now if you are a critic you consume so much music, and also try to really pay attention to, most common patterns just get totally overplayed ("oh, pop song chords AGAIN?!"). And then you try other genres, more avant garde things, trying to find more novel patterns. And that's how you get Trout Mask Replica https://youtu.be/r9lpLm7jwQY?is=9i-3pFY7qR4jePQn (some consider this the best rock album of all time).
This is not really a criticism of this approach, I also have difficulty taking any enjoyment with a lot of pop music because of this. That's an authentic subjective experience. It's just a fact that the pre-condition for being a critic is to have consumed a lot of art while paying close attention to it.
That's definitely part of it, and Scott has touched on it in previous posts, for instance in Friendly and Hostile Analogies for Taste, in Category E: Taste Is Like BDSM Porn.
It's an important insight. The experience of being a critic or heavy consumer is inevitably going to shift your perceptions, sometimes in ways that don't necessarily always make your perceptions better, and this is going to apply no matter how principled you are.
I tend to read lit criticism for telling me why something is good, rather than just that it is, but I also use two vague pseudo-criteria: (1) will it still be good if I read another 1000 books (in genre), (2) will it be good if I re-read it 1000 times.
Those are pretty good criteria. I think the question is exactly what number of books in a genre is optimal for forming the best judgements. At a certain point you can reach a type of semantic satiation where the standard tropes are meaningless to you and you're just scanning the text for something new, whether in language or content. I think 1,000 could be enough to get you to this point, depending on genre.
"It has been [135] days without a High High Hopes."
And that's why architecture critics are a problem. Their hypertrophied tastes are inflicted upon the rest of us through the buildings we live and work in.
and that's why rotten tomatoes is great, it presents the opinions of the critics who have seen too many, and the casuals who have seen too few.
Critics have (almost) nothing to do with building design. That's just economics and regulation.
> Everyone has had the experience of a song being overplayed: you liked listening to it once, you've listened to it 500 times in the supermarket while browsing groceries and YOU CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE.
Note that this is not in fact an experience that everyone has had.
This plus how specific people's taste gets. E.g. I have the above but for really specific genres I like (e.g. slushwave or breakcore). I don't even care about the critical conversation or genre boundaries, I just know some of what I like and I like thinking about it and hearing more that might show me something new and/or good :3
Also, academics tend to overrate novelty. Basically the case since uhh 1900 or thereabout when art turned into an academic topic. Probably a lot easier to discuss than aesthetics, you lazy professors.
That's why the [most visible] way artists react to AI art is so disheartening: that's something new! It's their job to use it to explore what art is and try new things and push its envelope!
Instead, as far as I can tell, "artists" stay clear out of AI and most AI art created is slop. (Of course, msot of everything is slop, I don't fault that)
There are a few legit artists in AI. I'm fond of the fauxtalgic comics of Trent Troop.
It's infuriating. I'm an artist. I always say that I started making art because I had ideas that I wanted to make physical, and AI can only help with that.
But I guess I am, like Scott says, a high-decoupling autistic spectrum kind of person because nearly everyone else is completely confounded by status issues.
Some of it may be status games, but I think a lot of what artists find uninteresting about AI art is that it doesn’t give the human artist fine-grained control of the output, so what is output is the average version of whatever was prompted. Part of what I find interesting about art is I feel like I’m communicating with the artist by consuming the art, and learning something about how someone else sees the world and thinks. Someone using AI to generate art is more like a customer commissioning a piece than an artist. Most people are not interested in decoupling art from the artist, because the communication is part of the point. Reducing art to being *just* pretty pictures is missing the point.
By the way, this isn’t just about AI art. This is also why “made by committee” commercial art often feels soulless or boring as well.
(I’m talking specifically about using image generators like Dalle here, I do think there can be artful ways to use AI, for example if an artist intentionally trained a custom model to produce a particular kind of output, in which case the model itself is the art. But that’s different than plopping a paragraph into Dalle.)
> I’m talking specifically about using image generators like Dalle here,
I think a big part of the problem is that there's not a lot of people who are good enough at AI to use all the systems like ControlNet to get the AI to do exactly what they want, and people who are good enough to art to know exactly what they want.
Personally, I train my own models and use the Krita plugin (as mentioned below). But these days I generally use the resulting image as a reference for a physical painting just because people get so damn weird about the AI thing. And people usually don't even believe you if you say you used AI if they can see the physical brushtrokes because they can't get their head around the fact that artists use studies and reference and don't just congeal art out of psychoplasm.
Compared to borrowing from google images, using AI for reference is arguably more ethical. No one can afford to pay models to 'cheat' like ye olde masters.
AI of various sorts can certainly help. But as Marcus Seldon notes, trying to make your ideas physical by using Midjourney or Nano Banana or any of the other text-to-image generators is going to be a lot like using an extremely powerful tool while wearing oven mitts. You can do a lot of things you could never do yourself, but you don't really have much control over it.
Obligatory shilling for Krita AI Diffusion. It's text-to-image, but you can at any point start drawing normally, and then go back to text-to-image. There's lots of possible workflows; I like doing a few dozen text-to-image runs to get a feel for the prompt and how the AI sees what I'm pointing at, and then dropping strength to 50% and mix-matching. At 50% the AI will make "small changes only"; this means you can move elements around, draw your own doodles, and the AI will do its level best to make your changes work with what was already there. Also if you're starting out as an artist, I think a good training method is to draw an image purely by hand, refine it at 50% with a weak prompt, then look in detail at what the AI changed and why its version looks better than yours, then try to apply these changes yourself.
Is there a way for me to try this out without going through the process of installing something on my computer? Perhaps more relevantly, is there a way I can give students in an AI literacy class (most of whom definitely don't have the skills to install something on their computer) a chance to try it?
Krita has a windows portable version. I'm not sure if it can install plugins, but if so it's two downloads and two clicks. The setup is definitely not as easy as it could be, downside of being a modification to an existing paint program.
For hosting, there is a cloud backend (I don't use it, so I can't comment on how well it works), or you can set up ComfyUI (the backend it uses) on a shared computer with a beefy GPU. Though it *will* be overloaded by a class using it simultaneously, so if you're going that route the cloud version is probably the way to go.
I think the point is that AI art is so specifically not new - it's a conglomeration of every piece of art that has come before it, with a lack of unique human story that might make it interesting.
How would they do that?
I found this article: https://www.theartist.me/art/15-ai-generated-artworks-that-captivated-the-world/, and a cursory search suggests that it's accurate for what the pro-AI people think are the best to offer right now.
Looking at the listed artworks (some are music), there's nothing new here. That's obvious, AI is trained on something and uses that as reference to make something else. AI can draw things not seen before, but not in some unique style that hasn't existed. Some are downright incomprehensible, but still from a style that already exists.
If you were an artist, the use of AI to "try something new" probably can't amount to more than experiencing new things. But that's not a strong reason for using AI - you can just browse existing public art websites. Hell, just ask an AI to maximize your opportunities for seeing new art styles.
Hey did you read "Kimi, author of the Menard" ?
A guy tried to fine-tune his LLM into producting Borges text about Don Quixote.
Borges (and that Substack post) make a fun exploration of these ideas: what happens when you move a work of art into a different context?
Haha this is awesome... Do you have a link to it?
I think this is it: https://linch.substack.com/p/fine-tuning-borges
That is amazing! And such a set of finds of the giveaway AI tropes in a meta-fictional passage by Borges.
I largely agree with this post, but I think it's too dismissive of the role of novelty. For instance, I can guarantee that I'm capable of producing a book just as good as Dickens. It begins as follows:
"It was the best of times; It was the worst of times."
I'm not sure how the rest goes yet but I can easily look it up and copy paste it here if anyone wants. In a double blind controlled trial, I can guarantee you that not a single person would be able to tell any difference between my novel and A Tale of Two Cities at a rate any higher than random chance. The beauty quotient would be objectively identical, and if beauty isn't what matters to you, then do you even like art?
This is a bit glib obviously, but my point is that directly copying something is far less of a contribution than inventing something new, so it doesn't seem odd to me that writing a work in the style of Dickens without directly plagiarizing him would fall somewhere in the middle, more impressive than my novel but less impressive than Dickens' original. And this isn't unique to mushy subjective fields, either. Doing research in a paradigm established by someone else is still valuable, but I wouldn't consider all modern scientists greater than Newton and Einstein, and I wouldn't consider all modern engineers greater than the Wright brothers. I might benefit on a day-to-day level more from generic and derivative drugs than originals, but I still have immense respect and gratitude to the people who developed the category of drugs in the first place, and I support the people trying to develop new types of drugs today.
I do agree that the emphasis on novelty and context in art has become too great at the expense of actual quality, trapping us in a world where creative endeavors become more and more a status ritual between insiders. Even worse, the alleged novelty isn't even what it's cracked up to be. Perhaps calling a urinal art was groundbreaking once, but calling a banana art, a hundred years later, isn't exactly immense progress. Architecture and literature are in a similar situation. It's an immense problem, and one that will take many, many years to solve.
I think what you're saying gets at a distinction between beauty and credit-assignment. Your book would be just as good as Dickens', you just don't deserve any credit for writing it.
I suppose what I think is that there's nothing wrong with conflating multiple factors into one holistic quality judgement, especially the first two factors, as long as we're entirely clear and honest about what we're doing.
Another way of viewing it is that there's clusters of "Dickensian works" and "Homeric works" centered on the works Dickens and Homer produced, but also containing works that most closely resemble them, as well as, if we want to overthink things, hypothetical works that people could theoretically write in the future or that Homer or Dickens could have written in parallel timelines.
It seems like a plausible heuristic to me that the best Homeric works we'll ever see in our reality are mostly the ones actually by Homer, and the best Dickensian works are mostly the ones by Dickens. They're the local optimum, if you will. If I write a Dickensian work, I have to either plagiarize, or I have to make changes that are almost guaranteed to make things worse, because I'm only imitating a style that I'll never truly master, in a dialect I've never even heard a real living person speak. So it follows that I should probably just move away from these clusters and focus on making Bobbersonian works. Will these be better than Homer and Dickens? Almost certainly not, but it seems like a more valuable contribution to literature.
I think the real question is exactly how far should the Bobbersonian cluster be from the Dickensian cluster? I don't think the distance should be zero, but I do think that modern literary sensibility demands an unreasonably far distance.
If Bob Bobberson's duplicate book is as good as Dickens' book, would that combination of words still be exactly as 'good' in your view if Victorian England had not existed? That is, if it was not about reality, but was some kind of sci fi work?
I ask in order to understand how you are attempting to separate one's experience of a work from the surrounding context, including very basic facts about a work (e.g. whether it is fiction or non-fiction, what genre it is in, how familiar we are with the general idea of what London was like at that time, which allows us to form strong mental pictures and expectations as we read ...).
He is very much a writer bound up in his place and time.
I think art is, to a much larger extent than people usually realize, *about* credit assignment - art appreciation is as much about admiring the author as admiring the work itself. That's why the author's circumstances matter, and why a lot of people have no interest in AI art no matter how good it gets in isolation, and they may feel betrayed if tricked into liking it. (I don't feel that strongly myself).
Reminds me of the borges short story, Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard%2C_Author_of_the_Quixote?wprov=sfla1
"it doesn't seem odd to me that writing a work in the style of Dickens without directly plagiarizing him would fall somewhere in the middle, more impressive than my novel but less impressive than Dickens' original"
I think it would depend; a Dickens pastiche might be genuinely good work. Historical fiction is popular, and there are a ton of "crime mysteries set in Victorian era" which cover the ground all the way from 'low brow but fun', 'not particularly good' up to 'this is literary fiction' level. The worst ones are the ones which put modern characters with modern attitudes into the author's imagined version of 19th century England with little to no research of the period and churn out a standard plot.
On the other hand, you get genuinely excellent works like the 1990s Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker, set during the period of the First World War:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneration_Trilogy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Barker#Regeneration_Trilogy
"Following the publication of Liza's England, Barker felt she "had got myself into a box where I was strongly typecast as a northern, regional, working class, feminist—label, label, label—novelist. It's not a matter so much of objecting to the labels, but you do get to a point where people are reading the labels instead of the book. And I felt I'd got to that point", she said in 1992. She said she was tired of reviewers asking "'but uh, can she do men?' – as though that were some kind of Everest".
Therefore, she turned her attention to the First World War, which she had always wanted to write about due to her step-grandfather's wartime experiences. Wounded by a bayonet and left with a scar, he would not speak about the war. She was inspired to write what is now known as the Regeneration Trilogy—Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995)—a set of novels that explore the history of the First World War by focusing on the aftermath of trauma. The books are an unusual blend of history and fiction, and Barker draws extensively on the writings of First World War poets and W. H. R. Rivers, an army doctor who worked with traumatised soldiers. The main characters are based on historical figures, such as Robert Graves, Alice and Hettie Roper (pseudonyms for Alice Wheeldon and her daughter Hettie Wheeldon) with the exception of Billy Prior, whom Barker invented to parallel and contrast with British soldier-poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. As the central fictional character, Billy Prior is in all three books."
I'm not familiar with those books so I can't pass judgement, but it sounds like they might fall into the "different enough from Dickens and high quality enough to be a worthwhile literary contribution, but too similar to Dickens or other old writers to attain the highest level of modern critical acclaim."
I think there are many books in that category, many largely unread, and many more unpublished or even unwritten, partly because of our stifling modern standards. Anything that seems too historical or speculative is too quickly assumed to be second rate.
Oh and by the way, the lowest circle of hell is reserved for people who write "historical fiction" where the characters have completely modern attitudes and accents. Calling it the worst type of historical is absolutely true, but it doesn't go far enough. It's like calling Hitler the worst person to ever apply to an art school in Vienna.
I think God gave us aesthetic intuitions so we’d have something other than Him to argue about.
More seriously, I think that the lack of any agreed-upon metric of aesthetic value means that, even if there was such a thing as objective beauty, we would have no way of recognising it. That universe would be identical to this one. And if you were to decide on an arbiter - say, popular opinion, or the opinions of those of a certain social status, or personal experience - you necessarily endorse that standard for all others.
I love the Screaming Popes and my grandmother hates them. Which of us is wrong?
I really enjoyed this. It has a classic SSC quality to it, and when I try to work out why, I think maybe it's because this is a topic on which you have strong opinions with enough emotional heft to get you engaged and punchy, but also genuine uncertainty and curiosity? Reminds me a bit of what I remember you saying in 'why I suck', about how some of your most popular writing came out of your own process of thinking things through, rather than offering fully crystalised opinions.
A sidenote on the AI Art Turing Test: I continue to think it was fatally flawed for reasons I don't think you have addressed (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ai-art-turing-test/comment/72660896)
Like, imagine an AI Poetry Turing Test where some of the poems were actually excerpts cut off mid-stanza (the cropping), and also some of the words were misspelled (the colours)
My memory of the test is pretty hazy now, but I think I only had to do that once or twice.
It was more than that; I've just had a look through the results post, and of the 24 human paintings I found 7 that were noticeably cropped. Still a clear minority, but pretty significant in my opinion -- especially given that it includes Giant Ship, which you noted was the human picture most frequently misidentified as AI, and which IMO was pretty badly butchered.
Here's the full list (done fairly quickly, so if anyone wants to double-check and note any that I missed or wrongly included, please do):
- 'Saint In Mountains' (*St. Anthony Abbot Tempted By A Heap Of Gold*, by the Ozzervanza Master),
- 'Creepy Skull' (*Untitled (Skull)* by Jean-Michael Basquiat),
- 'Giant Ship' (*Victorian Megaship* by Mitchell Stuart),
- 'People Sitting' (*Tailor's Workshop* by Quiringh van Brekelenkam),
- 'Girl In White' ( *Portrait of Charlotte du Val d'Ognes* by Marie-Denise Villers),
- 'Serene River' (*Banks Of The Oise At Auvers*, by Charles-François Daubigny),
- 'Colorful Town' (*Entrance To The Village Of Osny* by Paul Gauguin)
(I didn't count 'Double Starship' (*Malabar*, by Wojtek Kapusta) as being cropped by you; the closest to an original that I could find was a set of (in the author's words) "rough render shots extracted during the process", one of which seemed to match your version.)
I also noticed some pretty significant colour discrepancies, but (apart from 'Saint In Mountains', which I mentioned in that old comment) I haven't followed up on those to see how justifiable the versions you used were.
If anyone wants to double-check my list, note that the results post occasionally links to a slightly different painting (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agony_in_the_Garden_(Mantegna,_Tours) vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agony_in_the_Garden_(Mantegna,_London)), so you'll need to search for the real original; I didn't just see those discrepancies and assume they were signs of cropping.
For anyone who can't be bothered with all the details but just wants a taste of what I'm complaining about, here's the most misidentified actually-human work, as included in the test: https://imgur.com/a/za0dDXk
and here's the uncropped original: https://imgur.com/a/lNE8j7Q
Also check out the cropping + colour discrepancy between the test version of Saint In Mountains and the original painting; colours are admittedly tricky, but when I looked into this, the test version seemed like a real outlier vs. other reproductions on the internet.
Test version: https://imgur.com/qK3JIxo
Original: https://imgur.com/a/2on6bAF
That was definitely not what I had in mind for the angel painting, based on that description. Very fascinating.
I kinda want to see a painting that actually captures that beautiful description....
My question is always: why now? It is not like the past three millennia have seen a breakneck-speed sequence of artistic revolutions at the same pace as we have had since the 1900s. Artistic styles where happy to hang around for a few generations at the very least. Donatello was born in 1386, Michelangelo in 1475, and Veronese in 1528. While there is an evolution and substantial differences in style, I doubt anyone will argue that these were more jarring than the changes from Picasso (1881) to Warhol (1928), or from Warhol to Mr. Sharks in Formaldehyde (1965).
I cannot miss the parallel with progress in technology. Even if there is a continuous acceleration of changes, a discrete, qualitative jump happens the moment they take place faster than the generational replacement frequency. The notion of someone dedicating their life to a specific aspect of a craft (technological, or artistic) is gone. Is the art frenzy happening downstream of those technological changes? Building a cathedral was a work of centuries and several architect lifespans. The last such project is Sagrada Familia - every other current fever dream coming out of the mind of an avant garde architect is completed in mere years. But this is not true of paintings. So is there also some common cause - something something "elite overproduction"? I cannot find a good way to disentangle the effects here without running a counterfactual world in which there's not enough coal to power the industrial revolution. But at the very least the pattern is suspicious, and it should make us think a bit about whether what we're seeing is a memetic complex with rules (you must challenge the masters!) that are simply maladaptive in a much faster world.
What breakneck pace? We've been in the postmodern period since the 60s (70s at the latest), in much the same way that we're still flying jumbo jets.
There's a book called Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art that touches on this. It's mostly about how disturbingly variable each generation's idea of what the classical canon of art even was, but in later chapters it goes to the high turnover rate of contemporary artistic movements, sometimes to the bitter disappointment of their own creators.
The worst part of this is that art too focused on novelty is actually the least novel, because while the the exact implementation changes, the goal doesn't, so no matter how fast things move, the direction is ultimately circular.
I guess that "goal" should be just one among the several aspects that Scott lists (correctly imo) as being what is understood as "art". So the question then can also be reframed as, why the major shift to the specific goal of novelty, that as you say is much less stable than any of the others.
Not sure. I think originally the novelty served more of a purpose. I'd hate to live in a world without Van Gogh and Monet, but I think that type of earlier and more fruitful experimentation sort of established a precedent where you didn't want to be the last person producing outdated work under outdated assumptions. Each generation after that was incentivized to break from traditions earlier and earlier. Who wants to spend years struggling to master a style, and then, when you finally start to achieve results, everyone tells you you're irrelevant?
This is mostly just a mixture of my own prejudices against certain types of contemporary art and some half-remembered pieces from books I read years ago, so maybe someone else can give you a better answer.
Oh no, don't get me wrong, not saying the search for novelty is bad in and of itself. Just that the balance has changed, to it nearly dominating what it means to do art - at least from the artist's perspective.
Yeah I think we agree about this, novelty is one important factor of art that's gained exaggerated importance, resulting in counterproductive effects. And I to me it seems like one of the main reasons this happened is, in a word, Moloch.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
> She would eat blindfolded (or be spoon-fed?) so the food’s appearance couldn’t distort her judgment either.
Actually the appearance of food, called "presentation", is an important aspect of cooking. Even if two dishes taste exactly the same, the one that looks like dog vomit should still lose.
This illuminates a larger point: most art can only be fully appreciated by someone well-versed in the details of its construction. For example, anyone can enjoy good-tasting food, but only someone familiar with cooking might be able to appreciate the clever technique the chef invented to julienne a carrot. Anyone can watch a movie and be entertained, but there are entire channels on YouTube dedicated to admiring particularly inventive and/or creative cinematography and VFX (to the point of going frame-by-frame). I myself have no musical education, and thus am unable to properly appreciate classical music. Acquiring such knowledge is IMO part of developing good taste.
I think we should try to draw a line between the good version of this, where the expert has learned things that unlock a 'deeper', genuinely richer appreciation, and the version that is basically just jadedness leading to desperation for novelty and outsized focus on trivial details. (Or at least, I personally draw that line, though it's pretty hard to argue that any of these value judgments are objectively correct or incorrect.)
The julienne technique example seems borderline to me: I can accept that it's a cool aspect of the craft that an expert will appreciate in ways I won't, and that they're genuinely having a slightly richer experience for it; but if they try to push the point much beyond that, I'll laugh at them.
You can often bootstrap a mostly objective evaluation from subjective evaluations via implicit democracy. If 90% of people share a subjective opinion, then that is the default objective standard, and anyone trying to go against it has the burden of proof that their way is better via some superior and non-subjective measure.
What context do you have in mind for this? When something is literally a matter of taste -- what's better, vanilla or chocolate -- I don't think we gain anything by saying that the (much) more popular thing is quasi-objectively better by default. If we're talking about a domain (literature, say) in which most of us feel that there really are 'true' standards of better and worse, I think we tend to do something along these lines, but it's less democratic and much more weighted toward the opinions of people who are (charitably) expert or (uncharitably) high status. Maybe they are meeting that burden of proof, though?
There is an XKCD to help you laugh at nearly everything, including this: https://xkcd.com/915/
"(maybe the forger exhaustively trained and tested random members of the population, found that 5% of people could write as well as Chesterton if prompted correctly, and randomly sampled from that 5% to produce his fake book) then my crisis would be deeper"
Would the crisis be deeper still if the forger was an AI? I guess the questions might still apply - if it can 100% replicate, can we fine tune so it can be the 0.001% better... But do you just have to give up and enjoy reaching your saturation point with Chesterton prompted poetry.
*I also cannot believe that I'm making a point you hadn't thought of. Albeit its a word that has a long history of having a meaning before LLMs but you even write "prompt" - am I missing that you already answer this question in the essay?!
Ok so let me try and have a crack at explaining why the analogy with medicine doesn't really make sense to me. The experience of both dining at a restaurant and engaging with art depend on what Ernst Gombrich would call the 'beholder's share': there is a collaborative back-and-forth going on between the viewer/diner and the artwork/meal, in which a specific experience is created in the moment based on their own personal history, emotions, preferences, cultural narratives, etc.
The beholder's share is basically the art history version of Popper's argument that all observations are theory-laden (Gombrich and Popper were great friends). The point being that there is no such thing as a neutral observer: you must always start out with some problem you are trying to solve, even if you're not consciously aware of it.
So we can dissolve a lot of confusion by reminding ourselves that the 'problem situation' that each person finds themselves in will vary wildly. This is is easy to see with something like books or TV shows: my 2yo is working on very different problems than I am! But it is equally true of dining: it sounds like you are interested in solving the highly-constrained problem of "which food tastes best when consumed blindfolded in my own home, with zero other context or sensory data". Most other people's problem-situation will have terms for probably dozens or hundreds of other considerations. The food critic's review is therefore much more useful for solving other people's problems than it is for yours.
Circling back to medicine: the disanalogy is that everyone evaluating a certain drug is in almost the exact same problem situation: they want to cure their cancer (or whatever) with a minimum of side effects. So it makes total sense to be completely fixated on efficacy vs side effects, and give essentially no consideration to anything else.
I also think that e.g. snobbish critics may seem more monolithic than what full data would show, as many converge into Bushwick hipsterdom while many... stay in obscure circles that the Bushwick hipsters think are cringe.
I feel like you can reverse this, play up the uniqueness of medicine and play down the uniqueness of food. Like so: Everyone taking medicine has the "patents" share, different allergies, medical histories, DNA, that means everyone reacts to the medicine differently.
But everyone eating a meal wants the same thing: Taste and nutrition.
