Oh Dave, you Tease and intellect tormenter, that this respond insists to us to seek and main-steam your content only to find few articles and no ability to support, feedback, or add value to and based on your work with no comment ability, no access of the value that others might provide. What might we assume but tormenting intent?
And 'the collective unconscious' is rooted in our Host from which He provides the Base Perfect Human's mind-body-soul (His Body and Blood) for which we all share and leach life from, Jesus Christ, that is Shared Virtues are realized and expressed in the universally true shared Natural Law, and later more fully expressed in Traditional Roman Apostolic Catholicism. So sorry you actively block this and any other responses to aspects of your content.
Thank you for your commend, and to simulation and unrealized hope to find authors of the quality that this suggested to me.
I think the priesthood thing is most directionally correct, but there are many priesthoods! The art you are into reflects some sort of social group. For the shirt example, maybe if you are part of some fancy rich club you all wear white after labor day exactly because you want to differentiate yourself from commoners. Same with art
I don't think the Google explanation is exactly right; my vague impression is that white and light colours are summer wear (because if you're lucky, the weather is hot and the sun is shining and light colours reflect the light better and just look suitable for the environment). Going into autumn, you should be changing to heavier, darker clothing to suit the cooler weather and dimmer light.
Part of it is, indeed, wealth - to be able to afford several sets of clothes for the changing seasons (just like dressing for dinner, which I imagine practically nobody does anymore). And fashion, and snobbery.
But I think I have to agree with Willie Brown (corrupt mayor of San Francisco, Kamala's squeeze who introduced her to high society and helped launch her on her career, but undoubtedly a man of taste and style) here 😁
"In his 2008 autobiography Basic Brown, he described his taste for $6,000 Brioni suits and his search for the perfect chocolate Corvette. In one chapter, "The Power of Clothes: Don't Pull a Dukakis", Brown writes that men should have a navy blazer for each season: one with "a hint of green" for springtime, another with more autumnal threading for the fall. He adds, "You really shouldn't try to get through a public day wearing just one thing. ... Sometimes, I change clothes four times a day."
Maybe not four times a day, but yes to different clothing for the seasons! I've changed out of my 'summer' colours to my 'winter' colours now, because with the grey skies, rain, and cold weather, wearing lighter colours (even if nowadays we all live and work in buildings with heating) just doesn't *feel* right.
" maybe if you are part of some fancy rich club you all wear white after labor day exactly because you want to differentiate yourself from commoners"
Okay, I *have* to quote from a Father Brown story here, "The Queer Feet" (and yes, the use of language has changed since that was an unremarkable title) 😁
"If you meet a member of that select club, “The Twelve True Fishermen,” entering the Vernon Hotel for the annual club dinner, you will observe, as he takes off his overcoat, that his evening coat is green and not black. If (supposing that you have the star-defying audacity to address such a being) you ask him why, he will probably answer that he does it to avoid being mistaken for a waiter. You will then retire crushed.
...The Vernon Hotel at which The Twelve True Fishermen held their annual dinners was an institution such as can only exist in an oligarchical society which has almost gone mad on good manners. It was that topsy-turvy product — an “exclusive” commercial enterprise. That is, it was a thing which paid not by attracting people, but actually by turning people away. In the heart of a plutocracy tradesmen become cunning enough to be more fastidious than their customers. They positively create difficulties so that their wealthy and weary clients may spend money and diplomacy in overcoming them. If there were a fashionable hotel in London which no man could enter who was under six foot, society would meekly make up parties of six-foot men to dine in it. If there were an expensive restaurant which by a mere caprice of its proprietor was only open on Thursday afternoon, it would be crowded on Thursday afternoon.
...They walked together along the passage to the entrance hall, where they saw the fresh, freckled face of the Duke of Chester, who was bounding buoyantly along towards them.
“Come along, Pound,” he cried breathlessly. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. The dinner’s going again in spanking style, and old Audley has got to make a speech in honour of the forks being saved. We want to start some new ceremony, don’t you know, to commemorate the occasion. I say, you really got the goods back, what do you suggest?”
“Why,” said the colonel, eyeing him with a certain sardonic approval, “I should suggest that henceforward we wear green coats, instead of black. One never knows what mistakes may arise when one looks so like a waiter.”
“Oh, hang it all!” said the young man, “a gentleman never looks like a waiter.”
“Nor a waiter like a gentleman, I suppose,” said Colonel Pound, with the same lowering laughter on his face. “Reverend sir, your friend must have been very smart to act the gentleman.”
Father Brown buttoned up his commonplace overcoat to the neck, for the night was stormy, and took his commonplace umbrella from the stand.
“Yes,” he said; “it must be very hard work to be a gentleman; but, do you know, I have sometimes thought that it may be almost as laborious to be a waiter.”
Maybe to expand a little bit: I don't think its just elitists and non-elitist. Think of goths, they have clear clothing and in-group rituals and the priesthood are the big musicians (?). This community clearly differentiates itself from the outside, but if you are within this community there are further more subtle marks of differentiation based on in-group conflicts and preferences.
The Labor Day thing reminds me of this, in myself: it's been a long time since I wore a dress or in fact dressed much differently than the average four-year-old, and certainly snobbery about clothing seems pretty irrelevant at the current moment. At the same time - though I own no tennis whites - I feel some slight compulsion to remain on the side of the divide of knowing, for instance, that you don't wear white shoes in fall or put your little girl in patent leather mary janes in summer. This probably locates me in some deeply mid part of the middle class, in Paul Fussell terms.
Breaking rules becomes meaningless when there are no generally acknowledged rules.
Here's what I'm thinking -- it's physics combined with priesthood.
In every field of human endeavour, there's things that are easy to appreciate and things that are hard to appreciate. A child can enjoy Harry Potter, but to enjoy James Joyce you need a lot more patience and a whole bunch of erudition to understand all the references Appreciating the hard-to-appreciate stuff is usually higher status (but not always, e.g. pornography or death metal).
So think of it as an easy-to-appreciate core surrounded by a bunch of hard-to-appreciate advanced material. But not all the advanced material is equally high status -- as with anything else, fashion predominates here, and certain flavours of advanced material cycle in and out of fashion among the afficionados as the years progress (e.g. Infinite Jest remains advanced literature but has apparently swung deeply out of fashion recently.)
Architecture is just particularly bad because the tastes of the afficionados get to determine what is built for the benefit of the rest of us.
I was going to say something similar. And sophisticated art at least acknowledges the existence of these priesthoods, since nothing more complex than a cave painting exists in a vacuum, so that their standards are either conformed to or violated with some sense of intent. It is this context of acknowledgement that made Jackson Pollock "art" and "a commentary on art" and someone's toddler's mess and or their Campbell's soup can on the counter "not art."
Very true, if these preferences are socially constructed then you'd expect to have different values for different classes and cultures/subcultures. When Scott talks about his reaction to "Class X" from Paul Fussell's book, that was how I felt reading Scott's review of Bauhaus to Our House. Yes clearly taste is not objective, and it has a lot to do with how we build up our self-image from bits an pieces of our culture, using signaling to control how we're perceived and perceive ourselves. But that's equally true for classical and modern architecture. If I trade my LC4 chair in my office for a beautiful rattan beaux-arts chair because Le Corbusier was a crazy communist, that's just me trading one signal for another.
My current model is inspired by Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.
If we imagine that people's art preferences are a sort of open-ended guess about how good the art is, their preferences are going to depend on their experiences that inform them about goodness or badness.
People share a significant proportion of their experiences. These shared experiences generate the correlations in their estimates of the quality of art. But because these shared experiences specifically exclude unique experiments that only a few people have had, they're as shallow as possible for a human to be. So if you average the aesthetic preference of many people, that gives you strictly more primitive results than if you took the aesthetic preference of any one of the people.
Those who work within a field have unique experiences not shared with the commoners, so they are somewhat more informed and therefore have somewhat better taste, in a sense. But they have specific non-random experiences, often to do with working within their field, so their taste tends to favor self-reference and simplicity. Which are certainly virtues, but become ungrounded if no other experiences are taken into account.
Someone who has lived an advanced life, learning about much of the world and doing many different things, would hopefully have a much more refined taste, being much closer to what is really good. But there's no objective way of measuring this. The closest options you have would be stuff like comparing their opinion to your opinion, or directly weighting based on their experiences.
And I guess if one wants to study it, one could look at how experience influences taste. Though the trouble is one really needs something like my LDSL model to accurately measure it. Which I'm still working on.
For most of history, many people would probably consider that a neat geometric shape. So we can sort of take this to be the "common taste" opinion of swatiskas.
In the modern west, we understand swastikas to be associated with nazis, and obviously nazis are bad so this also shows a problem with the swatiska. Healthy westerners will therefore dislike the swastika. Though many westerners are sort of unhealthy and might actually appreciate the nazi swastika more because of the coolness factor.
In the east, the swastika is a religious symbol related to peace. I don't know much about that, but I imagine this implies a lot more appreciation for it than "cool geometric symbol", and certainly the opposite sort of appreciation than "fascist symbol".
Someone who has properly absorbed both western and eastern culture will presumably have much more ambivalent and varied feelings about the swastika, knowing both its nazi history and its peace symbolism. This is a much more tasteful view than "neat geometric shape!".
> In the east, the swastika is a religious symbol related to peace. I don't know much about that
Specifically, it's a Buddhist symbol.
In China today they say that the counterclockwise-spinning swastika 卐 is an evil symbol of Nazism whereas the clockwise-spinning 卍 is a good symbol of the Buddha, but this is purely a defensive reaction to Western condemnation of the symbol as inherently evil. Historically, they aren't distinguished.
Hindus use it as well as Buddhists, you see it in India as well (where there are very few Buddhists, although many/most Hindus do consider the Buddha to be a divine incarnation).
That said, I've seen it in India, but it's not like it's everywhere- it's not uncommon, but certainly not ubiquitious, and if it fell out of fashion due to the Nazi thing there are plenty of other iconographies people could / would use.
It looks like they're included in one of the Chinese blocks, as well as in the Tibetan block since 2009. It's unclear from a brief read whether any language uses them widely *other* than to refer to the symbols, with the exception that Wiktionary notes a Japanese youth slang sense of "awesome, hype" because the pronunciation of the character (manji/まんじ) is close to an interjection (maji/マジ) for "seriously, for real". I don't know how widespread this actually is, but I'd be curious if it spread as something edgy or just completely without reference to the Western interpretation.
Unicode includes many characters that are really artwork and not writing. (囍 is another example.) While this is contrary to the purpose of Unicode, it seems to have been mandated by a commitment to full backwards compatibility with older encoding schemes. Any character that was listed in any of those older schemes must have a representation in Unicode, whether it has any written use or not.
>and certainly the opposite sort of appreciation than "fascist symbol"
To complicate things a bit, Nazis are actually cool and not particularly edgy in some parts of Asia, with Mein Kampf selling in self-help sections of Indian bookstores, while romantic comedies feature Hitler.
Coolness is about having the will and ability to break the law, so nazis were unquestionably cool, it's just that being cool is actually bad and healthy people ought to have a repulsion from cool stuff. Someone who thinks modern nazis are cool has their taste broken in a different way, I suppose, in that they don't properly internalize how defeated modern nazis are and how much they are losers. But it is understandable and forgivable for this to happen for easterners, as nazism isn't really part of their culture.
Cool things are appealing because your instincts are a better judge of what's healthy than all of your education put together.
It's also not nazis which are cool, but their uniforms and branding. There's feeling of authority, power, orderliness, determination, hope for a better future, and self-directness. Having these traits would make you more appealing on the dating market, as sexual selection has taught women which kind of men are likely to be able to provide for them and protect them.
"Moral good" is appealing when it's heroic, not when it's pathetic, which is why "Nice guys" generally don't have much luck in dating.
If we wanted to get more nuanced about it, we would need to distinguish the Weimar Republic vs Nazi Germany. During the Weimar Republic, the Nazis were breaking the law and getting away with it sufficiently successfully that they eventually took power. Once they had power and started committing genocide and so on, they are the ones deciding what is or isn't allowed, so they became wayy too mainstream to be cool, but the fact that they managed to reach this position proves that their approach prior to taking power was not just a LARP, which would've been un-cool.
I do wonder if the associations of the swastika actually help, there. In the West, our main introduction to it as mainstream was via the Nazis, so there's a ton of bad connotations associated with it.
But if you grew up in a culture where this is a common symbol, treated as holy and auspicious, and about as normal as seeing crosses on a church for Westerners, then encountering a European group (far-away, exotic, didn't impinge on your ordinary life) who used that symbol - they would benefit from the good associations of the swastika in forming unconscious opinions.
Few people would like the KKK even though they did use the cross, but if you tried to say "and that is because crosses are evil!!!! so the evil group naturally used the evil symbol!!!!", I think that wouldn't fly (for some people, yeah of course because Christianity bad, but for most people no).
In the US we associate white robes and peaked hoods with the KKK. But in Spain peaked hoods called capirotes and long robes are worn in penitential processions during Holy Week. When I was 16 I was in Spain on a school trip and saw such a procession. Being a precocious brat I understood what I was seeing, but some other kids on that trip were horrified.
They definitely had snazzy uniforms! And using a swastika as a political symbol was a savvy marketing move (of course, the Nazis ruined the swastika brand).
Swastikas aren't physically ugly or unpleasant though anymore than the n-word is. It is a neat geometric shape. It's only the meaning of the symbol we (or most of us) object to.
I'm at the stage of my life where the old English teacher maxim that "You can't just say 'it's nice' or 'I like it', you have to explain why" now evokes in me "Why the dickens not?"
Some things one likes because one likes them, and that should be enough. If people say they like (as they do say, and have said on here) Brutalist architecture or modern modern art, while I may wonder if their aesthetic sense is snarled up into a case of dyspepsia, well that's their opinion and their preference and they are entitled to have it.
If I thought people really did like this stuff, I'd be perplexed but accepting. But the nagging suspicion *is* that they *don't* really like it, they like what they have been told what they should like and any qualms they may have, they over-ride with "but this is good taste, this is a la mode, this is what persons of quality should and do choose".
There is, of course, a good case for educating your palate and learning to move past simple views and judgements, to learn to appreciate the new and novel. But does anyone *really* like Jeff Koons' balloon animals, for instance? Ah well, they may well have the same revulsion if I say I like this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallas_and_the_Centaur) "Ugh, Botticelli, how plebian, how commonplace, how kitsch!"
And by the end of his life, Botticelli was indeed exploring new styles, moving on from what he had mastered as a slick, repeatable, reliable turning-out of pretty imagery. But that was growth, not "beauty is out of fashion".
I thought about "liking" in the past and would even go further - people explaining why they like something are often lying or adding ad-hoc explanations.
`Why A likes oranges? They are juicy, not too sweet, not too sour, aromatic.`
`Why B you doesn't like oranges? They are mushy and white parts get stuck in the teeth.`
Those are just descriptions of oranges, they don't tell anything new if you already knew what an orange is. And still contain more opinions inside ("not too sweet" is not objective fact).
You can look at the same thing about pretty much everything: movie genres or particular movie, a game, a competitive sport, a physical activity, fashion style.
You can say why you like X, and sometimes it's beneficial. But often it's bullshit.
___
For a lot of hobbies people will say that they like X because of the community. OK, cool, but is the community of this particular hobby really better than the ones in dozens of other things?
Or when people like things like teamwork, competitiveness, discipline or specific sport, that still doesn't tell you why they like it over other ones.
___
With this view I am a bit of a weirdo. I am aware how others regularly say that they like X because of boring factors 1 and 2.
But my conclusion is that I'm fine with people liking things and not needing to explain, and I'm completely absolving myself from guilt for liking some low quality thing (music, game, artwork, joke <while obviously still looking down a bit at people liking other low quality things, like spammy tiktok content or just different jokes I dislike>).
And if I want to engage with someone I change a bit my expressions usually resulting in better perceived words. For example I may describe more about what I like about oranges, like that the aroma brings association of freshness to my mind. But at other times when I don't want to engage and someone says "this music is shit" I answer "I like it and don't care".
> For a lot of hobbies people will say that they like X because of the community. OK, cool, but is the community of this particular hobby really better than the ones in dozens of other things?
In many cases, yes. Some communities based around enthusiasm for a particular hobby or fandom are terrible. www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/nerd-social-fallacy Sometimes there'll be a split of some sort, ending up with two (or more) distinct sub-communities focused on the exact same subject, one of which is relentlessly unpleasant while another is fun and supportive. Somebody who finds a well-run place where they fit in could justifiably consider that rare and valuable, compared to e.g. more readily accessible enshittified social networks.
> Those are just descriptions of oranges, they don't tell anything new if you already knew what an orange is. And still contain more opinions inside
Those opinions are the whole point! All the (very important!) new information provided is about your actual preferences which would likely also generalize beyond oranges. By explaining "why" you assert e.g. that juiciness is more important for you than tidiness of eating without the white parts getting stuck in the teeth (which might be the opposite for someone else), or that "average-orange-sweet" is the amount of sweetness that you like, and that is interesting information because for someone else this level of sweetness could be far too sweet or far too sour.
> … But does anyone *really* like Jeff Koons' balloon animals?
Jeff Koons is like the he PT Barnum of the art world. That said I will admit to liking his Balloon animals. I think they create an interesting collision between the monumental and a child’s toy. They are sort of a cute contradiction in my opinion. What I kind of like even better is the wedding cake that he designed after he briefly married that Italian porn star. The whole thing was a stunt, but art is sometimes a stunt. At its most sophisticated, the art world resembles either a real estate market or a bond market more than anything else. This does not in any way impugn the motives of the artist who created those works, but there’s endless possibilities for argument about it. Attempting to come up with a rational explanation of the vagaries of art is a lot like trying to catch smoke in a butterfly net in my opinion. Too many moving parts.
Oscar Wilde once said that all art is useless and I tend to agree with him, but it sure is a way of stashing away money for the long-term if you’re in the blue chip world. Not too many people pay $100 million for a painting just because they like the way it looks on their wall. A museum poster would suffice for that.
>If people say they like (as they do say, and have said on here) Brutalist architecture or modern modern art, while I may wonder if their aesthetic sense is snarled up into a case of dyspepsia, well that's their opinion and their preference and they are entitled to have it.
I, personally, have something of a liking for brutalist architecture, but I think I can explain the reason.
I grew up in a middle class home. Almost every surface in it was, to some extent, fragile. If I wanted to nail two pieces of wood together, there was almost no place to do it, with the possible exception of an outdoor concrete walkway surface, if the weather cooperated that day.
So, to me, concrete surfaces (or similarly durable industrial-style surfaces, such as metal pipes) suggest areas where one doesn't have to be constantly on guard against damaging something (unlike, e.g. polished wood).
Does this make it clear why my personal preferences lean this way?
As for me, I grew up in rural New England, where houses were made of wood (or sometimes brick), and they were boxy with small windows. Being exposed to glass buildings, Mies-style, that let in the light and reflected the light was a revelation.
Many Thanks! I'm only vaguely aware of them. The first time I lived in Silicon Valley (in an apartment), I heard some people talk of them with dissatisfaction. I don't _think_ that I've ever been inside one, but it has been decades, and I may have forgotten.
My model of taste is "arbitrary thingspace pileups". It explains why some preferences are ~universal and some seem random.
Imagine the following toy problem: you have two lines, one with letter labels 'A', 'B', 'C', another with integers '1', '2', '3', and a single rule - "The lines must cross at B2 (i.e. where the label B is on the letter axis and where number 2 is on the integer axis)".
There are four valid solutions - both ascending (most obvious, A1-B2-C3), both descending, and two mixes (A3-B2-C1 and C3-B2-A1), assuming we cross the lines at the right angle.
Now imagine that we give this problem to a pile of neurons, and the rule is there because B2 happens to correspond to "You're about to get eaten by a tiger, RUN!!!" - the two axes are some dimensions of tiger-likeness and/or run-away-now-ness.
The neurons don't know that though! With just those inputs and one rule, there is still four valid solutions, and which one they learn is random.
So, four brains may come up with four different arrangements, but they will all agree that tiger-shaped inputs making pouncing-shaped moves Are Scary. What they will NOT agree on is everything else. Let's say the number axis is the number of colors seen:
Brain 1 likes minimalism - any pattern is kind of like tiger stripes, and the more stripey, the more scary it looks.
Brain 2 is the opposite - tigers do not look like a rainbow on LSD, they have relatively few colors in an orderly pattern, so a fireworks show looks less tiger-like than a blank wall does.
Worse yet, this is an online learning algorithm. Brain 3 actually originally learned the exact same pattern as 1, but then it got traumatised by a scientist in a white coat, leading it to update towards Brain 2's solution.
Without additional goals, these are all perfectly healthy, normal brains coming up with sensible embeddings, they just have different side-effects for evaluating inputs they were not explicitly designed for dealing with in a hardcoded fashion.
I think the grammar analogy is the closest, with a small tweak. In the post you say that the experts have reasons for what they're doing but that these rules are arbitrary. But there are some more or less universal rules that are common across almost all languages - the concepts of subjects and objects, for example. So taste might be like this: there are some universal traits that confer beauty, on top of which we've built lots of artificial (though some times internally consistent) rules.
Not to mention that grammar is necessary to formulate concepts - and that:
- speakers actually agree on something like 99% of grammar - they are just not aware of it (especially if they are native);
- make that 99.9% if you are talking about literate people from a given country and century, even if they were not paying attention to their secondary-school teacher, ever.
In colloquial use, "grammar" tends to refer only to the spurious claims about grammar that secondary-school teachers make. The grammar that everyone already knows isn't worth noticing or discussing. Everybody already knows it.
But it *is* worth noticing and discussing - and if people started being sold sentences that make sense locally and have fancy words, but are badly composed or meaningless upon closer examination, "grammar" in the linguist's sense would be very much part of the thing to discuss.
Your topic has been named "Escher sentences", with the paradigm example being "More people have been to France than I have." They're not common in the wild, but they do occur.
There's something to the grammar argument. If you talk like an uneducated yokel from the sticks, you'll have trouble convincing anyone that you're smart enough to be hired. You may be sharper than people doing the hiring, but first you have to communicate with them in their language.
Enjoyment doesn't require education. Taste requires education. You may enjoy drinking Two-Buck Chuck wine, and that's fine. But if you tell a professional vintner that Two-buck Chuck is just as good as a carefully crafted wine, they'll laugh in your face. Well, you might counter that "studies have proven that most people can't distinguish the good stuff from the cheap stuff." Yes, that's true, but most people haven't spent much time sampling hundreds or thousands of different wines and then having to describe them and rate them —and, more importantly, understand the "grammar" of what goes into making an excellent wine.
And a wine maker from Bordeaux might not agree with the style of wine made in Napa, but by god, they understand the how and the why behind those choices, because they share the same "language" of their craft.
I speak a little Armenian, and my understanding of Armenian grammar is mostly just based on vibes — I can tell when a sentence sounds wrong, even if I can’t pinpoint why. Sometimes I know how to change the sentence to make it “sound more right”, other times I don’t. Learning Armenian grammar more formally would involve learning what is specifically wrong with those wrong-sounding sentences. The grammar I’d be learning is a grammar I already have an intuitive sense of, not one that’s being arbitrarily imposed on me.
I'd go on to say that grammar is a necessary component to forming a relation. A bare noun or verb has meaning, but to relate it to anything – another word, the speaker, or the current situation – requires some kind of grammar.
The rules of a grammar are largely arbitrary, but once they're set they allow practitioners to convey more complex meanings among themselves more quickly and more reliably.
It seems like the same would be true in art. The "rube's" reaction to modern art is to say "I don't get it." The intended meaning of the artist is lost on the viewer, and whether that's a feature or a bug depends on the artist's intention.
This also relates to one interesting result of the "AI Art Turing Test," where the experienced artist was most easily able to pick out AI art because of incoherent details added without purpose, such as doors that went nowhere. In those cases, the AI generator was aptly using the "vocabulary" of the visual medium, but the elements weren't connected together – the grammar was deficient. The result was akin to beautiful calligraphy, created by randomly selecting words from the dictionary.
> A bare noun or verb has meaning, but to relate it to anything – another word, the speaker, or the current situation – requires some kind of grammar.
This isn't completely true. Grammar can express relationships, and with enough of it, and enough words, it can also specify what those relationships are. But it's more common to just note that there is a relationship and require the listener to know the nature of that relationship by other means. Thus, "my picture" could be one that I painted, or one that depicts me; a "fire hose" is one that's meant to be used in quenching fires, while a "gold bracelet" is one that's made of gold...
And when the only thing you want to say about a relationship is that it exists, you don't need grammar to do that. Existing languages have grammar to do the job, but the flimsiest, most recent contact pidgin can accomplish the same thing. Mention the two things; act like you're making an important point.
> Mention the two things; act like you're making an important point.
I considered that, but upon reflection I think that kind of gesticulation acts as a crude but effective grammar. It only makes sense because the speaker and listener share an understanding of tone, body language, or even the importance of repetition.
>And when the only thing you want to say about a relationship is that it exists, you don't need grammar to do that.
I tend to agree. Grammar is important if one needs to say something unusual, but domain knowledge can suffice in many situations. The set of words {dog, man bite} is much more likely to mean "The dog bit the man." than "The man bit the dog.". To convey the latter, the speaker and listener _do_ need a shared grammar.
My take is that Art is a Language, but one spectacularly bad at delivering information, because while concepts map on words reasonably well, they don't really map on sights, movement, or musical sounds. So the "grammar" of taste is all wonky, because even the best taste-grammatician can't really prove their version of taste-grammar delivers the message of the Language of Art the best, because the message is so cryptic, and unsuited for Art in the first place.
I agree with this, and I'd like to add that the first piece of grammar is arbitrary, but all subsequent grammar developments depend on pre existing grammar, and so isn't arbitrary, you can have grammar rules generalize over one another nicely, or conflict and collide.
An obvious example, "a man eating lion" vs "a man eating lion". The grammar rule that "man eating" can be used as an adjective to describe a lion is in conflict with the ordinary SVO sentence structure with "eating" as the verb. One needs to rely on context and pragmatics to understand which is intended. Its strictly less practical because of the grammar collision.
A less obvious example, "something no one ever talks about being an adult is the amount of time spent deciding to keep a cardboard box or not". It should be "something no one ever talks about, about being an adult, is..." because "about being an adult" is a prepositional phrase which is inserted in "something no one ever talks about is...". It wouldn't make sense to use "being an adult" as the preposition. What if the meaning was supposed to be "before being..." or "after being..." or "instead of being". But it seems fair that people find the "about, about" word doubling clunky. We could say that if a preposition starts with the same word it follows, the double is dropped and make that a grammar rule. Whether you like this or not depends on if you think word doubling or preposition inconsistencies are bigger issues. But it is a grammar rule bumping up on some other language sensibility not to double words.
I think the deepest insight into this sort of situation might come from computer programming. Anyone whose done it enough knows that well considered languages and code bases are much nicer to work with. It is strictly arbitrary in the sense that there are infinitely many ways to write the same program, but if you write it in brainf*ck, don't expect to be able to read it later.
But, does this apply to other taste? I'm not sure, but I lean towards "more than not". These things happen in spoken language because a message is encoded such that it can be decoded, and there are multiple coding rules (phonetics, grammar, semantics, etc) which may or may not work well together. Then the amount we should expect non-arbitrary taste in other domains relates to:
- is a message getting encoded and decoded?
- how many initial arbitrary closings are possible around which other closings must fit.
- how likely are different coding rules to cause collisions?
- how much better will encoding and decoding be if "nice" rules are chosen?
I think in all of the other examples these considerations imply non arbitrary taste.
- in visual art feelings and archetypes are being communicated. The initial rules are not arbitrary, since they need to draw on visual intuition from the natural world, but the rules added on top of those can probably vary significantly leading to situations different artists don't even recognize each other as having rules, like two people of different languages meeting for the first time.
- architecture is similar to visual art but with more practical physical constraints on the rules. This leads to a testable claim: architects ought to have an easier time finding something they agree is bad than visual artists.
- fashion is interesting because of how well it highlights the social signaling that is also found in all the others. The ability to encode and decode certain messages can be part of the communication.
It's a strangely compelling topic. I think an examination of the elements influencing the creation of different tastes would be fascinating. I'm thinking things like "set of possible sets of built-in rules people start with", "transmission substrate", "possible initial rules given built-ins and substrate", "possible rules that can be added given existing rules", "possible updates to old rules to accommodate the additional new rules"... etc?
Probably language nerds have already explored this a bunch and I just need to learn enough of their jargon to go learn about it.
I like this take. I think each point in the article adds something, but grammar is the furthest upstream. people acquire the grammar at different rates. some get bored of it quickly and desire novelty, some indulge in their mastery and create the priesthood, etc
music also straddles the line between universal and artificial. Eg the way Western music theory splits the scale into 12 tones. "C and G are a perfect fifth" is arbitrary priesthood jargon. "the human ear enjoys paired pitches with frequency ratio 3:2" is closer to physics, or at least biology.
There's similar examples in the visual arts. High contrast draws attention because in nature it normally demarcates the border between two separate objects (hence why animals use high contrast stripes as camouflage). You (usually) don't want to draw people's eyes down towards your shoes while you're talking to them, but drawing attention to your neck/head makes sense. Bright colors, complex details, and lines are also relevant in this regard. Regarding lines, a tie is literally an arrow pointing at your head, you can't get more explicit than that.
> But there are some more or less universal rules that are common across almost all languages - the concepts of subjects and objects, for example
That's just not true? "Subject" and "object" are not natural categories in Basque or other ergative-absolutive languages. The "object" of a transitive verb and the "subject" of an intransitive verb are identical, e.g. "I eat apples" but "Me eat".
If that's not what you meant, then there are languages with sentences without subjects or objects, e.g. in Cantonese, "Eaten" (as in the perfective of "eat") is a perfectly coherent sentence.
There's a subgroup of people who are interested in subject X. Can you name any important modern dance performers/choreographers? I guess I could name Martha Graham and a couple of others but that's about it. How about Italian composers of the Enlightenment? Here I do better: Vivaldi, Locatelli, Corelli, etc. Or how about famous Japanese film directors? Famous English writers of the "angry young men" period?
My point is that the general public watches movies but they're not that serious about it. OTOH there are film students/aficionados/connoisseurs with an interest in film that is far more in depth. You could ask them to name new wave directors and they could go on and on and on about their favorite auteurs.
Not everyone in that second group will have the same tastes but enough of them will that certain "important" individuals come up over and over again: Akira Kurosawa, Truffaut, etc. Similarly people that are really into classical music are probably familiar with Mozart, Bach, Mahler, and so on even if the general public has no idea who those people are. That's the canon that serious students of a genre/medium can generally be counted on to be familiar with. The level of craft of those fundamental artists is the bar that the real fans use to measure everything else against.
So are the tastes of the general public inferior? I would say no, but there's definitely a difference in focus/intensity/concentration between the two groups.
The tastes of cultured elites really do tend to be better than the tastes of the semi-cultured public. The great composers really are great.
There is a second question, though, about changes in taste among cultured elites. For example, when I was in high school in L.A. in the 1970s, Mahler was hugely fashionable. A Mercedes-Benz with a bumper sticker proclaiming love of Mahler was not an uncommon sight in Beverly Hills.
Now, I don't hear as much Mahler on KUSC in Los Angeles, but I hear a lot more Vivaldi than 50 years ago, when the "Four Seasons" was about it for Vivaldi.
How come?
Beats me, but I'm sure an expert could put together a plausible narrative partially explaining these changes in taste.
For instance, 1960s Italian spaghetti Western film directors are more prestigious today than 50 years ago when they seemed kind of kitschy. How come? Well, I'm sure there are a lot of reasons, but the oft-expressed personal taste of Quentin Tarantino has no doubt played a role. Love him or hate him, Tarantino is obviously really good at making movies, so it's not surprising that people pay attention to who influenced him.
Definitely. And there's any number of artists who were viewed by contemporary critics as masters who did not really withstand the test of time: Carol Reed, Booth Tarkington, and so on.
I would say that I seem to recall that Sergio Leone was getting more serious attention as an artist within his lifetime, certainly by the time "Once Upon a Time in America" came out.
Wait, what is the matter with Carol Reed? Is it that people just watch The Third Man and maybe Our Man in Havana, and forget the rest (which I haven't watched, btw.)?
The Third Man is great, while Our Man In Havana is dull.
My impression is that Hollywood fell in love with Brits after the introduction of the Boeing 707 in late 1958 made trans-Atlantic air travel highly practical. So Carol Reed won the Best Director Oscar for Oliver! even though he was 20 years past his prime.
The Third Man is one of my favorite movies of all time, but Reed's contemporaries thought he was going to be hailed as a master by future generations. That hasn't quite panned out in the sense that he's not considered to be in the same rank as Kurosawa, Fellini, etc.
"Cultured" means people who have studied "culture", so if they've studied it their opinions on the products of culture should be better informed. (This is assuming a definition of culture that includes movies. If it doesn't then you're relying on transferable skills.)
If your car needs repairing you get it done by somebody who has studied automotive mechanics, you don't trust a random member of the general public.
But Scott's position is basically that being cultured is not a thing and that the taste of experts is no better than that of someone who just knows what they like at a young age and sticks with that. Elsewhere he also says that he doesn't distinguish between the quality of different poems or novels, except insofar as whether an average person has a positive gut reaction to them.
1. People's likes and dislikes can change as they mature. If one educates oneself about a category of art (be it music, painting, film, architecture, etc.), one's tastes *will* likely change because (a) one is exposed to a broader range of artistic stimuli and (b) one will have a deeper understanding of why one likes or dislikes something.
2. The average person may like James Patterson novels. And most people don't attempt to read Proust or Tolstoy. But Proust and Tolstoy will be read a hundred years from now, while Patterson will be long forgotten. Of course, novels are just words strung together. So it's impossible for there to be any difference between Patterson and Proust, and people who tell you there is are just culture signalling (#snarkasm)
I couldn't disagree more with his position but I think it's consistent. He just has to establish that there are those who follow their hearts and have honest preferences, and a tiny minority of status game players who are malevolently responsible for phenomena like modernism, Proust and Tolstoy continuing to be remembered (and James Patterson probably not being remembered), and high end food. I am finding it hard to judge exactly when the break happened and the status seekers began wresting power from the honest enjoyers, but it seems to have been around the time of the second world war. (We just have to figure out how to recreate the world as it was then, and I have to say we seem to be making a decent fist of it.)
Dude. These are the people who gave us brutalism. And bananas taped to walls.
Art isn’t difficult. People flock to see the art of the past because it was good, because it’s stood the test of time, because the appeal of the greatest art is across culture.
By the standards of “art has to be difficult“ none of the great Art of the past can be art because what would the „uncultured“ average guy know? Where’s the difficulty in liking the Sistine chapel, or the cathedral of cologne?
Therefore the art of the past can’t really be art as it needs no educating, but an unmade bed, a banana taped to a wall, or stencilled anti capitalist slogan on a wall in Bristol are the real deal.
Art is not physics. We can trust the average guy is not going to be smarter than a physicist. Contrary to that the average student of Art Theory is probably banging around with an IQ of ninety - if he has taken enough fish oil and and gotten enough sleep.
Richard Feynman wrote about how he was able to recognize good art in the Sistine Chapel, and also recognize bad art, both without being able to define it. From "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman", "But Is It Art?".
Some art is objectively, indefinably good, and other art is not.
When it comes to classical music, there’s obviously some expertise there and the average guy can’t really tell the difference, nor does he like classical anyway.
There is fashion. Bach was never fully out of fashion though, and he wasn’t considered bad, just outdated. Anyway there’s no real drop in quality of music equivalent to the difference between the Sistine chapel and a banana on the wall in classical music (and pop is considered outside that tradition). Maybe the time Yoko Ono screeched
For the same reason I can tell the significant, meaningful difference between a burger I make on my grill and a McDonald's burger, but my dog doesn't give a shit whatsoever.
eta: I sounded disdainful because I had Big Bang Theory in mind. Not only does it exist, it was actually very popular for a time, probably still is. That has been my proof for a decade now that taste is very real, if not as significant as some experts claim.
"People who like frozen may feel that any (for them) minor improvement in taste doesn't justify the extra effort."
Good for them. But there are other individuals who believe that there is a significant difference between frozen pizza and what you can get in the best restaurants in NY/NJ, Italy, etc. For those individuals the difference in quality is transformative, to the point that their enjoyment of pizza would be sorely reduced if they were limited to the frozen variety.
I think that people who pay close attention to film have a more sophisticated palate.
As an example, I would bring up the anti-gun fight at the end of Monte Walsh with Lee Marvin. It's a flawed movie but the final gun battle is literally an anti-gun fight. To be fully appreciated it has to be viewed in the context of all the gun battles in all the Westerns that came before it.
Musicians, for example, tend to arrive pretty readily at consensus rankings of musical talent. My father-in-law was the second best classical tuba player in Chicago, and hence had the second highest paying classical tuba playing job in Chicago, with the Chicago Lyric Opera. But he acknowledged he'd never be better than Arnold Jacob of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
I'm reminded of a study Dr. Drew did on the minor celebrity guests on his talk show with Adam Carolla: he gave them standard personality tests. The most narcissistic celebrities were female reality TV stars and the least were musicians. It probably helps to be narcissistic to be a rock star, but musicians know so clearly that there are other musicians better than them that it keeps their narcissism in check.
Better for what purpose? A hammer is better when it's more effective at driving nails. A plane is better when it flies at more capacity with less fuel. What end do elite tastes serve more effectively than commoner tastes?
It might be useful to transfer this question to nature, so as to simplify it and de-politicize it and make plain, perhaps, that everyone - or at least everyone except those who deny the reality of aesthetics operating in our world - is driving after the same "feeling" regardless of what prompts it.
The various ends that the art form itself is meant to serve. In lots and lots of these aesthetic cases, there’s a range of aspects of the aesthetic experience that people appreciate, but some of them are more obvious while others require a bit more thinking to notice. For instance, in an action movie, the special effects in a fight scene are easy to notice, while the character development and motivation for the action are a bit harder to think about. So you sometimes get movies like Transformers, where there are some spectacular action sequences but it’s hard to remember who any of the characters are or why they’re doing this, and these movies can be popular because people think they’re getting what they want. But movies like The Matrix can do a better job of working on multiple levels.
There are of course different levels something can work on. A movie that is just about action sequences and doesn’t even try to have a plot could be great - and I saw a great review of Transformers that said “Michael Bay finally directed an arthouse movie”, pretending that it was just an abstract sequence of visual experiences with no attempt at plot or characters.
>The tastes of cultured elites really do tend to be better than the tastes of the semi-cultured public.
I ‘m not so sure. A lot of what elites have done historically with art is lift a new expression of it developed by the masses and then “refine” it in a way that makes it palatable and often exclusive to elite people.
Classical music is wonderful. But if an artistic medium isn’t limited by production cost (like orchestra music, opera, architecture, etc.) I don’t see any proof that elites have better taste. They might be more adept at expressing their reasons behind their tastes, though.
American art contains many examples of this. Without field hollers, the rich history of modern American music can’t get off the ground. It was the tastes of African slaves that set the tone for much American music. Robert Johnson wasn’t a cultural elite, but he clearly had an ear for incredible music. Same could be said for Louis Armstrong. Or to jump back to Europe, The Beatles came from working class families in Liverpool.
Scott mentioned ripped jeans. Like so many fashion trends, from the bucket hats and track suits of the 80s to the sagging pants of the 90s, these tastes originated in the streets and trickled up to the elites who eventually considered them cutting edge fashion.
We have to define who the insiders are here though. I would have thought the Beatles, Louis Armstrong are absolutely cultural elites who are moving their form forward and working from a keen sense of their own taste. You don't have to work at a museum
Yes that’s the difference. I must not be understanding what some folks mean by a cultural elite. I wouldn’t think most people consider field workers, saloon pianists, street performers, house party MCs, urban teens, etc. as cultural elites. And if the category is as broad as you indicate, I’m not sure how that explains why, in the poster’s specific example classical composers really are great, versus say a blues journeyman or the first kid to wear a chain wallet.
> The tastes of cultured elites really do tend to be better than the tastes of the semi-cultured public. The great composers really are great.
Yeah but the truly cultured elites will tell you that Vivaldi and Mahler are middlebrow pablum and that you need to be listening to Stockhausen and Boulez.
Right. Disputes between the taste of the 99.9th percentile (Stockhausen) vs. the 99th percentile (Vivaldi) can be quite interesting and irate. The two sides of the argument tend to be highly articulate.
But they mostly are tempests in teapots that concern people with season tickets for their local symphony orchestra who might have strong views over whether more or less music of the abrasive type should be programmed. For everybody below that level, is pretty much of a non-issue.
To go back to architecture, however, these kind of disputes are more significant because buildings last a long time and can't be avoided being seen the way Stockhausen's music can be pretty easily be avoided being heard.
Broaden this from "classical music" to music more broadly though - you can definitely find people just as invested in other genres! I'm talking about serious collectors and art appreciations here, not just the general public.
I expect that they'd also generally agree on the best Jazz musicians, or Rock and Roll bands, although I'd imagine that different people would have different favorites, and could probably enjoy discussing the relative merits of individual compositions within a genre with each other. However, I also doubt you could get a group of classical music appreciators to definitively settle on the "best composer" - different people with emphasise different things.
Now, maybe you think that music peaked in Europe a few centuries ago and its been downhill ever since, but I can't really think of any reason that would be the case aside from "my groups of sophisticated people thinks so" - I mean, you're probably defining them as sophisticated because they like classical music, although I imagine it correlates with other highbrow tastes.
Everyone has a favorite composer or a favorite conductor but there is also broad agreement on which conductors and composers you should at least be familiar with if you're going to claim to be a fan.
I would also assert that is another key difference between the serious students versus the general public: the former have a framework they can slot individual works into with an eye towards how any one piece or composer relates to other pieces and composers.
Finally, I seem to recall that in a comparison between classical and modern day pop music the former was far more complicated than the latter.
If your point is just that more exposure to something allows you to perceive more nuance in it then I definitely agree - in fact, I think you probably have to be pretty into classical music (or any other field) in order to develop your own subjective opinion on it! I would be unable to pick my favorite classical composer, simply because I'm not familiar enough with the music to identify which pieces particularly appeal to me, or to consider which artists exemplify the genre.
Although I find I have a hard time picking my favorite anything, I like different things for very different reasons, which is probably where the difficulty in getting different people to agree on "the best" comes from, even if they can all agree that certain artists are better than others.
Comparing to the spaghetti western example: when I was young the Beach Boys were considered corny, simple music, but current performers often express admiration for them. In part this is because their (Brian Wilson's, really) more ambitious work was a bit later than when the question was first asked. On the other hand, more than one respectable person thinks God Only Knows is one of the greatest records of all time. (By which I mean both Paul McCartney and Elvis Costello.) And that's from 1964!
I would distinguish between personal favorites versus respect.
For example, personally, I've probably spent more hours of my life listening to The Ramones than listening to Wagner. But I definitely wouldn't argue that my taste in music is just as good as somebody who flies around the world to see new productions of the Ring.
I think this cannot be effectively determined without some hard to do blind tests. For example, picking a select group of art afficionados, who, while perfectly fluent in European art, had never seen any Chinese paintings, and have them judge the top 10 of those, then do the same with a select group of Western general public who never seen any Chinese painting either, or many paintings for that matter.
I'm not sure of your point here, but I would point out that it's not reasonable to expect that somebody that loves classical music would then necessarily be a fan of sculpture. Similarly why would somebody that loves classical music be a fan of Chinese opera, for example?
If there is an underlying universal principle of Art, that afficionados and experts can access but plebeians cannot, then the experts should be able to divine this universal principle from ANY art, no matter how culturally alien to them, while normies with no training would only have intermittent success.
If an expert in European Classic Art cannot effectively judge Chinese Classic Art, then this would imply that there is no universal principle, just fortified cultural snobbery.
Or to put in the same words as the initial article: If Taste is determined to not be like Physics, which can be done experimentally, then this is very bad news for the taste confidence of art afficionados.
What's the universal principle that applies to sculpture as well as music as well as dance as well as painting as well as literature as well as poetry?
We have cross cultural cross over already - tourists visiting cities and museums. In the nearby (to me) city of Bath there are hundreds of Asian tourists walking around in any given day, Japanese and Chinese.
Are there all that many radical differences in tourist preferences by culture? There are some, but overall, it seems like East Asian tourists like many of the same things that Western tourists like: e.g., they apparently like Bath a lot, which English tourists have liked since Jane Austen's time.
One of the funnier cultural differences I can think of is that German tourists love visiting Death Valley in summer at noon. They want to get their picture taken in front of the giant thermometer in Baker, CA when it hits 50 C. It seems to have something to do with Karl May novels.
Tourists are a good example of both some kind of universality and the primacy of the past in producing great art and architecture.
People from Asia visit Bath, but give the buildings of Slough a miss. They can be seen taking pictures of Westminster Cathedral but don’t flock to brutalist Trellick Tower at all. If they ever got lost in the area it’s likely they would be on the next plane home, suffering from the London version of Paris syndrome.
Nevertheless Trellick tower is listed and many architects love it.
I agree with @Niclas, taste is about social status... like clothing, table manners and languages spoken, it is a subtle code to be able to clearly select and separate those who belong to the elitist in-group and those who don't.
Regarding preferences that is indeed in large part true. We are massively coded by our social and physical environments yet few understand to what extent. As tribal animals, we depend on both for our survival and success so few bother to question them.
Unfortunately, even decision-making is too. But here it is about the control over the narrative, used to fool the masses into choosing what they are made to believe is "the right thing". Where else did you think Orwell got the concept of double-speak from?... the House of Lords, not the Russians. Or why the church invented morals, etc, Anybody with a clear logical rational and slightly curious mind can find thousands of such examples governing many critical aspects of our lives.
And yes, sadly it does get us nowhere because a slightly more rational and less tribal humanity could long ago already have expelled poverty, famine and war. We would all be living in a blue-zone world.
Maybe to expand a little bit: I don't think its just elitists and non-elitist. Think of goths, they have clear clothing and in-group rituals and the priesthood are the big musicians (?). This community clearly differentiates itself from the outside, but if you are within this community there are further more subtle marks of differentiation based on in-group conflicts and preferences.
That was a major theme of Tom Wolfe's 1960s journalism, such as his first famous article "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby:" that in modern prosperous America, there are an immense number of non-elite subcultures with their own aesthetic codes and artistic geniuses, such as suburban Los Angeles car customizers such as George Barris. (When I was a little kid, after each visit to the dentist, my mother let me peek in George Barris's workshop window where he was working on the Batmobile or whatever.)
But then we would expect that people with taste, when not being observed, would abandon these codes and watch the movies, listen to the music, and eat the food that they really enjoy. No doubt that happens sometimes; other times, people reveal a genuine preference.
I think that the theory is people with taste actually like things but that the like is (unknown to us) caused by status concerns. I didn't think even Scott was saying that people were plain lying and in reality prefer pretty paintings and such.
The code isn't all conscious. Taste as distinction is tied to socialization, what you were taught is good/bad behaviour etc. If your parents liked the opera, they took you to the opera, and as a result, you're more likely to enjoy operas than those whose parents went to the cinema with them. This cycle goes hand in hand with the cycle of social reproduction (rich parents get rich kids through many factors, one of them being inherited cultural taste), and so the opera continues to be classy, while the cinema continues to be common. People obviously don't follow this on a 1-to-1 basis, but the deviations, however large they may be, aren't large enough to upturn the system.
I think most kids who are taken to the opera prefer Paw Patrol until they're 6, then from 6 to 11 they prefer watching video game speedruns on YouTube, etc., until much later in life they actually enjoy the opera. I agree that their being socialized is part of it, but in childhood—the time when in theory they would be most interested in pleasing their parents—they don't enjoy opera, I would posit because they have not learned to appreciate it yet.
Well, I haven't seen many operas, but they're not *that* different from musicals (except for age and language), and the modern introduction of "supertitles" (like subtitles, only bigger) that let you read a translation of what the performers are singing helps a lot with enjoying operas for people who aren't already dedicated members of the opera fandom.
In the performance of "Rigoletto" that I saw, before the show itself started, there was a short introduction that put a few of the opera's unconventional elements into context: in most operas, the tenor would be a romantic hero and the baritone would be more likely to be a villain, but in Rigoletto this was reversed: the tenor role is that of the Duke, who is charming, handsome, and a womanizer who only cares about himself, and the title character, Rigoletto, a court jester, is a baritone role.
People who pay more attention to style probably have better taste in style than people who don't pay much attention, and thus they get bored faster and are more interested in new fashions.
By the way, the "don't wear white after Labor Day" rule is an interesting example of how one can both be traditional and novelty-seeking at the same time. This rule has been around a long time, so you are obeying tradition from year to year, which has its satisfactions, but it also means that within a year, you change your look when you are starting to get bored with it: e.g., you first wear your white sports coat each year to the Kentucky Derby in early May and you last wear it to the regatta club dinner on Labor Day and then put it away for eight months. That sounds kind of fun.
I think what this misses is that there really are better or worse ways of creating art given certain aesthetic goals— but different people will have different things they want out of art. The layperson might see a painting as decoration, while the aesthetes will see it as an object that has the capacity of affording someone a significant aesthetic experience (e.g. awe, reverence, intrigue etc.).
Yes, one thing that strikes me is that the element of complexity is missing: the idea that something might be satisfying to some consumers because it rewards study.
Shakespeare for instance, is one of the half dozen most famous creative artists ever because he combines popular showmanship while also endlessly rewarding scholarly study.
Yes, yes, yes. A lot of Scott’s discussion here ignores goals entirely, and acts as though taste just exists by itself in a vacuum. Some goals are ones that are hard for people to see the motivation for, and those tend to produce harder to appreciate art. It’s true that the exclusivity of these sorts of goals often makes them turn into cultural shibboleths, but it’s missing the point to pretend that’s all there is to it. That might be the case when we are talking about something like hot sauce, or IPA, or dada, or splatter films, where showing how much of a hard thing to bear you can bear is sometimes the entire point. But with most other difficult art, there’s something you can learn to appreciate. It’s never good to look down on people for not having the experience and education to appreciate something that is worth appreciating, but I think it’s sometimes easy to confuse this snobbery with the backlash against philistinism (which is itself just a backlash against any aesthetic merit that the person doesn’t personally see).
Can you be more concrete and give an example in which understanding the goal makes it clear why (otherwise ugly by the common- man standards) building looks a certain way
Related to both A and E, I think there's at least some part of taste that's objective, in that any person studying the topic long enough will come to notice certain things that novices don't.
Example: Musical training makes people more aware of when things are out of tune. Trained musicians will probably be more bothered by things being slightly out of tune, even when a novice might not be able to hear it. Maybe that's too objective to fall under taste, but then does everything objective get excluded from taste definitionally?
It's correct that trained musicians will have a more sensitive sense of pitch, but exactly what they consider "out of tune" vs. "in tune" is a matter of convention/culture. There is some grounding in universal principles of acoustics (and human acoustic perceptions) but no static tuning system can fully satisfy those principles for more than a handful of notes at a time, and different traditions have chosen different compromises at different times. Modern trained musicians would likely consider Bach's well-tempered clavier (the actual instrument, not the musical work) to be shockingly out of tune, and he would feel the same about modern piano tuning.
And, yet, great composers virtually universally recognize JS Bach's mastery.
Please allow me to rant for a minute about Bach, without implying you hold the views I'm criticizing.
Bach was out of popular fashion for about 80 or 90 years when baroque polyphony was replaced by the classical style. That's one of the longer periods a great artist went before his rediscovery -- Vermeer is a rare example of somebody who is famous today who was not famous for a longer period of time.
Yet, the greats of the classical era -- Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven -- all studied him. Finally, in 1829 Mendelssohn brought him back into popular acclaim.
Ever since, Bach has been especially popular among mathematicians and physicists.
Now, it could be that Bach's fame over the last two centuries has been a conspiracy by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Einstein.
Or it could be that Bach was objectively a good composer.
Playing devil's advocate, here's an alternative model:
- Bach's style is influential
- The classical greats produce work informed by Bach, innovating sufficiently that Bach is seen as outmoded. Nevertheless, Bach and Mozart have common conventions in pitch, style, dynamics, ..., even if listeners at the time are too close to it to appreciate it.
- Once time has passed, listeners have enough distance to appreciate Mozart and Bach for the same, shared qualities they have in common (since they are built from the same canon).
Or more succinctly, couldn't they both be doing the same _kind of thing_ such that there's high correlation between liking one and liking the other (with, say, a gamelan or raga piece being a more different kind of thing, with less of a shared core and thus more divergence of tastes with Western listeners)? That way we don't have to claim universality, but only commonality within a canon.
Music has many compositional rules that to untrained observers would appear to be very arbitrary (e.g. no parallel fifths!). When two people, one trained and the other not, can listen to the same piece of music that the untrained person finds very appealing where the trained person hears violations of the rules and finds it shockingly bad. It wouldn't matter how well the piece is played or how in tune the instruments are if they violate those rules.
When I heard about the "no parallel fifths" rule, the person who told me about it said that it literally was an arbitrary rule that isn't taken particularly seriously in contemporary styles of music, but in his class we should follow it because it's how this particular kind of music was written historically.
Hm - I think if you played a short harmony with some parallel fifths in it, and said what they were, an untrained person would recognise them, and understand the effect they have. Maybe they don’t count as ‘untrained’ after that. Lots of composers use parallel fifths - I don’t know if Bach did specifically, but they have been around for hundreds of years. I wonder if Scott’s analysis applies moreso to rules like these - people might get sensitised and dislike them after a while, or they might come and go as fashions.
I'm definitely not denying that there are completely arbitrary components, but it certainly seems like there's _some_ preferences people converge on due to gaining expertise.
After having good tomatoes often in California, I was often confused in Texas on being served Caprese at restaurants where the tomatoes were basically flavorless. I guess their normal customers just thought Caprese was a thing you do, and didn’t realize it could taste great?
The adage of “show don’t tell” in writing - obviously this can’t be a hard and fast rule, but it’s generally more effective and rewarding for a reader when you show them the behavior of a character and allow the audience to form their own moral judgments than if you explicitly make moral judgments of the characters.
I think these sorts of semi-objective things are core to aesthetic taste.
I'd argue that someone being bothered by things being slightly out of tune is conditioned on said person having absolute pitch rather than on their musical training.
Of course, there's some connection between musical training and absolute pitch which goes into both direction as far as I know: someone who was training from the very early childhood is more likely to developed it, and someone who has it is more likely to become a musician, but this is not important for my point.
If you take and instrument and slightly detune it equally, a trained musician with a relative pitch and no outside point of reference would not notice it, most probably. Someone who is not a trained musician but has perfect pitch would be insanely bothered by that, however.
There were also cases of a musicians with perfect pitch who were - unfortunately - trained on old detuned pianos. So everything that is not detuned the same exact way now sounds wrong to them.
That's not even touching on the fact that our most common tuning system is relatively recent and is far from the only one possible. But that's a huge topic in itself.
Another thing to note is that musical training is much more likely to make a person tolerate things being "detuned" on purpose. An ignoramus would probably not like anything detuned except for some nostalgic guitar effects , an educated musician has a high chances of developing a liking for microtonal or atonal music which a normie would not at all tolerate, and that kind of music is often anything but in tune.
I was thinking of detecting things being out of tune relatively, which doesn't require absolute pitch. It's generally something you can just hear if two instruments are being played at the same time while out of tune. Intervals could also sound off with a single instrument.
The obvious analogy that's missing is "Taste Is Like Taste (in food)"
As a kid you start off having relatively simple taste like "sugar is good" or "bitter is bad". With time though you start appreciating finer aspects of flavour. You even stop liking the very sugary cake that your younger self would love simply because it's too primitive for your taste buds now, you want something more complex. Some people even start liking the bitter stuff! (How do people like beer is beyond me)
(The problem with architecture is that the sophisticated beer appreciators force their bitter disgusting drink on everyone else)
Well, sometimes you just like ketchup? (and it's not all the same, some brands are too sweet, others too vinegary, you need the balance).
I certainly wouldn't put ketchup on *everything*, but objecting to "and this person still puts ketchup on his steak!" can involve a degree of snobbery (whereas if it was some 'authentic' South American salsa type sauce that goes with carne, that of course would be a different matter).
If you -can't- appreciate ketchup on most foods, I'd say you have an entirely defective sense of taste. It's an extremely effective delivery mechanism for the "acidic" flavor profile, and as such is of immense benefit to a wide variety of foods, because most plebeians cannot appreciate the acidic or bitter flavor profiles and so tend to woefully underutilize them.
I think people actually do appreciate the acidity - it's just that they don't know how to cook with it. They will be aware that something is missing from food that isn't acid-balanced, they just won't be able to tell *what*.
This isn't my idea - Kenji Lopez-Alt had the two biggest home cooking failure modes as not acid balancing and not salting enough (in that order).
I'd say those are the biggest failures of out-of-home cooking, too. Also the very limited palette of most people's acids; pickles aren't the only acidic ingredient, dammit.
(But mostly this post was just reframing the addition of ketchup from a low-taste move to a high-taste move in order to demonstrate the arbitrariness of the classification.)
>Also the very limited palette of most people's acids; pickles aren't the only acidic ingredient, dammit.
I'm slightly amused from a hobby chemist's point of view. Organic acids are one of the classes of compounds with a very wide variety of edible variations: Acetic, tartaric, malic, citric, ascorbic, lactic, succinic ...
Foods that already have plenty of acid, and that have other subtle tastes that get overwhelmed by tomato, just aren’t great with ketchup! Ketchup is really great at what it does, but not all foods are trying to do the same thing. Most people don’t like ketchup on most desserts, and that’s because they have at least a basic understanding of what they’re trying to do with both ketchup and dessert.
I came here to write the exact same 'taste is like taste' comment.
I imagine it as something like craving novel experiences. As a child, you generally have very simple taste, and want nothing more than simple flavours and textures. As adults -- depending, of course, on how open to new experiences you are -- people generally get bored of simple flavours and textures, and seek out novelty. People start liking beer, or olives, or spicy food, or any number of things that 8-year-olds would turn their noses up at.
I wonder if it can just be explained by novelty-seeking, plus openness to new experiences? Obviously there are occasionally adults that retain their 'childish' palates, and want to eat nothing but fast food and ice cream. But probably the majority of people end up seeing their childhood tastes as simplistic, and wanting more complex food experiences.
The big difference between food taste and art taste is that people have to eat food every single day. Everyone in the world spends maybe an hour each day having their senses dominated by the experience of eating. So by dint of repeated exposure, the majority of people are going to travel some distance up the 'seeking complex new experiences' ladder.
On the other hand, most people don't think about art every day, and so never hit the "I'm bored of this simplistic stuff, I want a more complex experience" point. They remain in 'art taste childhood', liking the art equivalent of ice cream and hamburgers. Those that DO think about art for hours each day end up liking the art equivalent of olives, beer, and chilis. Weird, abrasive, bitter things that you do have to learn to like -- but once you're there, simplistic tastes seem boring and childish.
Right. For instance, up to about age 30, I didn't get the taste of Coca-Cola, which would seem to sophisticated palates like about the ultimate in mass market tastes. Yet, for three decades, it struck me as a kind of hoax perpetrated by people trying to seem sophisticated. Finally, I started to get Coke and even came to prefer it to Pepsi.
On the gripping hand, there are basic foodstuffs/tastes that everyone eats every day and don't get tired of. Bread is bread, and you can have artisanal stone-ground 500 year old German baking technique bread as distinct from Chorleywood Process commercial white bread, but it's all bread.
Replace the bread with chunks of concrete, and people will object, even if told "but this is the new better form of bread specially created by your betters, you commoners!"
I don't know about your country but around here all the "sophisticated" bread is suddenly sourdough, which strikes me as one of those objectively bad-tasting things that people are currently pretending to enjoy to seem sophisticated.
To be fair I think sourdough has its place, when accompanied with the right things (plain butter) but it's out of place in (say) most sandwiches. The taste of the bread shouldn't overwhelm the other ingredients.
I also feel like this is the obvious analogy, but I don't think it's such a linear progression! I don't think I'm ever going to stop enjoying ice cream, and there's definitely media with appeal to both adults and children - does that mean it's bad?
I'll admit that there's stuff I'd regard as more of a guilty pleasure because it feels particularly unsophisticated, but sometimes that's what I'm in the mood for, whether it's a cheap burger or a blockbuster film.
Note that the works of Shakespeare that were originally intended to have broad appeal, and weren't intended to be am acquired taste for a small number of sophisticates - I feel like truly great art should be enjoyable to anyone, but have depth that someone with more experience and familiarity can pick up on.
You’re not going to stop liking ice cream - but you can learn to appreciate the difference between good ice cream, and old freezer burned ice cream, and ice cream that is made with milk that went bad but has a lot of sugar added to cover up the bad taste.
There is truly great art that is easy to appreciate, like good ice cream, but often there is really bad art that seems superficially quite similar to it, like bad ice cream. There is also some great art that takes a lot of experience to properly appreciate - though there’s reason to say that a niche and culturally very specific work of art might be limited in the level of greatness it can be truly said to have generally.
>There is also some great art that takes a lot of experience to properly appreciate - though there’s reason to say that a niche and culturally very specific work of art might be limited in the level of greatness it can be truly said to have generally.
Hmm... Are there examples of art which are appreciated across widely varying cultures? I'd be much more convinced that an artwork _is_ great if well-experienced art critics from five widely varying cultures all agree that it is, even if I don't see the attraction myself.
As you said, this doesn't work with a "niche and culturally very specific work of art" - and in those cases, _I_ can't tell if there really is intrinsic value to the work, or if there is just some sort of status game lock-in.
That would definitely be a good thing to gather more examples of!
Right now I’m mainly thinking informally - it’s not just art critics and music critics that think Mozart is better than random other 18th century composers and that Picasso is better than other random midcentury painters, but even a lot of people outside those fields. And when high art critics make judgments about popular music and tv shows, they don’t generally come up with the *most* popular instances as best, but they do tend to gravitate towards some particular instances (“Hey Ya” by OutKast, and Community, more than “Who Let the Dogs Out” by the Baha Men, or Big Bang Theory).
I don’t know how often you can find true cultural outsiders these days though, given the globalization of everything.
> I don't think I'm ever going to stop enjoying ice cream, and there's definitely media with appeal to both adults and children - does that mean it's bad?
But you don't eat it for every meal, which is what my young kids would do if they were in charge of their own diets.
I agree that novelty is a key part of this, as several people have pointed out. I think the "grammar"/"priesthood" characterizations are probably the closest to being correct, but it's also about negotiating what aesthetic spheres should be approached as "grammars," which as "priesthoods," and to what extent. I would argue that novelty takes on different kinds of importance in "grammatical" contexts -- generally, those that require a greater degree of open group signification -- and "priesthood" contexts -- generally, those that don't (or shouldn't). Scott's examples of menswear and architecture -- closer to "grammars" -- are different from something like food or music -- closer to "priesthoods". Debating over whether a pastel color scheme signifies femininity (it Does, by the way) is important for in-group interpretation -- it becomes an in-group vocabulary. Menswear is a field that virtually every man existing in corporate/formal job contexts has to tacitly engage in, so there's a degree of "laundering" that exists. Demonstrating a capacity to communicate one's moods/status/point of view/personal history through what they wear creates a sense of distinction for the grammatically uninitiated and creates another vector for demonstration of intelligence for the grammatically initiated.
In contrast, open subcultural identification in a "grammatical" context (ex. dressing like "a punk" or "a goth" or whatever) is always going to be understood as "middle-class" at best because it demonstrates 1.) an understanding that this "grammatical" signification style is in some way important, but 2.) a high level of obedience fundamentally at odds with the types of "higher-order communication" I discussed earlier and a 3.) limited level of openness to novelty (i.e. "my willingness to engage with novel experience is wholly determined by the as determined by my chosen subcultural group"). If you extend this further and live in a "goth" house, you look unrefined because you're not understanding the reasonable limitations of the aesthetic's "reach."
"Priesthoods" run rely on novelty. The more disparate pieces you can collect in your palate, the more you can refine your point of view on the medium in question, the better you can push the medium forward -- the more complete the system of interpretation becomes.
I agree with this. I’ll also note some flavors are much easier to become accustomed to than others.
I wasn’t allowed to drink coke as a kid and never really sought it out until I was 18. When I did try it, it was really good! But it’s the sort of thing where if I had it every day I’d feel the need to give it up (an “unacquired taste” maybe.) Whereas it takes me much longer to get sick of the taste of certain cheeses, yogurt, tea, less one-note things. It’s also why dumping sugar or mozzarella or ketchup on everything strikes people as tasteless - it’s *boring* to them.
A confounding factor is that children's tongues are physically more sensitive to bitter flavors than adults - food literally tastes different to children.
We value complexity and variety in and of themselves. The latter I guess is relatively obvious : if you only ever had the same food all your life you would get sick of it (or at least most people would). By extension, while there are many uncomplicatedly good food, it might not be enough, and then you'd be willing to accept less uncomplicatedly good food just to add variety.
Complexity is valued because of how it engages our senses or mental process in novel and deeper ways. Personally the only sense about which I get this is taste, but I know others have it for other senses. I also get it for other things, like for example how I prefer strategy video games to action ones, even though I'm not unaffected by the adrenaline rush and all that. But I like the way strategy games engage more of my deeper brain better.
Of course producing complexity require skills, which mean people are going to play status game on top of the above. Also, since art is so important to us, various ideologies will get involved. Fast forward all of this across a human lifetime, and across history, and you can get to pretty weird places.
Valuing complexity for itself would mean we would always prefer, other things equal, the most elaborately decorated houses. Yet modernists preferred the least complex ones of all possible houses (or close to that). So what you mean by "complex" must mean something more complex. We reach our preferences for simple silhouettes via complex and convoluted trajectories?
> This model neatly answers our early question about the nature of computers. A computer's superpower is *specificity*. Computer Science researchers often talk about "complexity". Namely: time complexity; memory complexity; Kolmogorov complexity, etc. But complexity is merely the cost. The thing that the complexity is actually paying for is the *specificity*.
Sometimes though, the complexity really is the point, because the complexity provides a fun challenge. E.g. jigsaw puzzles.
(I'm assuming "abstraction" is meant to gesture at "versatility". Else, one could argue that, say... the Dual Numbers are highly abstract. And yet, mysteriously, nobody cares about the Duals nearly as much as the Reals.)
I mean, a swiss-army knife is versatile too. But imagine explaining to an extra-terrestrial why swiss-army knives are useful. "Because it's versatile" is, by itself, somewhat unhelpful if the ET doesn't already understand knives, screwdrivers, and nail-files.
But to explain why computers are useful to an ET, all you gotta do is explain that computers are extremely adept at math, AKA manipulating numbers, AKA tree-traversal. And what makes tree-traversal useful is the specificity. E.g. solving the roots of (y = -9.81x^2 + 800x + 5,000) narrows the search-space from the entire infinitude of the Real Numberline to two possible solutions. Which is often a little more precise than, say, just eye-balling the cannonball's trajectory. And not only does this specificity allow computers to run algorithms quickly, but it also allows them to track a huge amount of data. Because data is stored in memory, which is addressed with numbers, which are trees.
It's all tree-traversal. Always has been.
Sure, it's also true that trees are abstract enough to be extremely versatile. But the versatility per se isn't where the magic happens. "Abstracting away the details" really means "turning it into math", which merely punts the superpower mystery to a higher level of abstraction, i.e. "and... why is math useful/versatile?". The answer to which is: "numbers are trees and trees are specific". (N.b. "why are computers useful?" was my original motivating question behind the post. But in hindsight, maybe the post should have been framed as a direct response to Eugene Wigner's "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Math".)
Also, not all computers are general-purpose computers. Consider embedded systems. They typically do only one thing, and do it well. And yet, are they not computers? Do they not carry out computations? Consider a 4-function calculator. Can it run minesweeper?
Valuing complexity does not mean that we always value it about all else. Indeed it can also be nice to have something which is uncluttered, it can be freeing for the mind. Up to a point, after which we're just depressed. Also complexity does not necessarily mean the complexity must be obvious.
(I'm not necessarily saying it's applicable to modernists, I'm mostly engaging the general question about what taste can mean).
I find that (at least for me) it's too easy to commit the typical mind fallacy in those discussions. And I think that a big part that's missing in this post is accounting for the internal experience of having one's taste develop over time.
Say person A likes X over Y but person B likes Y over X. A person looking from outside can say then that it's just a subjective preference, and part of it is, but let's now make it more detailed:
Person A: I like X; Y is confusing
Person B: all X does is a cheap trick that I've seen through; Y has a rewarding complexity that I find something new in every time
Those aren't symmetric experiences, and often person A and B are the same person separated by a couple years!
(unfortunately B can become then smug about it, being seen as B starts rewarding status and so people start faking it, and we get this whole status game the rest of the post alludes to)
(the BDSM analogy is the closest thing in this post but internally it feels like a completely different mechanism)
Out of curiosity, what about poetry? For me I'm the person A and poetry is thing Y – I'm utterly confused by it and I don't know how to appreciate it. I think there definitely is a sense then in which your taste in poetry is "better" (or at the very least deeper) than mine
This is an interesting way of looking at it, and I think it adds something which Scott only sort of hinted at: the complexity can be very enjoyable.
I'm Person A with respect to painting, and I'm Person B with respect to theatre. (Probably 1/3 B + 2/3 A with poetry.) I enjoy theatre more than I enjoy paintings. My memory might be faulty, but I think I enjoy theatre more than I used to, as well. Learning more about what goes into a work, being able to see the choices that the actors, director, and playwright made... it makes it more intellectually stimulating, and I think it also makes me appreciate it more. It becomes more fun.
I have childish taste in food, but it's gotten slightly better as I age. When I was a child, I liked sweet Russian salad dressing. As a teen, I liked Thousand Island. As a 30-something, I liked Ranch, and when I hit my 50s I could finally appreciate Blue Cheese dressing.
It wasn't a conspiracy, it was just other people could appreciate what I couldn't yet appreciate.
I suspect changes to your gut microbiome will affect you taste preferences.
You can just get fed up with things, esp if you have them a lot (maybe this is your microbiome complaining).
When I was very young I ate a bar of chocolate without properly removing the foil. I got a strong metallic taste from the foil (maybe it was reacting with my mercury amalgam fillings) and this put me off chocolate for life.
Apparently smoking also changes your sense of taste.
How about taste in writing? Less mysterious? Writing is not a science — but I'm guessing you are quite confident as to why some writing is better. Also, good writing and popular writing doesn't necessarily overlap.
But how many hours have you dedicated to writing versus design? 1000x? 10000x? More? Cultivating taste?
For that matter, taste in thinking? I think Scott would probably find a lot of the ways "ordinary folks" think about intuition and evidence to be appalling (though of course a lot of the ways hyper-educated folks do it is appalling as well).
Literal taste is a feature-vector; metaphorical taste is a feature-vector. The feature-vector (i.e. list of features) is subjective and to some extent, negotiated socially. The features per se are objective features of reality. What mystery remains?
It's mysterious but you can relate to it, right? Surely you like different food (and books, movies, jokes...) as when you were 5 years old, or even 25 years old.
This is basically your option E (BDSM porn) but stated in a much more relatable way. It seems more-or-less-obviously correct to me, but it doesn't explain everything.
You still need a different theory to explain why most art forms develop so many arbitrary-seeming rules and conventions over time, and why people can feel so strongly about these. I think it's important to recognize this as a separate (even if somewhat related) issue that needs a separate explanation.
To me, something like your option G (grammar) seems the most plausible. But it depends a lot on the specific rule and art form, some are more arbitrary than others.
> I think it's important to recognize this as a separate (even if somewhat related) issue that needs a separate explanation.
Yes very much my thinking.
My theory of taste is roughly that there is a real sense in which a person's taste becomes more refined over time (note the word we use, "refined"), but we've also built a social game on top of a real phenomenon that often ends up absurd. Scott's post focuses too much on the social game aspect.
(ngl he also sounds somewhat bitter about it, maybe because he's overweighting architecture and art where he keeps saying "I like this" and people reply "it's slop actually", but I'd be really surprised if he couldn't relate at all to the personal growth theory of taste when it comes to writing and poetry)
Perhaps he really is this strange exceptional person that simply doesn't have this urge that everyone else does. (Scott, I mean this in the most neutral and non-judgmental way possible, sorry if it comes off as criticism.)
>Studies indicate that individuals with the "strong tasters" PTC gene variant were less likely to be smokers. This may indicate that people who find PTC bitter are more likely than non-tasters to find the taste of cigarettes bitter and may be less likely to smoke.
>Other studies suggest that there may be correlations between the ability to taste PTC and preferences for certain types of foods. This may be why some of us think that broccoli is just too bitter to eat.
I think we can eliminate the priesthood model at least. I don't believe that everyone with tastes broader than chicken nuggets is just doing it for social approval.
The reason why "sugar is good" is a bad taste, is that it leads you to want things that are unhealthy for you. It's good when your short-term preferences and your long-term goals are aligned with each other. More generally, it's good when your different preferences are consistent, and bad if they are inconsistent, and lead you to take actions that go against each other.
This is one of the few ways in which preferences can be evaluated from a setting that "sits outside" of equally arbitrary preferences that you have yourself: you can negatively judge things for inconsistency.
Now the question is, what's the equivalent for architecture? Maybe being one of those "in this house .... nobody is illegal" lawn poster people and simultaneously highly valuing homogeneous neighborhoods full of low-density suburban housing? Though even that feels like a stretch.
> The reason why "sugar is good" is a bad taste, is that it leads you to want things that are unhealthy for you
Going by this analogy, could it be that too much of what we'd call "bad taste" is in some sense bad for you? (mentally, spiritually, however you'd like to call it)
Note the term "brainrot" and how it's used in practice – people use it for low-quality attention-grabbing videos, or simplistic mass media, but it'd be quite a stretch to say that someone's got brainrot from reading too much Shakespeare
No no, I think the cat tail nailed it actually. I think you're saying you don't see an internal logic, but what if the logic was this: taste is about health, but it's subtle and people can easily be wrong about it. We all know people who eat things they shouldn't because they taste good, but when you reduce the "noise" of fat, sugar and salt to a minimum, people actually do have cravings for nutrients they genuinely need. I crave nettle tea when my iron's low. When I was pregnant, I got ahead of pregnancy cravings by just opening the fridge door and seeing what looked best to me just now (which mostly resulted in my regularly eating a spoonful or two of straight Dijon mustard.) I did this because I knew people have pregnancy cravings for a reason, it's because they need particular nutrients. And people, when they eat, really are tasting particular nutrients, though some of them are more subtle and hard to taste.
This isn't an argument that's goal-focused toward making the point that elite art is always better; I don't in fact think that. The landscape of both art and food is infernally complicated. There are cultural factors that play in in all kinds of ways, and plenty of the time high-status people are just plain wrong, often because they really are just playing games. (Like the cliquish architects Wolfe describes; I believe every word of that b/c y'know, humans. I fully wish we were still allowed to build attractive, high-quality buildings.)
My point is simply that sometimes there is a real difference. I'll go at it narrowly within my own field: fiction writing. I've observed a very common technique to make either a book or a movie popular and pleasurable to consume: create a protagonist who will always be pleasurable to identify with. They can be an underdog--in fact that helps--but they can never be truly wrong about anything. Anyone who genuinely dislikes them is a bad person. It doesn't have to be utterly obvious, it doesn't have to be to the level of Mary Sue at all--it just has to be there in the fundamental structure. They have to go from ruin to triumph without ever experiencing moral pain--the only pain that can reach through the link into the audience's heart and hurt them too--the pain of being, or having done, wrong.
To me this is flattering the reader to coax money out of their pockets, using a technique that broadly has the effect of lowering people's ability to see ways they might be wrong and others right; it's pandering, and I won't do it. (It's a bit like adding so much sugar to the sweet potatoes they're practically candy so the kids will praise your dish; it's bad for them, and it teaches them that sweet potatoes in themselves aren't good and their taste needs full disguising, and that is just not true. As long as the sweet potatoes are good quality. Sorry to obsess about sweet potatoes, I grow the durn things and I care.) I'm not some kind of elite who hates the reader and wants to whip them with my highbrowness; I'm working on a fantasy novel about 17th century France and a dragon. I just think there really is a real difference sometimes, and the taste of food is a great analogy. Because art can actually be good or bad for you, sometimes.
Oh, and the constant rumor that "healthy" always means "unpleasant" is wrong. I was sort of assuming that in the argument, and maybe I shouldn't have. But this is way too long for me to tack my food rant on the bottom of it, so I'm done now.
p.s. I know my argument wasn't at all written in your rationalist style, Scott--it's just not how my brain runs--but I hope that (if you wish) you can take the premises and run with them in a more linear logic-chain to see if you think they work.
Isn't it really interesting that this would be correlated? Food is such an interesting example because I feel like it crosses class lines so much more. You can be in any social class or subculture and have strong preferences around food (obviously within a different context of cuisines/restaurants/etc.). Whereas I feel like just saying the word architecture out loud puts you in a certain social strata.
I'd be curious Scott, how you feel like this discussion of taste pertains to literature/poetry/etc? From your writing at least that seems like the area where you have the classiest/most-tasteful preferences.
Just a bit of personal experience - I loved sweet as a child, still love as adult, but can't eat a lot because something changed in my biochemistry and now a spoon of sugar makes me feel like shit. In general, I think food taste is very rarely driven by complexity like other tastes are, and is mostly determined by simple associations and metabolic needs. It's not developing to something better or more sophisticated or complex, just changing.
But maybe it is developing to something better--better *for you*. I have a very similar issue with sugar and I also still love it, yet feel less tempted to eat it (except in small amounts after supper, the only time it works for my system) because of the effects. And now that I eat it much less, I feel satisfied with much less, and I don't enjoy things that are too purely sweet without enough other flavors... yellow cake with white sugar icing is now something I would only eat if you paid me to. (And paid well!) But dark chocolate is *great.* This is healthy for me, and listening to my tastes helps me not to develop Type 2 diabetes. (It also no doubt brings extra vitamins/minerals/micronutrients into my system via the desire for more flavor.) I actually think this could be well analogized into artistic taste--it's good for you to like the things *you* personally like b/c they suit your needs, as long as you watch out for your counterproductive cravings & don't follow them blindly (sugaaaaar...), esp by paying attention to how you feel afterwards & not just in the moment. (& hopefully eschew status games and food that's more about impressing your neighbor than enjoyment. I mean I guess that stuff won't kill you... unless it's badly prepared fugu...)
Do you take this to be a concrete example of E more than a than a novel concept, much like how the grammar explanation is a concretization of the priesthold model? (I ask because this is certainly how it seems to me).
Both this and the BDSM analogy say something like "seeking novelty because the old thing is no longer satisfactory". I don't like the BDSM analogy though because it suggests that it's as simple as a physiological process where you used to be satisfied by stimulus of strength 10 but you've become desensitised to it and now you need strength 20, then strength 30, and so on...
(Something like this seems to happen with hot sauce fans but I don't think anyone says that the person who won't settle for less than 🌶️XTREME🌶️ REAPER SAUCE has better taste than those who haven't entered the treadmill)
I think it has to do a lot more with how as one's ability to appreciate more complexity grows the old thing starts feeling thin on substance. Comments elsewhere mention that as their taste matures the maximum amount of pleasure they could possibly derive from a thing grows a lot higher than it was previously, so I think that thinking of taste in terms of "personal growth" sounds more fitting than "desensitisation"
This is also the first analogy that came to mind for me. I think it's a helpful framing because most of us spend more time thinking about and enjoying food than we do with, eg, architecture or visual art. It's also considered less of an intellectual pursuit, which makes having opinions about the taste of food more accessible to more people.
I think almost everyone can relate to the experience of liking or not liking food for a variety of reasons:
- Tastes bad in a way that almost everyone would agree with. It's spoiled or way too salty or whatever. Though there's still probably some unusual person out there who likes it or doesn't mind it.
- Tastes good in a way that almost everyone will agree with. Sometimes something relatively simple like ice cream, sometimes something complex like a meal prepared by a skilled chef.
- Not to my taste though I can understand other people enjoying it. I don't care for beets, other people love them.
- Didn't like it at first but it grew on me. Beer is like this for me and many others.
- Enjoyed something as a novel experience, even if I don't especially care to have it again. This is how I felt about durian.
- Liked something at first taste, but it's too one-note and gets less interesting the more you have of it. This is a common experience with overly sweet food.
I think all of these modes have clear analogies with art, and help clarify some of the different ways people experience artistic taste. I don't think they fall into any one clear category of fashion or priesthood or whatever else, though there are elements of these. Some people really do have limited taste and will be indifferent between eating any thing. Some people are really good at combining flavors in skillful tried-and-true ways, some in novel creative ways. Some people spend a lot of time and money seeking out the best possible food experiences that most align with their tastes, but most people dedicate less effort to this while still directionally pursing food that tastes good to them.
Like any kind of taste, food is sometimes turned into a status game where certain tastes are "in" or considered superior only because they're inaccessible. But ignore the status games and I think there is a very real kind of taste which is derived from human preferences that range from near-universal to completely idiosyncratic. And some people really are more skilled at certain aspects of this, like putting together novel combinations of flavors that others will like, or more quickly distinguishing between foods that seem appealing at first but diminish over time vs those that have enduring appeal vs those that seem unappealing at first but improve with time.
> I think all of these modes have clear analogies with art, and help clarify some of the different ways people experience artistic taste
This is a good list, thank you! Really makes me convinced that it's not an accident that "taste in food" and "taste in art" are referred to by the same noun
I think this is sort of backwards, as children have better taste than adults in a sense. They have more tastebuds and are more similar to adult supertasters in their dislike of vegetables and bitter foods.
Imagine we discover an isolated society where everyone becomes mostly colorblind around age 7, though it happens slowly so it's not too obvious. They show us their art, and it's ugly: far too many bright colors all over the place. After discussing and comparing art for a bit, they conclude we have the unsophisticated taste of children. In reality, they just can't detect the aspects we find distasteful.
People seem to have a strong bias towards thinking their own taste is "right" and others have bad taste.
We stop liking very sweet things as adults not because it's too primitive but because we evolved to tolerate it less as adults because adults need less sugar. If there were a general phenomenon of adults liking less extreme tastes, you'd expect the same to happen with salty, sour, and bitter tastes. But there's not much change in salt and sourness perception, and bitter perception moves in the opposite direction.
Food taste has deep evolutionary origins because if you don't have a steady supply of all the nutrients you need, you die. If you eat something your digestive system can't handle, you suffer badly before possibly dying. If your body needs different nutrients when you're an infant than when you're a 40 year old, your taste had better change to adapt, or else you die.
I think this has to be the core that the signaling/social construction/priesthood/whatever is built on. I think about coffee, where as you get more into it you seem to get more interested in fruity light-roast stuff where an average coffee drinker generally prefers more of a medium roast. All the experts doing all the interesting stuff are focusing on fancy single-origin light roasts, which makes drinking that kind of coffee a strong signal of your expertise and it compounds on itself.
Traditional menswear has been remarkably consistent over the last several hundred years (there’s been evolution but the broad principles are basically the same). Which seems to cut against nearly all the points raised at the end. A classic suit would be seen as stylish over a very long period of time.
I come from a country with no labor day, but nonetheless don’t wear white/cream trousers in winter after I did so once, saw myself reflected in a window and thought I looked weird and too summery.
True, there was a Great Male Renunciation beginning during the Enlightenment in menswear of the radical changes we see with feminine fashion. But the people who care the most about menswear keep changing the details of what's stylish. In His Girl Friday in 1938, for instance, Cary Grant wears boxy suits with loud checks, while in North By Northwest in 1958, he wears elegant slim cut suits.
An interesting question is whether taste ever stops revolving. Has history permanently decided that 1958 Cary Grant is a better look than 1938 Cary Grant? It seemed like that for a long time, but I haven't paid any attention to the question in this century. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point, people who care about such things decide that his 1938 race track bookie look was better.
To an extent the major changes of fashion have reflected climate changes and heating technologies. The warm Mediterranean civilizations generally had loose and flowing garments while the barbarian north featured sleeved tops and (for men) something like trousers. The styles merged during the early Middle Ages when a bitter cold volcanic winter necessitated heavier apparel. Likewise clothing for men and women both became heavier and more layered during the Little Ice Age. As the climate has warmed-- and as effective HVAC warmed indoor spaces and travel could be done in heated vehicles-- we've gone much skimpier on our apparel. Coats of any sort are well on their way to being cold weather outdoor wear only. Longer undergarments, once worn generally, are now also relegated to cold weather and mainly for those who work or play outdoors in winter. As warming proceeds the shorts and t-shirt look may well come to generate with some formal wear versions of itself.
The menswear norm of wearing wool suits is due to the dominance of the British Empire in the 19th Century even though it's a silly norm in Washington, Los Angeles, and perhaps Palo Alto in the 21st Century.
This is most true if you restrict yourself entirely to looking at British fashion, but even then it isn't really true.
The modern suit only goes back to about 1850s, and at the time its closest analogue was regarded as casual. Imagine if in a hundred and fifty years everybody talked about yoga pants as the height of women's fashion.
Well yes modern business attire is equivalent to the lounge suits of old, but business attire isn’t peak formal even within modern dress codes. A tuxedo today or a morning suit day wouldn’t look out of place 150 years ago.
Except for the part where you're not wearing a hat, and the modern lines would come across as unfashionably conservative (men's fashion in the 1850s was, uh, kind of suggestive). Wearing typical examples of modern tuxedos might manage the equivalent of "business casual", and come across as hired help.
Edit:
To clarify the 'kind of suggestive' thing, 1850s men's fashion had lines that emphasized and "led to" men's hips, butt, and/or, well, groin.
You wouldn't wear a hat with a tuxedo, it's evening dress. You would then and still would wear a hat with morning dress, but few of us will ever wear morning dress.
My theory taste is a schelling point for coordinating status between people of high creative and social intelligence and the socio-economic elite. The rich want creative and socially intelligent kids in their gene pool because that’s correlated with other (more useful) forms of intelligence plus it gives them the tools to navigate the same sort of status games and thus continue succeeding. And the “taste game” is precisely that kind of game of status. Along with the “attractiveness game” or the “money game.” Just going about it in a more subtle way.
I think the key is that the rules of taste shouldn’t be fully solvable by high creative intelligence people nor fully acquirable for high social intelligence people. To be a very high status ‘tastemaker’ you need both attributes to succeed in some measure. Otherwise you’re only selecting for one form of intelligence that may not correlate with all the others.
Here are two more possible explanations (note that I'm not really endorsing these, just trying to explain how I think at least some people think about taste).
First, taste is about something real which most people can sense unconsciously but not consciously. For example, it could be the case that most people who have not been educated in fashion will say that wearing black shoes and white socks looks perfectly fine, but if you showed them 100 people wearing black shoes and white socks and 100 people dressed identically except for the sock color, then they would rate the second group of 100 as being slightly better looking but not be able to explain why.
Second, taste is about difficulty and/or rarity. I think much of what people object to about "kitsch" is essentially that it's easy to produce. Lots of people who study painting for long enough and who have a modest amount of natural talent could eventually learn to paint like Thomas Kincaide. But not that many people can come up with cubism (though once *somebody* came up with cubism, it's not that hard to imitate). Smart people and people who look at art all the time are more interested in novel ideas and more impressed by things that are difficult to pull off. Thus Kincaide is boring and dumb, but Picasso is cool.
Relevant to this article, I find "mediocre landscapes" vastly more interesting and enjoyable than most other styles and subject matter. Portraits, still lifes, modernist explorations of raw form or color? I'm glad they exist but... I speed through those sections of museums to get to what clicks for me. Almost any landscape I can just lose myself in, the best drop me into a sublime trance.
I'll double down, I also really like pulp art, genre stuff like sci fi or western or fantasy art. I'm sure seasoned art experts find all that boorish, but by what authority should I be condemned?
If Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown can write a seminal work about learning to appreciate the garish consumer architecture of Las Vegas, than any gauche pop style can be rehabilitated, today's mediocrity is tomorrow's king.
The first seems undeniably to be a part of what’s going on. But even people with lots of training and refinement still have trouble telling apart what is their own idiosyncratic preference, and what is this broader thing that they have learned to express that many others react to without knowing how.