Yeah, your genes may partly determine whether Drug A is a good choice for you, in the same way that they may determine whether you like cilantro (and therefore whether you should order the salsa verde).
So technically you're right—everyone's problem-situation for medicine actually is unique, and in theory there must be a near-infinite number of solutions that perfectly take into account your personal biochemistry, contra-indications, cost, access, etc (i.e. the full set of molecules or treatments that don't violate the laws of physics).
But even if we lived in that fantastical world, there would still be many fewer dimensions that would go into the problem of 'which drug is right for me'. The cancer cells are either going to be killed, or not—the action mechanism of the drug is entirely unaffected by your perspective, your emotions in the moment, the people you're with, the lighting of the room, etc.
And that's what is not true of taste. It is impossible to consume art as a truly neutral observer, stripped of all context. The beholder's share is always present. You are always working on some kind of problem, or filtering your observations through some kind of perspective, and those kinds of problem-situations are wildly different from person to person.
One important aspect of artistic taste missing from the introductory list is something like celebration of humanity, or resistance to the flattening the creation and consumption of art into a legible, mechanistic process. It's the deeper of the two main motivations behind the second item in the list, the other being already covered by the first (sensory fatigue prompts search for fresh stimuli).
The inspiration that allowed me to verbalize this value of art is two SSC posts - Random Noise Is Our Most Valuable Resource, and The Phatic And The Anti-Inductive.
>my response to a really good poem is “I couldn’t write that in ten million years”.
You should definitely try, though. All those authors were people, and it's important to remember that kind of impact is reproducible. To imagine it's unreachable is to limit your growth.
I think everyone should make some kind of art, but it's okay to specialize in certain mediums and let others remain magic that you can fully appreciate
This is a much narrower thesis than the original, and I don't actually think it refutes many if the points Ozy makes, instead focusing on the easiest targets.
Does a story about say, the way-overdiscussed-asian-american-experience need to be written by an Asian American? Your argument seems to suggest no, but certainly part of what we are getting out of many stories (if anything) is its unique perspective on, well, something? To give a less social justice-y example, I really like the malazan books, but I kind of like them more knowing that Steve Erikson is an anthropologist who likes TTRPGs. I like the actual prose regardless, but I think the somewhat different perspective on world building and character development simply makes more sense if I understand it within its context. Could Claude someday write equally good prose? Perhaps. Would it give me any sense of peering into the soul of the author? Ah, probably not?
And yeah, I mean to be honest, some Michelin restaurants clearly are just trying to subvert your expectations in a way that gets to be not straightforwardly delicious. A lot of people in a blind test might just want a McDonald's cheeseburger. I was once asked when I made negronis for a party why I didnt make mojitos -- aren't those more crowd pleasing? And some people really are happy just reading exactly the one poet and eating exactly the one meal and having exactly the one drink. And other people like uh, whatever that angel painting is going on about.
Angelus Novus is Latin for Sheepbird.
Scott's childhood misunderstanding of restaurant critics resembles my childhood misunderstanding of anthropologists.
As a child, I was deeply impressed by how stealthy anthropologists must be. To observe life in remote villages in Papua New Guinea, to listen even to the conversations of the villagers inside their mud huts ... all without ever being seen! Because of course the subjects of their study could never be allowed to become aware of the anthropologists' existence, as this would bias their behaviour and invalidate the study.
I think one component you're missing here is that some people relate to history somewhat similarly to how you describe people relating to art. Seeing some historically significant thing can move them in a profound way. I'm not sure why -- I'm not generally one of those people. But for historic works this can create a response that looks like it's to the art, but if they thought it was my some gifted unknown it wouldn't hit the same, because the historical significance is what moves them.
This obviously doesn't solve the general question here. But I think it explains a lot of the "what does it matter whether the statue is by Michelangelo?" confusion.
I agree that beauty is important, but sometimes ugliness has its place as well. For example, here's a photo of a Soviet ballet theater:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuvash_State_Opera_and_Ballet_Theater#/media/File:Chuvash_State_Opera_and_Ballet_Theater.jpg
It's not beautiful in any way, and it's basically the opposite of what a ballet theater should look like... but that's part of what makes it so *awesome*. I'd take this brutalist prison monolith over a dozen blandly pretty theater buildings with generic columns and awnings and whatnot.
Agreed.
I can only assume the performance uses the entire vertical space, and the audience is seated on an elevator that follows the performers up and down.
I'll absolutely take it in a photograph! If I had to live near it, though, or regularly attend it, I would vastly prefer a blandly pretty alternative. I don't really agree that ugliness has its place in public architecture; that's putting the vanity of the architect and the remote appreciation of the counter-aesthete or tourist ahead of the daily lives of the people who are most affected by the ugliness.
Yeah, it often feels like when people praise Brutalism that they mean like, "oh, this would be a cool movie set," or like oh man what a neat villain lair. Okay, well the built environment is something we're all stuck with, most architecture is *very, very much* public art, and if I have to walk past this building every day I'd rather it not make me feel like a worthless ant.
did we finally find the inspiration for Obama's library?
That is pretty fantastic.
I do still prefer the Czarist revival stuff, though, like the 2020 Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Cathedral_of_the_Russian_Armed_Forces
> Yes, I do realize that. But he was good at it and you are bad. If you can’t figure out how to do it well, stick to the stale stuff within the existing horizon and wait however long it takes for the next genius to come along.
But how do you measure what is good and what is not? I used to be bored by classical music. Sure, there are some good pieces (you know, the popular ones), but you wouldn't see me checking out the philharmonic website to see if they were playing Mahler or Mozart or Chopin this month.
Then I heard some minimalist music, and it was a transformative experience for me. People around me were not moved at all, having the same pleasantly indifferent look I have when walking around Tate Modern, but I was sitting there totally dumbstruck.
It's not all the same. Adams' Phrygian Gates are meh, Shaker Loops are good. Reich's Music for 18 Musicians is sublime, Glass' Metamorphosis II arranged for the harp by Lavinia Meijer is divine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV2-zFh3tAU
But you *can* find me regularly checking out the philharmonic website now, going to every concert that sounds like it's something I might like.
I am willing to tolerate a lot of art people (me included!) say is ugly if telling us to shut up allows music like this to be written!
Art is supposed to say something about the creator. If music expresses great longing, that is because when I try to understand the music, it makes more sense if the composer is feeling great longing. Listening to great music is like writing poetry in strict metre: just as poetic metre doesn’t let you write a line until you find something new, great music doesn’t make sense until you understand the emotion that caused the music.
I think if someone did the experiment and 5% of the population could write music like one of the Renaissance greats, I’d be really interested in the training program, and what it expressed about the human condition. But if the participants could write the music *without feeling anything*, I’d enjoy the old music a lot less. I’d always be wondering if the composer’s emotions were worth understanding, or if they were phoning it in with the new method when they wrote, so I wouldn’t need to engage with it in the same way.
Sculpture is different. Michelangelo expressed the human body by paying great attention to it, so knowing that he cared enough to capture the amount of detail says something about how he feels. The fact someone can do the same with a camera and some software doesn’t change Michelangelo’s options, so it doesn’t change how I relate to it.
I was surprised to find out that there were enough rules for Renaissance music that pretty pleasant pieces could be cranked out by the yard.
I’m guessing “pretty pleasant” is doing a fair bit of the work here. Could you point me to some of these?
https://youtu.be/Aab7TvfDEKE?t=282
That’s one of the only pieces of Latin chant that made it big in the 20th century. Most of the time, if you follow the rules of harmony they describe, you don’t get something that good. It depends a lot on the underlying melody, and also the video mentions better and worse harmonisations. I stand by “pretty pleasant” doing a lot of the work.
art is not supposed to do anything. it does not have to say anything about the creator, or say anything at all. it does not need justification.
I’m not sure how to take this. Is it better that art exists at all, than that we just have blank walls and a plain-text internet? If so, then that art does have a justification. I’m not saying art needs a justification, but being *good* art means it is good *in some way*. I’m not saying the only way art can be good is if people engage with it as I described, but I think the way I described is a significant way in which art can be good.
> Art is supposed to say something about the creator.
There are poems and cathedrals whose artists are anonymous and never intended to be otherwise.
Sure, but you can make some reasonable assumptions about the authors based on the poems or cathedrals themselves. None of these anonymous cathedrals were sealed in time capsules for a random number of centuries so you didn’t know what social contexts they were built in.
Knowing roughly what time something was made is different from it being "supposed to say something about the creator".
But the way they design the cathedral tells you something about how they think about God. Is it ornate? Austere? Each of those choices says something about what the designer thinks.
I think context matter a lot.
To take a food analogy, if you take an American from 1950 and give him real Thai food - not the touristy stuff - the food is bad. It is too spicy, too much rice, and where are the potatoes and meat?
Of course, this is entirely a matter of taste. When an Thai comes to the US and opens a restaurant, he adjusts the food to the local tastes, with Thai influences. Use some of the spices, enough to give a sense of something new, but that would still appeal to local tastes.
Same with art. There are some common truths, I guess, but writing poem in Spanish or English is different. You can expect your audience to know different things. The U.S anthem can bring grown man to tears, and so do the Tikva (Israeli anthem), but probably not the same people.
The US Anthem typically brings me to laughter, because I always forget about the cymbals until they crash.
You cover a fair bit of ground here, but one of the questions you address is this: when we appreciate and evaluate art, how much of our assessment is truly in the artwork itself, and how much is due to other things we believe about it? Or, if you will, how much does aesthetic judgement rely on the data (the artwork) and how much relies on metadata (what you believe about it). Using your examples, metadata covers who the creator was, whether they were the first to do this, whether this artwork is part of an ongoing "conversation" etc.
Elsewhere, I've proposed a scale (the Barthes Scale) to measure this, i.e. for a particular person and a particular artwork, how important is the metadata to appreciating the artwork itself? For example, historical documents like Anne Frank's diaries rank high on the scale - the metadata is critically important, because their value depends on them being genuine and they can only be appreciated in a historical context. Whereas, consider the editing of a motion picture - this is low on the scale because (nearly) no one cares how it was done or who did it, they just care about the result.
Now sometimes it's legitimate to value metadata highly (e.g. my Anne Frank example before) and sometimes it isn't - the example I use in my piece is the connoisseur who can't pronounce judgement on a wine they're tasting until they've seen the label on the bottle.
I feel that formulating the issue this way can help us think more clearly about the issues you raise in your essay. I'm sure you detest naked self-promotion as much as I do, so the link I'm adding below is solely for your convenience if you are curious enough to want to pursue this idea further: https://medium.com/@hammond.a.johns/the-barthes-scale-how-ai-will-expose-what-we-really-value-in-art-8f8e3ecd8752
>the placard was a prank, and the sculpture was by Michelangelo after all?
While I Cannot Condone This, it'd also be very funny, just like other famous hoaxes such as Ern Malley. And I do think this was one of the key missing points in your earlier post about the AI sequoia picture: the feelings of profundity are real, no matter the provenance, but there's definitely *something* lost when such reactions are predicated on a deception. Like yeah, one could galaxy-brain that "a clever lie is just part of the experience", but there's a reason no one actually does the BAHP thing of making a restaurant where banal dishes are described in the ambrosial terms that royalty of yesteryear would have viewed them. (Or was that an Eliezer joke?) Once you let people in on the joke, it's not funny anymore, and whatever positive valence one had for the art is erased by negativa for getting successfully pwned. "Is this really the room where Allan Ginsberg wrote Howl?" "Why not?"
I do have to wonder if there isn't a failure of typical-mind here though. Like, do you genuinely...only taste "the real food" in food, regardless of context, ambivalent of ambiance? I know I'd enjoy my favourite dishes a lot less if I had to eat them in an overstimulating, dirty, crowded restaurant jonesing for a health code violation. Whereas the "objectively" simple fare on offer at a greasy dive bar ends up being great, precisely because one is conditioned by the social cues and atmosphere to have a good time and grade generously. Similarly, hunger is the best spice: water tastes incredible when you're dehydrated, plain bread is food of the gods after running on empty all day. The smell, the appearance, the lighting, the mouthfeel, the crackle and sizzle, who you're eating with...all of these contribute to gustatory satisfaction. Without loss of generality, this applies to many other domains of "art" as well. I find it strange to argue that we ought to evaluate such phenomena in isolation, and not consider the attendant epiphenomena as well. C.f. the objectively best music is just whatever you listened to as a teen/young adult. Everybody Knows about this bias, but it's hard to break anyway!
It'd also be remiss not to mention the "Michelin Curse", that restaurants so starred not-infrequently experience a precipitous decline in quality afterwards, sometimes even closing outright. Whether this is mere regression to the mean, or a sort of reverse Streisand Effect (that is, an undiscovered gem stops being a gem when the masses discover it) paired with not being able to perform under heightened scrutiny and expectations, is left as an exercise to the psychology undergrads and/or Tyler Cowen. Hanging the argument on this central recurring motif is thus necessarily fraught, since it self-disproves often enough that I now consider Critics Are Thumbin' In Awe as an anti-signal of Quality (and certainly ROI). Don't dine where the professional critic says to dine, dine where diners like you say to dine. Taleb probably has a pithier way to phrase that...
Consommé was a luxury in the Victorian era because it was hard to make, but after it was industrialized it was no big deal.
Same with aspic and gelatine (jello in teh USA, jelly in the UK). People often express surprise online about old cook books and "why was everything in the 50s coated in jello?"
Well, because the original version was aspic, which was labour-intensive to produce. Then commercially available food gelatine was sold, and now you didn't have to boil and strain things for hours:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspic
But of course, the new product doesn't taste exactly the same as aspic, so it fell out of fashion. Also, we have better methods of food preservation and the use isn't the same. And now we've moved on in our tastes, so even dishes using aspic often are not popular when made and tasted.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rEL9HpF__k8
A slightly better version of that recipe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nWAksAXYsk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okWps0jPDu8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmhZCk6LTdI
One of Nietzsche's 'untimely meditations' gives a helpful typology of approaches to history: Monumental (inspiring examples); Antiquary (reverent, linked to community - maybe encompasses the more pedantic 'here's the first impressionist painting'); and critical (radical, liberating). Think it can be read across to taste. One of the things I like about it is that it values all of these approaches. I think a technical, historical appreciation - connoisseurship, if you like - adds to the experience. Even bad art can give subjective experience of being inspired and changed, but deeper sustained engagement benefits from technical appreciation and historical understanding, which I think this piece dismisses too hastily.
Pirsig's "Metaphysics of Quality" provides a metaphor, and maybe even a vocabulary, relevant to this. Pirsig said that everything is made of Quality. Quality is divided into Dynamic Quality - generative, new, exploratory - and four kinds of static quality: physical, biological, social, intellectual.
I'd argue that art, as distinct from craft, has to contain Dynamic Quality. But only an interpreter with a context can tell the difference between Dynamic Quality (which, I think, must be connected to static quality) and random noise - or, indeed, between Dynamic Quality and static quality that they've never personally seen.
Also, there are multiple kinds of static quality, and there are multiple kinds of art, from Michelangelo's David to "Piss Christ" to "White on White" to Madonna or Warhol's work.
I think this translates into "Art must contain genuine novelty, and must build on something so the viewer can connect to it" - which is extremely broad, maybe overly broad, but it feels useful.
Separately, Scott, I'm really curious how you'd explore or react to the possibility of an LLM that could produce new Chesterton or Bach works - not just pastiches, but following the same deep structure into new places.
Separately, here's anecdata about modern art: I used to laugh scornfully at it. One day I stumbled into a Robert Ryman exhibition (the "White on White" artist) and spent an hour going "This is stupid" - and then I understood what he was doing, and went "This is brilliant" and resolved that I would never again criticize a piece of modern art until I understood it.
> Dostoevsky says that “the world will be saved by Beauty”. I’m busy trying to save the world through Truth, so I can’t personally work on Dostoevsky’s project, but I think it deserves the same level of dignity.
Is quoting Ode on a Grecian Urn too low hanging a fruit, here?
Regarding the rest, sometimes it feels like you're getting too much of your impression of contemporary art from people talking about art, rather actually experiencing it yourself. As an aesthetic-beauty first person who is also highly skeptical of Fine Art transgressive dumb thing, I still find lots of beautiful art to appreciate, and even like to think I make some, from time to time. Personally, it feels like the Fine Art/MFA/tax evasion evasion world co-opted the traditional art disciplines through academic institutionalization and financialization.
Outsider art is where it's at for sensory delight, these days, and Burning Man is the ne plus ultra for that. However, there is increasing pendulum motion back towards that in the financialized art world, as newly minted high net worth individuals with more traditional aesthetic sensibilities start throwing their weight around, especially in the Bay Area - see eg the Bay Bridge Lights, the Salesforce Tower Top, the Sijbrandij foundation's Big Art Walk project, etc.
I put the Angel image description into ChatGPT and this is what he came up with:
https://ibb.co/PvK15wrr
Much more what I expected the image to look like!
Hmm it says access "File stream access denied" for me, maybe you need to use an image pastebin!
I can see it, and it is superior to the original.
I got the same thing.
I replaced the link.
There are two facets to Novelty.
One is novelty from the audience's perspective. Being awed and transformed by a renaissance statue.
But another is novelty from the artist's perspective. Effort and struggle to produce something original and personal. I have had such transcendent experiences of struggle (both as a researcher as well as an amateur artist), and it makes me feel connected to this person, who I don't know, but who shares my experience of transcendence. It triggers my pro-civilization "good people living good lives" instinct.
In that case, the plaque that says it was a boomer in Ohio does turn my perception on its head, and quite legitimately so! Unless he's the one person on earth who somehow never saw a renaissance statue in their life and re-discovered this style independently.
We can take this too far of course. In the "high art" world, there is a certain worship for art that is "naive" and "genuine", to the point where artists play into that perception. It's an anti-inductive problem. I agree that this kind of consideration is orthogonal to sensory delight, which is still the most important aspect of art to me.
“In 1940, Beaux-Arts and Frank Lloyd Wright were the heights of American architecture. By 1950, nobody who was anybody was doing Beaux-Arts or Prairie; it was all International Style. “
Doesn’t this reflect the oversized influence that European refugees from fascist Europe had on American taste in the 1940s/50s? Americans still had an intellectual inferiority complex and were far too susceptible to European “sophistication”.
Goddamn nazis!
Broadly agree with the thrust of this (thanks for writing it!), but would like to pick a nit, if I may: "Anyone who says such a thing obviously doesn’t like poetry, they like - I don’t know, the experience of affiliating themselves with cool famous poets." I think an alternative is that our attention bandwidth is limited and you absolutely can choose to ignore other poets if you've not even exhausted the one you like the most historically, even if they're not the only one to write in that style.
I would say this is possibly not usually what people mean when they combine phrases that look like your mock example there, but *I* recognise I've said things that have a similar shape *and* meant precisely that (basically, there are just too many things I'm interested in, and for many of those things I prefer to keep them (artificially) narrow, and in that sense "I don't care" about the other artists, even if objectively I would enjoy them). Though, just to be clear, I've also said the opposite where I did want to widen my scope, this isn't a fundamental thing that happens all the time.
> You can’t fully appreciate Animal Farm unless you know the history of Soviet communism and recognize the book as an allegory for that history.
There's plenty of room between knowing specific historic examples of a theme and thinking it's literally a story about talking animals. The core concepts are that oftentimes people who say they want equality are just lying for personal gain, or that good intentions become corrupted by degrees. It doesn't take a genius to learn those lessons directly from just a modicum of life experience and see them reflected in allegory, even without a historical background.
Yes, I thought of this as well. If it can ONLY be appreciated as an allegory to Stalinist Russia, wouldn't a history of Stalinist Russia written at an 8th grade level be superior, since it conveys the same information in a more comprehensible way?
I don't find it hypocritical at all to find the painting less impactful when you learn it's from 1995. Part of the fun of historical artwork is finding meaning that's so universal it's lasted for all these years. That lends it some weight, the same way a prediction from 1900 is more interesting than one from 2015.
Even worse, when a deep and meaningful interpretation is dashed by an errant placard. That's just manipulative.
I can't make head nor tail of your conclusion.
"If you can’t figure out how to do it well, stick to the stale stuff within the existing horizon and wait however long it takes for the next genius to come along."
Why? From what angle are you asserting leverage over other people's behaviour?
I assume that you're not taking dictator-like powers, so they're not understood to listen to you because you force them to.
If you're talking about your patronage of the arts, are you in fact going to patronise low quality conservative art, but not low quality radical art? That would be fine, and it is in fact how commercial art markets work... I don't think this mechanism needs your input.
But I don't think either of those are true. I assume you're talking about something like cultural discourse, and saying: I think it is bad that you people who do cultural discourse repeatedly claim quality for bad radical art because this discourse is annoying... This opinion should be targeted more at the critics than the artists.
Artists need to practice, and lots of art is bad. This is fine, and I think you should not bother telling the bad artists that. Lots of criticism is also bad, and it sounds like you're just reading bad critics. Good critics will not waste your time telling you that bad radical art is good.
Is Walter Benjamin a good critic or a bad critic?
I dunno! Is he one of the critics that Scott was complaining about?
I've heard great things, but I think I only ever made one attempt to read Benjamin's work, and I have zero memory of anything in it.
Yes, Walter Benjamin is cited directly. He wasted Scott's time by telling him that bad radical art is good.
Oh, yes, I see. Sorry, I was reading too quickly and didn't spot that Benjamin was the source of that paragraph.
Like I say, I dunno. I have no particular reason to think Benjamin is good or bad, except he's famous. It wouldn't shake my world to hear that he has lots of bad ideas.
What conclusion do you draw?
Jacob Geller on Modern Art is worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5DqmTtCPiQ
Since Substack does not do link previews (?) here is the title:
"Who’s Afraid of Modern Art: Vandalism, Video Games, and Fascism"
Somehow he didn't see fit to mention that commies also weren't the biggest fans of "degenerate art". Somehow I'm not surprised.
Animal Farm: I think it can be appreciated as satire about revolution without knowing it's specifically about the Russian Revolution.
The problem with your ideal blinded restaurant criticism is that almost all the food needs to be fresh from the kitchen, not brought to someone's home. Maybe in your ideal world, restaurants would have identical small rooms for critics. I think I wouldn't go for a "just the food" approach, I would want to know whether the restaurant was a convivial place to eat, but that could be a separate review.
I find I like Angelus Novus-- it's a pleasant emotional jolt. Not the best thing ever, not the kind of art I want to live on, but I'm glad to have seen it.
Possibly related to art as conversation: A lot of ancient art looks modern because a lot of modern art was based on archaeological finds. I find this satisfying to know.
You could have the critic sit in a van outside the kitchen.
Surely some tastes are real. If person A's favourite show is The Sopranos and person B's favourite show is The Big Bang theory. Am I suppose to think that's just a neutral fact and doesn't tell me anything about them, except that maybe person A is more in touch with some taste/status meta-game.
The Sopranos just feels like it touches on more complex themes, has more complex dialog and plotting etc.
Probably person A is more likely to be an adult and person B is more likely to be a teenager. Or person A is more likely to be more educated than person B, etc.
The Simpsons was ranked the #1 show by professional critics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_(The_Book)
Sopranos was #2, just below it.
i guess art, and i presume food in a fancy restaurant, is not made outside context. Context can make you see more in the work, but shouldn't be a prerequisite for appreciating it.
How do you feel about Chesterton fan fiction? What I imagine is that people who understand visual art (I don't) look at modern impressionist paintings and see fan fiction which they can easily tell apart from the real thing.
This is exactly right, I think. People too easily generalize their own level of Paying Attention/Pattern Language and assume that if they can't see a difference between X and Y, no one can.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty"
John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
What about a bitter truth or an ugly truth?
I think there's still some conflation here. On the one hand there are personal value judgments made in a vacuum ("this is good" said about some painting in a museum or something) - these should be taken as basically personal opinions, and any high-falutin modern art critic who's not playing some silly social game will admit as much. If you like literally none of the art in the Tate Modern, obviously go do something else with your time. (And similarly I don't get why people keep whining on and on about the style of modern literature they don't like - just don't read it, there's plenty of different books out there)
On the other hand there's some idea of cultural value that "we" as a society are supposed to all agree on, and it ties into notions of fairness and unfairness because cultural appreciation in this sense comes with social capital. Hence all the people who work themselves up over "why does THIS belong in a museum???" and "it's not ART it's literally SHIT".
And that is why you keep coming back to architecture: artistic judgment in the first sense will never be commensurable with cultural value in the second sense, it's just a different game playing out in a different sphere. Yet you insist on conflating them, and so architecture provides the way out, because it simply takes on so much room in the public space and costs public money and whatnot, surely something should be done there so the general public will be able to find aesthetic enjoyment in something they cannot avoid and are also paying for...
And in the case of architecture I completely agree - but that is the only sphere of culture as far as I can see where this applies, and the reasoning that holds for architecture doesn't hold for e.g. literature and easel paintings. Just go read something you like, go to an exhibition of amateur renaissance imitators, write a Homeric epic about whatever (which I gather you do every now and then).. It's your own responsibility to search out the art you enjoy, instead of somehow trying to goad the mass-culture taste selectors to adapt in the direction of your tastes.
Most people like art almost entirely in a social sense - all the way from small talk with boring coworkers about lowbrow TV to a highbrow salon of connoisseurs talking about the latest thing in their specialized world. The art can be good, bad or indifferent - shared enjoyment is what counts.
Now let’s examine from the perspective of someone who cares about rationality, judgement, objective taste, etc. This perspective is common here, rare elsewhere. Even if some of us are perhaps a teeny bit autistic, we still care about sharing experiences, connecting with others, the feeling of being part of a group or a culture, being able to have meaningful conversations with shared assumptions and reference points. So if the cultural touchstones of our community are crap - eg I go on a date to the big fancy art museum and the art is literal piles of shit, or I go to dinner with coworkers and the chat is all about some reality TV slop - this is irritating. Sure I can go alone to the weird basement gallery that no one has heard of and see a piece of art that I love - I can even drag along a close friend or a spouse - but this is irrelevant to the broader culture where I also spend time. I can go research obscure punk bands - even find other fans online - but if the band broke up 10 years ago because no one came to the shows and no one I meet has heard the songs, then this fandom is a lonely and dead-ended pursuit.
>I don't get why people keep whining on and on about the style of modern literature they don't like - just don't read it, there's plenty of different books out the there
There will always be plenty of anything, there's always someone willing to self-publish their prose-maximalist, risky novel, and many no-name painters selling their classical style works online, but you may concede that an important part of art is its visibility, and our access to it. If only these very particular examples of what critics deem 'great art' are occupying the visible and accessible spaces we will be persuaded to believe that for the most part, only this kind of art exists or that only this kind of art is worthy.
These contraints that critics create around what makes 'good' art do influence what gets created. Everyone wants to make good art. And the visibility will go to the art that is deemed 'good' critically. Except in music, where critics have no power.
This is such a "high-decoupler" version of perception to witness that it's a wonder to behold. You even touch on it with the medical trials example. But art appreciation is almost the canonical "low decoupling" activity. The people who like and appreciate art at the level of art history and criticism are probably some of the lowest decouplers around! Funny to see this anthropological interaction between two wildly opposite extreme cultures.
That's a good way of putting it.
I think the issue here is that most of Art is made by and gatekept by the low decoupler clique which *utterly pisses off and disgusts/ bores* not only high decouplers but basically everyone outside of that clique.
I don’t care if making an ornamented building is not original. I just want something visually pleasing to look at, along with the vast majority of people.
Which I think is the major thrust of this post - if Art for this minority is by necessity not enjoyable by the majority, please for the love of all that is beautiful, please stop pushing it as the only acceptable form.
It's a separate issue. Traditional representational art appreciation is low-decoupling, too—that's why art forgery is a thing. If a work by Rembrandt is about to fetch a high price at auction and then it turns out it's not by Rembrandt, no one would say "well, it's worth just as much to me since it looks exactly the same regardless of who made it."
There are too many meanings of the word "Art", please remove three.
But seriously, using the same word for propensity to provide visual (or otherwise) pleasure, participate in a highbrow discussion between fellow practitioners, serve as speculative investment and be a store of value (and probably more!) does not help here.
Were it possible to do, I would advocate that visual pleasure part be henceforth renamed as 'Pretty' and all public procurement banned from funding Art, only Pretty.
To make it abundantly clear - I don't give a flying flamingo whether a government building is build in a repetitive or uninteresting manner making it bad Art by some metrics, or whether that makes it less likely to be then put on some preservation list 200 years from now. I want the Pretty. I expect vast majority of people wants the Pretty. Pretty is not universal and hard to pinpoint, so the solution to procurement usually goes through Serious People supposedly specialising in Pretty. To have those Serious People exist in the absence of the rich funding them, public historically invested in their education with the goal of providing some good authoritative source of Pretty (although I'll admit I have no idea whether that happens in US), and specialists thereof, to be able to then hire said specialists and have Pretty that works for most people.
Sadly, the whole public funding was under the overloaded term "Art", probably because specifying that "we really mean Pretty, but serious, not childlike, you know", was hard. Specialists then decided they don't care about the Pretty part of the term under which they got taught (Art) and ran away to do every other meaning of the word Art.
Public feels cheated, since they wanted Pretty, but they got no Pretty, only admonishments that it's shallow and tasteless and the drab concrete boxes are interesting commentary on (...)
So yes, maybe appreciating Art is low-decoupling thing. I don't think high-decouplers are somehow unable to appreciate Pretty. I don't think uneducated masses are somehow unable to appreciate Pretty. In particular, both of those camps seem to want more Pretty. There is no more Pretty, because the whole edifice supposed to produce Pretty produces no Pretty. This state of affairs is somewhat frustrating, especially when combined with the inevitable miscommunications happening due to how overloaded the term "Art" is and how unfortunate it is that we're discussing all of it under that term.
There is plenty of Pretty. Popular music is often Pretty. And places like DeviantArt and ArtStation are full of Pretty drawings.
Agreed, for many categories, those where procurement of Pretty is on a personal basis, there's both plenty of Pretty and plenty of different options for different tastes. It's great! I don't think this is relevant to the discussion, though, as contents of the DeviantArt and ArtStation are not subsidised by government as part of "culture" spending nor selected by any committee to be shown in public spaces for the next however many decades.
I'll freely admit that in my initial comment I meant Art in that form of public good, not personal consumption product. Yes, of course there is a lot of Pretty available if one wants to look for it, basically regardless of preferences.
No, what I was pointing at is that 'taste' and 'artistic value' are criteria for public works - either in the form of lead architect choices for public buildings or public funding for art - which inevitably end up not Pretty for vast majority of people. That seems suboptimal.
Public funding for music isn't bad, as far as I can tell.
I dunno about paintings and sculptures. I do not really care about them.
And even though I am the son of a family of architects, I do not care that much about buildings either. 😂
Not everyone feels transports of joy listening to Beethoven's Ode to Joy. It makes me feel almost physically sick as it reminds me of the EU (who pinched it for their anthem) ! Besides the Moonlight Sonata, which I do quite like, Beethoven's music seems to have a relentless, obsessive quality which I find disagreeable.
>“I could draw that with a bucket of crayons and ten minutes”,
1. I tried to do a Basquiat-style painting once. It was vastly inferior to the real thing. Ditto the work of a professional artist I knew who worked in the same style.
2. OTOH, I could probably do this, but that doesn't make it less beautiful: https://beyondproject.weebly.com/rowan-leaves-and-hole.html And a big part of work like that is the creativity involved. I could do it, but it never would have occurred to me to do so.
I googled Angelus Novus before you linked it and had the same disbelief and confusion reaction everyone describes. I had to double-check the author's name, etc. But I also absolutely love the image, to the point that I think I am going to order a physical copy and hang it in my apartment. I want to defend it as a purely sensory experience.
I don't know anything about the painter, maybe he did justify it as some complicated response to a critique to a bla bla. If so, I would be disappointed, but I would still love looking at Angelus Novus, the same as if you revealed it was a five-year-old's chicken scratch. I completely agree with how you describe what you find valuable in art. I've been to a few art museums with friends, and they always find it weird how I will just walk to a picture I think is beautiful and watch it rather than talk about each one and read the descriptions. I think I have very simple feelings about paintings, books, or songs; I either want to experience them more or I don't.
I have a strong urge to signal that I don't enjoy the painting out of pretense or that cluster of emotions that surrounds art critique. I feel a vicious and probably inordinate amount of contempt for the idea of people waxing lyrical about how a banana taped to a wall is a worthwhile contribution to human experience.
I can shift my perspective back and feel the initial "what the fuck is this" feeling I had, but the more I look at Angelus Novus, the more everything feels so perfectly... wrong, disgusting, innocent. Like a creeping horror movie, sure, it is not sensory delight from happy or heroic emotions, but I think you can be drawn to intensely sad or cathartic art purely for the sensory experience. Angelus Novus feels similar to Zdzisław Beksiński's paintings(https://www.wikiart.org/en/zdzislaw-beksinski), they are objectively disgusting, but the specific contours of the negative emotion they evoke also make me fascinated and entranced to a degree. Obviously, his work is far more technically sophisticated than Angelus Novus, but I don't enjoy technical sophistication purely for its own sake.
There is this particular mounting horror I love in fiction that I get from Angelus Novus. The scp There is no Antimemetics Department evokes it. I have a few specific memories of backpacking at night, particularly after midnight when I haven't seen any people for days. One where I am hiking along a series of desolate beaches with black water illuminated by a full moon is particularly vivid. I remember this overwhelming, profound feeling of helpless smallness. It was peaceful, I could see the beauty in every bit of my experience, but there was this horror, this twisting tension in my gut. Lovecraft definitely taps into this feeling as well.
For example, something about the mouth on Angelus Novus is so wrong, it is asymmetric, the teeth look rotting. I didn't even notice the tongue until writing this part. Looking at it too long makes me physically want to shower. But it is smiling, not just smiling but it feels innocent, like the joy of a particularly disgusting child happy to see a parent. The mouth and eyes give me such an incredible uncanny valley feeling of something half of me finds incredibly cute, and I want to care for it, while the other half is repulsed by it and wants to burn it. But that urge to burn it is so profoundly sad and tragic to the part of me that wants to protect it.
I have an odd relationship with negative qualia and disgust in particular, which is probably why this piece speaks to me. But to extend the food critic example, I don't think Angelus Novus is lukewarm slop justified as a response to some famous meal in 1974, adding commentary to the debate between pasta and lasagna. It is more like a restaurant selling a glass of pure lemon juice. I agree it would be a critic's job to point out that most people won't like the overwhelming sourness and describing this image as the sweeping epic Benjamin does is misleading. But there are people who really like pure lemon juice and making a restaurant that caters to them doesn't have to come from the weird masturbatory status games art critic spirals into.
Then it is good art for you and achieves the end it was looking for. That is what makes it art and not just extruded product.
There is a distinction between the people trying to induce strong emotions, any emotions. And the people trying to induce Pleasant emotions.
There is a reason that a lot of people don't like horror films.
Cooking seems mostly focused on making stuff that tastes nice. (Except for a few ultra-spicy foods)
A lot of artists want a reaction, any reaction. They want to avoid being meh and forgettable.
The easiest way to produce intense emotions is to make art where people go "wow that's ugly".
> A lot of artists want a reaction, any reaction.
I suppose I am fine with this, it's the type of thing that sorts itself out through free association. If enough people like the particular uncanny feeling I get from Angelus Novus, it survives; if they don't, it doesn't. A lot of people don't like horror movies, but they are also currently one of the most profitable genres, so clearly enough people also like them.
The status games around high art and art criticism feel different. The way critics talk about the banana taped to a wall or toilet in a gallery feels more parasitic. Art has cultural cachet because of the experiences people have with it, and the way criticism is done feels more like elites competing to extract status from it rather than contributing to it or indexing information about it.
Maybe another food analogy would be Angelus Novus feels like pickled herring while the toilet in a gallery feels like Salt Bae. He is cashing in on the reputation of south American steak houses and not delivering on the experience. It just feels cynical in a different way
> I suppose I am fine with this, it's the type of thing that sorts itself out through free association.
I don't think free association is doing a very good job here.
Lets say that the average architect looks at brutality architecture and thinks.
"This really speaks to me about the bleakness and futility of existence. Wow. Build more like this"
And the average person looks at the same building and thinks "grey miserable concrete cube, knock it down".
The tastes of the elite art creators are different from the tastes of everyone else. This may partly be due to self selection. And maybe partly due to, once the distinction is established, the artistic elites looking down on anyone with more average tastes.
Well there is a sense in which if fine arts culture is off making art that only fine artists want to look at, then someone somewhere (eg comic book artists) will make art for the average person.
A beautifully written post, which irony I only saw after finishing. Take the paragraph on Dostoyevsky. It's pure joy! After reading it on the train I had to stop and look out the window for a few seconds to cool down. But then after stopping and thinking about it for a bit longer: it's not remotely true.
Take Scott's own writing as art. It's very aesthetically pleasing, funny, novel, "engaging in a conversation". I'm convinced his best pieces are there primarily for the Beauty reasons: Mediations on Moloch, the cactus person, I can tolerate anything except the outgroup (which incidentally also hits with the self-aware meta-commentary I'm trying to point out here).
SSC/ACX is not focused on discovering the truth (compared to eg academic research or, I don't know, Robin Hanson's blogging) as much as it is on conveying or rephrasing it - I think this argument has been made in "Why do I suck". It is inspiring, and I can honestly say the cringe phrase about it transforming my life. But it's funny Scott himself doesn't recognise that.
I am a simpleton. If a work makes me think or feel something new or powerful, I deem it good art. For the most part, who the artist is, when it was made, or what other people think doesn't have any bearing on the matter for me.
Scott, you really, really should do what the Synthetic Opposition link recommends and read An Experiment in Criticism. Lewis was a very literary person who Actually Cared about literary experiences, and it's a fantastic account of what valuable thing all these discussions about taste are trying to get at.
Angelus Novus is excellent art in the same way a trolling comment or greentext can be excellent art. It takes you on a journey of expectation and surprise. The value of Angelus Novus is not just the painting itself, but the truly beautiful paragraph prepping you for something divine, only to have your expectations shattered, which is in itself an interesting experience.
The description prepping you for the visual medium is itself part of the art piece. It completes it to a level far above the painting alone.
> It takes you on a journey of expectation and surprise.
Yes. You are surprised at how bad it is.
The "it's good art because it's surprising/makes you feel strong emotions" thing, where you are surprised at how bad the art is.
If a chef cooked something that looked and smelled delicious, but tasted revolting, you would also be surprised.
But wasn't the picture created first, and then the paragraph created afterward by a different person? I wouldn't ascribe Scott's post on "My Immortal" to the original author, treating them together as one work.
The art was terrible until the bait and switch. Like all good art, it’s in part a reaction to what has come before. In this case the pompousness and beauty of the text juxtaposes well with the terrible painting. Like a good joke, it subverts expectations.
This is a fantastic essay, much food for thought, just exactly what I come here for. And even though seeing it made me laugh: Angelus Novus is a dog shit painting.
Russell Sprout’s debate with Jordan Call about modern Jazz touches on a lot of this stuff
"Imagine how I felt when I actually read restaurant criticism. It was all stuff like “Oh, the ambience here is very nice; I had a great conversation with the chef who told me about how his childhood in Sardinia motivated new takes on traditional dishes.” How can you be sure the chef’s personable manner isn’t influencing your impression of the food?! Haven’t you ever heard of the Pepsi Paradox in psychology? Aaargh!"
"Even if you think that dialectic and “being part of the conversation” is important, it’s obnoxious and in some sense parasitic to demand that it occupy the same part of semantic space as sensory delight."
I think that answers young Scott's objection to food critics praxis. We have a couple of fancy fine-dining establishments in my town (the doors of which I will never darken because I'm nowhere sophisticated enough to be their clientele) and after watching a lot of cooking videos, what I've come to realise is that the ambience *is* part of the entire experience. You could go to a Michelin-star restaurant that is a concrete box where everyone stands in the middle of the floor and the food is served on paper plates, but that's not why you go to a fancy restaurant. You go for an experience as much as for the food. That's why presentation matters (and I had a hard time wrapping my head round this, given that I lived through the nouvelle cuisine trend where it was 'two shredded blades of chives and three drops of basil oil, that will be fifty quid please') and why the quality of the ingredients, how and where the chef was trained, and what they're attempting does matter.
"We eat first with our eyes" is attributed to the famous Roman gourmand Apicius, and studies show (as they say) that visual stimuli do make a difference. Young Scott was on to something with his idea of blindfolds!
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22939762/
"Abstract
While the senses of taste, smell, and vision are distinct, visual stimuli have been shown to alter the perception of taste, smell, and flavor. Color may be the most obvious visual cue, but expectations through learned associations are set by other visual cues as well, including gloss, evenness, and shape. These expectations exert cognitive top-down influences that can and sometimes do alter assessments of taste and flavor."
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-9976/26/1/81
"Abstract
Chefs often say, “You eat with your eyes first.” This means that, while taste, smell, and vision are distinct senses, visual stimuli generate expectations through learned associations, and these expectations exert cognitive top–down influences that can and sometimes do alter assessments of taste and flavour. This study investigates the intangible values associated with the visual assessment of high-end pastry cakes among individuals from diverse food cultures. Using word association, the study explored the emotions, sensations, and impressions evoked by the visual representation of five high-end pastry cakes. Thematic content analysis was conducted to interpret and group the evoked words into dimensions. Across all cultures, “Organoleptic properties” emerged as the most highly rated dimension, aligning with expectations for food product visual assessments."
It *does* make a difference if the chef is making a modern twist on "this is the dish granny cooked every Sunday where I grew up in Sardinia" versus "I read about this recipe on a travel blog and decided to do a fusion version of it but I've never eaten the real thing".
Also, food critics have probably eaten about a hundred versions of the same dish, so if a chef produces a whole new novel twist on, say, mac and cheese, they'll applaud it and review it favourably even if most people would go "the hell is this, I just wanted mac and cheese!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS4BJPINl5Q
Possibly offensive to Italians - a chef's take on ragu and lasagna:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xT57w8ZS8U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNYT9rvMkjw
Your points (2: novelty) and (8: transformation) are connected to the idea of the sublime. Sublimity is not just extra beauty, but something terrifying, amazing, and beyond comprehension. I think it has to do with breaking predictive processing (which I argue for here: https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/hyperspace-of-perception?) Great artists of the past did something that audiences of their time could not have predicted, but was astonishing. It blew their minds. But now we have all absorbed that new artistic language (impressionism, prairie architecture, heroic hexameter, etc.) and while it still is great, it is no longer mind-blowing. It is part of what we are able to predict art can be. So modern artists keep trying to find the sublime by doing dumbass things like duct-taping bananas to walls, or sticking a pancreas on a dolphin and hoping that they break predictive processing.
it sounds like you’re on to something there.
One of your points is that Transgression alone is not enough. The introduction of Transgression as a valid mode of expressing creativity arguably only worked on its own once, with Duchamp’s museum exhibit of a urinal. Every (solely) transgressive gambit since then has lacked the charge of the original. They’re all derivative of the Dadaist emphasis on the jarring juxtaposition of unlikely elements, to conjure novelty. And to scandalize the overly judgemental, who are easily scandalized.
But after that initial punching through of social taboos, there’s only boredom. The vapidity of jadedness. Or the sort of decadence that pursues Transgression for its own purposes, which are no longer esthetic, or even creative. Transgression for the sake of transgression is as predictable as sado-dungeon scripts. The unpredictability of unexpected surprise and delight have left the room. Replaced by cliche.
It’s akin to the Guerrilla Theater of the 1960s, which only worked once. Throwing dollar bills into the pit of the stock exchange was brilliant- in 1970. Situationism is brilliant as critique of the “art-appeal”, “entertainment” tactics of State propaganda and Market propaganda (i.e., commercial advertisement. But, like Marxism, what’s brilliant as diagnosis is terribly flawed as cure. The Situationists attempted to subvert Advertising Propaganda Technique for the purpose of exposing its manipulations. What they eventually got was Che Guevara t-shirts. The didactic value of Situationism had shot its wad in the first round.
I don't think Marxism was even a brilliant diagnosis. His predictions about what would happen in the future under capitalism were just wrong.
I think Marx got more right than wrong, about the problems of making private capital accumulation the arbiter of so many other features of society. including the corrosion of values that results when markets are elevated to the status of an Ideology, an Ism. The elevation of market values- transactionality, commodification- has a way of developing a momentum that subordinates all other concerns to the pursuit of more money. Even practical good sense gets lost once an economic system prioritizes short-term parlays over traditional values like thrift, conservation, local relationship with natural resources, community stability, and the ideals of Enough and Other People.
This is really a topic for a different discussion. Although the aspects of the way various artistic endeavors are valued economically has some relevance. It’s worth noting that Marx’ “labor theory of value” pretty much collapses when applied to the efforts of artists. But viewing artistic effort simply in standard market terms is a debasement of the entire concept of art as carrying a meaning beyond its monetary valuation in the moment, under mundane considerations like “supply and demand.”
But the market doesn't actually value "short term" over long term to that extent. Massive amounts of money are invested in long-term payoffs. Amazon didn't start making profits until relatively recently, and was able to be funded by investors buying its stock anyway. Marx didn't predict anything like this would happen, he thought there would be falling profits, immiserated workers developing class consciousness, and escalating crises until the proletariat overthrew the system to adopt socialism and then communism.
You’re using an example of an investment in a concern that happens to have worked exactly as Marx predicted: to lead to a massive economic sector consolidated and run by the controlling interest of a handful of wealthy people for their own private ends. That’s the paradox of inertial capitalism: it works to replace diverse independent business enterprises in favor of getting as close to monopoly as possible.
That’s what made Amazon’s business plan such a low-risk investment: 1) Amazon grew by exerting a power designed to be hegemonic, to convert tens of thousands of independent e-commerce enterprises into its indentured clients; 2) Amazon founded its business as an e-commerce advertising platform facilitating the transfer and transportation of goods without the complications of manufacturing them; and 3) the original basis of Amazon’s (since diversified) revenues is commerce in actual, physically real, tangible weight material goods. The traditional basis of commerce.* That's how investors were persuaded that Amazon was a safe investment that was bound to succeed eventually. The front-loading of investment was directed toward expansion of a business model that was already proven. But my original comment wasn't directed at examples of how long money is able to wait until it gets more money. It was directed at all of the sustaining values put at risk by a paradigm with the power to subordinate every other activity of life to the goal of getting more money, Preferably as fast as possible, because that is what best enables the pursuit of even more money.
Marx also outlined the way that economic rules dominated by short-term gain capitalist priorities would inevitably lead to the macroeconomic paradigm of neoliberalism, which for all practical purposes ended up mandating that practically all American retail consumer products be manufactured in foreign countries, along with a substantial number of material goods with shall we say “strategic” value.** This overhaul of the American economy was accomplished in less than 20 years.
Like I said, at this point we aren't really discussing the topic at hand. But I can't let your reply stand unchallenged, either.
I assure you, for every example you can cite as evidence that CapitalISM has some innate wisdom or inherently moral character in its functioning, I can point out features of our economic system and events in economic history that prove that it’s a blind machine.
I’m not even opposed to market enterprise. I think independent small businesses are vitally important to maintaining all sorts of benefits for a society, with their diverse means of value addition. I just see what happens when market economic practices are formulated into an Ideology, as Capital ISM. Getting more money becomes more important than anything else. More important than clean water and air. More important than personal health. Leaving a fortune in money gets to be held as the key to providing a better future for ones offspring, instead of leaving a healthy planet for them. As an ideology, CapitalISM acts as an inertial force that’s unalterably opposed to the concept of Enough, and also entirely capable of disregarding any priority beyond accumulation through commodification, to serve exclusively private ends.
Market enterprise requires governors, brake pedals, and the feedback loops of common interest (including respect for sustaining a healthy natural environment, the underpinning of life on the planet.). To the extent that Marx's predictions have been refuted, most of the time it's been due to the introduction of those checks and balances on the ambitions of private interests seeking to maximize their private gain for their private ends.
(*An aspect not shared by the "unlimited vaporware" promises of AI, with its massively front-loaded investment plan. Which also includes quite a chunk of "public funding" already, as it happens.)
(**Autarky is not a workable economic platform when viewed dogmatically as a requirement by a national government, but there are available examples of nations who have insisted on maintaining at least a few sectors of their economy as domestic proprietary concerns, for the benefit of their people. . And if any country in the world could have insisted on maintaining a thrifty attitude toward their national resource trove and a healthier domestic manufacturing base than the one we have today, it’s the US. But the blind machine of globalization-without-a-brake-pedal demanded otherwise. And now a regime of "socialism with unique national characteristics" has responded to the conversion of the US economy to debt-fueled consumption, meeting that demand by sticking a hose in our mouth.
I don't know what Marx would have had to say about a command economy nation owning so much of the means of production that supplies US market consumer demand. Ross Perot had some prophetic insights to share on that prospect, though. Those1992 debate transcripts make for some eye-opening reading. ]
Matthew Yglesias used to quip that Amazon was a charity run by the stock market for the benefit of consumers. That was because the prices were so low (related to the lack of profit). Amazon still doesn't set prices monopolistically, as it's not actually a monopoly.