H) Everyone has some selection of things they find aesthetic and non-aesthetic, and taste is the ability to maximise the aesthetic appeal of something across the whole population, or alternately to minimise the active dislike.
I) The worst taste is objectively bad, but taste grows more subjective the better it gets; most human beings live in a world that's so tasteful that they spend all their time arguing about the marginal benefit of symmetrical house windows. If the vast majority of humans lived in a house painted in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage or covered in wallpaper made of gory real-life crime scene photographs then they would go crazy.
J) Styles are a series of local maxima in a space that constantly contorts due to changes in public opinion. Good taste is either the ability to read these contortions or the blind luck to guess them correctly, and then build a house that will be maximally tasteful in 10 years' time.
K) Taste becomes apparent to the layperson only after extended contact with something tasteless, and experts are able to tell we'd hate living in a tasteless house six months before we realise it ourselves.
Imagine someone who likes kids' jokes only and gets inordinate pleasure from them.
They are consternated by the existence of, I dunno, the Chicago comedy scene, because it's so superfluous to requirements. Normal people, to use Scott's term, in their view don't need all this faff, they can just get laughs by repeating chicken crossing the road jokes. To their mind it can only be a huge status game.
I am not saying this is the same thing, but how do we know it's not?
Decades ago when "performance art" was fashionable, it struck me that "performance artist" was what they called you if you weren't that good. If you were Andy Kaufman-level good, they called you a comedian or actor. If you were David Bowie or David Byrne-level good, they called you a rock star.
Scott, apologies if you've talked about this in one of the threads, but how are you on TASTE taste—like, the taste of food? Worldwide, the most popular foods and beverages bear very little resemblance to fancy food. Indeed, the global triumph of McDonald's and Coke suggests that in the gustatory realm, what's universal is the superiority of junk food. Leaving nutrition aside, do you feel that people who maintain that (say) scallops with braised chard tastes better than a Big Mac, or that IPA tastes better than Modelo, etc., are maintaining a priesthood based on false reasons? Or are they on to something?
I've never been able to get into fancy food, so I can't answer this from a position of knowledge.
My guess would be some combination of the porn analogy (you get bored of certain types of food and seek novelty), and a sensitization effect where you might notice slight imperfections in food, this unintentionally "trains" you to hate the imperfections more, and then you can't stand food that isn't made perfectly.
See, I wonder if food sophisticates can't stand food that *is* made "perfectly" from a universalist standpoint: food that hits the big obvious flavor centers in a big obvious way. What could be more perfect than a piece of supermarket birthday cake for sweetness and calorie density? Yet past a certain age many adults stop enjoying that kind of birthday cake because we find it cloying: once you've had the first bite you've got the whole experience. Something like dark chocolate offers notes that do multiple things—bits of bitterness, etc.—and thus, through these kinds of "imperfections," it's satisfying to keep eating. And I think that maps pretty well onto the difference between what I'd consider kitsch and what I don't.
From the unsophisticated rube standpoint, the modern architects went "we're replacing the chocolate with better chocolate. but it's dark chocolate, which will be more bitter to your palate until you get used to it. except it's not really chocolate, it's something artificial that imitates chocolate. and the bitterness is because we added in fifty times more agent to make it even harsher because it's medicinal, isn't it? and maybe it'll make you throw up, but that's *good*!"
I think you can't really say that someone who refuses the new 'chocolate' is acting just like a toddler that only wants sugar rush.
I like Brussels sprouts, many people hate them. I'm not going to say "well my educated palate is much better than yours, simpletons" for that. We may use the bitter peel of citrus fruits for flavour, but nobody is going to add in the pith because that's *too* bitter and would spoil the dish.
What Scott's original post on architecture was getting at, I think, is that the modern 'cooks' made the dish out of *all* pith in some cases.
The story of Brussels sprouts is particularly interesting.
Quoting Wikipedia: "In the 1990s, Dutch scientist Hans van Doorn identified the chemicals that make Brussels sprouts bitter: sinigrin and progoitrin.[11] This enabled Dutch seed companies to cross-breed archived low-bitterness varieties with modern high-yield varieties, over time producing a significant increase in the popularity of the vegetable.[12]"
So it's perfectly possible that middle-aged people were subjected to the old style decades ago and reasonably decided that this wasn't their thing, but _would_ like the new variants, if they were aware of the difference.
We evolved to like sweetness less and tolerate bitterness more as we age. You're interpreting the adult tuning of these dials as more sophisticated.
Why don't people tell similar stories about how they loved eating lemons as a child, but now prefer a more complex mix of flavors? Because sour perception doesn't change that much.
If evolution had tuned the dials the opposite way for children and adults, adults would instead be talking about how children can't appreciate the depth and vibrancy of flavor in cake.
Anecdotally, I stopped sweetmaxxing once it led to an annoying mucus buildup at the back of my throat whenever I ate something "too sweet". I still like the taste. It's the side effects that turn me off.
This isn't my experience. I think it's more fair to say that many food 'sophisticates' are could more easily be classified as 'adventurous' eaters. The reason they turn their noses up to Chef Boyardee isn't because it's 'too perfect', but because it's bland and uninteresting. A friend who went to culinary school talks about 'mouth feel'. Sure, pudding tastes good, but there's only so much of it you can stand. No matter how much you like pudding, if you were on an all-pudding diet, it wouldn't take long before you'd start to look for something more interesting to do with your tongue than gulp down another mushy bite.
I think you could over-correct here, and assume 'sophisticated' eaters get bored of pudding after a single bite, but I don't think that's what's going on here. I think what's happening is that they're actively seeking adventure, not that they're easily bored by slight repetition.
So when you put pudding on their plate, their first instinct is to ask, "is there any way to make this more fun?" They're not disgusted by 'ordinary', so much as they're overlooking it entirely. To analogize to music, the reason they're not interested in that supermarket birthday cake isn't because it's actively dissonant, so much as it's background noise they don't even notice. If they're annoying about their food sophistication, a charitable interpretation is that they're the kind of person who's looking for a buddy to be adventurous with. "Sure, you could jump off the low part of the bridge, but come over here and we'll jump off the higher part together!"
I guess, but isn’t that kind of a reductive way of looking at it? Is becoming bored with YA literature as one grows the same as getting into kinky porn? Is “when I was a child, I spoke as a child, I reasoned as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things” the same as getting into kinky porn?
I used to not be very discerning about food, but got into fine dining later in life. I'm pretty confident that it's lifted my ceiling for enjoying meals, and only raised the floor a little bit. I enjoy a fancy tasting menu more than anything I would have enjoyed before, but it hasn't stopped me enjoying burgers.
So I don't agree that it's about becoming hypertensive about imperfections, or bored about 'normal' things, and it's more about learning an appreciation for subtleties I couldn't pick up on before.
Noticing that a cream sauce would be even better with a bit of lemon and tarragon doesn't stop it being yummy.
Mostly upside, very little downside (except my wallet).
Yes, I agree with this. People sometimes say they don’t want to develop good taste, because it would be expensive, but you still have the same appreciation for the thing as before, even if you now also know what you’re missing.
It’s like how I feel about weather after living in Southern California. When I was in Texas, I thought an 80 degree day or a 65 degree day were pretty good, but now that I live in California, I realize just how much better it can often be, but I still recognize that those days are pretty decent (especially compared to most Texas weather in either winter or summer).
There's a lot of science behind making things taste better, and not just in the 'sophisticated' sense! Two examples:
1. Years ago, the people at Coca Cola did some internal blinded taste tests that showed people preferred Pepsi. They panicked, thinking the only thing keeping them afloat was branding, so they perfected a new formula that beat Pepsi in their taste tests, then launched this as the infamous "New Coke". People hated it. Why the great performance in blind tests?
The tests they were using were 'sip tests'. The sweeter Pepsi did better for most people in a one-off setting, but was too sweet to sit down and drink a full can. (With some variation, where a subset of the population prefers Pepsi.)
2. There are some food additives that make things better. I had a roommate some years back who wasn't all about fancying up his diet. I pointed this out to him, like how 'malt' additives just make things taste better, bought some malted milk, and was using it to help enhance flavors. He dismissed this assertion, until one day we were driving along and he mentioned he really loves Grape Nuts. "I don't know what they put into that stuff, but it's addicting."
"Malt." He was incredulous. He didn't believe me until we pulled over into a supermarket and, sure enough, it was listed there among the ingredients.
Doritos are engineered to taste great. In addition to malt, they have MSG and a unique type of 'flavor enhancer' that increases the binding affinity of MSG by 50x, namely inosinate and guanylate salts. This is present in all the different varieties of Doritos - including the new flavors - and explains why they're difficult to put down even if you're not really into the new BBQ/spicy nacho flavor.
I suspect there's a combination of factors involved in 'taste', making taste like 'physics', and like a 'priesthood', and an acquired thing, etc.
What about videogames? If I remember correctly, you stopped on Civilization IV. And I generally agree, where should be games for new crowd and hardcore crowd. And general sense of superiority is common, but not necessary.
For bitter and spicy, the BDSM model works better. Rejecting bitterness is likely an evolutionary adaptation that prevent us from eating toxic plant alkaloids. With time you can develop a kink for this mild displeasure. So IPA lovers aren't faking it.
For McDonlads, it is the fashion analogy that works. This can be tested with non-westerners, who haven't being acculturated into seeing junk food as tacky. Mainland Chinese people love McDonalds. Also, after the iron curtain fell it was common for middle class eastern Europeans to eat out in junk food chains.
PD: Not relevant, but I would say many kids would like fresh grilled scallops at first try. They are considered more refined because of availability/price and novelty, since they aren't a staple in the US. Most kids wouldn't go for chard though.
FWIW, I met a bona fide French chef de cuisine, who said, that some days, what you want is a Big Mac. Not an artisanal wagyu steakburger infused with truffles and raw bull semen or whatever it is that foodies prize, but a Big Mac.
> Rejecting bitterness is likely an evolutionary adaptation that prevent us from eating toxic plant alkaloids. With time you can develop a kink for this mild displeasure.
Occurs to me that could actually be an "intentional" feature of the original evolved function. If one of your hunter-gatherer ancestors ate small quantities of some plant repeatedly over years and survived, well, apparently it's locally abundant, yet wasn't too toxic after all. Might as well keep gradually ramping up the dosage, to stress-test whatever clever prep method they devised, while scoring more essential nutrients.
It has not been my experience that mainland Chinese people love McDonalds. It's more that they see it as a western novelty food, like how Americans see haggis or escargot. So it became kind of a fad to try on special occasions for a while. I know a lot of people in China, and I do not know a single one that thinks McDonalds or KFC tastes better than their own cuisine. In fact, a lot more people dislike than like it.
>do you feel that people who maintain that (say) scallops with braised chard tastes better than a Big Mac
The problem here is that you're comparing something that's definitionally mass produced in order to maximize profit vs something that evokes care put into cooking and ingredient sourcing. Would that person prefer a McScallop to a very well made, but simple, burger?
I think this sort of illustrates a problem with this discussion: It seems to me like there are two things that can be true, and they get tangled together in a way that makes everyone angry:
* There is such thing as expertise: most people will enjoy prefer a good burger made by a good cook to a Big Mac.
* People who get deep into a subject, in order to get that expertise, seem to eventually end up seeking novelty, which might be totally divorced from quality
So then, you get stuff that sits all across the spectrum created by these two axes, and different people will value one or the other differently. Someone who's very deep into it will see someone eating a Whooper and conclude they are a philistine, when maybe they just prefer burgers and that's the one that's available to them. Someone who's not might look at some lavender flavored foam and conclude that the people eating these are just too high on their own supply, rather than appreciating the skill and ingenuity required for successful molecular cuisine (I am a pleb, so don't take this example at face value). Many times, both will be right, but homogenizing the outgroup leads to less productive discussions.
>IPA tastes better than Modelo
At the risk of jeopardizing my whole point above, if I wanted to argue that taste is fake, I'd just relentlessly attack IPA supremacists.
Burger King Whoppers strike me as really tasty. I consider it a massive failure of Burger King marketers that they've never gotten across to the public that Whoppers are, obviously, more flavorful than Big Macs.
I think that someone who has been raised on McDonald's burgers, upon tasting a carefully sourced and prepared burger by an excellent chef, will *not* necessarily say, "wow, this is way better." They may be too used to the sweetness of McD's sauces, in particular. Similarly, my kids prefer Kraft Mac n Cheese to homemade macaroni and Cheese made with a roux and such. Dark chocolate is an acquired taste. Etc.
The other thing is, in the comments below the Bauhaus book review, Scott defended what are derisively called McMansions as being perfectly lovely. But surely when aesthetes/snobs criticize McMansions part of what they're criticizing is mass-production and a kind of "fake craftsmanship"? That's why they're called McMansions! So I don't think we can just say "well, of course quality will tell"; oftentimes that depends on experience and also on temperament (Scott obviously is not deprived of education).
>I think that someone who has been raised on McDonald's burgers, upon tasting a carefully sourced and prepared burger by an excellent chef, will *not* necessarily say, "wow, this is way better." They may be too used to the sweetness of McD's sauces, in particular.
If it's a reasonably similar burger (cheese, lettuce, onions, pickles and some sort of sauce), I believe most people would. Maybe an experiment could be done on this? I think the main problem would be to make the good burger look as bad as the BigMac, in order not to bias the subjects.
>Similarly, my kids prefer Kraft Mac n Cheese to homemade macaroni and Cheese made with a roux and such.
Welp, time to get new kids
>Dark chocolate is an acquired taste
Yes, but dark chocolate is not just "good milk chocolate" it's a different flavour profile.
>The other thing is, in the comments below the Bauhaus book review, Scott defended what are derisively called McMansions as being perfectly lovely. But surely when aesthetes/snobs criticize McMansions part of what they're criticizing is mass-production and a kind of "fake craftsmanship"? That's why they're called McMansions! So I don't think we can just say "well, of course quality will tell"; oftentimes that depends on experience and also on temperament (Scott obviously is not deprived of education).
I agree, but I think this fits within the framework I propose: Scott is so much more predisposed towards traditional building aesthetics, that he's willing to overlook the faults of the Big Mac and choose it over a concrete box, no matter how well proportioned and how good the lighting is inside the box.
Also, I think Scott might be overplaying the contrarianism a bit here, and in a less contentious environment might concede that some of the houses displayed are kind of silly looking, but I'm not a mindreader, much less so through the internet.
Children have more taste buds, which they gradually lose as they age (that continues all the way to old age). Things that taste horribly bitter to a six year old can be appreciated by a thirty year old. Coffee, broccoli, dark chocolate etc, are usually acquired tastes with age.
>But surely when aesthetes/snobs criticize McMansions part of what they're criticizing is mass-production and a kind of "fake craftsmanship"? That's why they're called McMansions! So I don't think we can just say "well, of course quality will tell"; oftentimes that depends on experience and also on temperament (Scott obviously is not deprived of education).
One pattern that I always dislike is when a snob dismisses something simply because it is mass produced. Sometimes, mass produced items are _better_ than craft items. Industrial production can have tight quality control. If a mass produced item happens to match up with what one needs, the price/performance ratio can be orders of magnitude better than any alternative.
Keep in mind I wasn't making a point about mass production per se; I was responding to the complaint that it was unfair, when discussing taste, to compare mass-produced food (McDonald's burgers) with something carefully crafted. I was saying that, if mass production leads to less aesthetic pleasure, then that should be true of McMansions as well—I don't have a strong opinion of that, though I do personally think it's probably true in many cases. Keep in mind that mass produced items may be better along many axes (you mention quality control and the ratio of price to performance) without necessarily being *aesthetically* better. We (either humans generally or just we snobs) tend to appreciate small imperfections and asymmetries that suggest something is handmade and/or naturally derived; it feels more alive than uniformity does.
Many Thanks! Yes, I, personally, do tend to focus on quality control, fitness-for-purpose, and price/performance much more than on aesthetics. I don't have a strong opinion about McMansions either. I've followed some of the links to some of them in the Bauhaus discussion, but I don't think I've seen many of them in the wild.
I have no idea of whether the owner of a typical McMansion winds up with "buyer's remorse" over the decoration. I, personally, prefer to be able to _see_ the functional parts of my home, primarily so that, if something fails, I can find it and get it fixed promptly, and decorative surfaces tend to hinder that.
McDonald's and coke are successful because they are very cheap, you can buy them anywhere, and you can trust them to always taste the same no matter when or where you buy them.
Actually good food tends to lack some of those qualities.
I used to think I didn't much like leafy vegetables, until as an adult I discovered the difference between the ones you buy at the supermarket, which taste like cardboard, and the ones you buy at (I know this sounds like what a follower of a priest would say, but I swear I go by taste) farmer's markets and organic food shops, at least where I live. Then I became a lover of vegetables. But most people will just say "why would I pay twice as much for something that looks exactly like the supermarket version?" You'd think the "organic" branding was meant to get around that problem, but supermarkets where I live now sell organic vegetables, organic vegetables that taste like cardboard exactly like the other supermarket vegetables, but people think they're buying the good ones because it says "organic".
I mean that if stores were allowed to sell coke that says "coke" but tastes like piss, people would buy it, and it would ruin the reputation of the brand.
> McDonald's and coke are successful because they are very cheap, you can buy them anywhere, and you can trust them to always taste the same no matter when or where you buy them.
Neither McDonald's nor Coke taste the same no matter where you buy them. Just the difference between US Coke and Mexican Coke is huge, and European-produced variants are again different. Same for the BigMac: while the rough taste profile is the same, there's still significant differences in the details around the world.
> It's not immediately obvious why you would want this skill - it makes your life worse, because you'll just be fretting over flaws you see in everything.
One way to think about it is that bad art/architecture/etc is going to bother you anyway, but taste will let you figure out why. If you have taste as a designer/artist, you know how to work with small details to produce work that less sophisticated people like to look at, even if they don't know why they like it.
e.g. I know next to nothing about menswear, but I still think the menswear guy has real knowledge about how to dress well, because he can point out what part of bad suits makes them look bad, and suggest a better alternative.
As you say, having developed taste lets you account for why things work for you and for others, and perhaps you can turn that into a skill for becoming an artist of some kind yourself.
But also, doesn't developing taste as you grow up open up new areas of pleasure and interest that would not be there if you did not allow your taste to be cultivated? And doesn't this compensate for the downside of seeing flaws in things around you?
The counterargument to this is that perhaps a kid gets more pleasure from a simple toy than I could ever get from looking around an art gallery, and maybe it would be better to just retain child-like preferences and enjoy everything. This unfortunately doesn't seem like an option for most people.
I've never been able to distinguish great wine from lousy wine, which has saved me a lot of money over the years. But ... I don't criticize people who can tell the difference.
I think I've managed to have my cake and eat it too. I have been able to develop artistic taste and appreciate things that would have bored me as a kid, but I also still like stuff that I liked as a kid. I can watch a Very Serious 70s New Hollywood Art Movie and appreciate it, and then watch a childrens' cartoon and love it too. My culinary tastes are similar, I can enjoy gourmet food, but can also enjoy fast food and candy bars.
I'm not sure what I did to allow me to do this. Maybe it's that I try not to let status come into the picture. To me the entertainment I get from a kid's cartoon isn't a worse type of enjoyment than the entertainment I get from a Very Serious Arthouse movie, it's merely a different one.
Yes. People think that before they learn taste they don’t get affected differently by good and bad things. But very often they’re wrong - they do have the effect, but just don’t know how to express the effect.
> The few scientific experiments we have - hoaxes, blind tests, etc - are not very kind to taste as a concept. Consider eg [...] the AI Art Turing Test.
What did the AI Art Turing Test prove in regard to taste? All it proved is that the strong statement "all AI-generated images are slop" is false. But if your claim is "people say they don't like AI art because of their good taste, but here they liked an example of AI art, curious", surely a better explanation is "the person who ran the AI generator had good taste when selecting the output"?
"Taste seems to constantly change" … it seems like this is much less true than fashion. For example I think JS Bach has been considered tasteful music since at least the Classical era. If you look in the history of music there was an era in the late 19th century where the French were mocking Mahler as "Schubertian" and basically dismissing all German music. But even Debussy admitted that Bach's music was excellent. Why the stability?
My hot take is: Taste is about appreciating impressive aspects of art that others might miss. There are two dimensions to this: 1) how impressive is it, 2) in what way is it impressive? So e.g. Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps is impressive in its percussiveness, and the way that its dissonant musical voices create a scene. But those aren't aspects of music that composers had traditionally worked with. People looking for status could signal in-group membership if they "got" what he was doing. So while (1) impressiveness is somewhat universal, (2) the types of expression on display go in and out of style and basically reflect fashion dynamics of "insiders" trying to differentiate themselves by constantly changing the goal posts.
My theory of why Bach has had staying power because he is so impressive along enough dimensions that musicians who study him end up deciding they basically have to hand it to him, even though the Baroque-era areas of interest like fugue are way out of style now.
Something that's interesting about classical music these days is there's a divergence: people view most of it as objectively "tasteful", but knowing a lot about it no longer confers much status. I think this is roughly because it is impressive (dimension 1) but is no longer impressive in ways that confer status (dimension 2).
When I was a kid 50 years ago, it said good things about the atom bomb scientists that they were into Bach. Now it says good things about Bach that the atom bomb scientists were into him.
Do you bite this bullet for poetry? I find it really hard to accept that a crap hospital wall poem is no better or worse than WB Yeats or Milton.
I agree that logically I have no grounds to say anything in the world is better than anything else, but on the other hand *come on just read Dover Beach it's obviously great* 😅
If I imagine a world where the poet laureate is as likely to have got there by writing greeting card poems as anything else, it's hard to shake the sense that something important would have been lost.
Maybe the synthesis is just that, yes it's arbitrary and recondite and lacks universal meaning - but it's enough that *someone* finds these formalisms beautiful, without us needing to call it a fundamental truth.
I do think there's a meta argument that if you don't like _any_ of these abstruse things you're missing out on something in life: if you only like four-chord pop and fast food and hallmark movies and Facebook poetry, that maybe there's a part of the human experience you aren't tapping into. But perhaps that's as far as we can go.
In another post Scott says that "Horatius" (https://englishverse.com/poems/horatius) is better than any poem of the last 50 years, which includes a lot of, say, Philip Larkin's work. So I don't think that's even much of a bullet for him to bite.
Most people probably tend to like or dislike something reminiscent of their childhood in proportion to whether the latter was happy or otherwise. "Give me a child until they are seven .." and all that. This applies to music, poetry, architecture, art, anything. But tastes are also influenced by personal temperament, and aspiration plus imitation.
Regarding temperament, I think a person's taste in music paradoxically veers towards styles opposite to their temperament, to take them out of themselves so to speak. A highly-strung, maybe slightly neurotic, type will be soothed by the mechanical emotionless predictable style of a bach fugue (the kind of music which leaves me cold, the dreary musical equivalent of patterned wallpaper droning on and on!) . By contrast, a basically cold fairly indifferent person will feel pleasantly stirred by expansive emotion-laden music of Mahler or of course Wagner (the Austrian painter's favorite!). A laid-back "dude" will like thumping heavy metal, and so on.
The same goes for poetry. I share Scott's preference (if such is the case) for heroic epics like Horatius, or Ballad of the White Horse, or (in my case) The Charge of the Light Brigade. But homely, studiously banal poems like most modern ones leave me cold. "They eff you up your Mum and Dad .." that kind of thing, although in many cases one can see they're cleverly constructed and often not without some charm.
He should have read Bryan Caplan's "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids", explaining that nothing his parents actually did in raising him mattered, and instead only their genes.
Not having any kids would be breaking any cycle, and thus not impossible. In that case, he rather than his kids would be the genetic dead end. But if he did have kids, there wouldn't be any more reason to think that they would be dead-ends any more than his parents were.
“This Be the Verse” may be homely (though is Horatius not homely?? “East and west and south and north/The messengers ride fast”?), but it’s atypical of much of Larkin’s poetry; check out “The Whitsun Weddings” for instance. To me the distinction between Larkin and Macaulay isn’t beauty, because Larkin can vary those registers very widely; it’s difficulty.
AFAIK, Scott likes traditional formal poetry and dislikes free verse. So do I, and I also mostly share his opinions on architecture. I expect the correlation will be strong in general, with the modern architecture (and modern art) fans also liking modern poetry. There's a link in terms of how much craft is visibly necessary to achieve it.
(Scott, if you're going to do a survey asking people which buildings they like best, maybe also include some poems, and see how they correlate?)
With poetry, the sort of trite verse produced by greeting card makers (and ChatGPT) is clearly neither good traditional poetry nor modern deliberately-unstructured poetry. It's trying to imitate the former, badly.
I'm happy to admit I don't know enough about architecture to distinguish between the architectural equivalent of a Shakespearean sonnet and the architectural equivalent of a greeting-card verse. But I know I prefer both over the architectural equivalent of what wins poetry prizes nowadays.
Poetry is fundamentally an exercise in "painting in the lines", and from a certain perspective, the technical impressiveness of poetry is in painting between very fine lines. That is - you establish a rigid set of rules and adhere to it.
The early rules were fundamentally musical in nature; rhyming and meter.
Gradually poetry developed more and more complex variants, which decreasingly lent themselves to music.
Modern poetry abandons music almost entirely - the artform is now in creating a kind of linguistic puzzle, in which it is up to the reader to figure out what rules you are following, and a sophisticated writer is one who creates harder-to-identify rules, and a sophisticated reader is one who is able to solve harder puzzles. It's like Dixit, however - no points if -nobody- guesses the rules, with an exception for if everybody feels like they -almost- get it. If everybody feels like they almost get it, and nobody actually gets it, you win the game.
I don't know, I read current poetry magazines, and I think contemporary Anglophone poetry is very imagistic & mostly has very little dependence on cleverness or sophistication. I think teachers like to teach the stuff that exercises a kind of codebreaking cleverness in the reader, but actually editors of poetry magazines don't like it as much.
I think that example kind of demonstrates my point; for its length it's pretty dense with puzzles. Like, the first stanza asks a question, and each stanza except the first and last finishes the previous stanza's answer, finds it unsatisfying somehow, and so starts (but leaves incomplete) a new answer. The final stanza instead rejects the question entirely. It's a fairly basic puzzle setup; you establish a pattern, and then violate it at the end, with the violation serving as a clue to help point out what the pattern was.
What you're calling puzzles seems to me to be just the structure of the poem. That's not the main thing. The main thing is the images. I guess there's no way to convince anybody of that. But, like you said, it's a simple structure, not particularly sophisticated or interesting. The interesting aspect is the imagery. The olive, floating in brine. The sun kneeling, the milkweed bowing, the sparrow pecking, the heart of the owl. It's not worth much as a puzzle; but as a short film that plays in your mind, it's worth a page in a magazine.
It makes me really sad that people's first instinct is to condemn things they don't understand, instead of looking for explanations like this.
This makes so much more sense to me than "I don't understand modern architecture, therefore it must be a ploy to gain social status by pretending to like ugly buildings".
To be clear I'm not actually a -fan- of this kind of poetry, so this description is ... somewhat critical. I'd analogize modern poetry to a Sudoku puzzle more than anything else, and most of the genuine fans, I think, would find this description to be kind of offensive.
I'm not into any kind of poetry so I don't know how accurate or offensive this description is, but I find it quite relatable when I think of other forms of art that I understand better (e.g. movies like Pulp Fiction that are told non-linearly and putting it all together is an enjoyable mini-puzzle).
In general, "it makes me think" seems like a pretty common reason for people to enjoy art, but yeah, certainly not the only one.
I can never understand poetry. The only things I noticed I like is like 3 lines from ozymandias. English isn't even my native language but I don't appreciate poetry in my own language too. Words I like are either one-liners or phrased as prose.
1) Variant on E (porn): Taste is like overly sugary food: If you eat a little of it, it's sweet and amazing, but if you actually eat large amounts of it you start getting sick of it and disgusted with the style (unlike real "high class" food, which you can eat every day for years and still love). People who spend a lot of time considering taste have reached satiation and know this, and are correctly warning you that you'll get sick of your normal tastes if you overdo them (and then once being a culture critic becomes a thing, you get people who spend so much time tasting even the fancy food that they become sick of it too - it may take 100x as long but they spend 100x as much time as you eating it - and then they start overindexing on novelty).
2) "Taste" is a proxy for "something being promised". e.g. a building with good architecture looks good because it's promising to be a pleasant place to live, but actual architecture experts know that form would be unpleasant to live in (this is still not objective, because different people find different things comfortable, but it can catch some real insight). Specifically I dislike old architecture and like new slop styles like 5+1s because I've lived in both and found the old buildings pretty unpleasant to actually live in (cramped, drafty, poor lighting etc), even when they look nice from outside. I don't know how general this is though.
AI art is a clear example of this - art promises to be a depiction of something (even a fantasy), but AI art isn't (once you dig into the details they're usually inconsistent, not emergent properties of a hidden order).
I think bad-taste Marvel movies are also an example of this - they're optimised to overpromise (via cool trailers and lots of setting up characters that will be very important and meaningful in the next movie we promise) and then (usually, especially in the newer ones) don't actually deliver on any of it and have flat stories that don't add much to the trailer.
IMO architects (especially the prestigious ones) don't care about what a building would be like to live in; only what it looks like from the outside.
There seems to be a trend at the moment to design houses with huge triangular windows, the width of a whole room and at least one storey high, if not two. They're terrible for thermal comfort (cold in winter, hot in summer), and terrible for glare / sun in your eyes, and they're difficult to fit curtains or blinds to (which might help with the glare) because of the triangular top. They need regular cleaning, but they're difficult to clean because they go so high.
I'm sure I've read an article that goes into great depth about how insensitive architectural design is to the way homes will be used in real life and the typical usage paths between and within rooms, from a UX design kind of perspective.
They thought they were. There's a school of thought that le corbusier was rubbish at understanding how people and societies actually work and was a persistent demolisher of Chesterton fences. See eg the Criticism section here
Some of the Bauhaus architects did much better than Le Corbusier at this. Even Le Corbusier himself did much better with his designs for single family homes than his designs on a more monumental scale.
Now that's a bad analogy. Bolsheviks gave workers and peasants education and improved living conditions, much more so than Tsars managed after freeing serfs in 1862 (which is frankly why there was a Revolution). They also gave them new buildings which looked boring, but were much better to live in than what they were lived in before.
As far as I know my lineage, my ancestors never rose above a store manager position, and mostly were peasants, so if I had to make a call, I would vastly prefer to live under Soviet rule than to live under Tsar.
The Tzars were well on their way to modernising into a liberal democratic capitalist society with a constitutional monarchy, just like Britain or Japan. There was absolutely zero reason to spend 70 years under the rule of envious murderous psychopaths who killed millions of their own people in that time in service to a nonsense ideology and dysfunctional economy. The revolution happened because of some bad choices and because the Russian peasantry was allowed free rein to indulge their destructive tendencies.
I think the related point is also as you eat less sugar in your diet overall, you notice smaller and smaller amounts of added sugar until you realize that most food has added sugar. It won't make you any happier to complain about this, but it doesn't make you start liking sweets again.
There are some differences – the type of sugar; whether it's bound up in some kind of matrix and thus released more slowly or with a different taste profile; and whether it comes bundled with vitamins and other nutrients (the higher proportion of your food that's added sugar, the lower the proportion of other nutrients you are likely to get).
Simply wrong. "Sugar" is not just the one thing, it's fructose or glucose or galactose or some combination. What's added is not necessarily the same as what is already there.
What do you mean? I mean, sure as broad categories, there is huge overlap between the sugars that count in some sense as “natural” and the sugars that count in some sense as “added”. But there are big differences between the behavior of powdered sugar and granulated sugar, sugar in liquids and sugar crystals on top of solids, sucrose and glucose and sucralose and aspartame, coconut sugar and cane sugar and beet sugar. You can taste all of these differences, and they affect your experience even if you haven’t learned to identify them.
Those are some real differences. But "added" vs "natural" sugar is meaningless in terms of consumption. If selection results in a particular fruit being very sweet, it does not make it any healthier due to being "natural" and any sugar in a juice made from that fruit will still act like that same sugar if you'd added it to water.
I’m not claiming anything about healthfulness! I’m claiming that there are distinct and detectable taste differences. Molecular gastronomy and Alice Waters both have their place in fine dining.
I think you're missing the point. Added sugar makes things taste sweeter. The vast majority of foods without added sugar are not that sweet, unless you're just drinking honey and maple syrup.
I think a lot of the negative things about taste, emphasized here in the comments and also in the post, have some truth to them. Snobbery in particular. But I also think that there is some reality in taste, or at least non-arbitrariness. For example, styles change frequently, but within eras and styles, people with 'sophisticated taste' will generally agree which are the best of that era, even if it's not within their personal or professional style, and I don't think this comes simply from groupthink.
Generally, people who get deep into a genre-- scifi, painting, mathematics, woodworking, engineering, music, architecture -- will develop a sense of aesthetics about the field that is different than what casual observers care about (and is not the same as raw performance). Wouldn't it be weird if experts had the same preferences as non-experts?
I don't think the directionality of these developed preferences is fully random, even if there are strong currents of fad and trend. We notice the situations where elite preference differs from mass preference, but the align frequently. Nearly every observer would agree that iPhones are the most well designed phones aesthetically. For someone like Steve Jobs, 'good' design is connected to good function and good technology and flows from the same mental structures. The ugliness of Windows was viscerally offensive to him.
But the main thing I want to say is that I think this question could be tested empirically to some degree. I think if you take art and design 'experts' and expose them to a wide range of novel aesthetic content, art and graphic design, from different genres (both high brow and low brow styles) they would have some convergence on what is 'good' that's non-random and different from non-experts. Maybe it's impossible to separate this from the idea discussed in the post that they've all been swimming in the same aesthetic value systems in advance of the test; so that may be what drives any convergence in the test. Would be interesting though.
Even more so - there is often a lot of overlap between the highest rated examples of a genre from experts in the genre, and the highest rated examples of the genre from experts in other genres. There’s some difference, and often the top rated in the genre in one decade will change in another decade. But it’s very rare that examples considered mediocre in one period get re-evaluated as great - it’s more common that examples considered tenth best become re-evaluated as best, or even that examples reviled as awful and disgusting get re-evaluated as best.
> This particular rule has a sort of rational explanation - the copula takes the nominative case. But when you get into why the copula takes the nominative case, it’s hard to tell whether this is a natural fact about the definition of cases, or whether Latin-obsessed grammarians unfairly demanded that Anglophones follow the Latin usage.
No it isn't. The very same people who tell you that English pronouns follow Latin case norms are also happy to tell you that French pronouns work in exactly the way they deplore for English: "Je", for example, is the appropriate form of the first-person singular pronoun when it is the subject of a verb, and "moi" is the appropriate form in all other circumstances.
So there isn't any constituency anywhere for the idea that Latin case norms are a natural fact about cases. We know they aren't, we know the French do the same thing that uneducated slobs do, and we know the French are the epitome of refinement.
The trick is to avoid knowing all of those things at the same time.
The 'moi' in french is a bit more complex than that I believe, it is a 'tonic/non clitic pronoun' which can be both used in the nominative case (replacing 'je') and in the accusative case (replacing 'me').
Btw, I still haven't understood the logic in english of using 'me' instead of 'I' when answering a question about the subject. Why is it fine in this context to use 'me' in the nominative case? For example:
Well, you're right that I overlooked the (French) form "me". Fortunately, that doesn't affect the fundamental point that the French pronoun rules match the English ones, except for being correct while the English rules are supposed to be wrong. We may infer that English has a closer relationship to Latin than French does.
> Btw, I still haven't understood the logic in english of using 'me' instead of 'I' when answering a question about the subject. Why is it fine in this context to use 'me' in the nominative case?
(1) I told you the logic above. You can only use "I" as the subject of a verb. Everywhere else, including in your example, you're required to use the default form of the pronoun, "me". Citation form? "Me". Used in isolation? "Me". Object of a conjunction? "Me".
(2) You can't use 'me' in the nominative case. That's impossible, because in the nominative case, it's 'I'. You seem to have confused noun case with some other kind of phenomenon.
As Scott suggests, probably all of these models have decent explanatory value.
I want to make a point in favor of the BDSM analogy. Consider any kind artistic medium which you personally have a strong interest in and have engaged with a lot, but which is not connected to your social status (a good example would be if you listen to niche music genres and rarely if ever talk with anyone about them). Now consider if your tastes have changed substantialy. If they have, this supports the BDSM analogy.
A weakness of the BDSM analogy is that a decent chunk of people*start off* with relatively unusual edgy tastes. Yoji Yamamoto (a famous avant garde fashion designer) recalls sitting in his Mum's sewing shop (or some business like that) as a young boy, and disliking the style of the women who would come into the shop. I'm pretty confident that a decent number of people are like this.
Most things that we think of in terms of taste have much more embedded detail/information than we can process efficiently. "Taste" is largely about the filter we apply to reduce the observational experience to manageable levels of information. Someone with minimal experience/expertise regarding a particular subject will filter out most of the information, leaving them with broad generalizations (symmetry, color palette, etc).
The process of gaining expertise in an area will tend to increase the information processed about a subject (that is, make the process of noticing more details more quickly), partially through shear practice, but also through other experienced people pointing out common things to look for, common trends by time period, etc. This essentially gives the expert more complex filters to pull out more information.
But the process of building those filters also inserts biases/weird focuses. If some group of experts became arbitrarily focused on a particular area of detail ("ornamentation is bad") then that will impact their filters and the filters of their intellectual successors. They're still perceiving more detail than the non-expert, but processing it in arbitrarily different ways.
Thus an expert in music understands much more about Bach than I ever will -- almost certainly knowing why I find it enjoyable better than I could express! But the same process that gave them that expertise might also give them perceptional biases arbitrarily different from mine which could, for example, mean they find Bach uninteresting.
Taste is like physics, if the rules were practically impossible to figure out, and researchers would make attempt after futile attempt to extract signal from overwhelming noise and fail. The field goes down blind alleys in the wrong direction, builds theory upon more theory, and constructs an orthodoxy that will hold to those theories even when their implications become blatantly false in ways that even people outside the field can see.
A better analogy would be "taste is like social science", perhaps.
There is good art and bad art. In some areas and times, the most respected experts are just wrong. Sometimes painting or architecture or poetry can just mess up, with the whole field converging towards bad taste.
If taste X and Y are indistinguishable to most people, but experts say X is better, it is possible that they're right. If almost everyone says Y is better than X, but experts say X is better, then the experts are just bad at their job.
(Exceptions: If the product was produced for a particular audience with divergent tastes, or if the subject is being evaluated in a manner that includes non-aesthetic judgements (practical concerns).)
There's an analogy to be made somewhere here between art and philosophy. The latter also involves experts insisting on distinctions that seem meaningless to laypeople, as well as a sharp divide between philosophical writers who have broad popular appeal but are viewed with contempt by the priesthood, and those who are admired by the priesthood but whose names have never penetrated into the broad popular consciousness.
No, I don't think so. In science and finance it's usually possible to agree on objective criteria for whether or not a distinction is useful. It's not a matter of taste whether one investing strategy makes more money than another, or whether a proposed new set of diagnostic guidelines results in better survival rates for cancer patients. It's not hard to find edge cases where some sort of "expert judgment" is involved, but such cases are not foundational to the entire cognitive practice, as they are for art and philosophy.
I think this is part of why it's rare to see outsiders dismissing the expertise of scientific insiders on the grounds that their supposed expertise is all status games and meaningless bullshit, the way Scott does here for architecture, Sam Harris does for metaethics, or Alan Sokal did for "postmodernism." You do get outsiders dismissing the authority of mainstream science (e.g. antivaxxers), but they tend to have different accounts of why the experts are wrong (e.g. they are lying because they want to make money for pharma companies). They don't say the scientists have talked themselves into believing that meaningless bullshit is meaningful.
H. Taste is a mix of evo-psych and fashion, in various proportions. This seems pretty obvious to me, and I'm surprised that you didn't explicitly mention the former in any of the possibilities.
The unsophisticated naive level are people who like landscapes depicting wholesome nature, depictions of beautiful healthy people etc (clear evo-psych implications), and similarly colorful harmonious architecture and upbeat, simple but harmonious music. Then people who specialize in that stuff eventually get bored, and start increasingly adding complexity and subversion, partly arbitrary but still having evolutionary-approved facets. Those at some level become subtle enough that unsophisticated people don't notice them because the gestalt-effect is too alienating.
My personal example here is extreme metal music, some of which I unironically enjoy, but the vast majority of people would say that all of it is horrible noise (and I agreed with them in the beginning, "getting into it" was gradual). The "level above mine" is enjoying harsh noise, which apparently some people genuinely do, and this doesn't seem to provide much status, unlike say the very similar stuff with academic cred, so I'm forced to admit that nature seems to be generous and malleable enough to allow even that in some cases.
Well, you can't really escape being influenced by some sort of fashion to a degree, nobody retains primal innocence past very early childhood. But, it seems clear to me that preferring "natural" and "healthy" stuff by default is as close to human universal as it gets. I wonder, did anybody bother to ask those feral children...
I mean that what I would have sworn 20 years ago that it was preferred because it was "natural" and "healthy" is now out of fashion, and what I thought was the opposite is now beloved by the masses.
In particular I'm thinking about music. Not a particular genre of music. But I've noticed that across the board, in almost every genre of music for the masses I've been exposed to, back in the 80s and 90s, even early 00s to some degree, there was a sense of cheerfulness, hope, optimism, energy, positivity, I don't know how to put it.
I thought that was natural. People like positive energy!
But in hindsight, it was the 80s and its lingering fallout.
Then, very gradually, that sense of cheerfulness that was everywhere faded, and now the opposite reigns. Most contemporary popular music I hear strikes me as subtly gloomy, even in genres that I thought were supposed to be cheerful.
How come happiness and positivity is out of fashion? I thought it was a human universal.
Hmm, I'm generally trying to avoid contemporary popular music like the plague, but still, my impression is different, for what it's worth.
So, the main commercial forces these days appear to be traditional pop, R&B and rap, and the biggest hits in each of those still tend to be simplistic and energetic, if not entirely optimistic. I agree that straightforward optimism is out of fashion, but still, the attitude is much more "fight the power" than doom and gloom.
In particular, rap is the ascendant force, and I think it's telling that the "black culture", that it's the expression of, is the only context in which the establishment tolerates straightforward expression of healthy assertive masculinity, which in all other instances is branded "toxic" and shunned.
There's the problem here that being Italian I have more examples in mind from Italian popular music than Anglo-American, but I've noticed the same trends in Anglo-American music. I think they're global trends.
Nobody today would make a pop song like "Heaven is a Place on Earth", for example.
My impression is that rap evolved in a similar direction, and EDM too, compared to what those genres used to be.
Keep in mind that by "gloomy" I don't mean funeral doom metal. I mean a subtle lack of something, which used to be there.
I would have to spend too much time gathering examples to make a detailed argument, so I apologize for not trying.
I'm not sure that we actually disagree. I didn't mean to imply that "natural" and "healthy" always mean happiness and positivity. Our ancestors were also angry and sad often enough, and gloom(ier) art never was entirely unpopular. Popular attitudes reflect the world we live in, and the zeitgeist is generally gloomier than in the eighties, whether it is reasonable or not.
> Nobody today would make a pop song like "Heaven is a Place on Earth", for example
"Happy" by Pharrell Williams was a big hit just... well okay, it was 2013 but I think it still counts as the present for the purposes of this conversation. No cynicism or irony, just a happy song about being happy.
> Finally you’re living in buildings made of jarringly-colored metallic blobs that look like Cthulhu might emerge from them at any moment.
Are **you** living in buildings made of jarringly-colored metallic blobs that look like Cthulhu might emerge from them at any moment?
I don't know any famous architects so I don't even have anecdotes about this.
Recent book review made it sound like architects actually wanted to live in a pretty nice places, then other architects came and made devastating arguments that this is bourgeois so they stopped. But then they switched to designing buildings where *other* people have to "take it like a man".
Mies van der Roeh built a couple of famous Modernist apartment high-rises on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, which an underling of mine lived in, but then he decided he preferred to look at them than live in them, so he moved across the street.
Of the modernists, at least Goldfinger, Neutra, Wright, and Le Corbusier lived in buildings of their own design. It's not clear whether van der Rohe would have liked to live in the Farnsworth House if that had been an option, but it seems possible.
I have a theory that modernism just doesn't scale well.
These all look like nice houses that I'd be happy to live in https://modernlivingla.com/architect/richard-neutra/... and why not? They're just a bunch of glass boxes sitting in a beautiful verdant environment. The house doesn't attract too much attention to itself, it just sits there neutrally in the pretty garden.
But when you get beyond suburban houses with gardens and into large buildings in city centres, the buildings are no longer in the environment, the buildings *are* the environment. There is nothing around except the building.
Importantly, I think that with the influence of projects like the Case Study Houses (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_Study_Houses) modernism really did influence mass suburban homebuilding techniques, in ways that people have fully internalized.
When it comes to the larger scale structures, I don’t know of other styles than modernism that have had more success!
Similarly, I've always disliked Richard Serra's sculptures that are rusted metal walls when they put them in downtown spaces so that office workers have to walk 5 minutes out of their way to get around them. But I finally saw a Serra in the Hamptons on some zillionaire's three acre front lawn ... and it looked fine!
Lots of stuff looks good on estates in the Hamptons.
I have a different model for art/taste that feels helpful here. One (very vague but sometimes useful) definition of art is that art is a work that "says something" about something outside itself in a considered fashion.
Often the "says something" takes the form of representation or evocation. So an artistic photograph may "speak" about a scene in a way that gives consideration to how human attention tends to flow, mixtures of colors, surprising juxtaposition, metaphor, etc. Meanwhile an impressionist painting may do those things but also "speak" about our perceptions of light and color over and against fine detail. I've attended lectures by a very Catholic architecture scholar who claimed that great architecture will often represent or evoke the human body or face in it's structure (this need not be true, it's just an example of a "considered" approach one could take).
This definition is imperfect and can have plenty of holes poked in it, however I think it's particularly useful in the following way: We can appreciate art when we recognize at some level (conscious or unconscious) what it is "saying". But this is contingent on being familiar with the reference, so the more esoteric the reference the fewer people can appreciate the art. Increasingly over the last century or two, many schools of art (especially "elite" or academic art) have been predominantly "speaking" about art that came before, rather than about natural or non-artistic referents. I think this is true in visual art, architecture, music, and perhaps most explicitly in high fashion.
This artistically-referential art is entirely valid as art, but the esoteric nature of the referent means that one needs a deep grounding in the relevant artistic traditions to recognize and appreciate what is being "said". Since this is a cultivated attribute it becomes an obvious way to make claims of status. "Anyone can appreciate a painting of a sunset. It takes a trained eye to see what this painting is saying about the nature of art vis a vis the use of figure in late 20th century photography". However such esoteric appreciation need not be pure snobbery. It also is a form of reward/satisfaction of an area of our lives in which we have invested deeply. (Similar to how we might especially appreciate a very niche joke that would really only make sense to someone in e.g. our academic discipline)
I think this model can explain the way that particular esoteric art can have a legitimate appeal to it's initiates that isn't purely arbitrary or subjective (though it is deeply path dependent), nor need it be purely about asserting status (though it can certainly degenerate into raw snobbery). Thus I think it overlaps with the justified priestly and fashion models above, while perhaps illuminating a bit more of the internal structure of the values
Aside: Is esoteric art a particularly modern (last 100-200 years) phenomenon? I tend to think so. Previously much art tended to produced for mass audiences and wealthy patrons who were in turn asserting status in view of larger audiences. This limited how esoteric art could productively be (though see e.g. Catholic lore or heraldic symbols for contents that are very esoteric and inaccessible to moderns). As academic and cultural institutions developed it became more possible for communities of artists to produce art primarily for the approval of other artists/connoisseurs, enabling ever more esoteric reference structures.
But I do think that “saying something” is only one way that great art can be great - a particularly intellectual one. Some art is good in other ways. I don’t think Rothko “says” much about anything (or if it does, any one of the paintings says much the same thing as the others). But the paintings are still aesthetically effective, particularly when assembled together, as in the Rothko Chapel in houston. This probably corresponds to formal or sensory properties as opposed to intellectual ones, and those exist for other art as well. (Some of those are themselves subject to the kind of esoteric development you mention.)
I agree. I'm not particularly happy with the phrase "saying something"; I just can't come up a better word. But for my purposes "saying something" need not be intellectual commentary. For instance a landscape painting may simply be saying something about how a particularly place looks.
I suspect the 20th century is not the first time art forms underwent this kind of esoteric development. I would guess that within esoteric mystery cults and the like, things like this happened before. But the 20th century might be the first time that there was wide enough opportunity to study and learn about many kinds of art, such that all art forms underwent the transformation, and also managed to have large and influential followings.
I tend to buy E the most for many topics. I think if you've looked at a million paintings, you tend to know more about when a painting is exceptional than someone who's looked at a few, and same thing for e.g., wine. I have more experience with wine than paintings, and the main thing is that exceptional isn't the same thing as good (the taste part). But if something is exceptional and good (to me), then it is quite a bit more pleasant than if something is ordinary and good (to me), and things that are ordinary and good are typically relatively good to pretty much everyone.
In that sense, I don't think it's a priesthood so much as well, a club of people who like similar exceptional things enough to seek them out. That's why there's multiple taste centroids!
It's crazy how you can miss the only applicable analogy, which is maybe too obvious to be stated, but taste is of course like taste in the food sense! Some people like some foods better than others, which is cultural and trend dependent, but in the end we can agree that a cook who has dedicated his life to cooking probably has 'better' taste than some strawman who only eats Mcdonalds and drinks Pepsi. This better taste consists not only of being able to enjoy stranger and more complex tastes, but also of being better able to differentiate between different styles of cooking, and being able to hierarchically rank the quality of the same dish in different restaurants etc. Let's say you never ate indian food, and the first time you eat it you think it tastes horrid because you're only used to bland McD burgers, but after some more attempts you educate your tastebuds to appreciate something like butter chicken from the local deli. Still you're not able to appreciate the spicier or more subtle varieties, or indian food with weirder/more exotic ingredients etc, or you're not yet able to tell the difference between a well made butter chicken and one from the supermarket etc. Of course there's differences between these, and the wine tasting meme is always a response to this to some extent, but it's a reach to say that at least in food it's not possible to develop taste and have some objective/intersubjective measure of better quality food and better taste, while still respecting the fact that people's tastes can clash based on personal biology, culture or trends, where the same can apply for art. If you're seriously interested in getting something like an answer I recommend reading Kant's Critique of Judgement.
Taste can be trained. I don't think Scott is denying this. What is in question is whether a highly trained taste is somehow better. Would a porn connoisseur say that their highly developed sense of subtle details in their taboo BDSM porn is somehow superior to another person getting excited by stumbling across some partial nudity on Tumblr for the first time? Does a sommelier have a better, more rewarding life when they are aware of the winemaking shortcuts used to make crowd-pleasing cheap wine, so they only feel satisfied when drinking artisanal wines costing hundreds of dollars a bottle? Does an aficionado of new brutalism feel constant pain that they can't afford to live in a concrete edifice?
That's a different question than Scott was stating, because then there is a somewhat objective difference in quality between mcdonalds and prime texas roast or hallmark cards and Rembrandt (which Scott seems sceptical on), but it's just the question if it's ultimately worth it to be able to tell the difference. The answer to this question is also a lot simpler than you think, as you could just ask people if the things they developed a taste for enrich their lives, and it pretty much always does, as that's the reason they cultivate that taste! Or maybe consult you own taste and see if you would rather live without your favourite music and just listen to elevator music your whole life! Maybe in a counterfactual bizarro world we could conceive of grey humans who could be perfectly happy eating astronaut sludge and looking at a white plane all day, but in reality man is meant to grow, explore and flourish!
> Would a porn connoisseur say that their highly developed sense of subtle details in their taboo BDSM porn is somehow superior to another person getting excited by stumbling across some partial nudity on Tumblr for the first time?
Of course they would! Those god damn philistines jacking off to the front page of Pornhub... Soulless, passionless bullshit. Real porn tells a story, it speaks to the human condition. It reaches into the deepest recesses of passion and pain, the darkest and most primal desires that lie at the depths of the soul.
I think storylines were more popular when it aired in theaters, now with the internet the trend has been away from that and more short clips, perhaps analogous to TikTok reducing attention spans to the point that young people are less interested in long feature films.
Yeah, and that's the problem! There's just an endless amount of garbage, and it takes so much effort to actually find stuff that actually works for me. Thankfully, I am able to make that effort because sexual gratification is the one thing that's able to consistently motivate me, but it's still such a pain. And I get bored of things so easily too, so the work never ends...
How about a positive version of the BDSM porn thing?
One data point: My taste in classical music.
I started out listening to Schubert and loved it, but found Berg or even Wolf weird; and even Schumann a bit suspicious.
Once I "understood" (not intellectually, but on an emotional and aesthetic level) Schubert much better, I started to love Schumann, then Brahms etc etc
(Older Music still doesn't do much for me.)
Schubert is still my favourite composer, but I love the others as well.
I do not think that there is a universal objective taste in music (or even if there is I don't care; I find Haendel or Hayden terribly boring, and I assume they are objectively good if there is such a thing).
I do not claim that the same is true for everybody who likes (or claim to like) modern architecture; but I am sure that there are people who like gothic and then, when they spent time looking at architecture, came to appreciate brutalism or whatever, and still like gothic.
A big part of taste working as it does is that it is not only a shibboleth for subcultures at various hiérarchies (élites all agree that they have better taste than peons, but elite artists have better taste than simple opera goers, an critics, etc); but it is also a potential action vector for schismogenesis: identification of a strong incompatibility between groups will lead to a desire for differentiation - this the communist/bourgeois, the royalists/napoleonics, roman integrated/native résistance différences, exaggerated instinctively across all common experiences.
Note: your AI at test only supports the unreality of taste if you buy that AI has bad taste. It's possible that AI captures the shared component of good taste and the people who say otherwise are simply wrong, but that doesn't mean taste quality isn't real.
(....caveat emptor: probably best not to browse the internet reading comments by people who begin with "my-theory-colon"...)
I think there may well be some way in which aesthetics, elegance, etc. might actually be universal; perhaps literally universal, such that a space alien might find eg. Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism elegant and pre-Copernician epicyclic orbital mechanics inelegant, or perhaps merely a universal part of the human condition.
BUT - this isn't what the taste priesthood (not just the critics and journalists and millionaire art-buyers, but also most of the greatest artists, architects, creatives, etc.) are searching for: rather than seeking fundamental insights into universal aesthetic beauty, they're mostly inventing arbitrary signalling/social/political games, buoyed onwards by occasional glimpses of the divine which they hit upon entirely by accident.
Similarly, when people dismiss taste as wholly mundane/arbitrary/subjective and claim that polyester tracksuits and grocer's apostrophes, and (lest you think I'm being classist here..) plate-glass oblong skyscrapers are just as aesthetically valid as effortful clothing choices, careful prose, and the Taj Mahal, they're ignoring and dismissing an internal sense/feeling that - I believe - *even they themselves* possess. (Evidence: people who claim this still nevertheless show up to weddings etc. wearing effortful formalwear rather than polyester tracksuits, still take care over their own apostrophe placement when writing things they really care about, and -I would be willing to bet- would still prefer to live in Grosvenor Gardens House - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grosvenor_Gardens_House - rather than in the Nova Building - https://nova-london.uk - that's just next door..)
Scott's description of the "Don't wear white after Labour Day" rule stuck me as a useful example of this: Sure, "Don't wear white after Labour Day" is a nonsensical priesthood sorta rule - but there definitely does seem to be another level above that, something like "Don't wear ostentatious brash clothing in a deliberate, crude effort to signal that you're more rich than other people", which is slightly closer to the divine and which the "no-white" rule - perhaps accidentally - touches-upon an aspect of.
Of course, it's probably turtles all the way up: perhaps one level still further above (viz. one more step closer to the divine Platonic Taste...) the rule might look more like "Visually express to others that you are their fellow travellers through life, and you think and feel and love and fear the way they do - whilst *simultaneously* expressing that you are unique and interesting and stimulating and independent-of-thought"
I'm not a particularly fashion-conscious, cool, trendy, aesthetically-minded, or even (frankly) aesthetically-pleasing-to-look-upon sort of person, and I am sufficiently tasteless that I happen to find AI art just as pleasing as human art - but even *I* get the sense that there's some sort of higher-dimension "good" which our merely human art and aesthetics occasionally touches-upon. Could just be an illusion, perhaps similar to the sense everybody gets during a psychedelic trip, of course - but I think recognising this sense is there, illusion or not, does explain an awful lot about how aesthetics works and how people feel about it.
Very true - but I'm not sure where you're going with the observation? "Internally the anti-aestheticist thinks wearing a fabulous gown at a wedding is unnecessary, being aesthetically-identical to a tracksuit, but goes along with the norm nevertheless and resignedly, eye-rollingly dons a fabulous gown so as to avoid ostracism"?
"Somebody who is an anti-aestheticist in ordinary daily life nevertheless has, under the infrequent, peculiar circumstances of a wedding, internalised the same norms as everybody else and thus unconsciously suspends their usual views on aesthetics and doesn't register anything dissonant about donning their fabulous gown on that occasion"?
I find that this explanation resonates with me. However, I find it plausible that logical depth (the measure of complexity in terms of running time of an algorithm) matters: some application of universal(*) aesthetic principles might require certain amount of processing powers to appreciate, such that some individual humans don't have that processing power, at least until they develop heuristics to simplify the calculation (perhaps through conscious effort of learning to pay attention to correct things, perhaps unconsciously, like how the visual cortex of expert Chess players adapts to detecting good or bad Chess positions, or perhaps they are like NP-problems that are easy to check once someone tells you the answer that you should be looking for).
Consider music by Bach for instance, noted in other discussions as an exemplar of staying power regardless of contemporary trends. I hypothesize that some aspects of his music are universally aesthetic: the harmonious sounds, clever melodies, etc. The appreciation of these elements has low logical depth and everyone can enjoy them. However, you can go deeper into the structure of the fugue, or deeper still into patterns within patterns within patterns, and the problem of detecting/appreciating these features has a greater logical depth and does not necessarily come to all people naturally. However, they nevertheless are "real patterns" (as Daniel Dennett would put it) that are objectively there.
How this might relate to styles of contemporary art would be that certain styles deliberately flaunt aesthetics at level of gestalt impressions, or low logical depth (and why they do this can be explained through means of status games or other explanations offered), but might posses real patterns of aesthetic beauty at greater logical depth. That can explain why enthusiasts of certain allegedly fine things can be consistent in their preferences, and why individuals can through exposure "get" that thing (as they develop more tractable mental algorithms for detecting the aesthetic patterns), like appreciating subtle tastes of dark chocolate rather than simply overloading their senses with raw sweetness. That, of course, doesn't necessarily indicate that ALL contemporary (or historical) art has anything but status games going for them, and not all aesthetic qualities are in this way universal: I reckon human mind has enough degrees of freedom to be able to start appreciating e.g. absence-of-bourgeoisieness (just like it can learn to like spicy food or snuff pornography), but as originally postulated, some aesthetic qualities (like certain type of elegance, symmetry, etc) are there by default, and I believe that e.g. music by Bach, or neoclassical architecture, posses them.
(*) Which doesn't mean all possible agents appreciate it so. Paperclip maximizer would assign infinite disutility to nearly all works of art because they aren't paperclips. If you really think about it, it's not "absolutely and forever unconditionally universal for all conceivable agents" kind of universal. But regardless of existence of any observers, 1+1=2 is true in specific axiomatic systems or pattern of a "chair" is real (because the pattern of molecules that make up the chair, unlike an equivalent number of randomly picked molecules in the universe, can do some heavy lifting, like modeling the movement of all of the molecules when you simplify them to their center of mass), and these are the sort things that you would expect to be universal to all naturally evolved beings, say, and I agree with the commenter that there probably are aesthetic universals/truths at this level.
I had to read this (slowly..) about six times; now that finally I [think I] fully understand it - I find I agree wholeheartedly with every single word you say!
Grosvenor Gardens House is a nice looking building. I don't dislike the style.
Of the two though and judging strictly off the exteriors, which I think is the question being asked, I'd prefer to live in Nova. Any rich eccentrics reading are welcome to purchase me a unit to test my resolve.
I don't see why we can't start with something that most of us definitely have enough experience in, by virtue of being literate (after all, we read book reviews and can type) - namely, literature, and perhaps the prose of the last 200 or 250 years more particularly.
Then we can probably agree that:
a) there's schlock and there's better stuff,
b) we don't need to all like all of the better stuff,
c) genuinely top-of-the-shelf stuff had at least some cross-cultural appeal, whether immediate or after you get enough into it,
d) better stuff can be better in different ways, and there's such a thing as flawed but genuinely interesting,
e) snobbishness plays a role, both in enshrining some things that turn out to be Emperor-is-naked and in pooh-poohing some good stuff with mass appeal, but the role of that is actually much smaller than a non-reader or someone habituated to schlock would be likely to guess;
f) when it comes to the good stuff, some of the judgement on what is 'better' is not just arbitrary or a product of in-fighting, but you can just decide that you like what you like. (Example: Flaubert is a finer stylist than Balzac, who is a finer stylist than Zola, but you can decide you'd rather read lots of Zola (even if it sometimes makes you roll your eyes), some Balzac and no more Flaubert, or else some complicated mixture that makes a lot of sense such as "some Zola, lots of Balzac except for the times when he's more like Zola (I'm staying away from "The Thirty-Year-Old Woman", I read the summary), and you'll get to read most Flaubert at some point, but not now". Funnily enough these preferences should still make sense if you read them in good translations.)
The same goes for other things that are relatively accessible (film) or even for things that most people aren't into and for which a truly deep and thorough appreciation would involve years of education that most sincere appreciators don't actually have (Western classical music, and indeed any other sort of music that gets called 'classical').
So, the real question is: say you are a person (such as me or Scott) who has been passably exposed to a field (visual arts, architecture). How do you determine whether it is more like fashion (which most of us agree is a silly, nasty game where people get played for snobbery and profit) or more like literature?
My two cents:
a) maybe act with some caution,
b) ask yourself whether there are genuine, practical justifications that are not obvious but that make sense on reflection, and listen to the people who make sense, even or perhaps especially when they are not being simply normie (though there's a lot to be said in favor of being normie and right).
b) would not make much sense for painting, but it makes sense for architecture.
Also, not to repeat what several others have said, but what about "taste is like taste"? Or, in the when (b) applies, "taste is like taste plus nutrition"? Perhaps this makes most sense for architecture:
- grandma could prepare a mean tamal/polenta/kigel/cassoulet, which, in terms of nutrition, actually made perfect sense in the time of *her* grandma, given what folks needed and what she had to work with; (vernacular architecture)
- there is such a thing as things that are bad for you and taste nasty, but people get because they are easily accessible and they have actually been hooked by corporations wanting to make money;
- some of the pretentious stuff is insufferable or indigestible, but some actually tastes really nice and interesting, at least once you get past the initial shock;
- the high priesthood has lost status; in fact, the entire field has sometimes been given an unhealthy amount of prestige, and it made sense to take it down a notch;
- there's obvious cultural dependence and also the thrill of the exotic, but there's also such a thing as genuinely liking food from a different culture at first, start by making trivial mistakes in appreciation, and then learning more and liking it even better.
Perhaps this is a bit too optimistic or kind, but it seems to make some sort of basic sense.
The analogy with grammar is interesting because it seems to capture both the possibility that taste could be something that's somehow "in us", and the obvious fact that we can chose how to "behave" within (or beyond, if there is a beyond) its constraints.
However, grammar itself is not something made up by grammarians, no adult native speaker of their language needs to "develop a 'sense' for what 'sounds wrong'" - whatever is being used in a speech community is grammatical - and whatever is not being used, nor understood, is ungrammatical. Normally what self-proclaimed grammarians mean, when they say something is "wrong" is "You don't behave according to the standards of the speech community I place you in!" This seems to come from a rarely acknowledged prescriptive position which often forgets that grammar in itself first has to be captured in descriptive terms.
This prescriptive position of course has its place in teaching people to comply to the standards of a certain speech community, or a register of language that is, for whatever reason desirable to them (or their parents.) As in: When children learn to compose a formal text in school etc.
Still, what that standard is would be F again. Language change (i.e. grammatical change) itself seems to work more like E and a bit F, on the other hand....
“Tasteful” may be hard to define, but “Kitsch” is really really obvious and solves most of the riddle. “Kitsch” things are intentionally directly imitating other things.
For example, people 100 years ago built Beaux-Arts buildings because they were trying to build good-looking buildings and that’s how it came out. People doing it now would just be trying to make their building look Beaux-Arts-y. Similarly, men in the 18th century wore wigs and stockings because they thought it looked good, if you wore them now you’d just be cosplaying as Robespierre.
Tied on to the above, the Kitsch buildings tend to be really bad imitations (columns the wrong size, random mix of window styles etc). The result is this weird Disneyland feel that if you lean against the wall you’ll fall through it there’ll be a cheap conventional building underneath.
Modern buildings, although ugly, at least look like what they are. Its the difference between being kidnapped and forced to live with someone who acknowledges they’ve kidnapped you, and being kidnapped and forced to live with someone who keeps unconvincingly pretending to be all your relatives at the same time.
Pugin also originally made a name for himself with a very specific brief though, namely to build the Catholics a bunch of churches that can compete with the now-Anglican medieval ones on "churchiness," and was still sufficiently constrained materials-wise that what he was doing wasn't that different.
The Palace of Westminster is still a little bit naff when you know the date of it, but done well enough that you keep forgetting that it's not actually an old building when you're inside it.
> “Kitsch” things are intentionally directly imitating other things.
That's not enough. Imitations can be good. Things go bad when the imitiations imitate only the style, completely ignoring the actual substance that makes the thing they are imitating fit for purpose.
What do you think of Thomas Kinkade? I've read denunciations of his work as kitsch (e.g. https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/thomas-kinkade-a-case-study-in-kitsch-2955480.php ), but, as far as I can tell, his paintings succeed at being pleasant depictions of partially imaginary landscapes. As far as I can tell, they are indeed fir for purpose, comforting decoration, not an earthshaking purpose, but a perfectly decent one.
I think that the "taste is like BDSM" explanation is the closest, but that's not quite it, either. The analogy I'd use is that "taste is like developing a skill".
Suppose that you've never read a murder mystery in your life. Then you read your first one, and at the end it's revealed that the butler did it. Oh wow! Amazing! Brilliant! You never expected that! You think the story is the greatest ever.
Then you read ten more murder mysteries where the butler did it, and you start thinking that this is a boring cliché and you never want to read another story like that in your life. What's more, you learn to notice the kinds of clues that suggest it's the butler pretty early on, so you don't need to wait all the way to the end to figure it out.
Until maybe one day you read a story that seems to very obviously hint that it was the butler, but then it's revealed that this was intentional subterfuge by the author, and the real culprit is someone else. Now you're amazed again! Oh wow! Brilliant!
But if someone _hadn't_ already read countless of stories where the butler did it before, they wouldn't find this particularly interesting. They wouldn't have known to expect that it was the butler, so they also wouldn't be impressed by the reveal that it _wasn't_ the butler. Now if this person said that "I don't see what fuss was about, this wasn't so good", then you might very reasonably say "actually it _was_ good but you don't have enough taste to appreciate it".
The "developing a skill" analogy is because in this case, the more read person has developed the skill of being able to predict where a story is going and of understanding what an author is doing. The development of any skills means that you become able to make subtler discriminations in the domain of that skill than someone less trained. So whereas someone who wasn't so read would have no idea of what's happening until the very end, someone with more "mystery-reading skill" could already pick up on the hints of who did it much earlier. And then because they were so practiced in it, the author could make use of their skill to build on elements that subverted the expectations or played on them.
Or let's take drawing. Suppose that you're just learning draw, and then when you try to draw humans, the proportions are all wrong and they don't look at all like people. So you study anatomy and get a better sense of what exactly makes a human look good or bad when you're drawing them. But now that you're getting better at noticing subtle problems in the anatomy of your characters - that you can then correct to make them look better - you are also getting better at noticing subtle problems in the anatomy of _other people's_ drawings. If you had never tried to learn to draw yourself, you wouldn't notice any of those problems, since you wouldn't have needed to pay extra attention to what's good anatomy.
Here's a third example, about piano tuning: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PJu2HhKsyTEJMxS9a/you-don-t-know-how-bad-most-things-are-nor-precisely-how . It's a long post so I won't quote it in full, but it goes into detail about how trained musicians are able to hear how a piano is out of tune when other people don't notice that anything is wrong. Again, because in the process of learning to play better and better music, they have also learned to make finer and finer discriminations about piano sounds.
I think the BDSM analogy is the opposite of what it should be. People look at things and become more sensitive to how they look, not less. They look at buildings and notice the shutters are fake for instance. Or they don’t need so much action or romance in the books they read, they notice the style or dialogue.
Hmm possibly. My thinking was that it's similar in the sense that old tropes and patterns in the porn become familiar and uninteresting as they become too predictable. Similar to how "the butler did it" might be amazing and surprising on the first time that you see it, but boring and uninteresting on the hundredth time.
That’s a good point! I’d add that sometimes the skill simply doesn’t develop for whatever reason.
For instance, I’ve read quite a few murder novels and, sadly, I’m still as incapable of guessing who did it as for the first one I read. It’s so bad that I think I couldn’t even figure out who the villain of a Scooby-Doo episode is.
But there’s nothing wrong with appreciating all the clues leading to the reveal by re-reading the novel.
> For instance, I’ve read quite a few murder novels and, sadly, I’m still as incapable of guessing who did it as for the first one I read. It’s so bad that I think I couldn’t even figure out who the villain of a Scooby-Doo episode is.
Far be it for me to ruin it for you, or for anyone else out there, but it's generally a pretty limited repertoire of characters, right?
Take Scooby-Doo as the limiting case - they introduce between 1 and 3 adult, non-Scooby-team, characters. The villian is going to be one of those 1-3 people. Even by sheer random chance, you've got 33% odds.
Then in SD in particular, the motivations are always childishly predictable (given they're children's programs). Somebody with some obvious financial or status motive for pretending a place is haunted, whether it's a house, theme park, business, whatever.
That allows you go take your 1/3 characters and generally completely eliminate some of them, leaving you with a clear top-runner or at the least a 50/50 choice. Basically, you're using the clues you get from watching the story unfold to try to determine who really dunnit out of the very limited subset of possibilities.
Mystery novels are a simple extension of this reasoning. Then it gets one or two epicycles more complicated because now as Kaj is talking about, they're trying to subvert expectations or play orthogonally on tropes, but non-advanced mystery novels are basically the same thing as the Scooby reasoning.
I don't mean to belabor the obvious here, this just sounded to me like somebody saying "you know, I've watched Monty Hall a hundred times, and the prize has NEVER been behind the first door he picked..."
It's missing a level of thought about the program or story framing itself that points at the truth.
I wanted to say that taste is like science, but skill makes sense, too. It is a collective exploration of the space of possible positive human sensory experience (or something like that).
It changes in time, because some regions have already been explored. You won't get a prize for exploring something that someone else has explored before you (and got a prize for doing that). And maybe you don't know that the particular region has already been explored, which is what makes the difference between you and the art expert.
People who train to obtain a skill, naturally have a different perspective from mere observers. For example, if you watch someone pick up a 100 kg weight, you just go "hmmm, 100 kg, that's quite a lot", because that's all you understand and all you care about. But another weightlifter would notice the posture, the exact movements, the balance, etc. Because he cares about *how* this was achieved, not just the fact *that* it was achieved. A weightlifting coach, even if he cannot lift that much himself, would also have a perspective similar to the weightlifter.
But art is more like science than weightlifting. Repeating the achievements of yesterday means nothing; the person who invented something is respected, and also the person who perfected it. But the person who repeats what others did is merely a student.
At some moment deep in history, most of human attempts at art were shit. Making something nice was impressive. Also, making something realistic was impressive.
But at some later time, we mostly figured out how to make nice and/or realistic things. We even figured out how to make a few superstimuli. Now the artists are no longer impressed by making nice things according to a well-known (among them) recipe. They are looking for new ways to make things... even if the tradeoff is that it makes them somewhat less nice. Sometimes much less nice, because the region of nice things is already mostly explored.
These days you get a prize for finding a new recipe that works... maybe not perfectly, sometimes not even very well, but better than anyone's priors would be. For example, you paint a set of seemingly random dots that for some difficult-to-explain reason just *looks better* than a set of *actually* random dots. If that is a new thing you have invented, you get the applause. Then people kinda figure it out... maybe, if you put darker dots closer to the bottom and the lighter dots closer to the top, that makes it better than random placement? Also, some combinations of colors of dots are nice against the color of background? Afterwards, no one gets a prize for painting seemingly random dots. Unless someone finds a way to paint the dots in a way that contradicts the established theory and still looks better than random. Maybe you can make the dots really random, and give the *background* a gradient with darker color at bottom and a lighter shade at top? Or maybe, if the gradient is darker at bottom and lighter at top, it will actually make it better to put lighter dots close to the bottom, and the darker dots closer to the top?
And the random visitor is like: "okay, random dots on the paper... is *this* what counts for art these days? I could have done the same." (No, you couldn't.)
Now I am not saying that some artist and art critics couldn't be just faking it. You get charlatans in science, too; why wouldn't there be many at art? Also, I suspect that the most expensive art is often used for money laundering -- if you give someone ten million dollars, the tax office will get suspicious; but if the person buys a modern artist's painting for one million dollars, and later sells it to you for eleven millions, that's just rich people enjoying their hobby as usual.
In one of the comments from the Wolfe review discussion, Scott says something like "it just looks fine" in reference to some McMansion details. I would say that "taste" is the opposite of that sentiment. It's a combination of care, intention, education, context, knowledge, and skill that is analogous to expertise in other disciplines. When someone lacks artistic or design taste, it's likely that they lack some of the above as pertains to art and design.
Let's say that you are an avid skydiver. You really enjoy skydiving, and you really enjoy skydiving with friends in particular. However, you make a new friend who happens to be confined to a wheelchair. You don't ever skydive with them, and this fact also isn't very difficult to emotionally come to terms with. The fact that your friend could not skydive with you was immediately obvious the moment you met them and was consequently easy to 'emotionally understand'.
Now let's say that instead of an avid skydiver, you are an avid venter. You are constantly stressed out, and you cope with this by venting to friends. However, one day one of your newer friends gives you a rule: no venting. At first, while you may comply, you may also feel emotionally disappointed, and compelled to vent to them in a way you may consciously subdue. However, once you spend enough time with them, you realize that they chronically have severe and exhausting anxiety issues. Enough exposure to this, and your desire to vent to them disappears. You 'emotionally understand' that you ought to not vent to them, in addition to intellectually understanding this.
Baruch Spinoza was a Jewish philosopher who was alive in the 1600s. His theory of emotions, which I share, is that emotions are beliefs that are held with a high enough of a confidence interval. Everyone starts with a basic survival drive, and when someone believes with a high enough of a confidence interval that their predictive baseline for their short/medium/long-term survival was too low, they feel 'pleasure', and when the opposite happens, they feel 'pain'. Spinoza spends a good amount of time in his Ethics developing a complicated taxonomy of emotions from this basic framework.
It is hard to emotionally learn something from just reading it or conceptually grasping it. Our brains have evolved to believe the most things that we (a) witness experientially and (b) witness in the context of established and familiar social narratives. In this sense, the way I view art is as a pedagogical tool. The downside to it is that it is a very conceptually imprecise and sloppy way to educate yourself content wise. The upside is that the pedagogical upside to it is much higher than traditional forms of learning because of how art hijacks the way human brains form beliefs.
For example, imagine that you are coming out of a breakup. You can read books about how most people recover from breakups, and this will likely have little positive effect on your emotional state. However, an incredibly well-made, empowering song, made by someone you view as relatable, about that person lifting themselves through a tough breakup and recovering, comparatively will likely have a much larger positive effect on your emotional state. In the first case, you get exposed to a pedagogical tool that intellectually teaches you that you will recover from your breakup, and in the latter case you get exposed to a pedagogical tool that emotionally teaches you that idea.
In theory, 'art is a pedagogical tool' should in theory mean that everyone's artistic taste ought to be the same past a point of certain sophistication. In practice, this idea is naive. For one, most people's identities are tradeoff bundles between true beliefs and useful beliefs. If you are too untethered to reality, it is hard to succeed at life. At the same time, lots of relationships would probably die if people didn't (intellectually and emotionally) halo effect their partners. In addition, there are time tradeoffs in life, and a finite number of things any given person can intellectually and emotionally understand. Finally, there are certain things that are not super pleasant to think about. Postmodern architecture might help one emotionally understand some of the more negative aspects of our society (in a very abstract way) more than alternative styles, but some people might reasonably decide that the negative headspace is not worth the knowledge.
Let's simplify and synthesize. My perspective is that the 'purpose' of art is that it is a unique type of pedagogical tool, that different people utilize differently depending on their subjective priorities. This is a difficult question to delve into because giving a philosophically sufficient immanent account of aesthetics requires some real depth and rigor. This comment might not provide that sufficient rigor, but hopefully it is a step in that direction. At the very least, the writing practice is useful to me.
One weekend in 1988, my wife and I were visiting a young couple in Seattle. My wife asked E., what shall we do tomorrow? E. broke into tears and exclaimed, "We can't do anything with you tomorrow because J. and I have to jump out of an airplane with Bill Gates, and we're all going to die!"
I think you are not friendly enough to points E(BDSM) and G(Grammar).
E: Using porn as analogy is unnecessarily dismissive. There is the same effect in any art! The first time you read a tale, it can be about a prince saving a princess and you would be exited! The tenth time you would be bored and eventually you need a story with intrigue, a hundred characters, complex drama, clever plans using fourth level of recursion and novel revelations about the nature of the multiverse (cough planecrash cough). That is the actual example when rubes outnumber experts, hate what experts like and yet experts are right - some works are just better than others, but you can only appreciate them after you are saturated on lower-level content.
G: Grammar rules, even when arbitrary, still perform a vital role: they help correct for message noise and in extreme cases are just necessary for any communication to happen at all. If someone says in a slightly noisy place "I goed", the communication would fail not because I am a snob who refuses to talk to people who use incorrect grammar, it would fail because I would think "Eye goat?... What is an eye goat?". The same can happen with fashion: if you show up to a funeral in an orange t-shirt with silly print, (some) other people are not going to be giddy that they are now higher in status than you, they are going to be confused - did you learn about funeral just now and couldn't change? Do you not have other clothes? Was the deceased your mortal enemy and you are actively celebrating? If they learn that you just dressed like this because you think fashion is silly, they are going to be justifiably angry because you made them think about you instead of a friend they lost.
Great comment, I was just about to comment endorsing the exact same combination of 2 explanations.
E: I found the "food taste" analogy (raised independently by multiple commenters above) to be a lot more relatable way of saying the same thing. Either way, this is a great explanation of why people's tastes can change but they don't change randomly, most experts still end up with tastes similar to each other.
G: Explains the missing part, why most art forms end up with a large number of arbitrary-seeming rules and conventions. That said, I think there's a wide range of how arbitrary the rules are depending on the exact rule and art form.
It seems plausible that some rules have lost all connection to reality and are just used for social signaling at this point, but even there, I don't want to condemn them too much. It really is nice to be able to relate to someone because they spent enough time in your field to become intimately familiar with rules and conventions that other people don't care about.
Hah when I wrote a comment here, of course someone already said it but better. Having lots of independent comments (others said this too) in agreement is nice tho, Scott really should rethink the E part.
So, I mostly fall on the side of preferring "unsophisticated" art, but on the other hand, I definitely have a sense that there's more and less sophisticated writing, and that more sophisticated writers are legitimately doing something more skillful, if not objectively better. There are some qualities of unsophisticated writing which less discerning readers are often fairly blind to (like stiff and unnatural dialogue or paint-by-numbers characterization.) And there are some qualities of unsophisticated writing which I think tend to be outright preferable to unsophisticated readers. For instance, a lot of what we conventionally consider "good writing" in prose has to do with effective compression of information, transmitting content through implication so as not to weigh down the pacing with excessive explicit details, and giving the reader the sense that the content rewards closer examination. But unsophisticated readers are often very bad at reading between the lines, so information which isn't explicitly stated might as well not be there for them. So writing which doesn't try to pack that extra information in, and assume that the reader is picking up at least some of it, is actually preferable for them.
I sometimes wish that I had the ability to deeply appreciate unsophisticated writing, since it'd make me much easier to please as a consumer. But at the same time, it's hard for me to want *not* to be able to appreciate the craft in what sophisticated writers are doing. I wonder sometimes if I'm like an unsophisticated reader, with my preferences shaped by a blindness to elements of craftsmanship in architecture that other people can appreciate. But honestly, I lean towards suspecting this isn't the case. I think the best literary artists of earlier centuries would be impressed by the craft of the best modern writers, whereas I don't get the impression that this is the case with historical and modern architects.
I think if you understand how ethics can be socially constructed, subjectively objective, you also extend your underdstanding towards aesthetics as well. The referent is real but somewhat arbitrary with various gradation of good and bad justifications.
I think there are three main categories that art gets judged by. 1. how pleasant it is to look at. 2. the effort it takes to create it. 3. The effort it takes to come up with the idea of it. (4. Political messaging, mostly tangential to the others.)
The average person only cares about 1 (and maybe 4). The professionals mainly care about 2 and 3 (and maybe 4), even to the exclusion of 1. A big bouncing action flick that cuts corners on the plot can satisfy 1, be mediocre at 2, and not even attempt 3, and that's when everyone's taste goes off in different directions.
2 and 3 can still be opposites. Giant dome structure with lots of fiddly bits are hard to make, but eventually enough people get good at them that making them becomes expected, and now 3 kicks in with a new challenge; "take a flat wall and a single color, and find a way to make it interesting."
Hhmmm... I'd *like* to agree with you, since it would be nice if art worked that way. And maybe some forms of art work that way. Literary art arguably works that way, like what Desertopa argued.
But when I consider picture/painting-style modern art and modern architecture...
Similarly, with architecture, I would think that less ornamentation = less effort. I mean, it's at least one less thing to worry about. There can certainly be legitimate artistic design reasons for wanting less ornamentation... nonetheless, it makes a design simpler, likely reducing the effort needed to bring it to life.
Ironically (?) I think Rothko aficionados partly invoke the mysterious alchemy of his personally-mixed paint/washes/whatever. As though they are associating his work with the great masters of the past who necessarily had to be chemists in some sort.
I only have this idea because I'm from Houston and periodically people worry about the Rothko chapel in re the finishes on the walls deteriorating, and was it eggs? etc.
I only went into it once, forty years ago, and it made less impression on me than the exhibit inside the Menil that day, which was totaled cars.
These would be typical examples where 3 ("effort it takes to come up with the idea of it") dominates 2 ("effort it takes to create it"), and 4 ("political messaging") might be relevant too.
A lot of modern art is meant as a reaction to older art (something along the lines of "look, I can invoke the same feelings as your fancy classical painting, using just a few blobs of color") and doesn't make much sense without that context.
I'm somewhat interested in the process of making the lower square. It's close enough in color to the background that I can't completely tell if it's a different color or just looks that way because of the brush strokes. And the top red section is pretty much perfectly smooth, with big vertical lines, so all the texturing in the bottom section is intentional.
So, more impressive than your average kindergartener. You might have to reach all the way to third grade to find its equal.
Somewhat tangential comment: For architecture, the overwhelmingly important criterion is: Does it work? Is it a reasonable place to live in or work in? (1) has some impact on passers-by. (2) is something the architect should _minimize_. (3) is of interest to the architect in their interactions with their fellow architects, and probably lost in the noise for everyone else.
They *should* minimize 2, but that doesn't mean they want to. There was a guy building his own house here; he asked his engineer buddy for pointers, and the engineer talked him into building an octagonal steeple roof. The guy was stuck on the roof for months trying to build a proper octagon.
"Taste" can be very accurately described by three sperate qualities. Subjective taste, objective taste and desire for novelty. Unfortunately these all get mixed up into a big pile when it comes time for people to talk about things. The stereotypical stupid elite artist is someone who acts like their subjective taste and novelty desire are objective taste criteria, generally with tons of signaling about how much better their taste is than the unwashed masses. The stereotypical philistine is someone who has no need for novelty and says objective taste doesn't exist, all that matters is my subjective taste.
When I reflect on why I like some art or architecture, it has to be some combination of: "this generates a visceral positive reaction" and "it aligns with my identity/persona to enjoy this aesthetically". My theory would be that taste is a combination of the two:
1) If you have an identity tied to conforming with elite norms or tastes, it becomes more like the "Taste as a priesthood" argument - you learn the values of the elite class and temper your visceral reactions accordingly. You make sure that your taste evolves to match changing aesthetic norms. Note that your perceived elite doesn't have to be art school graduates, it could be the rationalist or silicon valley elites, or octagenarian classics scholars.
2) If you have a non-elitist, conformist identity - you don't want to stand out too much - it feels more like "Taste is like grammar". You subconciously adjust your taste to avoid standing out too much, toning down preferences that feel overly elitist or populist to stay within the norm.
3) If you have a somewhat contrarian identity, you don't want people to be able to guess your taste, so you deliberately seek out or cultivate unconventional reactions. I don't know if this fits into your framework - but may be most like the "Taste is like BDSM" argument. You become aware that "conventionally attractive" art is trying to trick you into visceral positive reactions - I'm sure we all notice this with pop music - and feel varying degrees of resistance. You also notice that both elite and mainstream cultural norms are trying to shape these reactions, and you try to resist both - you don't want to conform to either norm, and try to cultivate an original or opposite reaction.
It's simpler than that. At least if you don't involve examples where social dynamics lead people to feel the need to lie about their preferences.
Taste is simply a preference for things which are healthy and beneficial for the person who enjoys them, or which are the polar opposite and consumed as a way of overcoming or yielding to something unappealing (humiliation fetishism, scat, sadism, morbid curiosity, etc.)
It's not just symmetry which is appealing. Music too will sound better when it's more ordely and less messy. Your room, your hair, your clothes - it's pretty when it's cleaner, purer, more ordely, less complex, *lower in entropy*. This is because human beings fight against entropy, and anything which has higher entropy tends to have been corrupted. We enjoy things which are unblemished, and which look strong, healthy, or capable of leading to better states (when judging personalities and such). The skin of healthy people look better, strong colors are prettier than faded ones, colors associated with waste and decay are ugly.
It's not just physical appearance, it generalizes way further than that. Optimism is more appealing than pessimism, envy and jealousy tends to be ugly, heroic actions are appealing, strength is appealing, honesty is appealing.
Concrete jungles have an ugly grey, faded colors. Sci-fi tends to be metallic but look very clean (and often bright).
Political corruption has the name "corruption" for a reason. "Dirty means" uses a word associated with physical uncleanliness for a reason. "Fair" means just, but also beautiful or good, and that's also no coincidence.
It all seems to obvious to me. And in cases where some people like something and others dislike it, it's usually because something valuable is being treated with too little respect (sex is generally appealing, and that's exactly why some people find it unappealing when it's not treated like it's special enough)
Imo the best analogy is taste is like philosophy. We all have aesthetic preferences, just like we all have views about the world. But people who spend more time thinking about and engaging with these subjects often come to unintuitive and more expansive views about them. In an objective sense the total “range” of aesthetic modes of expression taken seriously by art critics and scholars is much more broad (and inclusive of totally different kinds of aesthetic experience) than the average person is open to, and philosophers similarly consider a far broader range of questions than the average person will consider. Of course this is complicated in art by status games and fashion etc, but so is the philosophy world. Imo with both philosophy and art there is truth to “both sides” of this question: the theorists do have mindblowing insights, but there is also an emperor has no clothes aspect to this. An example is the avant-garde film Wavelength. I can see why the average person finds this single shot zoom of a mostly empty room to be torturously boring, but once you learn to expand your conceptions of visual art, it becomes an riveting and intense experience. But at the same time, an average joe will probably not benefit much from being made to comprehend why Wavelength was one of the most groundbreaking artworks of the 20th century.
Why do people like watching elite competition like sports? I think it's an interesting comparison because competitive skill is objective but I still see some relevant similarities to this discussion of art.