> Marx also outlined the way that economic rules dominated by short-term gain capitalist priorities would inevitably lead to the macroeconomic paradigm of neoliberalism
No, he didn't. The concept of "neoliberalism" didn't even exist back then. It was coined in the 20th century by Marxist & nationalist/proto-Nazi German critics of liberals like the Austrian School economists.
> I assure you, for every example you can cite as evidence that CapitalISM has [...] inherently moral character in its functioning
I don't believe in objective morality. I am discussing Marx's descriptions & predictions, which can be evaluated empirically.
> including respect for sustaining a healthy natural environment, the underpinning of life on the planet
I don't think that's a major theme of Marx's writing, fitting with how actual Marxist regimes don't prioritize the environment.
As genAI gets more common, and as capitalism reaches deeper and deeper into social/cultural relations via it, the pressure is ramping up for people to basically "prove" that they're human and/or "authentic" (paying attention to their own outputs, and not tricking you / merely selling you shit while pretending to be your friend).
Unfortunately this has increased demand for cliquey dynamics like above, but luckily the "niche-ification" of culture makes this weirdly easy for us weirdos to get involved in.
I.e. the cultural conversation is less prone to "Alberti's famous meal of 1974" if the "culture" at hand is, say, the size of the rationalist community, or the rave music community, or the RYM cluster #4189376: Stimulation Level 738 community, or the Brony community, or...
Basically smaller tribes that only occasionally (if ever) "breach containment" into wider awareness, like a video game reference that goes viral to people who've never played the game.
"My understanding of this, from the little art history I’ve read (including this review) suggests that artists thought the traditional forms were played out. There was nowhere left to go with poetry that rhymes - nowhere left to go with heavily ornamented buildings - nowhere left to go with representational painting."
this reductive story never makes much sense once on starts to look at particular modernist movements in detail. think, for example, of the viennese early 20th century sensibility. surely, what bothered, say, Adolf loos, karl Krauss or Wittgenstein was the combined ethical/political/aesthetic lie that continuing with past artistic languages would have entailed. to offer a similarly reductive, but more correct, alternative slogan: something had changed about human life, or at least european life, to such an extent that whatever made the output of previous artistic approaches into something more than decorative fluff couldn't be relied upon anymore. to avoid degenerating into kitsch, then, an artist had to make do without the pre-modern background that constituted the horizon of intelligibility of past art. different modernisms then understood the act of replacing or circumventing that background in various ways, giving rise to distinct schools and movements.
to give further credibility to this bird's eye view, note that Walter Benjamin elaborated upon something very much like it in several of his most influential essays. I think an account that makes Benjamin out to be what he obviously seems to be (a superhumanly keen interpreter of artistic movements and new forms of expression, at the moment of their birth) is pro tanto to be preferred over one that doesn't.
I thought Wittgenstein was a philosopher (and an analytic one at that) rather than an artist.
certainly, but a philosopher who participated in a pretty distinctive intellectual culture in which many others were artists (and people on substack are more likely to be familiar with Wittgenstein's views than those of the artists within this cultural milieu).
'The forms allowed for the modern novel have been constricted over the course of the century, so that now every book that “makes it big” in the critical world is a slight variation on the same form... There is a million-item checklist every modern book must follow not to get panned as “gauche” or “unsophisticated."'
It's only possible to think this if your only exposure to contemporary literary fiction is people online making generalisations about it. The book that won the Booker Prize in 2022 was about a ghost who tries to solve his own murder in 1980s Sri Lanka. In 2023, a near-future dystopian novel about totalitarian Ireland told in a single sentence. In 2024, a short novel that follows six astronauts on the International Space Station over 24 hours. In 2025, yes, OK, the kind of book you're thinking of here, an austere book about an emotionally-detached everyday guy (but Szalay is a wonderful writer). It is true that a certain kind of autofiction has been *especially in fashion* in recent years, and that has been tiresome for people like me who are bored by it, but all kinds of other books are published, praised and read, as they always have been.
With regard to the question of derivative work ("Okay, but do you like art?"), I think we should draw a distinction between the impact of a work on the individual, and the amount of credit or social respect that the artist deserves.
As far as an individual viewer's response is concerned, it makes sense that the strongest response to impressionism may be evoked by the first good impressionist works that one encounters. As long as the artist has done a competent job executing the conventions of the genre (not trivial), it is entirely reasonable that the result should have the same emotional effect on a naïve viewer as the original works of Monet would. In both cases, the experience is that of discovering impressionism for the first time.
On the other hand, even if the derivative artist's work is just as good as Monet's, it makes sense that Monet gets more credit. Monet (and contemporaries) had to invent the style of impressionism and figure out how to execute it without existing examples to copy or refer to. Even if there are many people who each have their own favourite impressionist works, or even if your real favourite artist is the AI image generator that can spit out impressionist versions of whatever scene you request, it makes sense that you and all other impressionist fans can agree to revere Monet as a founder of the movement you enjoy and as the inspiration without whom your favourite works might not exist in the same form.
This is a matter of coordination. It wouldn't be socially possible to coordinate the same level of respect and reverence for other derivative impressionists because there are too many of them and which one made the most impact on someone probably depends idiosyncratically on the order one encountered them.
Then again, among devoted fans of a genre or style, it makes sense that originality may be less important than sheer quality. All impressionism fans already know Monet and his work is no longer novel or exciting to them. So if some new artist comes along doing equally good work, it is natural that the new artist may be celebrated within that niche community. And I think this actually does happen. I don't know too much about the Impressionism appreciation community, but for example with music fans or video game fans, there can be lots of excitement about new releases within a specific genre, even though it's unlikely that the new release will get the same widespread acclaim as the defining works of the genre. And if the new releases are unique or innovative in some way, then they may themselves inspire imitators and become new definitive benchmarks for their own niche.
In fact, one could argue that if the restaurant critic is influenced by the reputation of the restaurant, that should be okay, because the people dining there will also be influenced and enjoy the experience more than in a less reputable place. The famous experiment about cheap and expensive wine shows this. But this opens up possibilities to corruption, and ultimately raises the question where does the line between real and fake is drawn? Can we just tape bananas to walls, make the critics hype it up, everybody is happy and worships the banana, and no one notices the next Michelangelo? It is very much 1984 and Brave New World kinds of questions. Can reality be infinitely distorted? Should it be? Should everything be subjective?
The banana seems to be enjoying a poor reputation, it's only ever made fun of. It's like someone going viral for their cringe TikTok video.
What is the critic adding then? Shouldn't they be telling the reader something they don't already know, so they may choose a good restaurant to go to? Reviewing a place with no reputation whatsoever would seem to be the most useful thing a critic can do.
I think a lot of this is due to leakage between communities, and communities vs their underlying conversations. Hipster rock critics and hyperpop critics have their own separate conversations, but things get weird when both their reviews are in Pitchfork. Brutalist architects and ornamental architects have separate conversations, but one has recently had budgets and political power while the other hasn't. (Buildings, much much more so than underground music, require funding and permissions under the current system.)
I fully agree with the post. I do like art--my cubicle is covered in photographs and paintings, and I've memorized The Darkling Thrush--but I'm more of a history guy. I think modern art fails on all counts. A story:
I live in Providence, and I've been to the RISD Art Museum a few times. There are some good rooms--they've got at least one Monet, and some of the historical pieces are of historical interest (though ugly and therefore not good as art)--but a lot of the larger galleries are student-made modern slop.
One piece which has bothered me ever time I've gone is a collection of drums hanging on the wall, arranged around a chair. The first time I saw these, I was curious. I became intensely interested when I heard a slight rumbling noise coming from the drums. I thought "My God, somebody's gone and worked out the acoustics to make the sounds of footsteps reverberate within the drums! This is a really clever bit of design!". It was only for that reason that I read the plaque.
The sound was a tape recording of a washing machine, played from a speaker inside the chair. The piece was supposed to be a commentary on women's role in the domestic sphere or something to that effect.
I used to volunteer at the Antique Gas Engine Museum in Vista, CA. This was a living museum: the goal was to keep all this stuff running and doing its job. The place grows corn, winter wheat, sorghum, &c., and processes it on actual historical equipment.
Anyway, during the show days, somebody would bring a collection of antique, gas-powered Maytag washing machines and run a few of them. These were more aesthetically pleasing than a random arrangement of drums up on a wall (if only for being more coherent), and I struggle to think of a more powerful way to make a point about women's domestic labor or whatever that student was trying to convey.
1. Art is multidimensional.
2. Information about the various dimensions increases one's ability to judge each dimension.
3. How much importance one places on each dimension is subjective.
4. There are perhaps hundreds of factors which create this subjectivity, including such varied ones as gut reaction, desire for social status, and marginal utility.
So whether you ask, "Is it good?" or "Do you like it?", the answer could be yes, no, no, yes, ...
Beauty is a many-splendoured thing.
Maybe I am misunderstanding, but I found the comparison between art and medicine confusing. Medicine is supposed to fix a discrete issue. Art is (among other things) is supposed to expand your mind.
These functions are fundamentally different — medicine takes you from a point below your baseline back to your baseline, while art is supposed to somehow elevate you from beyond your baseline. It feels to me that using the logic of science to think about art is completely wrong: the point of it isn’t to create things that maximally activate awe (or even novelty, or anything else that can be maximized) in the same way that medicine is supposed to maximize health.
Art operates in a less well-defined space than science does, so I think they need to have different logics. I don’t know what art’s is or should be, but I think it lacks a well-defined outcome, making RCT logic incomprehensible.
Anything can be art. Math, medicine ..
Why do you say art has to expand your mind? There's great art that is repetitive (such as Wodehouse moves where the themes and plots repeat). You are assigning a social activism role to art here.
What do you mean when you say medicine can be art? What would be an example?
I don't think it's a contradiction to say that repetitive art can expand your mind. If Wodehouse literally repeated his jokes we wouldn't laugh. The stable plots and themes provide a steady baseline which make the variations and surprises more effective.
Medicine involves the doctor using subtle intuitive approaches sometimes, based on what she feels would help, not based on rational thinking.
Every field involves such approaches.
I think maybe a better way of saying what I was trying to say before is that the goals and methods of science, while still complex and fuzzy in lots of ways, are more clearly-defined than art. I know I said art is supposed to expand your mind, but it's also kind of incomprehensible to say what art is "supposed" to do. That's part of what art does: evoke some emotion or idea in you, create new sensations, make you see the world in a way you might not otherwise (whether through repetition or not).
I think the inherent fuzziness of the goals of art makes it hard to think about art in the way that rationalists approach the world (in terms of outputs that can be tested, measured, or optimized for). That's why comparing art to medicine feels weird to me. We could debate whether acting intuitively makes something art or not, but doctors have a clear goal that can be optimized: cure the patient. The goal of art is very unclear, and may not even be something that can be defined in as consistent a way as health can be defined.
Not every question is of a scientific type. Art involves emotions.
It cannot be studied honestly using the scientific method. The mind is too complex. There are too many factors affecting it, many of them unknown, many unknown unknown factors.
We can't even define art unambiguously. How can we then understand it using science?
Some of the most interesting things in life cannot be studied using science - happiness, art, love…
Totally agreed!
You seem to be re-inventing the wheel here. Over a half-century ago I took a philosophy course titled aesthetics that dealt with a number of the issues you address here (I don't recall all the names, but Arthur Danto and Nelson Goodman come to mind). I understand that dealing with the issues initially on your own may accelerate your progress when you do read what others have written, but is there any point to sharing them with others? Seems more appropriate for one of those late night college bull sessions that play a role in various pundits' imaginations.
I like the following definition of great art : it is art that evokes complex emotions in me. If it evokes only simple emotions, it is *probably* not great art. I shouldn't have used the term "definition", because it's not a science.
Now do psychoacoustics and the High End Audio Wars.
I have always thought that, if the sound coming from the speakers fools the listener, then the engineering and whether or to what extent the sound duplicates the original acoustic event or the master tape is irrelevant.
Apparently, that is heresy to some.
Once again, if you love scifi, I can’t push Christopher Ruocchio hard enough if you want to see a true artist of the form. (Relevant enough and I think people should risk glazing artists doing good work more)
I'm surprised you don't mention outsider art here, which gets at some other related level of this conversation. Henry Darger's art is not objectively amazing as a piece on its own, and the bit of his writing I've read is not for popular consumption, but I find everything he did totally fascinating because of his mind set and I don't think that's just "wanting to be associated" with the artist and his mind. The fact that he did all of this in total isolation over decades sets what he created into an obsessive point of view from the perspective of the observer, which changes the art itself.
I get you've already addressed context changing the art like 7 times here, but it just really does in a way I just can't buy any of your counter arguments. The mind set of the creator is not always important, but sometimes it's absolutely critical to the appreciation of the art and I can't hand wave it away with logic and hypotheticals. I love looking at Henry Dargers art because of who he was and imagining myself inside his mind. I wouldn't if he had lived some other life.
I'm astonished that Scott can postulate these imaginary cases of latter-day imitations of great art without discussing the real-life example of Vermeer and the forger Han van Meegeren.
Re the steakhouse parable. This is funny. I spend time up in the Catskills in a small town that essentially has two restaurants and both are owned by the same man . One of them is a bar/restaurant/pizzeria and the other one just down the street is a steak house. Seeing as the fellow owns both restaurants, he orders all his meat from one place. The steak you can get in the bar/cafe is the same steak you can get in his steak house but it sells for a lot less money. So seeing as the ambiance of his steakhouse is a lot like what might be a mall restaurant in the Midwest, I prefer a cheaper steak surrounded by six flat-screen TVs, a jukebox, and a lottery machine.
How much of the Western idea that great art must be beautiful, inspiring, etc., is downstream of the fact that, historically, the works of those whom we celebrate as great artists was commissioned by elites, and that is the type of art they were interested in supporting?
Interestingly, in contrast to other visual art, we don't assume that a film must be beautiful and inspiring in order for it to be great.
For a whole inquiry into this issue I highly recommend a book by Otto Rank called "Art and Artist." it is a little obscure and a bit dense but it’s a good read,, especially if you’re interested in a psychoanalytic perspective from the 20s written by an analyst who had a lot of artists as clients. Henry Miller for example. It’s also quite sweeping in it’s historical scope. There’s a lot of anthropological investigations to do with burial sites and decoration, etc..
I've spent a lot of time reviewing modern classical music, some of it experimental, some more user-friendly. In both cases I base my judgment on whether it seems to me "cool" or vapid. One piece of modernist music can make me think "That's really neat" and another can make me think "This is empty scribbling." And that's not always related to the fame of the composer: I am convinced that the renowned Elliott Carter may have lots to say to the performers, but absolutely nothing to say to the audience. The critics who admire him are mostly performers, or have been trained as performers. I was trained as a listener.
What's your favourite piece of recent classical music? Always looking to expand my playlist...
My candidates for the finest classical composers currently writing are Caroline Shaw and Anna Clyne. My advice to start with Shaw are her remarkable Pulitzer-winning piece for unaccompanied choir, "Partita," which sounds like nothing else on earth, and her collected music for string quartet. For Clyne my favorite work is a dark and turbulent piece for orchestra called "Night Ferry," inspired by Schubert she says, and I can see the structural resemblance, but it sounds more like Sibelius. Among other composers, a favorite work of mine that's no .longer quite so new, though the composer is still living, is "Ash" by Michael Torke, which sounds more like Beethoven than anything else that's not by Beethoven. I am also very fond of immersing myself in long pieces by Steve Reich.
Thank you very much for these!
"there is a million-item checklist every modern book must follow not to get panned as “gauche” or “unsophisticated”, and almost no great book of the past followed any of these rules. The Iliad certainly didn’t”
This is a poor time for passive voice — I don’t know who is panning as gauche. I haven’t run into anyone panning anything as gauche in the last couple years, so the guess I lean towards is that some algorithm is finding the six people whos opinions best rile you up and showing you their snooty book reports. A sentence subject should clear me of this delusion!
I pretty much agree with all you've said. One thing I'll say is that I think you discount a bit too much the connection element behind art though. One of the strongest, most "mystical" experiences I've had with art for me was in a Roman villa near Pompeii. It was unusually well-preserved and allowed the visitors to look at it without much cordons or checks (I assume thanks to how relatively little known it was). And on a wall of this villa, among all its frescoes, was a painting of a little bird, like a sparrow or a robin. And for some reason that shook me up because I got to look at it from up close and I saw how beautifully accurate at was, which got me feeling that whoever painted it must have looked at a little bird, and looked at it well, and thought it was cute, and rendered lovingly every single feature of it. Such a familiar feeling, such an abyss of time between us - completely different lives and worlds, we would have hardly understood each other (my Latin isn't that good) - but this one thing, this insignificant thing of thinking "hey, little birds are cute" may have connected us.
So in a sense I think that with art, those feelings of connection throughout vast cultural and temporal barriers, as well as admiration for craft and dedication, are an element. That's not about art in itself, but about art as artefact, as proof of work and life of someone else, often someone long gone.
You were talked out of bringing up Ayn Rand in this piece. It's okay you can admit it.
I do think it's funny that the villain The Fountainhead was an art critic. So transgressive!
My favourite music makes me feel like I’ve been taking drugs. My favourite buildings make me feel humble - they make me feel placed in the world. Poetry and painting work on me in yet different ways.
I’m an architect. For me, architectural beauty depends on at least three things: truth to materials, truth to ritual, and novelty in relation to both. Kahn’s brick wants to be an arch. But a restaurant also wants to be a restaurant, not a self-service counter with better lighting. A courthouse, church, house, library, pub, or street each has a ritual structure which must be thoroughly satisfied before it connects.
The best buildings bring material truth, ritual and invention into equilibrium (all of this can be measured, btw).
A lot of keen minds have written about this: Kahn, Ruskin, Semper, Loos, Alexander, Scruton, Zumthor, and many others. Let’s all read and reconvene.
Notably, Wikipedia's page on Angelus Novus reprints the exact paragraph you did. And if you subtract the blockquote, the page still contains more text about Benjamin than about Klee. I think it would not be too far of a reach to say that there is a beautiful piece of art called Angelus Novus and its author is Walter Benjamin. There was a painting involved at some point, the same way that there is a tree involved in a beautiful piece of art consisting of a photograph of a tree; there is absolutely no point in visiting the site the photograph was taken and seeing if the tree was anything special. Perhaps modern art is deliberately designed to turn art critique into an art form, since the less a piece intrinsically says, the more you can say about it.
While there are many ways to respond to this as someone who has indoctrinated undergraduates into understanding contemporary art for years ill touch on the idea that Buildings don't look good anymore and technically Masterful Renaissance paintings.
They both suffer from market conditions of the times they exist in. Renaissance paintings were not made in isolation by suffering geniuses, they were made by large workshops (bottegas) with deep patronage. It was a technological investment in image making, and there historical mastery is unmatched because this investment ceased or reached its zenith (technologically). There is a great Raphael show at the MET in NYC right now. Of note because Raphael was considered such an apex painter that he inspired an entire movement called Pre-Raphaelite, which sought to return to a time before his innovation to find areas where paintings could still be made. The suffering genius idea, which would eventually lead to figures like Klee, sets off around impressionism and relies as much on commercially available tubes of paint as any other factor. The context of art, and how it both situates in history and extends into the future, is its real pleasure and what contemporary art enjoyers like most. The idea art is a reflection of its time is relevant beyond just responding to a feeling of a time, all the way down to the constraints of a time. If beauty is missing from art today or from the buildings you see and dislike its because the constraints of today is preventing it. But that doesn't mean that artists especially are not attempting to prod at those constraints to find gaps.
I'm not sure I have ever been Deeply Moved by visual art, let alone Transformed. There are poems, books, movies I can point to for that, but when people describe having such strong reactions to paintings, I feel like I'm reading Benjamin's description of Angelus Novus. "Uh-huh, interesting, well show it to me then and- what? That's all? Is this a prank?"
I mean they're usually quite nice paintings or statues or whatever, but I don't think I've ever heard anyone say they were Transformed by eating a meal. If someone did say that, and you ate the same meal, finding it merely quite nice, you would be as confused as I am about visual art. Someone explain this to me.
Some masterpieces choreograph dances between many types of visceral and analytical meaning. For these works, many angles of observation are meaningful, including synthesis of the angles into a... tesseract of sorts.
I say "tesseract" because past a certain point it becomes hard to believe that a work so complex, which strained so many realities through human brains into a single sensory experience, can exist. It shouldn't be possible for that many dimensions to manifest in reality.
An absurdity like Watchmen can be enjoyed from seemingly every visceral and analytical angle at once. It's visual and logical and philosophical and emotional and even musical; every page is defined by its historical context; it's every genre of fiction at once. And these angles form Watchmen by structurally reinforcing each other's greatness. Thus Watchmen's worth is assembled from every definition of "art" you could name - including this artful dance of perspective, in itself.
And I love this dance, wherever it flows, as much as it's possible for anyone to love anything.
This might be the closest I can get to defining the difference between the greatest art and Dolphin Pancreas Baby that Scott is having trouble articulating.
If you love good prose and can enjoy someone writing beautiful prose about (actually) beautiful art, I recommend anything written by Simon Schama. I didn't really have much use for art history either until I read a few of his books (and later watched some of the documentaries he narrates or hosts). He's become one of my favorite historians.
Is there one book you could recommend as a starting point? (The Power of Art seems like the obvious one, except that it's the companion piece to a TV miniseries, which makes me wonder if it's less good than his standalone books.)
My favorite books of his are Citizens (about the French Revolution) and The Embarrassment of Riches (about the culture of the Dutch Golden Age). These are not just about art, but he uses art a lot to make his points. The Embarrassment of Riches is much heavier on art than Citizens is.
I enjoyed pretty much all the documentary series I've seen of him as well so I wouldn't really take that as too much of a mark against a book. Those tend to be more general, but I wouldn't say they are bad quality. Many of them are available on PBS which you can watch with PBS Passport or as an Amazon Prime channel for like $5 a month. Others are on the BBC.
He can tend towards the grandiloquent, but I feel like he earns it. His prose is excellent but very dense.
Hume spoke of this https://davidhume.org/texts/empl1/st
I went and looked for other art by Paul Klee and it was equally bad as Angelus Novus.
This causes me to lean away from "Paul Klee is deliberately emulating a low-skill art style as a way to generate a specific reaction" and towards "Paul Klee just does not have much technical skill as an artist."
In some sense this should be irrelevant, of course. We should be able to say that a painting is bad based purely on the painting itself, without looking at context. But the praise made me wonder if there was something about the art that I wasn't getting -- if maybe Paul Klee was a technical genius who had *carefully arranged* those sparse lines. After doing the research, I think the answer is no.
https://www.wikiart.org/en/paul-klee
Think of Art as a flow of Shannonian information, bits, that a receptor with limited processing power has to parse. Abstract concepts such as "Impressionism" or "pacing" work as filters which help you group bits of information into "chunks" which are easier to parse. The endgame is not to reduce all information to just one easy-to-parse concept, because that just gets boring. Oh, it's just Impressionism, whatever. But it's also not to trascend the need for abstract concepts. Because if the information is too much for you then you may get overloaded or anxious. No good. You want to get to that sweetspot, that Mihály-Csíkszentmihályi-flow-state of aesthethic contemplation where it just clicks. Where it's still challenging, but you feel like you have the tools to make sense of it.
Notably, different filters break down information in different ways. Some abstract paintings require specific filters to be appreciated. Breaking them down with the wrong filter just produces a boring picture. Oh, my five year old could've paint that. Whatever. Also, the space you phisically occupy and your psycho-sensory state and profile also act like filters. If you're high or are autistic you just see a different work of art. The music of a string quartet gets lost in an open field. You need a quiet, enclosed space to really appreciate it. Pop music with simple melodies and simple lyrics needs a show of lights and dancing and costumes and set pieces (more information) to not bore it's audience.
Great art which persists over the centuries sort of automatically adjusts to where you are. If you know nothing, then just the immediate big picture is pleasant and its complexities are safely hidden away. But as you learn more, it grows with you. You, again, literally see a different work of art that someone who knows nothing. You don't grow past Shakespeare, as you would with, say, Harry Potter. Harry Potter gets destroyed by all sorts of conceptual filters. Shakespeare gives you interesting returns basically no matter which filters you apply to it. Even filters which didn't exist when the work was created. Feminism, psychoanalysis, bear biology.
A skillfully done painting in the style of Van Gogh, if known to be done by a modern artist (or AI), will be worth very little in the market. If, on the other hand, it is a newly discovered painting by Van Gogh, it will be worth millions. Why? Because if a connection to Van Gogh can be established it gives the painting magical properties, like a hat that belonged to Lincoln, or a Honus Wagner baseball bat, or a ring worn by Marilyn Monroe, or a flag that was taken to the moon. People believe in magic and will pay a lot for it.
Is “ that would plunge me into some kind of aesthetic crisis” supposed to be “wouldn’t”?
What counts as "art" to normal people is probably different than what counts as art to "experts" at critiquing art. Normal people can use "made me feel something" as a heuristic but just like a surgeon is numb to gore, experts "feel things" that normal people would see as some kind of weird fetish.
I've been working in marketing and advertising for a long time, for 17 years now, and this touches on something: when is value created?
If you look at brand advertising, like jeans or jewelry or whatever, the advertising, in some sense, actually creates the value. People are willing to pay more because they associate that clothing with high status or certain identity and that identity comes from the advertising, which is essentially custom-made art to promote a product.
One could say that all art is a waste of utility and I'd be inclined to agree with that. It's why I made my career in business-to-business advertising instead of consumer advertising. but it's also a fact that that story or connection is something that people really want and it can make them happy.
For me, taste = Paying Attention/Pattern Language. My Sensory Delight is one or two orders of magnitude greater in realms where I have some grasp of PA/PL, and my appreciation of Novelty is basically nil except where I can integrate that novelty into a broader understanding of PA/PL.
Scott's posts on this topic endlessly frustrate me because he, not grasping the PA/PL of architecture/art sufficiently to have skin in the game, nevertheless insists on throwing uninformed tomatoes at the artists and architects--even though he understands other aesthetic fields, e.g. prose, well enough to KNOW that there's much more going on from inside perspective than a glib outsider would suspect.
(I say this as someone who is probably 70% sympathetic to his views on modern architecture and 20% sympathetic to his views on modern art.)
I think there’s a sense in which good art is still made, we just don’t really call it art first.
Most video games, people taking photos for photo shoots, and some movies about aesthetics are trying to make good art that is pleasing to look at in the mundane sense that you would expect.
I think your architect example is worse for us as consumers because we can’t choose to not consume, as in look at, the buildings around us. Maybe the thing is that the more voluntary people’s consumption of your art and the more that you’re judged on making other people feel good, the more your art is driven towards looking good.
In your modern art examples, you end up hating it and thinking it looks bad because you can’t voluntarily consume your own version of museum art. You’re not the person the modern art is being sold to. I hate it too, but I mostly just think it’s stupid.
Could you imagine an entire community disappearing up its own ass about more and more refined versions of its peculiar interest until it’s totally incomprehensible to outsiders? Strange to believe, but I bet that’s how most people feel about rats solving AI with Bayes or whatever is most upvoted on lesswrong
If I had a positive reaction to what turned out to be mass produced fake art, I'd conclude "producing fake art requires copying real artists, and it was actually the creativity of those real artists, filtered through the fake, that I had a reaction to".
There's also the possibility that in making the fake art, someone made a random and noncreative decision that happened to also be a good creative decision by pure chance (especially if it makes the work seem fresh compared to other works) and this is on top of the creativity copied from other artists.
Would you happily consider the copycat one of your favorite artists? And if not - okay, but do you like art?
No, for the same reason that I wouldn't consider someone who takes a photograph of the Mona Lisa to be one of my favorite artists. The copycat brought the art to me, but did not contribute to its artistic content other than possibly by chance.
There are multiple ways to take it from here, and multiple things you might be interested in related to these ideas.
1: According to Heidegger, Being (with a big B, it refers to human "being") is also inherently Being-towards-death. He views Being as each human not just existing in the now, but always existing within a social structure and always projecting themselves into an abstract future "possibility-space". You're not just "Being" now, you're also at all times partially existing in the futures you see for yourself.
Part of always projecting yourself into the future like this is the understanding that all of your projected futures lead to the same point, death. This means that Being is also always being-towards-death. This is what art (and much more) derives a lot of meaning from.
I probably did butcher Heidegger, considering he's notoriously difficult to comprehend, but a lot of his ideas are very interesting and worth thinking about.
2: Semiotics and how symbols relate to meaning. Unfortunately I don't have time to write how this relates to the post right now, but hopefully I'll remember later.
If we imagine the commentary from Benjamin as being a description of the art he envisioned and Angelus Novus merely an implementation, we should be able to create a piece of art that evokes the same reaction in more than just one person. We could perhaps judge the art’s success based on how many people felt what Benjamin felt on seeing it.
Surely, then, we could give Walter’s description to the median machinery of man, and have it crank out the most plausible representation of the masses’ expectations; hopefully an isomorphism for the majority of people.
But it doesn’t work. You can feed the Angelus Novus description into AI all day and only get back trite stupid images that evoke nothing. At least with the real Angelus Novus image I felt a sense of weirdness and somewhat unsettled.
So the closest visual rendition of the prose remains the original, as we know it can engender Benjamin’s sentiment in at least Benjamin.
This piece treat sensory awe as a property of the object alone — strip provenance and what's left is the real thing. But the Chesterton-grade "I couldn't write this in ten million years" awe depends on registering that a being like you did something you couldn't. A sunset is beautiful; it isn't artistically awe-inspiring in that sense. AI is the test, and the images that floored people in 2023 look generic now in a way that has nothing to do with technical improvement. The depth was novelty all along. Your framework predicts the awe outlasts the novelty. It hasn't.
The piece also reads like a rhetorical move. The occasion is the AI Art Turing Test, the conclusion you keep walking up to without stating is "so AI art is fine," and keeping the argument abstract lets the framework persuade without you defending the application.
I enjoy spending a day in a museum, so I'm going to try to describe what the plaques (the "backstories") do for me, someone who likes visual art but never studied art history and in fact leaves museums with a bunch of open tabs about art history and techniques.
What I like about the museum experience is the flow state I can access, looking carefully at each object. I try to look at objects before I look at their plaques, so that each object stands totally alone and I evaluate it based on my naive reaction.
Part of the exercise is also to suppress the judgment function and force myself to see what is there. In doing so, I can derive at least some delight from looking at every item when I notice myself noticing something; if I stay in the judgment mode, I can judge all items as "insufficiently delightful" just from being in a bad mood. In cooking, where I have more expertise, I'm *more* capable of suppressing my judgment and describing what a food objectively "is". Neither as a taster nor a viewer am I capable of doing an objective chemical analysis on the spot. I can say that a cookie is slightly burnt on the outside and dense inside, a pattern that often appears when something was baked at a higher temperature and for less time than the recipe likely called for; that it seems to have been made with white sugar, flour, egg, and a combination of butter and shortening. I can say all this before I get to whether I liked the cookie or not.
Notice that even in that value-neutral analysis, I called on my knowledge of how baking works and what's likely to happen to a cookie. If someone told me that the cookie had been constructed in a 3D printer, atom by atom, I would in some sense be wrong (the fat composition wouldn't be "butter and shortening", it would be a combination of triglycerides not derived from milk or plants). I would also be kind of disappointed: if you can print any food, why print this?
Plaques do something similar for me: good museum writing gives me a sense of what techniques were common and available to artists at the time, which lets me notice more things through giving me more buckets in which to put observations. I can notice that the pattern of glazing on pottery looks random, and a plaque can lead me to think "oh, it is random because it's poured" or "it's painted on, so perhaps it isn't random. Oh, I see brushstrokes." An audioguide that describes all the characters in a painting lets me home in and notice more things about them than if they had been anonymous, the same way that we notice more about our friends than about strangers. Being able to notice more detail makes me, at least, capable of having a stronger reaction to the art.
> I would also be kind of disappointed: if you can print any food, why print this?
This is essentially my exact reaction to most contemporary art!
Something that undermines your arguments and that you've consistently failed to consider (to my recollection) in these posts about art and taste you've done is that, when it comes to the artistic mediums of which you're critical, you seem ignorant about them, and your taste is not a good referent.
I remember you've sort of acknowledged this after one of the architecture posts, where you noted that a number of commenters disagreed with you about some modernist buildings being ugly, and that is a recurring issue in your posts on the subject, you, personally, dislike the examples you give of bad art, and base a large part of your reasoning on these examples being bad art, but if you're in fact wrong, and they are in fact good art, a large part of your argument falls apart.
Here you treat the example of Angelus Novum as being obviously, barefacedly bad, but if you were wrong about it being bad, your conclusion that people saying it's good just because of cultural context, because of "the conversation", might be wrong too, and your notion that we're calling "philosophical point scoring" by the same name as "creating beautiful things" might be wrong too, if it's the case that the examples you think are bad, are actually good, in the "beautiful things" sense. You have an extremely narrow taste on other mediums, and this blinds you to what might be good about them, you might be a victim of your own lack of literacy in the mediums which you criticize. I'm not personally that literate in visual arts either, but I think I have a broader taste than you do, and can notice some artistic elements that are good about Angelus Novum, like it's neat that it puts emphasis on more bare geometric shapes, so there's a contrast between the bareness of the shapes and how they're put together to make a recognizable figure, and it's neat how it's coloured with really subtle shading differences that help define the body parts, and it's framed with a dark uneven colour, kind of surrounding it in a dark mist, and it's neat how its body is really disproportionate, like really big eyes and head, which together with the geometric shape construction makes it kind of monstrous... I don't know, as I said I don't really have the technical language to say much about it, but I can see there's neat things about it regardless. Similarly with your disdain for brutalist architecture, you summarize it as "concrete cube", but it's more about giving more emphasis to geometric shapes and making a construction out of geometric shapes, which I also think is really cool, I'd love to live somewhere with a lot of brutalist buildings around, because they're not just "concrete cube", they have a lot of varieties of shapes that you don't get with older architecture. Maybe you should try to grapple with the ways in which these art pieces you don't like might be good in ways you don't currently understand?
You're knowledgeable and probably have good taste in the medium of writing, then, in that medium, do you notice that other people think things are bad, where you, armed with your knowledge, think they're good? Like you sing praises to G. K. Chesterton's writing, but now imagine hypothetical blogger Alett Scoxander comes along with a blog post about how modern writing is bad, but they have a very narrow taste in writing, and they have this example where they saw a beautiful painting, let's say in a kind of Caravaggio chiaroscuro style, which was inspired by a passage by Chesterton, and they saw the painting first, and read the passage after, and think there's a huge contrast between how beautiful the painting is, against how horrid the writing that inspired it is, saying that it pales before the likes of Shakespeare and how modern writing is bland and simplistic, and without understanding Chesterton's writing they draw conclusions about how the people that praise it must be for some cultural reason (I checked while writing this, and found out that funnily, Chesterton and Klee were contemporaries... they lived almost the same actually, just shifted like 4 years, so a pretty appropriate comparison). With your writing experience you'd probably consider it bollocks, but then how would you communicate this failure to Alett Scoxander, for whom their conclusions make perfect sense? I guess a thing to keep in mind, since we're all fans of rationalism and Bayesianism here, is how certain can you be about a judgement of some art form, given how much you know about it. Like you know a whole lot about writing, you've spent your whole life writing and studying writing, so you can be pretty certain about your judgements, and can give a whole lot of arguments to justify some writing judgement. Given that point of comparison, how certain can you be about your judgements regarding visual arts and architecture? how much do you estimate you'd have to study to reach a high enough certainty that what you say about them is right? and certainly, you should weight your judgements about those forms according to your uncertainty.
Artists study and work a whole lot to deepen their understanding of their art, and be able to wield it effectively, and while the analogy with medicine is not entirely adequate because art is a lot broader and softer, there's still a lot of knowledge of technique and function in art that makes judging it a more precise affair, so artistic knowledge is somewhere in the middle between not knowing anything and just making guesses, and the precise, strict knowledge of a hard science. How far do you have to go in that knowledge scale to trust your judgements? How close to the hard science end of the scale do you think you are when it comes to writing knowledge and judgements? Even if artistic knowledge doesn't hit the hard science end of the scale, it's a lot closer to it than what you get from just absorbing pieces of art casually and doing a little bit of thinking about it, it's a hard discipline, so how much would you have to study to get a decent certainty about artistic judgements?
Tangentially, I'm actually curious about what you think about modern writing, here you mentioned the popular end of it, but what about the more avant garde part of it, that's maybe more comparable to the modern pieces of art you're critical of? like I've seen some writers be critical of writing like James Joyce's style, saying it's comparable to this kind of modern trend of getting more abstract and conceptual to the detriment of artistic beauty. Are you critical of this kind of modern writing? If you don't like Joyce, with your knowledge of writing I'd be really curious seeing you criticise that kind of modern art, seeing what'd be your technical arguments for disliking it. Then again, maybe you think that kind of modern art is good?
Great comment
Agreed that there is good and bad art, and therefore there are probably better and worse cave paintings. But the most technically proficient and “best” cave painting made today wouldn’t come close to my awe at the shittiest cave painting from prehistory, and I would viscerally distrust anyone telling me I shouldn’t care about that.
I get not liking novelty for the sake of novelty, but what’s missing from this piece is a sense of awe at human history. Great art can inaugurate or represent a new age, like cave paintings or the early Soviet avant garde work of Kandinsky.
If you find our modern age of formaldehyde sharks and dolphin pancreas/marmoset novelty/tax evasion art to be wanting…might I suggest that you find our age of late capitalist slop to be wanting? There may be parallels here to the trajectory of Soviet avant garde abstract art of the 1920s descending into crappy Soviet socialist realism. A stagnant society will produce artistic stagnation masquerading as novelty.
I started going to sushi restaurants recently. One of my favorite items was the red snapper sashimi. Then a few weeks ago I learned that “red snapper” in an American sushi restaurant actually means “tilapia”.
I didn’t immediately stop ordering it, but now it just doesn’t feel the same.
I had to look it up. Interestingly Oreochromis spp. should be advertised as AFFRTAT, a fish formerly referred to as tilapia. There seems to have been a taxonomic revision in 2013.
I agree with Scott that art that exists to question "what is art" isn't that interesting. However, I feel that he overestimates the amount of modern art that does this.
Instead, I would posit that 3) Pattern Language and 7) Political And Ideological Point-Making are, and have been for a very long time, the primary driving forces behind art, both modern and pre-modern.
In the 18th and 19th century, the language of art was primarily driven (in Europe) by political institutions. A notable example is the concerted political/critical push in the French academies to change from the visual language of Rococo, which was deemed frivolous and bad for society, to the neoclassical style, which was believed to instill civic virtue. While sensual pleasure and technique was to be found in both styles, the primary change was in the *language* of art. No longer was art communicating about shepherds flirting with women in frilly dresses, now the dialogue is shifted to highlight scenes of civic duty and sacrifice. To reflect this change in politics and ideology, the visual language changed as well -- gone are the soft focus and deep backgrounds, replaced by hard lines and geometric settings. (See David's Oath of the Horatii: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bd/Le_Serment_des_Horaces_-_Jacques-Louis_David_-_Mus%C3%A9e_du_Louvre_Peintures_INV_3692_%3B_MR_1432.jpg/3840px-Le_Serment_des_Horaces_-_Jacques-Louis_David_-_Mus%C3%A9e_du_Louvre_Peintures_INV_3692_%3B_MR_1432.jpg vs Fragonard's The Swing: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/The_Swing_%28P430%29.jpg)
If you look at art critics from the period, most of their main criticisms were about the subject matter and how it was depicted (3 and 7) -- due to the academy systems, the top artists all had pristine technique. There was a shared language of art, mostly based on Biblical and mythological scenes. For each artist, political and personal interests are mostly expressed through this shared language of myth. (At art museums, I recommend spending the most time on religious paintings when looking at art from this period -- notice which characters are highlighted or de-emphasized, how they interact, how they're emotionally reacting to what's happening in the scene and how it might compare to the classic readings of Bible stories)
In the modern period, the arts became more and more de-institutionalized and culturally the focus was shifted more towards the individual. Public interest in myth and religion waned. The modern artist doesn't use a shared language -- they develop a personal language and system. This language may be intertextual (4), but renowned artists are usually primarily concerned with developing their own coherent language.
Because modern artists try to build a personal language, if you take any of their pieces and A/B test them like Scott suggests, they're likely to fall flat. This is expected, because you haven't learned how to read the work yet. If you look across the artist's ouvre, things will usually make a lot more sense, even if you don't like it.
For example, take Cy Twombley's Leda and the Swan: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80083
It looks like nothing. It looks like shit. But, it makes a lot more sense if you see his other works, and realize that one of his primary concerns is with the relationship between visual arts, writing, myth, and the process of symbolization. We see the caligraphy-like looping markings, and the splashes of color evoke a sense of movement and violence. In the corner, there's a window, which is a motif across his work. Out of the cloud of scribbles, you see heart shapes.
Do I *like* it? No, I actually don't, I'm not a fan of his. But I understand and appreciate what he's doing here with his personal language, and my girlfriend, who has spent much more time with his works, loves him. My point here is that Cy Twombley is *not* making art about art. He's making art about violence, gendered violence, about storytelling and myth -- just with an idiosyncratic personal language.
You can say that this idea of "personal artistic language" sucks and we should stop doing it. That would be fine. But I don't think that a conformity-driven spiral of criticism is what you don't like about modern art, and I don't think that there's been any fundamental break (other than some exceptions like Dada) in how artists and critics make and value art.
(Anecdotally, I've heard multiple people say that they didn't like particular artists or modern art in general until seeing a particularly well curated exhibit which "teaches" you how to "read" an artist)
For me, this is the real pleasure of modern art: looking across an artist's work, deciphering their project, and seeing where it ends up.
I've thought before that we should take things like Duchamp's urinal and classify it not as art but as "commentary." Like "wow, what a great piece of commentary!" The main distinction being that art is beautiful and commentary is not (and commentary is also is transgressive to the form of art). But this may mean Hieronymus Bosch's works would be considered "commentary." And so would some Dali and Picasso, and probably a lot of works that intuitively feel like good and proper art. So this distinction is still in the works.
I think it clarifies things to regard Art as a cluster of fandoms that, partially for contingent historical reasons, have attained and preserved a kind of luxury branding. Fandoms emerge when something turns out to have a strong, persistent appeal to a quorum of people with obsessive/compulsive tendencies (in the ordinary, not necessarily clinical, sense). There may certainly be crossover appeal to other types of people, but those people don't sustain the fandom. Typical fandom behaviors include stuff like memorizing names of important figures, memorizing a bunch of history, wanting to talk a lot about the thing every single day even when not much new has happened, ranking different aspects of the thing, getting mad at "fake fans", creating amateur variations on the thing and tributes to it, etc. By the nature of obsession/compulsion, people in their grips can't readily explain why they're so enthralled, because the initial enthrallment happened outside of their conscious processing. They're even worse at convincing neutral or hostile third parties why they should be interested. They'll confabulate answers, but My 9-year-old daughter has gotten really into K-pop recently, and I happily listen to songs with her, but, though I'm absolutely not a musical sophisticate, I can't help but feel that I don't "get" it. My father recently confessed to me that he was always baffled by Star Wars, which at one point I loved. I tried to make my kids watch it, but they had basically no interest. So it goes.
A lot of the recurring High Art discourse attractors are just variations on generic fandom discourse. E.g. "art for art's sake" that just seems to exist to participate in some dialectic that, from the outside, seems ungrounded in anything broadly human…that's just "fan service", "easter eggs", etc. Many fans get a little thrill out of this sort of thing even as others roll their eyes. Obsessive fans get mad at others "pretending" to like a show or creator when they just like the popular stuff and don't even know about the obscure stuff…well, that's just the same as art lovers having the urge to roll their eyes at The Starry Night or the Mona Lisa.
A big difference, of course, is that no one feels beset upon by the judgment of, say, professional-wrestling fans or hunting enthusiasts, even though you could certainly spin up a little parable about how appreciating the self-conscious spectacle of violence or the confrontation of man and the wild tap into deep elements of the human experience, blah blah. But I think we should just be totally reductive and simple-minded here: we empirically observe that high-minded American adults will scold the young for being dismissive or philistine toward Jackson Pollock etc. and also scold the young for being obsessed with Pokémon. There is no superego voice in our heads saying, "What's wrong with you? Why don't you appreciate Pokémon?!" so, if we are the kinds of people who are troubled by superego voices, we won't waste a second wondering why we don't care about Pokémon, but the fact that we may not "get" the latest sophisticated Art will feel like a rock in our shoes…
A helpful view. I especially like the thing about professional wrestling. Seriously competetive sports often also have aspects of art, recognizable by conaisseurs. High competence and high effort with a bit of creativity and sometimes beauty.
A framing about taste I like- viewing art is about empathy with the artist. When I view at a great work, my awe comes from feeling the amount of work in piece, and further, the amount of work that was put into becoming the kind of person who could produce such a piece. This effect is far greater if you are a craftsperson of the same genre; when I look at the Mona Lisa I can guess it might have taken a while, but a trained painter has a sense of the monumental effort. G. K. Chesterton is far more exciting to Scott then to me, because Scott has a sense of the kind of mind state that is required to write poetry like that. This also explains why novelty becomes exciting. The mind state required to come up with a radically new idea is one worthy of awe and is something many people aspire to. Also explains why people find AI art uncompelling, as it does not represent any real work on behalf of artist. Seeing people stretch their capacity as a human illuminates to us that we are also capable of such feats, that the door they went through is an option to us as well, which is a wonderful feeling whether we take it or not.
While I appreciate bringing thoughtful attention to visual art, this piece is doing what it criticizes, focusing on The Conversation, critics, philosophy, Klee, and Duchamp. Is it because they have recognizable names, which makes them easy to talk about?
Rather than retreating from ambiance into treating aesthetic experiences as something that might benefit from blinded studies, we should go the opposite direction, as most of our ancestors have done, and place the art within liturgical contexts. The Sistine Chapel is beautiful even now, even pictures of it are beautiful, but surely it was even more beautiful when people were praying and singing, than as a museum. The mosaics in the Hagia Sophia are still beautiful, in a tragic kind of way, but it must have been more beautiful with the Emperor and court attending, the bishops, with chanting, incense, and prayers.
Khinkali are delicious. They taste good, have good texture, and when they start getting cold, they can be fried up and reserved. But they are just OK in isolation. Within a supra, surrounded by toasts, they become magnificent. The women who made them are proud of their work! They go on about their house wine and thank those who helped them with the cooking. This is important! It is not mere decoration!
Flia is... I don't necessarily care for it. But it's an activity as much as it is a food, and the activity is fun. It's about having your mom and sister and aunts about, talking and "making flia." You might think that flia could be replaced with not making anything, or with some other better tasting food, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Empericially, it's an important part of the event.
Angelus Novusis interesting. The description above is unhinged, but other descriptions are about the printmaking process, and I would absolutely be excited to attend a printmaking workshop with Klee of his students.
The thing that's most missing on contemporary art is participation. Even immersive art spaces like Meow Wolf are beloved, because the viewer is involved. It's more true of poetry than novels, which is related to the relative popularity of novels over poetry this century. I don't like reading poems alone, but do enjoy book clubs where we read poems aloud, and live poetry readings.
I follow Otto Rank's psychological understanding about our primary dilemma (we can imagine having it all but we know we will die). His basic thesis is that development in the meaning of art forms parallels development in soul belief. The artist expresses individual personality in dead materials (bones, clay, ink) for the collective soul belief. Periods follow prehistoric mysticism, Greek idealism, Christian cathedrals and our modern individual psychology. Strong ideologies produce what we call "genius"; Homer, Michelangelo, Picasso. Much more can be said about this relation of an individual to the society from his Art and Artist, Creative Urge and Personality Development which is itself a work of art (also contains one of the earliest references to "impressionism" as it was published in 1932 Paris hanging-out with Anaïs Nin - who wrote a Preface - and Henry Miller).
My take on paintings is twofold:
Art is dead, but looking at paintings is awesome;
Most of the paintings worth looking at were done before 1950, but there are still some good ones out there!
Camerom Harwick argues that it's about (in)exploitability: a "tasteful" thing must be difficult to make more of, or someone will make lots more of it and you will keep consuming it. In this view, the food critics work because it's easy to make hyperpalatable food (just mix bear fat and salt) but not easy to make ambience and reputation; the mass-manufactured 1995 sculpture actually is in some sense worse; the highest art has to keep becoming more ridiculous as people work out how to make nice paintings and such.
https://cameronharwick.com/writing/high-culture-and-hyperstimulus/
I wonder which of these it is:
Any artifact which is easy to make more of, will be spammed to hell. As a result, if something is easily duplicated, you won't be able to look at the same instance of it as the rest of humanity and without that connection to culture it's mostly valueless
Connection to the rest of culture, by everyone looking at the same thing, is fundamentally unduplicatable, which is why it's a powerful element of tastefulness
The success of the fountain hints at the second
Was Andy Warhol "tasteful"?