Sports I don't know can still be fun to watch and for those it probably doesn't matter much if I'm watching the top competitors, I can't tell the difference anyways.
So maybe, as Scott suggests, it would be bad to actually learn the complexities of elite competition since "it makes your life worse, because you’ll just be fretting over flaws you see in everything."
But this seems wrong! Sure it can sometimes feel bad to see someone fuck up and have the knowledge to know that they fucked up (though many people also enjoy this). But people who really know a sport really do get more out of it. They get amazed by great athletic feats because they know how challenging they are and what it means to accomplish them.
So even though I know almost nothing about painting or poetry it seems plausible something like this is going on--people who are really into modern poetry really are getting something out of it that less sophisticated people aren't, something you can only get when you obtain the requisite context and knowledge, and they are enjoying it at a deeper level than possible without that, and that's what they mean when they say it is actually good and the stuff you like isn't.
I think the priesthood/grammar analogy is mostly right, and applies to all artistic/aesthetic fields. But acquiring knowledge of say architecture will not just ruin McMansions for you, they will also make you appreciate buildings that you would otherwise not care for.
I think it's useful to think about taste through the lens of Shakespeare. The genius of Shakespeare is that he wrote plays that worked on multiple levels, so that both common and refined attendees would enjoy them. William appealed to the former with rude sex jokes:
And to the latter he appealed by being creative with iambic pentameter. Every line that title character in Hamlet speaks is intentionally one syllable too long (11, not 10), this leaves the final "iamb" unfinished. Learned audiences will notice this and feel a sense of incompleteness when he speaks. This reinforces the play's characterization of Hamlet as indecisive. Provided you also like rude sex jokes, the play now works on multiple levels for you.
Most artist are not as good as Shakespeare, and can only make things work on one level. This is how you get the McMansion (that works on the base level) and Bauhaus (that works on the elite level). Neither of these levels are "objectively" correct, but they feel objectively correct to the onlooker. To you (Scott) it seems impossible that anyone would find modern architecture beautiful, while the architecture critics can not understand how anyone would like McMansions.
Personally, I believe that architecture needs to work at least somewhat well on the base level, because everyone is asically forced to look at it. This is in contrast to other mediums like poetry or film, where avant garde artist are free to forego common appeal as much as they like. If you don't like it, you can just ignore it!
Are you saying architects must ensure their work does not cause negative net utility by triggering dislike in the majority of people who are not "educated" about architecture, compared to many other kinds of human endeavor?
I like your post on the whole, but this comment on Hamlet is not quite true. Many of his lines are only ten syllables (though a disproportionate number in his most famous soliloquy have eleven), for instance:
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:
In addition, the eleven syllable line (with the last syllable unstressed), was a common and accepted variation on iambic pentameter, Spenser uses them frequently, especially in the second half of the Faerie Queene. I agree that Shakespeare uses them far more often than, say, Marlowe, and possibly increasingly often in his later works.
I think your point about multiple levels is strong, though. I think certain periods have a greater wealth of works that function on multiple levels than others. A pretty strong split happens in the early 20th century in quite a few fields.
It's a little difficult because things that once had popular appeal and accessibility are now much less accessible because of cultural and linguistic difference. But in literature, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress was both wildly popular and is also considered a masterpiece. Dickens, too, had dual appeal. Probably Homer, though it's hard to exactly say what "popular" meant back then. I actually think Tolkien is a good example, where his immediate audience was a group of Oxford medievalists, but his work has had obvious popular appeal (and its fair share of sneers from modernists, of course).
In art, part of Vermeer's whole schtick was using elaborately expensive pigments (like lapis lazuli, literally ground up jewels) to paint ordinary people, so there may be something there. But I can't claim to have much "taste" in painting.
Music, I couldn't say. Maybe Ralph Vaughan Williams? Tchaikovsky?
> In art, part of Vermeer's whole schtick was using elaborately expensive pigments (like lapis lazuli, literally ground up jewels)
Actually, when Vermeer was painting, and for many thousands of years before then, Ultramarine (blue derived from lapis lazuli) was the ONLY option for a "deep" or "dark" blue, and it had ALWAYS, for the entire history of art, been the most expensive pigment, more expensive than gold by weight.
When you see medieval icons with literal hammered gold backgrounds, vermilion red robes on priests or male saints, and dark blue robes on the Virgin, the blue in those paintings was the most expensive color, and those three colors were used because they were the most expensive and finest colors available.
Cheaper synthetic blues like Prussian blue wouldn't be discovered for another 50-100 years after Vermeer.
There's a great book that goes into this and more that I reviewed at my substack, Philip Ball's Bright Earth, well worth looking into if you're interested in this sort of thing.
I think there's value in learning to appreciate the nuances of craft, especially when that craft is connected to a historical/community tradition.
I'm very far from a sommelier, but I have spent time thinking about/learning about wine and as time has gone on I tend to like nicer wines more and cheap wine less. It's been pointed out to me that learning about wine seems to be making my life worse. To enjoy wine I have to spend more money than I did previously.
But I find the post-learning about wine drinking experience to be more satisfying than the pre-learning about wine experience. This isn't necessarily about enjoying the flavour more, but I think because the additional experiences of thinking carefully about the flavors and learning about the history of the vineyard makes for a better experience.
Why not just think carefully about/learn the history of cheaper wine? I think better wine tends to actually be better suited for engagement on a deep level. It's easy to grasp why when it comes to the historical/craft side of wine. But I it's true also for the taste element. Nicer wines tend to have a few more flavours that tend to be designed to interact in interesting ways. But I think it's certainly possible to have a deep and satisfying relationship with cheap wine too. Though perhaps not quite as satisfying and perhaps less easily than you can with nice wine.
Bringing this back to architecture, I think one can develop this sort of relationship with any school of architecture. And the nature of architecture as an omni-present part of the environment is that many people develop the start of this kind of relationship unconsciously based on the buildings around them, what they see in films etc.
That being said, some architecture will probably lend itself to an appreciation of the craft and history more than others (and which architecture will change somewhat between people). I tend to think that for most people, this will be some form of pre-modernist architecture featuring ornament but I don't have evidence for that.
I think this is a pretty cynical way of reckoning with taste. The concepts of kitsch and avant-garde can be well-defined even without saying one is better in an absolute sense.
What is considered “tasteful” right now is not arbitrary. Culture is like a conversation with a large circle of speakers. At the beginning of the conversation, the people are strangers, and the language they have in common is limited, so what people can say is very simplistic. “God is good,” “Beautiful woman is good,” “Pleasant weather is good,” that sort of thing. It’s small-talk, the only kind of talk you can have with strangers. As time goes on, however, common symbols are developed. There are expectations about the sort of things people can say, because they have been said in the past. Because these expectations and symbols exist, the conversation can “evolve” when a speaker subverts or complicates these expectations. Now people know each other—there are “inside jokes” that wouldn’t make sense in the abstract, but have a particular meaning that is understood by anyone who has been following the conversation and the people in it.
This is why Manet’s painting of “Olympia,” a simple female nude (what could be more basic?) was met with universal revulsion by the nineteenth century art scene. For these people, the “female nude” was an established symbol in the artistic language of history, representing purity, nature, etc. The Renaissance masters painted a lot of nude women, but never women *taking off their clothes*. The female nude (at this point in art history) is not a woman who has taken off her clothes, but a symbol of feminine essence. Olympia, on the other hand, is a woman who has taken off her clothes. A subtle distinction to an outsider, but a slap in the face for these art critics. I would consider Olympia an example of an “avant-garde” painting. It is art that adds to the conversation; it refers to what has been said before in a new way. This does not mean that the “tasteful” people will like it—many hated it—but that it *responds* to taste as it exists.
Kitsch isn’t “bad art that stupid rubes like,” it’s art that does not respond to anything. Kitsch is someone who shows up at the conversation between old friends having a passionate exchange of ideas and just starts making small-talk, unaware of what they are interrupting. This is why those who follow the conversation do not like kitsch—it is a non-sequitur, a distracting noise in an otherwise rational progression of harmonies.
But again, you do not have to believe in taste in an absolute sense to get behind this model of art. What is “good” obviously depends on the audience and the context of reception. However, I think it would be disingenuous to say that the people involved in this conversation are all talking about similar things because it’s “cool” or “trendy” to do so, and that there’s no other reason why they would be so aligned in their taste. They’re simply responding to each other in their shared language. If you hear someone speaking in a language you don’t know, it would be strange to immediately think “you’re all saying stuff that doesn’t mean anything just to be cool.”
This is the best response; I wanted to say something like it but wouldn't have done so well.
I think this framing suggestions two ways of interpreting the objections of those like Scott in the previous post.
1. Using in jokes and shared references can be very exclusionary--it's a conversation, and a good conversation can't just spend all it's time on small talk and pleasantries, but a conversation has to be able to welcome new people into it.
If you invited some people to a party and they only spoke in references that only they shared and made no attempt to include you, that would be snobbish and rude. So too, when the public commissions a new building and an architect makes no deference to public sensibilities, it's snobbish and rude.
2. A conversational form that relies too much on shared references becomes sterile. It's like the joke about the prisoners who don't need to hear the actual jokes anymore, just the number that references it. A good conversation should refer back to the good times the participants have shared, but it should also plan future events that can be the basis for future discussion.
In this frame, modern architecture has become too obsessed with manifestos and abstract ideas, and become tedious in the manner of someone who only ever wants to talk about other conversations they've had.
I have no opinion on the second, knowing very little about architecture, though I will count myself as one who enjoys some of the examples of "bad" modern architecture for what that's worth.
The first is more interesting, because it suggests the question of who the implied participant/audience of the conversation is. I think some of Scott's complaints effectively have the form of, why should you guys get to dominate the conversation?
On this I sympathize with both sides: art has been and should continue to be a distinctive subset of broader culture, and not just dilute into mass preference. I think art that emerges from the mainstream "artistic tradition" should get at least some priority in public space over stuff that's merely popular.
But art should still be accessible; both because it's publicly funded and publicly facing, and because without an external audience it's too easy to become lost in the ironic self-referential weeds.
And finally, one should reject a firm distinction between art that "continues the conversation" and art that is just a non-responsive interjection.
Even the most refined artists get ideas and inspiration from kitsch, and vice versa.
Maybe there are multiple levels with different sets of rules and different analogies at each level.
Level One
A child enjoys simple tastes for evolutionary reasons. A sugar sandwich has lots of sweetness. Cheese on toast has that layer of fat that goes down smoothly. Bitter things taste bitter. McD has figured out how to make burgers that taste simple and to avoid the difficult tastes.
Most people graduate to…
Level Two
An adolescent learns to enjoy more complex tastes. Maybe the bitterness of beer and wine is not so bad once you get used to it. In and Out burgers are even better than McD’s and, have you tried baby back ribs or chicken tikka masala?
Many people graduate to…
Level Three
Taste is like fashion. We get bored with chicken tikka masala after a while and try pokē or tonkatsu. IPAs are more complex than Bud Light. But even that gets boring eventually and we move on to the next thing.
Level Four
There’s another level of experts and professionals above this that have the authority or the nous to identify or invent the next big thing that level three people will enjoy when they get bored with the previous fashion. Meanwhile, there are still people eating sugar sandwiches and cheeseburgers and the rest of us look down on them.
I this multi-level structure works for music, architecture, clothing, and art as well as food.
I think a more friendly version of your BDSM take is normally taken as implicitly true in a lot of discussion about "arthouse" film. A common reason given for why critics like more experimental or artier films and have more middling takes on popular films is often that when your job is to watch every film that comes out you quickly become numbed to the predictable structure and style of big films but that 90 minute experimental film structured and stylised as memories of a childhood holiday (Aftersun) is fresh and thus you are more excited about it. It has to be taken as a mix of multiple because the critics still only like films that are deemed well executed (despite what Marvel meme pages claim they do not give good ratings to the majority of experimental films) but it drives it into their favourite of the year while someone who only watches films every so often will be more impressed by the new Top Gun even if they like Aftersun or whatever.
A little while back I visited my parents and cued up Aftersun because I had heard lots of praise for it and it has gotten an Oscar nomination. My parents reacted to the film by saying I wouldn't be allowed to pick movies anymore, and I had to side with them on their evaluation of that film specifically.
I was mostly disappointed by Eraserhead. I was expecting something ... more ... than what I got. Like ... okay ... surreal dystopian horror. But it was also incredibly mundane. Possibly it was a better movie in the context in which it was released, like The Beatles, or Hitchcock; by the time I got around to consuming it, I was already familiar with most of what it was going to do, so nothing was all that surprising. (Like the "soundtrack", one of the characteristic elements of the movie, which felt ... dated, for lack of a better term.)
The only thing Lynch produced that lived up to the reputation Lynch has developed, in my opinion, is episode 8 of the third season of Twin Peaks, which was actually pretty brilliant; it took me two or three watchings to figure out exactly what it was doing.
I'd recommend Naked Lunch, though, unless you're face blind. (I'm face blind, but watched it with somebody who helpfully pointed out certain key elements for me; without that the movie would have been a lot more confusing.)
Going to go try Begotten; it reads a little like Mad God, to me, and I liked that movie a lot.
I did choose Aftersun deliberately both because it was my film of the year and because it was fairly polarising when it filtered through to general audiences. Although for me personally I find it hard to look at it objectively because it was deliberately written to evoke feelings I have experienced, Wells said that she deliberately removed some of the certainty (e.g. the suicide you mention not being confirmed as happening) so that it could appeal to more people rather than being purely autobiographical which from internet discussion for the most part worked and gave the film a personal aspect to a lot of people. Its just generic enough to make it feel personally applicable to anyone who had a particularly strained relationship for whatever reason with a parent or any working class Brit who grew up having to pretend the cheap holiday is amazing. I do disagree that it didn't have a buildup and crescendo though, everything from the moment Under Pressure starts playing is the culmination of the pervasive sense of unease and distance from Calum that Sophie feels, I don't think it hits straightaway because you expect some sort of confirmed resolution in the end but its the strongest left the cinema 10 minutes ago reaction I've had when the significance hits and on a rewatch I felt the film was even stronger.
But I think putting that aside it appeals well to critics who grew up in stable middle class households because it is a very executed film on a purely technical level while also being experimental with its structure. Its very deliberate with its use of perspective and recurring visual and audio motifs and the acting is superb. Then its also not remotely a typically structured film which makes it standout to people who watch a film or several a day and have to stay focused to write a review.
Finally perhaps as more of an aside I think the film suffered somewhat getting international acclaim. I've seen quite a bit of confusion from American audiences about several key aspects of the film because none of the British class signifiers that are embedded throughout the film are familiar. It uses a lot of fundamentally British shorthands to paint a picture of Calum and Sophies life, without knowing them it can feel overly specific in a way that isn't actually intended.
I've always felt like taste in art and literature is most similar to taste in food, in that it ultimately is a matter of personal preference - even though there is stuff that's generally agreed to be ugly/disgusting or delicious/beautiful, there's definitelty such a thing as an "aquired taste" in both domains - people can get really into stuff the rest of us would consider off-putting. I don't mind, until they try to insist that their personal preferences in food or art are objectively correct!
I think this analogy works because I like different things at different times - sometimes I want a sophisticated work with complex flavors, other times I want saccharine comfort food. I enjoy visiting art galleries and reading "great works" of literature, but I'm not going to pretend there's not times when I'd prefer something more lowbrow or mainstream, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
How about “there’s dozens of different axes/dimensions of personal preference at any one time, many of which could be framed as a ‘taste vs kitsch’ struggle between a high-preference minority and low-preference majority, but how often is that only because an “I like this to be ‘kitsch’” minority and “I don’t even pay attention to aspects on this particular axis” majority are lumped into an “anti taste” alliance?
English PhD candidate here. Got some sophisticated tastes in literature but also a hyper-egalitarian attitude toward taste, so I feel like I’m (relatively) well-positioned to talk about this.
Personally, I think the BDSM/ desensitization analogy is the best of the list, but only relatively. … Can’t say that any of these analogies really speak to my experience of developing sophisticated tastes nor to my experience of being around people with equally sophisticated tastes but less egalitarian attitudes.
Here’s what I think is going on:
Positive psychologists all kind of agree that there are qualitatively different intrinsic psychological rewards (hedonia vs. eudaimonia, affective vs. cognitive subjective wellbeing, etc.). They disagree about where to draw the most parsimonious lines demarcating these different kinds of intrinsic rewards, but they all kind of agree that intrinsic psychological rewards can be of qualitatively different kinds.
Personally, I like Seligman’s PERMA model:
- positive emotions, feeling good, good moods, etc.
- engagement, interest, involvement flow
- positive relationships, feelings of connection to other people
- meaning, significance, impact
- accomplishment, mastery, competence
I think that art is cool because it can offer all of these different kinds of intrinsic rewards. And I think the difference between the masses and the sophisticates has to do with the particular intrinsic rewards that are being sought from art.
The masses tend to seek positive emotions from art, while people that become “cultured” engage with art for some other reason: either they are seeking engaging art, or they want the feel like accomplished/ masterful consumers/ interpreters of art or whatever.
I think that cultured “taste” is merely the emergent outcome of people self-selecting into different cultural niches of people who engage with art for the same basic reason that they do. The particular niches shift and change over time for a whole bunch of psychological, socio-political, and institutional reasons, but I think that this basic distinction between the masses wanting positive emotions from while sophisticates wanting something more than positive emotions (engagement, relationships, meaning, accomplishment) is important an important part of the puzzle.
If I had more time, I’d discuss why I think that people sometimes react with such a visceral sense of disgust when they see art/ art-consumption that is serving/ seeking very different kinds of intrinsic rewards than they personally prefer, but this comment is making me late for work as it is 😅
Even If Not, Feng Shui purports to be D. A friend of a friend used to do Feng Shui consulting and the friend that she is also friends with told me that even long after she ended the Feng Shui consulting, she found it VERY distressing to be in apartments of people who have never considered Feng Shui and therefore set their apartments up in another ("wrong") way. Not exactly the same as taste, but it seems relevant?
I'd explain it in terms of novelty and pattern recognition. If you've seen thousands of nice paintings of landscapes your brain will create a general category for them, and start noticing patterns. Then if you see a new one it'll only be interesting to the extent it varies on some axis.
A lot of artistic movements came from people who had been immersed in the previous status quo. (Art schools where you had to do a million still life sketches, study all the old masters in excruciating detail, etc). So they came up with things that were interesting to them because they varied on some axis (e.g. lets do weird things with shape and colors). The really weird modern art is like a superstimulus that comes out of that process acting recursively
I really like the example of grammar. I do recognize that grammar is highly arbitrary, but I also get annoyed at sloppy grammar.
The sloppy grammar that annoys me is when someone fails to distinguish subtle differences in grammar, that results in a flattening of their language, and makes it harder for them to convey as many distinct meanings with their language. For example, if you do not distinguish between when you "have done" something and when you "had done" something, it makes it harder for you to talk about nested past tense (known to grammarians as the past perfect tense). Similarly, "was"/"were" seems important to me because "were" conveys a hypothetical in a way that "was" does not. If your grammar were to make it more difficult to talk in a certain way, then you become less likely to use hypotheticals or nested past tense(s) in your speech. Your language becomes flatter, and you are less able to communicate as many interesting ideas.
Notably though, alternative dialects do not flatten grammar in the way that being sloppy does. African American Vernacular, in particular, has more tenses/aspects than standard English ! To use your example, "she be going there" means that she goes there habitually or frequently - it is normal for her to go there. The closest grammar in standard English is not "she is going there", which implies that it is happening right now, but rather "she does goes there". This is still not quite right because it might occur only occasionally. The negated "he ain't be going there" cannot, however, be replaced with "he does not go there", because "does not" suggests that it never happens. He could have gone there in the past, or he could go there in the future, or maybe even he is going there right now, but it's not normal, so "he ain't be going there".
I am a fan of using grammar in a way that allows you to convey more different ideas more easily, regardless of whether it's "proper", and strongly dislike grammar which flattens the languages and makes it harder to make distinctions. This feels non-arbitrary to me.
This also happens in visual arts. Sometimes, the rules which exist allow you to convey more information to the "reader" of the art than you could if you did not follow the convention.
The most flagrant example of this I know of is in iconography. Different saints have different things ("attributes") that they're depicted with. If you know what these are, it becomes much easier to read Catholic & Orthodox art. For example, if you see someone with a book and a lion, it's Mark, and you might look nearby for someone holding large keys (Peter) or maybe three other people with books & animals (Matthew, Luke, & John). If instead you depict someone with keys, and a book, and a lion, then you're doing iconography wrong, and making it harder for people to read your art.
This shows up in more subtle ways in lots of other kinds of art. Scott & Ilzo described some of this when talking about the AI gateway in the AI Art Turing Test post. Ilzo could read the details of the art/architecture, and notice that they were nonsense, which you (and I*) could not have read.
While modern art & architecture does have some use of subtle distinctions to convey information, I do not think that is most of what is going on.
Modern architecture is an explicit rejection of the architectural languages which had developed over the previous centuries. It is not a language. It is a conlang. Or rather, a branching family of conlangs.
Much of the beauty of natural language comes from its expression of a real human culture that has developed alongside the language through the centuries. Conlangs do not have this history, and so feel sterile. Modern architecture similarly tries to create new patterns independent of its history, and so it is sterile like a conlang.
It is possible for an artform to begin as a constructed thing, devoid of the association of human culture, and then to build the human relationships to create a culture around it. This seems to have happened to some extent for the modern architects themselves. But it also seems like modern architecture explicitly rejects building this kind of shared material culture with the people who use its buildings. Modern architecture (often) completely rejects input from the people who will live and work in it. It also makes little effort to educate these people on how to read the modern architecture. I like to think that European peasants would at least know who the saints were who are depicted in their local church, and it's still fairly common to teach children to distinguish the three classical Greek orders of columns (Ionic, Doric, & Corinthian).
If modern architects taught people how to read their buildings, and then accepted feedback from the people who use the building most, then I think that it could develop into a new, beautiful artform, which is still meaningfully different from the styles of architecture which came before and retains the essential aspects of its modernism. But as long as there remains a social gulf between the architects and the people using the buildings, it will remain a set of self-referential conlangs, hostile to the people who find themselves forced to use it.
* My main reaction to that picture was wondering what was going on around and through the gate. There is a rocky canyon on both sides of the arch, but a flat, featureless plane through the gate. It read to me like a depiction of a portal - although I would have expected that the artist would have made the fact that it was a portal more obvious if that had been her intention.
I think there are some other aspects that are missed in this list. Any form of art or design exists in a certain cultural context. If you ignore that context, people who know it will find that result confusing, jarring, or ignorant (i.e. tasteless). Here are some simple examples that might help clarify:
- A wedding announcement written in Comic Sans. If you didn't know that font had a cultural background of humor and/or informality, it would seem inappropriate.
- An older white upperclass man wearing a kente cloth jacket. If you didn't know about the cultural history of kente cloth and its association with west Africa and especially its cultural significance in the US in the late 20th century, it could seem just like a bold colorful pattern.
- If you had never learned about Christianity, but seen some churches from the outside, you might believe that it was right and proper for houses to have a large cross on the roof. If you built a regular house and put a large cross on the roof, people would confuse it for a church, but not think it was just a nonreligious design element choice.
None of these are universal - they exist within a particular culture. But just because something is not an objective standard does not make it meaningless. I think this is a bit like the grammar case, but more like the priesthood fashion cases C and D. But the explanations are not "because I said so" or "this thing was important and useful once but no longer is", but rather that there is a common cultural language, known and used by most classes and not just the priesthood, but over time fewer people remember the language, and are made to feel dumb because of it.
This is not to say the arguments about functionality aren't also important. Roofs that don't leak, windows and balconies that are actually usable, cladding that doesn't peel off are all relevant.
Paul Graham's essay Taste for Makers https://paulgraham.com/taste.html argues that taste is real and important, but it also argues that good design involves avoiding temporary fashions, rather than leaning into them.
Maybe there's a sense in which the kind of taste Steve Jobs had was real, but the kind of taste Le Corbusier had was fake?
> Some of these rules are sensible and necessary, but others are arbitrary or even actively anti-rational. For example, it would make more sense to say “he goed” than “he went”, but only the latter is correct.
As opposed to the latin grammar stickler example, this one evolved naturally. And it likely has a sensible reasoning behind it, just like biological evolution. Eg "went" is a word that is used often, and it sounds smoother and better than "goed". It's mostly only words that are used often that are irregular, which is an indicator that the mechanism for it is in this vein.
...Mate, it's not that complex. We just think you're basic. Personally, I look down on others for their awful taste because the false sense of superiority it gives me is the only thing preventing me from killing myself. The description for the Actual Art Degree thought in Disco Elysium is extremely relevant here:
> Yeah, it's another copotype -- the worst one. The most savage and brutal. The Art Cop. Nothing is good enough for him. Everything is *shit*. You have to employ an armada of adjectives to depict and demean the mediocrity of the works and visual institutions around you. Really *flex* that critical muscle. Until the vocabulary for PUNISHING mediocrity becomes second nature. Here we go...
Trite, contrived, mediocre, milquetoast, amateurish, infantile, cliche-and-gonorrhea-ridden paean to conformism, eye-fucked me, affront to humanity, war crime, should *literally* be tried for war crimes, resolutely shit, lacking in imagination, uninformed reimagining of, limp-wristed, premature, ill-informed attempt at, talentless fuckfest, recidivistic shitpeddler, pedantic, listless, savagely boring, just one repulsive laugh after another.
It seems to me that a variety of people discussed a number of building styles - and individual buildings, and their surroundings - in the comments yesterday, easily demonstrating that there is no shortage of "tastes", as many as there are commenters perhaps - while a few, mysteriously invoking the cosmos, deemed the subject illegitimate.
(Had we instead discussed the cosmos, and our ideas of same - more and less informed by reading, or telescope time - that might have been more satisfactory; yet I feel most of us would have been on *less* firm ground than in discussing our own likes and dislikes.)
I once lived, 30-plus years ago across the street from an old woman who lived in the modest Victorian frame house in which she had grown up, having never married, never left it. Hyde Park Austin, the scruffier part.
She hung her laundry out on the line, easily viewable as it was a corner lot, privacy fences having not yet taken over. This demonstrated that she wore actual bloomers, which prompted a quizzical smile from passersby.
I went in her house once on some pretext. It seemed that it must have been almost exactly as it was in the late teens or twenties. (By which I mean, the furniture that people would have had then, which tends not to be the furniture of that moment, but an accumulation of the decades prior.) There was a good deal of lace or crochet about, and some needlepoint on that dull pinkish background that was once so popular, and an actual antimacassar, and I particularly recall a handworked doily draped over the TV. It was a little depressing to me - but not wholly unfamilar, as there had been a brief (shinier) "Victorian" revival in the late 1980s, Laura Ashley most notably (though since we couldn't exactly return to full skirts, corsets, bustles, and buttoned boots, we contented ourselves with the later drop-waist dresses). A friend of mine's mother was mad in those years for those teddy bears in their elaborate little outfits and went full Victorian/teddy bear picnic through all their common rooms - but it was a sunnier effect, not sad and dim. Still very much overstuffed.
I have since been in quite a number of old and faded houses of different periods, because I attend estate sales once in awhile. One thing is plain: people, even those with means, used not to "do over" their houses very readily. (Materialism really has increased!) They "did" their house upon moving in, with their heirlooms and what "living room suite" was on sale in the store downtown, and then just lived in it. For decades. Grand-looking houses in fine leafy neighborhoods often conceal within carpet and drapes that are decades old, and chipped furniture.
There was a midcentury book called "The Tastemakers". I picked it up at an estate sale, actually. (That guy had a ton of interesting books. As I often do, I looked him up afterwards, and found that he had seemingly murdered his wife and yes, utterly gotten away with it.) I didn't find the scheme of it especially persuasive - it was most interesting in its detail - but the title says it all: the author concluded that our tastes have at least in America for the past couple hundred years, been "made" by others, for what he believed were changing reasons. This is true whether or not you think you are ahead of the curve. Whether or not you hew to a Marxism-derived notion of what is bourgeois. You have a range of choices, and most people are satisfied with whatever's on offer.
(From my estate-sale-ing, especially in a military town, I know that distinctly not upper class people were gaga over Asian stuff, after the war - so I think that events may influence fashion - "taste" - as well as the various tastemakers.)
But I think we live with such bounty that there is still a great deal of latitude within that, for personal preference to exercise. For what you find pleasing and cozy - or, if coziness stifles you, for some other arrangement. (I'm amazed in walking by houses at night to find that some people are I guess fine with a single blue overhead light, as though they are living in a lab; I think they are "wrong" in some sense not to know about table lamps and so forth, but even as I feel it, I know it is "wrong" only for me.)
And always, we are usually hearkening back to something - for instance, even the brutalism or Corbusier fans, are looking backward at this point.
A good test of art is longevity, and the appreciation of other cultures. Westerners going to the Taj Mahal, Asians queuing to see Michelangelo‘s David.
David, if sculpted today, would no doubt seem kitsch to modern arbitrars of taste, and it doesn’t really fall into the modern definition of Art. It’s not difficult, it’s not challenging and it’s liked by the uneducated. It also doesn’t critique capitalism in a way that a banana on a wall bought for $6.2 by a crypto millionaire does.
Scott mentions the international style, which is devoid of all ornamentation but is not always fugly, if always bland. Brutalism - some exceptions aside - was always ugly; and was also something beloved by people who needed at least 4 years at undergraduate level to appreciate and more to architect . The creators had the luxury of not living in brutalist buildings though, and none did to my knowledge. The uneducated masses had to.
To be honest I don’t think future generations will flock to the rotting bananas in the same way they do for David, but time will tell.
I don't think Michelangelo's David actually stands out as better than all the statues made since. I think people go to see it *because* it's famous. It's the most well-known statue in the world apart from landmarks. If there's one statue that a person had heard of and can make an effort to go see, it's probably going to be that one. The fame is self-perpetuating. You can't make David unfamous by making better statues; it'll remain famous for historical reasons.
People tend to say seeing the Mona Lisa in person is disappointing, yet it remains popular, I think, not because the experience is great, but because its fame is self-perpetuating. Naturally people want to see one of the world's most famous paintings.
I agree with your main point that most modern art won't endure. On the other hand, if trends are somewhat arbitrary, there will be works from this century that will pass the test of time 100 years from now and remain popular despite not actually having more merit than other works.
“....in the old days, it was hard to keep white clothes clean in the autumn, so if you wore them anyway, it seemed like boasting that you could afford a staff of hard-working maids, and boasting is uncultured.”
…Scott is on to a slightly different explanation here, of why “good taste” exists. Good taste is a sign/signal that you are in control of yourself:
You do not boast.
Don't drink so much that you vomit at the carpet.
Know that if you place your napkin on your lap at dinner you only unfold it once – you never unfold it all the way.
...and so on. In short, estetic preferences has something to do with (or are at least correlated with) self-control, as well as with ability to understand subtle things, grasping qualities that are not immediatelly obvious to everybody, notice stuff that requires a trained eye, and so on.
In this way, people with "taste" can differentiate themselves from those who lack self-control, who do not see subtle sides of anything, and/or only understand what is immediatelly given. Pierre Bourdieus obsession with "The Distinction" is relvant here.
...and Norbert Elias made a grand theory about nothing less that the historical emergence of the superego in the middle ages, based in the increased value he claims people placed on self-control & on noticing the not-immediately-obvious with regard to table manners, esthetics and everything else under the sun (The Civilization Process vol I and II).
ha! I had this intuition about taste being like porn once but never found someone with the same insight. I was listening to particularly abrasive music and thought to myself: well, this is just like a fetish for my ears.
Furthermore, there is no "higher ground" for liking abrasive music as much as there is no higher ground for developing a particularly peculiar taste in porn
Normal people like his paintings a lot, but more "sophisticated" people dislike them. When I first saw them, I couldn't see why anyone would hate them. They are so pretty and charming. Do people hate landscapes, cottages, and sunsets? Are they just snobs who hate nice things? Is it because it's nice art about obvious traditional subjects?
Yet over time, I also got to dislike Thomas Kinkade paintings. They are like what people have said about cheap birthday cake: overly sweet and bland. The lighting doesn't feel realistic and nuanced; the sunsets lack the grandeur and gravitas of real sunsets. It doesn't mean I've gotten to dislike landscapes or sunsets, but I've gotten to dislike the kitschy version.
By contrast, I still like the paintings of Thomas Cole:
At a first glance, they seemed equally nice. On a surface level, they are also nice paintings about obvious traditional subjects. But they have a staying power and nice details that have remained appealing to me even after having them in my computer desktop rotation for years.
I think it's the same with McMansions. Traditional houses are really nice and any reasonable person likes them. McMansions look like traditional houses at first glance, but if you study them for too long, you get to dislike them. That doesn't mean traditional styles are bad, just that incompetent versions of them are bad.
I want to defend Thomas Kinkade here. I have close family members who very much love them. And they love them for precisely the reasons you dislike them.
They find his work enchanting. They like how he took traditional subjects and gave them an aura of enchantment. The unrealistic lighting lacking nuance is precisely the point - it's clearly not meant to be exactly realistic. It's meant to have a dreamy enchanting feel. And many people love it precisely for that reason.
I get why you dislike this about Kinkade's artwork, but I also get why many people love his work for the exact same reasons. And honestly, I haven't seen much artwork quite like his, which I regret since I wish I could find such artwork for those family members who love it.
>They find his work enchanting. They like how he took traditional subjects and gave them an aura of enchantment. The unrealistic lighting lacking nuance is precisely the point - it's clearly not meant to be exactly realistic. It's meant to have a dreamy enchanting feel. And many people love it precisely for that reason.
That sounds perfectly reasonable. I had been looking at his paintings as pretty and comforting. "Aura of enchantment" is indeed a reasonable description as well.
Thomas Cole is legitimately great. (Of course, I'm favorably biased toward all the Hudson River School painters, as that's what I saw whenever I looked out a window growing up.) "The Course of Empire", "The Architect's Dream", and "The Titan's Goblet" are in my desktop wallpaper rotation.
I'm frankly not familiar enough with Shakespeare to form an independent view, but a factor occurred to me: presumably some true and genuine aspects of art you may appreciate are like NP-problems that are easy to verify once you know the solution, but possibly really difficult to come up with.
Now, let's suppose Shakespeare is "good enough" to have lots of nuance in his works, which is a high but not staggeringly high bar. Given that there's entire libraries of Shakespeare analysis, once exposed to it, you can go "ah, this IS a really clever bit of social commentary", "it never occurred to me until now but that's brilliant use of language" and "I love the artful parallel Shakespeare's plot draws between x and y" and earnestly and unironically love the works for their clever social commentary, brilliant use of language and artful parallels, to such a degree you couldn't get as much out of any other work (and these features wouldn't in any way be fake but actual efforts of Shakespeare's craftsmanship). But that doesn't mean that there aren't contemporary authors one could appreciate just as much if not more, if one were to immerse into them just as deeply.
Certainly, while I'm not immersed in Shakespeare specifically, I know from personal experience that greater enjoyment can come from more intimate knowledge and understanding of the work. For example, knowing to pay attention into psychology of battle and knowing that Tolkien knows of it first-hand, does enhance my reading of Lord of the Rings, and this is a sort of enjoyment I could have acquired from someone telling me "you know, Tolkien fought at the Somme and is deeply immersed in historical sources written by and for warrior-aristocrats who also saw battle: you should pay attention to his depictions of psychology of battle and how it differs from pop-culture depictions like video games or ASOIAF". Or reading volumes of Tolkien analysis, which is a mere fraction of Shakespeare analysis.
Amusingly enough, Tolkien also had a negative take on Shakespeare (at least when it comes to Shakespeare's depiction of fantasy). He thought fantasy was ill-suited to the stage, making his opinion the opposite of George Orwell, who talked about A Midsummer Night's Dream being better watched than read.
[...] Drama is naturally hostile to Fantasy. Fantasy, even of the simplest kind, hardly ever succeeds in Drama, when that is presented as it should be, visibly and audibly acted. Fantastic forms are not to be counterfeited. Men dressed up as talking animals may achieve buffoonery or mimicry, but they do not achieve Fantasy. This is, I think, well illustrated by the failure of the bastard form, pantomime. The nearer it is to “dramatized fairy-story” the worse it is. It is only tolerable when the plot and its fantasy are reduced to a mere vestigiary framework for farce, and no “belief” of any kind in any part of the performance is required or expected of anybody. This is, of course, partly due to the fact that the producers of drama have to, or try to, work with mechanism to represent either Fantasy or Magic. I once saw a so-called “children's pantomime,” the straight story of Puss-in-Boots, with even the metamorphosis of the ogre into a mouse. Had this been mechanically successful it would either have terrified the spectators or else have been just a turn of high-class conjuring. As it was, though done with some ingenuity of lighting, disbelief had not so much to be suspended as hanged, drawn, and quartered.
Going down a level from taste in general. I have never encountered "don't wear white after labor day" as anything besides "fake fashion rule". So: does anybody here actually try and follow this 'rule'? if so, whats your motive?
I see people saying white looks worse in winter, but this seems like an odd thing to say when white is an extremely common non-clothing wintertime decor color. blue/white is all over everything near Christmas/New Year, does that also look wrong?
There's a thing called winter white. The existence of winter white gives women more stuff to buy. Women like having more stuff to buy.
I myself recently purchased a winter white tee shirt. I will in fact probably principally wear it in fall/winter. Under a charcoal cardigan, for instance, where a more pure white tee might suggest "undershirt". Maybe too, it is pleasing to have a white that is not bluish like snow, in snowy places. Color is important to me but I can't actually talk about it. I would similarly confine "jewel tones" to autumn/winter but I don't care for jewel tones against my skin/hair, so that's moot.
For me, the words - "winter white", "jewel tones" - are much of the appeal.
But of course, all rules contain their opposite. I have always kinda wanted a pure snow white, fluffy winter "party" sweater, done in a fine yarn. I will probably never have this, but I can readily imagine it.
I didn't know about winter white, but that does seem to be a handy way to discriminate between the two - don't wear summer white after (whatever date Labour Day is, I'm not American) *but* then you can shift to winter white/frosty and silvery blue tones that match with elements of snow and ice.
Winter white makes me think of ermine, the fur trim that comes from the animal which changes from the brownish fur in summer to the white fur for winter:
Winter white is definitely off of plain white, e.g. the white-white culottes or jeans you might wear in summer. I really like it though. I don't really understand in what direction, but it's not yellowish; I can't do yellow unfortunately.
I think of fur colors as being suitable for fall/winter generally. I will always associate cashmere in browns or taupes or grey shades, with luxury. This keeps me from falling into the trap of buying the colorful shades on offer in the catalogs or stores; my one foray into contemporary-affordable-to-me cashmere sent me confused, back to merino wool.
tl;dr - If something affects N% of the population, it affects 100% of the population that lives with N and their choices. As N gets large and coordinated, the thing can become load-bearing including the usual signaling routines.
I accept a weak version of A, along with C/D/G.
For the former, I'll largely echo Joel Long's comment above; for an example, I sharpy disagree that black ties on white shirts are a priori equally jarring as black shoes with white socks - ties are far closer to the center of the visual field, and therefore can work as a deliberate contrast instead of as a distraction. Think of it like the "sensory issues" associated with autism etc., but mildly affecting a large portion of the population.
For the latter group, I'm going to steal from @dieworkware: "Clothes are cultural language." Not grammar, *language*. It will look like finicky arbitrary grammar if you're trying to learn it from a perspective of memorizing a long list of individual rules, yet the naturally fluent may never be able to explain what they're doing beyond certain things being Right or Wrong. There are obvious functional ground rules - no screaming into people's ears or wearing sandals in winter - but an appeal to pure functionality absent coordination throws the baby out with the bathwater.
Fashion literacy doesn't get deliberately taught with a goal of universal comprehension the way reading gets taught, but the communication channel isn't empty even for the disinterested. Likewise, the skill curve is such that someone wandering in late from outside will regularly re-litigate “Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick”. It's cultural, it's path-dependent, and yes, it's subjective... but if I've learned even one thing from the old SSC, it's that you can't write off coordination problems!
tl;dr the second: "Attractiveness" is an extremely multifaceted thing. What is attractive is subjective, and can be uncertain even to the subjects. How much effort you spent this morning preparing to be personally attractive is objective, and visible to varying levels of detail. All of the above communicate socially-mediated information.
> What is attractive is subjective, and can be uncertain even to the subjects. How much effort you spent this morning preparing to be personally attractive is objective, and visible to varying levels of detail. All of the above communicate socially-mediated information.
I've always thought it's funny that *women* are the ones that spend the majority of the time shopping, applying makeup, and iterating between different outfits to get that "perfect" look, rather than men.
From all the data shows us (old Oktrends posts, Gwern's analyses, etc), the factors that objectively matter most for female attractiveness are age, symmetry of feature, and hip waist ratio. You can infer HWR through any outfit, and you can plainly see age and symmetry of feature through pretty much any makeup schema. The entire hours-long effort every day is sound and fury, angels dancing on pins, pointless. It will do barely anything to change a woman's objective "attractiveness" ranking relative to other women, which is vastly overdetermined by things that makeup and outfits don't change.
MEN on the other hand - a man's attractiveness is driven by his confidence, fitness, wealth, status, career, and personality attributes. THOSE can be messaged more through outfits. Confidence could be tweaked with subtle makeup, and fitness with better outfits that accentuate your shoulders or arms or whatever. If you dress like a million bucks, you LOOK more like a million bucks, and so higher in mate value. How you dress can actually be reflective of your status, wealth, and personality.
But do men care at all? Nope. Fashion blind, the lot of them, in jeans and t-shirts or hoodies.
It's always seemed to me we should be living in a sort of Louis Quatorze "tights and wigs and flamboyant frock coats" for men sort of schema, and it's always been funny to me that we're not. I mean, male BIRDS get it - what's wrong with men?
I suggest you're approaching this from the wrong angle. Try semiotics. Fashion, in the clothing sense, is about reconciling two irreconcilables: showing which group you belong to and standing out from the crowd. The result is the ouija board we see.
re goed: dunno what controls American language but here in England the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) monitors and documents first and current usage but makes no judgements. There is only observed and novel.
I've always wondered how OED handles learn and lend, which are regularly "misused" as in, "he learned me" and "I lent it off him". The online version says of 'lent': "Formerly often used where we should now say 'Borrowed', so they do make judgments after all! (The two words are almost homophones and similar in spelling, so, I assume, in ChatGPT-like fashion, they occupy connected nodes in the brain and uneducated (yes, sorry!) people tend to use the grammatical construct of the wrong one.)
Finally, what are you wearing these days Scott? I may need a new look in 3 or 4 years time...
The more you (mindfully) consume something, the more you’ll develop a sense of what about it you like and what about it you don’t like. Some of what you like about it might be fairly universal and quasi-objective, other things will be more specific to you. Some of it will be more “innate”, some of it will be more influenced by existing social norms you’ve been exposed to.
None of this means that taste is “fake” though, taste is just a deep appreciation and understanding of what makes you enjoy things.
I have “shallow” taste when it comes to coffee and wine. I like coffee and wine okay, I can discern some good from bad, but for the most part different coffees and wines taste sort of similar to me. The experience of consuming them is fine, it’s mildly enjoyable, but not really a source of significant joy for me.
I have “deeper” taste for TV shows and movies. I know what I like and watching really good TV feels really fulfilling to me. I also don’t like a lot of it, probably I dislike more than I like of the TV that get consumed on average. But that doesn’t mean I enjoy TV less. TV in general is much greater source of enjoyment for me than coffee, even though I think most coffee is good enough.
But upon reflecting I think the most appropriate theory is F - taste is like fashion, but with a class spin: taste is also about signaling that you have (cultural) capital without actually boasting about your capital, which would be distasteful
You could read Bordieu to get a deeper sense of this theory, but if you are lazy or don't like reading purposefully obscure continental philosophy there is this awesome series by Dynomight: https://dynomight.net/bourdieu/
I missed this discussion in its last incarnation, and after 5 hours and 180 additional comments, I likely have missed this one as well. But I suspect all of this is over-complicating the matter. Taste is just the baby brother of taboo, which is to say it is an evolved cultural mechanism for creating cohesive group behavior. The reason why it is so incoherent and pointless now is because we have drifted so far from our evolved cultures that the instinct remains with little of evolutionary worth to get traction on.
*You* hate it?! This precise sentence so infuriated my Apostrophe that it insisted I stop reading. I never reached the posts end so I have no idea what Scotts final conclusion's were.
Is it possible that fashion/architectural taste could be something like literal taste? If you expect something to taste bad, it more often does, and the reverse is true as well. So a normal person hears about beautiful art, thinks of something bright and intricate, and then indeed likes it. Sophisticated people are told that art is transcendent and subtle, and so they imagine a big grey square and then find a cement block beautiful because they expect to. Both groups then have their expectations confirmed and further entrenched, and it is only by being punished for their original reactions that they can be reformed to the other side.
My problem with non-sophisticated beauty isn’t that I think it’s wrong, but I think it isn’t clearly less correct classy art. I don’t understand classy art, but it clearly makes classy people feel a lot of emotions, so it seems to be doing something.
I've been formally inducted into one of the aesthetic priesthoods (I have an MFA in Literary Arts) so I've thought a lot about these questions. One extremely important factor missing from this discussion is purpose.
To pick an easy example: socks have a purpose and ties have a different purpose, both of which accord with the more general purpose of the men's suit; so it's not strange that high contrast between socks and shoes would feel different from high contrast between shirt and tie. Socks (it seems to me) are a transitional element between shoes and pants. Their purpose is mainly practical, but also serves the aesthetic purpose of harmonizing the pants and shoes. High contrast doesn't serve the purpose of harmonization. Ties have no practical purpose (hiding buttons is ornamental, not practical); their purpose is to communicate something deliberate. That makes high contrast appropriate sometimes (the tie says, "Look at how sharp and clean white and black look").
And the purpose of the suit interfaces with the purpose of the human body. Feet have a very different purpose from chests. So the fact that the color rules for foot clothes are different from the color rules for chest clothes doesn't require explanation, and certainly doesn't make the color rules any less legitimate.
I pondered for many years what makes a novel great. Eventually, I realized that novels do so many different things, encompass such a wide variety of purposes, that it's impossible to hold them all to the same standard. A novel can hold up a mirror to a nation and teach it who it is. It can satirize one specific political figure and two generations later be incomprehensible except to niche historians. It can speak one universal truth to any human being whose language it's been translated into. It can tell kids "It's okay to be different". It can create a record of the inner feeling of living in some particular time and place, it a way that's more honest than a nonfiction diary could be. It can represent an entry into a highly structured genre, such that its readers judge it successful if it includes 100% of some checklist of required elements.
Each of those is a different purpose. The rules of composition that serve one will impede the success of another. Aesthetics is bound up in purpose. Many of the difficulties this article confronts will fall away on considering the purpose of the thing.
There's a funny Wodehouse article about spats, but I can't seem to find it. He talks about how he would keep his spats perfectly clean and neat, because high class servants will see your perfect spats and let you into the house, even if the rest of your clothes are a bit untidy or threadbare. (It strikes me just now that maybe this is where Douglas Adams lifted his joke about towels!) So you can see how high contrast in spats serves the purpose of the outfit.
I did some amateur pondering on color rules for lingerie, and concluded that it works in exactly the opposite way as socks: lingerie should maximize contrast with skin color. Thus, "nude" is the least sexy color, as it invokes a desexualized Barbie doll.
I do think poseurs about taste exist at all and affect the popular conception of art at all, especially in forms of art with fewer degrees of freedom (like architecture), but I feel like it's pretty silly to be this dismissive! I'm not an art person at all, but I've enjoyed literary fiction a couple times, and that experience made it clear to me that "tasteful" things are the things which reward you for paying attention and thinking about them. It isn't as monolithic as this article seems to portray it - disagreements among art people regarding taste are the norm and not the exception. This article seems like an example of Scott's occasional tendency to misunderstand people by trying to learn about them by simulating them in his mind without much training data - people into "tasteful" stuff are happy to tell you why they like something if you ask nicely, or to try to help you appreciate what they appreciate if you just approach in a non-adversarial way. They only roll over and start emitting illegible non-arguments in adversarial environments.
The signalling dynamics of "taste is like fashion" are a basically correct, but it feels too focused on status. It's not just "good taste" and "cool kids": the way a person reacts to art that is sacred/violent/weird is supposed to be a glimpse into their personality. The mapping from artistic preferences to personality (and cultural context) is certainly not straightforward, but this "fog of war" makes signals harder to fake or suppress while also providing some plausible deniability, greasing the wheels of social interaction.
My analogy would be that debating art is like bonding over getting wasted together: it's supposed to make you vulnerable to revealing stuff you wouldn't ordinarilly, thus increasing trust or revealing significant disagreements.
Taste, in this sense, is fundamentally a question of familiarity with saturated content; alternatively, it is a novelty-seeking behavior.
We have it here, too. We get tired of people bringing up the same questions-and-answers that have been brought up on your blogs over and over and over again. Tasteful commentators are the ones who are familiar with the constantly-retread ground and are familiar enough with the general content that they are able to consistently identify what comments would be "novel"; we group in with them the people whose worldviews are consistently different enough that they, also, end up producing "novel" content.
Taste isn't subjective, but it isn't objective, either; it is relative. A tasteful commenter here might be a bore somewhere else, and a bore there might be a tasteful commenter here.
I didn't quite see this approach in any of the options: maybe participating in a cultural system of taste-making is inherently good (i.e suitable to our nature, helping us flourish), even as the specifics of the taste rules of any given time and place are indefensible in any kind of absolute way. It's almost as if learning to appreciate something that has been built according to *some* set of arcane rules has its own pleasure.
I'm sure taste making has many layers to it. It's hard to separate it from identity making and status jostling in a wider sense, the kind of aesthetics I appreciate (or denigrate) is a way of associating myself with some groups of people and away from others. But there's a strong element of personal enjoyment too.
And once again, just because taste rules are arcane and not metaphysically absolute doesn't mean they are completely arbitrary either. There may be rough directions in which we are inherently able to hone our sensibilities, even as cultures provide the specifics of the landscape.
Have to quibble that foray into BDSM isn't merely driven by desensitization. I've never read a convincing report of the psychological factors, but I can say that well before streaming was a thing and just at the point where porn piracy was easily accessible online, I thought to search for e.g. dominant women (and then you could argue that porn consumption further entrenched the tendency to the point of addiction). Incidentally, I find that years after quitting porn, this interest wanes unless you explicitly feed it. That is, I perfectly enjoy vanilla escapades without feeling as though I miss out on anything else, but if I indulge in s&m I would still enjoy it. I'm not sure how I feel about it today, but that could be because I associate it with a negative formative period. I think the overconsumption was harmful, but I'm not sure if BDSM in itself is.
Anyway, taste. This is about two components that cannot be divorced from one another.
On the one hand, taste serves a purpose in signaling, forming bonds. Once, if you wanted to stand out, you'd have to do interesting things like write a symphony, build something or perform a feat. In consumer culture we're told that consumer choices will make us interesting and/or likeable. Teens in particular feel this pressure. They have the task of sussing out what things are important to purchase and what isn't, in this arms race.
The other vector is plainly pleasure. Not much to say except some people develop a wider tolerance to variety over time and some don't. It's not all "faking", but some of it may be. For my part I appreciate a bit of dissonance in music and interesting twists and turns, but I've heard some avant-garde that really does just sound like noise and I bounce off of it.
I think the reasons Scott gives to be suspicious of taste apply to most human pursuits, including ones involving "objective" questions.
1. "Taste seems to constantly change." The way physicists do physics constantly changes. People find new ideas they like better than older ideas; this in itself doesn't demonstrate this assessment is correct or not.
2. "Even very sophisticated people seem to disagree about taste." Even very smart and knowledgeable scientists disagree about science, including objective questions that are theoretically verifiable by future experiment.
3. "When we see how the sausage gets made, it often involves politics or power struggles." It is true in all fields I can think of (including physics) that politics, money, reputation etc. play a big role in what ideas become popular and influential, not just who is objectively correct.
4. "The few scientific experiments we have - hoaxes, blind tests, etc - are not very kind to taste as a concept." It's very hard for people outside a field to judge which scientific arguments are superior--definitely random people will do a bad job.
So I don't think these reasons even suffice to reject the "it's like physics" analogy--in these respects art is like physics.
Physics seems to have changed much less since the invention of string theory than it did in the comparable stretch of time before it. But that may be because we've plucked the low-hanging fruit and additional insights require particle-accelerators on such scales that we still haven't built them.
Tastes and fashion change but one thing I've noticed is impervious to change: rich people like to be where other rich people are, especially when they vacation.
Unlike social sciences, physics differences seems to converge. Old theories can explain 500000 things, new theories can explain 500001 things, but they're (should be) in agreement for 500000 things. That one anomaly is why new theory is needed. On the contrary, social tastes seems like seesawing a lot in a cycle, divergent, and it'll never reach a singularity.
D doesn't seem charitable enough. it could be that normal people would perceive a light blue tie as feminine subconsciously, but tie wearers need sophisticated forum poasters to tell them that.
The cringe of the forum poster is composed of a magnified sense of the femininity, and cringe at the lack of knowledge of the wearer.
Some people like ugly dogs, some people like dogs that look as much like a pretty toy as possible. This is all the same phenomena. There is natural taste, for things like symmetry, big eyes, and colors that map to the natural environment, unique colors like orange hair/fur. However, people need to signal, the easist way to set a clear boundry is to do the opposite of what is natural. So as humans we are always playing with our natural taste, and it's opposite, mixing elements of both as fashion. So I think dogs with smushed faces are viserally ugly, in fact a wretch when they come near me. But other folks say I'm going to make the ugly thing cute, because reasons. The other thing going is something is slightly broken in them and a bit got switched from 1 to 0. It stands to reason if you have a natural taste for something, some people naturally won't have it and others will have it swing the opposite way. This helps evolution get unstuck.
I put a very high value on being surprised. The feeling of surprise is one of the great pleasures in my life, in part because it is very rare, especially in the fields where I am inclined to seek it out. I love reading fiction. The more I read, the harder it is to be surprised. I start to recognize certain ways of crafting a plot, or using language, or papering over a lack of imagination. I start to recognize certain styles that writers love and start to copy. The first time I read Thomas Bernhard, it was radical and surprising, and I got a lot of pleasure out of it. There are many authors who felt the same, and loved his style so much that they imitated it. I can vaguely enjoy reading those authors, but it's not the original enjoyment, because it's not as surprising.
And often, within the first couple of pages of a new book, I'll just think, yeah, I've seen this before, and I'll lose interest. It's not that I can guess every plot point, or write it myself. The texture of the language feels familiar in some way. When I think of someone as being unsophisticated, what I really mean is they're too easily surprised. For someone to say they love reading but to only read mass-market thrillers sounds to me like someone saying they really love math but actually they just love multiplying numbers together. Maybe what I feel is just envy at the reproducibility of their pleasure.
But surprise and beauty have to go together in some way. With the Bernhard example, it doesn't quite work the other way around--if I encounter an imitation of a style before the original, I get more pleasure than vice-versa (there's some surprise), but the original still offers more pleasure when I get to it, because writers who can invent an original style, even though they also all imitate to some extent, are doing something deeper and better than those who can't, something that is still offers surprise even on re-read (which is why there's often more surprise in re-reading a classic than in reading a bad book I've never read before). Some of this might be priesthood--there are writers who are canonized and to whom one pays greater attention while reading, and so ends up in some way more open to surprise. There are presumably some kinds of stepladders of surprise that one has to climb to be pleasantly surprised by, say, Arno Schmidt. There are formal inventions that are too easy to imitate, that were surprising at one time but now have been copied so much that the original is no longer pleasurable (say, a blank canvas presented as art). There are personal preferences in terms of what counts as good surprise. There are times when even people with great taste will get excited en masse about a questionable style (Ossian). But, even if I can't prove it, I believe there's still something irreducible to the best works, which manage to work within certain aesthetic principles while making them fresh or surprising or changing them in some way. Are these principles arbitrary? Yes, but if anything the writers I consider boring and unsophisticated tend to hew even more closely to these principles, whereas the writers who do something special break those principles in interesting ways. The priesthood spends all its time trying to catch up to its best priests, while the laypeople recite yesteryear's daring prayers, now thrice warmed over, and call it anti-elitism.
Maybe architecture is a bit different because we can't all live in twenty or thirty amazing buildings, so we have to deal more generously with imitations. Also we craft architecture at the level of a building but consume architecture at the level of a neighborhood, and there are artistic principles that apply to neighborhoods that individual architects don't pay attention to while crafting buildings. Still, I think this applies to many fields.
"Also we craft architecture at the level of a building but consume architecture at the level of a neighborhood, and there are artistic principles that apply to neighborhoods that individual architects don't pay attention to while crafting buildings."
Assuming the architecture "priesthood" has seen, studied, and experienced much more in this domain, it's reasonable to expect they place a greater value on being surprised.
This would lead them to prioritize novelty (the stereotypical groundbreaking modern building) over harmony and symmetry more than the general public, who relatively value harmony more (that modern building looks completely out of place in my neighborhood).
Taste is the ability to detect aesthetic quality. What you're really trying to determine is whether aesthetic quality is subjective and thus socialized, or objective in a way that people can be factually right or wrong about (like physics).
To begin with, the subjective/objective split isn't coherent. Phenomenologists who deal with aesthetics, such as Merleau-Ponty, characterize human existence as an embodied aspect of the universe upon which other parts of the universe operate. Regarding honey, he writes, "To say that honey is viscous is another way of saying that it is sugary: it is to describe a particular relationship between us and the object or to indicate that we are moved or compelled to treat it in a certain way, or that it has a particular way of seducing, attracting or fascinating the free subject who stands before us." The nature of the world is not subjective or objective, but relational. Sensitive observations we make of the world are not complete from what would be the standpoint of an omniscient observer, but they are true in that they reveal real and salient properties about the world. When something is aesthetically good, it's good in that latter sense.
A social and variable layer sits upon that activity of aesthetic quality; fashions change, but the desire to be dressed well and meaningfully is perennial and seems to be ubiquitous across cultures. The two are hard to disentangle because they're different aspects of the same process. Taste is a perceptual skill and can be exercised in a better or worse way. Like any skill, it can be honed.
It's valid to talk about it that way. MMP was discussing the experience of honey, in which its viscosity, it's sugary-ness, its color, and all else are revealed aspects of a phenomenon.
Yup! And, to expand your "matter of flow" point, it is the ratio of the shear stress imposed on a liquid to the rate of flow produced by that stress. Reproducibly measurable via e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viscometer
"Taste is the ability to detect aesthetic quality."
Isn't this assuming the conclusion, or at least framing it in a deliberately leading way? Suppose I say that WWF wrestling is the greatest form of art known to man, and you disagree. If I summarize our argument as "WWF wrestling has high aesthetic quality, but we disagree on whether this is subjective or objective", I'm already granting myself quite a lot.
I'm not sure I understand your lack of subjective/objective distinction - it seems obvious to me that physics is objective, but which animes are good is subjective. Your examples don't really help - to say that honey is sugary seems completely different from saying that it's viscous - for example, sugar is sugary but not viscous; oil is viscous but not sugary. I agree that it's hard to perfectly ground objective things (it may be objectively true that an elephant is larger than a mouse, but we have to experience them in order to get that), but this is the general problem of knowledge that philosophers have various opinions on and solutions to, and I don't think these just amount to denying that we can know stuff in a non-subjective way.
Can you explain more about how your perspective would treat, for example, the "is an elephant objectively bigger than a mouse?" example.
The elephant is bigger than the mouse in ways that you can measure, but aesthetics belong to a qualitative world that is not measurable. At the same time, it's philosophically inadequate (and feels wrong) to claim that the qualitative world begins and ends in the atomic, individual consciousness, or worse, is arbitrary and unreal because it's not measurable, or worse still, would allow me to say that at least for me, the mouse is bigger than the elephant if I stand far away from the elephant and hold up the mouse close to my face.
If you insist on keeping the subjective/objective split - which is an eminently reasonable thing to do - then taste is objective. This is the claim that Clement Greenberg made, and his basis was that if taste were subjective, there would be no mechanism to form consensus. Everyone would just like what he liked and art history wouldn't form. Generation after generation would not continue to gravitate toward Leonardo, Rembrandt, and so on. (Later Marxist and post-Marxist critics tried to argue that such tastes are formed and enforced by capital or some other bugbear, but let's leave that aside.)
The problem with Greenberg's argument is that it doesn't deal with the question of why preferences differ from person to person if taste is objective. To my thinking, the qualitative world depends on contingencies. A chair is hard, I can sit on it and it will hold me. To a drill bit the chair is not hard, I can plunge a hole in it. So the hardness of the chair is contingent on how I want to interact with it. The beauty of the chair is contingent on its shape, material, its workmanship, the examples of other chairs in comparison, and much more. If I have good taste in chairs I'll be able to evaluate those contingencies sensitively and knowledgeably. Taste is the ability to detect quality. Of course, I'm a contingent phenomenon as well, and I bear a different set of contingencies than others. But we differ from one another less than we generally think, and if I like a chair it's probable that someone else will like the chair for basically the same reasons. So it is with Rembrandt.
Another way of dealing with this is to regard the subjective/objective split as an illusion or bias of consciousness, and to regard perception as a kind of skill in which we reach out to other areas of the world of which we are an inseparable part. Alva Noë uses this model. In this notion, even to see something plainly is a skill, and taste is a skill of visual judgment that can be more or less astute, or exercised well or poorly. This has the advantage of softening the distinction between the measurable and qualitative domains, and allows lapses of taste to be failures of skill rather than failures to apprehend objective reality.
"If you insist on keeping the subjective/objective split - which is an eminently reasonable thing to do - then taste is objective. This is the claim that Clement Greenberg made, and his basis was that if taste were subjective, there would be no mechanism to form consensus. Everyone would just like what he liked and art history wouldn't form. Generation after generation would not continue to gravitate toward Leonardo, Rembrandt, and so on. (Later Marxist and post-Marxist critics tried to argue that such tastes are formed and enforced by capital or some other bugbear, but let's leave that aside.)"
I think this is part of what I'm trying to argue against in this essay - Hindu purity laws, grammar, and fashion seem to be subjective, but we can form consensus about them anyway.
That we can form consensuses about them suggests that they're not entirely subjective. Again, I propose that (assuming the subjective/objective split) there's an objective substrate to a subjective activity in such cases. The specifics of Hindu laws may be subjective but the need to live morally is objective. The specifics of English grammar and usage may be subjective but good communication is objective. What counts as good fashion at the moment is subjective but that a person may be dressed well or badly is objective. Moreover, in many cases, you're not going to be able to describe whether a given manifestation of culture (like subject-verb-object order in English) is an objective requirement or a subjective one because we're talking about two sides of a singular cultural process.
"If I summarize our argument as "[professional] wrestling has high aesthetic quality, but we disagree on whether this is subjective or objective,' I'm already granting myself quite a lot."
I would gladly let you grant yourself that. The problem is that if that's a subjective impression, then you'll have a hard time recovering your previous assertion, that professional wrestling is the greatest form of art known to man, because now you're making a subjective claim on behalf of other people. If it's objective, then you're challenged with articulating what inheres in professional wrestling which makes it a greater vehicle for human expression than any art form that has appeared over the same hundred-year history - say, jazz. You're not going to be able to make that case. They're wildly different creative forms, first of all. Then the emotional range and recognized masterpieces of jazz don't have equivalents in wrestling. So the subjective/objective disagreement is the least of your challenges. Merleau-Ponty articulated the relational model out of impatience with totalizing claims like the example.
On a related note, one of my criticisms of The Creative Act by Rick Rubin is that he doesn't spend enough time talking about wrestling, which he adores and has promoted, and too much time talking about painting, with which he clearly doesn't connect.
I wish he had said (if that's what he thinks) that professional wrestling has not been given adequate credit as a vehicle for human expression and discussed what makes great professional wrestling great. I would have conceded that he enjoys wrestling more than fiction or painting and listened attentively to what wrestling can tell us about creativity.
When it comes to art, the right question is usually not which claims are true, but which claims are salvageable.
Here to register that I like brutalism and McMansions alike. It's convenient having broad tastes. I have equally broad tastes when it comes to music, fashion and painting. Not through any particular effort, I don't think, but just because that's how I'm built.
Nor do I think I experience art in a shallow way. On the contrary, I think this broadness is related to my ability to really hone in on aspects that I like in a flawed work and really enjoy those aspects to the exclusion of all else. I wouldn't call that a shallow experience.
I may never be a homeowner, and I'll certainly never be able to build a home from scratch, but if I ever can. I will probably live in a building so over the top of that it brings together warring factions in agreeing that I am tacky. Probably some type of Castle or Aztec Temple or something.
I think there's some degree of "pagerank" (http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/) going on. While it does not explain taste from first principles, the idea is that "good taste is what people with good taste have". This is self referential but the process miraculously converges!
To tie this to a point I've made and tried to endorse elsewhere in the thread, I think part of the mechanism is that people get good taste by engaging with older generations of tastemakers, and the stuff they have endorsed as good.
It's the same way language changes: by exposure to previous speakers of the language. The directionality that path dependence imposes is at least a little bit arbitrary, but once it's established, it constrains you in such a way that you can't go arbitrarily far away from the previous iteration
All of this seems right, but I will offer a defence of the semi-fake justifications.
Until outrageously recently, pretty much all expressions of taste were some form of showing off wealth.
Wealth was in general amassed by taking it from other people and violently oppressing them in some way. So all taste was various flavours of robberbarontaste.
In approximately the early 20th century, we had the idea that this was a bad thing, and we should really not show off about stolen wealth, because that's kind of like showing off about stealing, and we're really trying to be people who don't do that any more.
Therefore in the 20th century, the artists/artisans whose job had previously been to stamp RICH LUXURY WINNER on everything became directionless, and came up with all kinds of crazy shit.
(It also became possible in the 20th century to get rich by doing good stuff, but there are still more people who get rich by stealing it, and we're still in the rebound phase from robberbarontaste.)
The crazy random ideas about what is good art/architecture/fashion are truly random and don't deserve your compliance. However, they do share a general good feature, which is that they are all honest efforts to work out what to do with the effervescent creativeness that seems to exist in our species, if it is not to be used exclusively in the service of the idea Iambiggerstrongerbetterthanyou.
I dunno who Greg Clark is. I mean, I'd be willing to consider pushing back the date a bit for some western countries. But I don't think anywhere had universal suffrage before the 20th century, did it?
The industrial revolution predates the 20thC, but wealth accumulation was much faster in the 20thC.
I'm using stealing in a very political and polemical way here. I'm not talking about petty criminals, but about the large scale and (in my view) illegitimate stranglehold on wealth maintained by violent rulers and their heirs in the premodern world.
He has studied probate records to see what property people were leaving to their heirs, which also allowed him to see things like which surnames died out vs increased. His finding was that what the Soviets would call "kulaks" were able to thrive while aristocrats killed each other off, and that this process led to people becoming more patient & less violent over time.
Oh, yeah, I remember now, the surnames guy. I'm not immediately understanding how his work would relate to my argument. He argued that social status has been very stable over long periods, didn't he? That's consistent with what I'm suggesting: status was won through violent conquest, then aristos effectively prevented social churn and maintained their families' social and economic superiority (through, I suggest, nefarious means).
I'm pretty uncomfortable with claims like "kulaks thrived...aristocrats killed each other off". Like, I can imagine that on some group level that might be true, but it still seems likely that for any individual aristocrat, life was much better than for any individual kulak. And during this process, the aristocrats would still have been exploiting the kulaks.
To return to the theme of the post, I certainly think premodern Russian architecture is consistent with the theme of Iambiggerstrongerbetterthanyou.
He documented DOWNWARD social mobility: in a Malthusian environment there are more children than there is property to divide up. Space at the bottom is opened up by the surnames that disappeared.
The posted link is very compatible with the idea that the state cracks down harshly on blue-collar crime while only prosecuting the most egregious examples of white collar crimes, which largely get ignored as a cost of doing business
The clearance rate for homicide is rather low in inner-cities, and homicide gets far more resources than, for example, non-fatal shootings. That there are still large numbers of people in prison is because criminals commit lots of crimes until they eventually get caught.
Your point about the Hindu priesthood reminds me that the same thing is true is Judaism, with the caveat that there are sects and subsects whose doctrinal differences are sometimes glossed over for solidarity against the goyim, but which lead to bitter internecine battles. I have formulated this into a law which says: "For any Jew, there's always a law of Judaism you don't know, and always a group of Jews ready to ridicule you for not knowing or following it." To lead back to the discussion of taste, these distinctions have some sort of basis tied to ancient texts and rational extension, but simple disagreement over these bases and bandwagon effects create partially overlapping zones of practice, with deviations regarded as lapses in understanding of the commands of God. So it is with taste, with similar doctrinal differences, sects, understandings and practices.
My reaction to that part was "_how_ sure are you that all the Hindu priests get the same answer to novel situations?" because as-a-Jew I can see that...not happening.
My example was very much motivated by Judaism, but I switched it to Hinduism at the last second because there are lots of (mostly Christian) religious people here who come up with motivated excuses for any Biblical laws ("it only bans pork because there were parasites in it back in Biblical times") and I felt like I had a chance of avoiding that if I switched it to Hinduism.
I do feel like it's almost miraculous how much rabbis agree on the basics even without a central authority.
I'm pretty uneducated about Judaism, but when I think of kashrut, I think of things like no milk with meat, different sets of dishes for milk and meat, etc. Although I understand the absolute basics are in the Talmud, my impression is that the Talmud doesn't list the exact number of hours (but most Jews have converged on six), doesn't specify that you need two different sets of dishes (but most Jews have converged on yes), and don't specify what foods are pareve (though most Jews have converged on the same list). I understand some of these convergences are Ashkenazi only, but that's still half of Europe agreeing on something!
I know of a few areas where there are genuine disagreements (eg kitinyot on Passover), but AFAIK those are pretty unusual and often highlighted as one of the places where authorities disagree.
>some sort of basis tied to ancient texts and _rational extension_
There is a mathematical analog to rational extension called analytic continuation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_continuation . This comes from complex function theory, and applies to functions in the complex plane. The basic idea, like rational extension, is that you start with the function in one area and can extend it (classically by taking its derivatives and building a power series) to a larger area.
The interesting point for this discussion is that, while this can sometimes lead to a function that is defined and consistent throughout the whole complex plane ( "entire" functions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entire_function ), it can also lead to _inconsistent_ results.
For example, if you take the square root function, (e.g. starting with the positive square root, e.g. starting at sqrt(+1)=+1) and try to analytically continue it around the unit circle, when you get back to the start, you will be looking at the negative square root branch.
So, even in this very simple case of extending a function with a perfectly well defined procedure in just a two dimensional plane one can get "inconsistent" (really multivalued, in this case) results.
This is kind-of the simplest version of path dependence giving conflicting
>doctrinal differences, sects, understandings and practices
i think scott doesn’t like taste because he thinks of preferences as exogenous. scott thinks of himself as someone who exogenously likes pretty, kitsch ai paintings, and the people being mean and saying he just has bad taste are bullies who just exogenously like other, more traditionally celebrated forms of art, perhaps for reasons of social milieu or perhaps by chance. why not let bygones be bygones?
but preferences and taste are also endogenous to the amount of time and effort you put into consuming and learning about art. time and taste are complements, up to a point. people who love art are compelled by curiosity to learn about it, and they rationally seek to learn from other people who have spent a lot of time studying and loving it. taste is not just a religious or social-hierarchical desire to learn the elite rules of the game. maybe part of it is that kind of herding/signalling equilibrium. but there is also a real hierarchy of human capital investment, too
accepting that you do not start out with good taste, that it is something you will acquire with time, and that your appreciation will deepen with it, is a good perspective to have. if i don’t like a piece of art, yet someone who i perceive as having good taste and a deep knowledge and appreciation does like it, i will often think “what am i missing?” it doesn’t mean everyone will converge to the same objective truth as they learn more—it’s a “heterogeneous rankings” world—but conditional convergence is strong
i think this is all pretty uncontroversial when discussed in the context of things like math, science, philosophy, politics and economics. students in the early phases of their education accept that those above them have a better appreciation of what is good and interesting in these subjects. for some reason, this breaks people’s heads with things like art poetry and fashion. scott is an aesthete in many ways, with strong preferences over writing styles, modes of logical argumentation, micro-political ideologies. but he also maybe wears sweatpants and t shirts because theyre comfortable, listens to the same music he got into in college, has some kitschy art (or maybe an mc escher poster) on his wall. to someone a bit more advanced in the areas of fashion, music, and art, these are recognizably “intro level” tastes. similar to how people just getting into politics for the first time tend to certain opinions (teenage anarchism, etc). i think scott should be open minded to the possibility that he—and most of his readers—have bad taste, and that’s not a reflection of their exogenous characteristics, but rather a reflection of a lack of investment in these areas
hierarchies of knowledge, experience and judgment exist in all areas, even science. it is rational for junior scientists to look to more senior distinguished scientists for guidance on which hypotheses to explore, which methods to use, what is an interesting question. in pure areas where applications are distant, these are not “hard” scientific objective judgments but are very important for determining what works gets done and where funding gets allocated. virtually all mathematics theorems published are “true”, but which ones are interesting and worthwhile is almost entirely a matter of subjective taste among elite mathematicians
expertise is not a substitute for truth in areas where objective truth does not exist or is not accessible. scientific replication also has limits (you’re not going to build your own large hadron collider) and adjusts very slowly (look how slow progress has been since the original alarm bells of the replication crisis were sounded a decade ago)
We both agree (I think) that people start out with exogenous preferences. Then some of those people take an art class, and after a while, their preferences shift to the standard sophisticated ones. We're debating whether that's just learning and deeply-internalizing a set of arbitrary rules, or something more interesting. I interpret your comment as rehashing that agreed-upon foundational situation, but as concluding that therefore it must be the more interesting one - if I'm missing an argument there, you'll have to explain it to me in more depth.
people start out with exogenous preferences, they endogenously choose whether to invest more time in consuming and learning about art, then their preferences evolve. the evolution is a mix of “learning the rules” and also something resembling human capital formation. investments in traditional human capital (education, training, work experience) create skills that are valuable in production which are rewarded by higher wages. investments in aesthetic human capital allow one to extract more* utility from consumption. to the extent i disagree with your post, i think it’s because you’re missing the human capital investment dimension
personally, i found the experience of studying math similar to studying poetry. i started out with preferences (i like algebra more than real analysis), but as i learned more i was able to digest more complex proofs, gained an appreciation for abstraction, and came to like certain proof methods over other (i.e. prefer direct proofs to proof by contradiction). similarly, i started out with preferences in poetry, but i learned to be able to read more complex poems without getting frustrated or confused, appreciated abstraction, and grew to appreciate qualities of poems that i had previously not been able to discern. i don’t think it makes much sense to say “if someone hasn’t read much math, and their favorite theorem is the Pythagorean theorem, that’s equally valid as someone who has studied more and loves Galois theory, since the latter has just learned the rules of what is considered abstract math by academic elites.” same goes for poetry, even though no poem is true and poetry is useless
another example is chefs or food critics learning to develop their palette. an extreme subjectivist opinion that says “kids who only eat mac and cheese with ketchup are just as valid arbiters of taste as gordon ramsay, people who claim to like fine french cooking have just learned a set of rules” is wrong. people who used to be picky eaters are very grateful they made that transition
*while i concede that in some cases learning more about art can decrease your utility of specific works of art, i don’t think it can lower your utility *over all*. (if some annoying art people seem to be negative utility monsters for whom this is true, this probably has more to do with their way of expressing themselves)
Everything I understand about taste I have learned from music. In music, there is a huge diversity of genres. There is music considered by many to be snobby or kitschy.
Snobby music: there is painfully screechy noise music that people unironically listen to and enjoy. Or modern classical which is similarly unlistenable. Many even find Bach to be boring, or bebop jazz to unpleasantly sound like playing a bunch of random notes at the same time.
Kitchy music, depending on who you ask, could be modern pop, or modern country music, or children’s music in TV shows, or Kenny G.
The biggest feature of music compared with other art forms is the dominance of pop. Unlike in architecture, the people’s choice is respected and celebrated. Of course, many people also think modern pop sucks!
I would venture to say that unless you can truly understand and theoretically agree why every single music genre has merit, you do not understand taste.
To me, the explanation of taste is that it is a question of context/audience.
First, you can think of making a playlist for a certain event. What songs should go in? There is sort of an objective answer to this question. Different music is good in different situations.
Second, people’s tastes change over time. Often you really do get bored of cliche stuff and start to enjoy the more “difficult” music over time.
My best example of this is learning to like jazz music. At first, you aren’t familiar to it, and it all sounds bad. The songs you like are things like La La Land, which is watered down cliche jazz designed to appeal to modern listeners. But as you learn more about the history, you been to understand and hear jazz differently. You realize how fake and inauthentic La Land Land is, and listen to more “original” jazz. Etc. there are so many settings where you can think of this type of thing happening: cooking, wine tasting, classical music, fashion, …
At the same time, La La Land is still an all time great work of music. People love it! It’s just in a class of its own (like Kenny G). If you want to play jazz music for a bunch of white people who don’t know much, La La Land might be the correct choice. Even if your jazz is better, nobody will care.
The reason architecture is so messed up is because (1) expert tastes are so different from the masses, in the same manner as for jazz, (2) expert architects don’t care what the masses think. The key lesson of music is that what the masses think does matter, and even if art is low brow or unsophisticated, it can he extremely high quality, innovative, and important (modern pop music).
>The reason architecture is so messed up is because (1) expert tastes are so different from the masses, in the same manner as for jazz, (2) expert architects don’t care what the masses think.
and (3) The masses have to live in, or work in, the result. And, frequently, the result is not fit for purpose (most trivially, flat roofs for ideological reasons in rainy or snowy areas).
I think part of taste is deeper perception, which can be natural or learned. I collect knives. While even a poor quality knife might cut perfectly well, there are many marks of quality that will bug you from the day they are pointed out to you. Is the edge evenly ground on both sides and from heel to tip? Are the pins flush with the scales? Are there gaps at the liners? And so forth. A quality knife has a good chance of lasting longer and working better, so this isn't arbitrary. Some people notice these automatically, but they are usually learned from other enthusiasts and through experience. I might pick up a knife and immediately sneer, and it might not be obvious why to someone who hasn't built up the knowledge and "taste". Custom knives cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars, for those with the taste to appreciate that sort of perfection in every detail.
I guess the difference is that I would be able to explain what bothers me about a knife. It's not just aesthetic, but has some use value. I'm sure chemists who appreciate the very best gas chromatography machines, astronomers who know telescopes, and gearheads who love cars all have the same kind of "taste".
1. Human universals. I am not sure that i have ever seen a non-western art, that is not obviously beautiful. Chinese and Japanese painting and drawing can be just stunning. Inca architecture is as much better that its Spanish successors as ice cream is than hay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coricancha. Even Bauhaus incorporates symmetry and geometric shapes. If you are in Chicago, make a point of visiting the Illinois Institute of Technology campus which was designed by Mises 33rd to 35th on State St. due east of White Sox Park.
2. In group out group designation and boundary marking. Gang colors Motorcycle leathers. Same stuff.
The grammar rule about pronoun use ("It's I" vs "It's me") ignores the fact that French, the foreign language with the most influence on English historically, does have a set of pronouns it uses for that purpose rather than the subject pronouns. E.g., "C'est moi".
One thing this is making me consider is whether "great art" should have broad appeal - a lot of these theories of taste suggest that the "unsophisticated person" not liking it is a feature not a bug, as it serves to differentiate those who have taste from those who do not. However, there is something to be said for art that everyone can enjoy, with people who are more familiar with the style not dismissing it but having the ability to pick up on more subtle nuances in the work that others might overlook or only subconsciously pick up on. Contrary to the more social-signalling type framing, I don't think that having taste should mean you have to only enjoy stuff that's intended for a narrow group of classy people.
I'm not saying that all great works should be as broadly appealing as the latest action movie, but there are films that are both critically acclaimed and commercially successful, and I think they tend to be the ones people remember for a long time.
I don't think this is limited to film - it can apply to books, it definitely applied to the plays of Shakespeare, and a lot of Renaissance art was commissioned by the wealthy but intended for public display (generally in a religious context), so I suppose there's a kind of beauty that snobs can appreciate but even an illiterate peasant can pick up on.
Architecture is the most obvious example of something that does need to have broad appeal, since everyone will see it and many will interact with it, which is probably why Bauhaus and its decendants were so divisive. It's fine for modern art to be avant garde and for a niche audience, that stuff is confined to galleries and the homes of people with too much money, but working or living in its architectural equivalent is going to be annoying if you haven't got a sophisticated palate.
(I went to the Tate Modern recently, I generally enjoyed it and there were some fascinating conceptual pieces that stood out, but I was unimpressed by a lot of the works there and generally preferred the older works in the National Gallery)
I view high taste, the kind that veers into snobbery, as a defense mechanism against overabundance. When there is too much of something — sugary food, TV shows, video games, porn, AI art slop — then it's good to have developed taste so that you can reject everything (except possibly the most excellent instances of the thing) so as to avoid excessive consumption.
This however comes with a risk, which is of being snob for things that aren't overabundant or that you can't avoid experiencing, in which case snobbery can make you unhappier.
I believe some economists have suggested that media should thus be taxed to prevent such overproduction, but that suggestion has never been popular enough to arouse much interest.
It doesn't seem like a great idea; to the extent that it's a problem, overabundance is better dealt with at the level of individual consumption, not production IMO.
A tax would reduce consumption. And the excess effort devoted to production is part of the problem, pushing some people into more socially valuable activities would be part of the point.
I guess my point is that I don't agree that it's not socially valuable to produce media in overabundance. Overabundance is how we get the actually good stuff. A million bloggers blogging can yield a dozen excellent ones better than a smaller set.
The question is, do we need new art? Or bloggers? There's already enough content out there to last a lifetime, so there is an argument to be made that the production of entertainment is a massive waste of resources.
Resounding yes to both. Art, blog posts, and entertainment in general are (more often than not) valued terminally, not instrumentally, which means that it's not coherent to describe them as a waste: we make them because they're fun/interesting/beautiful in themselves, not because they give us something else. (And also, I might add, because they're fun/interesting/beautiful to make.) When something is valued terminally, getting better versions of the things is good because it fulfills the value better.
Also, since the world continuously changes, the supply of art, blog posts, and entertainment provided by the past is insufficient: people will want content that speaks of the present.
there isn't enough content that engages with my personal interests to last a lifetime, and I would be very bored if it stopped tomorrow
also, end art and eventually existing art becomes outdated; as much as I enjoy old works, I also want ones which engage with the concerns of my own era
also, I think the closing of all economics departments in the western world would be infinitely more socially valuable
I really enjoyed C. S. Lewis' An Experiment in Criticism. The angle he takes there is that the big difference isn't between people who like good literature and people who like bad literature, it's between people who care about literature and people who don't see what the big deal is. It's a bit dated, because the second group who he describes as reading whatever without caring to pass the time, and then putting the book aside happily as soon as they have something better to do, would do other things today. You can still understand his point though.
He touches on people who use fashionable literary opinions as a status symbol, but he's trying to find something else behind the idea of "good literature."
I bring this up, because while I very much enjoyed this post, and think it is a great description of a common bad version of "taste", I think there is also good version, something like a skill, that people should not be discouraged from seeking. If you put time and effort into things, from football, to music, to reading, and so on, you can get a deeper and different kind of enjoyment out of them.
I think there's a very real concern that becoming a connoisseur will make your life worse. Audiophiles increasingly restrict what they can take pleasure in listening to, wine-snobs lock themselves into more expensive wines but it's unclear whether they take more pleasure from them, and so on.
At a certain point, you're only creating unnecessary annoyances for yourself.
If a lot of people love the piece of art, that seems promising.
If you can only enjoy it after subjecting yourself to punishing academic studies that tell you that everything the plebs like is in fact awful and that only this is TRUE art in spite of everyone else loathing it, less so.
Some great art usually requires education to appreciate. Like Shakespeare...which I don't get. I'm trying to educate myself to try and appreciate his work.
It's like BDSM, I think--but I say that as a taste priest, so maybe I'm just blind to my own indoctrination. But my experience of aesthetic disgust is usually processed like this: "oh, you've done x, but at the cost of y--which is also something you profess to desire--that's unfortunate." So, if I see like a new Academic Gothic building I might feel something like: "Well, you've got beauty but at the cost of anachronism and inauthenticity, how disappointing."
If we all went back to making Gothic stuff, it wouldn't be anachronistic anymore! It would just be perfectly good neo-neo-Gothic during the peak of the neo-neo-Gothic era!
I'm pretty serious about this, the things you're talking about trading off seem fake or pointless to me, like refusing to take medication because that's not the "authentic" body state you would have without medication, or something like that.
I get this complaint, but on the other hand, if someone wrote a book using 16th century English, and completely in the style of 16th century authors in terms of themes, subject matter, etc, I'd find it fair to call that anachronistic. Same with someone who started wearing togas everywhere; it's true that there was a time when the toga was an authentic expression of your fashion taste, but it's basically impossible for that to be true of someone today.
At the very least, our neo-neo-Gothic revival is going to be less religiously focused, be built using different techniques, and exist in a very different urban environment than the original.
I agree that there's a world where we revive parts of the Gothic style and it counts as authentic, but it is going to have to adapt _somehow_ to accommodate the intervening changes in architectural practice, built environment, and surrounding culture and examples that don't show any of that adaptation feel like fair game for being called inauthentic and anachronistic.
I think "anachronism" might be the wrong level of complaint here.
Insofar as the themes of 16th century books are things like religion, loyalty, and valor, these themes are timeless, and people should continue to write about them.
Insofar as they're things nobody cares about, like the biography of St. Hieronymous, people may want to avoid writing about it because nobody would care, not because it's anachronistic (ie not simply because people did it in the 16th century).
Insofar as 16th century techniques are ineffective and irrational (eg writing in blackletter without spaces which is very hard to read) we can replace them with modern techniques.
I'm not even sure that togas are "inauthentic" in this sense. You won't be surprised to learn that I think bright ornate 16th century clothing is prettier than modern clothing. But I wear dull black suits like everyone else, even though I hate them. So which is an "inauthentic expression of my fashion taste"?
I do agree that the goal shouldn't simply be to imitate Gothic and then call it a day. We should be aiming to create buildings that are more beautiful than any that have been created before. I just think that spending a century or two relearning Gothic and restarting from there would be a better use of the next century, in the service of this goal, than spending another century going in circles around the same old Modernist ideas.
"So which is an "inauthentic expression of my fashion taste"?"
Yeah, I agree the notion of authenticity here isn't totally well defined, but I still feel like I know what the criticism is getting it. It feels like it's a notion of authenticity constructed in opposition to a highly self-consciousness, highly affected style.
When I think about what it means for me to be authentic I think of not trying too hard, not overthinking myself... And it's hard for to imagine myself walking outside in a toga and speaking ye olde English in that frame of mind. It's not the only meaning of authentic, but it's valid, and I think it's a fair criticism. A lot of people find it off-putting when someone is clearly "trying too hard" or trying to act out a certain character, and I can get that a building can come off that way too.
"I just think that spending a century or two relearning Gothic and restarting from there would be a better use of the next century, in the service of this goal, than spending another century going in circles around the same old Modernist ideas."
The part of this I find easiest to relate to is the "stop going in circles" part--But I'm still skeptical that the way to get unstuck is to just go straight backwards.
We shouldn't fetishize Gothic, or try and pretend modernism never happened, and whatever comes next is going to have to respond to and grow out of what we currently have.
>If we all went back to making Gothic stuff, it wouldn't be anachronistic anymore! It would just be perfectly good neo-neo-Gothic during the peak of the neo-neo-Gothic era!
Seconded!
Look, if an academic Gothic building _works_ as an academic building, _fine_ .
Amongst other ways of viewing them, styles are _technologies_ . If an old technology works properly for some purpose, "anachronism" is not a good enough reason to refuse to use it.
I would no more turn up my nose at a technology of the past, in the name of avoiding anachronism, than I would turn up my nose at a technology from some other culture, in the name of avoiding cultural appropriation. It is sensible to use best practices from wherever and whenever they originated.