I don't know anything about him other than something something pop art.
I recently read Ben Lerner's essay on art vandalism, and what it reveals about how society appreciates art.
https://harpers.org/archive/2013/12/damage-control/
A Warhol canvas being shot with a gun only increases it's value; Michelango's Pieta being smashed is only a tragedy. There is something illuminating in the difference.
Lerner notes towards the end that when art is damaged in a way that the insurer feels is beyond and/or not worth repair, the insurer pays the artist - and then puts the damaged piece in warehouse somewhere, after which it is 'legally' of zero value. He has a chance to view some of these written off pieces, many of which are not visibly damaged. As they are now worthless he's allowed to handle them - they cannot legally be returned to society, no matter how famous the artist or the piece. This says more to me about modern art than pages of critical theory.
My favorite bit - referring to a broken Koons balloon dog : "I admit I felt a frisson of transgression getting to handle the fractured sculpture, an icon I have wanted, in my more childish moments, to smash."
"But some people say they come away from art transformed, in a way which is neither just sensory delight nor just political ideology."
I always assumed this was just hyperbole. Are there any prominent examples of people being appreciably changed by art? Like where the person's behavior actually noticeably changed? IE, reconciled with some estranged family member, stopped eating meat, switched cigarette brands, etc?
I think this essay has an unacknowledged normative premise, and the eight categories you list might not be separable in the way you want. The piece assumes the sensory-delight game has priority over the dialectical-coordination game, and that players of the latter who claim to be playing the former are doing something illegitimate. But if aesthetic pleasure is an evolved heuristic for coordination utility, and coordination is what cultural selection filters for, then the games aren’t really separable, they’re just nested layers of the same process. The chef referencing Alberti 1974 is playing the game correctly, just on a different wavelength than you might prefer.
See more about this at https://demonstrandom.com/essays/posts/functional_theories_of_art/ and https://demonstrandom.com/essays/posts/financial_theory_of_art/ (warning: long, speculative, more like research notes than essays).
To be clear, I don't think these are really rival accounts, since the the descriptive claim and the normative one don't dissolve each other. It's possible to believe that the conflation is structural and still prefer to live in a world with more pure-sensory critics in it.
I kepr waiting for you to mention the poems of Ossian, who were the work of Scott Macpherson, a Scottish man who wanted to write epic poetry in the 1760s and so pretended to have discovered an ancient oral tradition passing down the poems of Gaelic Homer. When he was unmasked as a fraud, the whole critical apparatus that had assessed him had to reassess itself.
On the care for provenance, this seems like the same kind of error as thinking food critics should eat blindfolded.
I get thinking the critic should not know the restaurant, or not have a conversation with the chef. But presentation is part of the food. Like, if you could eat gray mush that tastes (and textures) exactly like a good steak, or a good steak itself, I have a hard time thinking anyone would choose the gray mush, and I even have a hard time thinking anyone would not care either way.
If you see a beautiful sculpture, and you learn that it was made by someone putting "beautiful sculpture" into some AI and having it 3d printed, that *should* hit you differently than if you learned it was made by a one armed blind person, who had never seen the human form but nonetheless captured every detail of it.
If you said "I'll have the 3d printed one because I mostly care about how it looks, and that one's cheaper" I'd understand. But if you said "I see no difference in these two, they give me the same sense of awe." I'd be confused. When you talk about a good poem giving you the sense of a god proving his superiority to mortals, isn't the second one closer to that than the first? Isn't a god saying "I can create visual beauty without ever having experienced it myself, with one hand tied behind my back" proving his superiority better than a god saying "I can type 'beautiful sculpture' into a diffusion model"?
And I think the "first Impressionist painting" has a whiff of this. It says "I can do Impressionism without having experienced it first." The modern one doesn't.
You made me look up blind sculptors. Turns out, there is in fact a famous one-armed blind sculptor, Michael Naranjo: https://www.dreamtouchbelieve.com/
He went blind at 23 in Vietnam, so it's not like he has never seen anything, but his artistic career and most of his adult life came after.
Many of the articles I found online about blind sculptors are specifically about religious art:
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-ouch-29837275
You may find Dr. Ramachandran's treatment of art in his book The Tell-Tale Brain interesting. I think it's the most convincing takes on the universal bedrock of aesthetic taste - that is, the neurocognitive primitives that seem to underlie our experience of art. These are things like grouping, peak-shift, contrast, isolation, perceptual problem solving, etc... Might be worth a read to develop your thinking on this further...
Now, I think this is a set of universal constraints on aesthetics... but of course doesn't really say anything about the nature of art or beauty. That is, art may choose to adhere to these, or to purposefully violate them, etc... but I do think it's "new ground" to tread, that is - a more sophisticated understanding of the mechanisms of perception and taste.
I imagine an enterprising artist might be able to leverage this into novelty... and indeed many already are.
But I guess on the broader point of the *project* of art, and its restless, shifting nature... something I've been thinking about a lot lately, and been meaning to write about is that human nature is incoherent. So ultimately I feel like there's not a *there* there... our humanity ties us to the here and now, to acting from local information. We have some limited, slow machinery of logic and reason to perceive the grander shape of things, but that shape is absurd, and lacking any sort of satisfying structure that satisfies our innate desire to seek patterns and problem solve. So art is this - a local and ultimately incoherent phenomenon.
I think there's a baseline flaw in doing art criticism as Ranking.
Paradoxically, this is not to say that every artifact or depiction touted as a work of art is of equal value. That would be like insisting on a position that there's no art at all.
The problem is that it's just too difficult to conceptualize an effective rubric as a template to reliably evaluate artistic quality. The best artistic works are a singular result. So singular that it’s incomparable (which is not to be confused with “#1 The Best Evar”, etc.) Artists tend to gain recognition and approval for expressing a concept that's personally unique, that adds their signature stamp as a contribution to the record of artistic creation. But there's also a lot of artistic work that's idiosyncratic and not very good. There's also a lot of art that's recognizable as homage or imitation that's quite good, even if it isn't the last word in creativity (so to speak.) Artistic masterpieces aren't even necessarily individual visions. And artistry takes so many forms.
So, it's complicated. There's no accounting for taste.
!
The fact that there can never really be a certain reliable linear order ranking does not mean that it isn’t fun to try, however. It has a way of making for a really fun conversation, and even an instructive one. Just not a definite one, a conclusive one.
I’d venture that the conversations can even serve a valid purpose, if they’re carried on both within and without the realm of critical professionalism, as group exercises over time. I think that the worth of artistic creations is associated with an enduring quality. That they’re built to last, on their own merits. Not dependent on the support of some outside official credentialing orthodoxy. A signature set of creative and esthetic aspects that isn’t to be confused with its short-run auction price.
I have to admit, the Substacker I've linked is one phenomenally talented portrait artist. If it's real.
I'm actually still hold some skepticism that it's real, even though one of the posts is a is a sped-up videoclip of him working on one of his drawings. Simply in terms of the ability to reproduce the seen- the scene beheld by his visual sense- so flawlessly with his hand. The superb level of fine motor coordination of it. The eye-hand coordination. The compositional detail.
https://substack.com/@ryosukeart
I always felt guilty for not reading contemporary literary fiction. So I want to believe it’s terrible.
Let me stir the pot with this recent video on Frank Lloyd Wright: Were his buildings in good taste. As the presenter makes clear, architecture is art with a function for serve.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zji7Zc-AYxA
I love modern art and architecture, and I assure you that I'm not just making some exotic snobbish intellectual judgement. I feel preconscious sensory delight from modern art.
I've never seen Michelangelo's David in person and I think it's unfair to judge from photos, but I've seen several stylistically similar sculptures in museums, and my reaction has always been, "Yeah, looks like a naked person. I've seen those before. Neat, I guess." I can intellectually appreciate that the sculpture took profound skill, and is embedded in a rich historical context. But if I want to like the statue, I have to cultivate my appreciation by telling myself how impressive and sophisticated it is. Ditto for cathedrals, bar maybe the Sagrada Familia. I do like the Ode to Joy, though not as much as a lot of experimental modern music that would probably horrify you.
I feel preconscious sensory delight when I walk through a gorgeous cluster of skyscrapers, particularly when their mirror facades dissolve into the sky, or when they light up in the night with dancing LEDs. I still remember this sculpture I encountered while passing through Seattle:
https://theverymany.com/piloti
I didn't have to choose to like it. I was simply struck by awe. I felt like I had been transported to an alien planet, or shrunk into the world of microfauna, suddenly humbled by a beautiful thing I had yet to understand. I love how it contains enough structure to invite the imagination, but remains abstract enough to not spoil the effect by imposing too specific of a vision. I also love this sculpture in San Francisco:
https://www.bigartloop.org/corpus
When I first saw it, I grinned like an idiot. How eerie, charming, and plain cool. Of the many traditional sculptures I've studiously taught myself to appreciate in museums, not a single one has left enough of an impression that I can remember to bring it up now.
I enjoy a broader array of "modern art" than what I've brought up here, it's not just organic sculptures. Weirdest thing I can claim is that I love how highways look from above, these vast concrete arteries pulsing with life, and nobody ever even designed those for aesthetics. Point is, Scott, I think modern art appreciators mostly do actually like art, they're not just being pretentious.
Mostly, I am now curious if there is any famous, blind food critic. Preferably deafblind. And better still, a deafblind misanthrope.
Not sure what your standards for "famous" are, but there is Daniel Aronoff: https://www.blindtastetest.net/
I have an interesting experience reading Scott's essays about taste: When I read his abstract discussions about stuff like context, novelty, history of the medium, etc, my response is something like "No Scott, you're wrong, those things are important and you shouldn't dismiss them in favor of pure aesthetic impression!" But then I get to some of the specific examples that Scott gives near the end of the essay and I agree with him that they seem kind of crappy. I was just as disappointed by "Angelus Novus" as he was. I also think modern architecture looks pretty bad.
I think I might have figured out what was going on when I thought of examples of "tasteful" art that I personally enjoy and appreciate. Most art like that I enjoy works on two levels, it does all the stuff that "tasteful," "fine art" does, but it also functions well as "regular" art. For example "Final Crisis" by Grant Morrison is a meditation on the nature of stories that draws influence from multiple historical sources and uses many creative types of symbolism. However, it's also a story where Darkseid tries to conquer Earth and the Justice League beats him up. "Evangelion" is a piece of postmodern experimental film full of deep symbolism about depression and loneliness. However, it's also a cartoon about teenagers piloting giant robots to kill big monsters that are trying to destroy Tokyo.
I think the types of art that seem to be the primary target of Scott's ire are those where most of the "normal aesthetic" stuff is completely stripped away and all that is left is the "tasteful" stuff. To use Scott's "steakhouse" example, they are the equivalent of a steakhouse with the most beautiful building ever, coolest ambience ever, and most interesting chef ever, that serves steak that literally tastes like dog shit. I share Scott's dislike for that type of art, even if I think his criticisms of taste go too far.
"Might this transgressive thing be art?" quoth the Raven
But what's transgressive about a dolphin placenta on a baby? We've seen the banana taped to the wall, the unmade bed, the urinal, the shark in formaldehyde. The random stuff art genre is not transgressive, its passé.
But there is an art style that is truly transgressive. Its got striking visuals that can impress a layman but is sure to drive an art critic to outrage. It is AI Art!
So if you, art critic don't want to become one of those Philistines who criticised the Impressionists or Van Gough before everyone realised their transgression was transcendent. I present, for your glowing approval, my work: Big Titted Catgirl in JPEG!
But I am serious that if transgression is art, AI art is the new heresy that will likely be tomorrow's standard.
> I present, for your glowing approval, my work: Big Titted Catgirl in JPEG!
You forgot the link.
Scott, your only point seems to be - the people who espouse taste never provide coherent objective measure to justify their claims.
You seem to concede what's good is subjective, you seem to concede what's good is contextual, you seem to concede that exposure and repetition lessens the impact, and every time your comeback is - okay, but look at the critics and tastemakers, they're clearly just full of shit.
Well, the response to that is that tastemakers are in fact full of shit, gatekeeping and playing status games and all. Everybody knows that (and just ignores them for the most part). We still think taste is a meaningful thing to speak about. Existence of something does not depend on whether there's a validated and agreed upon way to measure it. It's a very basic fallacy to claim otherwise.
There are some modern artists who embrace beauty and novelty together. I went to an amazing exhibition several years ago at the Tate Modern of works by the Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. You can see some of his art here: https://olafureliasson.net/artworks/
but it really can't be conveyed through a screen, because most of the one exhibit I saw was about experiencing the play of light through mist, various kinds of kaleidoscopy in space, and other things like that. It's a rare set of artworks that is both easy for a naive visitor to appreciate on a surface level and gets critical acclaim.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olafur_Eliasson
>It's a rare set of artworks that is both easy for a naive visitor to appreciate on a surface level and gets critical acclaim.
Art that a naive visitor can't appreciate is pretentious twaddle. If you need a degree in *schniff schniff* AHHHHT to appreciate it properly, any artistic component has been replaced with a status game.
That's one perspective, but it seems to just immediately discard almost all art produced by anyone in any culture, given how much cultural baggage there is in almost all of it. The average person won't get Norman Rockwell or Beethoven unless they've grown up in the United States or listening to tonal music.
I think that the best art works on multiple levels. A layman can view it and appreciate it for its beauty, or its entertainment value, or just for some vague ineffable feeling it generates. Someone more versed in this kind of art can do that as well, but he can also appreciate the historical and cultural context, seeing the additional message in the artwork. And someone familiar with how this kind of art is made can appreciate the skill and creativity that went into the process: particularly fine brushwork, a clever bit of VFX compositing, audio distortion used as melody, etc.
I think the problem with (most) modern art is that it focuses solely on those additional layers, and ignores its core mission: to make something people can appreciate for what it is, not for its history or provenance or technical skill.
I think that's often right. Though I don't think that the pure surface layer that is accessible to someone with no cultural context is any more important than any of the more intellectualized layers, given how few potential audiences really come in without any cultural context. Any particular work of art is unlikely to emphasize all these layers equally. I do think it's a problem that high modernism particularly denigrated a few layers and ended up aiming at layers that often don't travel well at all. But the populist-slopulist take that some others have in this thread (and Scott flirts with), that these few layers are *all* that matters, is at least as problematic.
In the past artists dealt with the expressive forms available to them, and this was the extent of the "narrative". When they pushed the limits, it may or may not have been appreciated at the time, Bach had to be rediscovered, for example, and would not have considered his work "art" in the modern sense. So defining art has largely been about retroactive appreciation, we have needed to understand that something actually happened and what it was. But now the art world and larger culture is dominated by a huge 'narrative industrial complex' that is trying define or manifest the flame before it is lit, and with that, the nature of the project has changed.
Reflecting and relating to context has become an end in itself, in stead of being the necessary starting point. And this has in fact made it much easier to claim that we are in the presence of art. When I walk through a modern commercial art show, a surprising number of works are completely narrative dependent, to the point that a code or manual has to be provided, this being the new standard that the "taste" is excellent.
The original vs. copy or fake problem is simply a version of not wanting to be fooled, and giving credit, such as emotional investment, where it is due. So when someone calls AI products art, for example, they are advocating for being fooled, given that art, if it is anything at all, is a project of profound human to human communication.
So maybe art is something that cannot survive being problematized.
Oh, and "white people" are not the only snobs.
I think the cultivation of taste needs repeated exposure to develop an awareness of what you like, and to deepen the appreciation of great works of art. Maybe music is an outlier in this respect.
I'm confused by the emphasis on novelty - my appreciation of e.g. Beethoven's 9th symphony is deepened by hearing it repeatedly. In fact, before I go to a concert, I will often listen to a recording of the piece in advance. On the first listening most things are going to be overwhelming, and if I don't know what to listen for, I miss out on much of the enjoyment. I guess that at a certain point it could become stale, but if I listen to the symphony now, I'll hear foreshadowing of themes between the movements, I'll listen out for counterpoint and fugue, and all that gives intellectual satisfaction.
There's also an emotional level - there are moments that can send a tingle down my spine even on a low quality YouTube recording, if I pay attention, but the experience in concert is an order of magnitude more intense. I guess it would be reduced by repeated exposure, but for a performance that requires 100-odd highly skilled musicians, it's not likely to happen. I experience this most strongly with the music of Mahler and Brahms, which I seek out when I can, but I can develop enough awareness of a C20th piece (say Bartok, Stravinsky, etc.) to appreciate them.
This seems not limited to music: people will read the same poems repeatedly, watch the same films over, and so on. Is it that people respond well to being reminded of the complexity of art?
Angelus Novus was certainly a letdown after that buildup (saw it before the reading but still, massive letdown).
I think your analogy to grammar was best. Grammar and aesthetic taste are general rules to make sure language and art convey what they should (meaning and experience, respectively and broadly). Having good grammar or good taste helps you to convey and understand things put in front of you. But they are rules to be held to lightly and can be broken from and many who hold to them too tightly grow snobbish and absurd, potentially in contradictory ways.
David Foster Wallace, is this you?
Excellent post. This is just correct.
What does the cultural critique community of Astral Codex Ten think of harsh noise music? It is “music” that literally just consists of loud, screeching, cacophonous noises with no melody, harmony, or rhythm. On the one hand, you could look at it from a point of view of “wow, this really challenges what it means to be music! If you analyze the commentary it makes on the compositional process, you can find bla bla bla…” But that’s not the angle I’m coming from when I say I like it. I genuinely enjoy the harsh sounds for the sake of harsh sound, for the unpleasant but fascinating place they occupy in aesthetic-space. It’s like the aural equivalent of eating ridiculously spicy food, it isn’t fine art, but it has a certain appeal in just how much it overloads the senses. So even if you ignore the pretentious “commentary on music” angle, I find harsh noise appealing for exactly what it is, really loud and unpleasant sounds that evoke a certain masochistic aesthetic pleasure. What do all of you think of this? Does harsh noise count as music, either as sophisticated commentary or as weird shit that just sounds cool? Does the fact it takes basically zero skill to make play into this at all? Here are some examples of harsh noise, if you need some reference:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ukZYP5Dy43E
https://youtube.com/watch?v=bHN_e8qa4iU
https://youtube.com/watch?v=PB1cEyy0fKs
I ended up listening to Everywhere at the End of Time during the pandemic, when online communities were into organising listening to things together; it seems like something you might get on with? Skip straight to stage 4 or so, if you go from the start it won't at all be obvious why I'm suggesting it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJWksPWDKOc This is someone who strongly feels they have something specific to express, via the medium of noise.
Personally, I prefer structure in my harsh noises; things like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9J_z_kjGaVs are about my limit.
How do you feel about motorbike engine style beat with little else? Like this cover https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuPkRvO0kvA or track 3 of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hN5we6CL-w
I'm familiar with Everywhere at the End of Time, I haven't listened to the whole thing but I appreciate the concept and think it's a cool project. As for "motorbike engine style beat with little else," I assume you're talking about loud, repetitive percussion, and I enjoy lots of extreme metal styles of drumming, especially stuff with constant double kick bass drums. A good example of fast, monotonous drumming I like is on this Burzum track: https://youtube.com/watch?v=vfBmYfnjLho
Yup, we're on the same page with that. Track added to my PL, exploring other Burzum things now; thanks! :)
...oh my god, there's actually a thread where Temporary Secretary is (basically) on topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EeTkF-SLxE
I would apologize, but you know you deserve it.
Temporary Secretary isn't THAT bad. Paul has certainly written worse (i.e. the granny-est of his granny music)
I think blind tastings of wine by critics are a thing.
And it has completely overturned wine's critical establishment, showing that extremely expensive wines do barely any better than cheap wines when their price and context is hidden. Look up the "Judgement of Paris" (not the one that started the Trojan War), where a blind tasting had California wines do better than French wines, totally upending the established regional hierarchy within wine criticism.
Yes, it did! 😀 (Although the top echelon of wine tasters do recognize a difference between many expensive and cheap wines even when blinded.)
Yeah, but the J.P. was 50 years ago and now the best California wines (like those who took part of that competition) are also comparably expensive.
Drink plenty of expensive wine and you might find you can identify the cheap plonk.
I personally find it very hard to care what art critics think about anything, on any level. I have never in my life gone to a restaurant, read a novel, or or purchased a product based on a critique. A *description*, yes, but a critique, no.
I am currently writing a review of "A World Appears" by Michael Pollan. We'll see how that goes.
If I had the experience of seeing a piece of visual art I thought was really great and found out it was by "made by some nobody in the past 50 years to sell on the mass market", I'd conclude that said nobody probably did have a lot of skill and/or talent at making art in that style, but achieving that level of skill today probably doesn't actually require being a 1-in-a-million genius and the mass market is just who actually buys art in that style.
If everyone had "good taste", everything would look, sound, and taste the same. Wouldn't that onjectively be a much more boring way to live?
Yes you are of course right. And this wasnt the first I have read of Scott's work, and I actually do respect him and his message tons. My reaction was also really sadness. Because I thought it was a waste of time for a beautiful mind to pontificating on the wrong subject. One in which he was clearly a fish out of water, and in my view, retracted from his credibility when he could have just not written, and I would still think he was 99% correct all of the time. Don't get me wrong just because I was so worked up in reaction to this one piece. Im general I appreciate rationalism but I think it too often can devolve into mental masturbation in a way that this piece was reminiscent of. If it wasn't 3:30 am when I wrote it, I would have been more considerate and respectful, which is how I actually do feel. My tackles were just raised and it was a post of emotional reaction. Oh amd I was talking about Scott's analysis, just the simple often ignored fact that I know as a life long biologist. If you seek to understanding something by dissecting it, all you really get is a fraction of knowledge, but most consequentially and often ignored, the bird or shark or whatever, is no devoid of the thing smyou supposedly studying- life. So what did you really LEARN about life by killing it? I believe that a balance between the judicious use of intuition when appropriate and rationalism when appropriate is the best path to a better future. Respect the call out to the negative Nelly nature of my comment. In general, I have nothing but respect for Scott and this whole community. Im just not big on swimming downstream so I will contrarian the shit out of every! Thanks for listening to this particular ape man for a sec. Be well yall!
I am late to the party here but let me propose this synthesis.
1. People are totally genuinely interested in beautiful things, but
2. People genuinely have a lot of trouble disentangling their own views on what is beautiful from the views of others, especially people they like or admire.
And this is what causes all the confusion.
- They actually have made art since the Eisenhower administration. A lot of it re-embraces beauty. I particularly enjoy Pierre Huyghe's sculpture. Even Mehretu's "modern art" has scooted back towards beauty. Curiosity is a good thing.
- Why do Chesterton like poems suck? Why can't we reprint his form for infinite genius? Because you did not live in turn of the century London, you didn't smell the horse shit, you didn't smoke his cigars. And the memory of these things will only grow fainter. If culture or what it's like to be Chesterton contributes 5% to genius, that's a deal breaker. You have to write your own poems Scott.
I don't know if this is responding to the post at all or simply a comment on art generally, but I've found art most edifying when I think of it as a form of empathy.
What I, and I think many people, often desire from art is some form of transcendental experience, where you encounter art that seems to partially part the veil, and you emerge from that experience transformed in some small (or large) way, after seeing capital-B Beauty. And while we're right to seek out and treasure those experiences, they're, in my experience, somewhat rare.
What I also value is trying to see art through an empathetic lens. Angelus Novus is a great example of that. Without having read that one person's description I probably wouldn't have put much thought into that work, and I'm not going to go out and buy a print or anything, but seeing it after reading the description connects me to that critic. Criticism, at its best, is a sort of shared sight. The critic "sees" something in the art that they try to communicate, and by viewing art in light of that communication, we can better see what they're seeing. Even if we ultimately believe that what they see isn't entirely justified by the art itself, we've still engaged in an act of empathy. In addition to stretching that empathetic "muscle" we also gain a greater vocabulary for how other people might see art and the world.
Maybe doing this we are occasionally duped by a dishonest and insincere critic or artist, but I think that's a fine price to pay for entering into the collective conversation of art/beauty/aesthetics.
Even if we aren't examining art in light of what someone else has said about it, we can practice seeing art in this way. I try to make it a habit, now, whenever I go to an art museum, to pick a couple of pieces and really look at them. Stand in front of them for 10, 15 minutes, and try to experience that piece in a number of different ways. For a painting I might spend some time thinking about the technical aspects--what do I see in terms of the brush stroke, or the colors used, or the composition? Then go to wherever my mind takes me to try to get into the artist's headspace. Why would someone pick this subject to paint? Look at faces. What do the expressions on the faces tell us about those people? What background details can I see? What do I know about this artist and their place in the history of art? What political, religious, or social topics might have been on their mind at the time? And so on and so forth
I've found that nearly every time I've done this I've not felt it to be a waste of time. Even if most of the answers to the questions I ask myself are, "I have no clue" or "this is confusing", the very act of genuinely spending time with the art is meaningful. For maybe only a brief moment I've tried to step outside myself and see something as someone else might have seen it.