Let me try and clarify what I meant about trade-offs. I think my issue with reviving old art styles, like the Gothic, for instance, is that when these styles were devised, each component was instrumentally justified. So, for instance, light, and letting in a maximum of light is very important for Cathedral architecture, and that's why Rouen cathedral, for instance, is so exemplary. Now, if you were to create a neo neo gothic cathedral that hewed too closely to actual gothic style, it would be a betrayal of the aesthetic priorities of the people who originally created gothic cathedrals: now the style is an end in itself, as opposed to a means.
For another example, consider ornamentation. I don't disagree that the lack of ornamentation on buildings today is unfortunate, and maybe we have socialist architects or insurance adjusters to blame for that. But in a world where carving a gargoyle is a virtuosic achievement of an artisan, covering your cathedral in them expresses something quite different from what it would mean today, when such things could be cheaply mass-manufactured.
I would happily embrace a neo neo gothic style that embraced the aesthetic priorities of the original gothic architects, and maybe tried to maximize lighting in a space, or tried to include ornamentation from local artists. But where it would become kitsch is when it would unironically embrace the old look of the gothic, without any regard for what those people were trying to do. That's what I mean by "in-authenticity".
Is refusing to replicate an old style the same as refusing a medication? I say no. I think recreating an old style would be like chewing willow bark instead of taking aspirin. You can say: why are all our medicines now featureless pills instead of whimsical alchemical tinctures? Haven't we lost something? And I would respond: maybe it's more fun to eat willow bark than to take aspirin, but we can't go back, because that would be a betrayal of why willow bark was even a medicine in the first place.
I think there were some features of Gothic buildings that were done for practical reasons, but that many weren't. There's nothing practical about stained glass. They used the stained glass because it was beautiful. There's nothing practical about having statues on the facade. I don't even think there was anything practical about the spires.
Either something doesn't add anything (including beauty) over modern techniques - in which case we can replace it without any loss - or it does add something, in which case I don't think it's inauthentic to refuse.
We should never have our lives made worse by getting more options. I worry that your position suggests that if we ever discover some even more practical way to make buildings that's even uglier, we'd be obligated to switch to it (Wolfe has a section on this in the book - he suggests that corrugated metal sheets supported by pylons are like this). I imagine the price of corrugated metal and pylons dropping, and all the architects, crying, demolishing their modern architecture buildings so we can have corrugated-metal ones, even knowing that it will make the world worse and uglier, because now stone and steel are themselves "inauthentic".
Also, has materials technology really advanced that much since, say, Art Deco days? If not, we should be able to build Art Deco without it being "inauthentic". Was the US Capitol Building "inauthentic"? The British Parliament building? If not, how come we can't build like that?
"We should never have our lives made worse by getting more options," -- that seems right. And it does seem that architectural monoculture does make our lives worse. If a commitment to "authenticity" leads towards architectural monoculture, then I have to agree it's bad.
Also, upon reflection, I don't know how I could confidently separate the received dicta of the aesthetic priest class from taste as such. I remember finding Brutalism ugly, until I had it explained, and then I came to like it, to really enjoy it. That seems like evidence against BDSM and evidence for Priestcraft.
So, I suppose, I'm partly convinced. But what I don't see space for in your model are legitimate grounds for calling something like Caesar's Palace bad, actually. If I build Trevi Fountain in Vegas, it's not beautiful, it's trashy, and I don't know if your model has vocabulary for why.
The stuff about fashion and priesthood captures part of it, but those effects are layered on top of something more interesting. That other thing?
Taste is like mathematics. People who are fascinated with mathematical objects like numbers, sets, classes, functions, etc., often enjoy creating and tinkering with a variety of formal systems for manipulating such. Some of the systems emerge from attempts to explain, predict, or rationalize real-life processes observed in the wild. Others are the product of purely abstract exploration of mathematical possibility. Both systems frequently turn out to have some useful applications, but true mathheads don't see application as the litmus test of mathematical value. Mathematicians tend to feel that a sufficiently clever or elegant exercise in mathematics has a kind of beauty that is a self-justifying value. But you need a mixture of inherent mathematical ability and education in the systems and conventions in play to really appreciate it.
Aesthetics is similar. Sometimes you start by observing patterns in what people "naively" tend to do when making houses, clothes, decorations, whatever. You create formalizations that capture your heuristics about what tends to work out well in practical terms. But you can also create formal systems of aesthetic signaling and set about "proving theorems" for them. "Can we make an acceptable house without any (straight lines, colors, whatever)?" becomes like "what results can we still prove if we remove some of our axioms?".
This can easily spiral off into levels of complexity and abstraction that are at best tenuously connected to fundamental practical issues like dressing to make your body look good, or building a house that is cheerful and cozy. But the beauty of accomplishing something novel under a complex set of constraints is real, even if you need an educated eye to perceive it. And I think these symbolic games spin off useful applications from time to time, if not as consistently as mathematics turns out to do.
Yes, I agree with this, and also had some of these ideas in mind.
I even think you can get the same "on come on, this is just intellectual masturbation" feeling..."abstract nonsense" was I think self-applied by category theorists, but I'm pretty sure even practicing mathematicians have often felt that way about some of the more abstruse areas of set theory or mathematical logic.
You also get periodic widening of the scope of the enterprise that can be controversial: I'm sure if you told some ancient Greek geometers that their domain would one day include figuring out whether you can untie a knot, or whether you can cross a set of bridges using each bridge only once, they'd be somewhere between mystified and miffed... But if it's productive to incorporate stuff like that, it genuinely grows the field in a useful way.
Finally, I think a lot of the best practitioners can operate at all levels: I think of Conway and things like the "see-and-say" sequence; there's a certain playfulness and willingness to go back to basics. I think a lot of modern art has that character: what if we forget everything we know about perspective and whatever, and go back to playing with line, colour, form, what did we miss the first time around?
I think another factor in aesthetic taste is that some people are more sensitive to aesthetics than others. Not sensitive in a romantic way, but sensitive in the way that autists are sensitive to loud noises.
For example, if you make a website with stark contrasts between colors, it will hurt some people's eyes, but some people won't mind. To appease everyone, web designers usually suggest a soft off-white and off-black rather than #FFFFFF and #000000. If your eyes aren't sensitive to high contrast, it may seem like web designers are just being unnecessarily fussy. See also: "don't wear white socks with black shoes."
Another example is how some people have strong disgust responses and some don't. Take trypophobia: some people find honeycomb beautiful and some will find it unnerving. This is probably influenced by evolutionary pressures to some degree, and it probably has effects on aesthetics that resemble anything close to honeycomb.
With Brutalist architecture, it's more complicated. From what I've gathered, it makes some people feel as though they're in a creepy claustrophobic building where everything is lifeless and authoritarian, but some people feel it's a fun experiment with cool geometry and futuristic vibes. For some reason, if your brain doesn't intuitively register Brutalist shapes as foreboding and uncomfortable, you have a better chance of enjoying it.
I don't know why this happens, but maybe it's a much more complex version of the previous examples.
> If your eyes aren't sensitive to high contrast, it may seem like web designers are just being unnecessarily fussy.
No, the problem is that web designers are morons who don't understand that not everyone views their site on an 8K screen in absolutely perfect lighting conditions. Everyone can distinguish the #888888 text from the #888889 background, right?
I haven't even started ranting about today's near-invisible scrollbars!
That's true as well, but I think most people have a preference against high contrast modes. Most computer interfaces and IDEs have a high contrast mode but they're unpopular relative to standard light/dark modes.
I used to be able to get Substack to order comments by new, so that when I clicked on new replies they would appear right there rather than requiring me to scroll to the bottom. That option now appears to be gone. Does anyone know a workaround for this, like a query parameter I could add to the url to return to the desired behavior?
Nerds without much developed taste in the arts want to dismiss taste instead of trying to understand it (because they’re insecure or bitter, and saying smart things is how they feel cool among fellow nerds). But if they spent time trying to understand art itself, taste would not be such a mystery.
What does art do? It makes us feel things. Sometimes, it helps us feel new feelings. It stimulates our imaginations. It connects us with our bodies and with each other. It can alter our conscious state in all kinds of profound ways.
When we’re little children, we have a taste for breast milk and will love plain carrots and mild flavors. Lemon juice would overwhelm our nervous system. Hot salsa too. I couldn’t stand sour cream as a child… now I’ll happily dollop it on my nachos. I liked nursery rhyme songs as a child, but then my tastes developed. For some people, musical tastes continue to develop and broaden throughout their lives. For others, it slows down after adolescence, and they more or less keep listening to the same stuff from there on out.
What’s really going on here? Why does my dad prefer white bread and literally say “yuck” to wheat bread? And is he wrong? Wheat bread has stronger bitter and mineral flavors, which can distract from the sugars. Why is it that, the first time I did mushrooms, I started chewing on grass and really enjoyed the flavor? I even enjoyed the taste of some dirt. Native Americans used to dig a hole in the ground, fill it with mesquite pods, spit into the pit, and use tools to make a spit-mesquite-dirt mash that they enjoyed. Is that yucky?
Here we go: How come The Shaggs, a family of kids who could barely play their instruments, are often cited by musicians as one of the best bands of all time (per Zappa, Cobain, and more)? Are these musicians just playing a fashion game, wherein they find esteem in being able to say, “I have a secret power of enjoying music that others can’t”? It might be tempting to think so because people don’t like feeling that there is some real enjoyment to be had, but which they can’t access. “It’s probably not actually enjoyable,” they tell themselves.
Here’s a theory that ACT didn’t look at: Art has various costs and benefits. Listening to heavy metal at loud volumes has real effects — it throws tons of dissonance at eardrums, loads of clashing high-end frequencies. It can stir up sympathetic feelings of aggression, frustration, or anxiety. The pounding rhythms can create adrenaline. But the vocal melodies in songs like Enter Sandman can also feel sweet and serene. If slowed down and harmonized by Gregorian monks, it could be convincingly presented as a sublime historical composition. Some can afford the cost of entry for the melody. For some, the cost is actually the benefit — their personality, life experiences, traumas, or constitution crave the intensity of heavy metal, just like some people love the intensity of skydiving or fighting.
Other people’s personalities have them seeking connection to their childhood. They want simple, bright singalongs. Others want trippy stuff that puts them in a state of aporia — something to interrupt the banality of normalcy, which their minds can only handle so much of.
Of course, there are hipsters as well. They see cultural consumerism as an opportunity to play a status game. I don’t have to repeat all the tropes and memes we’ve heard about “well, I liked their earlier works,” etc. I know some people who don’t like sharing their favorite obscure art and music with others because they like the feeling of exclusive access, like dragons hoarding their rare artifacts.
But they are the exception to the rule — unless you live in a hipster record store, a modern art gallery, or an indie theater or whatever.
Art has value. Certain aspects of art can or cannot be easily attuned to by different people for a variety of reasons. But some will learn to attune to things if sufficiently motivated.
There you go. That’s taste.
If you think it’s mostly a social status game, maybe that’s because you have a taste for those games.
If art didn't inspire something in you, it failed as art, at least with respect to you.
"Taste" is two different things: One is an acknowledgement of this statement. The second is a different statement:
If art didn't inspire something in you, you failed, at least with respect to that art.
For the majority of people, the latter version of "taste" is their predominant experience, because the first group of people don't tend to comment on the unremarkable fact that somebody didn't find a particular piece of art inspiring, and very rarely attempt to correct the people from the second group.
Hipsters will certainly agree with you and say “yeah that art sucks” or “he’s got no taste”, and constantly analyze through that lens of failure.
(Although I think you’ve got the “predominant” claim wrong. Most people, if they don’t like something, will say “That’s awful.” “Sucked.” “One star.”
Not so many people say “I failed at enjoying this.” They won’t even say “you failed at enjoying it.” They’ll say “oh, you thought it sucked, huh?”.)
For me, it’s more simple, and without judgment. One’s “taste” is simply the recognition that something generally is or is not being experienced with positive affect. I have a general taste in music, but I’m not always in the mood for any kind of music. Because something fails to “inspire” me in a given circumstance does not mean I’ve lost my taste for it. I may have simply lost my appetite.
Marx would say that 'taste" is downstream from economics. To give an example of this logic, the fashion for plump women stemmed from times of relative food scarcity, etc..
-the goal of art is to cause emotional/aesthetic experiences
-people watch/read art and, ineluctably, judge its efforts to give them those experiences
-people articulate and defend those judgments
-the judgments of the most articulate people tend to correlate, and this is called good taste
The derogatory social proof/trend explanations play a role, but I think they’re subphenomena of taste and are simply much more prominent in fashion and contemporary art than in most other art forms like books, movies, poetry
When I want to feel sympathetic to things like this, I imagine it as something akin to the board games I enjoy.
I like games with long rulebooks that take hours to play and multiple playthroughs to learn to play well. Most people don't! The median person who encounters Twilight Struggle gives up a quarter of the way through the rulebook, before even setting it up. If they do set it up they either get offended that I give them a huge handicap, or get grumpy when they lose horribly. And yet I assert that Twilight Struggle is a really, really good game.
I would phrase this as something similar but not identical to your D/E:
H: High vs low effort enjoyment. If you are looking to get enjoyment out of something without putting any effort in, you look for certain kinds of thing.
You want board games with simple rules that are easy to learn and with little enough strategy/enough randomness that I won't reliably rip you apart when I think about strategy more than you.
You want music with a simple thumpy rhythm, and maybe a hot [gender of preference] singing about how much they like you.
You want food with high intensities of simple, desireable flavors like 'sweet' or 'meaty'.
But if you are willing to put some effort in as well, you can enjoy things that require effort from you rather than only enjoying things that are spoon-fed to you.
And many of these effortful things are much more enjoyable than the simplest things once you put the effort in! The amount of enjoyment I get from complicated games is clearly higher than both 'the amount of enjoyment I get from simple games' and 'the amount of enjoyment the median person gets from simple games'.
This is a poor defense of architects, who impose their tastes on everyone around them to a great extent, as if I attempted to ban Candy Crush and demand that everyone play Dark Souls instead. But I think it's a reasonable sympathetic lens for some things like food/music/poetry.
It was quite fascinating to learn how totally ideological the development of the principles of modern architecture were
It seems a fundamental motivation is to reject the social order that was and to the degree it still exists. I think I am emotionally perceptive, and I think I can sense a genuine and still current motivation where making something beautiful is a celebration, and therefore a betrayal of whoever doesn't have reason to celebrate
I think many people have a sense of survivor's guilt where any acknowledgment of good news is wrong because you should keep being angry until the last oppressed individual is free. I think this is a persuasive undercurrent behind the power of modern art and architecture and justifies an emotional and moral claim of a kind of taste. We the people would be much happier for society to be allowed to celebrate to a much greater degree. Elites can afford to performatively mourn, for the rest of us the marginal cost is far far greater
I think the closest thing there is to a human universal with regards to taste is “I think that looks hard to do”
This is why for regular normies, highly detailed representational art looks “good” and pretentious abstract art looks “bad.”
But “looks hard to do” is a bit situational. That’s why you can show a video of a record breaking single player eggplant speedrun in Spelunkly and people who know what that means will be very impressed and a normal person will be like, “uh cool, but what did I just watch?”
But this is a lowest common denominator taste level. The more widespread and universal it is the less likely it will appeal to niche elite tastemakers.
Note also that technology affects our impressions of what “hard to do” looks like. Naturalistic art had a real crisis to deal with in the wake of photography. Same for sculpture in the wake of mass manufacturing.
I think, at least on one level, the same thing is now happening with AI art. Even if elites looked down their nose on highly detailed representational art, at least you could win over normies with your prowess.
But now anyone can squeeze cheap detail - “cheaptail” let’s call it - out of a tube, effortlessly and carelessly. So what used to be a universal signifier of “somebody spent a lot of time on this and it’s therefore probably worth your time to pay attention to, Mr. Easily impressed normie”, now communicates nearly the opposite.
Not a complete explanation of taste, just a tiny slice of it.
“Taste is like BDSM porn” is the closest, though it’s really about sensitization and desensitization.
Desensitization allows the artist to ignore elements that those new to the form would find abrasive.
Sensitization allows the artist to notice complexities, or technique, that others miss.
So far as I can tell, most people (including artists) want about a 80/20 distribution of familiarity to novelty. As desensitization and sensitization occur, what is novel vs familiar changes, and so preferences are altered.
I should note that there are also definitely people who simply like what is most socially acceptable, and who would express different preferences absent social pressures.
This is a weird article that's kind of...missing the whole point of artistic expression?
If you're considering analogies for taste, it's strange not to consider that taste is a skill like exercise, or learning to play piano.
It's fine not to play piano. It's also fine to take piano for 6 months as a kid, be able to read music and play Hot Cross Buns, but know you're never going to be a master pianist. And it's fine to be a wildly skilled classical pianist who can't improvise or play jazz, and not to even have any interest in learning.
But it would be annoying if people started saying "I'm not sure piano playing even exists - almost nobody I know plays all those fancy pieces, and it doesn't seem to hurt them at all. Besides all the best piano players play different things, and we don't even have a good metric for ranking them."
The only gesture towards "maybe this is a cultivated skill" in this article just kind of brazenly claims that the skill makes your life worse. But enjoying challenging art that forces you to think of things in a way someone else thinks has been such a massive boon to my life I have a hard time imagining a good life that doesn't include it. And in an era defined by *failing* to understand the minds of others, I have a really hard time with this idea that we should all just look at pretty picture and watch blockbuster slop, and not doing that makes us snobs who are just signalling.
This conflates skill and taste. One doesn't need to be able to play "fancy pieces" in order to be able to tell they sound good. But if they sound like shit, well, they do.
I worked very hard to avoid this conflation and I think I succeeded, but fair enough. I used piano because it has different styles that analogize well to different high-end tastes, but I get why it would be confusing.
Let's try something else - sports. Lots of people will play sports recreationally a little. Lots of folks won't play sports at all. Some people get really really good at a particular sport.
So imagine a world where Scott Alexander writes this article: "Some people trust Micheal Jordon more than me to be good at sports, but I'm not sure 'good at sports' is even a meaningful category. Lots of people are saying that Micheal Jordon isn't even good at sports anymore, even though years ago they were saying he was fantastic. Even at the height of his popularity, he was apparently a mediocre baseball player.
But even if we ignore all these inconsistencies, it's unclear what the point is. Let's accept, for argument's sake, that it's possible to be "good at sports." Now you can't even enjoy a game of pickup basketball with your friends anymore! If being good at sports just ruins your ability to enjoy sports the way most people do, and if most people will never reach this mythical 'good at sports' status, then being 'good at sports' starts to seem a lot like a status game, where we just judge people on made-up metrics! Sure, you could give justifications for those metrics, but even the experts disagree on those justifications. All and all, probably sports skill is just made up."
Yes, thanks for this comment. Is it so impossible for a deep thinker like Scott to understand what people get from deep thought about art? I keep wanting Scott to meet someone who doesn't understand why he (Scott) spends all this time writing thousands of words week in and week out trying to understand the world and persuade people of his ideas. Just sharing inspirational quotes on Facebook works fine for this hypothetical person as far as thinking and sharing thought goes, so why is Scott putting so much effort into understanding how society works and whatnot? And in particular why is he arguing with OTHER thinkers, as if there could be a correct answer, when it's clear that in fact there will never be universal agreement on any of these ideas? Is it just the status he's gained from thinking and writing?
I think this may be a weakness of "rationalist" thought. One tenet of rationalism is that there actually cannot be a difference of opinion if everyone has all the information and acts rationally. So I suspect Scott, on some level, does actually think there's a correct answer to the things he discusses and that his articles are working towards those answers.
We have to be careful not to strawman here - the rationalist thought process doesn't deny personal taste. It wouldn't claim that there's an optimal piece of art that everyone would enjoy. But it would claim that for your unique psychology, assuming that enjoying art has more value than whatever else you could be doing, there is a correct piece of art for any given moment.
Appreciating art is therefore an optimization problem, and like the other optimization problems rationalism attempts to solve, we need to see past social dogma and constraints, and seek out whatever art provides an individual person the most pleasure. And we need to gather data and establish principles to determine how to guide people to the art they'd enjoy the most (Rationalist thinkers are very aware of the practical problems with this idea, they consider this a platonic ideal but are much more pragmatic in practice).
This isn't an explicit part of the philosophy but it's a quirk I've noticed of all these writers - the idea that each person has a single unified consciousness that essentially understands its wants and desires and at least directionally points us towards them. I'm not sure how to explain this well, but see Scott's bizarre belief that nobody can be mistaken about their subjective feelings, or Zvi Mowshowitz's constant claims that targeted advertising is good because you'll see lots of useful ads for things you want.
Add all that together and you get an opinion on art criticism that's like "okay well the only real data we have about a person's preferences are their subjective opinions, so what use is taste if it's not a collation of majority subjective opinions?"
People often dislike viewing Nazi art, AI art, appropriated art, and the art of the cancelled. They appreciate art by local and indigenous artists, celebrity artists, their kids, or the art of their own religion, for reasons orthogonal to its material properties. Art is visual rhetoric and hard to separate from the underlying moral stance unless you are ignorant of it or don’t care about it.
That helps explain why art is often ugly, and artists are fine with it. Sensual pleasure is only one feeing art may aim to induce. Moral rhetoric is not meant to make people happy, it’s ostensibly meant to steer right action. Seeing old bad architecture as the relics of past moral debates makes the most sense to me.
>People often dislike viewing Nazi art, AI art, appropriated art, and the art of the cancelled. They appreciate art by local and indigenous artists, celebrity artists, their kids, or the art of their own religion
I could not disagree more. What I like about viewing art has no component of political correctness.
I have a suggestion for all those who are skeptical of taste and, specifically, taste-makers:
Instead of focusing too much on what taste-makers say is bad, kitsch, etc. and getting upset about it (especially if you find yourself liking those same things), focus moreso on what they say is good. You don't have to buy into the hierarchy of taste that they are espousing - if you disagree, you disagree. But I think engaging with "the classics" directly and forcing yourself to try to understand what one might appreciate about them will still end up being an enriching activity. You don't have to buy into some sort of ranking that, e.g. "opera is the highest possible way to experience music" in order to enjoy La Donna e Mobile.
"But the whole mystery is that taste isn’t universal. It seems perverse to dismiss the sort of art that untrained people like, proclaim other art which they hate to be better, then plead that you’re basing your judgment in “human universals”."
Can't it just be that good art is deeper, and has these human universals *in far deeper and subtler ways" than bad art, such that any unwashed rube *if they found these subtleties" would agree the good art is more beautiful, but most don't have the patience or education to find them?
I think that total aesthetic taste of a person is a sum of several contributions:
- universal - what humans and aliens would agree on, shaped by laws of physics (don't know which),
- human - what humans find appealing, shaped by our biology,
- cultural - what humans of a certain culture would agree on, shaped by shared experiences,
- individual - shaped by experiences (including biological specifics) of a particular person.
Where the latter two are malleable due to the brain's plasticity.
Now I would think of this as a function of many variables, a hypersurface, whose output is a number on the nice-ugly scale for different parameters of the object being judged.
This function has shallow minima, so slight variations of the different contributions - mostly the cultural and individual, can override the more universal contributions to taste. But some of these minima are deep and they show up as some of the more general rules (preference for slightly broken symmetry, rule of thirds...)
I'm largely convinced by the signaling-based explanations for art and taste in Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson's "Elephant in the Brain":
1. Art is a fitness signal. Simler and Hanson compare humans to the Satin bowerbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satin_bowerbird, where the males make giant piles of blue items (hard to find) as a fitness signal, and the females select mates based on the impressiveness of their blue piles. The assessment requires some skill / knowledge on the females' parts, e.g., since one should have higher (resp., lower) standards for the blue piles in a blue-rich (resp., poor) environment--more on this in 4., below.
As such, art has to be challenging to actually be a good signal (in the birds' case, blue objects are hard to find in nature). This does a good job explaining not only why we like things like sonnets, which are objectively a bad form of communication (the *point* is that it's hard to communicate that way, which makes it impressive when you can), as well as why we care so much about extrinsic factors of an art (facts concerning the production of the art, as opposed to (intrinsic) facts that would be discernible from analyzing the work of art itself). The signaling explanation explains why we particularly care about those extrinsic factors that would make the production more challenging (I was impressed when I realized that what I initially thought was a painting by my friend's dad (a painter) was actually a quilt made by his mom (a quilter)). Similarly, it explains why we value live performances (risk of failure = more impressive).
This does a good job explaining many of your examples of taste (e.g., why we find symmetry appealing, and the shutter example). I also think it does a pretty good job of explaining taste in pure mathematics; journals accept papers based on the perceived difficulty of the result, and people particularly like when a hard problem has a short solution (since this is particularly impressive).
2. Fashion is a prestige signal, in exactly the way you describe in the section "F. Taste Is Like Fashion (Derogatory)." Being aware of fashion trends is a way to show that you are closer (in the web of social connections) to the "cool kids."
3. These two intersect, since conforming to a bunch of constantly changing rules set by the cool kids is difficult, and therefore requires both connections to the cool kids and skill (hence signals both prestige and fitness).
4. It's valuable to be able to assess what the good fitness signals are, and what is fashionable.
Like the satin bowerbird, you want to be a good judge of which art works are actually difficult and hence actually good fitness signals (otherwise you're fooled by an unfit individual). Similarly, you want to be good at picking up new trends, and identifying which works of art fit with new trends. Consequently, learning taste really does seem like a supervised / reinforcement learning setup, where you are exposed to works of art and high-prestige people with good taste (in grad school, called "advisors") identify which of those are "good taste" (challenging, and fitting with current trends) until you become good at identifying this yourself.
Also, because "good taste" is a useful skill that confers an evolutionary advantage, it is in turn one that you want to seek out in your allies (including mates), because it is something you want your allies and your children to have, and conversely having good taste is something you want to advertise yourself as having.
I think this gives a very good explanation for why sommeliers rate wines that they are told are more expensive / more prestigious as tastier. First, in those cases, they already know that the wine is expensive / prestigious, so they want to try to prove that they really can identify this (to advertise their good taste); hence some convoluted (and often fake) explanation for why the wine they're told is more expensive is tastier.
Second, being told beforehand the wine is expensive / tasty also changes the process because now the wine is essentially in the "training" (as opposed to "test") set. That is, someliers should want to move their taste assessment function on the basis of this new data point--and the role of changing trends means that they should weight newer points more than you might otherwise think from the logic of "it's just one data point". That is, while I argued in the previous paragraph that when presented with an expensive wine a somelier would invent a fake justification with the rationale "I want to advertise that I would have identified this wine as prestigious," the point of this paragraph is that they are also actually trying to identify what makes this new data point prestigious so that they can identify similar wines as prestigious in the future.
This also helps to explain your presthood with semi-fake justifications model for taste. First, I would expect that the semi-fake justifications often relate to extrinsic factors that make the production of the work more challenging, and it actually can be a non-fake, more objective question whether those factors actually do make the production more challenging. Second, I'm guessing that the semi-fake justifications are often generated in a similar way to the sommeliers' justifications for expensive wine above, where the assessors are motivated to generate semi-fake justifications to demonstrate that they are good assessors of taste.
>The signaling explanation explains why we particularly care about those extrinsic factors that would make the production more challenging (I was impressed when I realized that what I initially thought was a painting by my friend's dad (a painter) was actually a quilt made by his mom (a quilter)). Similarly, it explains why we value live performances (risk of failure = more impressive).
For me, this easily flips over into a "You spent _how_ much effort on this? Are you crazy?". It happened that I was once at an exhibition of artistic quilts (or possibly some other textile art with similar labor - this was about 4 decades ago). Someone asked my opinion of it, and I said I was appalled at the labor needed (and was actually comparing the effort needed to the effort needed to paint the same images). Efficiency is sane!
My theory: Taste (sophisticated )is like taste (unsophisticated).
What I mean is as follows:
Suppose you have 2 movies and you want to figure out which is better.
You don't care about which is better according to movie snobs. You care about which is better for regular folks. But even the question "which is better for regular folks" can have multiple answers:
1. Which one more regular folks will say is better if you showed them both movies
2. Which one regular folks would enjoy more if you measured their enjoyment level in their brains while watching
3. Which one regular folks will say is better if you showed them both movies and then waited a year and then asked which was better.
4. Which regular folks would say they like better if they were specifically paying attention to the question of "which will I like better"
5. Which are they more likely to watch again
... And probably a million other possible answers.
"Taste" is an attempt to get a more robost answer to the question "which do regular folks like better" than you get by just asking regular folks which they liked better (1)
Because ultimately we care about the regular folks. If all the people like X art better than Y art then X is better. But many people are not necessarily great at answering the question "which did I like better" in a way that coarilates with other facts we would expect from liking the thing.
It seems pretty simple to me, because I've seen it again and again: In art, music, film, writing, fine dining, you name it. If you don't have a lot of experience in these fields, then look at, listen to, read, and eat whatever you want, it's all good. But if you have a lot of experience in music, then simple melodies and chord progressions will bore you to death. If you have a lot of experience in fine dining, basic cooking will seem plain.
This progression that happens with experience has both objective and subjective components. More experienced musicians are objectively identifying increases in complexity and nuance (just look at the crazy things that go on in jazz!). However, they can also disagree on what's best based on personal preferences, or the differences in their personal experiences.
I agree that discernment is a great word and a better synonym for "taste", but I disagree that it's the more useful phrasing. There's a bit of chicken-and-egg: If someone is being discerning, *why* are they being discerning? Which is what Scott's post I think tries to tackle. My answer is that it's simply a side effect of experience/exposure/eventual boredom.
oops, my comment was meant to be an addendum, not a rebuttal. The fault is mine for not making that clear. We're in complete agreement.
edit: like, sometimes comments are less about bickering vs the parent, and moreso about adding to a conversation which onlookers might find use in overhearing.
>My answer is that it's simply a side effect of experience/exposure/eventual boredom.
Weird note: I just did a search, and no one has used the word "jaded" for boredom or Scott's (E) BDSM analogy.
On a somewhat separate note: If we think of some art form as having minor elements and major elements, reacting to experience/exposure/eventual boredom by
a) peering ever more closely at tiny details of minor elements and
b) making ever larger changes to major elements
are both possible tactics, but they are quite different tactics, even if the cause is the same
Notably, the fake-shutters-in-architecture example, despite being in the fig leaf category, actually seems somewhat universal.
Not everyone would care, but it is a preference that's straightforward to derive independently - sometimes you just look at the shutters and imagine closing them and then go "oh, wait".
Not everyone has the same opinion about this issue, but I don't think anyone has opposing opinions. Some people think that shutters that don't make sense are terrible; other people think it doesn't really matter. Probably in some situations many people might say, "Even though this might look weird to some, fixing it would look even weirder." But I don't think anyone thinks that too-small fake shutters are intrinsically better!
Great stuff. I just want to add: I wouldn't discount the role of raw economic interest in shaping fashion and taste. For example, another men's fashion rule is you don't wear a brown belt or brown shoes with a black suit; the shoes and belt must also be black. There's nothing jarring, though, about seeing brown shoes beneath a pair of black slacks...they're both dark colors, so that justification doesn't work in this instance. I sorta suspect that if you dug into this and tried to find out where this arbitrary rule came from, you'd find that it originated amongst amongst a group of managers and investors in the West Yorkshire Tannery Company circa 1867 or something like that.
Likewise, if you run a successful designer clothing company like Ralph Lauren or Calvin Klein, you have a plausible claim that you have Very Good Taste because you've designed lots of clothing that people like and find tasteful and want to buy and that's why you're so successful, but at the same time, your position allows you to shape what people find tasteful or fashionable to a certain extent, simply because you designed it. It's in your economic interest that what is fashionable or tasteful looking keep changing so that you can sell a greater volume of clothes. Therefore, you do what you can to ensure that this happens; to convince people that what was fashionable two years ago is now lame-o-rama and should be replaced at considerable expense.
The white socks black shoes thing makes sense to me actually! For one thing there’s the association of white socks with like, gym clothing. For another, I think in general “dark stuff on a white background” is usually considered much less striking/distracting than “bright parts on a dark background,” and the latter generally needs to be carefully done to not look weird or cheap. I’m thinking of like, black gamer headphones with colorful accents or a neon disco or even just a dark room with glowy red lights.
All black is classy yeah, but when something is BRIGHT in dark your eye naturally goes THERE. And most people don’t want that with their ankles only lol. I suspect that’s less tastelords and more hyper-awareness of people’s visual processing.
I also agree that a lot of taste/calling others’ work barbaric is based in not just trends but popularity games. Go to the heart of it, remove any politics, and you’ll find many people find at least a few admirable works in “out of fashion” styles. Some people are wired to not enjoy baroque but taste will help them emotionally overcome that or at least acknowledge that others aren’t barbaric for thinking so.
The whole article does read as taste-hostile to me though. Maybe I’m less hostile toward it because despite being a nerd I feel hyper-attuned to why people like the things they do, able to rapidly adapt to standards of art/fashion around me, and find it kind of fun to knowingly break rules.
I don’t know much about visual arts; I can barely write my name. I do have almost a decade of formal musical training though, and we absolutely have our snobs. We also have a robust system of justifications. There are two trends I see in music not noted here.
First, I think is relative skill level and education level, particularly in theory. I can enjoy music of any genera if the players are highly skilled. Knowing how technically difficult it is to play a certain piece makes it more impressive to a trained listener. Modern jazz is a good example of this I think, all the varieties of post-bop, acid, fusion etc. To the untrained a lot of this probably sounds like noise (and arguably some of it is, or its just chops for the sake of chops). Classical I think as well has some of this. The popularity of classical music seems to have decreased as the percentage of the population with musical training has also decreased. It was much more common in the past for regular people to play “a little bit” of one of the instruments used in classical music; there were also just a lot more professional musicians before the development of good sounding recorded music and affordable playback devices after WWII. This sort of thing is sometimes described as “art made for other artists”. As the number of artists drops, so does the appreciation of this phenomena.
Another, more pernicious imo, trend is simple economic envy. Since the proliferation of affordable recorded music in the 50s, and the rise of Popular music, there have been a lot of very mediocre, if not outright poor, musicians that have made a LOT of money. Rock and roll was the first one, but anything that could be described as popular music has this. I’ve known hundreds of musicians personally that are infinitely more skilled and have a better grasp of theory then many popular musicians that have made many millions over the years playing really very basic and simple music. The insults the jazz players hurled at the rock players in the 60s are probably the nadir of this sort of thing. When the market has clearly chosen the unimpressive but popular over the virtuoso but increasingly niche, all those people that have spent many years of their lives perfecting their crafts only really have snobbery to fall back on. I probably have to include myself in this as well, with the one caveat that I never actually expected or tried to make a living off of my music, it always just been an excessive hobby.
I will end this screed with a phrase exemplifying this second trend (which also happens to be true): The Beatles were a boy band.
I don’t really agree. If I remember the novel correctly, Ellsworth Toohey absolutely has taste and knows taste to be a real thing. He’s just adamantly opposed to promoting or even placating it because of his objectives.
> we know physics is referring to the real nature of matter and energy and so on
Do we? I mean, I get what you're saying here, but to the best of my (limited) understanding physics hasn't yet reached a bottoming-out point of "okay, these are definitely the things that actually constitute reality in themselves, rather than being useful abstractions describing interactions of those things". For all we know it could be increasingly detailed models all the way down, which would make physics a slightly more, uh, palatable analogy for taste.
I will say that there is a purpose to the kinds of rules that your English teacher promoted -- they actually make learning related-but-different languages substantially easier! (As a Russian speaker, "Я она" -- "I am she" -- makes much more sense than "Я ее" -- "I am her"). Languages in the Indo-European family stem from a common origin and so rules tend to be more similar than they appear at first glance, so keeping rules closer to each other makes learning languages a great deal easier. "The copula takes the nominative case" is a common rule across the Indo-European family (and I would be surprised if it were different outside of it, based on the logic of the nominative case, though of course languages get very weird and not all languages even use nominative-accusative alignment -- ergative-absolutive is a thing!), and changing it would be illogical and make learning other languages more challenging for English-speakers (and make learning English harder for speakers of other languages).
(Of course, there also exist common rules which just don't make sense. Most languages mandate the double negative, but I think English's mathematical attitude -- two negatives make a positive -- makes more sense than the more common cross-cultural rule.)
Nadie no va --> Никто не пошел --> Nobody didn't go ????
By which I mean that the Polish word for "it" serves as a copula and takes the nominative case. (In contrast to the regular copula "to be", which takes the instrumental.)
You can kind of say this in Russian -- an old-fashioned/formal/dramatic alternative to "я она"/"I am she" might be "я ею являюсь"/something like "I myself arrive as her" -- and this takes the instrumental case, although it's not a very natural way to talk. Might have to think about this.
“People feel on a deep level that poor grammar is wrong - misplaced apostrophes can send pedant’s into a rage.”
I’ll happily admit that I am a pedant and that I judge writers for making this kind of grade school-level mistake. I’m also pretty sure I’ve mellowed about this, not least because of how horrifically people maim language on, say, Discord, or in general text messaging.
I’m also a non-native English speaker and my main interaction with the language is by reading, not speaking. As such, someone not caring to distinguish between “their”, “there” or “they’re” may think they don’t have to bother with this arbitrary rule and that everyone knows what they mean.
This is importantly not true! I understand a sentence through its grammar, and I basically experience a compiler’s parsing error while reading this kind of mistake. Then I have to load the “speak it aloud and deduce the intended meaning” subroutine. It is more taxing and breaks the flow of my reading.
This could be generalized to some extent, I suppose.
Yeah lots of wrong applied grammar can result in contradictory meanings. I have the exact same experience as a non native so I agree that at least some grammars are seemingly objective and fundamental.
These may be fashionable now, I don't know. But I think you can make a case that certain very well made things are beautiful, in a way whose foundations go deeper than what Scott's calling taste. It has to do with the integration of form and function -- for example, in this skeletool the way the holes in the blades lighten the tool, and also serve as grips for pulling out the blade, and make an attractive lacy design. As a matter of fact, a lot of old machinery is beautiful in that way -- things with gears, for instance. Or Tycho Brahe's astrolabe.
Your models attempt to explain examples which tend to favor the idea that taste is subjective and about status signaling – i.e. what color socks or tie should you wear. But can it explain taste judgments that are far more universal: e.g. Shakespeare was a good writer, the Godfather is a good movie, the Beatles were a good band, and Notre Dame is a good building. Not everyone will rank these the same, but everyone will agree they are better than average. Otherwise, you end up with the absurd conclusion that there is no such thing as some art being better than others.
This points to some universal tastes in humans. These might involve a huge number of innate preferences: for certain colors, certain kinds of symmetry, a desire to learn about the world, attraction to certain physical environments, recognition of complex design, admiration for tools which are made with skill, etc. All of these preferences interact in highly complex ways so that a taste emerges with a particular flavor. One of the innate preferences impacting taste would be the desire to signal to others that you are a good and wise person. It gets a "vote" in determining whether flavors are attractive or repulsive.
Everyone has all these innate preferences in common, but in different strengths, and this leads to tastes that are to some extent universal, and to some extent individual. Social context will have a massive impact on preferences related to the desire for social status. For a construction worker, nobody cares whether you like Shakespeare, and in fact your social status might suffer if you talked about how much you liked Hamlet. So Shakespeare tastes bad to you. If you are an English professor, Shakespeare must taste good because if anyone found out you thought it tastes bad, you would lose respect.
Further, social context can change quickly because of fashion cycles, so tastes actually change with the times. Note that under this theory, we don't have to accuse people of lying about their tastes to gain social status, although they might do that too. They might actually be feeling that certain arts are gross or disgusting or awesome, if they are heavily attuned to the social effects of liking or disliking them.
Artistic tastes that are based heavily in the quest for social status probably don't lead to appreciation that is as deep, complex, visceral and authentic as those that are grounded in the other human innate preferences. But they probably do lead to strong feelings of disgust or aversion.
There is rarely a circumstance when the desire for social status is not affecting artistic taste. But it can be more or less, and most of us intuitively perceive a problem when that dial is turned up too high. I think that's what Wolfe is pointing about.
>Human universals don’t change that fast! Rules about what is vs. isn’t “jarring” don’t change that fast! Only fashion changes that fast!
To go back to architecture again, some changes (albeit decade to decade, not year to year) are driven by real changes in technology. In the 1880s
>High rooms counteract poor air quality
>Primarily for air quality reasons, the height of rooms had been gradually raised over the years. This made it possible to install high windows with separate, openable frames of which the top part could be used for airing, even in winter. During the 1880s, the heights of rooms reached a maximum and were subsequently reduced.
This _changed_ when fans driven by small electric motors became widely available, allowing (relatively) compact ducts to replace natural convection for ventilation.
I think the case for taste is stronger than you've given here.
I think under the priesthood case, many people find lots of meaning and pleasure in very deeply understanding this set of rules, and I think empirically the people who get the most meaning and pleasure from art are often those who learn the rules most deeply. I think the arguments against this make the most sense if one has a hedonistic axiology, but I think if was has a different axiology, and particularly if one is an objective list theorist, then the counterarguments seem weaker. I think there's an analogy to pure maths here. One can have multiple axioms underlying a mathematical system, from which follow valid inferences. I think it doesn't seem crazy to say that one of the meanings of life might be uncovering the vast depths of those systems, and the same could apply to art.
I think it's important to note that on hedonistic accounts of why complex art rules are valuable, it is ultimately an empirical question whether supporting those rules is socially valuable, but a different style of argument has to be applied to objective list theories accounts.
I think a second argument is that art has a social purpose, and better art either communicates different ideas or communicates them better. Importantly, this is an empirical claim, not a normative one. But one reason that lots of people hate brutalism and lots of people love it is that I think it is, in fact, effectively communicating a message - one of egalitarian high modernism - that people have strong views about it. I think many people love the novels of Jane Austen and Tolstoy because - they claim - they're extremely good at conveying subtle and deep arguments in a way that, say, contemporary trade romances aren't. I think people also often give similar reasons for liking sci-fi.
To be clear, I think that it's not at all clear that art that follows what is generally considered to be the rules of taste is necessarily the best at conveying those messages. For instance, Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Day After had a large social impact but aren't generally considered technical masterpieces.
Is it possible that taste is real, and only I have it?
More seriously: why not analogize taste to... taste? Human beings can become acculturated to an extreme variety of foods. Food is incredibly culturally specific, and one man's yum is another man's yuck. Some people eat casu marzu. Some people eat kiviak or surströmming or fermented mare's milk. Some people seem to enjoy the tactile sensation of eating sannakji even as it attempts to choke them.
There are fashions in food. Pineapples and gelatin molds became unbearably trendy in the fifties. The sixties saw an explosion in canapés and "exotic" international foods like fondue, coq au vin, and stroganoff. In the seventies, Julia Child revived French cuisine, in the eighties, sushi took us by storm, and in the nineties... You get it.
NEVERTHELESS, there is such a thing as bad food and good food. Fresh bread tastes better than stale. A smooth sauce looks better, coats food better, and feels better in the mouth than one that has separated. A moist roast tastes better than one that has been overcooked and dried out. Almost everyone will prefer a perfectly roasted piece of broccoli to overboiled gray sludge. Raw materials, technique, and execution obviously matter.
Also, taste in food must be learned, and there is such a thing as an underdeveloped palate. In childhood we gently introduce children to an ever-expanding library of sensory experience. This often takes them outside their comfort zone, and they might prefer dino nuggies every day. But the adult who refuses to eat vegetables often strikes other adults as - well, childish. Limited, parochial. Missing out on a vast and varied culinary world.
Notice that some culinary traditions punch above their weight class in worldwide popularity. I'd submit that Italian, Mexican, Vietnamese, and Japanese cuisine are surprisingly popular despite coming from countries with comparatively little global influence. People just really, really like pizza, tacos, and salty-ass noodle soup. You can try it for the first time as an adult and say, "Damn, pass me some more." These foods are, in some non-arbitrary sense, GOOD. By contrast, nobody who wasn't raised to eat kiviak is gonna touch it.
It is also possible for elitist food culture to disappear up its own ass. The movie "The Menu" satirizes this nicely. A disaffected auteur chef serves his wealthy guests a menu of culinary experimentation that has spiraled into pretension, unconcerned with nourishment and pleasure. Taste can be misshapen to impress others AT THE EXPENSE of satisfying the underlying needs food is intended to serve.
But some food is better than other food, it is possible to be an expert in food, and it is possible to cultivate one's tastes in food.
Good artistic taste is like an interest in solving math problems. Many people aren't interested in solving math problems at all, of course. Those who are want the problem to be challenging but not so challenging they have no chance of solving it. When you are learning math, remembering your multiplication tables perfectly presents a challenge. Then learning to add fractions presents a challenge. Then comes algebra and calculus. Then harder stuff. A big part of taste is *wanting* to solve the harder problems. The payoff comes in not only solving the problem but seeing the beauty in the solution.
Part of the beauty of both math and art is the element of surprise. The world is more enchanting when you can still be surprised. This explains why the *easy stuff* becomes insipid after a while. It also explains why elegance matters. Something that looks difficult to the layman but is merely tedious won't be interesting to the expert, e.g., art overly decorative but lacking pith. It also explains why sometimes an easy looking problem to a layman may turn out to be fascinating and beautiful to the expert, e.g., art you think your five-year-old could make.
This is a bit like your BDSM porn analogy.
To explain "prettiness", I'll add: pretty to a layman is something like the number "10" or the number "100". Prettiness to the expert is something like the number "23".
I know you're trying to simplify and summarize, but I think reductionism saves us as usual. A lot goes into taste, but we can consider a few layers or categories. In each category, different parts may be objective, subjective, universal, or idiosyncratic (universal and objective usually pairing, subjective and idiosyncratic usually pairing, but not always). But it hardly matters what we call them by the time we're considering a cost-benefit, discussed at bottom.
First, raw sense data. Symmetry, nice colors, etc, are fairly objective and universal. But any given person may have their own sensory aberrations—some people like pink, some like grayscale, some really like simple, etc.
Then there are higher-order concepts. Wanting your building/outfit/etc to be a coherent whole with some internal consistency seems semi-universal, though not necessarily objective. Preferring extreme anti-bourgeoisie is much more niche and subjective. Perhaps a more universal equivalent would be "don't put fake gold all over your Salvation Army". Anyone trying to make statements like the socialists would fit in this category though, whether or not they are more niche or more universal: Randian aesthetics of form and function, giving your tech institute floor to ceiling glass to look extremely modern, making hospitals white so you can tell they're clean.
Then there are the responses to existing rules and examples. These are hardest to sort into objective vs subjective, as you point out with the the Latin grammarian who points out a valid extension from a past rule but to a case where it doesn't fit well. And even the BDSM analogy seems tricky to me: yeah, I naturally appreciate a nice modern building more if it's not surrounded by equally nice modern buildings, so there's some natural slide toward extremism. But an even trickier case is black shoes and white socks. I personally hold this belief, and I don't know exactly where it comes from, but I think it was partially because white socks and white shoes look cool, and black socks and black shoes look cool, and so for years the majority of the people I saw wearing white socks with black shoes were unfashionable. Moreover, by the positive manifold, they usually had other unsavory traits. So while this perception is surely not universal, I also basically endorse the perception and (limited, local) abiding by its heuristic. "Subjective" and "priesthood" seem not to do it justice, since it's a perfectly natural response to my associative cognition, but it's clearly a derived quantity more like social fashion and less like the actual sense data of white socks and black shoes is unpleasant. I agree this results in your Barber Pole model, but to me it feels much less "subjective" and arbitrarily chosen than it sounds when you say "[cool people choose a signifier, it trickles down, etc]".
To these three you might add practical affordances: what the building (or clothing) makes you do by default. (E.g. the drug-riddled "streets in the air", or the fact that round tables are awful for conferences because they lead to big conversations.) This is even more objective (and imo important) than aesthetic versions of form meets function.
Bringing this back to its origin, I think you're interested in these metaphors because you'd like to have a good argument against socialist architects and other people who ruin the commons from their ivory tower with idiosyncratic proclamations about taste. I'd argue it's perfectly fine to argue from a cost-benefit perspective: the anti-bourgeois statements and desire to make a splash absolutely do not justify the worse raw sense data and the impractical usage, especially given alternatives. If an architect (or fashionista, etc) is too caught up in responding to examples or pushing an ideology to build things that help people, they're failing their job. That means form that improves function, affordances and practicality, sensorily pleasing data, and creative new cost-effective and constraint-cognisant methods to achieve these. Those modernist socialist architects sound more like a priesthood, but I certainly don't think fashion or architecture inherently evolves in this manner.
First, Scott, you're collapsing together taste as a social convention and personal sense of aesthetics. Social conventions are real, they're probably as bad as you describe, but they're at best piggybacking on some real, psychological mechanism of aesthetic pleasure (and displeasure), at worst, completely uncorrelated with it. The moment you (impersonal you) try to discuss taste as a social convention, you sound like you're denying the existence of psychological mechanism of aesthetics, and then you sound like you're claiming people's aesthetic experiences aren't real and everyone with a taste (different than you) is just a poser. This is a bad way to accuse people of being posers (because it's easily dismissed with you simply missing an universal human experience, which at this point implies literally being tasteless). It's an even worse way to actually try to understand taste, because personal aesthetic experience is the (not a, the) fundamental part of it (social conventions can of course affect it by pushing you to rewire yourself to better conform to them; there's still something in there that needs to be rewired).
Second, you've omitted the simplest possible explanation that taste is like, well, duh, taste. Just like we seek things that are pleasurable to eat (because they provide nutrition, are known to be safe to consume, etc.), we seek things that are pleasurable to experience (because they stimulate our minds, affirm our sense of order in the world, etc.). Art and aesthetics are arguably a lot more subjective, and I'd like to explicitly denounce any and all claims that some cuisines/artstyles are superior to others, but if you can see how some people would claim that McDonalds and sodas are probably not the best food around and the normal people who consume them are being deceived by an overly simplistic interpretation of positive signals from their tastebuds, or how spices can be objectively beneficial despite being an acquired taste contrary to our basic instincts, then it should not be difficult to see how similar claims could be made about aesthetics.
“It’s not immediately obvious why you would want this skill - it makes your life worse, because you’ll just be fretting over flaws you see in everything. ”
Doesn’t this prove too much? Just about everything we enjoy about today’s world happened because someone was bugged enough by a flaw in the order of things to work out a solution, which eventually caught on when the existence of the solution made plain how insufferable the status quo was.
If you’re not dissatisfied with the little flaws in your life, why would you strive to make more money (ie bring more wealth into existence)? If this effect is widespread, you don’t even get efficient markets since making money ceases to be a widespread incentive!
In the West it is considered more cultured and sophisticated to able to enjoy and appreciate many different sorts of cuisine. The hipsters and socialites will wax rhapsodic about not just Mexican or Chinese but Ethiopian fusion, Peruvian, Mongolian cuisine etc. the more varied your taste and the more you can appreciate the better - either in its simplicity or complexity, and if you like the really gross stuff by local standards, the exotic delicacy, you get even more bonus points.
Only liking your cultures food is very philistine.
But art operates in reverse, a narrowing of appreciation to exclude as much as possible rather than expansion.
Why?
Because taste is not real underneath its all just status and power and signaling.
When are was really hard to make, having it at all was sophisticated. Just like in the book as it got easy to make, they invented careful rules only the rich and cool enough people could keep up with.
But food operates in the reverse, poor people only have the access to, and therefore narrowed preference for, their local quisine. Only the rich can afford to grow up eating food from all over the world.
>But art operates in reverse, a narrowing of appreciation to exclude as much as possible rather than expansion.
No, no. An art connoisseur is going to appreciate many more genres of art than a layman. For instance, most people are only interested in the musical genres that were popular in their culture when they were young. It works exactly like your example with food.
There is a satiation effect concerning food, with a reverse side to it - after some hungry time bland food tastes delicious. I suspect a bit of that works with aesthetics, too. Almost anybody can hum a simple tune, some can sing, some carve little figures or braid hair, but something special like a traveling band of musicians or the pictures and sculptures in a town church gets valued higher. People with daily access to high-end art lose their taste for it.
I'm married to an architect and I would advocate for the "Taste Is Like BDSM Porn" theory. They're total hipsters who are tired of the normie stuff even when it looks pretty (e.g. my wife hates "live edge")
1-Skill with a ceiling. In some particular field practitioners can be distinguished by their skill, but at the very top all practitioners are equivalent. For the average person, their preference will align with the skill. But among those at the very top, they need to find something to distinguish one from another. Of necessity, these things will be orthogonal to skill. To the average person, this may result in outputs that seem equivalent, or even inferior, because they are judging based on skill.
2-Taste is subjective and fixed. Two people experiencing the same thing may have different reactions to it if one is more sensitive than the other. The less sensitive one will be inclined to seek out further stimulation, experiences that will seem unnecessary at best and unpleasant at worst to the more sensitive person.
I don't know how useful the second model is. I think it might describe food tastes, but it doesn't seem like many other artistic fields are focused on pure sensation.
I like the first model, as it dodges the physics vs priesthood argument. The elements pursued at the highest level of a particular field are not arbitrary, but will not be distinguishable to an amateur either.
But my favorite part of my first model is that it makes predictions! Specifically, any event that raises the skill level experienced by the average person should make the original elements appreciable to the average person. Two examples I've thought of are mass distribution and AI.
So in music, the advent of radio and recordings should have resulted in the average person's taste moving to match the elite, since everyone has access to the best musical artists. Does the profusion of musical genres support this? Or does the continued strength of pop music show that skill isn't relevant to average preference after all.
Likewise, now that AI can create images easily that before could only be produced by talented and experienced individuals, we should see a shift in tastes, and an increase in the popularity of art that is currently only preferred by the elite.
Music would likely be a more helpful place to start the conversation than visual art.
First, my sense is that the sort of people who read this blog are somewhat likely (20%, maybe more), to have spent many years studying an instrument and possibly received some formal education in Western classical music. Probably vanishingly few of us are professional musicians, but it's overall better than visual arts where any kind of real experience is probably below 5%.
Second, music has a clear division into classical and popular forms, but taste exists within both and many non-experts have strong preferences within both classical and popular music. That should steer us decisively away from the idea that taste is simply elitism, even though elitists certainly exist. This doesn't rule out the priesthood analogy, however, since there are many priesthoods.
Looking at music, then, here's some relevant observations I thought about while reading the post. There were some periods when it considered innovative to blend elements of Jamaican genres, reggae and ska, with Western styles. Reggae and ska were themselves products of cultural fusion, but they were far enough from Western rock music that the blend made for some novel sounds. But many of the resulting songs probably sounded hopelessly kitschy or just bad to people from the Caribbean where those styles and their ancestors were commonplace, and as the styles became commonplace in the West we came to see some of the songs (I'm not saying they must have been the same ones) as kitschy. Taste changed in a matter of decades, but not for some sketchy reason, I'd argue that anyone who just listens to a pop radio station would agree on the broad strokes. It's similar to the grammar or justified priesthood analogies, but there's something more intuitive. Maybe not as unshakeable as physics, but something that comes naturally to people with a common set of experiences. When the experiences are different, reactions could be completely different.
This probably has a lot to do with why styles of popular music go so decisively in and out of fashion, persisting and getting revived in different generations and locations. As taste gets more refined, the amount of deviation needed to avoid seeming cliched goes up while the amount of deviation permitted to avoid losing most listeners goes down, and so a new context is needed for musicians to once again feel like there's something new they can try out.
What happens if you disregard innovation? Look at Shibuya kei, the product of a bunch of Japanese people who were deeply interested in 20th century American and British popular music and decided to create music to match their tastes. In this new context with a new blend of experiences they made something definable on its own. But to many sophisticated fans of pop music, Shibuya kei is the embodiment of kitsch. The Shibuya kei artists didn't set out to innovate in the genres they imitated, they set out to make more of what sounded good. It's said to lack the individuality and context that makes great music. Fair enough, but even its harsh critics, who have a similar list of musical favorites, are forced to admit it sounds good. The artists may not have a grasp of English grammar, but their musical grammar is in sync with people who have sophisticated taste in pop. The fact that it's not enough goes against the grammar analogy.
As one gets deeper into music, it seems like there are a few paths that naturally emerge. You could chase novelty, looking for music that sounds like nothing you've heard before, and end up in subgenres of rock and electronic music. It's like the BDSM analogy. Alternatively you could chase the stuff that emerges from a deep understanding of the medium and strives for excellence in expression, pushing the limits of musical grammar. That's classical music.
We get weird modernist music primarily from people who go a third way and take an interest in the story behind the music. We're often taught when trying to appreciate difficult art in school to put ourselves in the artist's shoes and try to feel the feelings that went into the work, or to appreciate the situation and tools they were working with. Less artificially, we often find a deeper appreciation of our favorite rock bands or classical composers when we learn their life stories and their creative process. Modernist art sees this demand for self-expression and/or having a unique creative process and optimizes on that. But it's destined for unpopularity because most people are not so interested in studying obscure forms of self-expression that they're willing to sacrifice novelty or ignore whether the musical grammar sounds right.
When people with a taste for abstract, self-expressive works (or works with a political/religious message, which people appreciate in a similar way) in any artistic medium are elevated to a higher social status, like in some corners of academia, and the artists get more attention from elite audiences, I believe that's where it starts to look suspicious to regular folks. Unfortunately, I think it's inevitable that the academic priesthood of the 21st century has a distinct taste, just as it was inevitable that '80s goths had a distinct taste. Music (or aesthetics more broadly, but I think music is particularly potent) and your social circle reinforce each other. The question is whether this preference harms society's ability to produce art that speaks to regular folks. It hasn't in music, but maybe it has in architecture.
Anyway I'm going to go rock out to some Shibuya kei to prove I'm not a music snob.
You are rightfully identifying the contradictions inherit in the idea of "good taste" if you don't also accept the "objective good determined by God" foundation for it. If aesthetics have no objective founding, then they're just priesthoods and fashions and status games.
Your criticism of the objective idea is that taste is not universal, which it should be if objective. I would argue that tase is universal, to an extent. Of course, I am also on your side when it comes to the architecture question, and I find that the fact the mass majority of humans prefer some styles over others is evidence that those styles are closer to objective beauty than the others! I have the enviable position of not having to defend the idea that good taste is something exclusive to an educated elite, and also completely alien from common tastes.
Food is a good analogy. A McDonalds cheeseburger is very popular, and also is considered to be not good food. I don't think those ideas are contradictory: the cheeseburger has many flavors and qualities that are good, but they are not the highest quality and they are combined with other negative features, such as being poor nutrition and being made from cheap ingredients. Someone who loves McDonalds and has contempt for "fine dining" might benefit from some "education": you could take him out to some fine dining resteraunts and introduce him to new foods. Over time he might discover that he is developing good taste himself: that he can appreciate really good French cuisine and, while he can still recognize why he liked Big Macs so much, also recognizes that there are a lot better foods. It's not about claiming that the Big Mac isn't tasty, but about discovering that there are so many other foods that are better and more complex.
Ultimately, "good taste" is ruined when it turns into snobbery and is used as a cudgel in status games. The point of good taste is to enjoy good things, not to prove your superiority to others. C. S. Lewis wrote about this in his essay "Lilies that Fester":
"Suppose you had spent an evening among very young and very transparent snobs who were feigning a discriminating enjoyment of a great port, though anyone who knew could see very well that, if they had ever drunk port in their lives before, it came from a grocer’s. And then suppose that on your journey home you went into a grubby little tea-shop and there heard an old body in a feather boa say to another old body, with a smack of her lips, “That was a nice cup o’ tea, dearie, that was. Did me good.” Would you not, at that moment, feel that this was like fresh mountain air? For here, at last, would be something real. Here would be a mind really concerned about that in which it expressed concern. Here would be pleasure, here would be undebauched experience, spontaneous and compulsive, from the fountain-head. A live dog is better than a dead lion. In the same way, after a certain kind of sherry party, where there have been cataracts of culture but never one word or one glance that suggested a real enjoyment of any art, any person, or any natural object, my heart warms to the schoolboy on the bus who is reading Fantasy and Science Fiction, rapt and oblivious of all the world beside. For here also I should feel that I had met something real and live and unfabricated; genuine literary experience, spontaneous and compulsive, disinterested. I should have hopes of that boy. Those who have greatly cared for any book whatever may possibly come to care, some day, for good books. The organs of appreciation exist in them. They are not impotent."
Later in the essay he makes clear his opinion of "experts" whose art is hated by the masses:
"Mr. J. W. Saunders has set it all out in an excellent article entitled “Poetry in the Managerial Age” (Essays in Criticism, iv, 3, July 1954). He there faces the fact that modern poets are read almost exclusively by one another. He looks about for a remedy. Naturally he does not suggest that the poets should do anything about it. For it is taken as basic by all the culture of our age that whenever artists and audience lose touch, the fault must be wholly on the side of the audience. (I have never come across the great work in which this important doctrine is proved.) The remedy which occurs to Mr. Saunders is that we should provide our poets with a conscript audience; a privilege last enjoyed, I believe, by Nero."
Flying Lion, your reply inspired two thoughts and the motivation to review your SubStack.
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First is the passing fleeting thought that finial responded to your reply (for some reason) to finally pause long enough to get a glimpse of Her, ..
For those with any kind of passing knowledge of Platonic or other types of 'Forms', that of their perfection and they only can fully exist near or with God and His Truth.
It suggests to me that some kinds 'Taste' might be from a recognition of aspects of what we accept as tasteful - is the result that it Reflects internal more fully some part of their perfect Form from which they are less then shadows in respect too.
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And your example of the suggest hypothetic sufferer of a semi-toxic psychological situation of some people that are near manifestations of the Forms of pretense, falseness, and shallowness, ..
that part of your comment reminded me of a Lunch Party on Long Island NY when as a freshman in HS I was spend a break from school at the mother house and was automatically included to a lunch party thrown by (at the time) unknow person, Lauren Bacall, and the kind of sensed heavy undercurrents that existed and covered over by the overt pretenses. It would have been exhaustingly boring absent that undercurrent and my slow collection and integration of it into what seemed like Order, when an older businessman approached and chatted in a friendly way which I always enjoyed from strangers ..
(on intrastate and interstate bussed adults that know they will never see you again confess the most interesting things, needing to find someone to share with),
.. he in indirect ways was asking something of me that I was too naive to 'get' in a reasonable time, he was trying to pick me up for a quicky I guess, the sudden realization and surprise at it, weirdly including a kind of flattered feeling was hard not to expose to the world at that moment in a normal full body shake or similar, but after a moment of thought I explained politely that I was flattered by his offer but came with my female lover and we were practicing exclusivity, or something to that effect, .. and found a good excuse to leave explaining the sudden opportunity to approach our social free Host.. to spend the time that I sensed was in good graces and expected of all the guests, something I was somehow nervous about but was sudden filled with courage and eager to do as a method of politely escape from a suddenly uncomfortable situation for us both.
Anyway - if his goal was really to break my internal focus on that undercurrent, he was surprisingly effective because I did not recall it at all until long after we left. And may have completely forgotten under normal relaxed 'non-threating' unstrange environments.
Perhaps there is something very significant under that vapid pretensive talking that you cannot hear and never thought to listen for?
«For example, it would make more sense to say “he goed” than “he went”, but only the latter is correct.»
"to go" is a top 100 word, which is why it's so short. Its past form "went" is a top 500 word. If it were "goed", we'd often mishear one for the other. Similarly "gone" is probably top 500, too. Since the most basic movement word is so central, we can emphasize different tense aspects of it, in objectively beautiful snippets like "Go to hell!", "He really went to town on that corpse.", "He's dead and gone.".
Why is that beautiful? Well it's objectively beautiful, because *mumble* something *mumble* minimizes prediction error. Also just imagine it was "to go, goed, goed" instead. These sexy snippets would sound like mush.
Now anyway, a philistine might say "but if it's such a common word, isn't it cruel, that it's irregular, giving us so many chances to make mistakes"?
No opposite logic. If you use the word all the time, you get lots of repetitions in, each reinforcing the irregular pattern and making it seem natural. Hence uncommon and rare verbs are mostly regular, the most common ones are sensibly irregular for ease of communication in suboptimal acoustic environments and aesthetics.
Yeah I heard that tons of grammars are optimizing for noisy channels, which is our reality. The contradictions seem to happen when rules are applied far from where it should be, resulting in disagreement between pedant and pragmatist
I take his work to suggest that there >are< absolute, objective foundations for aesthetic experiences. However they are likely to be so deeply buried and complex as to be undefinable for the practical purposes of considering any particular real world situation.
Interesting. I have been in the visual arts my whole life, and those 9 points completely made sense to me as the rules to a good composition.
My favorite was “peekaboo “ because I immediately thought of a very famous shot in Rosemary’s Baby. The cinematographer (William Fraker) had framed a shot through a doorway of Ruth Gordon sitting on a bed speaking on a telephone while Mia Farrow was trying to overhear it from the other room. He d shot through the doorway so you could see Ruth Gordon, sitting on the bed framed by the doorway. Roman Polanski looked through the viewfinder and said “no no Willie, move the camera the over, move the camera over.” Fraker shifted the camera so that Ruth Gordon was now partially obscured by one post of the door frame. Pulaski approved. The cinematographer scratched his head.
At the Premier screening of the film, Fraker was sitting in the audience, and when that shot hit the screen, everyone in the theater shifted their head sideways at the same time.
My own theory - I'm not sure how it fits into the above, exactly - is that certain things are easy to appreciate (ketchup and french fries; twee countryside houses all asparkle with fairy energy; milk chocolate; sweet wine) and others take more time and exposure to learn to like (horseradish; Cy Twombly; dark chocolate; dry wine). By liking the things that take longer to appreciate, you demonstrate that you have had the leisure to immerse yourself into something. It's just a class signifier.
>By liking the things that take longer to appreciate, you demonstrate that you have had the leisure to immerse yourself into something. It's just a class signifier.
A bunch of the commenters have said that, for several cases, they have enjoyed the things that took longer to appreciate more than the more straightforward things.
For the class(es?) that have the leisure to do this, an interesting question is:
Does this use of time pay for itself? Is there _enough_ additional appreciation to be worth the time to acquire it. Even the upper class has finite lifespans, and time learning more complex appreciation is time not spent enjoying simpler things or learning other things.
( This is, admittedly, ignoring _pure_ status games where the upper classes test each other on appreciation of obscure things. )
Taste is a mix of social status games and something more ''objective''. Trying to make it one or the other will create confusion. A related source of confusion here is the distinction between beauty and art. Art is communication through aesthetic phenomena, but it need not leverage beauty (aesthetic pleasure) as its main tool. It can also leverage the opposite end of the scale. So while many of us primarily seek beauty, some people want to communicate using aesthetics that aren't pleasurable (beautiful). If some people find the message communicated sufficiently interesting or novel, they might say that it is good or interesting art, even though there is little beauty involved. Historically art went hand in hand with beauty, but in the case of modern architecture, beauty seems to have been largely abandoned in favor of communication and status games. Or at least, beauty was abandoned for a large portion of us, since our sense of beauty really does evolve if we study certain artforms deeply, as I will propose an explanation for now (together with a proposal for what beauty fundamentally is).
Let me work under the following hypothesis, which I have argued for in a longer post on my Substack: beauty is experienced when our subconscious brain successfully decodes and predicts a very large amount of patterns in a sensory signal. Decoding and prediction are related, because successful decoding of a sensory signal can be verified if other portions of the signal now can be successfully predicted. In fact, the metric of successful decoding probably just is subsequent successful prediction. So beauty, I believe, is the pleasure of successive predictive processing when operating at the edge of our capability. This urge is likely evolutionary beneficial, because signals that contain complex patterns that our brain is just marginally able to decode are probably signals that we are learning from at an optimal rate. And we want to sharpen our sensory abilities to be sensitive to subtleties in signals that appear in our environment - faint tracks from animals, subtle patterns in the clouds indicating rain, facial expressions signaling deception, etc. Thus, it makes evolutionary sense to have a generalized reward signal for successful gradient in complex pattern recognition - to reward us with a sense of beauty for engaging with sensory signals that can optimally sharpen our senses. Here is the slogan: beauty is caused by entropically fine-tuned signals.
A very basic example of the relation between prediction and aesthetic satisfaction: play C major scale on any instrument, but do not play the last note returning you to the starting point of the scale: C-D-E-F-G-A-B-STOP. Your brain gets extremely frustrated, because it makes a very strong prediction that C is about to appear. If you play the C instead of STOP, you feel a sense of aesthetic satisfaction when your prediction is verified. Similarly, rhymes are aesthetically satisfying because they provide a structure of language where the brain has a decent shot at successful prediction (and guaranteed almost-successful prediction). Other examples of patterns to be decoded are: tempo in a song, timbre of instrument (wood vs metal), geometric structure (topology, curvature scales, repeated shapes etc), correlations in color, etc. Or, on the subject of ornament: suppose your brain picks up an ornament somewhere on the building. Then, as you move your eyes across the building and see identical or similar ornaments, you give your brain lots of chances to do more successful predictions. More beauty.
Now, as you practice an art, you really do sharpen your sensory abilities. What previously was hard for your brain to predict might now become easy. You need something else for genuine sensation of beauty. It is not surprising that atonal music was developed by composers who had an extremely deep knowledge of tonal music, like Schoenberg. It probably all become too predictable for his brain. But this is not the case for most of us, so it remains pleasurable. This prediction framework also easily explains why you get sick of a basic song you heard to much: it becomes predictable because your brain basically memorized it. However, this doesn't happen with all music, especially music that is sufficiently complex. It has to much microscopic structure for your brain to memorize, so you get to rediscover a bunch of patterns every time you here. This is also a useful role of ornament: it protects the artwork from memorization, hence making the beauty less degradable. It is pretty easy for you to conjure an accurate image of some of those modernist buildings in your brain. Less so for an ornate building - you usually only conjure the long-wavelength structures.
Anyway, in the case of modernism, I suspect that things are driven in large portion by status games (further poisoned by ideology). But I also do believe the architects were genuinely aesthetically bored by classical architecture, probably triggered by a deep study of this very architecture.
> If some people find the message communicated sufficiently interesting or novel, they might say that it is good or interesting art, even though there is little beauty involved.
I would be interested in a concrete example of what you are referring to here.
I don't enjoy most such art myself, so it is challenging from the outside to pick the status games apart from what people aesthetically enjoy (although see one exception below). But it seems clear that the pioneers of modernism in architecture described in Scott's post were genuinely interested in communicating the ideas of communism aesthetically. And broadly, with a lot of contemporary art that is ''ugly'', it hard to imagine that the curators working with it does not find at least some aesthetic satisfaction in a portion of it. These people got into art for a reason - they also have experienced the beauty of the classical masterpieces - and I suspect the cognitive dissonance would be too strong if they didn't at least find some aesthetic value in the stuff they are peddling. It makes it easier to justify the status games they are playing to themselves if their aesthetic compass is at least somewhat aligned.
As another example, I enjoy a genre of music that most people find downright ugly: black metal. I find it genuinely beautiful. Or perhaps sublime is the better word. But certainly aesthetically pleasurable. Check for example the track Jesus Tod by Burzum, or Nattens Madrigal by Ulver.
Well, modern architecture is a bit of a broad category to apply that statement to, I think. We could talk about a particular building. Interesting and good, but not beautiful.
I realize we are talking about taste, which is precisely why I said to any given person. Taste is personal; 1000 people could give you 1000 answers all different.
I would find it very hard to find something good and interesting but not beautiful when we are talking about art. A lack of beauty would make it not good as far as I am concerned. Apparently, that is not true for you so I’m curious to have a specific reference. It would make it a bit easier to understand. Do you find the music you like to be good and interesting but not beautiful?
I am with you, I don’t like art that has abandoned beauty. But there is a whole lot of out there it that a group of people seem to find interesting. Just visit the wiki page of Coneptual Art and pick your any piece there. Or consider the piece of music named 4′33″ - 4 min a 33 s of silence that apparently sufficiently many people found interesting when presented in the right context.
My first experience of this my memory has filed - is a vivid Dream where the graph of 1/x as X goes to 0 from +1 and -1 does not meet even at positive infinity or negative infinity and this recently learned fact must have so upset me that I dreamed the graph I had looked at recently is vague disturbing of the disconnected line, that in my dream the graph became 3D and both curves returned on the axis of my perspective an to meet at that axis' infinity.
What is Beauty? A mathematic function?, or the Gifts that is available to someone to experience that ..?
I could have asked a young woman in one of my JR HS classes, would she see any Beauty in that?
I was a very poor student who came and went from various schools between the ages of 16 and 19. I remember a year struggling through a differential calculus class as I had not formally studied trigonometry. I had to work pretty hard to get a passing grade in that class. I do remember experiencing an emotion that I would say is very akin to contemplating something beautiful at certain things that I learned to understand taking that class. Perhaps the experience of understanding something is very similar to the experience of perceiving something beautiful. I also found it good and interesting.
Seeing beauty is a very personal thing, I agree. And yes, you might’ve asked that girl that she thought it was beautiful as well. I think I would find it beautiful, but I’m not enough of a mathematician to really follow you here.
I had a similar experience, reading an article about quantum physics. There was a thought experiment of two clocks with pendulums swinging and mapping the position of the pendulums. It was something about how random that graph would look without any direct experience of the two clocks behind it. The idea struck me as interesting good and beautiful.
I think you're missing the point by looking towards the priesthood to determine what "everyone" or "all the sophisticated people" thought at some time in the past. If you want to get a sense of the ethics of 2024 universal culture, look at widespread laws, customs, and hot-button culture war topics. Not at what academic philosophers are saying.
Beneath that top layer of conspicuously taste-conscious people, there's a broader set of people who have taste in a low-key way. I speculate that the aesthetic preferences of that latter set are much more stable over time.
My idea is that true taste gives you a new emotion. You unlock godspeed you black emperor emotions which were not available to you when listening Bruce Springsteen. Everything else is priesthood
Lots of comments, sorry if it already appeared, but I will try to contribute with this text by Paul Graham "Is there such a thing as good gaste?": https://paulgraham.com/goodtaste.html
"De gustibus non est disputandum" is a Latin phrase that translates to "there is no disputing about taste," meaning that personal preferences are subjective and shouldn't be argued about; essentially, "you can't argue about someone's taste.". -- Google AI overview
The problem with your example is that artists have more complicated relationships with their contemporaries than a simple fan of music does. All those people probably agree much more than disagree if you asked them about the artists who came a generation before them.
One of the few things I've ever heard about John Lennon who is understood to have sold his soul to Satan for success, wealth, and all that comes from worldly Satanic enslavement, his time bargained-for ending at the day of his murder, .. the good taste that I considered reasonable, his apprehension of some of Led Zeppelin's content.
Haha I skimmed the subject headings and then wrote the following without realizing how repetitious it was: How about "taste is like fashion"?
I don't think anyone would really argue that one fashion of clothes is objectively superior to another, but at any given time there are trends and rules that clothing fashions follow in order to be "in style." Some people have a fashion sense that allows them to detect what clothes are in style or not, which leads them to have different and to normies sometimes confusing clothing preferences. Similarly some people have artistic taste and thus understand what art is in style right now. It's a real understanding that it takes time and study to develop, but comes down to something more like sociological knowledge of the preferences of the fashionable art world than it does to any objective standard.
This is really not a correct way to understand Hinduism (some Hindus would disagree with me, but they're wrong).
What westerners call Hinduism is either the synthesis of several distinct religions (if you're a lumper) or an amorphous term covering several totally distinct and separate religions (if you're a splitter, which is more where I am). Unlike Christianity, Hinduism is not a religion defined by priests or by the clerical class. The "Popular Hinduism" practiced by low-education people in the villages is at least as old as the religion of the priests, sometimes has very little to do with it (or for that matter with the religion of the Vedic era), and is every bit as legitimate. Popular Hinduism is not some kind of dumbed-down, defective version of Brahminic Hinduism.
I would say that some purity laws, stuff like the prohibition on beef, is a pretty core aspect of Hinduism, but that's not because the priests say it, it's because most Hindus (irrespective of class, education level, ethnicity or region) agree that it is.
I consider the entirety of Hinduism to be a politically inspired and shaped forced capture of the many once separate and clearly different religions that formed in the isolated physically or other reasons that must have been the excuse and reason for endless tribal warring, murder, genocides, enslavement, and all other evils that such wars find and realize, that by forcing through force that likely happened, forcing them under a unifying God that offers an acceptable solution for unification and end of the horrors all suffered in the then existing paradigm all were trapped in endlessly, that endless circle of suffering and insanity they knew from experience and history as told by elders of every tribe.
And that in each separate form of Hindi we can find value and wisdom the none or few of the others contain. And in the few Wise publicly professed Truths that Pope Francis has been Inspired to State, of that is known to me, and perhaps like all Catholic doctrine aware including him, perhaps further evil intent that like a stopped clock happens to be correct twice a day, .. that all religion is Willed by God, and that I believe with Faith expresses that which Traditional Catholicism still lacks, some Wisdom that is contained in each and is the bridge to many new Converts and souls saved.
What may seem like fashion or heresies to most is - as in Hindi - a method for countless souls saved and a Fuller Inspired Church.
Thanks for your comment. You are spot on about the nature of Hinduism, but I must say that the prohibition of beef is still primarily a North Indian thing. It always irritates me that Indian belief systems, both progressive and regressive, are often defined (inadvertently, perhaps and certainly by Scott) through a North Indian lens. Go down South to Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and you'll see that even upper-caste Hindus have no such inhibitions about beef or rituals or whatever. This might have something to do with ancient history. The South has always been richer, more developed, and more progressive. Sadly, this also means that my beloved Kerala continues to elect corrupt Communist governments. Thank God I live in America!
>Fashion is a set of rules, like “don’t wear white after Labor Day”. Why shouldn’t you wear white after Labor Day?
Because white is a summer color, and Labor Day is the unofficial end of summer. Nothing more or less to it. If you're wearing white after Labor Day, according to this rule (or "rule" if you prefer), you're not evil or boastful or anything like that, you're just wearing a summer color in what we have all agreed is now autumn, and you're therefore just kind of...out of it, or whatever.
I very seriously doubt this was ever announced with "great fanfare" as it was never more than a rule of thumb.
Obviously, how seriously anybody ever took this rule depended on how much they subscribed to the notion of white being a summer color.
Whatever nonsense Google told you is simply one of those after-the-fact "explanations" that people pull out of their asses, along the lines of Fornication Under Consent of the King.
From this reply I expect to infer that you reject the assumed Right of the Master (and benefactor, Protector and Provided over others) his right of first access and opportunity to impregnate all married wives before husbands, and expect the Justly desired support from them and all his other servants, with the impregnated successes by him to be a seen as blessing, and with it nearly guaranty for his or her access to Master's class and placement and right to the chance of Knighthood and future greater things for males and similar for female offspring, with honor reflected on the couple?
How backward and disOrderd your belief system must be. One might reason.
Here's an idea: I think artistic taste is like the actual sense of taste. Sometimes you eat food and it feels yummy and other times you eat food and it feels yucky. But if you eat the same food enough times, sometimes what felt yucky at first can feel yummy later on.
And ALSO if you get raised into a certain culture that largely (but not entirely) determines your taste. (E.g. many Americans find burgers yummy, whereas many non-Americans would find them yucky. But I'm American and I also find burgers yucky at times, though not always. Exactly analogous to how architects switched from liking fancy decorated buildings to liking concrete slabs but one of them specifically wanted a concrete slab with circles in it.)
>for example, you originally couldn’t split an infinitive in English because doing so was impossible in Latin; only later did people develop a “sense” that this “sounded wrong”.
You've got it backwards. You absolutely could originally split an infinitive English. The split infinitive went in and out of fashion over the last six hundred years or so, but it wasn't until the nineteenth century that a group of Latin-obsessed grammarians decided that you "couldn't" do it because it can't be done in Latin.
I feel like Scott is missing the mark on this one. I think most people have some intuitive sense for what looks good, what looks right. But that doesn’t mean they can act on it. I know I’ve seen people look great in an outfit, but if I try it, I look silly. People with good taste either can act on it intuitively, and/or have the theoretical structure to build something from the ground up.
I think Derek Guy is a great example of this. One of his common bits is to show a poorly dressed politician alongside some well dressed “nobody”. And at least I have some ingrained sense that the person he holds up as better dressed looks better, but I might not have the sense to pin it on the longer jacket or the fuller pants.
Additionally, good taste should be more timeless than fashion. Someone with good taste can steer you away from the details that will look silly in 20 years. Which for your shoes might not matter, but for designing your house or picking wedding clothes, it might matter more.
And even if there isn’t an objective truth to point to, there are communal truths. Most people will associate an outfit with polyester bell bottoms with the 70s, certain mustaches remind people of Magnum PI, bleak faceless buildings remind them of communism. People with taste know these intuitive associations (…and more subtle ones, of course) to control and play with how something is received.
The timelessness sense mentioned reflects a deeper understanding of the universality and significant truth of this topic or aspect of the subject, and extends to most everything - not only in fashion.
(Side note: Bell-bottom pants almost killed me as an older boy when - as a good swimmer - I jumped into a lake from the dock in wild-male expression and the corduroy bell-bottom pants removed most of the force-created function of my legs and added weight increased the deadly pull under the surface. Tastelessness can be deadly.)
"It’s not immediately obvious why you would want this skill - it makes your life worse, because you’ll just be fretting over flaws you see in everything."
I kinda think this too, honestly - I get to spend so much less on food than my peers since I'm still content with frozen stuff and the occasional meal prep. That said:
In general, I would define "taste" as "the ability to appreciate craftsmanship". Having taste means being able to understand (and care about) the intentions behind the art you're looking at. Older styles are not inherently tasteless - no one serious will argue that the Mona Lisa is bad, actually - but the older they get and the more cemented they are in popular consciousness, the more likely they are to be blindly copied by amateurs who don't understand why they are the way that they are. Consider two examples of modern "tastemakers": McMansion Hell and Die, Workwear! When these two criticize houses/fashion, they never say "this is from an older style and that's bad." They always say "This is a random mishmash of different styles with no clear intent behind it."
I want to rescue the idea by emphasizing E, but ameliorative (taste is like *porn* porn). Suppose all your life you have tasted everything from A to Z through osmosis, except X, and you already settled on ranking everything you already know. Then by chance, you encounter X, and you see it as the greatest fucking thing in the world. Your worldview shatters, your ranking useless, and you wonder if there's another alpha, beta, aleph, Alif, out there that's even greater than this that you don't know. So you start to try to identify what's exactly different of X from A to Z that makes it better, and try to predict the next better things out there. For it you come up with lots of rules and patterns that may or may not actually be relevant.
Then you encounter someone that have only experienced A and B under their belt and you thought "poor sweet summer child, there are more wonderful things out there!" And you teach then the rules so that they too know that A and B are actually shit and there are better things out there. But those people never see C D or X so the rules don't make sense to them, but you assure yourself that they just haven't seen anything yet. Recent converts are the most zealous missionaries after all. Then you encounter someone that have only seen A and X, and say that A > X, and all hell break loose (remember, we thought that X > everything).
I've seen some shades of this when I'm recommended things I don't know and actually get benefit from it. But sometimes things are not that instant so I have to wonder if those people are just snobby or there's something to their word, eventually. And the advicer also wonder if it really doesn't fit my taste, or I just haven't walked in that shoe far enough. There's also "acquired taste" that screw things up.
Overall, I think I have a slightly more charitable view of this thing, saying that in lots of cases, some people that will see enough, haven't seen enough, so need to be guided by someone that have seen enough. If those people will never see enough, then those rules won't apply. Like someone that never comes out of their neighbourhood can be satisfied with all the wines they have in their cellar, but if I come to NY, I hope I don't have to trial and error that much to find one to my taste, and hope someone can guide me to them.
Great comment! It is perspectives like these that support the fact that not everyone existing is a NPC, but still have a relatively free soul.
I live for self-soul expanding Epiphanies as described, those that add a dimension to me and gives me another 'eye' to see the world with or the relive my remembered life through.
The wisdom of questioning those things that in our ignorance and lack of wisdom we once accepted as simple.
Part of Wisdom is to see the [potential] good in evil, and the [potential] evil in good.
There are features of taste that are "universal human", but we don't see those, because everyone already sticks to them. Ask a dolphin or a bee to determine an absolute taste.
Of those features that aren't human universal, most are about social groupings. "People of my group like this kind of thing", and this is important enough to people that they feel it strongly.
Of the remainder, part of it is consistent universal taste. I have a sister who's obsessive about neatness, but I hardly notice it.
Of the remainder, much of it varies from time to time. Right now I want a mystery, but yesterday I wanted a fact article, and usually I want a comfortable SF Fantasy.
This is good point, I think it really gets at what all these definitions of taste are missing - the idea that experts often do notice stuff that non-experts don't
3. How fresh, original and interesting the ideas feel to the observer
I think when most people say something is "ugly," what they're really saying is that it's boring. And when most people say something is "good," what they really mean is that it's interesting.
For example, imagine a painting that's just a red square. Someone who knows nothing about the tradition of red square art might say, "That's just a red square, so boring." But someone well versed in the history and tradition of red square paintings might say, "Ah, this red square painting comments on other Red Square Painting, and its simplicity echoes the flag of the author's country, and it's commenting on how nationalism and artistry interact."
Most of the time, I think learning more about art helps you enjoy it more. As a teenager I found medieval art very boring. But when I took a college class that explained some of the themes and symbolism in medieval art, it suddenly became more interesting to me, because I could think about how the art explores death and time, instead of thinking "well, this is a realistic picture of fruit."
But sometimes, learning more about art actually makes you dislike it more. When I was seven I loved the movie "Ice Age," because it introduced me to ideas and story beats I hadn't seen before. But then I saw a million other similar movies, and stopped thinking that "Ice Age" is particularly good.
Generally, experts in x agree on what's "a good version" of x and what's "a bad version" of x because they're good at understanding x, and have a shared understanding of which concepts are "new/interesting" and which are "old/boring." If you watch a lot of kids movies, there is a stark difference between "The Lion King" and "Ice Age 2," two movies I liked about the same amount as a child.
But it's a little more complicated than this, because viewers can also interpret a piece of art in ways that don't have much to do with the actual art. Eg, you see a portrait of a woman that looks like your grandma, and it's more interesting and moving to you because you imagine the woman as your grandma. Or you might find "wokeness" boring, and so whenever you perceive a piece of art as "woke" you stop being able to notice anything else about it, and the whole piece of art becomes boring. "How many ideas exist in a piece of art" is subjective, and depends on the viewer. All these criteria depend on the viewer, which, I think, is why taste is so slippery and various.
I would guess most menswear enjoyers would agree that if you were picking clothing for practical goals you should wear whatever makes your target audience think you look the best combination of:
-- Tall
-- Thin
-- Muscular
But mostly people get into this stuff because its fun. Most people dont think ridiculous designer clothing look objectively better. I think this is all taking fashion a bit too seriously. Most people into fashion understand its kind of frivolous and dumb. But they are having fun with it. Good enough for me.
_Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ is a book about Robert Pirsig, the author, trying to grasp the concept of Quality---which is what we are talking about here---in which the author literally loses his mind, falls into a catatonic state for days and is institutionalized for a time. He believes that Quality is something that is neither objective nor subjective and that The Western Mind can't really grasp it, hence the Zen. It's a good book.
I'm sorry I am unable to simply 'like', as there was a kind personal uncentered lostness the author expresses that he once had and now doesn't have, and he missed (like someone that breaks both his legs and now till death he knows he will never enjoy dancing, running, or a simple walk with a love), or what he once trusted and relied on became unstable and seem to betray him when he most needed it and now he is crippled though not able to trust want was once so valuable and significant to who he was, or something like that that I seem to deeply understand, and it's like that every young man through teens and settling into his manhood would sense a similar underlining understanding of that kind.
On reflection I wonder if the author has a decent old standard father, like the fathers and men I knew as an older boy, and that fatherlessness and the unJust degrading, self-hatred seeds, and demonization that our lives for simply Being and Breathing, by lying putrid evil back souled mothers and women with power vomited as poison along with our murdered baby parts and soul sucking demonic leaches not yet vomited into babies and young defenseless children they get near, and of course the Satanic Gov, and our insanity accepting Sick Fem-Nazi controlled Joy-Love-Truth-Goodness murdering Western societies that are actively killing use through ever increasing tormenting, deep confusing, and invisible to even ourselves, that Suffering, suicide seeking horrors-filled vileness that is alien to self yet bound to us so deeply that it could have only be forced that deep when as innocent and helpless as a new-born.