Scott,
I'm glad we got a followup. I have some thoughts:
1) Grand, Unified Theory of _____ is always wrong; anything approaching an attempt to analyze individual, subjective experience across multiple domains for both different individual and combinations of senses in a grand, unifying theory is not-even-wrong.
2) You shouldn't need to be told that "having taste" and "reaching the top of a nominally-taste-based status-hierarchy" are two very different things.
3) Others have already pointed this out, but I'll add my own non-expert explanation, as you often do: Taste-testing restaurant food in a controlled environment and experience-testing restaurants with controlled food would help design better restaurants, but it wouldn't be a good way to review restaurants.
4) Re-read your own "Lines Composed In A Fake Sequoia Forest" to remind yourself of how you responded to a kinda-sorta analog of your sculpture hypothetical and insight into how the context/history of a work of art affects appreciation: I don't think AI art is necessarily bad, but I think "Why did a human create this" and "Why did an AI create this" are questions that are interesting in very different ways. If that makes sense to you, add context-based qualifiers to multiple possible human artists. For a real example, two of my favorite musicians are virtuosos of the same instrument who have played closely related music. One combines A-list-level creativity with superhuman chops and has a bombastic style, while the other has "merely" elite chops, but is one of the most inventive and well-rounded musicians of his generation and has an extremely cerebral, understated style. I marvel at both of them, but my appreciation of the former isn't as deep as my appreciation of the latter; I'll hear the latter play something peculiar and think, "Why would he play THAT," then answer my own question, "Why would he play anything else?" Do you ever find yourself thinking about art (in any medium) like this?
5) To what extent do you think "taste" is a reflection of one's ability to notice and explain "once you see it, you can't unsee it" type things? [eg, the AI art "gateway ruin" that was superficially competent but had no underlying logic to either its original form nor its weathering (https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/151145038/5-but-others-might-genuinely-be-on-a-higher-plane-than-the-rest-of-us) or jsanilac's anti-attached-garage manifesto (https://www.jsanilac.com/garage/)] Similarly, putting "je na nais qua" into words (Leonard Bernstein said something along the lines of each note in Beethoven's Eroica being both surprising, when we first hear it, and then having felt inevitable, after we've heard it, which is an example of this I love)? You seemed to hint at these ideas of taste in your recent writing advice.
6) Do you know if there's any research on altered perception of visual art by people with face blindness?
I think 5 is definitely important. One definition I've heard of a great book is one that can be read with pleasure by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure. I don't think it's a perfect definition but there's something to it. I've found that AI art and writing are impressive at first but get worse the longer you look at them and the closer attention you pay, which is why I don't put a ton of stock in Scott's "look at a thumbnail of a picture for 5 seconds and if you can't immediately tell whether it's AI, that means your taste is fake" test.
(To be clear I'm not commenting on the future trajectory of AI art, just on what I've seen so far. It's inevitable that it will get better, the question is: how much better?)
I'm reminded of this Alan Watts quote "What is reality? Obviously, no one can say, because it isn't words..." So much of this post and the previous is focused on the critic's side of the equation, and the tool of the critic is words. Reviews of a restaurant are expressed in words, the Angelus Novus commentary is words, and as a blogger your tool is words. But none of it is the art itself. You're trying to pin down art into something objective, something agreed upon, something with a definition, and as you briefly alluded to this is in the tradition of the dialectic. That all fits into the rationalist community and fits into critique and fits into your selected medium, but the symbol of a thing is not the thing itself.
Take genre. What really is the purpose of genre? To say that something is punk or postmodern-classical or dubstep is really only a symbolic representation of the music itself. It's only useful in the context of words, either written or spoken, to give someone an idea or expectation of the music you're talking about. And it's also only useful if the listener/reader is aware of music they've heard in that genre before and can map their general idea to the words you're using. Genre is a tool of communication only in words. It can serve as location on a map that is unique to every single person that has created their own internal understanding of music. But once you actually hear the music, genre is completely irrelevant. The music is self evident. A combination of genres, or something so strange you say "I'm not sure what this is" may be outside your current internal map, but that doesn't make it bad or good, it just means you don't have an existing taxonomy to describe it in words. Good news is you don't have to, you just have to listen!
The commentary of Angelus Novus obviously isn't the same as the work itself, a restaurant review isn't the same thing as the food, even a review of art in the same medium such as a book isn't the same thing as the book. The only way to determine what art is great is to experience the art. Then we all come together and categorize/debate/symbolize our collective experiences with the same work but all we are really doing is checking what everyone else's experience was. Sometimes a lot of people think it was great, sometimes only the critics think it was great, sometimes it takes years of future experiences and context to collectively conclude something was great. The metrics, the words, the symbols we use for greatness are largely irrelevant. The exact number of people who think it's great is irrelevant. If you ever look up what the most popular song on any particular date was more often than not you won't have any idea what the song was, yet there are songs that never charted that tens of millions remember decades later.
LLMs are terrible at describing love. They are trained on a bunch of words, none of which are love itself, and all of which are descriptions of everyone's own representation of their experience of love. The average response the LLM targets doesn't get close to any of it, and the LLM has never experienced love. Love isn't words, it's an experience. And if you want to get super technical about it and say love is a complex collection of neurological processes then you're really missing the point because the description of all those processes still isn't the same as the process itself. Love is an experience with all the context of every experience you've ever had to bring you to this point and feel this specific feeling. Immeasurable; undefined. How else could we continue making new art about love for thousands of years if it wasn't so specific yet so universal?
Taste or greatness will never be defined, can never be quantified (and if it is we have a Goodhart's law situation), and will never stay the same. As opposed to sports where greatness can be measured such as running a set distance in less time than anyone else, art isn't a competition. The best any of can do is to experience the art, to experience reality, to experience the feeling inside (even if we are horrified or disgusted), and to continue on. Sometimes we are moved, sometimes we are indifferent. Once you are moved, you can never be un-moved. Even if you despise the art, you were still moved. Sometimes many people are all moved in a negative way and we call it greatness.
Experience the art, anything else is just noise.
You hit on a pet peeve of mine. I first encountered the idea that art should be evaluated as divorced from context back in a music theory elective I took in college, and it’s sat uneasy with me ever since.
I think it’s because I believe personal transformation is, in fact, inextricably tied to the context in which you encounter the art, (your understanding of) the history that preceded it, and (yes) how novel it is, at least to you.
Let me give an analogy to this blog. At the risk of offending our host, the book review contests gave some of the best content ever published here. A lot of them have stuck with me and have since formed fundamental building blocks of my thought process.
For me, the ones that did this most successfully were the ones that took a scholar’s life work and gave a distilled, accessible introduction to them. After reading Lars Doucet’s review of Progress and Poverty, I can no longer look at the vacant storefronts of San Francisco without thinking “Land value tax would fix this!”. After reading Brandon Hendrickson’s The Educated Mind review I can exactly pinpoint (at least part of) what separated my mediocre teachers from my excellent ones: the best ones looped in Mythic and Romantic elements (including historical stories) to make their lessons much more memorable, like my civil engineering professor telling us about Robert Hooke’s secret anagram “ceiiinosssttuv” as a way to make Hooke’s law memorable.
I think great art often does this as well. It leaves you with a fundamental building block that directly affects your thinking from then on, like the base nutrients in a meal going on to permanently be part of your body. The sensory delights, then, are the seasonings, the spices, the sugar on top of that, which makes the whole dish palatable, and harmonizes with and complements the fundamental flavour of the meal.
If a dish is mostly spices and sugar, it’s just empty calories. It’ll be enjoyable in the moment but is unlikely to stick with you.
A couple of examples:
Fans of this blog might know the online author Wildbow, famous for his online serial “Worm”. But I’ve been reading through a more recent serial of his, “Pale”, a magical fantasy set in contemporary times which I think is actually his best work.
One thing it explores is the concept of the “Faerie-Goblin dichotomy”. In his world, the Faerie are beings of artifice, of glamour, of presentation and poise and status. If Instagram was a fantasy race it would be the Faerie. The goblins, on the other hand, are the dregs of humanity: shit, piss, drunkenness, crass violence, and the grossest parts of sex. Naturally, they hate each other.
Through the Faerie, it explores how living for artifice eventually leads to a sort of self-Flanderization, where one aspect of your public image ends up taking over how you’re seen and ultimately how you see yourself. Through the Goblins, it explores how their grossness can be its own sort of falseness and artifice and status game, meaning the two ends of the spectrum aren’t that distant. One of the human characters is trained by both a Fae and a Goblin, and ends up combining both techniques.
And it wraps all this (and more) in a murder-mystery-slash-coming-of-age story with characters that are stronger and more memorable than in Worm. (And that’s saying something.) That’s the spice.
One of my favourite books is Michael Ende’s “The Neverending Story”. Its core, or at least the part that sticks with me, is that it’s often hard to know what you truly want out of life. It can sometimes take a lifetime of exploration to really figure it out, and some people never even get there in time to achieve it.
It wraps that in a beautifully complementary fantasy story with metafictional elements that hook you into the fundamental mysteries behind its world and makes it clear that a lot of this is, in fact, about you, the reader.
(If you only ever saw the movie, you never caught this part. The first movie is only half the book. Read it, and see if you can find a paper edition that preserves the original red-and-green text colouration, which is a core part of the experience.)
In music, your typical “good sounds” are traditional harmony, ratios of frequencies that sound pleasing to the ear. Its opposite is chromaticism, notes so close to each other that their ratios are out of whack: not a nice 1:2 or 1:3 ratio of frequencies but something like 16:15. There’s a string piece by Krzysztof Penderecki that is absolutely awful to listen to, because it sits on those chromatic chords for minutes on end, ear-piercing screeches making you sick to your stomach until you beg to make it stop.
Then you learn that the title of the piece is “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” and you realize all of that was intentional. The horror you’re feeling is a fraction of the horror those victims felt.
This one, admittedly, has fairly little seasoning. But put it in the right context, prepare yourself for what you’re about to listen to, and it can be transformative nonetheless.
The context can even serve to help bring unusual artistic ideas to a broader audience. The internet has recently gotten kind of obsessed with Angine du Poitrine, a band making microtonal rock music: https://youtu.be/0Ssi-9wS1so
Microtonality is the final boss of chromaticism. Forget the 16:15 semitone, you’re now playing even more dissonant 35:36 quarter-tones which sound even harsher to the ear. How the hell do you make that pleasant enough to listen to that it goes viral?
First, you present yourself as literal aliens bringing strange new music to humanity. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these folks went viral through video rather than audio. They have polka dot skin paint and masks, bare feet to manipulate their instruments, and a triangle emblem that may or may not be a religious symbol. This gets people into a mood where they say “I don’t understand this yet, but I’m going to keep watching to figure it out, because it’s fascinating.”
Then, you give just enough familiarity for listeners latch onto. In their case, it’s traditional rock vibes that usually come in strong a few minutes into each song. If you’re listening to that link above, give it like 4-5 minutes before writing it off completely. For me, that’s when the fascination turned into enjoyment.
So what’s its core nutrient? In my view, it’s that microtonality and chromaticism can actually sound fun and catchy, even if strange. One of the comments on that YouTube video summed it up best: “The elites don’t want you to know this, but you can just make up your own notes.”
But if that were common in the majority of the music industry, it would not be so fascinating, and that lesson would not be interesting or memorable. We’d have already internalized it. I suspect some Indian or middle-eastern listeners probably already have, and are less likely to be fascinated by Angine du Poitrine.
Returning to my university experience, that music theory class gave us a bunch of tools to analyze music, and had us write a paper using those tools to analyze a song we picked from a list. Context was one of them, but was called out as controversial, for reasons similar to those expressed here.
For that paper, I initially picked some boring orchestral song where I could felt like I could use all the tools. But I couldn’t make it come together. I could talk about the timbre and melody and so on, but it felt like what I had to say about those didn’t cohere into an interesting whole.
So I ultimately dropped it the night before the paper was due and feverishly wrote about the song that actually spoke to my heart, Franz Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade”, a song for vocals and piano based on a scene in Goethe’s “Faust”: https://youtu.be/kxhpNRZZ7vs
I couldn’t use all the tools as easily, but I brought in the context and it served as the core of the essay: that this is a love song where the love is a BAD thing, which both the lyrics and the musical choices emphasize, all backed by the cyclical sounds of Gretchen’s spinning wheel in the background.
And that’s the core of the song: that love is not always beautiful and healing, but can be dangerous and destructive. I’ve since seen friends fall into that trap and I wish I could have spared them from that fate.
(Cont’d below)
I’m not a poetry buff nor am I familiar with the works of Chesterton. But my suspicion is that part of why you like his poems is that he puts something valuable to you into their core. Maybe a kernel of his principled Christian moral philosophy? And I think more Chesterton poems would add more texture to that, more dimensions, maybe more lessons.
And hopefully, because it’s from the same author at a different point in his development of thought, those lessons don’t really repeat themselves more than they have to. I’m not sure a forgery or someone aping Chesterton’s style would do this.
Artists evolve, they refine their messages, they change their minds and advance their skills. Even Michelangelo had this: the early to mid Sistine chapel paintings had much more optimistic and brighter messages than the later ones, because the later ones were painted when the Protestant reformation was threatening the power of the Catholic church. Hence why “The Last Judgement” depicts a strong, muscular Christ passing final judgement on a world full of sinners.
I’m not sure I’m going to listen to much more Angine du Poitrine, in contrast. A few songs of theirs are enough to get the core message across. (Though who knows, maybe they’ll surprise me.)
Which is also why I agree with you on modern art. I agree that the core message of “Haha, can you believe I can call this transgressive and ugly thing art?” was already played out by the time of the Dadaists, and has no place in something as permanent as architecture. I think it’s time for the pendulum to swing back, even in ways that might seem a bit cringe.
(Even the Renaissance was named such because they felt like they were re-birthing the artistic and scientific spirit of the ancient Romans and Greeks. Maybe it’s time for another one?)
The tricky thing, though, is that this core of value is always relative to the viewer. A kid’s show that says “The true treasure is the friends we made along the way” is horribly cliché and boring, unless you’re a five-year-old that has never seen that message expressed before. That five year old does in fact need to learn that connections to people can sometimes be far more meaningful than material wealth. This is another reason why context, why knowing the target audience, matters.
I cannot defend Angelus Novus, I think it’s weird and kind of ugly. But I suspect that Benjamin is being honest about his praise of it. His Angelus Novus is not the same one we see, because he’s seeing it tinted by his life experience, frameworks, and biases. He’s projecting his own concerns about progress onto the painting, the same way I projected my concerns about life onto “The Neverending Story”. It could just as easily have been a blank canvas, if he were the kind of person to project those concerns onto literal nothingness.
As an artist, you have to pick your audience and meet them where they’re at. What is the core of your art going to target, and who’s going to pay you for making it? The people that have never seen that message before, the people who have seen some of it and want more, or the people who’ve seen a lot of it and think it’s played out, and are hungry for variety?
If you want to draw an analogy to science here, medicine is the wrong analogy. You want to look at social science, especially social science of perception, like the infamous “Dress”.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/D2GrrrrfipHWPJSHh/book-review-how-minds-change#:~:text=The%20neuroscientists%20tie,the%20first%20place
No one can agree on whether The Dress in that picture is white/gold vs. blue/black because what you see is dependent on whether you’re a morning or evening person, whether you’re used to seeing items illuminated by yellow indoor lighting or blue noonday sunlight. The Dress has a factual answer: it’s black and blue. Art does not.
Art doesn’t exist on the canvas. It exists in the mind of the person viewing it.
Art is the perception of art.
I don’t think it’s possible to scientifically segment out good art as separate from the context the viewer brings to it. The best you can maybe do is to say which contexts and interpretations are most common in your society and tailor your art towards that. (Architecture in particular could probably benefit from this.)
But if you do that, expect a lot of people on the fringes, especially people who consume a lot of art, to complain that art is boring now and nothing is new. Which frankly doesn’t look too different from what we have today.
Is microtonal music finally going mainstream? I never thought I'd see the day.
Two unrelated points:
1. There is still far more straightforwardly sensory pleasing art than deliberately ugly art. It might not always be hanging on the walls of a museum, but pretty landscapes are definitely more common on the whole than animals drowned in exotic fluids. The point being that not everything has to be for everyone, and there is plenty of straightforward art available if you don't like moist creature cadavers.
2. I really think you underestimate the drive for novelty. I mean, ice cream, pizza, and hamburgers are probably the most delicious foods in some imaginary objective sense. It's not surprising that kids (and many adults) overwhelmingly prefer them. But many people just have a drive to try something different. I like sushi, for example, but I couldn't argue that it actually tastes better than burgers. But I am overall happier having sushi some nights and burgers on other nights.
On the point of the chefs and the architects, my impression is that the discussions they are having with each other via tortellini and buildings are more important than you give them credit for. Even though common folk like us won't have a semantic understanding of what is going on here, we can still sense the perspective and intention and craft in the final product. To me, this is a major part of what causes the subjective experience of beautiful design.
Not an RCT, but the best experiments I've seen on musical taste was a series done at Princeton in the oughts. https://magazine.trollbreath.com/fad-fashion-in-science-fiction/
And this was not tasteful, but I found it hilarious, and some of the pieces skillful.
http://www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com/cgi-bin/mag.cgi?do=columns&vol=randall_hayes&article=032
All works of art are novel to a person just learning about them.
It's interesting that taste requires that your sensitivity be numbed by a barrage of works. One wonders if that really is a good way to tell the good from the bad.
I have replied here.
https://dissidentmuse.substack.com/p/cutting-through-aesthetic-materialism
I am an art snob that likes Resnais movies and modern art. I actually grew up as a Letterboxd kid.
If I were to probe my subconscious enough, I would probably define a 'good' work of art as a work of art that accurately represents people and psychological dynamics and a 'bad' work of art as a work of art that does not do this. Meaning, even if the world is fake and fantastical: are the psychological profiles of the characters congruous? Could they be people that existed in the real world? Do the decisions they make over the course of the work stay 'in character'? In a movie, do their living spaces fit what they 'are like'? In a novel, do the emotional tendencies of how they think match how they behave around others? Do the characters have the depth and emotion that every person in the real world has in some capacity?
In this frame, the great artists just do accurate representation with hard-to-understand or alien psychologies. Stanley Kubrick accurately represents a sociopath in A Clockwork Orange. Alfred Hitchcock renders a perverted romantic obsessive with high fidelity in Vertigo. Dostoevsky consistently writes depressive, brooding, and narcissistic characters in a way that is vivid enough to where it strikes home for anyone who has had phases like that in their life. This naturally skews negative, as alien psychologies more often lead to suffering than pleasure, but in theory if someone wrote some sweeping 800-page postmodern novel about some rigid and polyamorous Effective Altruist this would also qualify.
Musicians and painters just do this on a smaller scale. Instead of rendering people in fictional worlds, artists and painters are just tasked with invoking feeling. The best people in the world at doing this try to use their skill to invoke hard-to-access or strange feelings. Van Gogh paintings invoke an odd mixture of melancholy and serenity. Jackson Pollock paintings are kind of odd to look at, but they definitely engender some form of unique feeling.
There is a tension between the artist and the public here. The artist naturally wants to push their craft as far as possible: try to fictionally write or film the hardest to understand people, try to invoke the hardest to access feelings. The public only wants to feel feelings that feel pleasurable: the brutalist architecture definitely makes them feel something, but that feeling is negative, so they dislike it.
I'm also a decoupler. But I'll admit that art makes it hard.
There's a story, partially apocryphal, which has gained in brevity and wit as passed from mouth to mouth.
It is told about Werner Herzog, who upon being astonished by "The Act of Killing" warns a young Joshua Oppenheimer that "Art never changes anything". Years later, after the film forced a reckoning with the evils of the past, Herzog met with the director again, this time saying "Art never changes anything... until it does".
Were the film fictional I'd enjoy it. That it's a documentary makes it extraordinary. That it's transformative makes it transcendent.
But somehow, for me, the anecdote above, though fast and loose with the truth, makes it perfect.
Whatever function couples the element of art together, it's mysterious, and nonlinear.
This essay makes the good point that a lot of art/lit/steak criticism is bad because it shows little interest in the art itself, only in the dialectic of criticism. You detected this point because you, a critical essayist, have developed a refined taste for critical essays.
But what does this have to do with taste in art?
I have decent taste in painting. I scored at 90% on your art Turing test for most genres, with the only exception being ones I personally hate like expressionism. I developed this taste by spending hundreds of hours in museums, including in Jerusalem where I absolutely loved Angelus Novus.
I could explain to you how that painting makes me feel and what's captivating and exciting about it, but this will have marginal effect at best on your own taste in art. You develop taste by tasting things, and only occasionally reading a bit to help you conceptualize and contextualize them better. The fact that a lot of criticism contributes 0 to developing good taste as opposed to the little bit it was supposed to doesn't deny taste itself.
Is Scott wrong to say that most modern architecture sucks? After all, he "tastes" it every day.
He's not!
This entire series is Scott expressing his aesthetic tastes and arguing against "taste" being gatekept by some self-appointed guild. It should be called "with everyone (except credentialed blowhards) on taste"!
Imhbho: The greatest art that takes under 5 minutes is a certain music-video. As it is the most reacted to, as the reaction-videos get the most views, as the reactors show the strongest emotions ("beautiful", "sad", "hit me harder than a car, and I was hit by a car", "10 out of 5") and many are moved to start talking about deeply personal memories; of course nearly all cry, most bawl, the men on average even more than the women. 'Only difference is this one is true'.
"Monsters - the official video" by James Blunt (sure, I agree "Hurt" is in the top 3, too)
As for literature: "Literature has really just two topics: Love and death. All else is mumpitz." (MRR, Jewish-Polish literature critic.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoGGYCogY58
The problem with the steakhouse RCT analogy is xkcd.com/1462. People who go to a steakhouse aren't primary buying the taste of the food! They really are buying the experience, along with the personal feelings of luxury and the social status that come with it.
And similarly visual art has been primarily a way to turn wealth into status and legitimacy via a bunch of cliquey amateur philosopher fashionistas for centuries now. I'm in strong agreement that beauty and its appreciation are worthwhile in themselves but "art" as a term for that, as opposed to the other stuff, isn't worth reclaiming at this point.
As it happens I've been rereading Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory just now (courtesy of my second grader developing a grisly interest in that war via the Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales series; IYKYK). It's interesting on a bunch of levels and is just a hell of a book, but one of the angles that's really grabbing me that Fussell at least thus far hasn't really put forward is how closely the war coincides with the end of traditional poetry and its replacement with the stuff most of us ignore.
There are two obvious stories you can tell here (and I feel like they both have to be somewhat true). One is that the modern communication media that were about to displace poetry from mass culture were just hitting. Movies were in their infancy; the commercial gramophone was moving towards being a mass product; radio was soon to follow. Obviously this could steal the audience and leave the poets talking to themselves with no commercial incentive to produce stuff anyone else liked.
There's also the extent to which the war clearly shattered the entire cosmology of the participants, and left them grappling for new ways to express what they'd experienced. Dulce et Decorum Est is a fascinating blend of old and new, old allusions...but contradicted; old form...but with the rhyme scheme disrupted; unapologetically ugly subject matter and outspoken anger at the people who were using the old forms to write patriotic propaganda.
Fussell is particularly interested in a different work, In Parenthesis, which I now need to read; a mixed prose and poetic narrative of a soldier's experience from training to the Somme, which explicitly tries to reach back to Arthurian and mythological themes. Fussell's read is that Jones (the author) is trying to render the war comprehensible by fitting it into the old narrative tradition, but that the reality of life under artillery and machine gun defeat the effort; from searching around it seems that other people disagree about quite what Jones was trying.
In either case, you can see the outlines of a causal narrative; survivors of the war couldn't express that uniquely modern hell in the old forms, and since the art of the ensuing years was obviously going to be heavily concerned with processing the civilization's near self-immolation, things were going to move in a new direction.
(Side note: Fussell is sort of comically dismissive of the Americans, who both in his eyes lack the kind of strong national canon the Brits had and also didn't experience anything like the horrors the British did; he specifically roasts EE Cummings for seeming pleased with himself for being aware enough of Pilgrim's Progress to allude to it - incorrectly, Fussell feels.)