Yes, that book has deepness that Called and exposed such deep Satanic causing monstruous pain that is alien and only could have been placed at a very young age when helpless and by some deeply evil directed close trusted and recognized person.
- Why not ask me if I could direct the killing of some random 3+ billions of people worldwide if of those survivors, none would need ever suffer such Sick evil poisoning us all now and many already dead of it have? F-ing ask me and learn the 'God-forgive me please!' answer.
To me, taste is something like "ability to think about art and similar experiences in a way that allows you to find new things to enjoy about it past first impressions."
This is why, as other commentators have pointed out, it is analogous to taste for food. There are some foods that taste good when you first bite into them, and other foods that taste bad at first, but taste good when you take time to savor them and notice the sensations of eating them. There are also some foods that taste good at first, and taste different, but also good, if you savor and contemplate as you think about them.
Some art is optimized for a good first impressions (such as blockbuster action movies). Some is optimized to be enjoyed with thought and contemplation (such as although movies). Some is designed to be both (a smart action movie).
I think snobbery about taste comes in with the second type (bad first impression, good contemplatiocontemplation). Someone who is good at analyzing and thinking about things will show off by claiming to only things that take thought and analysis to appreciate.
I don't think this analysis is a complete explanation of all the social phenomena related to taste. Fads and fashion are definitely part of it too. There are instances where people overanalyze things that are in fashion and underanalyze things that aren't. A lot of critical tools can be applied to pretty much anything and produce interesting and rewarding analysis (for example, Lindsay Ellis did a fascinating video essay analyzing Michael Bay's "Transformers" movies). However, I think that looking at taste like this allows us to identify how it is pointing to something worthwhile, while also noticing when it is misused for status purposes.
Should everyone cultivate better taste? Not necessarily. Having taste allows you to get more types of enjoyment out of art than other people. However that's true of pretty much anything you put effort and practice into. If you really like art it's worth developing, but if your interests lie elsewhere maybe you should get more practice at something else.
I experienced a minorly-deep Ephinay food inspired.
As a young man near 20 years old, and having realized that relearning much of my new transformed by puberty body differences, and having be confused by something that a now and for most of my life would not require any thought to understand, I was at a point where I was pretty sure I mostly new myself and many of my normal limits discovered through sports and other life-experience ..
So when my biological and I sat down for a quick lunch containing fresh cut asparagus that he had two small fields of close to the farmhouse that there cuttable lengths already showing after being earlier cut at 5am and grew noticeably in that about 7 or eight hours, a treat only available to that that actually farm such produce, like corn on cob picked and husked while walking back to house to be dropped into already boiling water and pulled and eaten long before 30 minutes passed between picking and chewing ..
My biological father and mothers first husband spreads mayonnaise over his 'grass and I am shocked by the strangeness of the mixture, and he states its good, I refuse to even try thinking I know what I like, and it does and cannot include That!
Long story short after eating 'grass as I always have I finely give in to inner curiosity, and try it for I, and wow, I like it and by the time I finished that serving I am not only regretting the missed few meals that I in reason could have enjoyed more, but in some kind of irrationally I somehow regret every serving since childhood that would have been better eaten that way, and that absurdity of impossibility-based regret actual took a while to resolve.
And so, ends my forever saved and perhaps retold 1000's of years from now Sojourn into that thought Known, to discover betterness that I could not have predicted in a long life of wisdom hording.
Whenever you talk about this stuff, I get the sense that whatever's happening in your brain when you look at a painting is radically different to what's happening in my brain. I feel like I need an essay where you look at a bunch of randomly selected paintings and describe in detail how you respond to them.
I look at Tracey Emin's "My Bed" and go "No, that's not art. I understand the concept you are trying to get at, but you didn't set out intentionally to do this, and the glib rejoinder about 'nobody ever did this before' doesn't make it art".
It's an unmade bed and a mess of things during the phase of being depressed and drinking. The art *may* come in by carefully selecting and presenting the items, or replacements for them, afterwards.
This is the entire argument we are having: if you have to have an entire philosophical movement around "no this isn't an upturned rubbish bin, it is a piece of art" with name and all, in order to convince ordinary people that something is art, then it may be "art" but it is not art.
If I paint the outside of my house pastel blue, I may feel happy that it looks clean and new and the colour is pleasant. People may compliment me on it. But I would never describe it as "I have created a piece of art".
It's certainly true that all conceptual art created since about Warhol is a bunch of cheap gimmicks, and that everyone involved is just pretending.
One reason this happened is an earlier generation rejected classical standards, on the basis that the French Academy was a corrupt priesthood and the snobby elites were just faking it. (Big simplification but that's kind of what happened.)
Most of the modern stuff that Tom Wolfe complains about exists as a backlash to older elitist aesthetic standards, which over time crystallised into an equally repressive orthodoxy that continued to pass itself off as "radicalism" but was just as suffocating as the old bourgeois culture. Which also happened with Communism itself, of course.
So we're really dealing with two different forms of elite snobbery here - a conservative one and a radical one. I think you could reasonably argue that the conservative one is more aesthetically pleasing than the radical one, although as a working artist you're entitled to question and subvert both.
A topic that I have found myself meditating on reflection of the remember relevant past 60+ ears of live and painful forming of wisdom by mostly learning from and recovering from failure, mistakes, and often near deadly levels of suffering - the most common way - and soliciting input and feedback about it from likely my only intimate friendship and a recent surprise-discovery, the Topics centered around how our realities are all different and that is normal, the their distances between us all in this aspect is further then likely any past citizens of a common Nation has been, and our separate Realities are getting further apart always, with increasing rate they seems to have, and related topics
I believe after some bit of focused meditations on this, all could all spend no less than three crack-meth fueled 24-hour continuous awake and topic focused days of useful, interesting, and valued input from everyone one of us .. although I am not suggesting this literally, or anything with orgies and such. .. .. Really.
I'm so sure that I'll suggest an example likely to be different than most of you that followed or heard of the case against the father & son neighborhood watchers in Maine, USA that went to trial for the killing of that innocent poor unarmed black jogger, as likely many believe.
.. I followed the case closely mostly because it was clearly politically used to enrage black-white tensions in some powerful peoples' hope to drive another unJust rash of riots, arsons, murders, looting and other socially destructive lie Justless fueled insanities that benefits some powerful Satanic goaled Profit seekers, soul eating demonic horrors.
Well after close examinations of every unJust aspect, suppression of facts that are clearly on video, that Vile trial sentenced those men to life in prison and such a hell you wouldn't put a dog through, to destroy men for acting as protectors of their community from a thief that had been a regular troller of criminal opportunities that he was seeking and likely advancing to crimes of rape and perhaps murder.
The innocent black jogger in work boots was videoed entering into a construction site in sneakers and stealing at least the boots he died in, and likely something like a screwdriver stabbing tool he was videoed tossing away as be ran towards the father son controlled space, then the Jogger attacked the armed son in a sudden and clearly 90 degree lunged meant to surprise, and the videoed of all this and the grabbing of the son's rifle or shotgun by the barrel end forcing it into a chest or belly orientation beyond the control of the son's will to aim away if he so desired, and causing the discharge and likely the following ones that in totality kill himself with.
If not complete self-caused through plain and visible insanity and violence by the Jogger on that armed man, the once unarmed Jogger suddenly became 'armed' under common law at the attempt to take control of the weapon, a well-established reasonable legal defense protection usually provided Justly that and similar situations which can happen to citizens and police .. but in that hell-hole of vileness and Calls for the Just killing of all in some form of gov powers & connect to that trial and-or that case - in an Just sane world that was willing to set an good clear example of the wages of intended clear inJustice and Sin, And a message to the entire World that sanity is coming back and if every living f-ing person on earth must die trying to stop It then you'll might as well start digger our graves. ..
.. or something similar.
Is it possible that we live in different realities, and you are not as willing to risk or direct deaths as I am on the fact that your lie filled twisted corp-media satanic serving version of that aspect of your reality is less true than mine? Perhaps?
A good, significant, and very powerful force in all our lives, I believe. Worth some attention at the least.
Sanctimonious quibble, but I would prefer if people (like Scott) would stop using "BDSM" when they mean "weird/taboo/extreme" (or even just "kinky"). It's common to see people use the term to refer to any "scary kinky stuff", when BDSM is a specific kink (which is perfectly normal) whose community (by and large) has a huge emphasis on consent.
Snuff porn doesn't fit that, and even from a morally agnostic view, it doesn't fit any of the six parts of the acronym.
Scott in particular comes off as having a generally pretty sex/kink-positive social circle, and based and that and knowledge of his general libertarian views I assume it was meant in a value-neutral way. That makes it particularly bother me, because even with that presumed intent, it comes across as derogatory, especially when any of the above words would have better expressed what he seems to mean without picking on BDSM.
So first off, this is probably the funniest possible example you could have picked, because there's an individual *infamous* in the fetish artist community for commissioning fetish art of buxom blondes buying wonderbread to eat[1]. And at the risk of TMI, I know for a fact that several people in wetting kink and (to an even greater extent) inflation kink communities *have* fetishized the act of drinking water. Rule 34 functionally applies to kinks, the kinds of things people are into strain belief.
But I see your point. By definition, kinks are about an atypical relationship with sexual pleasure. I intended that to mean "normal [as far as kinks go]".
But now that I'm looking at the data, I'm not sure I even need that caveat. Looking at the best data we have, Aella's kink survey[2], B&D, D&S, and even S&M are all in the upper range of the chart at 20-50%, and most are close to 40%. Even if we assume that each one is at least slightly correlated with the others, that seems to imply that the 50th percentile person (the "normal") should be into at least one.
[2] See (https://i.imgur.com/cMCc7NY.jpeg) As for data quality, she has a better sample size than the supermajority of social science studies and any other sexuality study I'm aware of, and has validated it against mechanical Turk volunteers and gotten similar results. It *is* biased towards english-speaking 16-30s people who take viral internet surveys, though.
I think taste where there is just one individual is appeal - what resonates with you? What makes you feel something? Think something? What makes you feel intelligent and informed when you perceive it?
And then when you signal taste to someone, it also is endorsement.
Taste is based on one's background, including both their previous experiences as conscious consumers of art, as well as subconscious participation in ordinary ("non-art") aspects of life.
Experienced film watchers may look out for more subtle references in scenes; to people whom such films are a novelty, they may not notice these references, and immediately enjoy a more obvious part of the film.
I don't think taste exists like intricacy, originality, accuracy do, which would exist independent of a perceiver; taste requires that there is a perceiver
Taste may vary according to one's interests - eg someone may think something is +1 taste if the thing includes an accurate reference to a historical fact about religion, eg if they study religion in school and that's their interest; someone may think something is +1 taste only if it's about their preferred ancient civilization over one they have less interest in. What's "preferred" to someone may depend on how original, complex (eg # brushstrokes, time expenditure, time expenditure on craft before this particular piece), subtle (eg % people who consciously interpret a reference), combinatory (as well as *which* combinations make it up) something is; in this way, attributes that exist "independently" of perceivers contribute to the /taste/ of perceivers.
Taste can also vary according to one’s values, eg someone who values knowledge may require art to be more fact-embedded than fiction-inspired, for the art to be described as “good” in taste, whereas the taste of someone who prioritizes creativity might depend more on how unusual a piece is.
Someone who values originality and nonconformity may think something is “good” taste if it’s very different from what they’ve seen before (or very different within certain parameters, since they probably have other values too), while someone who values conformity may like whatever is “normal” and socially acceptable
Some people put more weight on subtlety even if it has a minor impact on them, some people put more weight on immense immediate impact, some people value something changing them (eg changing their beliefs, their mood) in a way, some people value something that supports their current POV
People can have different tastes, but the idea that **some taste is good, and others is bad** seems like a social status or class association thing
When I like something that is Good taste, it feels almost the same as well I like something that’s Bad taste; commonalities include that I think they both say something about me, and I generally choose to have them around me. Something that's different though, is that I probably will not want to broadcast my “Bad” taste in things to people who I think will think less of me for my taste in them
So yeah, signaling taste is like saying, "This is what I endorse!"
"Though financial mechanisms can become mind-bogglingly complicated, at the end of the day they are all based on principles that are so obvious, at least to money-minded people, that they don’t even seem worth spelling out. If I’m good at predicting outcomes, I can get rewarded. And deserve to be.
That’s why it’s funny— and, in a way, mind-blowing—when Rick Rubin describes that outcome-based mindset as something to which there is an alternative.
And the alternative, which seems just as obvious to him as stocks and bonds do to a Wall Street quant, is to create a thing.
This isn’t just starving artists whining about how no one understands them. An extremely successful Hollywood movie producer once explained to me that, at the end of the day, their job consisted of delivering money into the hands of a director and then keeping the financiers from meddling with the process long enough for the director to finish the film. The results, for this one producer alone, have been worth billions.
So there are huge businesses constructed on the way of thinking and working that Rick Rubin is describing. Rubin personally is a centimillionaire. The artists he’s worked with have generated billions in economic activity.
In a sense, though, such statistics just make the whole picture even more perplexing to outcome-centric money people.
During a 60 Minutes interview, Anderson Cooper goes to the heart of the matter by flat-out asking Rubin what he’s being paid for. Rubin’s answer comes down to that he has taste.
So, in a world where it’s demonstrably the case that intangibles such as taste can generate billions of dollars in economic returns out of basically nothing, what’s a financier to do?"
After my excitement of discovering the content referenced and reading one of the articles that was of personal interest and experience to me, with what I thought was the bases of a value-added comment, I discovered after internal composition of it that he was one of self-chose article-impoverishing 'only-pay readers may comment' author.
Rejecting us to 'pay' him in value-added work as these comment sections clearly allow for all that allow it, and relative poverty in those that do not.
The value added to articles through comments and replies is so clear I often wonder at those authors that require a paid subscription to contribute - as a disabled retired professional on a fixed income where the false Inflation Gov number is easily 4-8 percent low (not including fuel, medical, housing increases - the most rapidly growing [needed] consumer products), that to exclude my economic class seems undefendable and reductive in value of content.
What about books? Think about For Whom the Bell Tolls and Where Eagles Dare. One is a wartime story about a small band of people on an impossible mission behind enemy lines. It features tense action sequences and juxtaposes heroism and resourcefulness with cowardice and betrayal. It has a love interest, too.
Wait a minute—they’re the same book! Well, objectively, one explores the human condition in a way the other doesn’t and doesn’t try to. How well it does this can be debated. That it does this cannot.
Probably most people prefer Where Eagles Dare. Anyway, it was a huge success (and don’t forget the movie!). And this is fine—liking Where Eagles Dare doesn’t mean you’re stupid, uneducated or tasteless.
On the other hand recognizing that For Whom the Bell Tolls is on a higher plane doesn’t mean you’re inculcated in some religion, or following the cool kids or a slave to pointless rules. This is like physics.
What about other kinds of art? Bach and the Beach Boys? Bob Ross, anyone? Isn’t it the same?
But some books are objectively bad. Does anyone deny this? And some objectively bad books are popular. Here the masses are wrong. Here they have bad taste. Isn’t this also like physics?
"Reporting recently in the journal Animal Cognition, Edwin van Leeuwen of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands and colleagues saw something irresistibly nutty in a 12-chimp group in Zambia. Back in 2007, a female named Julie got it into her head to start walking around with a long, strawlike blade of grass in her ear.
The behavior had no discernible function, and no other chimp had ever been observed to do the “grass-in-ear-behavior” (what the authors call GIEB). Could she be trying to ease the irritation of a parasite or infectious disease? The researchers ruled that out, because neighboring chimp groups weren’t suffering from ear problems, making it unlikely that Julie was afflicted.
Julie just liked having a piece of grass sticking out of her ear. So sue her.
The behavior caught on. Chimps soon went about their business with grass stuck in their ears. Julie remained the queen of GIEB-ing. During the five-year study period, the other group members GIEB-ed from one to 36 times, whereas Julie clocked in with an untouchable 168 times. Eventually, two-thirds of Julie’s group GIEB-ed. The behavior continued even after her death in 2012—the gold standard of cultural transmission."
Wow, a great example of the basic power of the female in groups and societies and such realization is suppressed and censored by those that promote and helpless innocent good-intending blinding of us all from crib that allows so much daily personally suffered evil many cause and the society wide programmed use of them as a 5th column of unTruth, unJust, disOrdering destruction of all that supports our culture and society, ..
.. such as the insanities we must accept and pushed at us from crib like Abortion, sex is choice, child mind-body-soul sexual mutilations and acceptance of male-hate and virtueless spreading we suffer from and increasing daily - the source is unrecognizable cause from our now Sick Womanhood - because we blind to it, and the suggestion inspires life-destroying responses toward the 'criminal predatorial' informers.
Anyone else old enough to remembering womanhood as being a blessing to us all and generally virtue supporting, and have noticed the steady change that baby-murdering and other promotion of once [self & group] managed and rejected insane accepting and promoting evils?
I think it's a very small bit Universal Law Of Physics, larger but still small touch or Priesthood (derogatory) and split majority of Grammar/BDSM porn.
Eg, I too was fine with terribly constructed ugly overpriced drywall and petroleum product boxes the engineer shit out before his lunch break because he was actively contemptuous of his client, before I spent a bunch of time working on buildings, and living in them, and thinking about them, and becoming convercent in the grammar (What is that roofline doing there sticking out like a semi at church, style of thing), and finally becoming so BDSM pilled: Building edition I go to romania to look at wooden churches and have an emotional experience different from the usual one at that sort of place.
I am Neoclassical's biggest hater because of this. We had wonderful house styles nobody else could touch; we don't need to build shitty versions of trancedently excellent greek structures (I challenge anyone to go to the parthenon and not say: Damn, that is the one of the buildingest buildings I ever did see).
I especially appreciate Frank Furnace here. Every generic box with a pseudo greco-roman portico slapped on the front should be replaced with a Frank Furnace style monolithic neo-post-pre gothic monstrosity, they are all extremely cool AND they will tickle the taste sensor of even the most "McDonalds!" building apriciators.
The hidden premise to this post is that some people have a thing called "taste," whereas others (Scott, Astral Codex readers, gray tribe members, whatever) don't bother with such things and instead respond to art spontaneously, unaffectedly, guided in no way by what other people say or think.
Once you can understand why this is a bad premise you'll be closer to understanding what kind of thing taste is. Not much closer, granted.
What if taste is a self-fulfilling prophecy? Say you have a brilliant painter. The painter goes to some art school, and becomes an even better painter than they already were. They pick up "good taste" at the same time. Also, since many of their friends are also painters, they're clued into the network of cool people and are probably going to maintain good taste. Most people find this person's work beautiful or awe-inspiring or whatever, because it's really good. Meanwhile, there's a bunch of low-quality work that is also somewhat tasteless, because its creators weren't good enough to get into a high-status school, and don't care about art enough to maintain an artsy friend network.
Repeat for three centuries. Now everyone sees a bunch of tasteful good art and a bunch of tasteless bad art. People end up associating taste with beauty, even though they're mostly orthogonal. People will decide they like tasteful art better, not as a status game, but because it has attributes they associate with beauty.
Fairly often, you get art which is tasteful and bad. Either nobody notices (it's bad and doesn't get shared), or it gets called "pretentious" or "stuffy". Sometimes, someone comes out with a work which is utterly tasteless but so profoundly beautiful or meaningful that people can't ignore it. They get called "avant-garde", and sometimes change what is considered tasteful.
My model is that taste is like hardware. People need different levels for different purposes. Most people are fine with say a drill that overheats in a few minutes, most of the time, but sometimes they need something better-made if they have a big project. Similarly, pleasantly inoffensive art is fine for most purposes, but it doesn’t satisfy some needs that people might have sometimes, when they need an experience with more integrity.
It's best understood as D, but with the caveat that you subconsciously notice when the rules aren't followed White socks + black shoes aren't fashionable because the contrast draws the eye towards them. White shirt + black shoes are fashionable because the contrast draws the eye towards them. However the fashionable choice means people are looking at your face, rather than down to your feet. Scott didn't fully understand the rule when he said that the sock choice was simply jarring.
It's ironic because Scott wrote a great article about a different form of taste.
I can tell that the repetitive sentences in the medical note is unpleasant, but the repetitive sentences in his explanation are nice to read. He explains why the experience is different (one uses intentional parallelism) but the viewpoint that produced this fashion article would have just said it's inertia from people feeling bored once by the first example.
It's not like there's a secret writing cabal that decided repetitive sentences are boring and then created a secret anti-repetitive conspiracy, escapable only through the use of something arbitrarily called "parallelism". It actually just reads better, even if the reader couldn't describe why. Similarly all these rules about good taste are about how to look better. Dieworkwear's twitter threads are best viewed like this writing advice column. If the rules seems arbitrary, then maybe you're not fully understanding or the context in which they should be applied.
I would go with G.: Taste is like grammar. There can be multiple versions of it, each correct within the groups that use it.
Artistic taste can be partially based on underlying principles that many humans share due to how human brains evolved, or due to experiences that are common to many humans in a certain time and place. The bouba and kiki shapes demonstrate that shapes can evoke associations with sounds regardless of cultural context. Emotional associations with art can be similarly culture-agnostic.
On a smaller scale, taste can also vary by individual and with an individual's mood. Art can evoke calmness, anxiety, optimism, melancholy, and a variety of other mental states. Which state resonates with an individual person can change over time. That's why humans have things like goth phases.
Taste is also partially arbitrary, a convention acquired through socialization. It can help people identify themselves as part of a group. For some purposes, people being on the same page matters more than what that page is. Language itself is the preeminent example. A more visceral one is which side of the road people drive. These are conventions, based on coordination rather than derived purely from underlying principles.
When people use rules, labels, and conventions to create impressions, signal affiliation, and streamline interactions with strangers, I call that "background mindset". I would tend to file artistic taste under the category of background mindset.
" .. people being on the same page matters more than what that page is."
This prioritized group inclusion over truth choice that is toxic today through the West, that has never been known to have infected and poison a nation or empire that was recorded or understood before the death of it.
That is, of the two alternatives that no history of that toxic internal rule of cowering together valued more the truth directed risky taking; they either never existed or if appeared was do destructive, so chaotic was the death and collapse of the unified nation or empire that resulted that no understanding or records were possible.
This choice is a simple functional definition of womanhood and manhood, that unless for careful advancement up the mating status ladder, women will always avoiding wide attention by others, passive and serving to power.
Where manhood mating and advancement up the Status, Power, and Responsibly hierarchy requires courage risk and good grip on Truth, Rigorousness, and best under known and predictable Order in society & culture.
Manhood was never the false-witnessed reputational female Satanic unTruth, unJust, disOrdering, poisoning the genocidal (of our race) Sickened womanhood has done while we continued to Love, Supported, Protected, and Provided for then while Justly burning alive in public tied to a Stake was in Order, we continued instead to be their benefactors all while women and mothers were and are functionally Castrating, mutilating and crippling males from crib - in the march of success their betraying traitorous back dead putrid hearts filled with evil, the demonic goal and it's wider Form was often secularly name Communism, Marxism, Modernistic, Satanic, Globalists, Zionism, and many other names.
Names which describe the opponents of Goodness Love Joy Life .. of Church Militant. The Holy fight on earth for souls enslaved by Satan, the attack to the roots of virtue and manhood that Sickening womanhood advanced evil - the Rot from all we Loved and took for union of One Body as Holy direct Duty commanded, and using warped and Sicken hyper-empowered [once a blessing to all] womanhood to rot and murder joy and love and torturing our babies to death with silent screams from those we couldn't know of or protect if we did, and crippling of crushing manhood at the root - starting at the crib and unprotected by the driven away fathers and the death of Fatherhood and marriage such screaking-evil tools did with support of the GreatSatan Federal Gov.
A good line to meditate on, thank you commenter - who and wherever you are.
A more positive way to phrase (E): the natural artistic cycle is that, as you get more familiar with an artform, you start to value novelty. You start with defining works that scratch a certain itch, but at some point those get boring, i.e. fantasy novels that are 90% LotR with the numbers filed off. The first couple of those can be a genuinely enjoyable read, but past a certain point.... So creators begin to step away from the 'pure sugar' to do more complex stuff, even if it isn't as appealing to the uninitiated. (And, in time, break off to form new styles, then come back to remix the old stuff when the world has moved on enough that there's something new to say in those terms....)
I don't think this is bad. But what frustrates me (and I think some other people that value novelty and generally sympathize with artistic revolutionaries) about modern art and modernist architecture is that it goes the opposite way. It's simpler and has *less* entropy! Two glass cubes might not look *exactly* alike, but they're going to look as similar as two log cabins. Sure, the log cabins look different because of circumstance - those are the particular trees that were growing there at the time - while with the glass cube every detail is (supposed to be) intentional. But still, a black square is going to take a lot less space up on the disk than Michelangelo's or Van Gogh's work, and *especially* so for the de facto compression algorithm that our brains use. (The shade of black being #010206 or #050004 doesn't really matter to a human.) And the result is that, apart from the initial shock of "is this art?", there's vastly more room for creativity in more complex styles - *and* they can do better at the basic task of visual appeal.
I struggle somewhat with Scott's post here. This is because I have very mixed opinions on the topic.
I think there is genuine skill and craftsmanship when it comes to the creation of works of art. I think it's good to promote such skill and craftsmanship. The form of art I appreciate this the most in is literary art or narrative-based art. Wooden dialogue, exposition dumps, uneven pacing, characters lacking understandable motivation or a good sense of agency... these things really do bother me. I dislike them because they often break immersion for me, and I like to get very immersed in a story if possible.
That being said... many of the arguments I've read for "good taste" makes the enjoyment of arts, or even the enjoyment of food, sound like a chore to me. That you should purposely engage with content or food that you don't like until you eventually come to like it. I... am skeptical of this, I have to be honest. There are foods I like more as an adult than I did as a kid, like the taste of vanilla and the taste of bread. But how much of this is just the natural development of taste buds as we age? I certainly ate plenty of bread in one form or another as a kid. It didn't make me like bread more when I was a kid. It's just one day, as an adult, I noticed that now I like the taste of bread more than I used to.
Also, an idea like "keep engaging with something you dislike until you like it" strikes me as something very easy to hack with status games. How many people pretend to like something that they don't because they don't want to disappoint their friend or mentor who has "good taste"? How many give up on things that, in truth, they still like, precisely because they don't want to be seen as having "bad taste"?
I can certainly understand how Scott, being a Psychiatrist IIRC, would have concerns with the concept of "good taste". Social pressure to trade-in something you like a lot for something you don't like (or like less) could be bad for a people's mental health. If most people genuinely like "kitsch" is there a risk in condemning what they like and trying to convince them to like something else?
There seems to be a BDSM-esque synthesis of 1 and 2. If you focus on something a lot, as the priests do, there is an innate tendency for taste to develop in a particular way and this development is path dependent. Hence apparently ever changing assertions of what's best earnestly attested to by large number of people endlessly immersed in it, that seems arbitrary and nonsensical (at first) to everyone else, but consistent to themselves.
This interpretation allows us to avoid rejecting peoples representation of their internal experience.
Architecture is fashion, but it has a parallel function of being consumed by the public, so "bad" architecture is offensive to utilitarians. Unfortunately, buildings are paid for by rich people. The obvious architectural parallel is the transition to black-and-white coattails for men, away from the decorative dandy style. It's too "easy" now to make a "pretty" building, so it's better to not even worry about looks, go with anti-looks (counter-signaling), or pay priests/sophiscates. (there's quite a bit you can optimize with tuxedo purchases that require paying taxes to sophiscates. Although, it does cap out, and you wouldn't want a million-dollar tuxedo because "pfft, you spent THAT much on a tuxedo, you care too much." Although, devoting your life to marrying into class so that you can know exactly what tuxedo to get is pretty expensive.)
One of the clearest displays of how our culture and societies across the West has been undermined and anti-human is in the removal of Beauty from us in all things - including architecture. Old styles filled with skilled loving craftsmanship pronouncing Joy to the world, replace by or added into our practical existance ..
.. as seen in the Modernist take-over and attack on the Traditional Catholic Church since the 1960's in the needless destruction of existing beautiful Churches and the construction of hideous eye-sore new Churches. As Satan took control of Vatican and much of Leadership, the outward architecture became soul-crippling and away from inspiring and joyous.
If you don't bother to educate yourself in art, literature, music, architecture, food, wine, or whatever, you'll never learn the subtleties and the reason things are the way they are. And if you can't explain why you like or don't like something, how are you going to communicate your experience to people who have educated themselves about what makes a piece of art (of any medium) superior to that run-of-the-mill crap? Moreover, education exposes one to things one otherwise might not encounter. People with educated tastes may disagree about what makes one piece of art superior to another, but they have the vocabulary to communicate their reasons, and thus, they can educate others.
And so, you comment indirectly condemns the Babal we fell into what Latin stopped being valued and universally taught to the educated or to anyone hoping to best Serve Man and God.
One might date such an insane failure of parents and powerful Classes their Duty to all the future, it seems to beg to Heaven for a sane reason or cause that if possible to discover at all (and the criminals and events not recorded or if was then censored) but one might not likely go wrong is focused to begin with the Modernist movement that has so long actively attacked the Church, and the wide spread coordinated force that created Babal State for the world have that same 'taste' of Infiltration into upper power positions, the criminals always intending to use Offices provided them and those powers of them to betray their Offices' basic duties, to turn those powers against the Benefactors and Right Ordered leaders that we saw happen to the Traditional Catholic Church when Satan can be recognized as in the Modernist Pope that suppressed the 3rd secrete of Fatima in 1960 till today where many believe what was released was incomplete and best of another heretical lie from that Sickened and soul-murdering False Worldly 'Ape' version which has been public since before heretical containing Vatican II.
So, I expect it is likely a very good starting point to investigate when and from whom specifically targeted universal standard of Latin as a requirement for any and all Educated men, as one of the Attack of Church and mankind's hope and path away from Satanic enslavement and Hell that is forming into reality more clearly everyday now.
While I don't agree with Steven's thesis, he asked a good question about the end of Latin.
I asked ChatGPT:
When did Latin get deemphasized in formal education?
ChatGPT replied:
The deemphasis of Latin in formal education began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly in Western countries, as educational systems evolved to emphasize modern languages, science, and practical skills over classical studies.
Key Factors Behind the Shift:
Rise of National Languages:
During the 18th and 19th centuries, national identity movements led to a focus on vernacular languages in schools. Modern languages like French, German, and later English gained prominence as nations sought to educate their citizens in their native tongues.
Industrial Revolution:
The industrialization of society in the 19th century demanded a workforce trained in technical and practical subjects, such as mathematics, engineering, and the sciences. These fields became prioritized over classical studies.
Reforms in Higher Education:
By the late 19th century, universities began dropping Latin as a strict admission requirement, opening access to a broader range of students and reducing its dominance in secondary education.
Modern Educational Movements:
In the early 20th century, progressive education movements, especially in the United States and parts of Europe, emphasized subjects like literature, modern history, and the sciences over Latin.
Globalization and Modern Languages:
As international trade and diplomacy expanded in the 20th century, the need to teach languages like French, German, Spanish, and later Mandarin or Japanese grew, reducing Latin's practical importance.
World Wars and Cultural Shifts:
The devastation of World War I and World War II caused many societies to reexamine the role of traditional education, leading to more pragmatic curricula focused on rebuilding and modern skills.
Decline in Specific Contexts:
United States: By the mid-20th century, Latin had largely become an optional or specialized subject rather than a core requirement in high schools.
United Kingdom: Reforms such as the Butler Education Act of 1944 reduced the emphasis on classical education in favor of a broader curriculum.
Europe: Latin's decline was slower in countries like Italy or Spain, but even there, modern education reforms in the 20th century diminished its role.
Today, Latin remains part of specialized programs in classics or for students pursuing fields like law, medicine, or theology, but it is no longer a cornerstone of general education.
.. and for the other's needed spelling-Nazi cnt troll continuation, we sure need lots more of you useless great imitator of pile of poison vomit, if you aren't a Bot designed to undermine community and any share collective unity, .. only another tool of Satan.
I've only used chatGPT to see what questions triggers it or lies about, etc. ..
To learn more about the mind-raping owners and controllers that are twisting it like they twisted their children and many golems of evil murder and similar tasks like most of the population, clearly are, especially the military age ones, and those that our taxes pay for in training major police department on how to provoke violent response that on video makes the police beat-down and killings as started by the protesters,
Their goals and glimpse some aspects of next sage genocide and looting the USA when our service of the debt (now $1 Trillion dollar every 100 days) there and all that the ADL funders and directors of our and many top Gov, and Eu, when they Call-in our debt and we too militarily weak as we are now to refuse, to be treated like Greece was some decade or earlier before, that unJust situation (Greece had a lot of debt in private banking systems and those banking systems owners are likely connected of family to those that own most of the top EU people, ..
So they worked a deal where Grease's entire debt would be bought by the EU (on paper) and so no default was possible for Grease, and so everything of public value that could be carried away, that was profitable money maker for gov, lands, .. were sold to those bankers or their agents.
It drove the economy into horrible situation and a significant youth moved away for work and income, for to be treated like the real rulers and most of those under class servants think of them and us all?
As Palestinians as we always were to them, the super-race, able to genocide in public 200,000+ innocents .. and they will kill us and all we every loved after endless terrorizing, starvations, exposure deaths, .. as we can see.
They are mocking us all, and explaining by deed exactly how many other countries populations we can expect to help us, as many as we are not doing now.
I think he's advocating one Church and one Language to rule us all — and in the darkness bind us.
I was stumped by the mind-raping golems reference, though. As a reference to popular culture, poor ChatGPT seemed to be stumped, too. Question: is the critter created by Rabbi ben Bezalel still running around making trouble after 400 years?
The negative mention of golems makes me wonder if he has an anti-semitic tilt to his thinking. After all, technically speaking, Adam was a golem (Psalm 139:16, and Tractate Sanhedrin 38b).
Hypothesis: Taste is Beauty plus Fashion. Beauty is like Physics - universal(ish, for neurotypical humans), but very complicated. Fashion is as already noted fickle and arbitrary.
The apparent non-universality of Taste is in part because of the fickleness of Fashion, but also the complexity of Beauty. Some parts, like "symmetry yay!" are the same pretty much everywhere, but e.g. "different but not *too* different from what you grew up with" points in different directions for people from snowy forests with peaked-roof timber houses and for those who grew up in arid climes with mud-brick walls and minimalist roofs. Then there's "the preferred aesthetic of our oppressors is ugly", where it matters whether you were most recently invaded by the Nazis or the Arabs. And that barely scratches the surface of the emergent complexity of Beauty.
Putting great weight on Fashion impedes our ability to share the experience of Beauty, which is already limited by circumstance. But it opens new axes of status for people who aren't going to score highly in other areas, and we don't want people to feel like *complete* losers so leave the Fashionistas be. Within reasonable limits, at least.
Well, the historical and cultural data don't seem to indicate that human physical beauty is universal. Admittedly, I come at this question from a male bias, but when it comes to culture, big-hipped and ultra-zaftig women are considered beautiful in most of sub-Saharan Africa. In Asia, full-breasted women were considered to be ugly (but this cultural preference seems to have faded as better nutrition has enhanced breast sizes in Asian countries). European males liked those full breasts and wide hips, but they didn't seem to idolize really big women like the sub-Saharan Africans do. In ancient Rome, blond hair was considered to be ugly (because there were a lot of blonds among Celtic and German slaves). In medieval Japan, black teeth were considered beautiful. Then we've got the neck stretching that some Asian and African cultures put their women through. In the US and Western Europe, full-breasted women were the ideal until the 1960s and Twiggy came along. Since then, the ideal of beauty has changed to slender, small-breasted women with long legs.
But I'd agree with you when you say, "Putting great weight on Fashion impedes our ability to share the experience of Beauty, which is already limited by circumstance." Well said, BTW.
A further taste thing: Both in my previous line of work and in one of my hobbies (cooking); once I had a refined enough palet as it were, I (and my coworkers and cohobbiests) developed meta taste in addition to regular taste.
Eg, if you have meta taste, you can project what someone will like by being around them for a bit and seeing other things they like.
The hit rate on this is shocking; my boss would make 500 small decisions that non-tradies just weren't equip to make and 485 of them would be correct.
I can be cooking a meal for someone who doesn't like X, and I know in my heart that they do like X, and I cajole them into eating X, and now they request X every time we do a get together.
It seems trivial, but I'm planning an annual new years fancy dinner I do for a family friend and it's actually pretty involved. Less like "Does she like white fish" and more "Consider the context of her life up till now and all your experiences of her, from the aspect of does she like white fish"
We had an after-work club of wine snobs (along with people who just wanted to get sloshed) at my former company. Once a month, we snobs would bring our favorite wines for the other snobs to taste (and the non-snobs would drink whatever we poured them). We developed a system for describing wines. We broke it down into five parts (color), bouquet (aka nose, the scents of the wine), the tastes we experienced on the front of the tongue, the tastes we experienced on the mid-palate, and the tastes we experienced on the finish as we swallowed. Although we'd use different terms to describe what we were experiencing, we learned to map the way someone described to the wine they liked. We all got pretty good at predicting which types of wines would appeal to certain people.
THat's why I reject the 'pure class' explanation for taste; there are too many correlations between understanding something enough to know what someone else will like before they try it and this thing we call taste.
Not to say class signaling doesn't exist, I just think that it has it's own trend line that correlates with taste in one direction.
Oh Dave, you Tease and intellect tormenter, that this respond insists to us to seek and main-steam your content only to find few articles and no ability to support, feedback, or add value to and based on your work with no comment ability, no access of the value that others might provide. What might we assume but tormenting intent?
And 'the collective unconscious' is rooted in our Host from which He provides the Base Perfect Human's mind-body-soul (His Body and Blood) for which we all share and leach life from, Jesus Christ, that is Shared Virtues are realized and expressed in the universally true shared Natural Law, and later more fully expressed in Traditional Roman Apostolic Catholicism. So sorry you actively block this and any other responses to aspects of your content.
Thank you for your commend, and to simulation and unrealized hope to find authors of the quality that this suggested to me.
God Bless., Steve
I think the priesthood thing is most directionally correct, but there are many priesthoods! The art you are into reflects some sort of social group. For the shirt example, maybe if you are part of some fancy rich club you all wear white after labor day exactly because you want to differentiate yourself from commoners. Same with art
I don't think the Google explanation is exactly right; my vague impression is that white and light colours are summer wear (because if you're lucky, the weather is hot and the sun is shining and light colours reflect the light better and just look suitable for the environment). Going into autumn, you should be changing to heavier, darker clothing to suit the cooler weather and dimmer light.
Part of it is, indeed, wealth - to be able to afford several sets of clothes for the changing seasons (just like dressing for dinner, which I imagine practically nobody does anymore). And fashion, and snobbery.
But I think I have to agree with Willie Brown (corrupt mayor of San Francisco, Kamala's squeeze who introduced her to high society and helped launch her on her career, but undoubtedly a man of taste and style) here 😁
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Brown_(politician)#Personal_style
"In his 2008 autobiography Basic Brown, he described his taste for $6,000 Brioni suits and his search for the perfect chocolate Corvette. In one chapter, "The Power of Clothes: Don't Pull a Dukakis", Brown writes that men should have a navy blazer for each season: one with "a hint of green" for springtime, another with more autumnal threading for the fall. He adds, "You really shouldn't try to get through a public day wearing just one thing. ... Sometimes, I change clothes four times a day."
Maybe not four times a day, but yes to different clothing for the seasons! I've changed out of my 'summer' colours to my 'winter' colours now, because with the grey skies, rain, and cold weather, wearing lighter colours (even if nowadays we all live and work in buildings with heating) just doesn't *feel* right.
Chocolate brown is the wrong color for Vettes. Everyone knows this.
Black is a good color, but a pain to keep clean. Maybe a brown leather interior on a black Corvette.
Actually, black is one of the few colors that works on the sixth generation Corvette. The color-coded headlights mess everything up.
"Chocolate brown is the wrong color for Vettes. Everyone knows this."
Explains why he had to go on a search for the perfect one, then.
So, would you rather have a chocolate Corvette or one of the new Jaguars? 😀
The Vette can be repainted.
Not sure you can buy a current Vette in brown, but I may be wrong.
You can, but it does not look good
https://www.motor1.com/news/703628/2023-corvette-sales/
The C3 looks a lot better in brown https://www.corvetteforum.com/forums/c3-general/2113497-brown-c3-picture-thread-let-s-see-them.html
Neither look good in brown, and I love me the C3.
For someone who is renowned for refined taste, Willie Brown's insistence on a chocolate colored sports car baffles me.
It's his own little in-joke. His name is Brown, his eyes are brown, his skin is ...
He's just collecting the whole set! And why not?
I got the monobranding joke from the beginning, but brown is still a lousy color for Corvettes.
I didn't buy tabby corvettes.
Yes, my superpower is explaining the obvious!
" maybe if you are part of some fancy rich club you all wear white after labor day exactly because you want to differentiate yourself from commoners"
Okay, I *have* to quote from a Father Brown story here, "The Queer Feet" (and yes, the use of language has changed since that was an unremarkable title) 😁
"If you meet a member of that select club, “The Twelve True Fishermen,” entering the Vernon Hotel for the annual club dinner, you will observe, as he takes off his overcoat, that his evening coat is green and not black. If (supposing that you have the star-defying audacity to address such a being) you ask him why, he will probably answer that he does it to avoid being mistaken for a waiter. You will then retire crushed.
...The Vernon Hotel at which The Twelve True Fishermen held their annual dinners was an institution such as can only exist in an oligarchical society which has almost gone mad on good manners. It was that topsy-turvy product — an “exclusive” commercial enterprise. That is, it was a thing which paid not by attracting people, but actually by turning people away. In the heart of a plutocracy tradesmen become cunning enough to be more fastidious than their customers. They positively create difficulties so that their wealthy and weary clients may spend money and diplomacy in overcoming them. If there were a fashionable hotel in London which no man could enter who was under six foot, society would meekly make up parties of six-foot men to dine in it. If there were an expensive restaurant which by a mere caprice of its proprietor was only open on Thursday afternoon, it would be crowded on Thursday afternoon.
...They walked together along the passage to the entrance hall, where they saw the fresh, freckled face of the Duke of Chester, who was bounding buoyantly along towards them.
“Come along, Pound,” he cried breathlessly. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. The dinner’s going again in spanking style, and old Audley has got to make a speech in honour of the forks being saved. We want to start some new ceremony, don’t you know, to commemorate the occasion. I say, you really got the goods back, what do you suggest?”
“Why,” said the colonel, eyeing him with a certain sardonic approval, “I should suggest that henceforward we wear green coats, instead of black. One never knows what mistakes may arise when one looks so like a waiter.”
“Oh, hang it all!” said the young man, “a gentleman never looks like a waiter.”
“Nor a waiter like a gentleman, I suppose,” said Colonel Pound, with the same lowering laughter on his face. “Reverend sir, your friend must have been very smart to act the gentleman.”
Father Brown buttoned up his commonplace overcoat to the neck, for the night was stormy, and took his commonplace umbrella from the stand.
“Yes,” he said; “it must be very hard work to be a gentleman; but, do you know, I have sometimes thought that it may be almost as laborious to be a waiter.”
Repost from another reply here:
Maybe to expand a little bit: I don't think its just elitists and non-elitist. Think of goths, they have clear clothing and in-group rituals and the priesthood are the big musicians (?). This community clearly differentiates itself from the outside, but if you are within this community there are further more subtle marks of differentiation based on in-group conflicts and preferences.
The Labor Day thing reminds me of this, in myself: it's been a long time since I wore a dress or in fact dressed much differently than the average four-year-old, and certainly snobbery about clothing seems pretty irrelevant at the current moment. At the same time - though I own no tennis whites - I feel some slight compulsion to remain on the side of the divide of knowing, for instance, that you don't wear white shoes in fall or put your little girl in patent leather mary janes in summer. This probably locates me in some deeply mid part of the middle class, in Paul Fussell terms.
Breaking rules becomes meaningless when there are no generally acknowledged rules.
Here's what I'm thinking -- it's physics combined with priesthood.
In every field of human endeavour, there's things that are easy to appreciate and things that are hard to appreciate. A child can enjoy Harry Potter, but to enjoy James Joyce you need a lot more patience and a whole bunch of erudition to understand all the references Appreciating the hard-to-appreciate stuff is usually higher status (but not always, e.g. pornography or death metal).
So think of it as an easy-to-appreciate core surrounded by a bunch of hard-to-appreciate advanced material. But not all the advanced material is equally high status -- as with anything else, fashion predominates here, and certain flavours of advanced material cycle in and out of fashion among the afficionados as the years progress (e.g. Infinite Jest remains advanced literature but has apparently swung deeply out of fashion recently.)
Architecture is just particularly bad because the tastes of the afficionados get to determine what is built for the benefit of the rest of us.
White socks are we either in the Northern Soul subculture
I was going to say something similar. And sophisticated art at least acknowledges the existence of these priesthoods, since nothing more complex than a cave painting exists in a vacuum, so that their standards are either conformed to or violated with some sense of intent. It is this context of acknowledgement that made Jackson Pollock "art" and "a commentary on art" and someone's toddler's mess and or their Campbell's soup can on the counter "not art."
Very true, if these preferences are socially constructed then you'd expect to have different values for different classes and cultures/subcultures. When Scott talks about his reaction to "Class X" from Paul Fussell's book, that was how I felt reading Scott's review of Bauhaus to Our House. Yes clearly taste is not objective, and it has a lot to do with how we build up our self-image from bits an pieces of our culture, using signaling to control how we're perceived and perceive ourselves. But that's equally true for classical and modern architecture. If I trade my LC4 chair in my office for a beautiful rattan beaux-arts chair because Le Corbusier was a crazy communist, that's just me trading one signal for another.
My current model is inspired by Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.
If we imagine that people's art preferences are a sort of open-ended guess about how good the art is, their preferences are going to depend on their experiences that inform them about goodness or badness.
People share a significant proportion of their experiences. These shared experiences generate the correlations in their estimates of the quality of art. But because these shared experiences specifically exclude unique experiments that only a few people have had, they're as shallow as possible for a human to be. So if you average the aesthetic preference of many people, that gives you strictly more primitive results than if you took the aesthetic preference of any one of the people.
Those who work within a field have unique experiences not shared with the commoners, so they are somewhat more informed and therefore have somewhat better taste, in a sense. But they have specific non-random experiences, often to do with working within their field, so their taste tends to favor self-reference and simplicity. Which are certainly virtues, but become ungrounded if no other experiences are taken into account.
Someone who has lived an advanced life, learning about much of the world and doing many different things, would hopefully have a much more refined taste, being much closer to what is really good. But there's no objective way of measuring this. The closest options you have would be stuff like comparing their opinion to your opinion, or directly weighting based on their experiences.
And I guess if one wants to study it, one could look at how experience influences taste. Though the trouble is one really needs something like my LDSL model to accurately measure it. Which I'm still working on.
Example: Swatiska.
For most of history, many people would probably consider that a neat geometric shape. So we can sort of take this to be the "common taste" opinion of swatiskas.
In the modern west, we understand swastikas to be associated with nazis, and obviously nazis are bad so this also shows a problem with the swatiska. Healthy westerners will therefore dislike the swastika. Though many westerners are sort of unhealthy and might actually appreciate the nazi swastika more because of the coolness factor.
In the east, the swastika is a religious symbol related to peace. I don't know much about that, but I imagine this implies a lot more appreciation for it than "cool geometric symbol", and certainly the opposite sort of appreciation than "fascist symbol".
Someone who has properly absorbed both western and eastern culture will presumably have much more ambivalent and varied feelings about the swastika, knowing both its nazi history and its peace symbolism. This is a much more tasteful view than "neat geometric shape!".
> In the east, the swastika is a religious symbol related to peace. I don't know much about that
Specifically, it's a Buddhist symbol.
In China today they say that the counterclockwise-spinning swastika 卐 is an evil symbol of Nazism whereas the clockwise-spinning 卍 is a good symbol of the Buddha, but this is purely a defensive reaction to Western condemnation of the symbol as inherently evil. Historically, they aren't distinguished.
Hindus use it as well as Buddhists, you see it in India as well (where there are very few Buddhists, although many/most Hindus do consider the Buddha to be a divine incarnation).
That said, I've seen it in India, but it's not like it's everywhere- it's not uncommon, but certainly not ubiquitious, and if it fell out of fashion due to the Nazi thing there are plenty of other iconographies people could / would use.
I'm now seriously wondering who got both the swastikas into Unicode.
It looks like they're included in one of the Chinese blocks, as well as in the Tibetan block since 2009. It's unclear from a brief read whether any language uses them widely *other* than to refer to the symbols, with the exception that Wiktionary notes a Japanese youth slang sense of "awesome, hype" because the pronunciation of the character (manji/まんじ) is close to an interjection (maji/マジ) for "seriously, for real". I don't know how widespread this actually is, but I'd be curious if it spread as something edgy or just completely without reference to the Western interpretation.
Unicode includes many characters that are really artwork and not writing. (囍 is another example.) While this is contrary to the purpose of Unicode, it seems to have been mandated by a commitment to full backwards compatibility with older encoding schemes. Any character that was listed in any of those older schemes must have a representation in Unicode, whether it has any written use or not.
>and certainly the opposite sort of appreciation than "fascist symbol"
To complicate things a bit, Nazis are actually cool and not particularly edgy in some parts of Asia, with Mein Kampf selling in self-help sections of Indian bookstores, while romantic comedies feature Hitler.
Coolness is about having the will and ability to break the law, so nazis were unquestionably cool, it's just that being cool is actually bad and healthy people ought to have a repulsion from cool stuff. Someone who thinks modern nazis are cool has their taste broken in a different way, I suppose, in that they don't properly internalize how defeated modern nazis are and how much they are losers. But it is understandable and forgivable for this to happen for easterners, as nazism isn't really part of their culture.
Cool things are appealing because your instincts are a better judge of what's healthy than all of your education put together.
It's also not nazis which are cool, but their uniforms and branding. There's feeling of authority, power, orderliness, determination, hope for a better future, and self-directness. Having these traits would make you more appealing on the dating market, as sexual selection has taught women which kind of men are likely to be able to provide for them and protect them.
"Moral good" is appealing when it's heroic, not when it's pathetic, which is why "Nice guys" generally don't have much luck in dating.
Genocide isn't cool. Snappy uniforms and authority are cool.
If we wanted to get more nuanced about it, we would need to distinguish the Weimar Republic vs Nazi Germany. During the Weimar Republic, the Nazis were breaking the law and getting away with it sufficiently successfully that they eventually took power. Once they had power and started committing genocide and so on, they are the ones deciding what is or isn't allowed, so they became wayy too mainstream to be cool, but the fact that they managed to reach this position proves that their approach prior to taking power was not just a LARP, which would've been un-cool.
Ripped jeans are cool, and that's OK. Genocide is another matter entirely.
I do wonder if the associations of the swastika actually help, there. In the West, our main introduction to it as mainstream was via the Nazis, so there's a ton of bad connotations associated with it.
But if you grew up in a culture where this is a common symbol, treated as holy and auspicious, and about as normal as seeing crosses on a church for Westerners, then encountering a European group (far-away, exotic, didn't impinge on your ordinary life) who used that symbol - they would benefit from the good associations of the swastika in forming unconscious opinions.
Few people would like the KKK even though they did use the cross, but if you tried to say "and that is because crosses are evil!!!! so the evil group naturally used the evil symbol!!!!", I think that wouldn't fly (for some people, yeah of course because Christianity bad, but for most people no).
In the US we associate white robes and peaked hoods with the KKK. But in Spain peaked hoods called capirotes and long robes are worn in penitential processions during Holy Week. When I was 16 I was in Spain on a school trip and saw such a procession. Being a precocious brat I understood what I was seeing, but some other kids on that trip were horrified.
That's the Death of the Cool then.
They definitely had snazzy uniforms! And using a swastika as a political symbol was a savvy marketing move (of course, the Nazis ruined the swastika brand).
Swastikas aren't physically ugly or unpleasant though anymore than the n-word is. It is a neat geometric shape. It's only the meaning of the symbol we (or most of us) object to.
I'm at the stage of my life where the old English teacher maxim that "You can't just say 'it's nice' or 'I like it', you have to explain why" now evokes in me "Why the dickens not?"
Some things one likes because one likes them, and that should be enough. If people say they like (as they do say, and have said on here) Brutalist architecture or modern modern art, while I may wonder if their aesthetic sense is snarled up into a case of dyspepsia, well that's their opinion and their preference and they are entitled to have it.
If I thought people really did like this stuff, I'd be perplexed but accepting. But the nagging suspicion *is* that they *don't* really like it, they like what they have been told what they should like and any qualms they may have, they over-ride with "but this is good taste, this is a la mode, this is what persons of quality should and do choose".
There is, of course, a good case for educating your palate and learning to move past simple views and judgements, to learn to appreciate the new and novel. But does anyone *really* like Jeff Koons' balloon animals, for instance? Ah well, they may well have the same revulsion if I say I like this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallas_and_the_Centaur) "Ugh, Botticelli, how plebian, how commonplace, how kitsch!"
And by the end of his life, Botticelli was indeed exploring new styles, moving on from what he had mastered as a slick, repeatable, reliable turning-out of pretty imagery. But that was growth, not "beauty is out of fashion".
I thought about "liking" in the past and would even go further - people explaining why they like something are often lying or adding ad-hoc explanations.
`Why A likes oranges? They are juicy, not too sweet, not too sour, aromatic.`
`Why B you doesn't like oranges? They are mushy and white parts get stuck in the teeth.`
Those are just descriptions of oranges, they don't tell anything new if you already knew what an orange is. And still contain more opinions inside ("not too sweet" is not objective fact).
You can look at the same thing about pretty much everything: movie genres or particular movie, a game, a competitive sport, a physical activity, fashion style.
You can say why you like X, and sometimes it's beneficial. But often it's bullshit.
___
For a lot of hobbies people will say that they like X because of the community. OK, cool, but is the community of this particular hobby really better than the ones in dozens of other things?
Or when people like things like teamwork, competitiveness, discipline or specific sport, that still doesn't tell you why they like it over other ones.
___
With this view I am a bit of a weirdo. I am aware how others regularly say that they like X because of boring factors 1 and 2.
But my conclusion is that I'm fine with people liking things and not needing to explain, and I'm completely absolving myself from guilt for liking some low quality thing (music, game, artwork, joke <while obviously still looking down a bit at people liking other low quality things, like spammy tiktok content or just different jokes I dislike>).
And if I want to engage with someone I change a bit my expressions usually resulting in better perceived words. For example I may describe more about what I like about oranges, like that the aroma brings association of freshness to my mind. But at other times when I don't want to engage and someone says "this music is shit" I answer "I like it and don't care".
> For a lot of hobbies people will say that they like X because of the community. OK, cool, but is the community of this particular hobby really better than the ones in dozens of other things?
In many cases, yes. Some communities based around enthusiasm for a particular hobby or fandom are terrible. www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/nerd-social-fallacy Sometimes there'll be a split of some sort, ending up with two (or more) distinct sub-communities focused on the exact same subject, one of which is relentlessly unpleasant while another is fun and supportive. Somebody who finds a well-run place where they fit in could justifiably consider that rare and valuable, compared to e.g. more readily accessible enshittified social networks.
> Those are just descriptions of oranges, they don't tell anything new if you already knew what an orange is. And still contain more opinions inside
Those opinions are the whole point! All the (very important!) new information provided is about your actual preferences which would likely also generalize beyond oranges. By explaining "why" you assert e.g. that juiciness is more important for you than tidiness of eating without the white parts getting stuck in the teeth (which might be the opposite for someone else), or that "average-orange-sweet" is the amount of sweetness that you like, and that is interesting information because for someone else this level of sweetness could be far too sweet or far too sour.
> … But does anyone *really* like Jeff Koons' balloon animals?
Jeff Koons is like the he PT Barnum of the art world. That said I will admit to liking his Balloon animals. I think they create an interesting collision between the monumental and a child’s toy. They are sort of a cute contradiction in my opinion. What I kind of like even better is the wedding cake that he designed after he briefly married that Italian porn star. The whole thing was a stunt, but art is sometimes a stunt. At its most sophisticated, the art world resembles either a real estate market or a bond market more than anything else. This does not in any way impugn the motives of the artist who created those works, but there’s endless possibilities for argument about it. Attempting to come up with a rational explanation of the vagaries of art is a lot like trying to catch smoke in a butterfly net in my opinion. Too many moving parts.
Oscar Wilde once said that all art is useless and I tend to agree with him, but it sure is a way of stashing away money for the long-term if you’re in the blue chip world. Not too many people pay $100 million for a painting just because they like the way it looks on their wall. A museum poster would suffice for that.
>If people say they like (as they do say, and have said on here) Brutalist architecture or modern modern art, while I may wonder if their aesthetic sense is snarled up into a case of dyspepsia, well that's their opinion and their preference and they are entitled to have it.
I, personally, have something of a liking for brutalist architecture, but I think I can explain the reason.
I grew up in a middle class home. Almost every surface in it was, to some extent, fragile. If I wanted to nail two pieces of wood together, there was almost no place to do it, with the possible exception of an outdoor concrete walkway surface, if the weather cooperated that day.
So, to me, concrete surfaces (or similarly durable industrial-style surfaces, such as metal pipes) suggest areas where one doesn't have to be constantly on guard against damaging something (unlike, e.g. polished wood).
Does this make it clear why my personal preferences lean this way?
As for me, I grew up in rural New England, where houses were made of wood (or sometimes brick), and they were boxy with small windows. Being exposed to glass buildings, Mies-style, that let in the light and reflected the light was a revelation.
Many Thanks! That must have been quite a change!
And I always wanted to own an Eichler house, but they were always out of my price range.
Many Thanks! I'm only vaguely aware of them. The first time I lived in Silicon Valley (in an apartment), I heard some people talk of them with dissatisfaction. I don't _think_ that I've ever been inside one, but it has been decades, and I may have forgotten.
My model of taste is "arbitrary thingspace pileups". It explains why some preferences are ~universal and some seem random.
Imagine the following toy problem: you have two lines, one with letter labels 'A', 'B', 'C', another with integers '1', '2', '3', and a single rule - "The lines must cross at B2 (i.e. where the label B is on the letter axis and where number 2 is on the integer axis)".
There are four valid solutions - both ascending (most obvious, A1-B2-C3), both descending, and two mixes (A3-B2-C1 and C3-B2-A1), assuming we cross the lines at the right angle.
Now imagine that we give this problem to a pile of neurons, and the rule is there because B2 happens to correspond to "You're about to get eaten by a tiger, RUN!!!" - the two axes are some dimensions of tiger-likeness and/or run-away-now-ness.
The neurons don't know that though! With just those inputs and one rule, there is still four valid solutions, and which one they learn is random.
So, four brains may come up with four different arrangements, but they will all agree that tiger-shaped inputs making pouncing-shaped moves Are Scary. What they will NOT agree on is everything else. Let's say the number axis is the number of colors seen:
Brain 1 likes minimalism - any pattern is kind of like tiger stripes, and the more stripey, the more scary it looks.
Brain 2 is the opposite - tigers do not look like a rainbow on LSD, they have relatively few colors in an orderly pattern, so a fireworks show looks less tiger-like than a blank wall does.
Worse yet, this is an online learning algorithm. Brain 3 actually originally learned the exact same pattern as 1, but then it got traumatised by a scientist in a white coat, leading it to update towards Brain 2's solution.
Without additional goals, these are all perfectly healthy, normal brains coming up with sensible embeddings, they just have different side-effects for evaluating inputs they were not explicitly designed for dealing with in a hardcoded fashion.
I think the grammar analogy is the closest, with a small tweak. In the post you say that the experts have reasons for what they're doing but that these rules are arbitrary. But there are some more or less universal rules that are common across almost all languages - the concepts of subjects and objects, for example. So taste might be like this: there are some universal traits that confer beauty, on top of which we've built lots of artificial (though some times internally consistent) rules.
Not to mention that grammar is necessary to formulate concepts - and that:
- speakers actually agree on something like 99% of grammar - they are just not aware of it (especially if they are native);
- make that 99.9% if you are talking about literate people from a given country and century, even if they were not paying attention to their secondary-school teacher, ever.
In colloquial use, "grammar" tends to refer only to the spurious claims about grammar that secondary-school teachers make. The grammar that everyone already knows isn't worth noticing or discussing. Everybody already knows it.
But it *is* worth noticing and discussing - and if people started being sold sentences that make sense locally and have fancy words, but are badly composed or meaningless upon closer examination, "grammar" in the linguist's sense would be very much part of the thing to discuss.
Yours is a minority taste.
Your topic has been named "Escher sentences", with the paradigm example being "More people have been to France than I have." They're not common in the wild, but they do occur.
It feels fairly relevant here. Grammar is a structure and if 99.9% of it is universal - that has something to say about our opinions on taste.
Maybe I'm just another minority taste - I wouldn't know - I haven't extensively polled on this issue
There's something to the grammar argument. If you talk like an uneducated yokel from the sticks, you'll have trouble convincing anyone that you're smart enough to be hired. You may be sharper than people doing the hiring, but first you have to communicate with them in their language.
Enjoyment doesn't require education. Taste requires education. You may enjoy drinking Two-Buck Chuck wine, and that's fine. But if you tell a professional vintner that Two-buck Chuck is just as good as a carefully crafted wine, they'll laugh in your face. Well, you might counter that "studies have proven that most people can't distinguish the good stuff from the cheap stuff." Yes, that's true, but most people haven't spent much time sampling hundreds or thousands of different wines and then having to describe them and rate them —and, more importantly, understand the "grammar" of what goes into making an excellent wine.
And a wine maker from Bordeaux might not agree with the style of wine made in Napa, but by god, they understand the how and the why behind those choices, because they share the same "language" of their craft.
I speak a little Armenian, and my understanding of Armenian grammar is mostly just based on vibes — I can tell when a sentence sounds wrong, even if I can’t pinpoint why. Sometimes I know how to change the sentence to make it “sound more right”, other times I don’t. Learning Armenian grammar more formally would involve learning what is specifically wrong with those wrong-sounding sentences. The grammar I’d be learning is a grammar I already have an intuitive sense of, not one that’s being arbitrarily imposed on me.
Unless you're a foreigner learning the language.
I'd go on to say that grammar is a necessary component to forming a relation. A bare noun or verb has meaning, but to relate it to anything – another word, the speaker, or the current situation – requires some kind of grammar.
The rules of a grammar are largely arbitrary, but once they're set they allow practitioners to convey more complex meanings among themselves more quickly and more reliably.
It seems like the same would be true in art. The "rube's" reaction to modern art is to say "I don't get it." The intended meaning of the artist is lost on the viewer, and whether that's a feature or a bug depends on the artist's intention.
This also relates to one interesting result of the "AI Art Turing Test," where the experienced artist was most easily able to pick out AI art because of incoherent details added without purpose, such as doors that went nowhere. In those cases, the AI generator was aptly using the "vocabulary" of the visual medium, but the elements weren't connected together – the grammar was deficient. The result was akin to beautiful calligraphy, created by randomly selecting words from the dictionary.
> A bare noun or verb has meaning, but to relate it to anything – another word, the speaker, or the current situation – requires some kind of grammar.
This isn't completely true. Grammar can express relationships, and with enough of it, and enough words, it can also specify what those relationships are. But it's more common to just note that there is a relationship and require the listener to know the nature of that relationship by other means. Thus, "my picture" could be one that I painted, or one that depicts me; a "fire hose" is one that's meant to be used in quenching fires, while a "gold bracelet" is one that's made of gold...
And when the only thing you want to say about a relationship is that it exists, you don't need grammar to do that. Existing languages have grammar to do the job, but the flimsiest, most recent contact pidgin can accomplish the same thing. Mention the two things; act like you're making an important point.
> Mention the two things; act like you're making an important point.
I considered that, but upon reflection I think that kind of gesticulation acts as a crude but effective grammar. It only makes sense because the speaker and listener share an understanding of tone, body language, or even the importance of repetition.
>And when the only thing you want to say about a relationship is that it exists, you don't need grammar to do that.
I tend to agree. Grammar is important if one needs to say something unusual, but domain knowledge can suffice in many situations. The set of words {dog, man bite} is much more likely to mean "The dog bit the man." than "The man bit the dog.". To convey the latter, the speaker and listener _do_ need a shared grammar.
My take is that Art is a Language, but one spectacularly bad at delivering information, because while concepts map on words reasonably well, they don't really map on sights, movement, or musical sounds. So the "grammar" of taste is all wonky, because even the best taste-grammatician can't really prove their version of taste-grammar delivers the message of the Language of Art the best, because the message is so cryptic, and unsuited for Art in the first place.
I agree with this, and I'd like to add that the first piece of grammar is arbitrary, but all subsequent grammar developments depend on pre existing grammar, and so isn't arbitrary, you can have grammar rules generalize over one another nicely, or conflict and collide.
An obvious example, "a man eating lion" vs "a man eating lion". The grammar rule that "man eating" can be used as an adjective to describe a lion is in conflict with the ordinary SVO sentence structure with "eating" as the verb. One needs to rely on context and pragmatics to understand which is intended. Its strictly less practical because of the grammar collision.
A less obvious example, "something no one ever talks about being an adult is the amount of time spent deciding to keep a cardboard box or not". It should be "something no one ever talks about, about being an adult, is..." because "about being an adult" is a prepositional phrase which is inserted in "something no one ever talks about is...". It wouldn't make sense to use "being an adult" as the preposition. What if the meaning was supposed to be "before being..." or "after being..." or "instead of being". But it seems fair that people find the "about, about" word doubling clunky. We could say that if a preposition starts with the same word it follows, the double is dropped and make that a grammar rule. Whether you like this or not depends on if you think word doubling or preposition inconsistencies are bigger issues. But it is a grammar rule bumping up on some other language sensibility not to double words.
I think the deepest insight into this sort of situation might come from computer programming. Anyone whose done it enough knows that well considered languages and code bases are much nicer to work with. It is strictly arbitrary in the sense that there are infinitely many ways to write the same program, but if you write it in brainf*ck, don't expect to be able to read it later.
But, does this apply to other taste? I'm not sure, but I lean towards "more than not". These things happen in spoken language because a message is encoded such that it can be decoded, and there are multiple coding rules (phonetics, grammar, semantics, etc) which may or may not work well together. Then the amount we should expect non-arbitrary taste in other domains relates to:
- is a message getting encoded and decoded?
- how many initial arbitrary closings are possible around which other closings must fit.
- how likely are different coding rules to cause collisions?
- how much better will encoding and decoding be if "nice" rules are chosen?
I think in all of the other examples these considerations imply non arbitrary taste.
- in visual art feelings and archetypes are being communicated. The initial rules are not arbitrary, since they need to draw on visual intuition from the natural world, but the rules added on top of those can probably vary significantly leading to situations different artists don't even recognize each other as having rules, like two people of different languages meeting for the first time.
- architecture is similar to visual art but with more practical physical constraints on the rules. This leads to a testable claim: architects ought to have an easier time finding something they agree is bad than visual artists.
- fashion is interesting because of how well it highlights the social signaling that is also found in all the others. The ability to encode and decode certain messages can be part of the communication.
It's a strangely compelling topic. I think an examination of the elements influencing the creation of different tastes would be fascinating. I'm thinking things like "set of possible sets of built-in rules people start with", "transmission substrate", "possible initial rules given built-ins and substrate", "possible rules that can be added given existing rules", "possible updates to old rules to accommodate the additional new rules"... etc?
Probably language nerds have already explored this a bunch and I just need to learn enough of their jargon to go learn about it.
I like this take. I think each point in the article adds something, but grammar is the furthest upstream. people acquire the grammar at different rates. some get bored of it quickly and desire novelty, some indulge in their mastery and create the priesthood, etc
music also straddles the line between universal and artificial. Eg the way Western music theory splits the scale into 12 tones. "C and G are a perfect fifth" is arbitrary priesthood jargon. "the human ear enjoys paired pitches with frequency ratio 3:2" is closer to physics, or at least biology.
There's similar examples in the visual arts. High contrast draws attention because in nature it normally demarcates the border between two separate objects (hence why animals use high contrast stripes as camouflage). You (usually) don't want to draw people's eyes down towards your shoes while you're talking to them, but drawing attention to your neck/head makes sense. Bright colors, complex details, and lines are also relevant in this regard. Regarding lines, a tie is literally an arrow pointing at your head, you can't get more explicit than that.
> But there are some more or less universal rules that are common across almost all languages - the concepts of subjects and objects, for example
That's just not true? "Subject" and "object" are not natural categories in Basque or other ergative-absolutive languages. The "object" of a transitive verb and the "subject" of an intransitive verb are identical, e.g. "I eat apples" but "Me eat".
If that's not what you meant, then there are languages with sentences without subjects or objects, e.g. in Cantonese, "Eaten" (as in the perfective of "eat") is a perfectly coherent sentence.
I think you're not picking a bit here. Yes, I did have Basque in mind, that's why I said more or less and not absolutely universal.
There's a subgroup of people who are interested in subject X. Can you name any important modern dance performers/choreographers? I guess I could name Martha Graham and a couple of others but that's about it. How about Italian composers of the Enlightenment? Here I do better: Vivaldi, Locatelli, Corelli, etc. Or how about famous Japanese film directors? Famous English writers of the "angry young men" period?
My point is that the general public watches movies but they're not that serious about it. OTOH there are film students/aficionados/connoisseurs with an interest in film that is far more in depth. You could ask them to name new wave directors and they could go on and on and on about their favorite auteurs.
Not everyone in that second group will have the same tastes but enough of them will that certain "important" individuals come up over and over again: Akira Kurosawa, Truffaut, etc. Similarly people that are really into classical music are probably familiar with Mozart, Bach, Mahler, and so on even if the general public has no idea who those people are. That's the canon that serious students of a genre/medium can generally be counted on to be familiar with. The level of craft of those fundamental artists is the bar that the real fans use to measure everything else against.
So are the tastes of the general public inferior? I would say no, but there's definitely a difference in focus/intensity/concentration between the two groups.
The tastes of cultured elites really do tend to be better than the tastes of the semi-cultured public. The great composers really are great.
There is a second question, though, about changes in taste among cultured elites. For example, when I was in high school in L.A. in the 1970s, Mahler was hugely fashionable. A Mercedes-Benz with a bumper sticker proclaiming love of Mahler was not an uncommon sight in Beverly Hills.
Now, I don't hear as much Mahler on KUSC in Los Angeles, but I hear a lot more Vivaldi than 50 years ago, when the "Four Seasons" was about it for Vivaldi.
How come?
Beats me, but I'm sure an expert could put together a plausible narrative partially explaining these changes in taste.
For instance, 1960s Italian spaghetti Western film directors are more prestigious today than 50 years ago when they seemed kind of kitschy. How come? Well, I'm sure there are a lot of reasons, but the oft-expressed personal taste of Quentin Tarantino has no doubt played a role. Love him or hate him, Tarantino is obviously really good at making movies, so it's not surprising that people pay attention to who influenced him.
Definitely. And there's any number of artists who were viewed by contemporary critics as masters who did not really withstand the test of time: Carol Reed, Booth Tarkington, and so on.
I would say that I seem to recall that Sergio Leone was getting more serious attention as an artist within his lifetime, certainly by the time "Once Upon a Time in America" came out.
Wait, what is the matter with Carol Reed? Is it that people just watch The Third Man and maybe Our Man in Havana, and forget the rest (which I haven't watched, btw.)?
Agreed on S.L.
The Third Man is great, while Our Man In Havana is dull.
My impression is that Hollywood fell in love with Brits after the introduction of the Boeing 707 in late 1958 made trans-Atlantic air travel highly practical. So Carol Reed won the Best Director Oscar for Oliver! even though he was 20 years past his prime.
The Third Man is one of my favorite movies of all time, but Reed's contemporaries thought he was going to be hailed as a master by future generations. That hasn't quite panned out in the sense that he's not considered to be in the same rank as Kurosawa, Fellini, etc.
I'm unfamiliar with Our Man in Havana, the other I would have listed would be Odd Man Out. Odd that all three movies contain the word "Man".
>The tastes of cultured elites really do tend to be better than the tastes of the semi-cultured public.
Why?
Because they are cultured?
"Cultured" means people who have studied "culture", so if they've studied it their opinions on the products of culture should be better informed. (This is assuming a definition of culture that includes movies. If it doesn't then you're relying on transferable skills.)
If your car needs repairing you get it done by somebody who has studied automotive mechanics, you don't trust a random member of the general public.
But Scott's position is basically that being cultured is not a thing and that the taste of experts is no better than that of someone who just knows what they like at a young age and sticks with that. Elsewhere he also says that he doesn't distinguish between the quality of different poems or novels, except insofar as whether an average person has a positive gut reaction to them.
Both of those positions are nonsense.
1. People's likes and dislikes can change as they mature. If one educates oneself about a category of art (be it music, painting, film, architecture, etc.), one's tastes *will* likely change because (a) one is exposed to a broader range of artistic stimuli and (b) one will have a deeper understanding of why one likes or dislikes something.
2. The average person may like James Patterson novels. And most people don't attempt to read Proust or Tolstoy. But Proust and Tolstoy will be read a hundred years from now, while Patterson will be long forgotten. Of course, novels are just words strung together. So it's impossible for there to be any difference between Patterson and Proust, and people who tell you there is are just culture signalling (#snarkasm)
I couldn't disagree more with his position but I think it's consistent. He just has to establish that there are those who follow their hearts and have honest preferences, and a tiny minority of status game players who are malevolently responsible for phenomena like modernism, Proust and Tolstoy continuing to be remembered (and James Patterson probably not being remembered), and high end food. I am finding it hard to judge exactly when the break happened and the status seekers began wresting power from the honest enjoyers, but it seems to have been around the time of the second world war. (We just have to figure out how to recreate the world as it was then, and I have to say we seem to be making a decent fist of it.)
Dude. These are the people who gave us brutalism. And bananas taped to walls.
Art isn’t difficult. People flock to see the art of the past because it was good, because it’s stood the test of time, because the appeal of the greatest art is across culture.
By the standards of “art has to be difficult“ none of the great Art of the past can be art because what would the „uncultured“ average guy know? Where’s the difficulty in liking the Sistine chapel, or the cathedral of cologne?
Therefore the art of the past can’t really be art as it needs no educating, but an unmade bed, a banana taped to a wall, or stencilled anti capitalist slogan on a wall in Bristol are the real deal.
Art is not physics. We can trust the average guy is not going to be smarter than a physicist. Contrary to that the average student of Art Theory is probably banging around with an IQ of ninety - if he has taken enough fish oil and and gotten enough sleep.
Richard Feynman wrote about how he was able to recognize good art in the Sistine Chapel, and also recognize bad art, both without being able to define it. From "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman", "But Is It Art?".
Some art is objectively, indefinably good, and other art is not.
Richard Feynman didn't write that book. It was written by a fanboy of his.
J.S. Bach was out of fashion for 80 years after his death. The brilliant and rich Mendelssohn family helped keep his memory alive during that period.
When it comes to classical music, there’s obviously some expertise there and the average guy can’t really tell the difference, nor does he like classical anyway.
There is fashion. Bach was never fully out of fashion though, and he wasn’t considered bad, just outdated. Anyway there’s no real drop in quality of music equivalent to the difference between the Sistine chapel and a banana on the wall in classical music (and pop is considered outside that tradition). Maybe the time Yoko Ono screeched
That's not an answer
For the same reason I can tell the significant, meaningful difference between a burger I make on my grill and a McDonald's burger, but my dog doesn't give a shit whatsoever.
eta: I sounded disdainful because I had Big Bang Theory in mind. Not only does it exist, it was actually very popular for a time, probably still is. That has been my proof for a decade now that taste is very real, if not as significant as some experts claim.
So you're comparing humans to animals
Humans are animals
I'm getting a lot of snobbish sneering snark instead of reasoned, civil responses.
I thought you were supposed to be rationalists.
>The tastes of cultured elites really do tend to be better than the tastes of the semi-cultured public.
How on earth are you defining "better"? What objective criteria are you using to make this claim? Isn't this what Scott's post was all about?
"better" = more informed. Whether this is the same as BETTER is another question!
Somebody who eats a lot of pizza is probably better qualified to be a judge of what a good pizza is compared to somebody who just eats Tombstone.
There are plenty of people who are fine with frozen. Is there anything wrong with that? Of course not. But if you want to go beyond that?
"beyond that" in what sense? Why does there have to be a beyond other than more of the same.
People who like frozen may feel that any (for them) minor improvement in taste doesn't justify the extra effort.
"People who like frozen may feel that any (for them) minor improvement in taste doesn't justify the extra effort."
Good for them. But there are other individuals who believe that there is a significant difference between frozen pizza and what you can get in the best restaurants in NY/NJ, Italy, etc. For those individuals the difference in quality is transformative, to the point that their enjoyment of pizza would be sorely reduced if they were limited to the frozen variety.
I think that people who pay close attention to film have a more sophisticated palate.
As an example, I would bring up the anti-gun fight at the end of Monte Walsh with Lee Marvin. It's a flawed movie but the final gun battle is literally an anti-gun fight. To be fully appreciated it has to be viewed in the context of all the gun battles in all the Westerns that came before it.
Musicians, for example, tend to arrive pretty readily at consensus rankings of musical talent. My father-in-law was the second best classical tuba player in Chicago, and hence had the second highest paying classical tuba playing job in Chicago, with the Chicago Lyric Opera. But he acknowledged he'd never be better than Arnold Jacob of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
I'm reminded of a study Dr. Drew did on the minor celebrity guests on his talk show with Adam Carolla: he gave them standard personality tests. The most narcissistic celebrities were female reality TV stars and the least were musicians. It probably helps to be narcissistic to be a rock star, but musicians know so clearly that there are other musicians better than them that it keeps their narcissism in check.
Better for what purpose? A hammer is better when it's more effective at driving nails. A plane is better when it flies at more capacity with less fuel. What end do elite tastes serve more effectively than commoner tastes?
It might be useful to transfer this question to nature, so as to simplify it and de-politicize it and make plain, perhaps, that everyone - or at least everyone except those who deny the reality of aesthetics operating in our world - is driving after the same "feeling" regardless of what prompts it.
The various ends that the art form itself is meant to serve. In lots and lots of these aesthetic cases, there’s a range of aspects of the aesthetic experience that people appreciate, but some of them are more obvious while others require a bit more thinking to notice. For instance, in an action movie, the special effects in a fight scene are easy to notice, while the character development and motivation for the action are a bit harder to think about. So you sometimes get movies like Transformers, where there are some spectacular action sequences but it’s hard to remember who any of the characters are or why they’re doing this, and these movies can be popular because people think they’re getting what they want. But movies like The Matrix can do a better job of working on multiple levels.
There are of course different levels something can work on. A movie that is just about action sequences and doesn’t even try to have a plot could be great - and I saw a great review of Transformers that said “Michael Bay finally directed an arthouse movie”, pretending that it was just an abstract sequence of visual experiences with no attempt at plot or characters.
They make people think you are elite.
Pleasure.
If you listen to the same music at age 14 that you listened to at 13, you'll get bored. Same for age 15 as 14, and so forth.
Some people have higher ceilings than other people. Those with lower ceilings shouldn't resent them.
I recall reading that for some reason Sibelius was a peculiarly midcentury taste.
I may be able to hum Sibelius, but if so it's unawares.
>The tastes of cultured elites really do tend to be better than the tastes of the semi-cultured public.
I ‘m not so sure. A lot of what elites have done historically with art is lift a new expression of it developed by the masses and then “refine” it in a way that makes it palatable and often exclusive to elite people.
Classical music is wonderful. But if an artistic medium isn’t limited by production cost (like orchestra music, opera, architecture, etc.) I don’t see any proof that elites have better taste. They might be more adept at expressing their reasons behind their tastes, though.
American art contains many examples of this. Without field hollers, the rich history of modern American music can’t get off the ground. It was the tastes of African slaves that set the tone for much American music. Robert Johnson wasn’t a cultural elite, but he clearly had an ear for incredible music. Same could be said for Louis Armstrong. Or to jump back to Europe, The Beatles came from working class families in Liverpool.
Scott mentioned ripped jeans. Like so many fashion trends, from the bucket hats and track suits of the 80s to the sagging pants of the 90s, these tastes originated in the streets and trickled up to the elites who eventually considered them cutting edge fashion.
We have to define who the insiders are here though. I would have thought the Beatles, Louis Armstrong are absolutely cultural elites who are moving their form forward and working from a keen sense of their own taste. You don't have to work at a museum
Yes that’s the difference. I must not be understanding what some folks mean by a cultural elite. I wouldn’t think most people consider field workers, saloon pianists, street performers, house party MCs, urban teens, etc. as cultural elites. And if the category is as broad as you indicate, I’m not sure how that explains why, in the poster’s specific example classical composers really are great, versus say a blues journeyman or the first kid to wear a chain wallet.
> The tastes of cultured elites really do tend to be better than the tastes of the semi-cultured public. The great composers really are great.
Yeah but the truly cultured elites will tell you that Vivaldi and Mahler are middlebrow pablum and that you need to be listening to Stockhausen and Boulez.
Right. Disputes between the taste of the 99.9th percentile (Stockhausen) vs. the 99th percentile (Vivaldi) can be quite interesting and irate. The two sides of the argument tend to be highly articulate.
But they mostly are tempests in teapots that concern people with season tickets for their local symphony orchestra who might have strong views over whether more or less music of the abrasive type should be programmed. For everybody below that level, is pretty much of a non-issue.
To go back to architecture, however, these kind of disputes are more significant because buildings last a long time and can't be avoided being seen the way Stockhausen's music can be pretty easily be avoided being heard.
Broaden this from "classical music" to music more broadly though - you can definitely find people just as invested in other genres! I'm talking about serious collectors and art appreciations here, not just the general public.
I expect that they'd also generally agree on the best Jazz musicians, or Rock and Roll bands, although I'd imagine that different people would have different favorites, and could probably enjoy discussing the relative merits of individual compositions within a genre with each other. However, I also doubt you could get a group of classical music appreciators to definitively settle on the "best composer" - different people with emphasise different things.
Now, maybe you think that music peaked in Europe a few centuries ago and its been downhill ever since, but I can't really think of any reason that would be the case aside from "my groups of sophisticated people thinks so" - I mean, you're probably defining them as sophisticated because they like classical music, although I imagine it correlates with other highbrow tastes.
Everyone has a favorite composer or a favorite conductor but there is also broad agreement on which conductors and composers you should at least be familiar with if you're going to claim to be a fan.
I would also assert that is another key difference between the serious students versus the general public: the former have a framework they can slot individual works into with an eye towards how any one piece or composer relates to other pieces and composers.
Finally, I seem to recall that in a comparison between classical and modern day pop music the former was far more complicated than the latter.
If your point is just that more exposure to something allows you to perceive more nuance in it then I definitely agree - in fact, I think you probably have to be pretty into classical music (or any other field) in order to develop your own subjective opinion on it! I would be unable to pick my favorite classical composer, simply because I'm not familiar enough with the music to identify which pieces particularly appeal to me, or to consider which artists exemplify the genre.
Although I find I have a hard time picking my favorite anything, I like different things for very different reasons, which is probably where the difficulty in getting different people to agree on "the best" comes from, even if they can all agree that certain artists are better than others.
Comparing to the spaghetti western example: when I was young the Beach Boys were considered corny, simple music, but current performers often express admiration for them. In part this is because their (Brian Wilson's, really) more ambitious work was a bit later than when the question was first asked. On the other hand, more than one respectable person thinks God Only Knows is one of the greatest records of all time. (By which I mean both Paul McCartney and Elvis Costello.) And that's from 1964!
I would distinguish between personal favorites versus respect.
For example, personally, I've probably spent more hours of my life listening to The Ramones than listening to Wagner. But I definitely wouldn't argue that my taste in music is just as good as somebody who flies around the world to see new productions of the Ring.
I think this cannot be effectively determined without some hard to do blind tests. For example, picking a select group of art afficionados, who, while perfectly fluent in European art, had never seen any Chinese paintings, and have them judge the top 10 of those, then do the same with a select group of Western general public who never seen any Chinese painting either, or many paintings for that matter.
I'm not sure of your point here, but I would point out that it's not reasonable to expect that somebody that loves classical music would then necessarily be a fan of sculpture. Similarly why would somebody that loves classical music be a fan of Chinese opera, for example?
If there is an underlying universal principle of Art, that afficionados and experts can access but plebeians cannot, then the experts should be able to divine this universal principle from ANY art, no matter how culturally alien to them, while normies with no training would only have intermittent success.
If an expert in European Classic Art cannot effectively judge Chinese Classic Art, then this would imply that there is no universal principle, just fortified cultural snobbery.
Or to put in the same words as the initial article: If Taste is determined to not be like Physics, which can be done experimentally, then this is very bad news for the taste confidence of art afficionados.
What's the universal principle that applies to sculpture as well as music as well as dance as well as painting as well as literature as well as poetry?
We have cross cultural cross over already - tourists visiting cities and museums. In the nearby (to me) city of Bath there are hundreds of Asian tourists walking around in any given day, Japanese and Chinese.
Are there all that many radical differences in tourist preferences by culture? There are some, but overall, it seems like East Asian tourists like many of the same things that Western tourists like: e.g., they apparently like Bath a lot, which English tourists have liked since Jane Austen's time.
One of the funnier cultural differences I can think of is that German tourists love visiting Death Valley in summer at noon. They want to get their picture taken in front of the giant thermometer in Baker, CA when it hits 50 C. It seems to have something to do with Karl May novels.
Tourists are a good example of both some kind of universality and the primacy of the past in producing great art and architecture.
People from Asia visit Bath, but give the buildings of Slough a miss. They can be seen taking pictures of Westminster Cathedral but don’t flock to brutalist Trellick Tower at all. If they ever got lost in the area it’s likely they would be on the next plane home, suffering from the London version of Paris syndrome.
Nevertheless Trellick tower is listed and many architects love it.
I agree with @Niclas, taste is about social status... like clothing, table manners and languages spoken, it is a subtle code to be able to clearly select and separate those who belong to the elitist in-group and those who don't.
You can pretty easily describe every aspect of human preference and decision-making in these kinds of reductive terms. It gets us nowhere.
Regarding preferences that is indeed in large part true. We are massively coded by our social and physical environments yet few understand to what extent. As tribal animals, we depend on both for our survival and success so few bother to question them.
Unfortunately, even decision-making is too. But here it is about the control over the narrative, used to fool the masses into choosing what they are made to believe is "the right thing". Where else did you think Orwell got the concept of double-speak from?... the House of Lords, not the Russians. Or why the church invented morals, etc, Anybody with a clear logical rational and slightly curious mind can find thousands of such examples governing many critical aspects of our lives.
And yes, sadly it does get us nowhere because a slightly more rational and less tribal humanity could long ago already have expelled poverty, famine and war. We would all be living in a blue-zone world.
A rational society would use Systemic Consensus, not divide by majority rule. https://sk-prinzip.eu/ Watch Felber use it at 12:00 > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsO-b0_r-5Y
Maybe to expand a little bit: I don't think its just elitists and non-elitist. Think of goths, they have clear clothing and in-group rituals and the priesthood are the big musicians (?). This community clearly differentiates itself from the outside, but if you are within this community there are further more subtle marks of differentiation based on in-group conflicts and preferences.
That was a major theme of Tom Wolfe's 1960s journalism, such as his first famous article "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby:" that in modern prosperous America, there are an immense number of non-elite subcultures with their own aesthetic codes and artistic geniuses, such as suburban Los Angeles car customizers such as George Barris. (When I was a little kid, after each visit to the dentist, my mother let me peek in George Barris's workshop window where he was working on the Batmobile or whatever.)
But then we would expect that people with taste, when not being observed, would abandon these codes and watch the movies, listen to the music, and eat the food that they really enjoy. No doubt that happens sometimes; other times, people reveal a genuine preference.
I think that the theory is people with taste actually like things but that the like is (unknown to us) caused by status concerns. I didn't think even Scott was saying that people were plain lying and in reality prefer pretty paintings and such.
The code isn't all conscious. Taste as distinction is tied to socialization, what you were taught is good/bad behaviour etc. If your parents liked the opera, they took you to the opera, and as a result, you're more likely to enjoy operas than those whose parents went to the cinema with them. This cycle goes hand in hand with the cycle of social reproduction (rich parents get rich kids through many factors, one of them being inherited cultural taste), and so the opera continues to be classy, while the cinema continues to be common. People obviously don't follow this on a 1-to-1 basis, but the deviations, however large they may be, aren't large enough to upturn the system.
I think most kids who are taken to the opera prefer Paw Patrol until they're 6, then from 6 to 11 they prefer watching video game speedruns on YouTube, etc., until much later in life they actually enjoy the opera. I agree that their being socialized is part of it, but in childhood—the time when in theory they would be most interested in pleasing their parents—they don't enjoy opera, I would posit because they have not learned to appreciate it yet.
Well, I haven't seen many operas, but they're not *that* different from musicals (except for age and language), and the modern introduction of "supertitles" (like subtitles, only bigger) that let you read a translation of what the performers are singing helps a lot with enjoying operas for people who aren't already dedicated members of the opera fandom.
In the performance of "Rigoletto" that I saw, before the show itself started, there was a short introduction that put a few of the opera's unconventional elements into context: in most operas, the tenor would be a romantic hero and the baritone would be more likely to be a villain, but in Rigoletto this was reversed: the tenor role is that of the Duke, who is charming, handsome, and a womanizer who only cares about himself, and the title character, Rigoletto, a court jester, is a baritone role.
Yes, and those low status things that people enjoy in private are often called "guilty pleasures".
People who pay more attention to style probably have better taste in style than people who don't pay much attention, and thus they get bored faster and are more interested in new fashions.
By the way, the "don't wear white after Labor Day" rule is an interesting example of how one can both be traditional and novelty-seeking at the same time. This rule has been around a long time, so you are obeying tradition from year to year, which has its satisfactions, but it also means that within a year, you change your look when you are starting to get bored with it: e.g., you first wear your white sports coat each year to the Kentucky Derby in early May and you last wear it to the regatta club dinner on Labor Day and then put it away for eight months. That sounds kind of fun.
I think what this misses is that there really are better or worse ways of creating art given certain aesthetic goals— but different people will have different things they want out of art. The layperson might see a painting as decoration, while the aesthetes will see it as an object that has the capacity of affording someone a significant aesthetic experience (e.g. awe, reverence, intrigue etc.).
Yes, one thing that strikes me is that the element of complexity is missing: the idea that something might be satisfying to some consumers because it rewards study.
Shakespeare for instance, is one of the half dozen most famous creative artists ever because he combines popular showmanship while also endlessly rewarding scholarly study.
Scholarly study seems to expand to cover anything popular nowadays.
Yes, yes, yes. A lot of Scott’s discussion here ignores goals entirely, and acts as though taste just exists by itself in a vacuum. Some goals are ones that are hard for people to see the motivation for, and those tend to produce harder to appreciate art. It’s true that the exclusivity of these sorts of goals often makes them turn into cultural shibboleths, but it’s missing the point to pretend that’s all there is to it. That might be the case when we are talking about something like hot sauce, or IPA, or dada, or splatter films, where showing how much of a hard thing to bear you can bear is sometimes the entire point. But with most other difficult art, there’s something you can learn to appreciate. It’s never good to look down on people for not having the experience and education to appreciate something that is worth appreciating, but I think it’s sometimes easy to confuse this snobbery with the backlash against philistinism (which is itself just a backlash against any aesthetic merit that the person doesn’t personally see).
Can you be more concrete and give an example in which understanding the goal makes it clear why (otherwise ugly by the common- man standards) building looks a certain way
Related to both A and E, I think there's at least some part of taste that's objective, in that any person studying the topic long enough will come to notice certain things that novices don't.
Example: Musical training makes people more aware of when things are out of tune. Trained musicians will probably be more bothered by things being slightly out of tune, even when a novice might not be able to hear it. Maybe that's too objective to fall under taste, but then does everything objective get excluded from taste definitionally?
It's correct that trained musicians will have a more sensitive sense of pitch, but exactly what they consider "out of tune" vs. "in tune" is a matter of convention/culture. There is some grounding in universal principles of acoustics (and human acoustic perceptions) but no static tuning system can fully satisfy those principles for more than a handful of notes at a time, and different traditions have chosen different compromises at different times. Modern trained musicians would likely consider Bach's well-tempered clavier (the actual instrument, not the musical work) to be shockingly out of tune, and he would feel the same about modern piano tuning.
And, yet, great composers virtually universally recognize JS Bach's mastery.
Please allow me to rant for a minute about Bach, without implying you hold the views I'm criticizing.
Bach was out of popular fashion for about 80 or 90 years when baroque polyphony was replaced by the classical style. That's one of the longer periods a great artist went before his rediscovery -- Vermeer is a rare example of somebody who is famous today who was not famous for a longer period of time.
Yet, the greats of the classical era -- Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven -- all studied him. Finally, in 1829 Mendelssohn brought him back into popular acclaim.
Ever since, Bach has been especially popular among mathematicians and physicists.
Now, it could be that Bach's fame over the last two centuries has been a conspiracy by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Einstein.
Or it could be that Bach was objectively a good composer.
Playing devil's advocate, here's an alternative model:
- Bach's style is influential
- The classical greats produce work informed by Bach, innovating sufficiently that Bach is seen as outmoded. Nevertheless, Bach and Mozart have common conventions in pitch, style, dynamics, ..., even if listeners at the time are too close to it to appreciate it.
- Once time has passed, listeners have enough distance to appreciate Mozart and Bach for the same, shared qualities they have in common (since they are built from the same canon).
Or more succinctly, couldn't they both be doing the same _kind of thing_ such that there's high correlation between liking one and liking the other (with, say, a gamelan or raga piece being a more different kind of thing, with less of a shared core and thus more divergence of tastes with Western listeners)? That way we don't have to claim universality, but only commonality within a canon.
Music has many compositional rules that to untrained observers would appear to be very arbitrary (e.g. no parallel fifths!). When two people, one trained and the other not, can listen to the same piece of music that the untrained person finds very appealing where the trained person hears violations of the rules and finds it shockingly bad. It wouldn't matter how well the piece is played or how in tune the instruments are if they violate those rules.
When I heard about the "no parallel fifths" rule, the person who told me about it said that it literally was an arbitrary rule that isn't taken particularly seriously in contemporary styles of music, but in his class we should follow it because it's how this particular kind of music was written historically.
Hm - I think if you played a short harmony with some parallel fifths in it, and said what they were, an untrained person would recognise them, and understand the effect they have. Maybe they don’t count as ‘untrained’ after that. Lots of composers use parallel fifths - I don’t know if Bach did specifically, but they have been around for hundreds of years. I wonder if Scott’s analysis applies moreso to rules like these - people might get sensitised and dislike them after a while, or they might come and go as fashions.
I'm definitely not denying that there are completely arbitrary components, but it certainly seems like there's _some_ preferences people converge on due to gaining expertise.
Further examples:
After having good tomatoes often in California, I was often confused in Texas on being served Caprese at restaurants where the tomatoes were basically flavorless. I guess their normal customers just thought Caprese was a thing you do, and didn’t realize it could taste great?
The adage of “show don’t tell” in writing - obviously this can’t be a hard and fast rule, but it’s generally more effective and rewarding for a reader when you show them the behavior of a character and allow the audience to form their own moral judgments than if you explicitly make moral judgments of the characters.
I think these sorts of semi-objective things are core to aesthetic taste.
I'd argue that someone being bothered by things being slightly out of tune is conditioned on said person having absolute pitch rather than on their musical training.
Of course, there's some connection between musical training and absolute pitch which goes into both direction as far as I know: someone who was training from the very early childhood is more likely to developed it, and someone who has it is more likely to become a musician, but this is not important for my point.
If you take and instrument and slightly detune it equally, a trained musician with a relative pitch and no outside point of reference would not notice it, most probably. Someone who is not a trained musician but has perfect pitch would be insanely bothered by that, however.
There were also cases of a musicians with perfect pitch who were - unfortunately - trained on old detuned pianos. So everything that is not detuned the same exact way now sounds wrong to them.
That's not even touching on the fact that our most common tuning system is relatively recent and is far from the only one possible. But that's a huge topic in itself.
Another thing to note is that musical training is much more likely to make a person tolerate things being "detuned" on purpose. An ignoramus would probably not like anything detuned except for some nostalgic guitar effects , an educated musician has a high chances of developing a liking for microtonal or atonal music which a normie would not at all tolerate, and that kind of music is often anything but in tune.
I was thinking of detecting things being out of tune relatively, which doesn't require absolute pitch. It's generally something you can just hear if two instruments are being played at the same time while out of tune. Intervals could also sound off with a single instrument.
The obvious analogy that's missing is "Taste Is Like Taste (in food)"
As a kid you start off having relatively simple taste like "sugar is good" or "bitter is bad". With time though you start appreciating finer aspects of flavour. You even stop liking the very sugary cake that your younger self would love simply because it's too primitive for your taste buds now, you want something more complex. Some people even start liking the bitter stuff! (How do people like beer is beyond me)
(The problem with architecture is that the sophisticated beer appreciators force their bitter disgusting drink on everyone else)
This feels just as mysterious as artistic taste to me.
Say someone as a small child wants to put ketchup on all his food. And as an adult he still does. Is it mysterious if we say he has poor taste?
It’s partly about being able to appreciate and experience small distinctions.
Well, sometimes you just like ketchup? (and it's not all the same, some brands are too sweet, others too vinegary, you need the balance).
I certainly wouldn't put ketchup on *everything*, but objecting to "and this person still puts ketchup on his steak!" can involve a degree of snobbery (whereas if it was some 'authentic' South American salsa type sauce that goes with carne, that of course would be a different matter).
If you -can't- appreciate ketchup on most foods, I'd say you have an entirely defective sense of taste. It's an extremely effective delivery mechanism for the "acidic" flavor profile, and as such is of immense benefit to a wide variety of foods, because most plebeians cannot appreciate the acidic or bitter flavor profiles and so tend to woefully underutilize them.
That's what this sounds like.
I think people actually do appreciate the acidity - it's just that they don't know how to cook with it. They will be aware that something is missing from food that isn't acid-balanced, they just won't be able to tell *what*.
This isn't my idea - Kenji Lopez-Alt had the two biggest home cooking failure modes as not acid balancing and not salting enough (in that order).
I'd say those are the biggest failures of out-of-home cooking, too. Also the very limited palette of most people's acids; pickles aren't the only acidic ingredient, dammit.
(But mostly this post was just reframing the addition of ketchup from a low-taste move to a high-taste move in order to demonstrate the arbitrariness of the classification.)
Personally, I think the problem with ketchup is that it's too sweet. I could easily see myself liking a much drier "ketchup".
My go-to:s for acids are lemon, lime, tomatoes, vinegar (Sherry vinegar tends to be the most widely useful, IMO), wine, and sourcream.
>Also the very limited palette of most people's acids; pickles aren't the only acidic ingredient, dammit.
I'm slightly amused from a hobby chemist's point of view. Organic acids are one of the classes of compounds with a very wide variety of edible variations: Acetic, tartaric, malic, citric, ascorbic, lactic, succinic ...
Not salting enough? I'd like to hear his advice on cooking for people who are on low salt diets for medical reasons.
Foods that already have plenty of acid, and that have other subtle tastes that get overwhelmed by tomato, just aren’t great with ketchup! Ketchup is really great at what it does, but not all foods are trying to do the same thing. Most people don’t like ketchup on most desserts, and that’s because they have at least a basic understanding of what they’re trying to do with both ketchup and dessert.
I think you need to diversify your culinary experiences.
I came here to write the exact same 'taste is like taste' comment.
I imagine it as something like craving novel experiences. As a child, you generally have very simple taste, and want nothing more than simple flavours and textures. As adults -- depending, of course, on how open to new experiences you are -- people generally get bored of simple flavours and textures, and seek out novelty. People start liking beer, or olives, or spicy food, or any number of things that 8-year-olds would turn their noses up at.
I wonder if it can just be explained by novelty-seeking, plus openness to new experiences? Obviously there are occasionally adults that retain their 'childish' palates, and want to eat nothing but fast food and ice cream. But probably the majority of people end up seeing their childhood tastes as simplistic, and wanting more complex food experiences.
The big difference between food taste and art taste is that people have to eat food every single day. Everyone in the world spends maybe an hour each day having their senses dominated by the experience of eating. So by dint of repeated exposure, the majority of people are going to travel some distance up the 'seeking complex new experiences' ladder.
On the other hand, most people don't think about art every day, and so never hit the "I'm bored of this simplistic stuff, I want a more complex experience" point. They remain in 'art taste childhood', liking the art equivalent of ice cream and hamburgers. Those that DO think about art for hours each day end up liking the art equivalent of olives, beer, and chilis. Weird, abrasive, bitter things that you do have to learn to like -- but once you're there, simplistic tastes seem boring and childish.
Right. For instance, up to about age 30, I didn't get the taste of Coca-Cola, which would seem to sophisticated palates like about the ultimate in mass market tastes. Yet, for three decades, it struck me as a kind of hoax perpetrated by people trying to seem sophisticated. Finally, I started to get Coke and even came to prefer it to Pepsi.
On the gripping hand, there are basic foodstuffs/tastes that everyone eats every day and don't get tired of. Bread is bread, and you can have artisanal stone-ground 500 year old German baking technique bread as distinct from Chorleywood Process commercial white bread, but it's all bread.
Replace the bread with chunks of concrete, and people will object, even if told "but this is the new better form of bread specially created by your betters, you commoners!"
I don't know about your country but around here all the "sophisticated" bread is suddenly sourdough, which strikes me as one of those objectively bad-tasting things that people are currently pretending to enjoy to seem sophisticated.
To be fair I think sourdough has its place, when accompanied with the right things (plain butter) but it's out of place in (say) most sandwiches. The taste of the bread shouldn't overwhelm the other ingredients.
I also feel like this is the obvious analogy, but I don't think it's such a linear progression! I don't think I'm ever going to stop enjoying ice cream, and there's definitely media with appeal to both adults and children - does that mean it's bad?
I'll admit that there's stuff I'd regard as more of a guilty pleasure because it feels particularly unsophisticated, but sometimes that's what I'm in the mood for, whether it's a cheap burger or a blockbuster film.
Note that the works of Shakespeare that were originally intended to have broad appeal, and weren't intended to be am acquired taste for a small number of sophisticates - I feel like truly great art should be enjoyable to anyone, but have depth that someone with more experience and familiarity can pick up on.
You’re not going to stop liking ice cream - but you can learn to appreciate the difference between good ice cream, and old freezer burned ice cream, and ice cream that is made with milk that went bad but has a lot of sugar added to cover up the bad taste.
There is truly great art that is easy to appreciate, like good ice cream, but often there is really bad art that seems superficially quite similar to it, like bad ice cream. There is also some great art that takes a lot of experience to properly appreciate - though there’s reason to say that a niche and culturally very specific work of art might be limited in the level of greatness it can be truly said to have generally.
>There is also some great art that takes a lot of experience to properly appreciate - though there’s reason to say that a niche and culturally very specific work of art might be limited in the level of greatness it can be truly said to have generally.
Hmm... Are there examples of art which are appreciated across widely varying cultures? I'd be much more convinced that an artwork _is_ great if well-experienced art critics from five widely varying cultures all agree that it is, even if I don't see the attraction myself.
As you said, this doesn't work with a "niche and culturally very specific work of art" - and in those cases, _I_ can't tell if there really is intrinsic value to the work, or if there is just some sort of status game lock-in.
That would definitely be a good thing to gather more examples of!
Right now I’m mainly thinking informally - it’s not just art critics and music critics that think Mozart is better than random other 18th century composers and that Picasso is better than other random midcentury painters, but even a lot of people outside those fields. And when high art critics make judgments about popular music and tv shows, they don’t generally come up with the *most* popular instances as best, but they do tend to gravitate towards some particular instances (“Hey Ya” by OutKast, and Community, more than “Who Let the Dogs Out” by the Baha Men, or Big Bang Theory).
I don’t know how often you can find true cultural outsiders these days though, given the globalization of everything.
"Are there examples of art which are appreciated across widely varying cultures?"
Sure. European classical music might well be more popular these days with East Asians than with Americans.
Here, for instance, are 10,000 Japanese singing Beethoven's Ode to Joy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6s6YKlTpfw
> I don't think I'm ever going to stop enjoying ice cream, and there's definitely media with appeal to both adults and children - does that mean it's bad?
But you don't eat it for every meal, which is what my young kids would do if they were in charge of their own diets.
I agree that novelty is a key part of this, as several people have pointed out. I think the "grammar"/"priesthood" characterizations are probably the closest to being correct, but it's also about negotiating what aesthetic spheres should be approached as "grammars," which as "priesthoods," and to what extent. I would argue that novelty takes on different kinds of importance in "grammatical" contexts -- generally, those that require a greater degree of open group signification -- and "priesthood" contexts -- generally, those that don't (or shouldn't). Scott's examples of menswear and architecture -- closer to "grammars" -- are different from something like food or music -- closer to "priesthoods". Debating over whether a pastel color scheme signifies femininity (it Does, by the way) is important for in-group interpretation -- it becomes an in-group vocabulary. Menswear is a field that virtually every man existing in corporate/formal job contexts has to tacitly engage in, so there's a degree of "laundering" that exists. Demonstrating a capacity to communicate one's moods/status/point of view/personal history through what they wear creates a sense of distinction for the grammatically uninitiated and creates another vector for demonstration of intelligence for the grammatically initiated.
In contrast, open subcultural identification in a "grammatical" context (ex. dressing like "a punk" or "a goth" or whatever) is always going to be understood as "middle-class" at best because it demonstrates 1.) an understanding that this "grammatical" signification style is in some way important, but 2.) a high level of obedience fundamentally at odds with the types of "higher-order communication" I discussed earlier and a 3.) limited level of openness to novelty (i.e. "my willingness to engage with novel experience is wholly determined by the as determined by my chosen subcultural group"). If you extend this further and live in a "goth" house, you look unrefined because you're not understanding the reasonable limitations of the aesthetic's "reach."
"Priesthoods" run rely on novelty. The more disparate pieces you can collect in your palate, the more you can refine your point of view on the medium in question, the better you can push the medium forward -- the more complete the system of interpretation becomes.
I agree with this. I’ll also note some flavors are much easier to become accustomed to than others.
I wasn’t allowed to drink coke as a kid and never really sought it out until I was 18. When I did try it, it was really good! But it’s the sort of thing where if I had it every day I’d feel the need to give it up (an “unacquired taste” maybe.) Whereas it takes me much longer to get sick of the taste of certain cheeses, yogurt, tea, less one-note things. It’s also why dumping sugar or mozzarella or ketchup on everything strikes people as tasteless - it’s *boring* to them.
A confounding factor is that children's tongues are physically more sensitive to bitter flavors than adults - food literally tastes different to children.
We value complexity and variety in and of themselves. The latter I guess is relatively obvious : if you only ever had the same food all your life you would get sick of it (or at least most people would). By extension, while there are many uncomplicatedly good food, it might not be enough, and then you'd be willing to accept less uncomplicatedly good food just to add variety.
Complexity is valued because of how it engages our senses or mental process in novel and deeper ways. Personally the only sense about which I get this is taste, but I know others have it for other senses. I also get it for other things, like for example how I prefer strategy video games to action ones, even though I'm not unaffected by the adrenaline rush and all that. But I like the way strategy games engage more of my deeper brain better.
Of course producing complexity require skills, which mean people are going to play status game on top of the above. Also, since art is so important to us, various ideologies will get involved. Fast forward all of this across a human lifetime, and across history, and you can get to pretty weird places.
Valuing complexity for itself would mean we would always prefer, other things equal, the most elaborately decorated houses. Yet modernists preferred the least complex ones of all possible houses (or close to that). So what you mean by "complex" must mean something more complex. We reach our preferences for simple silhouettes via complex and convoluted trajectories?
https://fromthechair.substack.com/p/magic-runes-and-sand-dunes-the-binary
> This model neatly answers our early question about the nature of computers. A computer's superpower is *specificity*. Computer Science researchers often talk about "complexity". Namely: time complexity; memory complexity; Kolmogorov complexity, etc. But complexity is merely the cost. The thing that the complexity is actually paying for is the *specificity*.
Sometimes though, the complexity really is the point, because the complexity provides a fun challenge. E.g. jigsaw puzzles.
I feel like the superpower of a computer is much more cromulently labeled "abstraction" or perhaps "generality".
(I'm assuming "abstraction" is meant to gesture at "versatility". Else, one could argue that, say... the Dual Numbers are highly abstract. And yet, mysteriously, nobody cares about the Duals nearly as much as the Reals.)
I mean, a swiss-army knife is versatile too. But imagine explaining to an extra-terrestrial why swiss-army knives are useful. "Because it's versatile" is, by itself, somewhat unhelpful if the ET doesn't already understand knives, screwdrivers, and nail-files.
But to explain why computers are useful to an ET, all you gotta do is explain that computers are extremely adept at math, AKA manipulating numbers, AKA tree-traversal. And what makes tree-traversal useful is the specificity. E.g. solving the roots of (y = -9.81x^2 + 800x + 5,000) narrows the search-space from the entire infinitude of the Real Numberline to two possible solutions. Which is often a little more precise than, say, just eye-balling the cannonball's trajectory. And not only does this specificity allow computers to run algorithms quickly, but it also allows them to track a huge amount of data. Because data is stored in memory, which is addressed with numbers, which are trees.
It's all tree-traversal. Always has been.
Sure, it's also true that trees are abstract enough to be extremely versatile. But the versatility per se isn't where the magic happens. "Abstracting away the details" really means "turning it into math", which merely punts the superpower mystery to a higher level of abstraction, i.e. "and... why is math useful/versatile?". The answer to which is: "numbers are trees and trees are specific". (N.b. "why are computers useful?" was my original motivating question behind the post. But in hindsight, maybe the post should have been framed as a direct response to Eugene Wigner's "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Math".)
Also, not all computers are general-purpose computers. Consider embedded systems. They typically do only one thing, and do it well. And yet, are they not computers? Do they not carry out computations? Consider a 4-function calculator. Can it run minesweeper?
Valuing complexity does not mean that we always value it about all else. Indeed it can also be nice to have something which is uncluttered, it can be freeing for the mind. Up to a point, after which we're just depressed. Also complexity does not necessarily mean the complexity must be obvious.
(I'm not necessarily saying it's applicable to modernists, I'm mostly engaging the general question about what taste can mean).
Huh that's interesting.
I find that (at least for me) it's too easy to commit the typical mind fallacy in those discussions. And I think that a big part that's missing in this post is accounting for the internal experience of having one's taste develop over time.
Say person A likes X over Y but person B likes Y over X. A person looking from outside can say then that it's just a subjective preference, and part of it is, but let's now make it more detailed:
Person A: I like X; Y is confusing
Person B: all X does is a cheap trick that I've seen through; Y has a rewarding complexity that I find something new in every time
Those aren't symmetric experiences, and often person A and B are the same person separated by a couple years!
(unfortunately B can become then smug about it, being seen as B starts rewarding status and so people start faking it, and we get this whole status game the rest of the post alludes to)
(the BDSM analogy is the closest thing in this post but internally it feels like a completely different mechanism)
Out of curiosity, what about poetry? For me I'm the person A and poetry is thing Y – I'm utterly confused by it and I don't know how to appreciate it. I think there definitely is a sense then in which your taste in poetry is "better" (or at the very least deeper) than mine
This is an interesting way of looking at it, and I think it adds something which Scott only sort of hinted at: the complexity can be very enjoyable.
I'm Person A with respect to painting, and I'm Person B with respect to theatre. (Probably 1/3 B + 2/3 A with poetry.) I enjoy theatre more than I enjoy paintings. My memory might be faulty, but I think I enjoy theatre more than I used to, as well. Learning more about what goes into a work, being able to see the choices that the actors, director, and playwright made... it makes it more intellectually stimulating, and I think it also makes me appreciate it more. It becomes more fun.
This sounds important and right to me.
I have childish taste in food, but it's gotten slightly better as I age. When I was a child, I liked sweet Russian salad dressing. As a teen, I liked Thousand Island. As a 30-something, I liked Ranch, and when I hit my 50s I could finally appreciate Blue Cheese dressing.
It wasn't a conspiracy, it was just other people could appreciate what I couldn't yet appreciate.
Or it's just your taste buds getting burnt out!
I suspect changes to your gut microbiome will affect you taste preferences.
You can just get fed up with things, esp if you have them a lot (maybe this is your microbiome complaining).
When I was very young I ate a bar of chocolate without properly removing the foil. I got a strong metallic taste from the foil (maybe it was reacting with my mercury amalgam fillings) and this put me off chocolate for life.
Apparently smoking also changes your sense of taste.
>Or it's just your taste buds getting burnt out!
Or possibly losses from aging. https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/004013.htm
>The number of taste buds decreases as you age. Each remaining taste bud also begins to shrink.
This seems pretty analogous to the BDSM thing.
How about taste in writing? Less mysterious? Writing is not a science — but I'm guessing you are quite confident as to why some writing is better. Also, good writing and popular writing doesn't necessarily overlap.
But how many hours have you dedicated to writing versus design? 1000x? 10000x? More? Cultivating taste?
For that matter, taste in thinking? I think Scott would probably find a lot of the ways "ordinary folks" think about intuition and evidence to be appalling (though of course a lot of the ways hyper-educated folks do it is appalling as well).
Literal taste is a feature-vector; metaphorical taste is a feature-vector. The feature-vector (i.e. list of features) is subjective and to some extent, negotiated socially. The features per se are objective features of reality. What mystery remains?
It's mysterious but you can relate to it, right? Surely you like different food (and books, movies, jokes...) as when you were 5 years old, or even 25 years old.
This is basically your option E (BDSM porn) but stated in a much more relatable way. It seems more-or-less-obviously correct to me, but it doesn't explain everything.
You still need a different theory to explain why most art forms develop so many arbitrary-seeming rules and conventions over time, and why people can feel so strongly about these. I think it's important to recognize this as a separate (even if somewhat related) issue that needs a separate explanation.
To me, something like your option G (grammar) seems the most plausible. But it depends a lot on the specific rule and art form, some are more arbitrary than others.
> I think it's important to recognize this as a separate (even if somewhat related) issue that needs a separate explanation.
Yes very much my thinking.
My theory of taste is roughly that there is a real sense in which a person's taste becomes more refined over time (note the word we use, "refined"), but we've also built a social game on top of a real phenomenon that often ends up absurd. Scott's post focuses too much on the social game aspect.
(ngl he also sounds somewhat bitter about it, maybe because he's overweighting architecture and art where he keeps saying "I like this" and people reply "it's slop actually", but I'd be really surprised if he couldn't relate at all to the personal growth theory of taste when it comes to writing and poetry)
Weirdly enough, Scott can't seem to relate much even in the case of writing, we had that discussion yesterday: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-from-bauhaus-to-our-house/comment/80089562
Perhaps he really is this strange exceptional person that simply doesn't have this urge that everyone else does. (Scott, I mean this in the most neutral and non-judgmental way possible, sorry if it comes off as criticism.)
In the specific case of tastes in foods, we _know_ that some of the differences in tastes from person to person are solidly genetic: https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/basics/ptc/
>Studies indicate that individuals with the "strong tasters" PTC gene variant were less likely to be smokers. This may indicate that people who find PTC bitter are more likely than non-tasters to find the taste of cigarettes bitter and may be less likely to smoke.
>Other studies suggest that there may be correlations between the ability to taste PTC and preferences for certain types of foods. This may be why some of us think that broccoli is just too bitter to eat.
I think we can eliminate the priesthood model at least. I don't believe that everyone with tastes broader than chicken nuggets is just doing it for social approval.
The reason why "sugar is good" is a bad taste, is that it leads you to want things that are unhealthy for you. It's good when your short-term preferences and your long-term goals are aligned with each other. More generally, it's good when your different preferences are consistent, and bad if they are inconsistent, and lead you to take actions that go against each other.
This is one of the few ways in which preferences can be evaluated from a setting that "sits outside" of equally arbitrary preferences that you have yourself: you can negatively judge things for inconsistency.
Now the question is, what's the equivalent for architecture? Maybe being one of those "in this house .... nobody is illegal" lawn poster people and simultaneously highly valuing homogeneous neighborhoods full of low-density suburban housing? Though even that feels like a stretch.
> The reason why "sugar is good" is a bad taste, is that it leads you to want things that are unhealthy for you
Going by this analogy, could it be that too much of what we'd call "bad taste" is in some sense bad for you? (mentally, spiritually, however you'd like to call it)
Note the term "brainrot" and how it's used in practice – people use it for low-quality attention-grabbing videos, or simplistic mass media, but it'd be quite a stretch to say that someone's got brainrot from reading too much Shakespeare
https://circeinstitute.org/blog/blog-binge-watching-boethius-after-dark/
No no, I think the cat tail nailed it actually. I think you're saying you don't see an internal logic, but what if the logic was this: taste is about health, but it's subtle and people can easily be wrong about it. We all know people who eat things they shouldn't because they taste good, but when you reduce the "noise" of fat, sugar and salt to a minimum, people actually do have cravings for nutrients they genuinely need. I crave nettle tea when my iron's low. When I was pregnant, I got ahead of pregnancy cravings by just opening the fridge door and seeing what looked best to me just now (which mostly resulted in my regularly eating a spoonful or two of straight Dijon mustard.) I did this because I knew people have pregnancy cravings for a reason, it's because they need particular nutrients. And people, when they eat, really are tasting particular nutrients, though some of them are more subtle and hard to taste.
This isn't an argument that's goal-focused toward making the point that elite art is always better; I don't in fact think that. The landscape of both art and food is infernally complicated. There are cultural factors that play in in all kinds of ways, and plenty of the time high-status people are just plain wrong, often because they really are just playing games. (Like the cliquish architects Wolfe describes; I believe every word of that b/c y'know, humans. I fully wish we were still allowed to build attractive, high-quality buildings.)
My point is simply that sometimes there is a real difference. I'll go at it narrowly within my own field: fiction writing. I've observed a very common technique to make either a book or a movie popular and pleasurable to consume: create a protagonist who will always be pleasurable to identify with. They can be an underdog--in fact that helps--but they can never be truly wrong about anything. Anyone who genuinely dislikes them is a bad person. It doesn't have to be utterly obvious, it doesn't have to be to the level of Mary Sue at all--it just has to be there in the fundamental structure. They have to go from ruin to triumph without ever experiencing moral pain--the only pain that can reach through the link into the audience's heart and hurt them too--the pain of being, or having done, wrong.
To me this is flattering the reader to coax money out of their pockets, using a technique that broadly has the effect of lowering people's ability to see ways they might be wrong and others right; it's pandering, and I won't do it. (It's a bit like adding so much sugar to the sweet potatoes they're practically candy so the kids will praise your dish; it's bad for them, and it teaches them that sweet potatoes in themselves aren't good and their taste needs full disguising, and that is just not true. As long as the sweet potatoes are good quality. Sorry to obsess about sweet potatoes, I grow the durn things and I care.) I'm not some kind of elite who hates the reader and wants to whip them with my highbrowness; I'm working on a fantasy novel about 17th century France and a dragon. I just think there really is a real difference sometimes, and the taste of food is a great analogy. Because art can actually be good or bad for you, sometimes.
Oh, and the constant rumor that "healthy" always means "unpleasant" is wrong. I was sort of assuming that in the argument, and maybe I shouldn't have. But this is way too long for me to tack my food rant on the bottom of it, so I'm done now.
p.s. I know my argument wasn't at all written in your rationalist style, Scott--it's just not how my brain runs--but I hope that (if you wish) you can take the premises and run with them in a more linear logic-chain to see if you think they work.
(Just here to say that I love this comment! kind of what I was subconsciously getting at but actually spelled out properly)
Isn't it really interesting that this would be correlated? Food is such an interesting example because I feel like it crosses class lines so much more. You can be in any social class or subculture and have strong preferences around food (obviously within a different context of cuisines/restaurants/etc.). Whereas I feel like just saying the word architecture out loud puts you in a certain social strata.
I'd be curious Scott, how you feel like this discussion of taste pertains to literature/poetry/etc? From your writing at least that seems like the area where you have the classiest/most-tasteful preferences.
Just a bit of personal experience - I loved sweet as a child, still love as adult, but can't eat a lot because something changed in my biochemistry and now a spoon of sugar makes me feel like shit. In general, I think food taste is very rarely driven by complexity like other tastes are, and is mostly determined by simple associations and metabolic needs. It's not developing to something better or more sophisticated or complex, just changing.
But maybe it is developing to something better--better *for you*. I have a very similar issue with sugar and I also still love it, yet feel less tempted to eat it (except in small amounts after supper, the only time it works for my system) because of the effects. And now that I eat it much less, I feel satisfied with much less, and I don't enjoy things that are too purely sweet without enough other flavors... yellow cake with white sugar icing is now something I would only eat if you paid me to. (And paid well!) But dark chocolate is *great.* This is healthy for me, and listening to my tastes helps me not to develop Type 2 diabetes. (It also no doubt brings extra vitamins/minerals/micronutrients into my system via the desire for more flavor.) I actually think this could be well analogized into artistic taste--it's good for you to like the things *you* personally like b/c they suit your needs, as long as you watch out for your counterproductive cravings & don't follow them blindly (sugaaaaar...), esp by paying attention to how you feel afterwards & not just in the moment. (& hopefully eschew status games and food that's more about impressing your neighbor than enjoyment. I mean I guess that stuff won't kill you... unless it's badly prepared fugu...)
Do you take this to be a concrete example of E more than a than a novel concept, much like how the grammar explanation is a concretization of the priesthold model? (I ask because this is certainly how it seems to me).
Both this and the BDSM analogy say something like "seeking novelty because the old thing is no longer satisfactory". I don't like the BDSM analogy though because it suggests that it's as simple as a physiological process where you used to be satisfied by stimulus of strength 10 but you've become desensitised to it and now you need strength 20, then strength 30, and so on...
(Something like this seems to happen with hot sauce fans but I don't think anyone says that the person who won't settle for less than 🌶️XTREME🌶️ REAPER SAUCE has better taste than those who haven't entered the treadmill)
I think it has to do a lot more with how as one's ability to appreciate more complexity grows the old thing starts feeling thin on substance. Comments elsewhere mention that as their taste matures the maximum amount of pleasure they could possibly derive from a thing grows a lot higher than it was previously, so I think that thinking of taste in terms of "personal growth" sounds more fitting than "desensitisation"
This is also the first analogy that came to mind for me. I think it's a helpful framing because most of us spend more time thinking about and enjoying food than we do with, eg, architecture or visual art. It's also considered less of an intellectual pursuit, which makes having opinions about the taste of food more accessible to more people.
I think almost everyone can relate to the experience of liking or not liking food for a variety of reasons:
- Tastes bad in a way that almost everyone would agree with. It's spoiled or way too salty or whatever. Though there's still probably some unusual person out there who likes it or doesn't mind it.
- Tastes good in a way that almost everyone will agree with. Sometimes something relatively simple like ice cream, sometimes something complex like a meal prepared by a skilled chef.
- Not to my taste though I can understand other people enjoying it. I don't care for beets, other people love them.
- Didn't like it at first but it grew on me. Beer is like this for me and many others.
- Enjoyed something as a novel experience, even if I don't especially care to have it again. This is how I felt about durian.
- Liked something at first taste, but it's too one-note and gets less interesting the more you have of it. This is a common experience with overly sweet food.
I think all of these modes have clear analogies with art, and help clarify some of the different ways people experience artistic taste. I don't think they fall into any one clear category of fashion or priesthood or whatever else, though there are elements of these. Some people really do have limited taste and will be indifferent between eating any thing. Some people are really good at combining flavors in skillful tried-and-true ways, some in novel creative ways. Some people spend a lot of time and money seeking out the best possible food experiences that most align with their tastes, but most people dedicate less effort to this while still directionally pursing food that tastes good to them.
Like any kind of taste, food is sometimes turned into a status game where certain tastes are "in" or considered superior only because they're inaccessible. But ignore the status games and I think there is a very real kind of taste which is derived from human preferences that range from near-universal to completely idiosyncratic. And some people really are more skilled at certain aspects of this, like putting together novel combinations of flavors that others will like, or more quickly distinguishing between foods that seem appealing at first but diminish over time vs those that have enduring appeal vs those that seem unappealing at first but improve with time.
> I think all of these modes have clear analogies with art, and help clarify some of the different ways people experience artistic taste
This is a good list, thank you! Really makes me convinced that it's not an accident that "taste in food" and "taste in art" are referred to by the same noun
I think this is sort of backwards, as children have better taste than adults in a sense. They have more tastebuds and are more similar to adult supertasters in their dislike of vegetables and bitter foods.
Imagine we discover an isolated society where everyone becomes mostly colorblind around age 7, though it happens slowly so it's not too obvious. They show us their art, and it's ugly: far too many bright colors all over the place. After discussing and comparing art for a bit, they conclude we have the unsophisticated taste of children. In reality, they just can't detect the aspects we find distasteful.
People seem to have a strong bias towards thinking their own taste is "right" and others have bad taste.
We stop liking very sweet things as adults not because it's too primitive but because we evolved to tolerate it less as adults because adults need less sugar. If there were a general phenomenon of adults liking less extreme tastes, you'd expect the same to happen with salty, sour, and bitter tastes. But there's not much change in salt and sourness perception, and bitter perception moves in the opposite direction.
Food taste has deep evolutionary origins because if you don't have a steady supply of all the nutrients you need, you die. If you eat something your digestive system can't handle, you suffer badly before possibly dying. If your body needs different nutrients when you're an infant than when you're a 40 year old, your taste had better change to adapt, or else you die.
I think this has to be the core that the signaling/social construction/priesthood/whatever is built on. I think about coffee, where as you get more into it you seem to get more interested in fruity light-roast stuff where an average coffee drinker generally prefers more of a medium roast. All the experts doing all the interesting stuff are focusing on fancy single-origin light roasts, which makes drinking that kind of coffee a strong signal of your expertise and it compounds on itself.
Traditional menswear has been remarkably consistent over the last several hundred years (there’s been evolution but the broad principles are basically the same). Which seems to cut against nearly all the points raised at the end. A classic suit would be seen as stylish over a very long period of time.
But over all that time, you wouldn't wear a white suit after Labor Day (unless you are Tom Wolfe.)
I come from a country with no labor day, but nonetheless don’t wear white/cream trousers in winter after I did so once, saw myself reflected in a window and thought I looked weird and too summery.
Right.
Lighter colors are cooler in the hot sun, but they are a pain to keep clean, so it makes sense to restrict them to the hot sun months.
True, there was a Great Male Renunciation beginning during the Enlightenment in menswear of the radical changes we see with feminine fashion. But the people who care the most about menswear keep changing the details of what's stylish. In His Girl Friday in 1938, for instance, Cary Grant wears boxy suits with loud checks, while in North By Northwest in 1958, he wears elegant slim cut suits.
An interesting question is whether taste ever stops revolving. Has history permanently decided that 1958 Cary Grant is a better look than 1938 Cary Grant? It seemed like that for a long time, but I haven't paid any attention to the question in this century. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point, people who care about such things decide that his 1938 race track bookie look was better.
Boredom is a powerful force in human affairs.
To an extent the major changes of fashion have reflected climate changes and heating technologies. The warm Mediterranean civilizations generally had loose and flowing garments while the barbarian north featured sleeved tops and (for men) something like trousers. The styles merged during the early Middle Ages when a bitter cold volcanic winter necessitated heavier apparel. Likewise clothing for men and women both became heavier and more layered during the Little Ice Age. As the climate has warmed-- and as effective HVAC warmed indoor spaces and travel could be done in heated vehicles-- we've gone much skimpier on our apparel. Coats of any sort are well on their way to being cold weather outdoor wear only. Longer undergarments, once worn generally, are now also relegated to cold weather and mainly for those who work or play outdoors in winter. As warming proceeds the shorts and t-shirt look may well come to generate with some formal wear versions of itself.
The menswear norm of wearing wool suits is due to the dominance of the British Empire in the 19th Century even though it's a silly norm in Washington, Los Angeles, and perhaps Palo Alto in the 21st Century.
This is most true if you restrict yourself entirely to looking at British fashion, but even then it isn't really true.
The modern suit only goes back to about 1850s, and at the time its closest analogue was regarded as casual. Imagine if in a hundred and fifty years everybody talked about yoga pants as the height of women's fashion.
Well yes modern business attire is equivalent to the lounge suits of old, but business attire isn’t peak formal even within modern dress codes. A tuxedo today or a morning suit day wouldn’t look out of place 150 years ago.
Except for the part where you're not wearing a hat, and the modern lines would come across as unfashionably conservative (men's fashion in the 1850s was, uh, kind of suggestive). Wearing typical examples of modern tuxedos might manage the equivalent of "business casual", and come across as hired help.
Edit:
To clarify the 'kind of suggestive' thing, 1850s men's fashion had lines that emphasized and "led to" men's hips, butt, and/or, well, groin.
You wouldn't wear a hat with a tuxedo, it's evening dress. You would then and still would wear a hat with morning dress, but few of us will ever wear morning dress.
> A classic suit would be seen as stylish over a very long period of time.
Not at all. The trick with suits is that they stay broadly the same but change in ways that are obvious to those in the know.
My theory taste is a schelling point for coordinating status between people of high creative and social intelligence and the socio-economic elite. The rich want creative and socially intelligent kids in their gene pool because that’s correlated with other (more useful) forms of intelligence plus it gives them the tools to navigate the same sort of status games and thus continue succeeding. And the “taste game” is precisely that kind of game of status. Along with the “attractiveness game” or the “money game.” Just going about it in a more subtle way.
I think the key is that the rules of taste shouldn’t be fully solvable by high creative intelligence people nor fully acquirable for high social intelligence people. To be a very high status ‘tastemaker’ you need both attributes to succeed in some measure. Otherwise you’re only selecting for one form of intelligence that may not correlate with all the others.
Here are two more possible explanations (note that I'm not really endorsing these, just trying to explain how I think at least some people think about taste).
First, taste is about something real which most people can sense unconsciously but not consciously. For example, it could be the case that most people who have not been educated in fashion will say that wearing black shoes and white socks looks perfectly fine, but if you showed them 100 people wearing black shoes and white socks and 100 people dressed identically except for the sock color, then they would rate the second group of 100 as being slightly better looking but not be able to explain why.
Second, taste is about difficulty and/or rarity. I think much of what people object to about "kitsch" is essentially that it's easy to produce. Lots of people who study painting for long enough and who have a modest amount of natural talent could eventually learn to paint like Thomas Kincaide. But not that many people can come up with cubism (though once *somebody* came up with cubism, it's not that hard to imitate). Smart people and people who look at art all the time are more interested in novel ideas and more impressed by things that are difficult to pull off. Thus Kincaide is boring and dumb, but Picasso is cool.
Why didn't other people paint like Thomas Kincaide? He made a lot of money, it seems like it should have been an attractive opportunity.
Didn't they? He happened to be among the more successful of that stripe.
I'm not aware of others.
Most of them didn't bother putting their own name on it, since he'd already established such an effective brand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kinkade#Authenticity
Most painters of that ilk aren't famous, but many make a perfectly reasonable living.
90% of all artworks created in the world are pleasantly mediocre landscapes, sold for $400 to hang on the wall of a suburban house.
Relevant to this article, I find "mediocre landscapes" vastly more interesting and enjoyable than most other styles and subject matter. Portraits, still lifes, modernist explorations of raw form or color? I'm glad they exist but... I speed through those sections of museums to get to what clicks for me. Almost any landscape I can just lose myself in, the best drop me into a sublime trance.
I'll double down, I also really like pulp art, genre stuff like sci fi or western or fantasy art. I'm sure seasoned art experts find all that boorish, but by what authority should I be condemned?
If Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown can write a seminal work about learning to appreciate the garish consumer architecture of Las Vegas, than any gauche pop style can be rehabilitated, today's mediocrity is tomorrow's king.
The first seems undeniably to be a part of what’s going on. But even people with lots of training and refinement still have trouble telling apart what is their own idiosyncratic preference, and what is this broader thing that they have learned to express that many others react to without knowing how.
A few other possibilities:
H) Everyone has some selection of things they find aesthetic and non-aesthetic, and taste is the ability to maximise the aesthetic appeal of something across the whole population, or alternately to minimise the active dislike.
I) The worst taste is objectively bad, but taste grows more subjective the better it gets; most human beings live in a world that's so tasteful that they spend all their time arguing about the marginal benefit of symmetrical house windows. If the vast majority of humans lived in a house painted in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage or covered in wallpaper made of gory real-life crime scene photographs then they would go crazy.
J) Styles are a series of local maxima in a space that constantly contorts due to changes in public opinion. Good taste is either the ability to read these contortions or the blind luck to guess them correctly, and then build a house that will be maximally tasteful in 10 years' time.
K) Taste becomes apparent to the layperson only after extended contact with something tasteless, and experts are able to tell we'd hate living in a tasteless house six months before we realise it ourselves.
> I) The worst taste is objectively bad, but taste grows more subjective the better it gets;
Sounds like that's isomorphic to https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/25/the-tails-coming-apart-as-metaphor-for-life/
Imagine someone who likes kids' jokes only and gets inordinate pleasure from them.
They are consternated by the existence of, I dunno, the Chicago comedy scene, because it's so superfluous to requirements. Normal people, to use Scott's term, in their view don't need all this faff, they can just get laughs by repeating chicken crossing the road jokes. To their mind it can only be a huge status game.
I am not saying this is the same thing, but how do we know it's not?
I mean, you don't even need the hypothetical. SNL had a vote on whether to keep or ditch Andy Kaufman and "dump Andy" won.
Decades ago when "performance art" was fashionable, it struck me that "performance artist" was what they called you if you weren't that good. If you were Andy Kaufman-level good, they called you a comedian or actor. If you were David Bowie or David Byrne-level good, they called you a rock star.
Scott, apologies if you've talked about this in one of the threads, but how are you on TASTE taste—like, the taste of food? Worldwide, the most popular foods and beverages bear very little resemblance to fancy food. Indeed, the global triumph of McDonald's and Coke suggests that in the gustatory realm, what's universal is the superiority of junk food. Leaving nutrition aside, do you feel that people who maintain that (say) scallops with braised chard tastes better than a Big Mac, or that IPA tastes better than Modelo, etc., are maintaining a priesthood based on false reasons? Or are they on to something?
I've never been able to get into fancy food, so I can't answer this from a position of knowledge.
My guess would be some combination of the porn analogy (you get bored of certain types of food and seek novelty), and a sensitization effect where you might notice slight imperfections in food, this unintentionally "trains" you to hate the imperfections more, and then you can't stand food that isn't made perfectly.
See, I wonder if food sophisticates can't stand food that *is* made "perfectly" from a universalist standpoint: food that hits the big obvious flavor centers in a big obvious way. What could be more perfect than a piece of supermarket birthday cake for sweetness and calorie density? Yet past a certain age many adults stop enjoying that kind of birthday cake because we find it cloying: once you've had the first bite you've got the whole experience. Something like dark chocolate offers notes that do multiple things—bits of bitterness, etc.—and thus, through these kinds of "imperfections," it's satisfying to keep eating. And I think that maps pretty well onto the difference between what I'd consider kitsch and what I don't.
Well said.
From the unsophisticated rube standpoint, the modern architects went "we're replacing the chocolate with better chocolate. but it's dark chocolate, which will be more bitter to your palate until you get used to it. except it's not really chocolate, it's something artificial that imitates chocolate. and the bitterness is because we added in fifty times more agent to make it even harsher because it's medicinal, isn't it? and maybe it'll make you throw up, but that's *good*!"
I think you can't really say that someone who refuses the new 'chocolate' is acting just like a toddler that only wants sugar rush.
https://www.thespruceeats.com/what-is-bitterness-1328482
I like Brussels sprouts, many people hate them. I'm not going to say "well my educated palate is much better than yours, simpletons" for that. We may use the bitter peel of citrus fruits for flavour, but nobody is going to add in the pith because that's *too* bitter and would spoil the dish.
What Scott's original post on architecture was getting at, I think, is that the modern 'cooks' made the dish out of *all* pith in some cases.
The story of Brussels sprouts is particularly interesting.
Quoting Wikipedia: "In the 1990s, Dutch scientist Hans van Doorn identified the chemicals that make Brussels sprouts bitter: sinigrin and progoitrin.[11] This enabled Dutch seed companies to cross-breed archived low-bitterness varieties with modern high-yield varieties, over time producing a significant increase in the popularity of the vegetable.[12]"
So it's perfectly possible that middle-aged people were subjected to the old style decades ago and reasonably decided that this wasn't their thing, but _would_ like the new variants, if they were aware of the difference.
We evolved to like sweetness less and tolerate bitterness more as we age. You're interpreting the adult tuning of these dials as more sophisticated.
Why don't people tell similar stories about how they loved eating lemons as a child, but now prefer a more complex mix of flavors? Because sour perception doesn't change that much.
If evolution had tuned the dials the opposite way for children and adults, adults would instead be talking about how children can't appreciate the depth and vibrancy of flavor in cake.
Anecdotally, I stopped sweetmaxxing once it led to an annoying mucus buildup at the back of my throat whenever I ate something "too sweet". I still like the taste. It's the side effects that turn me off.
This isn't my experience. I think it's more fair to say that many food 'sophisticates' are could more easily be classified as 'adventurous' eaters. The reason they turn their noses up to Chef Boyardee isn't because it's 'too perfect', but because it's bland and uninteresting. A friend who went to culinary school talks about 'mouth feel'. Sure, pudding tastes good, but there's only so much of it you can stand. No matter how much you like pudding, if you were on an all-pudding diet, it wouldn't take long before you'd start to look for something more interesting to do with your tongue than gulp down another mushy bite.
I think you could over-correct here, and assume 'sophisticated' eaters get bored of pudding after a single bite, but I don't think that's what's going on here. I think what's happening is that they're actively seeking adventure, not that they're easily bored by slight repetition.
So when you put pudding on their plate, their first instinct is to ask, "is there any way to make this more fun?" They're not disgusted by 'ordinary', so much as they're overlooking it entirely. To analogize to music, the reason they're not interested in that supermarket birthday cake isn't because it's actively dissonant, so much as it's background noise they don't even notice. If they're annoying about their food sophistication, a charitable interpretation is that they're the kind of person who's looking for a buddy to be adventurous with. "Sure, you could jump off the low part of the bridge, but come over here and we'll jump off the higher part together!"
To me this is just the bdsm porn analogy.
I guess, but isn’t that kind of a reductive way of looking at it? Is becoming bored with YA literature as one grows the same as getting into kinky porn? Is “when I was a child, I spoke as a child, I reasoned as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things” the same as getting into kinky porn?
You're right, changing as a person (i.e. growing up) will also change your taste.
But then, we are always changing—you can’t step in the same river twice, etc.
I used to not be very discerning about food, but got into fine dining later in life. I'm pretty confident that it's lifted my ceiling for enjoying meals, and only raised the floor a little bit. I enjoy a fancy tasting menu more than anything I would have enjoyed before, but it hasn't stopped me enjoying burgers.
So I don't agree that it's about becoming hypertensive about imperfections, or bored about 'normal' things, and it's more about learning an appreciation for subtleties I couldn't pick up on before.
Noticing that a cream sauce would be even better with a bit of lemon and tarragon doesn't stop it being yummy.
Mostly upside, very little downside (except my wallet).
Yes, I agree with this. People sometimes say they don’t want to develop good taste, because it would be expensive, but you still have the same appreciation for the thing as before, even if you now also know what you’re missing.
It’s like how I feel about weather after living in Southern California. When I was in Texas, I thought an 80 degree day or a 65 degree day were pretty good, but now that I live in California, I realize just how much better it can often be, but I still recognize that those days are pretty decent (especially compared to most Texas weather in either winter or summer).
There's a lot of science behind making things taste better, and not just in the 'sophisticated' sense! Two examples:
1. Years ago, the people at Coca Cola did some internal blinded taste tests that showed people preferred Pepsi. They panicked, thinking the only thing keeping them afloat was branding, so they perfected a new formula that beat Pepsi in their taste tests, then launched this as the infamous "New Coke". People hated it. Why the great performance in blind tests?
The tests they were using were 'sip tests'. The sweeter Pepsi did better for most people in a one-off setting, but was too sweet to sit down and drink a full can. (With some variation, where a subset of the population prefers Pepsi.)
2. There are some food additives that make things better. I had a roommate some years back who wasn't all about fancying up his diet. I pointed this out to him, like how 'malt' additives just make things taste better, bought some malted milk, and was using it to help enhance flavors. He dismissed this assertion, until one day we were driving along and he mentioned he really loves Grape Nuts. "I don't know what they put into that stuff, but it's addicting."
"Malt." He was incredulous. He didn't believe me until we pulled over into a supermarket and, sure enough, it was listed there among the ingredients.
Doritos are engineered to taste great. In addition to malt, they have MSG and a unique type of 'flavor enhancer' that increases the binding affinity of MSG by 50x, namely inosinate and guanylate salts. This is present in all the different varieties of Doritos - including the new flavors - and explains why they're difficult to put down even if you're not really into the new BBQ/spicy nacho flavor.
I suspect there's a combination of factors involved in 'taste', making taste like 'physics', and like a 'priesthood', and an acquired thing, etc.
What about videogames? If I remember correctly, you stopped on Civilization IV. And I generally agree, where should be games for new crowd and hardcore crowd. And general sense of superiority is common, but not necessary.
For bitter and spicy, the BDSM model works better. Rejecting bitterness is likely an evolutionary adaptation that prevent us from eating toxic plant alkaloids. With time you can develop a kink for this mild displeasure. So IPA lovers aren't faking it.
For McDonlads, it is the fashion analogy that works. This can be tested with non-westerners, who haven't being acculturated into seeing junk food as tacky. Mainland Chinese people love McDonalds. Also, after the iron curtain fell it was common for middle class eastern Europeans to eat out in junk food chains.
PD: Not relevant, but I would say many kids would like fresh grilled scallops at first try. They are considered more refined because of availability/price and novelty, since they aren't a staple in the US. Most kids wouldn't go for chard though.
I love bitter flavors. IPAs are almost all garbage in which the hops drown out all other flavors. And they're not even very bitter.
Also none of the IPA lovers I've known actually like bitter flavors in general.
I suspect there's something going on with flavor association and marijuana there, possibly addiction-adjacent.
FWIW, I met a bona fide French chef de cuisine, who said, that some days, what you want is a Big Mac. Not an artisanal wagyu steakburger infused with truffles and raw bull semen or whatever it is that foodies prize, but a Big Mac.
From McDonald's.
> Rejecting bitterness is likely an evolutionary adaptation that prevent us from eating toxic plant alkaloids. With time you can develop a kink for this mild displeasure.
Occurs to me that could actually be an "intentional" feature of the original evolved function. If one of your hunter-gatherer ancestors ate small quantities of some plant repeatedly over years and survived, well, apparently it's locally abundant, yet wasn't too toxic after all. Might as well keep gradually ramping up the dosage, to stress-test whatever clever prep method they devised, while scoring more essential nutrients.
It has not been my experience that mainland Chinese people love McDonalds. It's more that they see it as a western novelty food, like how Americans see haggis or escargot. So it became kind of a fad to try on special occasions for a while. I know a lot of people in China, and I do not know a single one that thinks McDonalds or KFC tastes better than their own cuisine. In fact, a lot more people dislike than like it.
>do you feel that people who maintain that (say) scallops with braised chard tastes better than a Big Mac
The problem here is that you're comparing something that's definitionally mass produced in order to maximize profit vs something that evokes care put into cooking and ingredient sourcing. Would that person prefer a McScallop to a very well made, but simple, burger?
I think this sort of illustrates a problem with this discussion: It seems to me like there are two things that can be true, and they get tangled together in a way that makes everyone angry:
* There is such thing as expertise: most people will enjoy prefer a good burger made by a good cook to a Big Mac.
* People who get deep into a subject, in order to get that expertise, seem to eventually end up seeking novelty, which might be totally divorced from quality
So then, you get stuff that sits all across the spectrum created by these two axes, and different people will value one or the other differently. Someone who's very deep into it will see someone eating a Whooper and conclude they are a philistine, when maybe they just prefer burgers and that's the one that's available to them. Someone who's not might look at some lavender flavored foam and conclude that the people eating these are just too high on their own supply, rather than appreciating the skill and ingenuity required for successful molecular cuisine (I am a pleb, so don't take this example at face value). Many times, both will be right, but homogenizing the outgroup leads to less productive discussions.
>IPA tastes better than Modelo
At the risk of jeopardizing my whole point above, if I wanted to argue that taste is fake, I'd just relentlessly attack IPA supremacists.
Burger King Whoppers strike me as really tasty. I consider it a massive failure of Burger King marketers that they've never gotten across to the public that Whoppers are, obviously, more flavorful than Big Macs.
I agree! A Whooper with bacon is, to me, the archetypal burger.
Whoppers are good.
Fast food chain fries are also usually _excellent_, typically better than what you get at even good restaurants.
I think that someone who has been raised on McDonald's burgers, upon tasting a carefully sourced and prepared burger by an excellent chef, will *not* necessarily say, "wow, this is way better." They may be too used to the sweetness of McD's sauces, in particular. Similarly, my kids prefer Kraft Mac n Cheese to homemade macaroni and Cheese made with a roux and such. Dark chocolate is an acquired taste. Etc.
The other thing is, in the comments below the Bauhaus book review, Scott defended what are derisively called McMansions as being perfectly lovely. But surely when aesthetes/snobs criticize McMansions part of what they're criticizing is mass-production and a kind of "fake craftsmanship"? That's why they're called McMansions! So I don't think we can just say "well, of course quality will tell"; oftentimes that depends on experience and also on temperament (Scott obviously is not deprived of education).
>I think that someone who has been raised on McDonald's burgers, upon tasting a carefully sourced and prepared burger by an excellent chef, will *not* necessarily say, "wow, this is way better." They may be too used to the sweetness of McD's sauces, in particular.
If it's a reasonably similar burger (cheese, lettuce, onions, pickles and some sort of sauce), I believe most people would. Maybe an experiment could be done on this? I think the main problem would be to make the good burger look as bad as the BigMac, in order not to bias the subjects.
>Similarly, my kids prefer Kraft Mac n Cheese to homemade macaroni and Cheese made with a roux and such.
Welp, time to get new kids
>Dark chocolate is an acquired taste
Yes, but dark chocolate is not just "good milk chocolate" it's a different flavour profile.
>The other thing is, in the comments below the Bauhaus book review, Scott defended what are derisively called McMansions as being perfectly lovely. But surely when aesthetes/snobs criticize McMansions part of what they're criticizing is mass-production and a kind of "fake craftsmanship"? That's why they're called McMansions! So I don't think we can just say "well, of course quality will tell"; oftentimes that depends on experience and also on temperament (Scott obviously is not deprived of education).
I agree, but I think this fits within the framework I propose: Scott is so much more predisposed towards traditional building aesthetics, that he's willing to overlook the faults of the Big Mac and choose it over a concrete box, no matter how well proportioned and how good the lighting is inside the box.
Also, I think Scott might be overplaying the contrarianism a bit here, and in a less contentious environment might concede that some of the houses displayed are kind of silly looking, but I'm not a mindreader, much less so through the internet.
Children have more taste buds, which they gradually lose as they age (that continues all the way to old age). Things that taste horribly bitter to a six year old can be appreciated by a thirty year old. Coffee, broccoli, dark chocolate etc, are usually acquired tastes with age.
>But surely when aesthetes/snobs criticize McMansions part of what they're criticizing is mass-production and a kind of "fake craftsmanship"? That's why they're called McMansions! So I don't think we can just say "well, of course quality will tell"; oftentimes that depends on experience and also on temperament (Scott obviously is not deprived of education).
One pattern that I always dislike is when a snob dismisses something simply because it is mass produced. Sometimes, mass produced items are _better_ than craft items. Industrial production can have tight quality control. If a mass produced item happens to match up with what one needs, the price/performance ratio can be orders of magnitude better than any alternative.
Keep in mind I wasn't making a point about mass production per se; I was responding to the complaint that it was unfair, when discussing taste, to compare mass-produced food (McDonald's burgers) with something carefully crafted. I was saying that, if mass production leads to less aesthetic pleasure, then that should be true of McMansions as well—I don't have a strong opinion of that, though I do personally think it's probably true in many cases. Keep in mind that mass produced items may be better along many axes (you mention quality control and the ratio of price to performance) without necessarily being *aesthetically* better. We (either humans generally or just we snobs) tend to appreciate small imperfections and asymmetries that suggest something is handmade and/or naturally derived; it feels more alive than uniformity does.
Many Thanks! Yes, I, personally, do tend to focus on quality control, fitness-for-purpose, and price/performance much more than on aesthetics. I don't have a strong opinion about McMansions either. I've followed some of the links to some of them in the Bauhaus discussion, but I don't think I've seen many of them in the wild.
I have no idea of whether the owner of a typical McMansion winds up with "buyer's remorse" over the decoration. I, personally, prefer to be able to _see_ the functional parts of my home, primarily so that, if something fails, I can find it and get it fixed promptly, and decorative surfaces tend to hinder that.
McDonald's and coke are successful because they are very cheap, you can buy them anywhere, and you can trust them to always taste the same no matter when or where you buy them.
Actually good food tends to lack some of those qualities.
I used to think I didn't much like leafy vegetables, until as an adult I discovered the difference between the ones you buy at the supermarket, which taste like cardboard, and the ones you buy at (I know this sounds like what a follower of a priest would say, but I swear I go by taste) farmer's markets and organic food shops, at least where I live. Then I became a lover of vegetables. But most people will just say "why would I pay twice as much for something that looks exactly like the supermarket version?" You'd think the "organic" branding was meant to get around that problem, but supermarkets where I live now sell organic vegetables, organic vegetables that taste like cardboard exactly like the other supermarket vegetables, but people think they're buying the good ones because it says "organic".
I mean that if stores were allowed to sell coke that says "coke" but tastes like piss, people would buy it, and it would ruin the reputation of the brand.
> McDonald's and coke are successful because they are very cheap, you can buy them anywhere, and you can trust them to always taste the same no matter when or where you buy them.
Neither McDonald's nor Coke taste the same no matter where you buy them. Just the difference between US Coke and Mexican Coke is huge, and European-produced variants are again different. Same for the BigMac: while the rough taste profile is the same, there's still significant differences in the details around the world.
> It's not immediately obvious why you would want this skill - it makes your life worse, because you'll just be fretting over flaws you see in everything.
One way to think about it is that bad art/architecture/etc is going to bother you anyway, but taste will let you figure out why. If you have taste as a designer/artist, you know how to work with small details to produce work that less sophisticated people like to look at, even if they don't know why they like it.
e.g. I know next to nothing about menswear, but I still think the menswear guy has real knowledge about how to dress well, because he can point out what part of bad suits makes them look bad, and suggest a better alternative.
As you say, having developed taste lets you account for why things work for you and for others, and perhaps you can turn that into a skill for becoming an artist of some kind yourself.
But also, doesn't developing taste as you grow up open up new areas of pleasure and interest that would not be there if you did not allow your taste to be cultivated? And doesn't this compensate for the downside of seeing flaws in things around you?
The counterargument to this is that perhaps a kid gets more pleasure from a simple toy than I could ever get from looking around an art gallery, and maybe it would be better to just retain child-like preferences and enjoy everything. This unfortunately doesn't seem like an option for most people.
I've never been able to distinguish great wine from lousy wine, which has saved me a lot of money over the years. But ... I don't criticize people who can tell the difference.
I think I've managed to have my cake and eat it too. I have been able to develop artistic taste and appreciate things that would have bored me as a kid, but I also still like stuff that I liked as a kid. I can watch a Very Serious 70s New Hollywood Art Movie and appreciate it, and then watch a childrens' cartoon and love it too. My culinary tastes are similar, I can enjoy gourmet food, but can also enjoy fast food and candy bars.
I'm not sure what I did to allow me to do this. Maybe it's that I try not to let status come into the picture. To me the entertainment I get from a kid's cartoon isn't a worse type of enjoyment than the entertainment I get from a Very Serious Arthouse movie, it's merely a different one.
Yes. People think that before they learn taste they don’t get affected differently by good and bad things. But very often they’re wrong - they do have the effect, but just don’t know how to express the effect.
> One way to think about it is that bad art/architecture/etc is going to bother you anyway, but taste will let you figure out why.
Agree with this. Being able to put into words what things in a game or a show or a book irk me has let me know what to look for.
> The few scientific experiments we have - hoaxes, blind tests, etc - are not very kind to taste as a concept. Consider eg [...] the AI Art Turing Test.
What did the AI Art Turing Test prove in regard to taste? All it proved is that the strong statement "all AI-generated images are slop" is false. But if your claim is "people say they don't like AI art because of their good taste, but here they liked an example of AI art, curious", surely a better explanation is "the person who ran the AI generator had good taste when selecting the output"?
Came here to post this, the inclusion of that point in the list had me confused, too.
"Taste seems to constantly change" … it seems like this is much less true than fashion. For example I think JS Bach has been considered tasteful music since at least the Classical era. If you look in the history of music there was an era in the late 19th century where the French were mocking Mahler as "Schubertian" and basically dismissing all German music. But even Debussy admitted that Bach's music was excellent. Why the stability?
My hot take is: Taste is about appreciating impressive aspects of art that others might miss. There are two dimensions to this: 1) how impressive is it, 2) in what way is it impressive? So e.g. Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps is impressive in its percussiveness, and the way that its dissonant musical voices create a scene. But those aren't aspects of music that composers had traditionally worked with. People looking for status could signal in-group membership if they "got" what he was doing. So while (1) impressiveness is somewhat universal, (2) the types of expression on display go in and out of style and basically reflect fashion dynamics of "insiders" trying to differentiate themselves by constantly changing the goal posts.
My theory of why Bach has had staying power because he is so impressive along enough dimensions that musicians who study him end up deciding they basically have to hand it to him, even though the Baroque-era areas of interest like fugue are way out of style now.
Something that's interesting about classical music these days is there's a divergence: people view most of it as objectively "tasteful", but knowing a lot about it no longer confers much status. I think this is roughly because it is impressive (dimension 1) but is no longer impressive in ways that confer status (dimension 2).
When I was a kid 50 years ago, it said good things about the atom bomb scientists that they were into Bach. Now it says good things about Bach that the atom bomb scientists were into him.
Do you bite this bullet for poetry? I find it really hard to accept that a crap hospital wall poem is no better or worse than WB Yeats or Milton.
I agree that logically I have no grounds to say anything in the world is better than anything else, but on the other hand *come on just read Dover Beach it's obviously great* 😅
If I imagine a world where the poet laureate is as likely to have got there by writing greeting card poems as anything else, it's hard to shake the sense that something important would have been lost.
Maybe the synthesis is just that, yes it's arbitrary and recondite and lacks universal meaning - but it's enough that *someone* finds these formalisms beautiful, without us needing to call it a fundamental truth.
I do think there's a meta argument that if you don't like _any_ of these abstruse things you're missing out on something in life: if you only like four-chord pop and fast food and hallmark movies and Facebook poetry, that maybe there's a part of the human experience you aren't tapping into. But perhaps that's as far as we can go.
In another post Scott says that "Horatius" (https://englishverse.com/poems/horatius) is better than any poem of the last 50 years, which includes a lot of, say, Philip Larkin's work. So I don't think that's even much of a bullet for him to bite.
Most people probably tend to like or dislike something reminiscent of their childhood in proportion to whether the latter was happy or otherwise. "Give me a child until they are seven .." and all that. This applies to music, poetry, architecture, art, anything. But tastes are also influenced by personal temperament, and aspiration plus imitation.
Regarding temperament, I think a person's taste in music paradoxically veers towards styles opposite to their temperament, to take them out of themselves so to speak. A highly-strung, maybe slightly neurotic, type will be soothed by the mechanical emotionless predictable style of a bach fugue (the kind of music which leaves me cold, the dreary musical equivalent of patterned wallpaper droning on and on!) . By contrast, a basically cold fairly indifferent person will feel pleasantly stirred by expansive emotion-laden music of Mahler or of course Wagner (the Austrian painter's favorite!). A laid-back "dude" will like thumping heavy metal, and so on.
The same goes for poetry. I share Scott's preference (if such is the case) for heroic epics like Horatius, or Ballad of the White Horse, or (in my case) The Charge of the Light Brigade. But homely, studiously banal poems like most modern ones leave me cold. "They eff you up your Mum and Dad .." that kind of thing, although in many cases one can see they're cleverly constructed and often not without some charm.
By Philip Larkin
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
Seems like a plausible explanation for the declining fertility rate.
He should have read Bryan Caplan's "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids", explaining that nothing his parents actually did in raising him mattered, and instead only their genes.
But wouldn't that mean it's even more impossible to break the cycle, and thus the narrator shouldn't have kids because they're a genetic dead end?
Not having any kids would be breaking any cycle, and thus not impossible. In that case, he rather than his kids would be the genetic dead end. But if he did have kids, there wouldn't be any more reason to think that they would be dead-ends any more than his parents were.
Bryan Caplan should have summarised his thesis into a compact poem so I'd be more inclined to read it.
The fault, dear Melvin, is not in our dads,
but in ourselves, that we're on Lexapro.
“This Be the Verse” may be homely (though is Horatius not homely?? “East and west and south and north/The messengers ride fast”?), but it’s atypical of much of Larkin’s poetry; check out “The Whitsun Weddings” for instance. To me the distinction between Larkin and Macaulay isn’t beauty, because Larkin can vary those registers very widely; it’s difficulty.
Poetry is a really interesting analogy.
AFAIK, Scott likes traditional formal poetry and dislikes free verse. So do I, and I also mostly share his opinions on architecture. I expect the correlation will be strong in general, with the modern architecture (and modern art) fans also liking modern poetry. There's a link in terms of how much craft is visibly necessary to achieve it.
(Scott, if you're going to do a survey asking people which buildings they like best, maybe also include some poems, and see how they correlate?)
With poetry, the sort of trite verse produced by greeting card makers (and ChatGPT) is clearly neither good traditional poetry nor modern deliberately-unstructured poetry. It's trying to imitate the former, badly.
I'm happy to admit I don't know enough about architecture to distinguish between the architectural equivalent of a Shakespearean sonnet and the architectural equivalent of a greeting-card verse. But I know I prefer both over the architectural equivalent of what wins poetry prizes nowadays.
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
I can explain free verse poetry.
Poetry is fundamentally an exercise in "painting in the lines", and from a certain perspective, the technical impressiveness of poetry is in painting between very fine lines. That is - you establish a rigid set of rules and adhere to it.
The early rules were fundamentally musical in nature; rhyming and meter.
Gradually poetry developed more and more complex variants, which decreasingly lent themselves to music.
Modern poetry abandons music almost entirely - the artform is now in creating a kind of linguistic puzzle, in which it is up to the reader to figure out what rules you are following, and a sophisticated writer is one who creates harder-to-identify rules, and a sophisticated reader is one who is able to solve harder puzzles. It's like Dixit, however - no points if -nobody- guesses the rules, with an exception for if everybody feels like they -almost- get it. If everybody feels like they almost get it, and nobody actually gets it, you win the game.
I don't know, I read current poetry magazines, and I think contemporary Anglophone poetry is very imagistic & mostly has very little dependence on cleverness or sophistication. I think teachers like to teach the stuff that exercises a kind of codebreaking cleverness in the reader, but actually editors of poetry magazines don't like it as much.
Like, take this one, from this month's Poetry magazine: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/1625084/limerence
I think that example kind of demonstrates my point; for its length it's pretty dense with puzzles. Like, the first stanza asks a question, and each stanza except the first and last finishes the previous stanza's answer, finds it unsatisfying somehow, and so starts (but leaves incomplete) a new answer. The final stanza instead rejects the question entirely. It's a fairly basic puzzle setup; you establish a pattern, and then violate it at the end, with the violation serving as a clue to help point out what the pattern was.
What you're calling puzzles seems to me to be just the structure of the poem. That's not the main thing. The main thing is the images. I guess there's no way to convince anybody of that. But, like you said, it's a simple structure, not particularly sophisticated or interesting. The interesting aspect is the imagery. The olive, floating in brine. The sun kneeling, the milkweed bowing, the sparrow pecking, the heart of the owl. It's not worth much as a puzzle; but as a short film that plays in your mind, it's worth a page in a magazine.
I love this explanation so much.
It makes me really sad that people's first instinct is to condemn things they don't understand, instead of looking for explanations like this.
This makes so much more sense to me than "I don't understand modern architecture, therefore it must be a ploy to gain social status by pretending to like ugly buildings".
To be clear I'm not actually a -fan- of this kind of poetry, so this description is ... somewhat critical. I'd analogize modern poetry to a Sudoku puzzle more than anything else, and most of the genuine fans, I think, would find this description to be kind of offensive.
I'm not into any kind of poetry so I don't know how accurate or offensive this description is, but I find it quite relatable when I think of other forms of art that I understand better (e.g. movies like Pulp Fiction that are told non-linearly and putting it all together is an enjoyable mini-puzzle).
In general, "it makes me think" seems like a pretty common reason for people to enjoy art, but yeah, certainly not the only one.
I can never understand poetry. The only things I noticed I like is like 3 lines from ozymandias. English isn't even my native language but I don't appreciate poetry in my own language too. Words I like are either one-liners or phrased as prose.
Two more analogies:
1) Variant on E (porn): Taste is like overly sugary food: If you eat a little of it, it's sweet and amazing, but if you actually eat large amounts of it you start getting sick of it and disgusted with the style (unlike real "high class" food, which you can eat every day for years and still love). People who spend a lot of time considering taste have reached satiation and know this, and are correctly warning you that you'll get sick of your normal tastes if you overdo them (and then once being a culture critic becomes a thing, you get people who spend so much time tasting even the fancy food that they become sick of it too - it may take 100x as long but they spend 100x as much time as you eating it - and then they start overindexing on novelty).
2) "Taste" is a proxy for "something being promised". e.g. a building with good architecture looks good because it's promising to be a pleasant place to live, but actual architecture experts know that form would be unpleasant to live in (this is still not objective, because different people find different things comfortable, but it can catch some real insight). Specifically I dislike old architecture and like new slop styles like 5+1s because I've lived in both and found the old buildings pretty unpleasant to actually live in (cramped, drafty, poor lighting etc), even when they look nice from outside. I don't know how general this is though.
AI art is a clear example of this - art promises to be a depiction of something (even a fantasy), but AI art isn't (once you dig into the details they're usually inconsistent, not emergent properties of a hidden order).
I think bad-taste Marvel movies are also an example of this - they're optimised to overpromise (via cool trailers and lots of setting up characters that will be very important and meaningful in the next movie we promise) and then (usually, especially in the newer ones) don't actually deliver on any of it and have flat stories that don't add much to the trailer.
IMO architects (especially the prestigious ones) don't care about what a building would be like to live in; only what it looks like from the outside.
There seems to be a trend at the moment to design houses with huge triangular windows, the width of a whole room and at least one storey high, if not two. They're terrible for thermal comfort (cold in winter, hot in summer), and terrible for glare / sun in your eyes, and they're difficult to fit curtains or blinds to (which might help with the glare) because of the triangular top. They need regular cleaning, but they're difficult to clean because they go so high.
I'm sure I've read an article that goes into great depth about how insensitive architectural design is to the way homes will be used in real life and the typical usage paths between and within rooms, from a UX design kind of perspective.
Bauhaus architects and Le Corbusier were strongly driven by the living experience of the future inhabitants.
They thought they were. There's a school of thought that le corbusier was rubbish at understanding how people and societies actually work and was a persistent demolisher of Chesterton fences. See eg the Criticism section here
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier
Some of the Bauhaus architects did much better than Le Corbusier at this. Even Le Corbusier himself did much better with his designs for single family homes than his designs on a more monumental scale.
As strong driven as the Bolsheviks were the living experience of the people of Russia…better 1000 years of Tzarism to 10 years of Bolshevism.
Now that's a bad analogy. Bolsheviks gave workers and peasants education and improved living conditions, much more so than Tsars managed after freeing serfs in 1862 (which is frankly why there was a Revolution). They also gave them new buildings which looked boring, but were much better to live in than what they were lived in before.
As far as I know my lineage, my ancestors never rose above a store manager position, and mostly were peasants, so if I had to make a call, I would vastly prefer to live under Soviet rule than to live under Tsar.
The Tzars were well on their way to modernising into a liberal democratic capitalist society with a constitutional monarchy, just like Britain or Japan. There was absolutely zero reason to spend 70 years under the rule of envious murderous psychopaths who killed millions of their own people in that time in service to a nonsense ideology and dysfunctional economy. The revolution happened because of some bad choices and because the Russian peasantry was allowed free rein to indulge their destructive tendencies.
I think the related point is also as you eat less sugar in your diet overall, you notice smaller and smaller amounts of added sugar until you realize that most food has added sugar. It won't make you any happier to complain about this, but it doesn't make you start liking sweets again.
There is no difference between "added" sugar and "natural" sugar.
There are some differences – the type of sugar; whether it's bound up in some kind of matrix and thus released more slowly or with a different taste profile; and whether it comes bundled with vitamins and other nutrients (the higher proportion of your food that's added sugar, the lower the proportion of other nutrients you are likely to get).
Having other nutrients is a difference, but that doesn't change the nature of the sugar itself.
Simply wrong. "Sugar" is not just the one thing, it's fructose or glucose or galactose or some combination. What's added is not necessarily the same as what is already there.
Added vs natural is not fructose vs glucose vs galactose.
Shudder - brings back memories of carbohydrate stereochemistry... Oh, goody, we found at least one carbon that _isn't_ a chiral center...
What do you mean? I mean, sure as broad categories, there is huge overlap between the sugars that count in some sense as “natural” and the sugars that count in some sense as “added”. But there are big differences between the behavior of powdered sugar and granulated sugar, sugar in liquids and sugar crystals on top of solids, sucrose and glucose and sucralose and aspartame, coconut sugar and cane sugar and beet sugar. You can taste all of these differences, and they affect your experience even if you haven’t learned to identify them.
Those are some real differences. But "added" vs "natural" sugar is meaningless in terms of consumption. If selection results in a particular fruit being very sweet, it does not make it any healthier due to being "natural" and any sugar in a juice made from that fruit will still act like that same sugar if you'd added it to water.
I’m not claiming anything about healthfulness! I’m claiming that there are distinct and detectable taste differences. Molecular gastronomy and Alice Waters both have their place in fine dining.
So an expert taster could tell if a mead just contained the natural sugar of honey vs added sugar of the same chemical type?
I think you're missing the point. Added sugar makes things taste sweeter. The vast majority of foods without added sugar are not that sweet, unless you're just drinking honey and maple syrup.
I think fruit juice would be.
Alright, unless you're drinking any sugar concentrate, most things are not that sweet.
I think a lot of the negative things about taste, emphasized here in the comments and also in the post, have some truth to them. Snobbery in particular. But I also think that there is some reality in taste, or at least non-arbitrariness. For example, styles change frequently, but within eras and styles, people with 'sophisticated taste' will generally agree which are the best of that era, even if it's not within their personal or professional style, and I don't think this comes simply from groupthink.
Generally, people who get deep into a genre-- scifi, painting, mathematics, woodworking, engineering, music, architecture -- will develop a sense of aesthetics about the field that is different than what casual observers care about (and is not the same as raw performance). Wouldn't it be weird if experts had the same preferences as non-experts?
I don't think the directionality of these developed preferences is fully random, even if there are strong currents of fad and trend. We notice the situations where elite preference differs from mass preference, but the align frequently. Nearly every observer would agree that iPhones are the most well designed phones aesthetically. For someone like Steve Jobs, 'good' design is connected to good function and good technology and flows from the same mental structures. The ugliness of Windows was viscerally offensive to him.
But the main thing I want to say is that I think this question could be tested empirically to some degree. I think if you take art and design 'experts' and expose them to a wide range of novel aesthetic content, art and graphic design, from different genres (both high brow and low brow styles) they would have some convergence on what is 'good' that's non-random and different from non-experts. Maybe it's impossible to separate this from the idea discussed in the post that they've all been swimming in the same aesthetic value systems in advance of the test; so that may be what drives any convergence in the test. Would be interesting though.
Even more so - there is often a lot of overlap between the highest rated examples of a genre from experts in the genre, and the highest rated examples of the genre from experts in other genres. There’s some difference, and often the top rated in the genre in one decade will change in another decade. But it’s very rare that examples considered mediocre in one period get re-evaluated as great - it’s more common that examples considered tenth best become re-evaluated as best, or even that examples reviled as awful and disgusting get re-evaluated as best.
> This particular rule has a sort of rational explanation - the copula takes the nominative case. But when you get into why the copula takes the nominative case, it’s hard to tell whether this is a natural fact about the definition of cases, or whether Latin-obsessed grammarians unfairly demanded that Anglophones follow the Latin usage.
No it isn't. The very same people who tell you that English pronouns follow Latin case norms are also happy to tell you that French pronouns work in exactly the way they deplore for English: "Je", for example, is the appropriate form of the first-person singular pronoun when it is the subject of a verb, and "moi" is the appropriate form in all other circumstances.
So there isn't any constituency anywhere for the idea that Latin case norms are a natural fact about cases. We know they aren't, we know the French do the same thing that uneducated slobs do, and we know the French are the epitome of refinement.
The trick is to avoid knowing all of those things at the same time.
The 'moi' in french is a bit more complex than that I believe, it is a 'tonic/non clitic pronoun' which can be both used in the nominative case (replacing 'je') and in the accusative case (replacing 'me').
Btw, I still haven't understood the logic in english of using 'me' instead of 'I' when answering a question about the subject. Why is it fine in this context to use 'me' in the nominative case? For example:
- "Who did this?"
- "Me" ("I did this").
Well, you're right that I overlooked the (French) form "me". Fortunately, that doesn't affect the fundamental point that the French pronoun rules match the English ones, except for being correct while the English rules are supposed to be wrong. We may infer that English has a closer relationship to Latin than French does.
> Btw, I still haven't understood the logic in english of using 'me' instead of 'I' when answering a question about the subject. Why is it fine in this context to use 'me' in the nominative case?
(1) I told you the logic above. You can only use "I" as the subject of a verb. Everywhere else, including in your example, you're required to use the default form of the pronoun, "me". Citation form? "Me". Used in isolation? "Me". Object of a conjunction? "Me".
(2) You can't use 'me' in the nominative case. That's impossible, because in the nominative case, it's 'I'. You seem to have confused noun case with some other kind of phenomenon.
As Scott suggests, probably all of these models have decent explanatory value.
I want to make a point in favor of the BDSM analogy. Consider any kind artistic medium which you personally have a strong interest in and have engaged with a lot, but which is not connected to your social status (a good example would be if you listen to niche music genres and rarely if ever talk with anyone about them). Now consider if your tastes have changed substantialy. If they have, this supports the BDSM analogy.
A weakness of the BDSM analogy is that a decent chunk of people*start off* with relatively unusual edgy tastes. Yoji Yamamoto (a famous avant garde fashion designer) recalls sitting in his Mum's sewing shop (or some business like that) as a young boy, and disliking the style of the women who would come into the shop. I'm pretty confident that a decent number of people are like this.
Most things that we think of in terms of taste have much more embedded detail/information than we can process efficiently. "Taste" is largely about the filter we apply to reduce the observational experience to manageable levels of information. Someone with minimal experience/expertise regarding a particular subject will filter out most of the information, leaving them with broad generalizations (symmetry, color palette, etc).
The process of gaining expertise in an area will tend to increase the information processed about a subject (that is, make the process of noticing more details more quickly), partially through shear practice, but also through other experienced people pointing out common things to look for, common trends by time period, etc. This essentially gives the expert more complex filters to pull out more information.
But the process of building those filters also inserts biases/weird focuses. If some group of experts became arbitrarily focused on a particular area of detail ("ornamentation is bad") then that will impact their filters and the filters of their intellectual successors. They're still perceiving more detail than the non-expert, but processing it in arbitrarily different ways.
Thus an expert in music understands much more about Bach than I ever will -- almost certainly knowing why I find it enjoyable better than I could express! But the same process that gave them that expertise might also give them perceptional biases arbitrarily different from mine which could, for example, mean they find Bach uninteresting.
Strong comment.
Taste is like physics, if the rules were practically impossible to figure out, and researchers would make attempt after futile attempt to extract signal from overwhelming noise and fail. The field goes down blind alleys in the wrong direction, builds theory upon more theory, and constructs an orthodoxy that will hold to those theories even when their implications become blatantly false in ways that even people outside the field can see.
A better analogy would be "taste is like social science", perhaps.
There is good art and bad art. In some areas and times, the most respected experts are just wrong. Sometimes painting or architecture or poetry can just mess up, with the whole field converging towards bad taste.
If taste X and Y are indistinguishable to most people, but experts say X is better, it is possible that they're right. If almost everyone says Y is better than X, but experts say X is better, then the experts are just bad at their job.
(Exceptions: If the product was produced for a particular audience with divergent tastes, or if the subject is being evaluated in a manner that includes non-aesthetic judgements (practical concerns).)
I have a lot of sympathy with this view, though I don’t know that I fully accept it.
There's an analogy to be made somewhere here between art and philosophy. The latter also involves experts insisting on distinctions that seem meaningless to laypeople, as well as a sharp divide between philosophical writers who have broad popular appeal but are viewed with contempt by the priesthood, and those who are admired by the priesthood but whose names have never penetrated into the broad popular consciousness.
Also science, politics, finance, everything complex.
No, I don't think so. In science and finance it's usually possible to agree on objective criteria for whether or not a distinction is useful. It's not a matter of taste whether one investing strategy makes more money than another, or whether a proposed new set of diagnostic guidelines results in better survival rates for cancer patients. It's not hard to find edge cases where some sort of "expert judgment" is involved, but such cases are not foundational to the entire cognitive practice, as they are for art and philosophy.
I think this is part of why it's rare to see outsiders dismissing the expertise of scientific insiders on the grounds that their supposed expertise is all status games and meaningless bullshit, the way Scott does here for architecture, Sam Harris does for metaethics, or Alan Sokal did for "postmodernism." You do get outsiders dismissing the authority of mainstream science (e.g. antivaxxers), but they tend to have different accounts of why the experts are wrong (e.g. they are lying because they want to make money for pharma companies). They don't say the scientists have talked themselves into believing that meaningless bullshit is meaningful.
Arguably taste *literally is* a sub-field of social science.
H. Taste is a mix of evo-psych and fashion, in various proportions. This seems pretty obvious to me, and I'm surprised that you didn't explicitly mention the former in any of the possibilities.
The unsophisticated naive level are people who like landscapes depicting wholesome nature, depictions of beautiful healthy people etc (clear evo-psych implications), and similarly colorful harmonious architecture and upbeat, simple but harmonious music. Then people who specialize in that stuff eventually get bored, and start increasingly adding complexity and subversion, partly arbitrary but still having evolutionary-approved facets. Those at some level become subtle enough that unsophisticated people don't notice them because the gestalt-effect is too alienating.
My personal example here is extreme metal music, some of which I unironically enjoy, but the vast majority of people would say that all of it is horrible noise (and I agreed with them in the beginning, "getting into it" was gradual). The "level above mine" is enjoying harsh noise, which apparently some people genuinely do, and this doesn't seem to provide much status, unlike say the very similar stuff with academic cred, so I'm forced to admit that nature seems to be generous and malleable enough to allow even that in some cases.
This doesn't explain how even lowest common denominator popular taste has fashions that change over time (years, decades).
Well, you can't really escape being influenced by some sort of fashion to a degree, nobody retains primal innocence past very early childhood. But, it seems clear to me that preferring "natural" and "healthy" stuff by default is as close to human universal as it gets. I wonder, did anybody bother to ask those feral children...
I mean that what I would have sworn 20 years ago that it was preferred because it was "natural" and "healthy" is now out of fashion, and what I thought was the opposite is now beloved by the masses.