Which of these stories is right? Probably both, and you could probably loop them together into some broader "new media displaced the old popular media, new weapons created new horrors that called out for new modes of depiction" but it really does seem a hell of a coincidence when you put it like that.
I think this essay is mostly about splitting "art" into something like:
1) things that give sensory pleasure (a medium rare ribeye, a gif of a cat fitting into a box) which have the essential characteristic that they can succeed despite being predictable
2) things that play or advance a "fashion game" where the rules and goals of the game cannot be separated from the people playing them (sharks in formaldehyde, literal fashion e.g. lady gaga meat dress)
3) things that identify novel sources of meaning (which is very hard and so most people are bad at it, but when this occurs we rightfully call it art)
A common pattern is for people to confuse (perhaps intentionally) the fashion game with the novel source of meaning approach. And because many novel sources of meaning DO eschew "predictable sensory pleasure", many fashionistas who want to appear as artists will put sharks in formaldehyde or serve you molecular chicken foam on toast.
AMEN. Some of my favorite SSC/ACT posts are ones where I learn almost nothing because it's Scott saying exactly my own opinions but phrased way more eloquently, coherently, and to a much wider audience. I say "almost" nothing, because hopefully this helps me learn how to better refine my thinking into words so I can get better at conveying ideas like this. But mostly I think enjoy these out of narcissism. I feel validated that such an intelligent and well-respected person agrees with me and is so obviously correct, at least on this issue.
AMEN. Some of my favorite SSC/ACT posts are ones where I learn almost nothing because it's Scott saying exactly my own opinions but phrased way more eloquently, coherently, and to a much wider audience. I say "almost" nothing, because hopefully this helps me learn how to better refine my thinking into words so I can get better at conveying ideas like this. But mostly I think enjoy these out of narcissism. I feel validated that such an intelligent and well-respected person agrees with me and is so obviously correct, at least on this issue.
I'm not sure I trust food critics more than you do as a practical matter (Concretely my preference for restaurants go something like Yelp stars -> what I liked in the past [1] -> my friends' recommendations -> nothing). I don't think I have ever in my life chosen a restaurant based on a food critics' recommendation.
But as a practical matter I think it's very reasonable that a food critic should be reviewing the entire experience of eating at a restaurant rather than the blinded taste test. Your experience of eating, and indeed even the physical taste of the food, is not independent of the rest of the experience.
In most areas of human endeavor that use experimental studies other than medicine, we care a lot about "ecological validity." And (as someone with nonzero experience in food science), the ecological validity leakage between "this slice of plant-based meat tastes really good in a lab compared to alternatives" to "people will actually like this in a fancy restaurant served by a fancy chef" is massive.
[1] I have a poor memory
One of my all-time favorite quotes: “If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man's soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left.”
― Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant
"If someone who knew nothing about this liked it as a cute story about talking animals" Based on my recollections of childhood and my observations of my kids' co-op preschool, I think anyone can relate to the cycle of, "let's take things and distribute them fairly" proceeding to "it's only fair that we keep all the things". And there's zero cuteness. The resonance of this childish behavior with Communism is frosting, not cake.
Very interesting post and I agree on almost all points. One complicating thing to the conclusion: I think that a lot of the modern art people are deliberately trying to create a negative sensory experience in order to make people feel bad about the state of the world. So criticizing them for not creating beauty doesn't really work because they're largely doing it on purpose.
So it's not the art that's trash, it's the artist?
There are some people who say that art inspired them to be a better person. I once saw a comment somewhere by someone saying they were an asshole until a really good rpg videogame inspired them to be good. I don't know how accurate these claims are, but I do know that a lot of art tries to do this, like Scott's own Meditations on Moloch and The Goddess of Everything Else. This seems like a valuable aspect of art that doesn't get a lot of talking about.
I also think that sticking a urinal in a museum and calling it "art" is extremely unlikely to help at all and so dismiss things like that.
You had to be there.
> Suppose you go into a museum and you see a Renaissance-style sculpture. It fills you with awe, and you feel changed by what it tells you about the vitality and divinity of the human form.
Now suppose you read the placard, and it says “made c. 1995 by a Boomer from Ohio, who mass-manufactured it and sold copies to rich dentists to put in their McMansions.”
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I gave a similar example in On Taste (https://on-taste.xyz/) last year:
> You move next to the painting to read the plaque, hoping to learn about the artist's inspiration. Instead you read: "Morning Light on the Valley by Sarah Williams (c. 1885). Scholars now believe many elements were lifted directly from an earlier painting by Agnes Dubois." The serene valley you admired a moment ago now feels… compromised? It's still pretty, but knowing it's largely borrowed deflates the sense of originality and genius.
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Simply, my interpretation is that what you see is already shaped by what you know, remember, expect... The aesthetic experience is the total thing, context included, and that's what an artistic judgment has to work with, not some idealized version with the context stripped out.
Looking at the often deeply emotional debate about AI-in-art and AI-as-art, it's pretty clear that there are enormous gaps between what people actually enjoy and why they enjoy it, and what they _claim_ to enjoy and why they _claim_ to enjoy it.
These four things all inform each other somewhat, but often maybe not. Also, distaste is at least as important as taste for many. There is no consistency or coherence here, just everyone's attempts at striking a balance between whatever makes one's spine tingle and one's desire to be perceived as a person of taste and culture - if only in their own eyes.
Definitely food for thought. Perhaps it helps to compare art to history.
If you read a book about history and it explains some aspect of the Roman Empire, then you want it to be true. So, if you read it and enjoy it, and afterwards someone tells you that it was all made up, you feel betrayed.
Going further, some people are really interested in the Roman Empire, and perhaps they travel to Rome to see some monument that was build specifically for some victory of Trajan or so. And they see it and feel good. Now assume that they learn afterwards that the monument was actually erected in the 20th century and wasn't linked to Trajan at all. Then they are disappointed. Probably we would say righteously so. Truth is a important aspect of our expectation here.
But that is really close to how people feel when they visit art exhibitions of old pieces of arts. They don't care so much about the piece itself, they care about the historical context. So if it is made up, they have as much right to feel betrayed as someone who studies history.
Possibly, this is also true for new art: if I am interested in art that is 100 years old, in the context of its history, why shouldn't I be interested in art that came out yesterday, in the context of its own history, even though a lot of it is yet to happen?
All this is orthogonal to what Scott calls Beauty stripped of the placebo effect. But if you think that people neglect Best Art in Terms of Beauty, regardless of its context, then you should also promote the search for the Best History, regardless of its truth. Do you value the latter as highly as the former? If not, then why not?
I think there are a few reasons why people don't just "write like Homer (or Chaucer etc.)":
1) As others mentioned, Homer probably wrote in a style he didn't invent in a flash of genius, but it was synthesized from the tradition of his time. Contemporary authors work similarly. If we compare the literature canon against current books, we have to remember that we are comparing centuries against years. We are impatient to see change without realizing that time in the present flows slowly compared to history lessons. Also unlike economic output, literary output is not so easily sped up with inventions.
2) We also remember the best authors, most of the mediocre ones aren't discussed or are even lost to time as their works weren't copied so much. Ask an archeologist about what the typical inscription or text looks like, and they'll tell you it's extremely formulaic, to the point a missing paragraph can be reconstructed from a few letters.
3) This is something one could struggle against, but people have similar inputs due to globalization. Even if one author is an American conservative and the other is a Chinese liberal and they consume different media, those media are aware of each other and have accommodated each other's viewpoints and ideas, whether by accepting or refuting them. Every idea now is "poisoned" by the knowledge of the other ideas, unlike ancient times, where people not so far apart could have almost disjunct information sources.
Years ago, I tried to write science fiction stories. There was a local writing competition that also had some actual (i.e. mainstream) literary critics in the jury. Their decisions were often annoying. Like, in general, their taste was positively correlated with something being a good sci-fi story, but also once in a while they highly praised something that didn't make sense to anyone else.
From our position, they were just crazy. From their position, we (the authors disagreeing with their taste) simply didn't know what true art was.
So one year I decided to go full Sokal on them. Instead of trying to write the kind of story that I would like to read, I tried to optimize for their taste.
First, there was a guy who was among the winners practically every year. The competition was technically anonymous, but this one guy had a very specific style, recognizable immediately. From my perspective, he was just using the same pattern over and over again, and the critics were always impressed with the originality or something of his art. So this year I decided to write a story following exactly his template from the previous years.
Second, the critics always appreciated stories from new young authors, regardless of how technically badly written they were. So for my second entry that year, I tried to emulate a retarded teenager, and wrote a sci-fi poem containing the worst cliches I could think about. Added a sprinkle of patriotism, because that was another thing that some of the jury members valued highly.
Unfortunately, my first project failed, because not only the guy didn't contribute that year; he also wrote a letter to the jury apologizing for being too busy. So it was immediately clear that there was an impostor, and suddenly the template wasn't so artistic anymore. (One jury member admitted that before receiving that latter, he actually believed that it was that guy's story.)
Fortunately, the retarded poem made it to the finalist round, and got published in a book. We laughed about it a lot.
The long-term impact of my experiment was similar to Sokal's. The competition changed the rules, and the stories are no longer sent anonymously. That ended my participation.
Late to the party as I see you already posted a followup, but I wanted to add my two cents on restaurants. At a fundamental level, the system you describe where a restaurant critic has the food delivered in and eats it blindfolded is just missing major components of the experience. If how our taste buds reacted was truly all that mattered, people could just go about making the most delicious baby-food slurry and be content eating that. But you don't see products like Soylent transforming the eating experience. As a whole, society has not jumped on that bandwagon.
So in the first place, the visual presentation of food does matter. A perfectly browned, roasted chicken may be equally delicious to a pallid, beige chicken chili but one looks very appealing and one... does not. I've certainly seen many buffets or picnics where someone brought some casserole or side dish and absolutely no one takes it because it looks like cat vomit, which is a shame because it was probably delicious.
In the second place, your plan of restaurant critics having food delivered would - well, there's a vast difference between takeout and eating food that was made an hour ago or more and food that was made five minutes ago. You're going to get a severe downgrade in quality from that alone.
I thought your point about the diner food versus the critic rated steakhouse struck me as very funny because if you follow the great chefs, they are always talking about how the best steak sandwich they ever had was some hole in the wall in Bratislava or something. And they're inspired to recreate it in their restaurant but actually what they do is elevate it, deconstruct it, modernize it, and end up with something that seems to me totally opposed to both the substance and the spirit of this dish that they admired so much.
Now where I will slightly agree to your point is that on the whole, restaurant critics are reviewing Michelin starred restaurants, a breed known for their pretentiousness. When you eat at a Michelin starred restaurant, it's not just about sustenance or nutrition, it's not just about how the food tastes. Because you can get a perfectly good sandwich or whatever for 10 bucks. People who dine at those places are specifically going for the plating, the experience, the vibe, the artistry. When you're paying that much for one meal, they have got to pull out all the stops to deliver on very high expectations. They're not meant to be enjoyed by the common people who just care if something tastes good. A lot of us common folk just find those places pretentious and overpriced and don't understand the appeal. So it's a very good analogy to postmodern art in that there's a class of people who take it all very seriously and compare notes and pontificate about the symbolism or whatever, while a bunch of us look on in bewilderment.
I think people like William Blake who are totally blind to received wisdom and taste, have
true art without ‘rebellion for the sake of it’ and that artistic rebellion is simply mostly oppositional obedience to taste.
An interesting example of this from The Rest Is History this morning. When the Mona Lisa was first painted everybody was blown away by how good it influenced other artists. But as time passed Renaissance art became déclassé and everybody knew that stuff by Leonardo couldn't be any good and it ended up collecting cobwebs. But when the French Revolution happened all the old art stored away for the royalty was put on display for The People who didn't know they weren't supposed to like Leonardo and it became a huge hit again. An interesting illustration of the battle between genius versus fashion.
From an evolutionary psychology perspective, art must serve some practical function in the human animal, assuming no divine creation.
Humans are intensely social, and many individual experiences simultaneously serve group-level functions: displaying status, defining norms, demarcating in-groups and out-groups, and aligning people toward common goals.
Religion is the clearest example. Individual experiences of rapture, guilt, and fear bind a society together; religious leaders direct the group; norm violations bring punishment or excommunication; dietary laws reinforce identity. It’s no coincidence that art is universally associated with religion: music, dance, architecture, sculpture, scripture, hymns, epics.
My argument: what we call “fine” or “high” art is effectively religious art for secular society. In our modern world, conventional religious functions are distributed across the state, academia, and cultural media—and are currently hotly contested.
While art has some inherent physical grounding (symmetry, mathematical relationships between musical intervals), taste is largely a social game. High-status individuals define it; others follow to signal belonging or avoid stigma. Taste ultimately orients a group toward its highest ideals—and away from what it condemns.
(Yes, I used Claude to refine my initial draft and make it more readable. I am aware that I am signaling poor taste!)
Congratulations. Throwing that description of Angelus Novus at us and then having to go look at the painting was a unique artistic experience. Or was it comedy? Is comedy art? I laughed. Were you making the point that if art is truly about novelty, then comedy is the highest form of art?
I decided long ago that there is just one truth: there is stuff I like, and all critics who say it's bad are wrong and stupid, and if I can get more stuff I like, that's just great, no matter how "derivative" someone may call it. If I ever happen to be a dictator of some country (presently unlikely, but who knows) I will do all in my power to support the kind of art I like, and damn the consequences (but I would avoid banning most stuff I don't like, aside from maybe rap, because banning stuff just makes it more popular, especially when ban is hard to enforce totally).
For your Chesterton example, I can just substitute my very real musical example. I love 50's rockabilly (music that sounds like Bill Haley, Elvis Presley etc.). A few years ago, I discovered a modern, little known artists called Mario Bradley, who used studio techniques to make his songs sound almost exactly like 50's rockabilly (especially "Bip Bop Baby"). In terms of music, which evolved rapidly over 20th century, he's writing a new "Illiad" in ancient Greek. And I absolutely love every second of that song, and will vehemently argue that this is great art, and Mario Bradley is a very good musician that deserves more recognition than he gets, precisely because he manages to achieve that 50's sound, not only on his instruments, but also with his voice. If I found this song on a bootleg CD where it was mis-attributed to e.g. Johnny Powers (it shares some similarities with his "Long Blonde Hair", I think), would I love it less if I discovered it's a "modern replica"? Hells, no!
I think this actually happened a few times, because I love to get a big pile of songs and listen to every single and rate them for my own reasons, and I once got a pirate 100cd collection of rock'n'roll from the net, and you can imagine it wasn't entirely well-labelled. I can assure you I made no distinction between "true, old" rock'n'roll and "modern replicas" when deciding what to leave in my playlist.
re: "taste" conflating many factors
one thing that always tripped me up about my music "taste" was the fact that familiarity makes you like something more, regardless of how "good" it was to begin with. songs that i felt mediocrely about (or even disliked) i later liked, and was even emotionally moved by. the emotions then were real, but the lack of emotion (or negative emotion) i initially felt was also real. the only strong correlation in my music taste seemed to be how much i had happened to listen to a specific song. it didn't feel like i had much of a taste or opinion at all, and i thought there was something wrong with me!
i don't really have an answer for that one, besides the fact that this is a fact true of most people and not unique to me, and i stopped thinking about it.
another one (for visual art specifically) is the skill required to portray something as lifelike, especially for something as rich and complicated as skintone. i've never felt moved much by paintings or drawings, despite doing it a lot myself. i find it to be a meditative activity to try to make my piece of paper look like that thing over there, but never aspired to portray a Message or Feeling or anything. but my appreciation of oil paintings has gone up because of my experience painting - i think about the specific layers and what colors i would use if i wanted to achieve that effect (and that i don't have the ability to replicate that). but should the goodness of a painting be just how difficult it is? probably not, no
I think the difference is that people mostly go to restaurants for utilitarian reasons, not artistic reasons.
> But he was good at it and you are bad. If you can’t figure out how to do it well, stick to the stale stuff within the existing horizon and wait however long it takes for the next genius to come along.
Thank you for saying obvious truths form a public platform, that has always has the best part about this blog and SSC before.
I wholeheartedly agree with almost every single part of this post. the only disagreement I have is I actually genuinely think modern architecture and brutalist architecture look really cool. not as some kind of galaxy brain "this is a response to the Whateverist school of architecture demonstrating the contrast between whatever and whatever else" sense, but I actually just enjoy looking at modern/brutalist architecture. I don't know what to make of this - perhaps there are people out there who look at Angelus Novus and feel the same way i do when i look at the Barbican center or whatever.
Don't you have an old post titled "My Immortal as an Alchemical Allegory"?
The RCT critic is a bit like how BBQ competitions are judged. You are at a table with six or so other judges, there's a class for judging technically though it's admittedly not that strict. You are blinded to what team made each dish and you compare them against one another. You aren't blindfolded but you are supposed to disaggregate taste from appearance in ratings and they are probably correlated a little but you can just run a regression to see how much that is polluting rankings and reverse if you cared, I suspect it's not that big a deal. You average the scores of many judges against each other which... honestly maybe it'd be interesting to see all the raw data, maybe some dishes are high variance and that would be interesting.
It's not absolutely perfect but goes a long way. And I would say that the competition winning barbecue usually signals someone's restaurant will have enduring popularity (sure in part because the accolades, hard to disentangle that), and competition winners can shift styles when they introduce new concepts, like a fruitier bbq sauce will become a thing for a while, or mustard based sauces.
Most of the problems in this post come down to refusing to admit that "art" is not a single phenomenon but rather a loosely related series. Duchamp's fountain is not an artwork in the same sense that a Wordsworth sonnet is. It is not possible to get the same enjoyment from the two things. The fountain really is dependent on knowing the history. The Wordsworth only depends on fluency in English and a sensitive ear--it is not the same kind of phenomenon.
I'm really trying to avoid ad hominems here, but from having read your posts over the years I am left with the suspicion that you have not had what most people have when they talk about an "aesthetic experience." This isn't a value judgment--it makes me think of the Freud letter where he describes never having had the "oceanic feeling" that religious mystics get. An aesthetic object is not something that you can simply drink dry. It has an effect which is inexplicable and which tends to grow with deeper consumption. If you look at the accounts of the people who most know about literature, say, which is great writers, they almost always talk about how they return to the same author over and over and over. This is the closest to a universally accepted view among artists that I'm aware of.
Scott, I can't help but think of your earlier post "What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?"
See, I'm the guy who, when a waitress at a fine dining restaurant asks me, "how is everything tasting?", immediately think they must have learned to wait tables at Applebee's, because obviously the whole experience is what I'm there for, not just what I'm tasting.
That younger you would have even came up with the idea of a blinded food critic makes me think there's a "universal" human experience you're missing out on. Your comment about decoupling reinforces this. I'm a decoupler too, but I've also had formal culinary training and decades of what I'll call dedicated study of the art. I also have a PhD in biomedical science, which I think makes me uniquely qualified to say that aesthetics are not decomposable into components like a drug. There are groups that study hedonics and isolate things like how ambient scents or sounds affect the enjoyment of a meal, but the enjoyment itself remains whole.
I think you probably can see what I'm pointing at. When you write a great post, and you know it's good, do you know it's good because you used this one specific word or one specific technique? Your Inkhaven writing tips didn't decompose great working in the way you seem to expect to be able to decompose culinary art.
I agree taste is very important - I think the lack of it is a key pathology of why social media and AI have the downsides they do & they even use food language when criticizing it ("slop") - and I've thought food could be a gateway to developing taste in the broader sense.
What do you think? How do we bring the "taste of food -> enjoyment of the total package of the dining experience" to other kinds of taste which have components people might be blind to?
Scott, if you want to try the kind of food you described in your example, I hear it's a popular thing in authentic Chinese food. Some chefs specialize in food that has crazy, never before seen textures, but it's also tasteless. You're right that they advertise themselves that way though.
https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-invitation-to-a-banquet-by
I was taking the "the answer might surprise you" headlines as the joke they're meant to be, but in the meantime...
"What does a woman swimming in urine tell us about the state of the world?"
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/may/08/swimming-urine-venice-biennale-review
Although I have to say, choosing that as the highlight does a disservice to the rest of the weapons-grade cringe in there.
I don't understand why you keep saying you have no taste in visual art... Aren't there things you like or dislike? Are you indifferent to how everything looks?
If to summarize: art museums are terrible places to experience art because by their nature as musuems they have to catalog the great influences over the history of art not what is actually likely to amaze or astound the visitor.
I think you're close, but you're circling around some blind spots, so I think you should try to put your asks at the top and work through them. I loved the descriptive aspects of your post, and I appreciated your artful attempts at prescription, but I had to dig through the comments and make some inferences to figure out exactly what you wanted to be the case. So, here's my attempt:
Ask: I don't want to be surrounded by ugly buildings
Planned communities and Levittowns are pleasing to the eye. They're calming to drive around. And many of them do the patterned language well, in terms of you giving a feeling like, "this is a good home." But then, when I'm away from the suburbs, I end up in conversations where we mock the 'burbs for their conformity. We have songs like "Little Boxes" by Malvina Reynolds that expound on this theme. And after reading your post, I wouldn't go back and edit those conversations. I'm trying to figure out why, and I don't have a full understanding yet, but I think it goes like this: the upside of people taking out mortgages toward their own tastes in art, based on whatever combination of the 8 reasons you described above, in a decentralized manner, has a better net effect. You end up with places like the canals of Venice, CA, or the houseboats in Sausalito, or the flurry of modern homes in South Austin. These places have not only the sensory delight you're looking for, but a sophisticated pattern language that can only be achieved through this free economy of taste. And they also this other wabi-sabi thing that the Japanese talk about. (Interestingly, umami is also a Japanese word.)
Ask: I want food critics to be more RCT
Do you? There are plenty of options for all of the 8 types of aesthetics you described. Food critics earn a living by successfully guiding people to good food experiences. I don't want to interfere with the free market process there. Personally, I don't give a rat's ass about context when I'm eating good food. Or I take that back. If, after swallowing food, someone then told me something weird about the provenance of it, it could seriously alter my experience and cause indigestion. I could theoretically hold fast and say, "Okay, before you told me that, I really enjoyed the taste of it," but I would not go back to that restaurant.
Would I want to shake people out of their appreciation of context when it comes to food? I don't think so. People can like food for all sorts of reasons. Maybe they're rich and bored. Is there a Tragedy of the Commons like ugly building thing? I don't think there's a shortage of good food at the mid-range in Austin. Maybe in the Bay Area, but I don't think that's because of food critics.
I have two questions Scott, first, doesn't the link you provided for the Pepsi paradox link to an article that says there is not enough proof for the Pepsi paradox? 2 in your metaphor about medicines and that they work uninfluenced by the context, isn't that often not the case? Especially for psychopharmacology? (I might be wrong on that, but who best to ask then a psychiatrist?)
I was agreeing with pretty much all of this until I got to the part where you think Angelus Novus is lukewarm slop. There's just something off here. It is a beautiful moving painting.
I agree with most of what you said, which also puts me in opposition to a lot of people. Specifically regarding the distinction of contextual beauty and aesthetic beauty. But the big difference it seems is that I greatly appreciate the context, and it seems you don't at all.
When I hiked Mt. Kilimanjaro, I grabbed a black molten rock at the summit. It was so brittle that when I got home, it broke into two halves. So now I have two rocks. Both of pretty equal value to me. But what if it didn't break? What if instead of it breaking, I came back home, picked up a similar-looking black rock out of my backyard, and set it next to the one intact I collected from the summit? Would they be of equal value? Would they mean the same to me? They look the same. They have the same aesthetic value. They are both as 'beautiful'. But clearly one I hold more dear. Would you?
In terms of status games, there's a field that might beat out even modern art: luxury. And if you know anything about luxury, you know about Hermés. Hermés is the number one luxury brand in market cap, and probably the most prestigious. If you don't know anything about them, you might think it's fashion fad nonsense; rich people clinging to whatever is the highest perceived value. And to an extent, you'd be right. But there's a much deeper reason that Hermés is held in such profound esteem: they handcraft every single leather bag produced. And have for their entire 190 year existence. When you buy one, you know you are getting something that has heart put into it. You might disagree with me here but when you buy it, it's not just a bag - it's part of a story, a history. And no matter how much you might not want it to be true, participating in that is fundamental to human nature.
Does that mean I'm going to go buy a $10,000 leather bag? Hell no. I care about the story but not to that extent. It does mean, however, that when I receive a drawing of my family from my future child, I won't immediately say "this is shit" and throw it away. I'll cherish it for the rest of my life. That might seem like a dumb example but you come off as so extreme in this article that I don't know how extreme to take it. Clearly with that example, the context matters. So why doesn't it when you go to an art museum?