In particular I'm thinking about music. Not a particular genre of music. But I've noticed that across the board, in almost every genre of music for the masses I've been exposed to, back in the 80s and 90s, even early 00s to some degree, there was a sense of cheerfulness, hope, optimism, energy, positivity, I don't know how to put it.
I thought that was natural. People like positive energy!
But in hindsight, it was the 80s and its lingering fallout.
Then, very gradually, that sense of cheerfulness that was everywhere faded, and now the opposite reigns. Most contemporary popular music I hear strikes me as subtly gloomy, even in genres that I thought were supposed to be cheerful.
How come happiness and positivity is out of fashion? I thought it was a human universal.
Hmm, I'm generally trying to avoid contemporary popular music like the plague, but still, my impression is different, for what it's worth.
So, the main commercial forces these days appear to be traditional pop, R&B and rap, and the biggest hits in each of those still tend to be simplistic and energetic, if not entirely optimistic. I agree that straightforward optimism is out of fashion, but still, the attitude is much more "fight the power" than doom and gloom.
In particular, rap is the ascendant force, and I think it's telling that the "black culture", that it's the expression of, is the only context in which the establishment tolerates straightforward expression of healthy assertive masculinity, which in all other instances is branded "toxic" and shunned.
There's the problem here that being Italian I have more examples in mind from Italian popular music than Anglo-American, but I've noticed the same trends in Anglo-American music. I think they're global trends.
Nobody today would make a pop song like "Heaven is a Place on Earth", for example.
My impression is that rap evolved in a similar direction, and EDM too, compared to what those genres used to be.
Keep in mind that by "gloomy" I don't mean funeral doom metal. I mean a subtle lack of something, which used to be there.
I would have to spend too much time gathering examples to make a detailed argument, so I apologize for not trying.
I'm not sure that we actually disagree. I didn't mean to imply that "natural" and "healthy" always mean happiness and positivity. Our ancestors were also angry and sad often enough, and gloom(ier) art never was entirely unpopular. Popular attitudes reflect the world we live in, and the zeitgeist is generally gloomier than in the eighties, whether it is reasonable or not.
> Nobody today would make a pop song like "Heaven is a Place on Earth", for example
"Happy" by Pharrell Williams was a big hit just... well okay, it was 2013 but I think it still counts as the present for the purposes of this conversation. No cynicism or irony, just a happy song about being happy.
Popular music is designed by committees of marketing people at record companies, it doesn't emerge bottom-up from what people actually enjoy.
> Finally you’re living in buildings made of jarringly-colored metallic blobs that look like Cthulhu might emerge from them at any moment.
Are **you** living in buildings made of jarringly-colored metallic blobs that look like Cthulhu might emerge from them at any moment?
I don't know any famous architects so I don't even have anecdotes about this.
Recent book review made it sound like architects actually wanted to live in a pretty nice places, then other architects came and made devastating arguments that this is bourgeois so they stopped. But then they switched to designing buildings where *other* people have to "take it like a man".
Does anyone here know about it?
Mies van der Roeh built a couple of famous Modernist apartment high-rises on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, which an underling of mine lived in, but then he decided he preferred to look at them than live in them, so he moved across the street.
Of the modernists, at least Goldfinger, Neutra, Wright, and Le Corbusier lived in buildings of their own design. It's not clear whether van der Rohe would have liked to live in the Farnsworth House if that had been an option, but it seems possible.
I’ve done some tours of Neutra homes in the east side of Los Angeles, and if my budget ever allowed me to live in one, I absolutely would.
I have a theory that modernism just doesn't scale well.
These all look like nice houses that I'd be happy to live in https://modernlivingla.com/architect/richard-neutra/... and why not? They're just a bunch of glass boxes sitting in a beautiful verdant environment. The house doesn't attract too much attention to itself, it just sits there neutrally in the pretty garden.
But when you get beyond suburban houses with gardens and into large buildings in city centres, the buildings are no longer in the environment, the buildings *are* the environment. There is nothing around except the building.
Importantly, I think that with the influence of projects like the Case Study Houses (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_Study_Houses) modernism really did influence mass suburban homebuilding techniques, in ways that people have fully internalized.
When it comes to the larger scale structures, I don’t know of other styles than modernism that have had more success!
Unless there's trees around. Which is why the "Just Plant Trees™" strategy actually works.
Good point.
Similarly, I've always disliked Richard Serra's sculptures that are rusted metal walls when they put them in downtown spaces so that office workers have to walk 5 minutes out of their way to get around them. But I finally saw a Serra in the Hamptons on some zillionaire's three acre front lawn ... and it looked fine!
Lots of stuff looks good on estates in the Hamptons.
I have a different model for art/taste that feels helpful here. One (very vague but sometimes useful) definition of art is that art is a work that "says something" about something outside itself in a considered fashion.
Often the "says something" takes the form of representation or evocation. So an artistic photograph may "speak" about a scene in a way that gives consideration to how human attention tends to flow, mixtures of colors, surprising juxtaposition, metaphor, etc. Meanwhile an impressionist painting may do those things but also "speak" about our perceptions of light and color over and against fine detail. I've attended lectures by a very Catholic architecture scholar who claimed that great architecture will often represent or evoke the human body or face in it's structure (this need not be true, it's just an example of a "considered" approach one could take).
This definition is imperfect and can have plenty of holes poked in it, however I think it's particularly useful in the following way: We can appreciate art when we recognize at some level (conscious or unconscious) what it is "saying". But this is contingent on being familiar with the reference, so the more esoteric the reference the fewer people can appreciate the art. Increasingly over the last century or two, many schools of art (especially "elite" or academic art) have been predominantly "speaking" about art that came before, rather than about natural or non-artistic referents. I think this is true in visual art, architecture, music, and perhaps most explicitly in high fashion.
This artistically-referential art is entirely valid as art, but the esoteric nature of the referent means that one needs a deep grounding in the relevant artistic traditions to recognize and appreciate what is being "said". Since this is a cultivated attribute it becomes an obvious way to make claims of status. "Anyone can appreciate a painting of a sunset. It takes a trained eye to see what this painting is saying about the nature of art vis a vis the use of figure in late 20th century photography". However such esoteric appreciation need not be pure snobbery. It also is a form of reward/satisfaction of an area of our lives in which we have invested deeply. (Similar to how we might especially appreciate a very niche joke that would really only make sense to someone in e.g. our academic discipline)
I think this model can explain the way that particular esoteric art can have a legitimate appeal to it's initiates that isn't purely arbitrary or subjective (though it is deeply path dependent), nor need it be purely about asserting status (though it can certainly degenerate into raw snobbery). Thus I think it overlaps with the justified priestly and fashion models above, while perhaps illuminating a bit more of the internal structure of the values
Aside: Is esoteric art a particularly modern (last 100-200 years) phenomenon? I tend to think so. Previously much art tended to produced for mass audiences and wealthy patrons who were in turn asserting status in view of larger audiences. This limited how esoteric art could productively be (though see e.g. Catholic lore or heraldic symbols for contents that are very esoteric and inaccessible to moderns). As academic and cultural institutions developed it became more possible for communities of artists to produce art primarily for the approval of other artists/connoisseurs, enabling ever more esoteric reference structures.
Yes, this all seems right.
But I do think that “saying something” is only one way that great art can be great - a particularly intellectual one. Some art is good in other ways. I don’t think Rothko “says” much about anything (or if it does, any one of the paintings says much the same thing as the others). But the paintings are still aesthetically effective, particularly when assembled together, as in the Rothko Chapel in houston. This probably corresponds to formal or sensory properties as opposed to intellectual ones, and those exist for other art as well. (Some of those are themselves subject to the kind of esoteric development you mention.)
I agree. I'm not particularly happy with the phrase "saying something"; I just can't come up a better word. But for my purposes "saying something" need not be intellectual commentary. For instance a landscape painting may simply be saying something about how a particularly place looks.
I suspect the 20th century is not the first time art forms underwent this kind of esoteric development. I would guess that within esoteric mystery cults and the like, things like this happened before. But the 20th century might be the first time that there was wide enough opportunity to study and learn about many kinds of art, such that all art forms underwent the transformation, and also managed to have large and influential followings.
That's a lot of words murdered when the ancient Romans already figured: *de gustibus non est disputandum*.
I tend to buy E the most for many topics. I think if you've looked at a million paintings, you tend to know more about when a painting is exceptional than someone who's looked at a few, and same thing for e.g., wine. I have more experience with wine than paintings, and the main thing is that exceptional isn't the same thing as good (the taste part). But if something is exceptional and good (to me), then it is quite a bit more pleasant than if something is ordinary and good (to me), and things that are ordinary and good are typically relatively good to pretty much everyone.
In that sense, I don't think it's a priesthood so much as well, a club of people who like similar exceptional things enough to seek them out. That's why there's multiple taste centroids!
It's crazy how you can miss the only applicable analogy, which is maybe too obvious to be stated, but taste is of course like taste in the food sense! Some people like some foods better than others, which is cultural and trend dependent, but in the end we can agree that a cook who has dedicated his life to cooking probably has 'better' taste than some strawman who only eats Mcdonalds and drinks Pepsi. This better taste consists not only of being able to enjoy stranger and more complex tastes, but also of being better able to differentiate between different styles of cooking, and being able to hierarchically rank the quality of the same dish in different restaurants etc. Let's say you never ate indian food, and the first time you eat it you think it tastes horrid because you're only used to bland McD burgers, but after some more attempts you educate your tastebuds to appreciate something like butter chicken from the local deli. Still you're not able to appreciate the spicier or more subtle varieties, or indian food with weirder/more exotic ingredients etc, or you're not yet able to tell the difference between a well made butter chicken and one from the supermarket etc. Of course there's differences between these, and the wine tasting meme is always a response to this to some extent, but it's a reach to say that at least in food it's not possible to develop taste and have some objective/intersubjective measure of better quality food and better taste, while still respecting the fact that people's tastes can clash based on personal biology, culture or trends, where the same can apply for art. If you're seriously interested in getting something like an answer I recommend reading Kant's Critique of Judgement.
Taste can be trained. I don't think Scott is denying this. What is in question is whether a highly trained taste is somehow better. Would a porn connoisseur say that their highly developed sense of subtle details in their taboo BDSM porn is somehow superior to another person getting excited by stumbling across some partial nudity on Tumblr for the first time? Does a sommelier have a better, more rewarding life when they are aware of the winemaking shortcuts used to make crowd-pleasing cheap wine, so they only feel satisfied when drinking artisanal wines costing hundreds of dollars a bottle? Does an aficionado of new brutalism feel constant pain that they can't afford to live in a concrete edifice?
That's a different question than Scott was stating, because then there is a somewhat objective difference in quality between mcdonalds and prime texas roast or hallmark cards and Rembrandt (which Scott seems sceptical on), but it's just the question if it's ultimately worth it to be able to tell the difference. The answer to this question is also a lot simpler than you think, as you could just ask people if the things they developed a taste for enrich their lives, and it pretty much always does, as that's the reason they cultivate that taste! Or maybe consult you own taste and see if you would rather live without your favourite music and just listen to elevator music your whole life! Maybe in a counterfactual bizarro world we could conceive of grey humans who could be perfectly happy eating astronaut sludge and looking at a white plane all day, but in reality man is meant to grow, explore and flourish!
> Would a porn connoisseur say that their highly developed sense of subtle details in their taboo BDSM porn is somehow superior to another person getting excited by stumbling across some partial nudity on Tumblr for the first time?
Of course they would! Those god damn philistines jacking off to the front page of Pornhub... Soulless, passionless bullshit. Real porn tells a story, it speaks to the human condition. It reaches into the deepest recesses of passion and pain, the darkest and most primal desires that lie at the depths of the soul.
I think storylines were more popular when it aired in theaters, now with the internet the trend has been away from that and more short clips, perhaps analogous to TikTok reducing attention spans to the point that young people are less interested in long feature films.
good porn is porn i can fap to.
Yeah, and that's the problem! There's just an endless amount of garbage, and it takes so much effort to actually find stuff that actually works for me. Thankfully, I am able to make that effort because sexual gratification is the one thing that's able to consistently motivate me, but it's still such a pain. And I get bored of things so easily too, so the work never ends...
Good news! "Soulless AI slop" is coming to pornography! Sexual stimulation too cheap to meter! Infinite (or close enough) variety!
<mildSnark>
Does "soulless" need an official definition, like "pesticide-free"? :-)
</mildSnark>
I second the Critique of Judgement, very relevant.
How about a positive version of the BDSM porn thing?
One data point: My taste in classical music.
I started out listening to Schubert and loved it, but found Berg or even Wolf weird; and even Schumann a bit suspicious.
Once I "understood" (not intellectually, but on an emotional and aesthetic level) Schubert much better, I started to love Schumann, then Brahms etc etc
(Older Music still doesn't do much for me.)
Schubert is still my favourite composer, but I love the others as well.
I do not think that there is a universal objective taste in music (or even if there is I don't care; I find Haendel or Hayden terribly boring, and I assume they are objectively good if there is such a thing).
I do not claim that the same is true for everybody who likes (or claim to like) modern architecture; but I am sure that there are people who like gothic and then, when they spent time looking at architecture, came to appreciate brutalism or whatever, and still like gothic.
beauty is objective, taste is not. there, i solved it!
A big part of taste working as it does is that it is not only a shibboleth for subcultures at various hiérarchies (élites all agree that they have better taste than peons, but elite artists have better taste than simple opera goers, an critics, etc); but it is also a potential action vector for schismogenesis: identification of a strong incompatibility between groups will lead to a desire for differentiation - this the communist/bourgeois, the royalists/napoleonics, roman integrated/native résistance différences, exaggerated instinctively across all common experiences.
Note: your AI at test only supports the unreality of taste if you buy that AI has bad taste. It's possible that AI captures the shared component of good taste and the people who say otherwise are simply wrong, but that doesn't mean taste quality isn't real.
Obligatory xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/915/
Or perhaps https://xkcd.com/1015/ instead.
Posted that in another subthread already. :-)
Yes, but, seen one proton, seen them all... :-)
[ 𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑖𝑠 𝑎 𝑑𝑖𝑣𝑖𝑛𝑒... 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑠𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑜𝑑 ℎ𝑎𝑠 𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡 𝑎𝑠 𝑚𝑢𝑐ℎ 𝑡𝑟𝑜𝑢𝑏𝑙𝑒 𝑠𝑒𝑒𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑖𝑡 𝑎𝑠 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝐼 𝑑𝑜, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑖𝑠 𝑚𝑜𝑠𝑡𝑙𝑦 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑖𝑡𝑠𝑒𝑙𝑓 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑤𝑟𝑜𝑛𝑔 𝑑𝑖𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛...]
My theory:
(....caveat emptor: probably best not to browse the internet reading comments by people who begin with "my-theory-colon"...)
I think there may well be some way in which aesthetics, elegance, etc. might actually be universal; perhaps literally universal, such that a space alien might find eg. Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism elegant and pre-Copernician epicyclic orbital mechanics inelegant, or perhaps merely a universal part of the human condition.
BUT - this isn't what the taste priesthood (not just the critics and journalists and millionaire art-buyers, but also most of the greatest artists, architects, creatives, etc.) are searching for: rather than seeking fundamental insights into universal aesthetic beauty, they're mostly inventing arbitrary signalling/social/political games, buoyed onwards by occasional glimpses of the divine which they hit upon entirely by accident.
Similarly, when people dismiss taste as wholly mundane/arbitrary/subjective and claim that polyester tracksuits and grocer's apostrophes, and (lest you think I'm being classist here..) plate-glass oblong skyscrapers are just as aesthetically valid as effortful clothing choices, careful prose, and the Taj Mahal, they're ignoring and dismissing an internal sense/feeling that - I believe - *even they themselves* possess. (Evidence: people who claim this still nevertheless show up to weddings etc. wearing effortful formalwear rather than polyester tracksuits, still take care over their own apostrophe placement when writing things they really care about, and -I would be willing to bet- would still prefer to live in Grosvenor Gardens House - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grosvenor_Gardens_House - rather than in the Nova Building - https://nova-london.uk - that's just next door..)
Scott's description of the "Don't wear white after Labour Day" rule stuck me as a useful example of this: Sure, "Don't wear white after Labour Day" is a nonsensical priesthood sorta rule - but there definitely does seem to be another level above that, something like "Don't wear ostentatious brash clothing in a deliberate, crude effort to signal that you're more rich than other people", which is slightly closer to the divine and which the "no-white" rule - perhaps accidentally - touches-upon an aspect of.
Of course, it's probably turtles all the way up: perhaps one level still further above (viz. one more step closer to the divine Platonic Taste...) the rule might look more like "Visually express to others that you are their fellow travellers through life, and you think and feel and love and fear the way they do - whilst *simultaneously* expressing that you are unique and interesting and stimulating and independent-of-thought"
I'm not a particularly fashion-conscious, cool, trendy, aesthetically-minded, or even (frankly) aesthetically-pleasing-to-look-upon sort of person, and I am sufficiently tasteless that I happen to find AI art just as pleasing as human art - but even *I* get the sense that there's some sort of higher-dimension "good" which our merely human art and aesthetics occasionally touches-upon. Could just be an illusion, perhaps similar to the sense everybody gets during a psychedelic trip, of course - but I think recognising this sense is there, illusion or not, does explain an awful lot about how aesthetics works and how people feel about it.
I think at a wedding you're more subject to the observation of other people and their norms regarding formal occasions.
Very true - but I'm not sure where you're going with the observation? "Internally the anti-aestheticist thinks wearing a fabulous gown at a wedding is unnecessary, being aesthetically-identical to a tracksuit, but goes along with the norm nevertheless and resignedly, eye-rollingly dons a fabulous gown so as to avoid ostracism"?
"Somebody who is an anti-aestheticist in ordinary daily life nevertheless has, under the infrequent, peculiar circumstances of a wedding, internalised the same norms as everybody else and thus unconsciously suspends their usual views on aesthetics and doesn't register anything dissonant about donning their fabulous gown on that occasion"?
I find that this explanation resonates with me. However, I find it plausible that logical depth (the measure of complexity in terms of running time of an algorithm) matters: some application of universal(*) aesthetic principles might require certain amount of processing powers to appreciate, such that some individual humans don't have that processing power, at least until they develop heuristics to simplify the calculation (perhaps through conscious effort of learning to pay attention to correct things, perhaps unconsciously, like how the visual cortex of expert Chess players adapts to detecting good or bad Chess positions, or perhaps they are like NP-problems that are easy to check once someone tells you the answer that you should be looking for).
Consider music by Bach for instance, noted in other discussions as an exemplar of staying power regardless of contemporary trends. I hypothesize that some aspects of his music are universally aesthetic: the harmonious sounds, clever melodies, etc. The appreciation of these elements has low logical depth and everyone can enjoy them. However, you can go deeper into the structure of the fugue, or deeper still into patterns within patterns within patterns, and the problem of detecting/appreciating these features has a greater logical depth and does not necessarily come to all people naturally. However, they nevertheless are "real patterns" (as Daniel Dennett would put it) that are objectively there.
How this might relate to styles of contemporary art would be that certain styles deliberately flaunt aesthetics at level of gestalt impressions, or low logical depth (and why they do this can be explained through means of status games or other explanations offered), but might posses real patterns of aesthetic beauty at greater logical depth. That can explain why enthusiasts of certain allegedly fine things can be consistent in their preferences, and why individuals can through exposure "get" that thing (as they develop more tractable mental algorithms for detecting the aesthetic patterns), like appreciating subtle tastes of dark chocolate rather than simply overloading their senses with raw sweetness. That, of course, doesn't necessarily indicate that ALL contemporary (or historical) art has anything but status games going for them, and not all aesthetic qualities are in this way universal: I reckon human mind has enough degrees of freedom to be able to start appreciating e.g. absence-of-bourgeoisieness (just like it can learn to like spicy food or snuff pornography), but as originally postulated, some aesthetic qualities (like certain type of elegance, symmetry, etc) are there by default, and I believe that e.g. music by Bach, or neoclassical architecture, posses them.
(*) Which doesn't mean all possible agents appreciate it so. Paperclip maximizer would assign infinite disutility to nearly all works of art because they aren't paperclips. If you really think about it, it's not "absolutely and forever unconditionally universal for all conceivable agents" kind of universal. But regardless of existence of any observers, 1+1=2 is true in specific axiomatic systems or pattern of a "chair" is real (because the pattern of molecules that make up the chair, unlike an equivalent number of randomly picked molecules in the universe, can do some heavy lifting, like modeling the movement of all of the molecules when you simplify them to their center of mass), and these are the sort things that you would expect to be universal to all naturally evolved beings, say, and I agree with the commenter that there probably are aesthetic universals/truths at this level.
I had to read this (slowly..) about six times; now that finally I [think I] fully understand it - I find I agree wholeheartedly with every single word you say!
Grosvenor Gardens House is a nice looking building. I don't dislike the style.
Of the two though and judging strictly off the exteriors, which I think is the question being asked, I'd prefer to live in Nova. Any rich eccentrics reading are welcome to purchase me a unit to test my resolve.
Haha, okay fine, I'm submitting an ACX grant application to buy you a Belgravia mansion-flat.......
I don't see why we can't start with something that most of us definitely have enough experience in, by virtue of being literate (after all, we read book reviews and can type) - namely, literature, and perhaps the prose of the last 200 or 250 years more particularly.
Then we can probably agree that:
a) there's schlock and there's better stuff,
b) we don't need to all like all of the better stuff,
c) genuinely top-of-the-shelf stuff had at least some cross-cultural appeal, whether immediate or after you get enough into it,
d) better stuff can be better in different ways, and there's such a thing as flawed but genuinely interesting,
e) snobbishness plays a role, both in enshrining some things that turn out to be Emperor-is-naked and in pooh-poohing some good stuff with mass appeal, but the role of that is actually much smaller than a non-reader or someone habituated to schlock would be likely to guess;
f) when it comes to the good stuff, some of the judgement on what is 'better' is not just arbitrary or a product of in-fighting, but you can just decide that you like what you like. (Example: Flaubert is a finer stylist than Balzac, who is a finer stylist than Zola, but you can decide you'd rather read lots of Zola (even if it sometimes makes you roll your eyes), some Balzac and no more Flaubert, or else some complicated mixture that makes a lot of sense such as "some Zola, lots of Balzac except for the times when he's more like Zola (I'm staying away from "The Thirty-Year-Old Woman", I read the summary), and you'll get to read most Flaubert at some point, but not now". Funnily enough these preferences should still make sense if you read them in good translations.)
The same goes for other things that are relatively accessible (film) or even for things that most people aren't into and for which a truly deep and thorough appreciation would involve years of education that most sincere appreciators don't actually have (Western classical music, and indeed any other sort of music that gets called 'classical').
So, the real question is: say you are a person (such as me or Scott) who has been passably exposed to a field (visual arts, architecture). How do you determine whether it is more like fashion (which most of us agree is a silly, nasty game where people get played for snobbery and profit) or more like literature?
My two cents:
a) maybe act with some caution,
b) ask yourself whether there are genuine, practical justifications that are not obvious but that make sense on reflection, and listen to the people who make sense, even or perhaps especially when they are not being simply normie (though there's a lot to be said in favor of being normie and right).
b) would not make much sense for painting, but it makes sense for architecture.
Also, not to repeat what several others have said, but what about "taste is like taste"? Or, in the when (b) applies, "taste is like taste plus nutrition"? Perhaps this makes most sense for architecture:
- grandma could prepare a mean tamal/polenta/kigel/cassoulet, which, in terms of nutrition, actually made perfect sense in the time of *her* grandma, given what folks needed and what she had to work with; (vernacular architecture)
- there is such a thing as things that are bad for you and taste nasty, but people get because they are easily accessible and they have actually been hooked by corporations wanting to make money;
- some of the pretentious stuff is insufferable or indigestible, but some actually tastes really nice and interesting, at least once you get past the initial shock;
- the high priesthood has lost status; in fact, the entire field has sometimes been given an unhealthy amount of prestige, and it made sense to take it down a notch;
- there's obvious cultural dependence and also the thrill of the exotic, but there's also such a thing as genuinely liking food from a different culture at first, start by making trivial mistakes in appreciation, and then learning more and liking it even better.
Perhaps this is a bit too optimistic or kind, but it seems to make some sort of basic sense.
For about 275 years, since Goethe, Germans have found Shakespeare to be _really_ good.
The analogy with grammar is interesting because it seems to capture both the possibility that taste could be something that's somehow "in us", and the obvious fact that we can chose how to "behave" within (or beyond, if there is a beyond) its constraints.
However, grammar itself is not something made up by grammarians, no adult native speaker of their language needs to "develop a 'sense' for what 'sounds wrong'" - whatever is being used in a speech community is grammatical - and whatever is not being used, nor understood, is ungrammatical. Normally what self-proclaimed grammarians mean, when they say something is "wrong" is "You don't behave according to the standards of the speech community I place you in!" This seems to come from a rarely acknowledged prescriptive position which often forgets that grammar in itself first has to be captured in descriptive terms.
This prescriptive position of course has its place in teaching people to comply to the standards of a certain speech community, or a register of language that is, for whatever reason desirable to them (or their parents.) As in: When children learn to compose a formal text in school etc.
Still, what that standard is would be F again. Language change (i.e. grammatical change) itself seems to work more like E and a bit F, on the other hand....
“Tasteful” may be hard to define, but “Kitsch” is really really obvious and solves most of the riddle. “Kitsch” things are intentionally directly imitating other things.
For example, people 100 years ago built Beaux-Arts buildings because they were trying to build good-looking buildings and that’s how it came out. People doing it now would just be trying to make their building look Beaux-Arts-y. Similarly, men in the 18th century wore wigs and stockings because they thought it looked good, if you wore them now you’d just be cosplaying as Robespierre.
Tied on to the above, the Kitsch buildings tend to be really bad imitations (columns the wrong size, random mix of window styles etc). The result is this weird Disneyland feel that if you lean against the wall you’ll fall through it there’ll be a cheap conventional building underneath.
Modern buildings, although ugly, at least look like what they are. Its the difference between being kidnapped and forced to live with someone who acknowledges they’ve kidnapped you, and being kidnapped and forced to live with someone who keeps unconvincingly pretending to be all your relatives at the same time.
Pugin invented Neo-Gothic a couple of hundred years ago. Pugin was really good.
The Neo-Gothic Duke University chapel was designed 100 years ago by Julian Abele, an African-American architect. Abele was really good.
Are the best architects going into Gothic styles today? Beats me.
Pugin also originally made a name for himself with a very specific brief though, namely to build the Catholics a bunch of churches that can compete with the now-Anglican medieval ones on "churchiness," and was still sufficiently constrained materials-wise that what he was doing wasn't that different.
The Palace of Westminster is still a little bit naff when you know the date of it, but done well enough that you keep forgetting that it's not actually an old building when you're inside it.
> “Kitsch” things are intentionally directly imitating other things.
That's not enough. Imitations can be good. Things go bad when the imitiations imitate only the style, completely ignoring the actual substance that makes the thing they are imitating fit for purpose.
Kitsch is cargo cult.
>That's not enough. Imitations can be good.
Agreed.
What do you think of Thomas Kinkade? I've read denunciations of his work as kitsch (e.g. https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/thomas-kinkade-a-case-study-in-kitsch-2955480.php ), but, as far as I can tell, his paintings succeed at being pleasant depictions of partially imaginary landscapes. As far as I can tell, they are indeed fir for purpose, comforting decoration, not an earthshaking purpose, but a perfectly decent one.
I think that the "taste is like BDSM" explanation is the closest, but that's not quite it, either. The analogy I'd use is that "taste is like developing a skill".
Suppose that you've never read a murder mystery in your life. Then you read your first one, and at the end it's revealed that the butler did it. Oh wow! Amazing! Brilliant! You never expected that! You think the story is the greatest ever.
Then you read ten more murder mysteries where the butler did it, and you start thinking that this is a boring cliché and you never want to read another story like that in your life. What's more, you learn to notice the kinds of clues that suggest it's the butler pretty early on, so you don't need to wait all the way to the end to figure it out.
Until maybe one day you read a story that seems to very obviously hint that it was the butler, but then it's revealed that this was intentional subterfuge by the author, and the real culprit is someone else. Now you're amazed again! Oh wow! Brilliant!
But if someone _hadn't_ already read countless of stories where the butler did it before, they wouldn't find this particularly interesting. They wouldn't have known to expect that it was the butler, so they also wouldn't be impressed by the reveal that it _wasn't_ the butler. Now if this person said that "I don't see what fuss was about, this wasn't so good", then you might very reasonably say "actually it _was_ good but you don't have enough taste to appreciate it".
The "developing a skill" analogy is because in this case, the more read person has developed the skill of being able to predict where a story is going and of understanding what an author is doing. The development of any skills means that you become able to make subtler discriminations in the domain of that skill than someone less trained. So whereas someone who wasn't so read would have no idea of what's happening until the very end, someone with more "mystery-reading skill" could already pick up on the hints of who did it much earlier. And then because they were so practiced in it, the author could make use of their skill to build on elements that subverted the expectations or played on them.
Or let's take drawing. Suppose that you're just learning draw, and then when you try to draw humans, the proportions are all wrong and they don't look at all like people. So you study anatomy and get a better sense of what exactly makes a human look good or bad when you're drawing them. But now that you're getting better at noticing subtle problems in the anatomy of your characters - that you can then correct to make them look better - you are also getting better at noticing subtle problems in the anatomy of _other people's_ drawings. If you had never tried to learn to draw yourself, you wouldn't notice any of those problems, since you wouldn't have needed to pay extra attention to what's good anatomy.
Here's a third example, about piano tuning: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PJu2HhKsyTEJMxS9a/you-don-t-know-how-bad-most-things-are-nor-precisely-how . It's a long post so I won't quote it in full, but it goes into detail about how trained musicians are able to hear how a piano is out of tune when other people don't notice that anything is wrong. Again, because in the process of learning to play better and better music, they have also learned to make finer and finer discriminations about piano sounds.
I think the BDSM analogy is the opposite of what it should be. People look at things and become more sensitive to how they look, not less. They look at buildings and notice the shutters are fake for instance. Or they don’t need so much action or romance in the books they read, they notice the style or dialogue.
Hmm possibly. My thinking was that it's similar in the sense that old tropes and patterns in the porn become familiar and uninteresting as they become too predictable. Similar to how "the butler did it" might be amazing and surprising on the first time that you see it, but boring and uninteresting on the hundredth time.
That’s a good point! I’d add that sometimes the skill simply doesn’t develop for whatever reason.
For instance, I’ve read quite a few murder novels and, sadly, I’m still as incapable of guessing who did it as for the first one I read. It’s so bad that I think I couldn’t even figure out who the villain of a Scooby-Doo episode is.
But there’s nothing wrong with appreciating all the clues leading to the reveal by re-reading the novel.
> For instance, I’ve read quite a few murder novels and, sadly, I’m still as incapable of guessing who did it as for the first one I read. It’s so bad that I think I couldn’t even figure out who the villain of a Scooby-Doo episode is.
Far be it for me to ruin it for you, or for anyone else out there, but it's generally a pretty limited repertoire of characters, right?
Take Scooby-Doo as the limiting case - they introduce between 1 and 3 adult, non-Scooby-team, characters. The villian is going to be one of those 1-3 people. Even by sheer random chance, you've got 33% odds.
Then in SD in particular, the motivations are always childishly predictable (given they're children's programs). Somebody with some obvious financial or status motive for pretending a place is haunted, whether it's a house, theme park, business, whatever.
That allows you go take your 1/3 characters and generally completely eliminate some of them, leaving you with a clear top-runner or at the least a 50/50 choice. Basically, you're using the clues you get from watching the story unfold to try to determine who really dunnit out of the very limited subset of possibilities.
Mystery novels are a simple extension of this reasoning. Then it gets one or two epicycles more complicated because now as Kaj is talking about, they're trying to subvert expectations or play orthogonally on tropes, but non-advanced mystery novels are basically the same thing as the Scooby reasoning.
I don't mean to belabor the obvious here, this just sounded to me like somebody saying "you know, I've watched Monty Hall a hundred times, and the prize has NEVER been behind the first door he picked..."
It's missing a level of thought about the program or story framing itself that points at the truth.
I wanted to say that taste is like science, but skill makes sense, too. It is a collective exploration of the space of possible positive human sensory experience (or something like that).
It changes in time, because some regions have already been explored. You won't get a prize for exploring something that someone else has explored before you (and got a prize for doing that). And maybe you don't know that the particular region has already been explored, which is what makes the difference between you and the art expert.
People who train to obtain a skill, naturally have a different perspective from mere observers. For example, if you watch someone pick up a 100 kg weight, you just go "hmmm, 100 kg, that's quite a lot", because that's all you understand and all you care about. But another weightlifter would notice the posture, the exact movements, the balance, etc. Because he cares about *how* this was achieved, not just the fact *that* it was achieved. A weightlifting coach, even if he cannot lift that much himself, would also have a perspective similar to the weightlifter.
But art is more like science than weightlifting. Repeating the achievements of yesterday means nothing; the person who invented something is respected, and also the person who perfected it. But the person who repeats what others did is merely a student.
At some moment deep in history, most of human attempts at art were shit. Making something nice was impressive. Also, making something realistic was impressive.
But at some later time, we mostly figured out how to make nice and/or realistic things. We even figured out how to make a few superstimuli. Now the artists are no longer impressed by making nice things according to a well-known (among them) recipe. They are looking for new ways to make things... even if the tradeoff is that it makes them somewhat less nice. Sometimes much less nice, because the region of nice things is already mostly explored.
These days you get a prize for finding a new recipe that works... maybe not perfectly, sometimes not even very well, but better than anyone's priors would be. For example, you paint a set of seemingly random dots that for some difficult-to-explain reason just *looks better* than a set of *actually* random dots. If that is a new thing you have invented, you get the applause. Then people kinda figure it out... maybe, if you put darker dots closer to the bottom and the lighter dots closer to the top, that makes it better than random placement? Also, some combinations of colors of dots are nice against the color of background? Afterwards, no one gets a prize for painting seemingly random dots. Unless someone finds a way to paint the dots in a way that contradicts the established theory and still looks better than random. Maybe you can make the dots really random, and give the *background* a gradient with darker color at bottom and a lighter shade at top? Or maybe, if the gradient is darker at bottom and lighter at top, it will actually make it better to put lighter dots close to the bottom, and the darker dots closer to the top?
And the random visitor is like: "okay, random dots on the paper... is *this* what counts for art these days? I could have done the same." (No, you couldn't.)
Now I am not saying that some artist and art critics couldn't be just faking it. You get charlatans in science, too; why wouldn't there be many at art? Also, I suspect that the most expensive art is often used for money laundering -- if you give someone ten million dollars, the tax office will get suspicious; but if the person buys a modern artist's painting for one million dollars, and later sells it to you for eleven millions, that's just rich people enjoying their hobby as usual.
In one of the comments from the Wolfe review discussion, Scott says something like "it just looks fine" in reference to some McMansion details. I would say that "taste" is the opposite of that sentiment. It's a combination of care, intention, education, context, knowledge, and skill that is analogous to expertise in other disciplines. When someone lacks artistic or design taste, it's likely that they lack some of the above as pertains to art and design.
Let's say that you are an avid skydiver. You really enjoy skydiving, and you really enjoy skydiving with friends in particular. However, you make a new friend who happens to be confined to a wheelchair. You don't ever skydive with them, and this fact also isn't very difficult to emotionally come to terms with. The fact that your friend could not skydive with you was immediately obvious the moment you met them and was consequently easy to 'emotionally understand'.
Now let's say that instead of an avid skydiver, you are an avid venter. You are constantly stressed out, and you cope with this by venting to friends. However, one day one of your newer friends gives you a rule: no venting. At first, while you may comply, you may also feel emotionally disappointed, and compelled to vent to them in a way you may consciously subdue. However, once you spend enough time with them, you realize that they chronically have severe and exhausting anxiety issues. Enough exposure to this, and your desire to vent to them disappears. You 'emotionally understand' that you ought to not vent to them, in addition to intellectually understanding this.
Baruch Spinoza was a Jewish philosopher who was alive in the 1600s. His theory of emotions, which I share, is that emotions are beliefs that are held with a high enough of a confidence interval. Everyone starts with a basic survival drive, and when someone believes with a high enough of a confidence interval that their predictive baseline for their short/medium/long-term survival was too low, they feel 'pleasure', and when the opposite happens, they feel 'pain'. Spinoza spends a good amount of time in his Ethics developing a complicated taxonomy of emotions from this basic framework.
It is hard to emotionally learn something from just reading it or conceptually grasping it. Our brains have evolved to believe the most things that we (a) witness experientially and (b) witness in the context of established and familiar social narratives. In this sense, the way I view art is as a pedagogical tool. The downside to it is that it is a very conceptually imprecise and sloppy way to educate yourself content wise. The upside is that the pedagogical upside to it is much higher than traditional forms of learning because of how art hijacks the way human brains form beliefs.
For example, imagine that you are coming out of a breakup. You can read books about how most people recover from breakups, and this will likely have little positive effect on your emotional state. However, an incredibly well-made, empowering song, made by someone you view as relatable, about that person lifting themselves through a tough breakup and recovering, comparatively will likely have a much larger positive effect on your emotional state. In the first case, you get exposed to a pedagogical tool that intellectually teaches you that you will recover from your breakup, and in the latter case you get exposed to a pedagogical tool that emotionally teaches you that idea.
In theory, 'art is a pedagogical tool' should in theory mean that everyone's artistic taste ought to be the same past a point of certain sophistication. In practice, this idea is naive. For one, most people's identities are tradeoff bundles between true beliefs and useful beliefs. If you are too untethered to reality, it is hard to succeed at life. At the same time, lots of relationships would probably die if people didn't (intellectually and emotionally) halo effect their partners. In addition, there are time tradeoffs in life, and a finite number of things any given person can intellectually and emotionally understand. Finally, there are certain things that are not super pleasant to think about. Postmodern architecture might help one emotionally understand some of the more negative aspects of our society (in a very abstract way) more than alternative styles, but some people might reasonably decide that the negative headspace is not worth the knowledge.
Let's simplify and synthesize. My perspective is that the 'purpose' of art is that it is a unique type of pedagogical tool, that different people utilize differently depending on their subjective priorities. This is a difficult question to delve into because giving a philosophically sufficient immanent account of aesthetics requires some real depth and rigor. This comment might not provide that sufficient rigor, but hopefully it is a step in that direction. At the very least, the writing practice is useful to me.
One weekend in 1988, my wife and I were visiting a young couple in Seattle. My wife asked E., what shall we do tomorrow? E. broke into tears and exclaimed, "We can't do anything with you tomorrow because J. and I have to jump out of an airplane with Bill Gates, and we're all going to die!"
I think you are not friendly enough to points E(BDSM) and G(Grammar).
E: Using porn as analogy is unnecessarily dismissive. There is the same effect in any art! The first time you read a tale, it can be about a prince saving a princess and you would be exited! The tenth time you would be bored and eventually you need a story with intrigue, a hundred characters, complex drama, clever plans using fourth level of recursion and novel revelations about the nature of the multiverse (cough planecrash cough). That is the actual example when rubes outnumber experts, hate what experts like and yet experts are right - some works are just better than others, but you can only appreciate them after you are saturated on lower-level content.
G: Grammar rules, even when arbitrary, still perform a vital role: they help correct for message noise and in extreme cases are just necessary for any communication to happen at all. If someone says in a slightly noisy place "I goed", the communication would fail not because I am a snob who refuses to talk to people who use incorrect grammar, it would fail because I would think "Eye goat?... What is an eye goat?". The same can happen with fashion: if you show up to a funeral in an orange t-shirt with silly print, (some) other people are not going to be giddy that they are now higher in status than you, they are going to be confused - did you learn about funeral just now and couldn't change? Do you not have other clothes? Was the deceased your mortal enemy and you are actively celebrating? If they learn that you just dressed like this because you think fashion is silly, they are going to be justifiably angry because you made them think about you instead of a friend they lost.
Great comment, I was just about to comment endorsing the exact same combination of 2 explanations.
E: I found the "food taste" analogy (raised independently by multiple commenters above) to be a lot more relatable way of saying the same thing. Either way, this is a great explanation of why people's tastes can change but they don't change randomly, most experts still end up with tastes similar to each other.
G: Explains the missing part, why most art forms end up with a large number of arbitrary-seeming rules and conventions. That said, I think there's a wide range of how arbitrary the rules are depending on the exact rule and art form.
It seems plausible that some rules have lost all connection to reality and are just used for social signaling at this point, but even there, I don't want to condemn them too much. It really is nice to be able to relate to someone because they spent enough time in your field to become intimately familiar with rules and conventions that other people don't care about.
Hah when I wrote a comment here, of course someone already said it but better. Having lots of independent comments (others said this too) in agreement is nice tho, Scott really should rethink the E part.
So, I mostly fall on the side of preferring "unsophisticated" art, but on the other hand, I definitely have a sense that there's more and less sophisticated writing, and that more sophisticated writers are legitimately doing something more skillful, if not objectively better. There are some qualities of unsophisticated writing which less discerning readers are often fairly blind to (like stiff and unnatural dialogue or paint-by-numbers characterization.) And there are some qualities of unsophisticated writing which I think tend to be outright preferable to unsophisticated readers. For instance, a lot of what we conventionally consider "good writing" in prose has to do with effective compression of information, transmitting content through implication so as not to weigh down the pacing with excessive explicit details, and giving the reader the sense that the content rewards closer examination. But unsophisticated readers are often very bad at reading between the lines, so information which isn't explicitly stated might as well not be there for them. So writing which doesn't try to pack that extra information in, and assume that the reader is picking up at least some of it, is actually preferable for them.
I sometimes wish that I had the ability to deeply appreciate unsophisticated writing, since it'd make me much easier to please as a consumer. But at the same time, it's hard for me to want *not* to be able to appreciate the craft in what sophisticated writers are doing. I wonder sometimes if I'm like an unsophisticated reader, with my preferences shaped by a blindness to elements of craftsmanship in architecture that other people can appreciate. But honestly, I lean towards suspecting this isn't the case. I think the best literary artists of earlier centuries would be impressed by the craft of the best modern writers, whereas I don't get the impression that this is the case with historical and modern architects.
I think if you understand how ethics can be socially constructed, subjectively objective, you also extend your underdstanding towards aesthetics as well. The referent is real but somewhat arbitrary with various gradation of good and bad justifications.
Alternate title: Effective Art Truisms.
I think there are three main categories that art gets judged by. 1. how pleasant it is to look at. 2. the effort it takes to create it. 3. The effort it takes to come up with the idea of it. (4. Political messaging, mostly tangential to the others.)
The average person only cares about 1 (and maybe 4). The professionals mainly care about 2 and 3 (and maybe 4), even to the exclusion of 1. A big bouncing action flick that cuts corners on the plot can satisfy 1, be mediocre at 2, and not even attempt 3, and that's when everyone's taste goes off in different directions.
2 and 3 can still be opposites. Giant dome structure with lots of fiddly bits are hard to make, but eventually enough people get good at them that making them becomes expected, and now 3 kicks in with a new challenge; "take a flat wall and a single color, and find a way to make it interesting."
Hhmmm... I'd *like* to agree with you, since it would be nice if art worked that way. And maybe some forms of art work that way. Literary art arguably works that way, like what Desertopa argued.
But when I consider picture/painting-style modern art and modern architecture...
With a lot of the artwork of Mark Rothko, I'm open to the idea that there might be more depth of meaning to it than what the untrained eye would easily discern. Sure, that's possible. But I must admit I find it hard to believe that this Rothko piece took much skill or effort to make: https://media.nga.gov/iiif/a8c923e1-078d-4f94-b1f4-0e303afe2155__640/full/!740,560/0/default.jpg
Similarly, with architecture, I would think that less ornamentation = less effort. I mean, it's at least one less thing to worry about. There can certainly be legitimate artistic design reasons for wanting less ornamentation... nonetheless, it makes a design simpler, likely reducing the effort needed to bring it to life.
Ironically (?) I think Rothko aficionados partly invoke the mysterious alchemy of his personally-mixed paint/washes/whatever. As though they are associating his work with the great masters of the past who necessarily had to be chemists in some sort.
I only have this idea because I'm from Houston and periodically people worry about the Rothko chapel in re the finishes on the walls deteriorating, and was it eggs? etc.
I only went into it once, forty years ago, and it made less impression on me than the exhibit inside the Menil that day, which was totaled cars.
Deteriorating? How could anyone tell?
At a guess: maybe it was sloughing off, or getting crazed, or changing hue, or becoming dingier looking?
These would be typical examples where 3 ("effort it takes to come up with the idea of it") dominates 2 ("effort it takes to create it"), and 4 ("political messaging") might be relevant too.
A lot of modern art is meant as a reaction to older art (something along the lines of "look, I can invoke the same feelings as your fancy classical painting, using just a few blobs of color") and doesn't make much sense without that context.
I'm somewhat interested in the process of making the lower square. It's close enough in color to the background that I can't completely tell if it's a different color or just looks that way because of the brush strokes. And the top red section is pretty much perfectly smooth, with big vertical lines, so all the texturing in the bottom section is intentional.
So, more impressive than your average kindergartener. You might have to reach all the way to third grade to find its equal.
Good assessment. Your last two sentences gave me a good laugh.
Somewhat tangential comment: For architecture, the overwhelmingly important criterion is: Does it work? Is it a reasonable place to live in or work in? (1) has some impact on passers-by. (2) is something the architect should _minimize_. (3) is of interest to the architect in their interactions with their fellow architects, and probably lost in the noise for everyone else.
They *should* minimize 2, but that doesn't mean they want to. There was a guy building his own house here; he asked his engineer buddy for pointers, and the engineer talked him into building an octagonal steeple roof. The guy was stuck on the roof for months trying to build a proper octagon.
Many Thanks!
>he asked his engineer buddy for pointers, and the engineer talked him into building an octagonal steeple roof.
Ouch! With friends like that one doesn't need enemies...
"Taste" can be very accurately described by three sperate qualities. Subjective taste, objective taste and desire for novelty. Unfortunately these all get mixed up into a big pile when it comes time for people to talk about things. The stereotypical stupid elite artist is someone who acts like their subjective taste and novelty desire are objective taste criteria, generally with tons of signaling about how much better their taste is than the unwashed masses. The stereotypical philistine is someone who has no need for novelty and says objective taste doesn't exist, all that matters is my subjective taste.
When I reflect on why I like some art or architecture, it has to be some combination of: "this generates a visceral positive reaction" and "it aligns with my identity/persona to enjoy this aesthetically". My theory would be that taste is a combination of the two:
1) If you have an identity tied to conforming with elite norms or tastes, it becomes more like the "Taste as a priesthood" argument - you learn the values of the elite class and temper your visceral reactions accordingly. You make sure that your taste evolves to match changing aesthetic norms. Note that your perceived elite doesn't have to be art school graduates, it could be the rationalist or silicon valley elites, or octagenarian classics scholars.
2) If you have a non-elitist, conformist identity - you don't want to stand out too much - it feels more like "Taste is like grammar". You subconciously adjust your taste to avoid standing out too much, toning down preferences that feel overly elitist or populist to stay within the norm.
3) If you have a somewhat contrarian identity, you don't want people to be able to guess your taste, so you deliberately seek out or cultivate unconventional reactions. I don't know if this fits into your framework - but may be most like the "Taste is like BDSM" argument. You become aware that "conventionally attractive" art is trying to trick you into visceral positive reactions - I'm sure we all notice this with pop music - and feel varying degrees of resistance. You also notice that both elite and mainstream cultural norms are trying to shape these reactions, and you try to resist both - you don't want to conform to either norm, and try to cultivate an original or opposite reaction.
It's simpler than that. At least if you don't involve examples where social dynamics lead people to feel the need to lie about their preferences.
Taste is simply a preference for things which are healthy and beneficial for the person who enjoys them, or which are the polar opposite and consumed as a way of overcoming or yielding to something unappealing (humiliation fetishism, scat, sadism, morbid curiosity, etc.)
It's not just symmetry which is appealing. Music too will sound better when it's more ordely and less messy. Your room, your hair, your clothes - it's pretty when it's cleaner, purer, more ordely, less complex, *lower in entropy*. This is because human beings fight against entropy, and anything which has higher entropy tends to have been corrupted. We enjoy things which are unblemished, and which look strong, healthy, or capable of leading to better states (when judging personalities and such). The skin of healthy people look better, strong colors are prettier than faded ones, colors associated with waste and decay are ugly.
It's not just physical appearance, it generalizes way further than that. Optimism is more appealing than pessimism, envy and jealousy tends to be ugly, heroic actions are appealing, strength is appealing, honesty is appealing.
Concrete jungles have an ugly grey, faded colors. Sci-fi tends to be metallic but look very clean (and often bright).
Political corruption has the name "corruption" for a reason. "Dirty means" uses a word associated with physical uncleanliness for a reason. "Fair" means just, but also beautiful or good, and that's also no coincidence.
It all seems to obvious to me. And in cases where some people like something and others dislike it, it's usually because something valuable is being treated with too little respect (sex is generally appealing, and that's exactly why some people find it unappealing when it's not treated like it's special enough)
Imo the best analogy is taste is like philosophy. We all have aesthetic preferences, just like we all have views about the world. But people who spend more time thinking about and engaging with these subjects often come to unintuitive and more expansive views about them. In an objective sense the total “range” of aesthetic modes of expression taken seriously by art critics and scholars is much more broad (and inclusive of totally different kinds of aesthetic experience) than the average person is open to, and philosophers similarly consider a far broader range of questions than the average person will consider. Of course this is complicated in art by status games and fashion etc, but so is the philosophy world. Imo with both philosophy and art there is truth to “both sides” of this question: the theorists do have mindblowing insights, but there is also an emperor has no clothes aspect to this. An example is the avant-garde film Wavelength. I can see why the average person finds this single shot zoom of a mostly empty room to be torturously boring, but once you learn to expand your conceptions of visual art, it becomes an riveting and intense experience. But at the same time, an average joe will probably not benefit much from being made to comprehend why Wavelength was one of the most groundbreaking artworks of the 20th century.
Why do people like watching elite competition like sports? I think it's an interesting comparison because competitive skill is objective but I still see some relevant similarities to this discussion of art.
Sports I don't know can still be fun to watch and for those it probably doesn't matter much if I'm watching the top competitors, I can't tell the difference anyways.
So maybe, as Scott suggests, it would be bad to actually learn the complexities of elite competition since "it makes your life worse, because you’ll just be fretting over flaws you see in everything."
But this seems wrong! Sure it can sometimes feel bad to see someone fuck up and have the knowledge to know that they fucked up (though many people also enjoy this). But people who really know a sport really do get more out of it. They get amazed by great athletic feats because they know how challenging they are and what it means to accomplish them.
So even though I know almost nothing about painting or poetry it seems plausible something like this is going on--people who are really into modern poetry really are getting something out of it that less sophisticated people aren't, something you can only get when you obtain the requisite context and knowledge, and they are enjoying it at a deeper level than possible without that, and that's what they mean when they say it is actually good and the stuff you like isn't.
About human universals, besides the desire for symmetry, isn't there also a desire for surprise and amazement?
An inverted pyramid might not be symmetrical or seem harmonious (with its surroundings), yet it's certainly surprising.
I think the priesthood/grammar analogy is mostly right, and applies to all artistic/aesthetic fields. But acquiring knowledge of say architecture will not just ruin McMansions for you, they will also make you appreciate buildings that you would otherwise not care for.
I think it's useful to think about taste through the lens of Shakespeare. The genius of Shakespeare is that he wrote plays that worked on multiple levels, so that both common and refined attendees would enjoy them. William appealed to the former with rude sex jokes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DJAVuo1VV0
And to the latter he appealed by being creative with iambic pentameter. Every line that title character in Hamlet speaks is intentionally one syllable too long (11, not 10), this leaves the final "iamb" unfinished. Learned audiences will notice this and feel a sense of incompleteness when he speaks. This reinforces the play's characterization of Hamlet as indecisive. Provided you also like rude sex jokes, the play now works on multiple levels for you.
Most artist are not as good as Shakespeare, and can only make things work on one level. This is how you get the McMansion (that works on the base level) and Bauhaus (that works on the elite level). Neither of these levels are "objectively" correct, but they feel objectively correct to the onlooker. To you (Scott) it seems impossible that anyone would find modern architecture beautiful, while the architecture critics can not understand how anyone would like McMansions.
Personally, I believe that architecture needs to work at least somewhat well on the base level, because everyone is asically forced to look at it. This is in contrast to other mediums like poetry or film, where avant garde artist are free to forego common appeal as much as they like. If you don't like it, you can just ignore it!
Are you saying architects must ensure their work does not cause negative net utility by triggering dislike in the majority of people who are not "educated" about architecture, compared to many other kinds of human endeavor?
More or less
Well yes, otherwise people will petition to blow up your building.
I like your post on the whole, but this comment on Hamlet is not quite true. Many of his lines are only ten syllables (though a disproportionate number in his most famous soliloquy have eleven), for instance:
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:
In addition, the eleven syllable line (with the last syllable unstressed), was a common and accepted variation on iambic pentameter, Spenser uses them frequently, especially in the second half of the Faerie Queene. I agree that Shakespeare uses them far more often than, say, Marlowe, and possibly increasingly often in his later works.
Thank you. I am by no means a Shakespeare scholar, so my impression may have been overgeneralized.
I think your point about multiple levels is strong, though. I think certain periods have a greater wealth of works that function on multiple levels than others. A pretty strong split happens in the early 20th century in quite a few fields.
Any recommendations?
It's a little difficult because things that once had popular appeal and accessibility are now much less accessible because of cultural and linguistic difference. But in literature, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress was both wildly popular and is also considered a masterpiece. Dickens, too, had dual appeal. Probably Homer, though it's hard to exactly say what "popular" meant back then. I actually think Tolkien is a good example, where his immediate audience was a group of Oxford medievalists, but his work has had obvious popular appeal (and its fair share of sneers from modernists, of course).
In art, part of Vermeer's whole schtick was using elaborately expensive pigments (like lapis lazuli, literally ground up jewels) to paint ordinary people, so there may be something there. But I can't claim to have much "taste" in painting.
Music, I couldn't say. Maybe Ralph Vaughan Williams? Tchaikovsky?
> In art, part of Vermeer's whole schtick was using elaborately expensive pigments (like lapis lazuli, literally ground up jewels)
Actually, when Vermeer was painting, and for many thousands of years before then, Ultramarine (blue derived from lapis lazuli) was the ONLY option for a "deep" or "dark" blue, and it had ALWAYS, for the entire history of art, been the most expensive pigment, more expensive than gold by weight.
When you see medieval icons with literal hammered gold backgrounds, vermilion red robes on priests or male saints, and dark blue robes on the Virgin, the blue in those paintings was the most expensive color, and those three colors were used because they were the most expensive and finest colors available.
Cheaper synthetic blues like Prussian blue wouldn't be discovered for another 50-100 years after Vermeer.
There's a great book that goes into this and more that I reviewed at my substack, Philip Ball's Bright Earth, well worth looking into if you're interested in this sort of thing.
"whether Latin-obsessed grammarians unfairly demanded that Anglophones follow the Latin usage"
I think the answer there is "yes".
I think there's value in learning to appreciate the nuances of craft, especially when that craft is connected to a historical/community tradition.
I'm very far from a sommelier, but I have spent time thinking about/learning about wine and as time has gone on I tend to like nicer wines more and cheap wine less. It's been pointed out to me that learning about wine seems to be making my life worse. To enjoy wine I have to spend more money than I did previously.
But I find the post-learning about wine drinking experience to be more satisfying than the pre-learning about wine experience. This isn't necessarily about enjoying the flavour more, but I think because the additional experiences of thinking carefully about the flavors and learning about the history of the vineyard makes for a better experience.
Why not just think carefully about/learn the history of cheaper wine? I think better wine tends to actually be better suited for engagement on a deep level. It's easy to grasp why when it comes to the historical/craft side of wine. But I it's true also for the taste element. Nicer wines tend to have a few more flavours that tend to be designed to interact in interesting ways. But I think it's certainly possible to have a deep and satisfying relationship with cheap wine too. Though perhaps not quite as satisfying and perhaps less easily than you can with nice wine.
Bringing this back to architecture, I think one can develop this sort of relationship with any school of architecture. And the nature of architecture as an omni-present part of the environment is that many people develop the start of this kind of relationship unconsciously based on the buildings around them, what they see in films etc.
That being said, some architecture will probably lend itself to an appreciation of the craft and history more than others (and which architecture will change somewhat between people). I tend to think that for most people, this will be some form of pre-modernist architecture featuring ornament but I don't have evidence for that.
I think this is a pretty cynical way of reckoning with taste. The concepts of kitsch and avant-garde can be well-defined even without saying one is better in an absolute sense.
What is considered “tasteful” right now is not arbitrary. Culture is like a conversation with a large circle of speakers. At the beginning of the conversation, the people are strangers, and the language they have in common is limited, so what people can say is very simplistic. “God is good,” “Beautiful woman is good,” “Pleasant weather is good,” that sort of thing. It’s small-talk, the only kind of talk you can have with strangers. As time goes on, however, common symbols are developed. There are expectations about the sort of things people can say, because they have been said in the past. Because these expectations and symbols exist, the conversation can “evolve” when a speaker subverts or complicates these expectations. Now people know each other—there are “inside jokes” that wouldn’t make sense in the abstract, but have a particular meaning that is understood by anyone who has been following the conversation and the people in it.
This is why Manet’s painting of “Olympia,” a simple female nude (what could be more basic?) was met with universal revulsion by the nineteenth century art scene. For these people, the “female nude” was an established symbol in the artistic language of history, representing purity, nature, etc. The Renaissance masters painted a lot of nude women, but never women *taking off their clothes*. The female nude (at this point in art history) is not a woman who has taken off her clothes, but a symbol of feminine essence. Olympia, on the other hand, is a woman who has taken off her clothes. A subtle distinction to an outsider, but a slap in the face for these art critics. I would consider Olympia an example of an “avant-garde” painting. It is art that adds to the conversation; it refers to what has been said before in a new way. This does not mean that the “tasteful” people will like it—many hated it—but that it *responds* to taste as it exists.
Kitsch isn’t “bad art that stupid rubes like,” it’s art that does not respond to anything. Kitsch is someone who shows up at the conversation between old friends having a passionate exchange of ideas and just starts making small-talk, unaware of what they are interrupting. This is why those who follow the conversation do not like kitsch—it is a non-sequitur, a distracting noise in an otherwise rational progression of harmonies.
But again, you do not have to believe in taste in an absolute sense to get behind this model of art. What is “good” obviously depends on the audience and the context of reception. However, I think it would be disingenuous to say that the people involved in this conversation are all talking about similar things because it’s “cool” or “trendy” to do so, and that there’s no other reason why they would be so aligned in their taste. They’re simply responding to each other in their shared language. If you hear someone speaking in a language you don’t know, it would be strange to immediately think “you’re all saying stuff that doesn’t mean anything just to be cool.”
But kitsch isn't interrupting old friends. It appeals to people who like kitsch, and don't care about the people who don't.
This is the best response; I wanted to say something like it but wouldn't have done so well.
I think this framing suggestions two ways of interpreting the objections of those like Scott in the previous post.
1. Using in jokes and shared references can be very exclusionary--it's a conversation, and a good conversation can't just spend all it's time on small talk and pleasantries, but a conversation has to be able to welcome new people into it.
If you invited some people to a party and they only spoke in references that only they shared and made no attempt to include you, that would be snobbish and rude. So too, when the public commissions a new building and an architect makes no deference to public sensibilities, it's snobbish and rude.
2. A conversational form that relies too much on shared references becomes sterile. It's like the joke about the prisoners who don't need to hear the actual jokes anymore, just the number that references it. A good conversation should refer back to the good times the participants have shared, but it should also plan future events that can be the basis for future discussion.
In this frame, modern architecture has become too obsessed with manifestos and abstract ideas, and become tedious in the manner of someone who only ever wants to talk about other conversations they've had.
I have no opinion on the second, knowing very little about architecture, though I will count myself as one who enjoys some of the examples of "bad" modern architecture for what that's worth.
The first is more interesting, because it suggests the question of who the implied participant/audience of the conversation is. I think some of Scott's complaints effectively have the form of, why should you guys get to dominate the conversation?
On this I sympathize with both sides: art has been and should continue to be a distinctive subset of broader culture, and not just dilute into mass preference. I think art that emerges from the mainstream "artistic tradition" should get at least some priority in public space over stuff that's merely popular.
But art should still be accessible; both because it's publicly funded and publicly facing, and because without an external audience it's too easy to become lost in the ironic self-referential weeds.
And finally, one should reject a firm distinction between art that "continues the conversation" and art that is just a non-responsive interjection.
Even the most refined artists get ideas and inspiration from kitsch, and vice versa.
Maybe there are multiple levels with different sets of rules and different analogies at each level.
Level One
A child enjoys simple tastes for evolutionary reasons. A sugar sandwich has lots of sweetness. Cheese on toast has that layer of fat that goes down smoothly. Bitter things taste bitter. McD has figured out how to make burgers that taste simple and to avoid the difficult tastes.
Most people graduate to…
Level Two
An adolescent learns to enjoy more complex tastes. Maybe the bitterness of beer and wine is not so bad once you get used to it. In and Out burgers are even better than McD’s and, have you tried baby back ribs or chicken tikka masala?
Many people graduate to…
Level Three
Taste is like fashion. We get bored with chicken tikka masala after a while and try pokē or tonkatsu. IPAs are more complex than Bud Light. But even that gets boring eventually and we move on to the next thing.
Level Four
There’s another level of experts and professionals above this that have the authority or the nous to identify or invent the next big thing that level three people will enjoy when they get bored with the previous fashion. Meanwhile, there are still people eating sugar sandwiches and cheeseburgers and the rest of us look down on them.
I this multi-level structure works for music, architecture, clothing, and art as well as food.
I think a more friendly version of your BDSM take is normally taken as implicitly true in a lot of discussion about "arthouse" film. A common reason given for why critics like more experimental or artier films and have more middling takes on popular films is often that when your job is to watch every film that comes out you quickly become numbed to the predictable structure and style of big films but that 90 minute experimental film structured and stylised as memories of a childhood holiday (Aftersun) is fresh and thus you are more excited about it. It has to be taken as a mix of multiple because the critics still only like films that are deemed well executed (despite what Marvel meme pages claim they do not give good ratings to the majority of experimental films) but it drives it into their favourite of the year while someone who only watches films every so often will be more impressed by the new Top Gun even if they like Aftersun or whatever.
A little while back I visited my parents and cued up Aftersun because I had heard lots of praise for it and it has gotten an Oscar nomination. My parents reacted to the film by saying I wouldn't be allowed to pick movies anymore, and I had to side with them on their evaluation of that film specifically.
https://thepopculturists.blogspot.com/2024/06/this-weekend-in-pop-culture-june-28-30.html#comment-6491430482
And I'm someone who dug Eraserhead & Begotten (though I wouldn't show either to my parents).
I was mostly disappointed by Eraserhead. I was expecting something ... more ... than what I got. Like ... okay ... surreal dystopian horror. But it was also incredibly mundane. Possibly it was a better movie in the context in which it was released, like The Beatles, or Hitchcock; by the time I got around to consuming it, I was already familiar with most of what it was going to do, so nothing was all that surprising. (Like the "soundtrack", one of the characteristic elements of the movie, which felt ... dated, for lack of a better term.)
The only thing Lynch produced that lived up to the reputation Lynch has developed, in my opinion, is episode 8 of the third season of Twin Peaks, which was actually pretty brilliant; it took me two or three watchings to figure out exactly what it was doing.
I'd recommend Naked Lunch, though, unless you're face blind. (I'm face blind, but watched it with somebody who helpfully pointed out certain key elements for me; without that the movie would have been a lot more confusing.)
Going to go try Begotten; it reads a little like Mad God, to me, and I liked that movie a lot.
I did choose Aftersun deliberately both because it was my film of the year and because it was fairly polarising when it filtered through to general audiences. Although for me personally I find it hard to look at it objectively because it was deliberately written to evoke feelings I have experienced, Wells said that she deliberately removed some of the certainty (e.g. the suicide you mention not being confirmed as happening) so that it could appeal to more people rather than being purely autobiographical which from internet discussion for the most part worked and gave the film a personal aspect to a lot of people. Its just generic enough to make it feel personally applicable to anyone who had a particularly strained relationship for whatever reason with a parent or any working class Brit who grew up having to pretend the cheap holiday is amazing. I do disagree that it didn't have a buildup and crescendo though, everything from the moment Under Pressure starts playing is the culmination of the pervasive sense of unease and distance from Calum that Sophie feels, I don't think it hits straightaway because you expect some sort of confirmed resolution in the end but its the strongest left the cinema 10 minutes ago reaction I've had when the significance hits and on a rewatch I felt the film was even stronger.
But I think putting that aside it appeals well to critics who grew up in stable middle class households because it is a very executed film on a purely technical level while also being experimental with its structure. Its very deliberate with its use of perspective and recurring visual and audio motifs and the acting is superb. Then its also not remotely a typically structured film which makes it standout to people who watch a film or several a day and have to stay focused to write a review.
Finally perhaps as more of an aside I think the film suffered somewhat getting international acclaim. I've seen quite a bit of confusion from American audiences about several key aspects of the film because none of the British class signifiers that are embedded throughout the film are familiar. It uses a lot of fundamentally British shorthands to paint a picture of Calum and Sophies life, without knowing them it can feel overly specific in a way that isn't actually intended.
I've always felt like taste in art and literature is most similar to taste in food, in that it ultimately is a matter of personal preference - even though there is stuff that's generally agreed to be ugly/disgusting or delicious/beautiful, there's definitelty such a thing as an "aquired taste" in both domains - people can get really into stuff the rest of us would consider off-putting. I don't mind, until they try to insist that their personal preferences in food or art are objectively correct!
I think this analogy works because I like different things at different times - sometimes I want a sophisticated work with complex flavors, other times I want saccharine comfort food. I enjoy visiting art galleries and reading "great works" of literature, but I'm not going to pretend there's not times when I'd prefer something more lowbrow or mainstream, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
> you weren’t not supposed to do it.
Diana Feyer
Weren’t we not supposed to notice that?
How about “there’s dozens of different axes/dimensions of personal preference at any one time, many of which could be framed as a ‘taste vs kitsch’ struggle between a high-preference minority and low-preference majority, but how often is that only because an “I like this to be ‘kitsch’” minority and “I don’t even pay attention to aspects on this particular axis” majority are lumped into an “anti taste” alliance?
English PhD candidate here. Got some sophisticated tastes in literature but also a hyper-egalitarian attitude toward taste, so I feel like I’m (relatively) well-positioned to talk about this.
Personally, I think the BDSM/ desensitization analogy is the best of the list, but only relatively. … Can’t say that any of these analogies really speak to my experience of developing sophisticated tastes nor to my experience of being around people with equally sophisticated tastes but less egalitarian attitudes.
Here’s what I think is going on:
Positive psychologists all kind of agree that there are qualitatively different intrinsic psychological rewards (hedonia vs. eudaimonia, affective vs. cognitive subjective wellbeing, etc.). They disagree about where to draw the most parsimonious lines demarcating these different kinds of intrinsic rewards, but they all kind of agree that intrinsic psychological rewards can be of qualitatively different kinds.
Personally, I like Seligman’s PERMA model:
- positive emotions, feeling good, good moods, etc.
- engagement, interest, involvement flow
- positive relationships, feelings of connection to other people
- meaning, significance, impact
- accomplishment, mastery, competence
I think that art is cool because it can offer all of these different kinds of intrinsic rewards. And I think the difference between the masses and the sophisticates has to do with the particular intrinsic rewards that are being sought from art.
The masses tend to seek positive emotions from art, while people that become “cultured” engage with art for some other reason: either they are seeking engaging art, or they want the feel like accomplished/ masterful consumers/ interpreters of art or whatever.
I think that cultured “taste” is merely the emergent outcome of people self-selecting into different cultural niches of people who engage with art for the same basic reason that they do. The particular niches shift and change over time for a whole bunch of psychological, socio-political, and institutional reasons, but I think that this basic distinction between the masses wanting positive emotions from while sophisticates wanting something more than positive emotions (engagement, relationships, meaning, accomplishment) is important an important part of the puzzle.
If I had more time, I’d discuss why I think that people sometimes react with such a visceral sense of disgust when they see art/ art-consumption that is serving/ seeking very different kinds of intrinsic rewards than they personally prefer, but this comment is making me late for work as it is 😅
D is C seen from the inside, right?
Even If Not, Feng Shui purports to be D. A friend of a friend used to do Feng Shui consulting and the friend that she is also friends with told me that even long after she ended the Feng Shui consulting, she found it VERY distressing to be in apartments of people who have never considered Feng Shui and therefore set their apartments up in another ("wrong") way. Not exactly the same as taste, but it seems relevant?
I'd explain it in terms of novelty and pattern recognition. If you've seen thousands of nice paintings of landscapes your brain will create a general category for them, and start noticing patterns. Then if you see a new one it'll only be interesting to the extent it varies on some axis.
A lot of artistic movements came from people who had been immersed in the previous status quo. (Art schools where you had to do a million still life sketches, study all the old masters in excruciating detail, etc). So they came up with things that were interesting to them because they varied on some axis (e.g. lets do weird things with shape and colors). The really weird modern art is like a superstimulus that comes out of that process acting recursively
See Ayn Rand’s “argument from intimidation.”
I really like the example of grammar. I do recognize that grammar is highly arbitrary, but I also get annoyed at sloppy grammar.
The sloppy grammar that annoys me is when someone fails to distinguish subtle differences in grammar, that results in a flattening of their language, and makes it harder for them to convey as many distinct meanings with their language. For example, if you do not distinguish between when you "have done" something and when you "had done" something, it makes it harder for you to talk about nested past tense (known to grammarians as the past perfect tense). Similarly, "was"/"were" seems important to me because "were" conveys a hypothetical in a way that "was" does not. If your grammar were to make it more difficult to talk in a certain way, then you become less likely to use hypotheticals or nested past tense(s) in your speech. Your language becomes flatter, and you are less able to communicate as many interesting ideas.
Notably though, alternative dialects do not flatten grammar in the way that being sloppy does. African American Vernacular, in particular, has more tenses/aspects than standard English ! To use your example, "she be going there" means that she goes there habitually or frequently - it is normal for her to go there. The closest grammar in standard English is not "she is going there", which implies that it is happening right now, but rather "she does goes there". This is still not quite right because it might occur only occasionally. The negated "he ain't be going there" cannot, however, be replaced with "he does not go there", because "does not" suggests that it never happens. He could have gone there in the past, or he could go there in the future, or maybe even he is going there right now, but it's not normal, so "he ain't be going there".
I am a fan of using grammar in a way that allows you to convey more different ideas more easily, regardless of whether it's "proper", and strongly dislike grammar which flattens the languages and makes it harder to make distinctions. This feels non-arbitrary to me.
This also happens in visual arts. Sometimes, the rules which exist allow you to convey more information to the "reader" of the art than you could if you did not follow the convention.
The most flagrant example of this I know of is in iconography. Different saints have different things ("attributes") that they're depicted with. If you know what these are, it becomes much easier to read Catholic & Orthodox art. For example, if you see someone with a book and a lion, it's Mark, and you might look nearby for someone holding large keys (Peter) or maybe three other people with books & animals (Matthew, Luke, & John). If instead you depict someone with keys, and a book, and a lion, then you're doing iconography wrong, and making it harder for people to read your art.
This shows up in more subtle ways in lots of other kinds of art. Scott & Ilzo described some of this when talking about the AI gateway in the AI Art Turing Test post. Ilzo could read the details of the art/architecture, and notice that they were nonsense, which you (and I*) could not have read.
While modern art & architecture does have some use of subtle distinctions to convey information, I do not think that is most of what is going on.
Modern architecture is an explicit rejection of the architectural languages which had developed over the previous centuries. It is not a language. It is a conlang. Or rather, a branching family of conlangs.
Much of the beauty of natural language comes from its expression of a real human culture that has developed alongside the language through the centuries. Conlangs do not have this history, and so feel sterile. Modern architecture similarly tries to create new patterns independent of its history, and so it is sterile like a conlang.
It is possible for an artform to begin as a constructed thing, devoid of the association of human culture, and then to build the human relationships to create a culture around it. This seems to have happened to some extent for the modern architects themselves. But it also seems like modern architecture explicitly rejects building this kind of shared material culture with the people who use its buildings. Modern architecture (often) completely rejects input from the people who will live and work in it. It also makes little effort to educate these people on how to read the modern architecture. I like to think that European peasants would at least know who the saints were who are depicted in their local church, and it's still fairly common to teach children to distinguish the three classical Greek orders of columns (Ionic, Doric, & Corinthian).
If modern architects taught people how to read their buildings, and then accepted feedback from the people who use the building most, then I think that it could develop into a new, beautiful artform, which is still meaningfully different from the styles of architecture which came before and retains the essential aspects of its modernism. But as long as there remains a social gulf between the architects and the people using the buildings, it will remain a set of self-referential conlangs, hostile to the people who find themselves forced to use it.
* My main reaction to that picture was wondering what was going on around and through the gate. There is a rocky canyon on both sides of the arch, but a flat, featureless plane through the gate. It read to me like a depiction of a portal - although I would have expected that the artist would have made the fact that it was a portal more obvious if that had been her intention.
I think there are some other aspects that are missed in this list. Any form of art or design exists in a certain cultural context. If you ignore that context, people who know it will find that result confusing, jarring, or ignorant (i.e. tasteless). Here are some simple examples that might help clarify:
- A wedding announcement written in Comic Sans. If you didn't know that font had a cultural background of humor and/or informality, it would seem inappropriate.
- An older white upperclass man wearing a kente cloth jacket. If you didn't know about the cultural history of kente cloth and its association with west Africa and especially its cultural significance in the US in the late 20th century, it could seem just like a bold colorful pattern.
- If you had never learned about Christianity, but seen some churches from the outside, you might believe that it was right and proper for houses to have a large cross on the roof. If you built a regular house and put a large cross on the roof, people would confuse it for a church, but not think it was just a nonreligious design element choice.
None of these are universal - they exist within a particular culture. But just because something is not an objective standard does not make it meaningless. I think this is a bit like the grammar case, but more like the priesthood fashion cases C and D. But the explanations are not "because I said so" or "this thing was important and useful once but no longer is", but rather that there is a common cultural language, known and used by most classes and not just the priesthood, but over time fewer people remember the language, and are made to feel dumb because of it.
This is not to say the arguments about functionality aren't also important. Roofs that don't leak, windows and balconies that are actually usable, cladding that doesn't peel off are all relevant.
Paul Graham's essay Taste for Makers https://paulgraham.com/taste.html argues that taste is real and important, but it also argues that good design involves avoiding temporary fashions, rather than leaning into them.
Maybe there's a sense in which the kind of taste Steve Jobs had was real, but the kind of taste Le Corbusier had was fake?
"Good" design in terms of personal success probably requires being timely rather than timeless.
> Some of these rules are sensible and necessary, but others are arbitrary or even actively anti-rational. For example, it would make more sense to say “he goed” than “he went”, but only the latter is correct.
As opposed to the latin grammar stickler example, this one evolved naturally. And it likely has a sensible reasoning behind it, just like biological evolution. Eg "went" is a word that is used often, and it sounds smoother and better than "goed". It's mostly only words that are used often that are irregular, which is an indicator that the mechanism for it is in this vein.
You might consider approaching the question from the perspective of taste in writing, which you know very well, rather than, say, fashion.
...Mate, it's not that complex. We just think you're basic. Personally, I look down on others for their awful taste because the false sense of superiority it gives me is the only thing preventing me from killing myself. The description for the Actual Art Degree thought in Disco Elysium is extremely relevant here:
> Yeah, it's another copotype -- the worst one. The most savage and brutal. The Art Cop. Nothing is good enough for him. Everything is *shit*. You have to employ an armada of adjectives to depict and demean the mediocrity of the works and visual institutions around you. Really *flex* that critical muscle. Until the vocabulary for PUNISHING mediocrity becomes second nature. Here we go...
Trite, contrived, mediocre, milquetoast, amateurish, infantile, cliche-and-gonorrhea-ridden paean to conformism, eye-fucked me, affront to humanity, war crime, should *literally* be tried for war crimes, resolutely shit, lacking in imagination, uninformed reimagining of, limp-wristed, premature, ill-informed attempt at, talentless fuckfest, recidivistic shitpeddler, pedantic, listless, savagely boring, just one repulsive laugh after another.
It seems to me that a variety of people discussed a number of building styles - and individual buildings, and their surroundings - in the comments yesterday, easily demonstrating that there is no shortage of "tastes", as many as there are commenters perhaps - while a few, mysteriously invoking the cosmos, deemed the subject illegitimate.
(Had we instead discussed the cosmos, and our ideas of same - more and less informed by reading, or telescope time - that might have been more satisfactory; yet I feel most of us would have been on *less* firm ground than in discussing our own likes and dislikes.)
I once lived, 30-plus years ago across the street from an old woman who lived in the modest Victorian frame house in which she had grown up, having never married, never left it. Hyde Park Austin, the scruffier part.
She hung her laundry out on the line, easily viewable as it was a corner lot, privacy fences having not yet taken over. This demonstrated that she wore actual bloomers, which prompted a quizzical smile from passersby.
I went in her house once on some pretext. It seemed that it must have been almost exactly as it was in the late teens or twenties. (By which I mean, the furniture that people would have had then, which tends not to be the furniture of that moment, but an accumulation of the decades prior.) There was a good deal of lace or crochet about, and some needlepoint on that dull pinkish background that was once so popular, and an actual antimacassar, and I particularly recall a handworked doily draped over the TV. It was a little depressing to me - but not wholly unfamilar, as there had been a brief (shinier) "Victorian" revival in the late 1980s, Laura Ashley most notably (though since we couldn't exactly return to full skirts, corsets, bustles, and buttoned boots, we contented ourselves with the later drop-waist dresses). A friend of mine's mother was mad in those years for those teddy bears in their elaborate little outfits and went full Victorian/teddy bear picnic through all their common rooms - but it was a sunnier effect, not sad and dim. Still very much overstuffed.
I have since been in quite a number of old and faded houses of different periods, because I attend estate sales once in awhile. One thing is plain: people, even those with means, used not to "do over" their houses very readily. (Materialism really has increased!) They "did" their house upon moving in, with their heirlooms and what "living room suite" was on sale in the store downtown, and then just lived in it. For decades. Grand-looking houses in fine leafy neighborhoods often conceal within carpet and drapes that are decades old, and chipped furniture.
There was a midcentury book called "The Tastemakers". I picked it up at an estate sale, actually. (That guy had a ton of interesting books. As I often do, I looked him up afterwards, and found that he had seemingly murdered his wife and yes, utterly gotten away with it.) I didn't find the scheme of it especially persuasive - it was most interesting in its detail - but the title says it all: the author concluded that our tastes have at least in America for the past couple hundred years, been "made" by others, for what he believed were changing reasons. This is true whether or not you think you are ahead of the curve. Whether or not you hew to a Marxism-derived notion of what is bourgeois. You have a range of choices, and most people are satisfied with whatever's on offer.
(From my estate-sale-ing, especially in a military town, I know that distinctly not upper class people were gaga over Asian stuff, after the war - so I think that events may influence fashion - "taste" - as well as the various tastemakers.)
But I think we live with such bounty that there is still a great deal of latitude within that, for personal preference to exercise. For what you find pleasing and cozy - or, if coziness stifles you, for some other arrangement. (I'm amazed in walking by houses at night to find that some people are I guess fine with a single blue overhead light, as though they are living in a lab; I think they are "wrong" in some sense not to know about table lamps and so forth, but even as I feel it, I know it is "wrong" only for me.)
And always, we are usually hearkening back to something - for instance, even the brutalism or Corbusier fans, are looking backward at this point.
A good test of art is longevity, and the appreciation of other cultures. Westerners going to the Taj Mahal, Asians queuing to see Michelangelo‘s David.
David, if sculpted today, would no doubt seem kitsch to modern arbitrars of taste, and it doesn’t really fall into the modern definition of Art. It’s not difficult, it’s not challenging and it’s liked by the uneducated. It also doesn’t critique capitalism in a way that a banana on a wall bought for $6.2 by a crypto millionaire does.
Scott mentions the international style, which is devoid of all ornamentation but is not always fugly, if always bland. Brutalism - some exceptions aside - was always ugly; and was also something beloved by people who needed at least 4 years at undergraduate level to appreciate and more to architect . The creators had the luxury of not living in brutalist buildings though, and none did to my knowledge. The uneducated masses had to.
To be honest I don’t think future generations will flock to the rotting bananas in the same way they do for David, but time will tell.
I don't think Michelangelo's David actually stands out as better than all the statues made since. I think people go to see it *because* it's famous. It's the most well-known statue in the world apart from landmarks. If there's one statue that a person had heard of and can make an effort to go see, it's probably going to be that one. The fame is self-perpetuating. You can't make David unfamous by making better statues; it'll remain famous for historical reasons.
People tend to say seeing the Mona Lisa in person is disappointing, yet it remains popular, I think, not because the experience is great, but because its fame is self-perpetuating. Naturally people want to see one of the world's most famous paintings.
I agree with your main point that most modern art won't endure. On the other hand, if trends are somewhat arbitrary, there will be works from this century that will pass the test of time 100 years from now and remain popular despite not actually having more merit than other works.
There is something to the self perpetuating fame with regard to the Mona Lisa, but the David is a 17 foot masterpiece. Largely undisputed.
The point anyway is that the plebs don’t need a 4 year degree to appreciate either.
“....in the old days, it was hard to keep white clothes clean in the autumn, so if you wore them anyway, it seemed like boasting that you could afford a staff of hard-working maids, and boasting is uncultured.”
…Scott is on to a slightly different explanation here, of why “good taste” exists. Good taste is a sign/signal that you are in control of yourself:
You do not boast.
Don't drink so much that you vomit at the carpet.
Know that if you place your napkin on your lap at dinner you only unfold it once – you never unfold it all the way.
...and so on. In short, estetic preferences has something to do with (or are at least correlated with) self-control, as well as with ability to understand subtle things, grasping qualities that are not immediatelly obvious to everybody, notice stuff that requires a trained eye, and so on.
In this way, people with "taste" can differentiate themselves from those who lack self-control, who do not see subtle sides of anything, and/or only understand what is immediatelly given. Pierre Bourdieus obsession with "The Distinction" is relvant here.
...and Norbert Elias made a grand theory about nothing less that the historical emergence of the superego in the middle ages, based in the increased value he claims people placed on self-control & on noticing the not-immediately-obvious with regard to table manners, esthetics and everything else under the sun (The Civilization Process vol I and II).
ha! I had this intuition about taste being like porn once but never found someone with the same insight. I was listening to particularly abrasive music and thought to myself: well, this is just like a fetish for my ears.
Furthermore, there is no "higher ground" for liking abrasive music as much as there is no higher ground for developing a particularly peculiar taste in porn
My favourite example of kitsch is the paintings of Thomas Kinkade:
https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=thomas+kinkade+painting
Normal people like his paintings a lot, but more "sophisticated" people dislike them. When I first saw them, I couldn't see why anyone would hate them. They are so pretty and charming. Do people hate landscapes, cottages, and sunsets? Are they just snobs who hate nice things? Is it because it's nice art about obvious traditional subjects?
Yet over time, I also got to dislike Thomas Kinkade paintings. They are like what people have said about cheap birthday cake: overly sweet and bland. The lighting doesn't feel realistic and nuanced; the sunsets lack the grandeur and gravitas of real sunsets. It doesn't mean I've gotten to dislike landscapes or sunsets, but I've gotten to dislike the kitschy version.
By contrast, I still like the paintings of Thomas Cole:
https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=thomas+cole+painting
At a first glance, they seemed equally nice. On a surface level, they are also nice paintings about obvious traditional subjects. But they have a staying power and nice details that have remained appealing to me even after having them in my computer desktop rotation for years.
I think it's the same with McMansions. Traditional houses are really nice and any reasonable person likes them. McMansions look like traditional houses at first glance, but if you study them for too long, you get to dislike them. That doesn't mean traditional styles are bad, just that incompetent versions of them are bad.
I want to defend Thomas Kinkade here. I have close family members who very much love them. And they love them for precisely the reasons you dislike them.
They find his work enchanting. They like how he took traditional subjects and gave them an aura of enchantment. The unrealistic lighting lacking nuance is precisely the point - it's clearly not meant to be exactly realistic. It's meant to have a dreamy enchanting feel. And many people love it precisely for that reason.
I get why you dislike this about Kinkade's artwork, but I also get why many people love his work for the exact same reasons. And honestly, I haven't seen much artwork quite like his, which I regret since I wish I could find such artwork for those family members who love it.
Thank you! My late wife liked his work too.
>They find his work enchanting. They like how he took traditional subjects and gave them an aura of enchantment. The unrealistic lighting lacking nuance is precisely the point - it's clearly not meant to be exactly realistic. It's meant to have a dreamy enchanting feel. And many people love it precisely for that reason.
That sounds perfectly reasonable. I had been looking at his paintings as pretty and comforting. "Aura of enchantment" is indeed a reasonable description as well.
Thomas Cole is legitimately great. (Of course, I'm favorably biased toward all the Hudson River School painters, as that's what I saw whenever I looked out a window growing up.) "The Course of Empire", "The Architect's Dream", and "The Titan's Goblet" are in my desktop wallpaper rotation.
Related discussion by Michael Huemer on musical preferences: https://fakenous.substack.com/p/beethoven-vs-baby-shark.
That in turn links to his take on the Shakespeare controversy, in which he sides with Sam Bankman-Fried & Richard Hanania:
https://fakenous.substack.com/p/the-emperors-new-art#§shakespeare
SBF is wrong, Hanania is wrong, and this guy is wrong about Shakespeare.
Do you have prior arguments on the subject you'd like to link?
I'm frankly not familiar enough with Shakespeare to form an independent view, but a factor occurred to me: presumably some true and genuine aspects of art you may appreciate are like NP-problems that are easy to verify once you know the solution, but possibly really difficult to come up with.
Now, let's suppose Shakespeare is "good enough" to have lots of nuance in his works, which is a high but not staggeringly high bar. Given that there's entire libraries of Shakespeare analysis, once exposed to it, you can go "ah, this IS a really clever bit of social commentary", "it never occurred to me until now but that's brilliant use of language" and "I love the artful parallel Shakespeare's plot draws between x and y" and earnestly and unironically love the works for their clever social commentary, brilliant use of language and artful parallels, to such a degree you couldn't get as much out of any other work (and these features wouldn't in any way be fake but actual efforts of Shakespeare's craftsmanship). But that doesn't mean that there aren't contemporary authors one could appreciate just as much if not more, if one were to immerse into them just as deeply.
Certainly, while I'm not immersed in Shakespeare specifically, I know from personal experience that greater enjoyment can come from more intimate knowledge and understanding of the work. For example, knowing to pay attention into psychology of battle and knowing that Tolkien knows of it first-hand, does enhance my reading of Lord of the Rings, and this is a sort of enjoyment I could have acquired from someone telling me "you know, Tolkien fought at the Somme and is deeply immersed in historical sources written by and for warrior-aristocrats who also saw battle: you should pay attention to his depictions of psychology of battle and how it differs from pop-culture depictions like video games or ASOIAF". Or reading volumes of Tolkien analysis, which is a mere fraction of Shakespeare analysis.
Amusingly enough, Tolkien also had a negative take on Shakespeare (at least when it comes to Shakespeare's depiction of fantasy). He thought fantasy was ill-suited to the stage, making his opinion the opposite of George Orwell, who talked about A Midsummer Night's Dream being better watched than read.
I get where he's coming from. Stage plays as a medium does feel a bit too grounded in reality to authentically live up to the promises of fantasy.
A quote from him on the subject:
[...] Drama is naturally hostile to Fantasy. Fantasy, even of the simplest kind, hardly ever succeeds in Drama, when that is presented as it should be, visibly and audibly acted. Fantastic forms are not to be counterfeited. Men dressed up as talking animals may achieve buffoonery or mimicry, but they do not achieve Fantasy. This is, I think, well illustrated by the failure of the bastard form, pantomime. The nearer it is to “dramatized fairy-story” the worse it is. It is only tolerable when the plot and its fantasy are reduced to a mere vestigiary framework for farce, and no “belief” of any kind in any part of the performance is required or expected of anybody. This is, of course, partly due to the fact that the producers of drama have to, or try to, work with mechanism to represent either Fantasy or Magic. I once saw a so-called “children's pantomime,” the straight story of Puss-in-Boots, with even the metamorphosis of the ogre into a mouse. Had this been mechanically successful it would either have terrified the spectators or else have been just a turn of high-class conjuring. As it was, though done with some ingenuity of lighting, disbelief had not so much to be suspended as hanged, drawn, and quartered.
https://coolcalvary.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/on-fairy-stories1.pdf
Going down a level from taste in general. I have never encountered "don't wear white after labor day" as anything besides "fake fashion rule". So: does anybody here actually try and follow this 'rule'? if so, whats your motive?
I see people saying white looks worse in winter, but this seems like an odd thing to say when white is an extremely common non-clothing wintertime decor color. blue/white is all over everything near Christmas/New Year, does that also look wrong?
There's a thing called winter white. The existence of winter white gives women more stuff to buy. Women like having more stuff to buy.
I myself recently purchased a winter white tee shirt. I will in fact probably principally wear it in fall/winter. Under a charcoal cardigan, for instance, where a more pure white tee might suggest "undershirt". Maybe too, it is pleasing to have a white that is not bluish like snow, in snowy places. Color is important to me but I can't actually talk about it. I would similarly confine "jewel tones" to autumn/winter but I don't care for jewel tones against my skin/hair, so that's moot.
For me, the words - "winter white", "jewel tones" - are much of the appeal.
But of course, all rules contain their opposite. I have always kinda wanted a pure snow white, fluffy winter "party" sweater, done in a fine yarn. I will probably never have this, but I can readily imagine it.
I didn't know about winter white, but that does seem to be a handy way to discriminate between the two - don't wear summer white after (whatever date Labour Day is, I'm not American) *but* then you can shift to winter white/frosty and silvery blue tones that match with elements of snow and ice.
Winter white makes me think of ermine, the fur trim that comes from the animal which changes from the brownish fur in summer to the white fur for winter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoat#Fur
So that kind of white as in fur has associations with warmth, suitable for wintertime.
Winter white is definitely off of plain white, e.g. the white-white culottes or jeans you might wear in summer. I really like it though. I don't really understand in what direction, but it's not yellowish; I can't do yellow unfortunately.
I think of fur colors as being suitable for fall/winter generally. I will always associate cashmere in browns or taupes or grey shades, with luxury. This keeps me from falling into the trap of buying the colorful shades on offer in the catalogs or stores; my one foray into contemporary-affordable-to-me cashmere sent me confused, back to merino wool.
tl;dr - If something affects N% of the population, it affects 100% of the population that lives with N and their choices. As N gets large and coordinated, the thing can become load-bearing including the usual signaling routines.
I accept a weak version of A, along with C/D/G.
For the former, I'll largely echo Joel Long's comment above; for an example, I sharpy disagree that black ties on white shirts are a priori equally jarring as black shoes with white socks - ties are far closer to the center of the visual field, and therefore can work as a deliberate contrast instead of as a distraction. Think of it like the "sensory issues" associated with autism etc., but mildly affecting a large portion of the population.
For the latter group, I'm going to steal from @dieworkware: "Clothes are cultural language." Not grammar, *language*. It will look like finicky arbitrary grammar if you're trying to learn it from a perspective of memorizing a long list of individual rules, yet the naturally fluent may never be able to explain what they're doing beyond certain things being Right or Wrong. There are obvious functional ground rules - no screaming into people's ears or wearing sandals in winter - but an appeal to pure functionality absent coordination throws the baby out with the bathwater.
Fashion literacy doesn't get deliberately taught with a goal of universal comprehension the way reading gets taught, but the communication channel isn't empty even for the disinterested. Likewise, the skill curve is such that someone wandering in late from outside will regularly re-litigate “Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick”. It's cultural, it's path-dependent, and yes, it's subjective... but if I've learned even one thing from the old SSC, it's that you can't write off coordination problems!
tl;dr the second: "Attractiveness" is an extremely multifaceted thing. What is attractive is subjective, and can be uncertain even to the subjects. How much effort you spent this morning preparing to be personally attractive is objective, and visible to varying levels of detail. All of the above communicate socially-mediated information.
> What is attractive is subjective, and can be uncertain even to the subjects. How much effort you spent this morning preparing to be personally attractive is objective, and visible to varying levels of detail. All of the above communicate socially-mediated information.
I've always thought it's funny that *women* are the ones that spend the majority of the time shopping, applying makeup, and iterating between different outfits to get that "perfect" look, rather than men.
From all the data shows us (old Oktrends posts, Gwern's analyses, etc), the factors that objectively matter most for female attractiveness are age, symmetry of feature, and hip waist ratio. You can infer HWR through any outfit, and you can plainly see age and symmetry of feature through pretty much any makeup schema. The entire hours-long effort every day is sound and fury, angels dancing on pins, pointless. It will do barely anything to change a woman's objective "attractiveness" ranking relative to other women, which is vastly overdetermined by things that makeup and outfits don't change.
MEN on the other hand - a man's attractiveness is driven by his confidence, fitness, wealth, status, career, and personality attributes. THOSE can be messaged more through outfits. Confidence could be tweaked with subtle makeup, and fitness with better outfits that accentuate your shoulders or arms or whatever. If you dress like a million bucks, you LOOK more like a million bucks, and so higher in mate value. How you dress can actually be reflective of your status, wealth, and personality.
But do men care at all? Nope. Fashion blind, the lot of them, in jeans and t-shirts or hoodies.
It's always seemed to me we should be living in a sort of Louis Quatorze "tights and wigs and flamboyant frock coats" for men sort of schema, and it's always been funny to me that we're not. I mean, male BIRDS get it - what's wrong with men?
I suggest you're approaching this from the wrong angle. Try semiotics. Fashion, in the clothing sense, is about reconciling two irreconcilables: showing which group you belong to and standing out from the crowd. The result is the ouija board we see.
re goed: dunno what controls American language but here in England the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) monitors and documents first and current usage but makes no judgements. There is only observed and novel.
I've always wondered how OED handles learn and lend, which are regularly "misused" as in, "he learned me" and "I lent it off him". The online version says of 'lent': "Formerly often used where we should now say 'Borrowed', so they do make judgments after all! (The two words are almost homophones and similar in spelling, so, I assume, in ChatGPT-like fashion, they occupy connected nodes in the brain and uneducated (yes, sorry!) people tend to use the grammatical construct of the wrong one.)
Finally, what are you wearing these days Scott? I may need a new look in 3 or 4 years time...
The more you (mindfully) consume something, the more you’ll develop a sense of what about it you like and what about it you don’t like. Some of what you like about it might be fairly universal and quasi-objective, other things will be more specific to you. Some of it will be more “innate”, some of it will be more influenced by existing social norms you’ve been exposed to.
None of this means that taste is “fake” though, taste is just a deep appreciation and understanding of what makes you enjoy things.
I have “shallow” taste when it comes to coffee and wine. I like coffee and wine okay, I can discern some good from bad, but for the most part different coffees and wines taste sort of similar to me. The experience of consuming them is fine, it’s mildly enjoyable, but not really a source of significant joy for me.
I have “deeper” taste for TV shows and movies. I know what I like and watching really good TV feels really fulfilling to me. I also don’t like a lot of it, probably I dislike more than I like of the TV that get consumed on average. But that doesn’t mean I enjoy TV less. TV in general is much greater source of enjoyment for me than coffee, even though I think most coffee is good enough.
But upon reflecting I think the most appropriate theory is F - taste is like fashion, but with a class spin: taste is also about signaling that you have (cultural) capital without actually boasting about your capital, which would be distasteful
You could read Bordieu to get a deeper sense of this theory, but if you are lazy or don't like reading purposefully obscure continental philosophy there is this awesome series by Dynomight: https://dynomight.net/bourdieu/
I missed this discussion in its last incarnation, and after 5 hours and 180 additional comments, I likely have missed this one as well. But I suspect all of this is over-complicating the matter. Taste is just the baby brother of taboo, which is to say it is an evolved cultural mechanism for creating cohesive group behavior. The reason why it is so incoherent and pointless now is because we have drifted so far from our evolved cultures that the instinct remains with little of evolutionary worth to get traction on.
Good example: orcas suddenly developing a trend of attacking boats in 2020. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian_orca_attacks
Attacking boats is so 2020. They're wearing fish as hats now.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/for-orcas-dead-salmon-hats-are-back-in-fashion
"People feel on a deep level that poor grammar is wrong - misplaced apostrophes can send pedant’s into a rage."
I hate this so much.
*You* hate it?! This precise sentence so infuriated my Apostrophe that it insisted I stop reading. I never reached the posts end so I have no idea what Scotts final conclusion's were.
Greengrocer's love this one weird trick?
Is it possible that fashion/architectural taste could be something like literal taste? If you expect something to taste bad, it more often does, and the reverse is true as well. So a normal person hears about beautiful art, thinks of something bright and intricate, and then indeed likes it. Sophisticated people are told that art is transcendent and subtle, and so they imagine a big grey square and then find a cement block beautiful because they expect to. Both groups then have their expectations confirmed and further entrenched, and it is only by being punished for their original reactions that they can be reformed to the other side.
My problem with non-sophisticated beauty isn’t that I think it’s wrong, but I think it isn’t clearly less correct classy art. I don’t understand classy art, but it clearly makes classy people feel a lot of emotions, so it seems to be doing something.
E reminds me of this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/915/
And D is a lot like https://xkcd.com/1015/.
I've been formally inducted into one of the aesthetic priesthoods (I have an MFA in Literary Arts) so I've thought a lot about these questions. One extremely important factor missing from this discussion is purpose.
To pick an easy example: socks have a purpose and ties have a different purpose, both of which accord with the more general purpose of the men's suit; so it's not strange that high contrast between socks and shoes would feel different from high contrast between shirt and tie. Socks (it seems to me) are a transitional element between shoes and pants. Their purpose is mainly practical, but also serves the aesthetic purpose of harmonizing the pants and shoes. High contrast doesn't serve the purpose of harmonization. Ties have no practical purpose (hiding buttons is ornamental, not practical); their purpose is to communicate something deliberate. That makes high contrast appropriate sometimes (the tie says, "Look at how sharp and clean white and black look").
And the purpose of the suit interfaces with the purpose of the human body. Feet have a very different purpose from chests. So the fact that the color rules for foot clothes are different from the color rules for chest clothes doesn't require explanation, and certainly doesn't make the color rules any less legitimate.
I pondered for many years what makes a novel great. Eventually, I realized that novels do so many different things, encompass such a wide variety of purposes, that it's impossible to hold them all to the same standard. A novel can hold up a mirror to a nation and teach it who it is. It can satirize one specific political figure and two generations later be incomprehensible except to niche historians. It can speak one universal truth to any human being whose language it's been translated into. It can tell kids "It's okay to be different". It can create a record of the inner feeling of living in some particular time and place, it a way that's more honest than a nonfiction diary could be. It can represent an entry into a highly structured genre, such that its readers judge it successful if it includes 100% of some checklist of required elements.
Each of those is a different purpose. The rules of composition that serve one will impede the success of another. Aesthetics is bound up in purpose. Many of the difficulties this article confronts will fall away on considering the purpose of the thing.
It seems like having sharp contrast that draws attention to man's face is obviously more desirable than drawing attention to a man's feet.
On the other hand there was a period when white spats were the heighth of fashion.
There's a funny Wodehouse article about spats, but I can't seem to find it. He talks about how he would keep his spats perfectly clean and neat, because high class servants will see your perfect spats and let you into the house, even if the rest of your clothes are a bit untidy or threadbare. (It strikes me just now that maybe this is where Douglas Adams lifted his joke about towels!) So you can see how high contrast in spats serves the purpose of the outfit.
I did some amateur pondering on color rules for lingerie, and concluded that it works in exactly the opposite way as socks: lingerie should maximize contrast with skin color. Thus, "nude" is the least sexy color, as it invokes a desexualized Barbie doll.
I do think poseurs about taste exist at all and affect the popular conception of art at all, especially in forms of art with fewer degrees of freedom (like architecture), but I feel like it's pretty silly to be this dismissive! I'm not an art person at all, but I've enjoyed literary fiction a couple times, and that experience made it clear to me that "tasteful" things are the things which reward you for paying attention and thinking about them. It isn't as monolithic as this article seems to portray it - disagreements among art people regarding taste are the norm and not the exception. This article seems like an example of Scott's occasional tendency to misunderstand people by trying to learn about them by simulating them in his mind without much training data - people into "tasteful" stuff are happy to tell you why they like something if you ask nicely, or to try to help you appreciate what they appreciate if you just approach in a non-adversarial way. They only roll over and start emitting illegible non-arguments in adversarial environments.
The signalling dynamics of "taste is like fashion" are a basically correct, but it feels too focused on status. It's not just "good taste" and "cool kids": the way a person reacts to art that is sacred/violent/weird is supposed to be a glimpse into their personality. The mapping from artistic preferences to personality (and cultural context) is certainly not straightforward, but this "fog of war" makes signals harder to fake or suppress while also providing some plausible deniability, greasing the wheels of social interaction.
My analogy would be that debating art is like bonding over getting wasted together: it's supposed to make you vulnerable to revealing stuff you wouldn't ordinarilly, thus increasing trust or revealing significant disagreements.
Taste, in this sense, is fundamentally a question of familiarity with saturated content; alternatively, it is a novelty-seeking behavior.
We have it here, too. We get tired of people bringing up the same questions-and-answers that have been brought up on your blogs over and over and over again. Tasteful commentators are the ones who are familiar with the constantly-retread ground and are familiar enough with the general content that they are able to consistently identify what comments would be "novel"; we group in with them the people whose worldviews are consistently different enough that they, also, end up producing "novel" content.
Taste isn't subjective, but it isn't objective, either; it is relative. A tasteful commenter here might be a bore somewhere else, and a bore there might be a tasteful commenter here.
"Taste isn't subjective, but it isn't objective, either; it is relative"
Love this, and agree with this comment wholeheartedly
I didn't quite see this approach in any of the options: maybe participating in a cultural system of taste-making is inherently good (i.e suitable to our nature, helping us flourish), even as the specifics of the taste rules of any given time and place are indefensible in any kind of absolute way. It's almost as if learning to appreciate something that has been built according to *some* set of arcane rules has its own pleasure.
I'm sure taste making has many layers to it. It's hard to separate it from identity making and status jostling in a wider sense, the kind of aesthetics I appreciate (or denigrate) is a way of associating myself with some groups of people and away from others. But there's a strong element of personal enjoyment too.
And once again, just because taste rules are arcane and not metaphysically absolute doesn't mean they are completely arbitrary either. There may be rough directions in which we are inherently able to hone our sensibilities, even as cultures provide the specifics of the landscape.
Have to quibble that foray into BDSM isn't merely driven by desensitization. I've never read a convincing report of the psychological factors, but I can say that well before streaming was a thing and just at the point where porn piracy was easily accessible online, I thought to search for e.g. dominant women (and then you could argue that porn consumption further entrenched the tendency to the point of addiction). Incidentally, I find that years after quitting porn, this interest wanes unless you explicitly feed it. That is, I perfectly enjoy vanilla escapades without feeling as though I miss out on anything else, but if I indulge in s&m I would still enjoy it. I'm not sure how I feel about it today, but that could be because I associate it with a negative formative period. I think the overconsumption was harmful, but I'm not sure if BDSM in itself is.
Anyway, taste. This is about two components that cannot be divorced from one another.
On the one hand, taste serves a purpose in signaling, forming bonds. Once, if you wanted to stand out, you'd have to do interesting things like write a symphony, build something or perform a feat. In consumer culture we're told that consumer choices will make us interesting and/or likeable. Teens in particular feel this pressure. They have the task of sussing out what things are important to purchase and what isn't, in this arms race.
The other vector is plainly pleasure. Not much to say except some people develop a wider tolerance to variety over time and some don't. It's not all "faking", but some of it may be. For my part I appreciate a bit of dissonance in music and interesting twists and turns, but I've heard some avant-garde that really does just sound like noise and I bounce off of it.
I think the reasons Scott gives to be suspicious of taste apply to most human pursuits, including ones involving "objective" questions.
1. "Taste seems to constantly change." The way physicists do physics constantly changes. People find new ideas they like better than older ideas; this in itself doesn't demonstrate this assessment is correct or not.
2. "Even very sophisticated people seem to disagree about taste." Even very smart and knowledgeable scientists disagree about science, including objective questions that are theoretically verifiable by future experiment.
3. "When we see how the sausage gets made, it often involves politics or power struggles." It is true in all fields I can think of (including physics) that politics, money, reputation etc. play a big role in what ideas become popular and influential, not just who is objectively correct.
4. "The few scientific experiments we have - hoaxes, blind tests, etc - are not very kind to taste as a concept." It's very hard for people outside a field to judge which scientific arguments are superior--definitely random people will do a bad job.
So I don't think these reasons even suffice to reject the "it's like physics" analogy--in these respects art is like physics.
Physics seems to have changed much less since the invention of string theory than it did in the comparable stretch of time before it. But that may be because we've plucked the low-hanging fruit and additional insights require particle-accelerators on such scales that we still haven't built them.
Tastes and fashion change but one thing I've noticed is impervious to change: rich people like to be where other rich people are, especially when they vacation.
Unlike social sciences, physics differences seems to converge. Old theories can explain 500000 things, new theories can explain 500001 things, but they're (should be) in agreement for 500000 things. That one anomaly is why new theory is needed. On the contrary, social tastes seems like seesawing a lot in a cycle, divergent, and it'll never reach a singularity.
D doesn't seem charitable enough. it could be that normal people would perceive a light blue tie as feminine subconsciously, but tie wearers need sophisticated forum poasters to tell them that.
The cringe of the forum poster is composed of a magnified sense of the femininity, and cringe at the lack of knowledge of the wearer.
Some people like ugly dogs, some people like dogs that look as much like a pretty toy as possible. This is all the same phenomena. There is natural taste, for things like symmetry, big eyes, and colors that map to the natural environment, unique colors like orange hair/fur. However, people need to signal, the easist way to set a clear boundry is to do the opposite of what is natural. So as humans we are always playing with our natural taste, and it's opposite, mixing elements of both as fashion. So I think dogs with smushed faces are viserally ugly, in fact a wretch when they come near me. But other folks say I'm going to make the ugly thing cute, because reasons. The other thing going is something is slightly broken in them and a bit got switched from 1 to 0. It stands to reason if you have a natural taste for something, some people naturally won't have it and others will have it swing the opposite way. This helps evolution get unstuck.
I put a very high value on being surprised. The feeling of surprise is one of the great pleasures in my life, in part because it is very rare, especially in the fields where I am inclined to seek it out. I love reading fiction. The more I read, the harder it is to be surprised. I start to recognize certain ways of crafting a plot, or using language, or papering over a lack of imagination. I start to recognize certain styles that writers love and start to copy. The first time I read Thomas Bernhard, it was radical and surprising, and I got a lot of pleasure out of it. There are many authors who felt the same, and loved his style so much that they imitated it. I can vaguely enjoy reading those authors, but it's not the original enjoyment, because it's not as surprising.
And often, within the first couple of pages of a new book, I'll just think, yeah, I've seen this before, and I'll lose interest. It's not that I can guess every plot point, or write it myself. The texture of the language feels familiar in some way. When I think of someone as being unsophisticated, what I really mean is they're too easily surprised. For someone to say they love reading but to only read mass-market thrillers sounds to me like someone saying they really love math but actually they just love multiplying numbers together. Maybe what I feel is just envy at the reproducibility of their pleasure.
But surprise and beauty have to go together in some way. With the Bernhard example, it doesn't quite work the other way around--if I encounter an imitation of a style before the original, I get more pleasure than vice-versa (there's some surprise), but the original still offers more pleasure when I get to it, because writers who can invent an original style, even though they also all imitate to some extent, are doing something deeper and better than those who can't, something that is still offers surprise even on re-read (which is why there's often more surprise in re-reading a classic than in reading a bad book I've never read before). Some of this might be priesthood--there are writers who are canonized and to whom one pays greater attention while reading, and so ends up in some way more open to surprise. There are presumably some kinds of stepladders of surprise that one has to climb to be pleasantly surprised by, say, Arno Schmidt. There are formal inventions that are too easy to imitate, that were surprising at one time but now have been copied so much that the original is no longer pleasurable (say, a blank canvas presented as art). There are personal preferences in terms of what counts as good surprise. There are times when even people with great taste will get excited en masse about a questionable style (Ossian). But, even if I can't prove it, I believe there's still something irreducible to the best works, which manage to work within certain aesthetic principles while making them fresh or surprising or changing them in some way. Are these principles arbitrary? Yes, but if anything the writers I consider boring and unsophisticated tend to hew even more closely to these principles, whereas the writers who do something special break those principles in interesting ways. The priesthood spends all its time trying to catch up to its best priests, while the laypeople recite yesteryear's daring prayers, now thrice warmed over, and call it anti-elitism.
Maybe architecture is a bit different because we can't all live in twenty or thirty amazing buildings, so we have to deal more generously with imitations. Also we craft architecture at the level of a building but consume architecture at the level of a neighborhood, and there are artistic principles that apply to neighborhoods that individual architects don't pay attention to while crafting buildings. Still, I think this applies to many fields.
"Also we craft architecture at the level of a building but consume architecture at the level of a neighborhood, and there are artistic principles that apply to neighborhoods that individual architects don't pay attention to while crafting buildings."
Assuming the architecture "priesthood" has seen, studied, and experienced much more in this domain, it's reasonable to expect they place a greater value on being surprised.
This would lead them to prioritize novelty (the stereotypical groundbreaking modern building) over harmony and symmetry more than the general public, who relatively value harmony more (that modern building looks completely out of place in my neighborhood).
I am a domain expert on this topic.
Taste is the ability to detect aesthetic quality. What you're really trying to determine is whether aesthetic quality is subjective and thus socialized, or objective in a way that people can be factually right or wrong about (like physics).
To begin with, the subjective/objective split isn't coherent. Phenomenologists who deal with aesthetics, such as Merleau-Ponty, characterize human existence as an embodied aspect of the universe upon which other parts of the universe operate. Regarding honey, he writes, "To say that honey is viscous is another way of saying that it is sugary: it is to describe a particular relationship between us and the object or to indicate that we are moved or compelled to treat it in a certain way, or that it has a particular way of seducing, attracting or fascinating the free subject who stands before us." The nature of the world is not subjective or objective, but relational. Sensitive observations we make of the world are not complete from what would be the standpoint of an omniscient observer, but they are true in that they reveal real and salient properties about the world. When something is aesthetically good, it's good in that latter sense.
A social and variable layer sits upon that activity of aesthetic quality; fashions change, but the desire to be dressed well and meaningfully is perennial and seems to be ubiquitous across cultures. The two are hard to disentangle because they're different aspects of the same process. Taste is a perceptual skill and can be exercised in a better or worse way. Like any skill, it can be honed.
I thought viscosity was a matter of flow rather than sugar-content, such that oils could also be viscous without having any sugar.
It's valid to talk about it that way. MMP was discussing the experience of honey, in which its viscosity, it's sugary-ness, its color, and all else are revealed aspects of a phenomenon.
Yup! And, to expand your "matter of flow" point, it is the ratio of the shear stress imposed on a liquid to the rate of flow produced by that stress. Reproducibly measurable via e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viscometer
"Taste is the ability to detect aesthetic quality."
Isn't this assuming the conclusion, or at least framing it in a deliberately leading way? Suppose I say that WWF wrestling is the greatest form of art known to man, and you disagree. If I summarize our argument as "WWF wrestling has high aesthetic quality, but we disagree on whether this is subjective or objective", I'm already granting myself quite a lot.
I'm not sure I understand your lack of subjective/objective distinction - it seems obvious to me that physics is objective, but which animes are good is subjective. Your examples don't really help - to say that honey is sugary seems completely different from saying that it's viscous - for example, sugar is sugary but not viscous; oil is viscous but not sugary. I agree that it's hard to perfectly ground objective things (it may be objectively true that an elephant is larger than a mouse, but we have to experience them in order to get that), but this is the general problem of knowledge that philosophers have various opinions on and solutions to, and I don't think these just amount to denying that we can know stuff in a non-subjective way.
Can you explain more about how your perspective would treat, for example, the "is an elephant objectively bigger than a mouse?" example.
The elephant is bigger than the mouse in ways that you can measure, but aesthetics belong to a qualitative world that is not measurable. At the same time, it's philosophically inadequate (and feels wrong) to claim that the qualitative world begins and ends in the atomic, individual consciousness, or worse, is arbitrary and unreal because it's not measurable, or worse still, would allow me to say that at least for me, the mouse is bigger than the elephant if I stand far away from the elephant and hold up the mouse close to my face.
If you insist on keeping the subjective/objective split - which is an eminently reasonable thing to do - then taste is objective. This is the claim that Clement Greenberg made, and his basis was that if taste were subjective, there would be no mechanism to form consensus. Everyone would just like what he liked and art history wouldn't form. Generation after generation would not continue to gravitate toward Leonardo, Rembrandt, and so on. (Later Marxist and post-Marxist critics tried to argue that such tastes are formed and enforced by capital or some other bugbear, but let's leave that aside.)
The problem with Greenberg's argument is that it doesn't deal with the question of why preferences differ from person to person if taste is objective. To my thinking, the qualitative world depends on contingencies. A chair is hard, I can sit on it and it will hold me. To a drill bit the chair is not hard, I can plunge a hole in it. So the hardness of the chair is contingent on how I want to interact with it. The beauty of the chair is contingent on its shape, material, its workmanship, the examples of other chairs in comparison, and much more. If I have good taste in chairs I'll be able to evaluate those contingencies sensitively and knowledgeably. Taste is the ability to detect quality. Of course, I'm a contingent phenomenon as well, and I bear a different set of contingencies than others. But we differ from one another less than we generally think, and if I like a chair it's probable that someone else will like the chair for basically the same reasons. So it is with Rembrandt.
Another way of dealing with this is to regard the subjective/objective split as an illusion or bias of consciousness, and to regard perception as a kind of skill in which we reach out to other areas of the world of which we are an inseparable part. Alva Noë uses this model. In this notion, even to see something plainly is a skill, and taste is a skill of visual judgment that can be more or less astute, or exercised well or poorly. This has the advantage of softening the distinction between the measurable and qualitative domains, and allows lapses of taste to be failures of skill rather than failures to apprehend objective reality.
"If you insist on keeping the subjective/objective split - which is an eminently reasonable thing to do - then taste is objective. This is the claim that Clement Greenberg made, and his basis was that if taste were subjective, there would be no mechanism to form consensus. Everyone would just like what he liked and art history wouldn't form. Generation after generation would not continue to gravitate toward Leonardo, Rembrandt, and so on. (Later Marxist and post-Marxist critics tried to argue that such tastes are formed and enforced by capital or some other bugbear, but let's leave that aside.)"
I think this is part of what I'm trying to argue against in this essay - Hindu purity laws, grammar, and fashion seem to be subjective, but we can form consensus about them anyway.
That we can form consensuses about them suggests that they're not entirely subjective. Again, I propose that (assuming the subjective/objective split) there's an objective substrate to a subjective activity in such cases. The specifics of Hindu laws may be subjective but the need to live morally is objective. The specifics of English grammar and usage may be subjective but good communication is objective. What counts as good fashion at the moment is subjective but that a person may be dressed well or badly is objective. Moreover, in many cases, you're not going to be able to describe whether a given manifestation of culture (like subject-verb-object order in English) is an objective requirement or a subjective one because we're talking about two sides of a singular cultural process.
"If I summarize our argument as "[professional] wrestling has high aesthetic quality, but we disagree on whether this is subjective or objective,' I'm already granting myself quite a lot."
I would gladly let you grant yourself that. The problem is that if that's a subjective impression, then you'll have a hard time recovering your previous assertion, that professional wrestling is the greatest form of art known to man, because now you're making a subjective claim on behalf of other people. If it's objective, then you're challenged with articulating what inheres in professional wrestling which makes it a greater vehicle for human expression than any art form that has appeared over the same hundred-year history - say, jazz. You're not going to be able to make that case. They're wildly different creative forms, first of all. Then the emotional range and recognized masterpieces of jazz don't have equivalents in wrestling. So the subjective/objective disagreement is the least of your challenges. Merleau-Ponty articulated the relational model out of impatience with totalizing claims like the example.
On a related note, one of my criticisms of The Creative Act by Rick Rubin is that he doesn't spend enough time talking about wrestling, which he adores and has promoted, and too much time talking about painting, with which he clearly doesn't connect.
https://dissidentmuse.substack.com/p/the-creative-act-2
I wish he had said (if that's what he thinks) that professional wrestling has not been given adequate credit as a vehicle for human expression and discussed what makes great professional wrestling great. I would have conceded that he enjoys wrestling more than fiction or painting and listened attentively to what wrestling can tell us about creativity.
When it comes to art, the right question is usually not which claims are true, but which claims are salvageable.
Here to register that I like brutalism and McMansions alike. It's convenient having broad tastes. I have equally broad tastes when it comes to music, fashion and painting. Not through any particular effort, I don't think, but just because that's how I'm built.
Nor do I think I experience art in a shallow way. On the contrary, I think this broadness is related to my ability to really hone in on aspects that I like in a flawed work and really enjoy those aspects to the exclusion of all else. I wouldn't call that a shallow experience.
I may never be a homeowner, and I'll certainly never be able to build a home from scratch, but if I ever can. I will probably live in a building so over the top of that it brings together warring factions in agreeing that I am tacky. Probably some type of Castle or Aztec Temple or something.
I think there's some degree of "pagerank" (http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/) going on. While it does not explain taste from first principles, the idea is that "good taste is what people with good taste have". This is self referential but the process miraculously converges!
Scott Aaronson used that idea to create "eigenmorality":
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1820
To tie this to a point I've made and tried to endorse elsewhere in the thread, I think part of the mechanism is that people get good taste by engaging with older generations of tastemakers, and the stuff they have endorsed as good.
It's the same way language changes: by exposure to previous speakers of the language. The directionality that path dependence imposes is at least a little bit arbitrary, but once it's established, it constrains you in such a way that you can't go arbitrarily far away from the previous iteration
All of this seems right, but I will offer a defence of the semi-fake justifications.
Until outrageously recently, pretty much all expressions of taste were some form of showing off wealth.
Wealth was in general amassed by taking it from other people and violently oppressing them in some way. So all taste was various flavours of robberbarontaste.
In approximately the early 20th century, we had the idea that this was a bad thing, and we should really not show off about stolen wealth, because that's kind of like showing off about stealing, and we're really trying to be people who don't do that any more.
Therefore in the 20th century, the artists/artisans whose job had previously been to stamp RICH LUXURY WINNER on everything became directionless, and came up with all kinds of crazy shit.
(It also became possible in the 20th century to get rich by doing good stuff, but there are still more people who get rich by stealing it, and we're still in the rebound phase from robberbarontaste.)
The crazy random ideas about what is good art/architecture/fashion are truly random and don't deserve your compliance. However, they do share a general good feature, which is that they are all honest efforts to work out what to do with the effervescent creativeness that seems to exist in our species, if it is not to be used exclusively in the service of the idea Iambiggerstrongerbetterthanyou.
> Wealth was in general amassed by taking it from other people and violently oppressing them in some way.
I think Greg Clark would disagree about this applying in England.
> It also became possible in the 20th century to get rich by doing good stuff
Come on, the industrial revolution predates that by a good while.
> there are still more people who get rich by stealing it
No, the wealthy do not mostly consist of thieves, and crime does not pay. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2007/06/why_do_the_poor.html
I dunno who Greg Clark is. I mean, I'd be willing to consider pushing back the date a bit for some western countries. But I don't think anywhere had universal suffrage before the 20th century, did it?
The industrial revolution predates the 20thC, but wealth accumulation was much faster in the 20thC.
I'm using stealing in a very political and polemical way here. I'm not talking about petty criminals, but about the large scale and (in my view) illegitimate stranglehold on wealth maintained by violent rulers and their heirs in the premodern world.
This is the Greg Clark I was referring to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Clark_(economist)
He has studied probate records to see what property people were leaving to their heirs, which also allowed him to see things like which surnames died out vs increased. His finding was that what the Soviets would call "kulaks" were able to thrive while aristocrats killed each other off, and that this process led to people becoming more patient & less violent over time.
Oh, yeah, I remember now, the surnames guy. I'm not immediately understanding how his work would relate to my argument. He argued that social status has been very stable over long periods, didn't he? That's consistent with what I'm suggesting: status was won through violent conquest, then aristos effectively prevented social churn and maintained their families' social and economic superiority (through, I suggest, nefarious means).
I'm pretty uncomfortable with claims like "kulaks thrived...aristocrats killed each other off". Like, I can imagine that on some group level that might be true, but it still seems likely that for any individual aristocrat, life was much better than for any individual kulak. And during this process, the aristocrats would still have been exploiting the kulaks.
To return to the theme of the post, I certainly think premodern Russian architecture is consistent with the theme of Iambiggerstrongerbetterthanyou.
He documented DOWNWARD social mobility: in a Malthusian environment there are more children than there is property to divide up. Space at the bottom is opened up by the surnames that disappeared.
The posted link is very compatible with the idea that the state cracks down harshly on blue-collar crime while only prosecuting the most egregious examples of white collar crimes, which largely get ignored as a cost of doing business
Most "white collar crime" is also committed by relatively poor people. Thus the argument that the term is a misnomer and enforcement is "regressive": https://southerncalifornialawreview.com/2024/06/22/regressive-white-collar-crime/
The clearance rate for homicide is rather low in inner-cities, and homicide gets far more resources than, for example, non-fatal shootings. That there are still large numbers of people in prison is because criminals commit lots of crimes until they eventually get caught.
Your point about the Hindu priesthood reminds me that the same thing is true is Judaism, with the caveat that there are sects and subsects whose doctrinal differences are sometimes glossed over for solidarity against the goyim, but which lead to bitter internecine battles. I have formulated this into a law which says: "For any Jew, there's always a law of Judaism you don't know, and always a group of Jews ready to ridicule you for not knowing or following it." To lead back to the discussion of taste, these distinctions have some sort of basis tied to ancient texts and rational extension, but simple disagreement over these bases and bandwagon effects create partially overlapping zones of practice, with deviations regarded as lapses in understanding of the commands of God. So it is with taste, with similar doctrinal differences, sects, understandings and practices.
My reaction to that part was "_how_ sure are you that all the Hindu priests get the same answer to novel situations?" because as-a-Jew I can see that...not happening.
I didn't want to display my ignorance of Hindu practice by asking the same question, but, yeah.
My example was very much motivated by Judaism, but I switched it to Hinduism at the last second because there are lots of (mostly Christian) religious people here who come up with motivated excuses for any Biblical laws ("it only bans pork because there were parasites in it back in Biblical times") and I felt like I had a chance of avoiding that if I switched it to Hinduism.
I do feel like it's almost miraculous how much rabbis agree on the basics even without a central authority.
The story of the Septuagint is miraculous; in kashrut, for example, I think you know a different set of Jews than I do.
I'm pretty uneducated about Judaism, but when I think of kashrut, I think of things like no milk with meat, different sets of dishes for milk and meat, etc. Although I understand the absolute basics are in the Talmud, my impression is that the Talmud doesn't list the exact number of hours (but most Jews have converged on six), doesn't specify that you need two different sets of dishes (but most Jews have converged on yes), and don't specify what foods are pareve (though most Jews have converged on the same list). I understand some of these convergences are Ashkenazi only, but that's still half of Europe agreeing on something!
I know of a few areas where there are genuine disagreements (eg kitinyot on Passover), but AFAIK those are pretty unusual and often highlighted as one of the places where authorities disagree.
Re
>some sort of basis tied to ancient texts and _rational extension_
There is a mathematical analog to rational extension called analytic continuation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_continuation . This comes from complex function theory, and applies to functions in the complex plane. The basic idea, like rational extension, is that you start with the function in one area and can extend it (classically by taking its derivatives and building a power series) to a larger area.
The interesting point for this discussion is that, while this can sometimes lead to a function that is defined and consistent throughout the whole complex plane ( "entire" functions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entire_function ), it can also lead to _inconsistent_ results.
For example, if you take the square root function, (e.g. starting with the positive square root, e.g. starting at sqrt(+1)=+1) and try to analytically continue it around the unit circle, when you get back to the start, you will be looking at the negative square root branch.
So, even in this very simple case of extending a function with a perfectly well defined procedure in just a two dimensional plane one can get "inconsistent" (really multivalued, in this case) results.
This is kind-of the simplest version of path dependence giving conflicting
>doctrinal differences, sects, understandings and practices
i think scott doesn’t like taste because he thinks of preferences as exogenous. scott thinks of himself as someone who exogenously likes pretty, kitsch ai paintings, and the people being mean and saying he just has bad taste are bullies who just exogenously like other, more traditionally celebrated forms of art, perhaps for reasons of social milieu or perhaps by chance. why not let bygones be bygones?
but preferences and taste are also endogenous to the amount of time and effort you put into consuming and learning about art. time and taste are complements, up to a point. people who love art are compelled by curiosity to learn about it, and they rationally seek to learn from other people who have spent a lot of time studying and loving it. taste is not just a religious or social-hierarchical desire to learn the elite rules of the game. maybe part of it is that kind of herding/signalling equilibrium. but there is also a real hierarchy of human capital investment, too
accepting that you do not start out with good taste, that it is something you will acquire with time, and that your appreciation will deepen with it, is a good perspective to have. if i don’t like a piece of art, yet someone who i perceive as having good taste and a deep knowledge and appreciation does like it, i will often think “what am i missing?” it doesn’t mean everyone will converge to the same objective truth as they learn more—it’s a “heterogeneous rankings” world—but conditional convergence is strong
i think this is all pretty uncontroversial when discussed in the context of things like math, science, philosophy, politics and economics. students in the early phases of their education accept that those above them have a better appreciation of what is good and interesting in these subjects. for some reason, this breaks people’s heads with things like art poetry and fashion. scott is an aesthete in many ways, with strong preferences over writing styles, modes of logical argumentation, micro-political ideologies. but he also maybe wears sweatpants and t shirts because theyre comfortable, listens to the same music he got into in college, has some kitschy art (or maybe an mc escher poster) on his wall. to someone a bit more advanced in the areas of fashion, music, and art, these are recognizably “intro level” tastes. similar to how people just getting into politics for the first time tend to certain opinions (teenage anarchism, etc). i think scott should be open minded to the possibility that he—and most of his readers—have bad taste, and that’s not a reflection of their exogenous characteristics, but rather a reflection of a lack of investment in these areas
There is objective truth in science, and thus genuine experts rather than "experts" https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/10/20/the-experts/
hierarchies of knowledge, experience and judgment exist in all areas, even science. it is rational for junior scientists to look to more senior distinguished scientists for guidance on which hypotheses to explore, which methods to use, what is an interesting question. in pure areas where applications are distant, these are not “hard” scientific objective judgments but are very important for determining what works gets done and where funding gets allocated. virtually all mathematics theorems published are “true”, but which ones are interesting and worthwhile is almost entirely a matter of subjective taste among elite mathematicians
expertise is not a substitute for truth in areas where objective truth does not exist or is not accessible. scientific replication also has limits (you’re not going to build your own large hadron collider) and adjusts very slowly (look how slow progress has been since the original alarm bells of the replication crisis were sounded a decade ago)
There is indeed a hierarchy within science:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2850928/
Aren't you just assuming the conclusion here?
We both agree (I think) that people start out with exogenous preferences. Then some of those people take an art class, and after a while, their preferences shift to the standard sophisticated ones. We're debating whether that's just learning and deeply-internalizing a set of arbitrary rules, or something more interesting. I interpret your comment as rehashing that agreed-upon foundational situation, but as concluding that therefore it must be the more interesting one - if I'm missing an argument there, you'll have to explain it to me in more depth.
people start out with exogenous preferences, they endogenously choose whether to invest more time in consuming and learning about art, then their preferences evolve. the evolution is a mix of “learning the rules” and also something resembling human capital formation. investments in traditional human capital (education, training, work experience) create skills that are valuable in production which are rewarded by higher wages. investments in aesthetic human capital allow one to extract more* utility from consumption. to the extent i disagree with your post, i think it’s because you’re missing the human capital investment dimension
personally, i found the experience of studying math similar to studying poetry. i started out with preferences (i like algebra more than real analysis), but as i learned more i was able to digest more complex proofs, gained an appreciation for abstraction, and came to like certain proof methods over other (i.e. prefer direct proofs to proof by contradiction). similarly, i started out with preferences in poetry, but i learned to be able to read more complex poems without getting frustrated or confused, appreciated abstraction, and grew to appreciate qualities of poems that i had previously not been able to discern. i don’t think it makes much sense to say “if someone hasn’t read much math, and their favorite theorem is the Pythagorean theorem, that’s equally valid as someone who has studied more and loves Galois theory, since the latter has just learned the rules of what is considered abstract math by academic elites.” same goes for poetry, even though no poem is true and poetry is useless
another example is chefs or food critics learning to develop their palette. an extreme subjectivist opinion that says “kids who only eat mac and cheese with ketchup are just as valid arbiters of taste as gordon ramsay, people who claim to like fine french cooking have just learned a set of rules” is wrong. people who used to be picky eaters are very grateful they made that transition
*while i concede that in some cases learning more about art can decrease your utility of specific works of art, i don’t think it can lower your utility *over all*. (if some annoying art people seem to be negative utility monsters for whom this is true, this probably has more to do with their way of expressing themselves)
Everything I understand about taste I have learned from music. In music, there is a huge diversity of genres. There is music considered by many to be snobby or kitschy.
Snobby music: there is painfully screechy noise music that people unironically listen to and enjoy. Or modern classical which is similarly unlistenable. Many even find Bach to be boring, or bebop jazz to unpleasantly sound like playing a bunch of random notes at the same time.
Kitchy music, depending on who you ask, could be modern pop, or modern country music, or children’s music in TV shows, or Kenny G.
The biggest feature of music compared with other art forms is the dominance of pop. Unlike in architecture, the people’s choice is respected and celebrated. Of course, many people also think modern pop sucks!
I would venture to say that unless you can truly understand and theoretically agree why every single music genre has merit, you do not understand taste.
To me, the explanation of taste is that it is a question of context/audience.
First, you can think of making a playlist for a certain event. What songs should go in? There is sort of an objective answer to this question. Different music is good in different situations.
Second, people’s tastes change over time. Often you really do get bored of cliche stuff and start to enjoy the more “difficult” music over time.
My best example of this is learning to like jazz music. At first, you aren’t familiar to it, and it all sounds bad. The songs you like are things like La La Land, which is watered down cliche jazz designed to appeal to modern listeners. But as you learn more about the history, you been to understand and hear jazz differently. You realize how fake and inauthentic La Land Land is, and listen to more “original” jazz. Etc. there are so many settings where you can think of this type of thing happening: cooking, wine tasting, classical music, fashion, …
At the same time, La La Land is still an all time great work of music. People love it! It’s just in a class of its own (like Kenny G). If you want to play jazz music for a bunch of white people who don’t know much, La La Land might be the correct choice. Even if your jazz is better, nobody will care.
The reason architecture is so messed up is because (1) expert tastes are so different from the masses, in the same manner as for jazz, (2) expert architects don’t care what the masses think. The key lesson of music is that what the masses think does matter, and even if art is low brow or unsophisticated, it can he extremely high quality, innovative, and important (modern pop music).
...Does anyone consider the La La Land soundtrack to be jazz? Wikipedia just lists it as jazz pop, which is not the same.
Funny, since one of the main characters of La La Land is a jazz purist unhappy that a more watered down version of jazz is more popular.
>The reason architecture is so messed up is because (1) expert tastes are so different from the masses, in the same manner as for jazz, (2) expert architects don’t care what the masses think.
and (3) The masses have to live in, or work in, the result. And, frequently, the result is not fit for purpose (most trivially, flat roofs for ideological reasons in rainy or snowy areas).
I think part of taste is deeper perception, which can be natural or learned. I collect knives. While even a poor quality knife might cut perfectly well, there are many marks of quality that will bug you from the day they are pointed out to you. Is the edge evenly ground on both sides and from heel to tip? Are the pins flush with the scales? Are there gaps at the liners? And so forth. A quality knife has a good chance of lasting longer and working better, so this isn't arbitrary. Some people notice these automatically, but they are usually learned from other enthusiasts and through experience. I might pick up a knife and immediately sneer, and it might not be obvious why to someone who hasn't built up the knowledge and "taste". Custom knives cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars, for those with the taste to appreciate that sort of perfection in every detail.
I guess the difference is that I would be able to explain what bothers me about a knife. It's not just aesthetic, but has some use value. I'm sure chemists who appreciate the very best gas chromatography machines, astronomers who know telescopes, and gearheads who love cars all have the same kind of "taste".
1. Human universals. I am not sure that i have ever seen a non-western art, that is not obviously beautiful. Chinese and Japanese painting and drawing can be just stunning. Inca architecture is as much better that its Spanish successors as ice cream is than hay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coricancha. Even Bauhaus incorporates symmetry and geometric shapes. If you are in Chicago, make a point of visiting the Illinois Institute of Technology campus which was designed by Mises 33rd to 35th on State St. due east of White Sox Park.
2. In group out group designation and boundary marking. Gang colors Motorcycle leathers. Same stuff.
The grammar rule about pronoun use ("It's I" vs "It's me") ignores the fact that French, the foreign language with the most influence on English historically, does have a set of pronouns it uses for that purpose rather than the subject pronouns. E.g., "C'est moi".
One thing this is making me consider is whether "great art" should have broad appeal - a lot of these theories of taste suggest that the "unsophisticated person" not liking it is a feature not a bug, as it serves to differentiate those who have taste from those who do not. However, there is something to be said for art that everyone can enjoy, with people who are more familiar with the style not dismissing it but having the ability to pick up on more subtle nuances in the work that others might overlook or only subconsciously pick up on. Contrary to the more social-signalling type framing, I don't think that having taste should mean you have to only enjoy stuff that's intended for a narrow group of classy people.
I'm not saying that all great works should be as broadly appealing as the latest action movie, but there are films that are both critically acclaimed and commercially successful, and I think they tend to be the ones people remember for a long time.
I don't think this is limited to film - it can apply to books, it definitely applied to the plays of Shakespeare, and a lot of Renaissance art was commissioned by the wealthy but intended for public display (generally in a religious context), so I suppose there's a kind of beauty that snobs can appreciate but even an illiterate peasant can pick up on.
Architecture is the most obvious example of something that does need to have broad appeal, since everyone will see it and many will interact with it, which is probably why Bauhaus and its decendants were so divisive. It's fine for modern art to be avant garde and for a niche audience, that stuff is confined to galleries and the homes of people with too much money, but working or living in its architectural equivalent is going to be annoying if you haven't got a sophisticated palate.
(I went to the Tate Modern recently, I generally enjoyed it and there were some fascinating conceptual pieces that stood out, but I was unimpressed by a lot of the works there and generally preferred the older works in the National Gallery)
I view high taste, the kind that veers into snobbery, as a defense mechanism against overabundance. When there is too much of something — sugary food, TV shows, video games, porn, AI art slop — then it's good to have developed taste so that you can reject everything (except possibly the most excellent instances of the thing) so as to avoid excessive consumption.
This however comes with a risk, which is of being snob for things that aren't overabundant or that you can't avoid experiencing, in which case snobbery can make you unhappier.
I believe some economists have suggested that media should thus be taxed to prevent such overproduction, but that suggestion has never been popular enough to arouse much interest.
It doesn't seem like a great idea; to the extent that it's a problem, overabundance is better dealt with at the level of individual consumption, not production IMO.
A tax would reduce consumption. And the excess effort devoted to production is part of the problem, pushing some people into more socially valuable activities would be part of the point.
I guess my point is that I don't agree that it's not socially valuable to produce media in overabundance. Overabundance is how we get the actually good stuff. A million bloggers blogging can yield a dozen excellent ones better than a smaller set.
The question is, do we need new art? Or bloggers? There's already enough content out there to last a lifetime, so there is an argument to be made that the production of entertainment is a massive waste of resources.
Resounding yes to both. Art, blog posts, and entertainment in general are (more often than not) valued terminally, not instrumentally, which means that it's not coherent to describe them as a waste: we make them because they're fun/interesting/beautiful in themselves, not because they give us something else. (And also, I might add, because they're fun/interesting/beautiful to make.) When something is valued terminally, getting better versions of the things is good because it fulfills the value better.
Also, since the world continuously changes, the supply of art, blog posts, and entertainment provided by the past is insufficient: people will want content that speaks of the present.
there isn't enough content that engages with my personal interests to last a lifetime, and I would be very bored if it stopped tomorrow
also, end art and eventually existing art becomes outdated; as much as I enjoy old works, I also want ones which engage with the concerns of my own era
also, I think the closing of all economics departments in the western world would be infinitely more socially valuable
"Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels."
For some the point is to eat as little as possible.
"Elegance is refusal...."
I really enjoyed C. S. Lewis' An Experiment in Criticism. The angle he takes there is that the big difference isn't between people who like good literature and people who like bad literature, it's between people who care about literature and people who don't see what the big deal is. It's a bit dated, because the second group who he describes as reading whatever without caring to pass the time, and then putting the book aside happily as soon as they have something better to do, would do other things today. You can still understand his point though.
He touches on people who use fashionable literary opinions as a status symbol, but he's trying to find something else behind the idea of "good literature."
I bring this up, because while I very much enjoyed this post, and think it is a great description of a common bad version of "taste", I think there is also good version, something like a skill, that people should not be discouraged from seeking. If you put time and effort into things, from football, to music, to reading, and so on, you can get a deeper and different kind of enjoyment out of them.
Agreed! That book is outstanding.
I think there's a very real concern that becoming a connoisseur will make your life worse. Audiophiles increasingly restrict what they can take pleasure in listening to, wine-snobs lock themselves into more expensive wines but it's unclear whether they take more pleasure from them, and so on.
At a certain point, you're only creating unnecessary annoyances for yourself.
https://xkcd.com/1015/
There's an interesting video by James Hoffmann, a coffee connoisseur, on this subject. It's only about three minutes long.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU1y7hBSgiY
Relatedly, this finally made me look up proper Moka pot brewing technique.
According to coffee people, I make my coffee all wrong, I buy the wrong coffee and don't allow it to properly express itself.
I know what coffeee people consider good coffee. I've had it many times. I don't like it.
You seem to be saying there's no such thing as great art.
If a lot of people love the piece of art, that seems promising.
If you can only enjoy it after subjecting yourself to punishing academic studies that tell you that everything the plebs like is in fact awful and that only this is TRUE art in spite of everyone else loathing it, less so.
Some great art usually requires education to appreciate. Like Shakespeare...which I don't get. I'm trying to educate myself to try and appreciate his work.
It's like BDSM, I think--but I say that as a taste priest, so maybe I'm just blind to my own indoctrination. But my experience of aesthetic disgust is usually processed like this: "oh, you've done x, but at the cost of y--which is also something you profess to desire--that's unfortunate." So, if I see like a new Academic Gothic building I might feel something like: "Well, you've got beauty but at the cost of anachronism and inauthenticity, how disappointing."
If we all went back to making Gothic stuff, it wouldn't be anachronistic anymore! It would just be perfectly good neo-neo-Gothic during the peak of the neo-neo-Gothic era!
I'm pretty serious about this, the things you're talking about trading off seem fake or pointless to me, like refusing to take medication because that's not the "authentic" body state you would have without medication, or something like that.
I get this complaint, but on the other hand, if someone wrote a book using 16th century English, and completely in the style of 16th century authors in terms of themes, subject matter, etc, I'd find it fair to call that anachronistic. Same with someone who started wearing togas everywhere; it's true that there was a time when the toga was an authentic expression of your fashion taste, but it's basically impossible for that to be true of someone today.
At the very least, our neo-neo-Gothic revival is going to be less religiously focused, be built using different techniques, and exist in a very different urban environment than the original.
I agree that there's a world where we revive parts of the Gothic style and it counts as authentic, but it is going to have to adapt _somehow_ to accommodate the intervening changes in architectural practice, built environment, and surrounding culture and examples that don't show any of that adaptation feel like fair game for being called inauthentic and anachronistic.
I think "anachronism" might be the wrong level of complaint here.
Insofar as the themes of 16th century books are things like religion, loyalty, and valor, these themes are timeless, and people should continue to write about them.
Insofar as they're things nobody cares about, like the biography of St. Hieronymous, people may want to avoid writing about it because nobody would care, not because it's anachronistic (ie not simply because people did it in the 16th century).
Insofar as 16th century techniques are ineffective and irrational (eg writing in blackletter without spaces which is very hard to read) we can replace them with modern techniques.
I'm not even sure that togas are "inauthentic" in this sense. You won't be surprised to learn that I think bright ornate 16th century clothing is prettier than modern clothing. But I wear dull black suits like everyone else, even though I hate them. So which is an "inauthentic expression of my fashion taste"?
I do agree that the goal shouldn't simply be to imitate Gothic and then call it a day. We should be aiming to create buildings that are more beautiful than any that have been created before. I just think that spending a century or two relearning Gothic and restarting from there would be a better use of the next century, in the service of this goal, than spending another century going in circles around the same old Modernist ideas.
"So which is an "inauthentic expression of my fashion taste"?"
Yeah, I agree the notion of authenticity here isn't totally well defined, but I still feel like I know what the criticism is getting it. It feels like it's a notion of authenticity constructed in opposition to a highly self-consciousness, highly affected style.
When I think about what it means for me to be authentic I think of not trying too hard, not overthinking myself... And it's hard for to imagine myself walking outside in a toga and speaking ye olde English in that frame of mind. It's not the only meaning of authentic, but it's valid, and I think it's a fair criticism. A lot of people find it off-putting when someone is clearly "trying too hard" or trying to act out a certain character, and I can get that a building can come off that way too.
"I just think that spending a century or two relearning Gothic and restarting from there would be a better use of the next century, in the service of this goal, than spending another century going in circles around the same old Modernist ideas."
The part of this I find easiest to relate to is the "stop going in circles" part--But I'm still skeptical that the way to get unstuck is to just go straight backwards.
We shouldn't fetishize Gothic, or try and pretend modernism never happened, and whatever comes next is going to have to respond to and grow out of what we currently have.
>If we all went back to making Gothic stuff, it wouldn't be anachronistic anymore! It would just be perfectly good neo-neo-Gothic during the peak of the neo-neo-Gothic era!
Seconded!
Look, if an academic Gothic building _works_ as an academic building, _fine_ .
Amongst other ways of viewing them, styles are _technologies_ . If an old technology works properly for some purpose, "anachronism" is not a good enough reason to refuse to use it.
I would no more turn up my nose at a technology of the past, in the name of avoiding anachronism, than I would turn up my nose at a technology from some other culture, in the name of avoiding cultural appropriation. It is sensible to use best practices from wherever and whenever they originated.
Let me try and clarify what I meant about trade-offs. I think my issue with reviving old art styles, like the Gothic, for instance, is that when these styles were devised, each component was instrumentally justified. So, for instance, light, and letting in a maximum of light is very important for Cathedral architecture, and that's why Rouen cathedral, for instance, is so exemplary. Now, if you were to create a neo neo gothic cathedral that hewed too closely to actual gothic style, it would be a betrayal of the aesthetic priorities of the people who originally created gothic cathedrals: now the style is an end in itself, as opposed to a means.
For another example, consider ornamentation. I don't disagree that the lack of ornamentation on buildings today is unfortunate, and maybe we have socialist architects or insurance adjusters to blame for that. But in a world where carving a gargoyle is a virtuosic achievement of an artisan, covering your cathedral in them expresses something quite different from what it would mean today, when such things could be cheaply mass-manufactured.
I would happily embrace a neo neo gothic style that embraced the aesthetic priorities of the original gothic architects, and maybe tried to maximize lighting in a space, or tried to include ornamentation from local artists. But where it would become kitsch is when it would unironically embrace the old look of the gothic, without any regard for what those people were trying to do. That's what I mean by "in-authenticity".
Is refusing to replicate an old style the same as refusing a medication? I say no. I think recreating an old style would be like chewing willow bark instead of taking aspirin. You can say: why are all our medicines now featureless pills instead of whimsical alchemical tinctures? Haven't we lost something? And I would respond: maybe it's more fun to eat willow bark than to take aspirin, but we can't go back, because that would be a betrayal of why willow bark was even a medicine in the first place.
I think there were some features of Gothic buildings that were done for practical reasons, but that many weren't. There's nothing practical about stained glass. They used the stained glass because it was beautiful. There's nothing practical about having statues on the facade. I don't even think there was anything practical about the spires.
Either something doesn't add anything (including beauty) over modern techniques - in which case we can replace it without any loss - or it does add something, in which case I don't think it's inauthentic to refuse.
We should never have our lives made worse by getting more options. I worry that your position suggests that if we ever discover some even more practical way to make buildings that's even uglier, we'd be obligated to switch to it (Wolfe has a section on this in the book - he suggests that corrugated metal sheets supported by pylons are like this). I imagine the price of corrugated metal and pylons dropping, and all the architects, crying, demolishing their modern architecture buildings so we can have corrugated-metal ones, even knowing that it will make the world worse and uglier, because now stone and steel are themselves "inauthentic".
Also, has materials technology really advanced that much since, say, Art Deco days? If not, we should be able to build Art Deco without it being "inauthentic". Was the US Capitol Building "inauthentic"? The British Parliament building? If not, how come we can't build like that?
I think the modernist response is that yes, the Palace of Westminster is "inauthentic." It's a Gothic Revival building, not anything truly medieval.
"We should never have our lives made worse by getting more options," -- that seems right. And it does seem that architectural monoculture does make our lives worse. If a commitment to "authenticity" leads towards architectural monoculture, then I have to agree it's bad.
Also, upon reflection, I don't know how I could confidently separate the received dicta of the aesthetic priest class from taste as such. I remember finding Brutalism ugly, until I had it explained, and then I came to like it, to really enjoy it. That seems like evidence against BDSM and evidence for Priestcraft.
So, I suppose, I'm partly convinced. But what I don't see space for in your model are legitimate grounds for calling something like Caesar's Palace bad, actually. If I build Trevi Fountain in Vegas, it's not beautiful, it's trashy, and I don't know if your model has vocabulary for why.
The stuff about fashion and priesthood captures part of it, but those effects are layered on top of something more interesting. That other thing?
Taste is like mathematics. People who are fascinated with mathematical objects like numbers, sets, classes, functions, etc., often enjoy creating and tinkering with a variety of formal systems for manipulating such. Some of the systems emerge from attempts to explain, predict, or rationalize real-life processes observed in the wild. Others are the product of purely abstract exploration of mathematical possibility. Both systems frequently turn out to have some useful applications, but true mathheads don't see application as the litmus test of mathematical value. Mathematicians tend to feel that a sufficiently clever or elegant exercise in mathematics has a kind of beauty that is a self-justifying value. But you need a mixture of inherent mathematical ability and education in the systems and conventions in play to really appreciate it.
Aesthetics is similar. Sometimes you start by observing patterns in what people "naively" tend to do when making houses, clothes, decorations, whatever. You create formalizations that capture your heuristics about what tends to work out well in practical terms. But you can also create formal systems of aesthetic signaling and set about "proving theorems" for them. "Can we make an acceptable house without any (straight lines, colors, whatever)?" becomes like "what results can we still prove if we remove some of our axioms?".
This can easily spiral off into levels of complexity and abstraction that are at best tenuously connected to fundamental practical issues like dressing to make your body look good, or building a house that is cheerful and cozy. But the beauty of accomplishing something novel under a complex set of constraints is real, even if you need an educated eye to perceive it. And I think these symbolic games spin off useful applications from time to time, if not as consistently as mathematics turns out to do.
Yes, I agree with this, and also had some of these ideas in mind.
I even think you can get the same "on come on, this is just intellectual masturbation" feeling..."abstract nonsense" was I think self-applied by category theorists, but I'm pretty sure even practicing mathematicians have often felt that way about some of the more abstruse areas of set theory or mathematical logic.
You also get periodic widening of the scope of the enterprise that can be controversial: I'm sure if you told some ancient Greek geometers that their domain would one day include figuring out whether you can untie a knot, or whether you can cross a set of bridges using each bridge only once, they'd be somewhere between mystified and miffed... But if it's productive to incorporate stuff like that, it genuinely grows the field in a useful way.
Finally, I think a lot of the best practitioners can operate at all levels: I think of Conway and things like the "see-and-say" sequence; there's a certain playfulness and willingness to go back to basics. I think a lot of modern art has that character: what if we forget everything we know about perspective and whatever, and go back to playing with line, colour, form, what did we miss the first time around?
I think another factor in aesthetic taste is that some people are more sensitive to aesthetics than others. Not sensitive in a romantic way, but sensitive in the way that autists are sensitive to loud noises.
For example, if you make a website with stark contrasts between colors, it will hurt some people's eyes, but some people won't mind. To appease everyone, web designers usually suggest a soft off-white and off-black rather than #FFFFFF and #000000. If your eyes aren't sensitive to high contrast, it may seem like web designers are just being unnecessarily fussy. See also: "don't wear white socks with black shoes."
Another example is how some people have strong disgust responses and some don't. Take trypophobia: some people find honeycomb beautiful and some will find it unnerving. This is probably influenced by evolutionary pressures to some degree, and it probably has effects on aesthetics that resemble anything close to honeycomb.
With Brutalist architecture, it's more complicated. From what I've gathered, it makes some people feel as though they're in a creepy claustrophobic building where everything is lifeless and authoritarian, but some people feel it's a fun experiment with cool geometry and futuristic vibes. For some reason, if your brain doesn't intuitively register Brutalist shapes as foreboding and uncomfortable, you have a better chance of enjoying it.
I don't know why this happens, but maybe it's a much more complex version of the previous examples.
> If your eyes aren't sensitive to high contrast, it may seem like web designers are just being unnecessarily fussy.
No, the problem is that web designers are morons who don't understand that not everyone views their site on an 8K screen in absolutely perfect lighting conditions. Everyone can distinguish the #888888 text from the #888889 background, right?
I haven't even started ranting about today's near-invisible scrollbars!
That's true as well, but I think most people have a preference against high contrast modes. Most computer interfaces and IDEs have a high contrast mode but they're unpopular relative to standard light/dark modes.
I used to be able to get Substack to order comments by new, so that when I clicked on new replies they would appear right there rather than requiring me to scroll to the bottom. That option now appears to be gone. Does anyone know a workaround for this, like a query parameter I could add to the url to return to the desired behavior?
the removal of sorting ability has me triggered, as well.
Nerds without much developed taste in the arts want to dismiss taste instead of trying to understand it (because they’re insecure or bitter, and saying smart things is how they feel cool among fellow nerds). But if they spent time trying to understand art itself, taste would not be such a mystery.
What does art do? It makes us feel things. Sometimes, it helps us feel new feelings. It stimulates our imaginations. It connects us with our bodies and with each other. It can alter our conscious state in all kinds of profound ways.
When we’re little children, we have a taste for breast milk and will love plain carrots and mild flavors. Lemon juice would overwhelm our nervous system. Hot salsa too. I couldn’t stand sour cream as a child… now I’ll happily dollop it on my nachos. I liked nursery rhyme songs as a child, but then my tastes developed. For some people, musical tastes continue to develop and broaden throughout their lives. For others, it slows down after adolescence, and they more or less keep listening to the same stuff from there on out.
What’s really going on here? Why does my dad prefer white bread and literally say “yuck” to wheat bread? And is he wrong? Wheat bread has stronger bitter and mineral flavors, which can distract from the sugars. Why is it that, the first time I did mushrooms, I started chewing on grass and really enjoyed the flavor? I even enjoyed the taste of some dirt. Native Americans used to dig a hole in the ground, fill it with mesquite pods, spit into the pit, and use tools to make a spit-mesquite-dirt mash that they enjoyed. Is that yucky?
Here we go: How come The Shaggs, a family of kids who could barely play their instruments, are often cited by musicians as one of the best bands of all time (per Zappa, Cobain, and more)? Are these musicians just playing a fashion game, wherein they find esteem in being able to say, “I have a secret power of enjoying music that others can’t”? It might be tempting to think so because people don’t like feeling that there is some real enjoyment to be had, but which they can’t access. “It’s probably not actually enjoyable,” they tell themselves.
Here’s a theory that ACT didn’t look at: Art has various costs and benefits. Listening to heavy metal at loud volumes has real effects — it throws tons of dissonance at eardrums, loads of clashing high-end frequencies. It can stir up sympathetic feelings of aggression, frustration, or anxiety. The pounding rhythms can create adrenaline. But the vocal melodies in songs like Enter Sandman can also feel sweet and serene. If slowed down and harmonized by Gregorian monks, it could be convincingly presented as a sublime historical composition. Some can afford the cost of entry for the melody. For some, the cost is actually the benefit — their personality, life experiences, traumas, or constitution crave the intensity of heavy metal, just like some people love the intensity of skydiving or fighting.
Other people’s personalities have them seeking connection to their childhood. They want simple, bright singalongs. Others want trippy stuff that puts them in a state of aporia — something to interrupt the banality of normalcy, which their minds can only handle so much of.
Of course, there are hipsters as well. They see cultural consumerism as an opportunity to play a status game. I don’t have to repeat all the tropes and memes we’ve heard about “well, I liked their earlier works,” etc. I know some people who don’t like sharing their favorite obscure art and music with others because they like the feeling of exclusive access, like dragons hoarding their rare artifacts.
But they are the exception to the rule — unless you live in a hipster record store, a modern art gallery, or an indie theater or whatever.
Art has value. Certain aspects of art can or cannot be easily attuned to by different people for a variety of reasons. But some will learn to attune to things if sufficiently motivated.
There you go. That’s taste.
If you think it’s mostly a social status game, maybe that’s because you have a taste for those games.
If art didn't inspire something in you, it failed as art, at least with respect to you.
"Taste" is two different things: One is an acknowledgement of this statement. The second is a different statement:
If art didn't inspire something in you, you failed, at least with respect to that art.
For the majority of people, the latter version of "taste" is their predominant experience, because the first group of people don't tend to comment on the unremarkable fact that somebody didn't find a particular piece of art inspiring, and very rarely attempt to correct the people from the second group.
Hipsters will certainly agree with you and say “yeah that art sucks” or “he’s got no taste”, and constantly analyze through that lens of failure.
(Although I think you’ve got the “predominant” claim wrong. Most people, if they don’t like something, will say “That’s awful.” “Sucked.” “One star.”
Not so many people say “I failed at enjoying this.” They won’t even say “you failed at enjoying it.” They’ll say “oh, you thought it sucked, huh?”.)
For me, it’s more simple, and without judgment. One’s “taste” is simply the recognition that something generally is or is not being experienced with positive affect. I have a general taste in music, but I’m not always in the mood for any kind of music. Because something fails to “inspire” me in a given circumstance does not mean I’ve lost my taste for it. I may have simply lost my appetite.
Marx would say that 'taste" is downstream from economics. To give an example of this logic, the fashion for plump women stemmed from times of relative food scarcity, etc..
-the goal of art is to cause emotional/aesthetic experiences
-people watch/read art and, ineluctably, judge its efforts to give them those experiences
-people articulate and defend those judgments
-the judgments of the most articulate people tend to correlate, and this is called good taste
The derogatory social proof/trend explanations play a role, but I think they’re subphenomena of taste and are simply much more prominent in fashion and contemporary art than in most other art forms like books, movies, poetry
When I want to feel sympathetic to things like this, I imagine it as something akin to the board games I enjoy.
I like games with long rulebooks that take hours to play and multiple playthroughs to learn to play well. Most people don't! The median person who encounters Twilight Struggle gives up a quarter of the way through the rulebook, before even setting it up. If they do set it up they either get offended that I give them a huge handicap, or get grumpy when they lose horribly. And yet I assert that Twilight Struggle is a really, really good game.
I would phrase this as something similar but not identical to your D/E:
H: High vs low effort enjoyment. If you are looking to get enjoyment out of something without putting any effort in, you look for certain kinds of thing.
You want board games with simple rules that are easy to learn and with little enough strategy/enough randomness that I won't reliably rip you apart when I think about strategy more than you.
You want music with a simple thumpy rhythm, and maybe a hot [gender of preference] singing about how much they like you.
You want food with high intensities of simple, desireable flavors like 'sweet' or 'meaty'.
But if you are willing to put some effort in as well, you can enjoy things that require effort from you rather than only enjoying things that are spoon-fed to you.
And many of these effortful things are much more enjoyable than the simplest things once you put the effort in! The amount of enjoyment I get from complicated games is clearly higher than both 'the amount of enjoyment I get from simple games' and 'the amount of enjoyment the median person gets from simple games'.
This is a poor defense of architects, who impose their tastes on everyone around them to a great extent, as if I attempted to ban Candy Crush and demand that everyone play Dark Souls instead. But I think it's a reasonable sympathetic lens for some things like food/music/poetry.
It was quite fascinating to learn how totally ideological the development of the principles of modern architecture were
It seems a fundamental motivation is to reject the social order that was and to the degree it still exists. I think I am emotionally perceptive, and I think I can sense a genuine and still current motivation where making something beautiful is a celebration, and therefore a betrayal of whoever doesn't have reason to celebrate
I think many people have a sense of survivor's guilt where any acknowledgment of good news is wrong because you should keep being angry until the last oppressed individual is free. I think this is a persuasive undercurrent behind the power of modern art and architecture and justifies an emotional and moral claim of a kind of taste. We the people would be much happier for society to be allowed to celebrate to a much greater degree. Elites can afford to performatively mourn, for the rest of us the marginal cost is far far greater
>We the people would be much happier for society to be allowed to celebrate to a much greater degree.
Very much agreed! I don't use "toxic" much, (except in the literal sense, for some chemicals) but
>where any acknowledgment of good news is wrong because you should keep being angry until the last oppressed individual is free.
is toxic as hell
I think the closest thing there is to a human universal with regards to taste is “I think that looks hard to do”
This is why for regular normies, highly detailed representational art looks “good” and pretentious abstract art looks “bad.”
But “looks hard to do” is a bit situational. That’s why you can show a video of a record breaking single player eggplant speedrun in Spelunkly and people who know what that means will be very impressed and a normal person will be like, “uh cool, but what did I just watch?”
But this is a lowest common denominator taste level. The more widespread and universal it is the less likely it will appeal to niche elite tastemakers.
Note also that technology affects our impressions of what “hard to do” looks like. Naturalistic art had a real crisis to deal with in the wake of photography. Same for sculpture in the wake of mass manufacturing.
I think, at least on one level, the same thing is now happening with AI art. Even if elites looked down their nose on highly detailed representational art, at least you could win over normies with your prowess.
But now anyone can squeeze cheap detail - “cheaptail” let’s call it - out of a tube, effortlessly and carelessly. So what used to be a universal signifier of “somebody spent a lot of time on this and it’s therefore probably worth your time to pay attention to, Mr. Easily impressed normie”, now communicates nearly the opposite.
Not a complete explanation of taste, just a tiny slice of it.
“Taste is like BDSM porn” is the closest, though it’s really about sensitization and desensitization.
Desensitization allows the artist to ignore elements that those new to the form would find abrasive.
Sensitization allows the artist to notice complexities, or technique, that others miss.
So far as I can tell, most people (including artists) want about a 80/20 distribution of familiarity to novelty. As desensitization and sensitization occur, what is novel vs familiar changes, and so preferences are altered.
I should note that there are also definitely people who simply like what is most socially acceptable, and who would express different preferences absent social pressures.
This is a weird article that's kind of...missing the whole point of artistic expression?
If you're considering analogies for taste, it's strange not to consider that taste is a skill like exercise, or learning to play piano.
It's fine not to play piano. It's also fine to take piano for 6 months as a kid, be able to read music and play Hot Cross Buns, but know you're never going to be a master pianist. And it's fine to be a wildly skilled classical pianist who can't improvise or play jazz, and not to even have any interest in learning.
But it would be annoying if people started saying "I'm not sure piano playing even exists - almost nobody I know plays all those fancy pieces, and it doesn't seem to hurt them at all. Besides all the best piano players play different things, and we don't even have a good metric for ranking them."
The only gesture towards "maybe this is a cultivated skill" in this article just kind of brazenly claims that the skill makes your life worse. But enjoying challenging art that forces you to think of things in a way someone else thinks has been such a massive boon to my life I have a hard time imagining a good life that doesn't include it. And in an era defined by *failing* to understand the minds of others, I have a really hard time with this idea that we should all just look at pretty picture and watch blockbuster slop, and not doing that makes us snobs who are just signalling.
This conflates skill and taste. One doesn't need to be able to play "fancy pieces" in order to be able to tell they sound good. But if they sound like shit, well, they do.
I worked very hard to avoid this conflation and I think I succeeded, but fair enough. I used piano because it has different styles that analogize well to different high-end tastes, but I get why it would be confusing.
Let's try something else - sports. Lots of people will play sports recreationally a little. Lots of folks won't play sports at all. Some people get really really good at a particular sport.
So imagine a world where Scott Alexander writes this article: "Some people trust Micheal Jordon more than me to be good at sports, but I'm not sure 'good at sports' is even a meaningful category. Lots of people are saying that Micheal Jordon isn't even good at sports anymore, even though years ago they were saying he was fantastic. Even at the height of his popularity, he was apparently a mediocre baseball player.
But even if we ignore all these inconsistencies, it's unclear what the point is. Let's accept, for argument's sake, that it's possible to be "good at sports." Now you can't even enjoy a game of pickup basketball with your friends anymore! If being good at sports just ruins your ability to enjoy sports the way most people do, and if most people will never reach this mythical 'good at sports' status, then being 'good at sports' starts to seem a lot like a status game, where we just judge people on made-up metrics! Sure, you could give justifications for those metrics, but even the experts disagree on those justifications. All and all, probably sports skill is just made up."
Yes, thanks for this comment. Is it so impossible for a deep thinker like Scott to understand what people get from deep thought about art? I keep wanting Scott to meet someone who doesn't understand why he (Scott) spends all this time writing thousands of words week in and week out trying to understand the world and persuade people of his ideas. Just sharing inspirational quotes on Facebook works fine for this hypothetical person as far as thinking and sharing thought goes, so why is Scott putting so much effort into understanding how society works and whatnot? And in particular why is he arguing with OTHER thinkers, as if there could be a correct answer, when it's clear that in fact there will never be universal agreement on any of these ideas? Is it just the status he's gained from thinking and writing?
I think this may be a weakness of "rationalist" thought. One tenet of rationalism is that there actually cannot be a difference of opinion if everyone has all the information and acts rationally. So I suspect Scott, on some level, does actually think there's a correct answer to the things he discusses and that his articles are working towards those answers.
We have to be careful not to strawman here - the rationalist thought process doesn't deny personal taste. It wouldn't claim that there's an optimal piece of art that everyone would enjoy. But it would claim that for your unique psychology, assuming that enjoying art has more value than whatever else you could be doing, there is a correct piece of art for any given moment.
Appreciating art is therefore an optimization problem, and like the other optimization problems rationalism attempts to solve, we need to see past social dogma and constraints, and seek out whatever art provides an individual person the most pleasure. And we need to gather data and establish principles to determine how to guide people to the art they'd enjoy the most (Rationalist thinkers are very aware of the practical problems with this idea, they consider this a platonic ideal but are much more pragmatic in practice).
This isn't an explicit part of the philosophy but it's a quirk I've noticed of all these writers - the idea that each person has a single unified consciousness that essentially understands its wants and desires and at least directionally points us towards them. I'm not sure how to explain this well, but see Scott's bizarre belief that nobody can be mistaken about their subjective feelings, or Zvi Mowshowitz's constant claims that targeted advertising is good because you'll see lots of useful ads for things you want.
Add all that together and you get an opinion on art criticism that's like "okay well the only real data we have about a person's preferences are their subjective opinions, so what use is taste if it's not a collation of majority subjective opinions?"
One of my favorite book reviews of all time is Louis Menand on Steven Pinker, who also seems to think that art can be both explained solely instrumentally, and also optimized. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/11/25/what-comes-naturally-2
Taste is like moral feeling.
People often dislike viewing Nazi art, AI art, appropriated art, and the art of the cancelled. They appreciate art by local and indigenous artists, celebrity artists, their kids, or the art of their own religion, for reasons orthogonal to its material properties. Art is visual rhetoric and hard to separate from the underlying moral stance unless you are ignorant of it or don’t care about it.
That helps explain why art is often ugly, and artists are fine with it. Sensual pleasure is only one feeing art may aim to induce. Moral rhetoric is not meant to make people happy, it’s ostensibly meant to steer right action. Seeing old bad architecture as the relics of past moral debates makes the most sense to me.
>People often dislike viewing Nazi art, AI art, appropriated art, and the art of the cancelled. They appreciate art by local and indigenous artists, celebrity artists, their kids, or the art of their own religion
I could not disagree more. What I like about viewing art has no component of political correctness.
I have a suggestion for all those who are skeptical of taste and, specifically, taste-makers:
Instead of focusing too much on what taste-makers say is bad, kitsch, etc. and getting upset about it (especially if you find yourself liking those same things), focus moreso on what they say is good. You don't have to buy into the hierarchy of taste that they are espousing - if you disagree, you disagree. But I think engaging with "the classics" directly and forcing yourself to try to understand what one might appreciate about them will still end up being an enriching activity. You don't have to buy into some sort of ranking that, e.g. "opera is the highest possible way to experience music" in order to enjoy La Donna e Mobile.
"But the whole mystery is that taste isn’t universal. It seems perverse to dismiss the sort of art that untrained people like, proclaim other art which they hate to be better, then plead that you’re basing your judgment in “human universals”."
Can't it just be that good art is deeper, and has these human universals *in far deeper and subtler ways" than bad art, such that any unwashed rube *if they found these subtleties" would agree the good art is more beautiful, but most don't have the patience or education to find them?
I think that total aesthetic taste of a person is a sum of several contributions:
- universal - what humans and aliens would agree on, shaped by laws of physics (don't know which),
- human - what humans find appealing, shaped by our biology,
- cultural - what humans of a certain culture would agree on, shaped by shared experiences,
- individual - shaped by experiences (including biological specifics) of a particular person.
Where the latter two are malleable due to the brain's plasticity.
Now I would think of this as a function of many variables, a hypersurface, whose output is a number on the nice-ugly scale for different parameters of the object being judged.
This function has shallow minima, so slight variations of the different contributions - mostly the cultural and individual, can override the more universal contributions to taste. But some of these minima are deep and they show up as some of the more general rules (preference for slightly broken symmetry, rule of thirds...)
100% agree, glad biology has been invoked.
I'm largely convinced by the signaling-based explanations for art and taste in Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson's "Elephant in the Brain":
1. Art is a fitness signal. Simler and Hanson compare humans to the Satin bowerbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satin_bowerbird, where the males make giant piles of blue items (hard to find) as a fitness signal, and the females select mates based on the impressiveness of their blue piles. The assessment requires some skill / knowledge on the females' parts, e.g., since one should have higher (resp., lower) standards for the blue piles in a blue-rich (resp., poor) environment--more on this in 4., below.
As such, art has to be challenging to actually be a good signal (in the birds' case, blue objects are hard to find in nature). This does a good job explaining not only why we like things like sonnets, which are objectively a bad form of communication (the *point* is that it's hard to communicate that way, which makes it impressive when you can), as well as why we care so much about extrinsic factors of an art (facts concerning the production of the art, as opposed to (intrinsic) facts that would be discernible from analyzing the work of art itself). The signaling explanation explains why we particularly care about those extrinsic factors that would make the production more challenging (I was impressed when I realized that what I initially thought was a painting by my friend's dad (a painter) was actually a quilt made by his mom (a quilter)). Similarly, it explains why we value live performances (risk of failure = more impressive).
This does a good job explaining many of your examples of taste (e.g., why we find symmetry appealing, and the shutter example). I also think it does a pretty good job of explaining taste in pure mathematics; journals accept papers based on the perceived difficulty of the result, and people particularly like when a hard problem has a short solution (since this is particularly impressive).
2. Fashion is a prestige signal, in exactly the way you describe in the section "F. Taste Is Like Fashion (Derogatory)." Being aware of fashion trends is a way to show that you are closer (in the web of social connections) to the "cool kids."
3. These two intersect, since conforming to a bunch of constantly changing rules set by the cool kids is difficult, and therefore requires both connections to the cool kids and skill (hence signals both prestige and fitness).
4. It's valuable to be able to assess what the good fitness signals are, and what is fashionable.
Like the satin bowerbird, you want to be a good judge of which art works are actually difficult and hence actually good fitness signals (otherwise you're fooled by an unfit individual). Similarly, you want to be good at picking up new trends, and identifying which works of art fit with new trends. Consequently, learning taste really does seem like a supervised / reinforcement learning setup, where you are exposed to works of art and high-prestige people with good taste (in grad school, called "advisors") identify which of those are "good taste" (challenging, and fitting with current trends) until you become good at identifying this yourself.
Also, because "good taste" is a useful skill that confers an evolutionary advantage, it is in turn one that you want to seek out in your allies (including mates), because it is something you want your allies and your children to have, and conversely having good taste is something you want to advertise yourself as having.
I think this gives a very good explanation for why sommeliers rate wines that they are told are more expensive / more prestigious as tastier. First, in those cases, they already know that the wine is expensive / prestigious, so they want to try to prove that they really can identify this (to advertise their good taste); hence some convoluted (and often fake) explanation for why the wine they're told is more expensive is tastier.
Second, being told beforehand the wine is expensive / tasty also changes the process because now the wine is essentially in the "training" (as opposed to "test") set. That is, someliers should want to move their taste assessment function on the basis of this new data point--and the role of changing trends means that they should weight newer points more than you might otherwise think from the logic of "it's just one data point". That is, while I argued in the previous paragraph that when presented with an expensive wine a somelier would invent a fake justification with the rationale "I want to advertise that I would have identified this wine as prestigious," the point of this paragraph is that they are also actually trying to identify what makes this new data point prestigious so that they can identify similar wines as prestigious in the future.
This also helps to explain your presthood with semi-fake justifications model for taste. First, I would expect that the semi-fake justifications often relate to extrinsic factors that make the production of the work more challenging, and it actually can be a non-fake, more objective question whether those factors actually do make the production more challenging. Second, I'm guessing that the semi-fake justifications are often generated in a similar way to the sommeliers' justifications for expensive wine above, where the assessors are motivated to generate semi-fake justifications to demonstrate that they are good assessors of taste.
>The signaling explanation explains why we particularly care about those extrinsic factors that would make the production more challenging (I was impressed when I realized that what I initially thought was a painting by my friend's dad (a painter) was actually a quilt made by his mom (a quilter)). Similarly, it explains why we value live performances (risk of failure = more impressive).
For me, this easily flips over into a "You spent _how_ much effort on this? Are you crazy?". It happened that I was once at an exhibition of artistic quilts (or possibly some other textile art with similar labor - this was about 4 decades ago). Someone asked my opinion of it, and I said I was appalled at the labor needed (and was actually comparing the effort needed to the effort needed to paint the same images). Efficiency is sane!
"People feel on a deep level that poor grammar is wrong - misplaced apostrophes can send pedant’s into a rage. "
Guilty as charged.
My theory: Taste (sophisticated )is like taste (unsophisticated).
What I mean is as follows:
Suppose you have 2 movies and you want to figure out which is better.
You don't care about which is better according to movie snobs. You care about which is better for regular folks. But even the question "which is better for regular folks" can have multiple answers:
1. Which one more regular folks will say is better if you showed them both movies
2. Which one regular folks would enjoy more if you measured their enjoyment level in their brains while watching
3. Which one regular folks will say is better if you showed them both movies and then waited a year and then asked which was better.
4. Which regular folks would say they like better if they were specifically paying attention to the question of "which will I like better"
5. Which are they more likely to watch again
... And probably a million other possible answers.
"Taste" is an attempt to get a more robost answer to the question "which do regular folks like better" than you get by just asking regular folks which they liked better (1)
Because ultimately we care about the regular folks. If all the people like X art better than Y art then X is better. But many people are not necessarily great at answering the question "which did I like better" in a way that coarilates with other facts we would expect from liking the thing.
Taste is art exposure.
It seems pretty simple to me, because I've seen it again and again: In art, music, film, writing, fine dining, you name it. If you don't have a lot of experience in these fields, then look at, listen to, read, and eat whatever you want, it's all good. But if you have a lot of experience in music, then simple melodies and chord progressions will bore you to death. If you have a lot of experience in fine dining, basic cooking will seem plain.
This progression that happens with experience has both objective and subjective components. More experienced musicians are objectively identifying increases in complexity and nuance (just look at the crazy things that go on in jazz!). However, they can also disagree on what's best based on personal preferences, or the differences in their personal experiences.
I think le mot juste here is "discernment", which often comes with exposure.
I agree that discernment is a great word and a better synonym for "taste", but I disagree that it's the more useful phrasing. There's a bit of chicken-and-egg: If someone is being discerning, *why* are they being discerning? Which is what Scott's post I think tries to tackle. My answer is that it's simply a side effect of experience/exposure/eventual boredom.
oops, my comment was meant to be an addendum, not a rebuttal. The fault is mine for not making that clear. We're in complete agreement.
edit: like, sometimes comments are less about bickering vs the parent, and moreso about adding to a conversation which onlookers might find use in overhearing.
>My answer is that it's simply a side effect of experience/exposure/eventual boredom.
Weird note: I just did a search, and no one has used the word "jaded" for boredom or Scott's (E) BDSM analogy.
On a somewhat separate note: If we think of some art form as having minor elements and major elements, reacting to experience/exposure/eventual boredom by
a) peering ever more closely at tiny details of minor elements and
b) making ever larger changes to major elements
are both possible tactics, but they are quite different tactics, even if the cause is the same
Notably, the fake-shutters-in-architecture example, despite being in the fig leaf category, actually seems somewhat universal.
Not everyone would care, but it is a preference that's straightforward to derive independently - sometimes you just look at the shutters and imagine closing them and then go "oh, wait".
Not everyone has the same opinion about this issue, but I don't think anyone has opposing opinions. Some people think that shutters that don't make sense are terrible; other people think it doesn't really matter. Probably in some situations many people might say, "Even though this might look weird to some, fixing it would look even weirder." But I don't think anyone thinks that too-small fake shutters are intrinsically better!
But real shutters are often multiple hinged panels that fold up to look like tiny fake shutters
Great stuff. I just want to add: I wouldn't discount the role of raw economic interest in shaping fashion and taste. For example, another men's fashion rule is you don't wear a brown belt or brown shoes with a black suit; the shoes and belt must also be black. There's nothing jarring, though, about seeing brown shoes beneath a pair of black slacks...they're both dark colors, so that justification doesn't work in this instance. I sorta suspect that if you dug into this and tried to find out where this arbitrary rule came from, you'd find that it originated amongst amongst a group of managers and investors in the West Yorkshire Tannery Company circa 1867 or something like that.
Likewise, if you run a successful designer clothing company like Ralph Lauren or Calvin Klein, you have a plausible claim that you have Very Good Taste because you've designed lots of clothing that people like and find tasteful and want to buy and that's why you're so successful, but at the same time, your position allows you to shape what people find tasteful or fashionable to a certain extent, simply because you designed it. It's in your economic interest that what is fashionable or tasteful looking keep changing so that you can sell a greater volume of clothes. Therefore, you do what you can to ensure that this happens; to convince people that what was fashionable two years ago is now lame-o-rama and should be replaced at considerable expense.
The white socks black shoes thing makes sense to me actually! For one thing there’s the association of white socks with like, gym clothing. For another, I think in general “dark stuff on a white background” is usually considered much less striking/distracting than “bright parts on a dark background,” and the latter generally needs to be carefully done to not look weird or cheap. I’m thinking of like, black gamer headphones with colorful accents or a neon disco or even just a dark room with glowy red lights.
All black is classy yeah, but when something is BRIGHT in dark your eye naturally goes THERE. And most people don’t want that with their ankles only lol. I suspect that’s less tastelords and more hyper-awareness of people’s visual processing.
I also agree that a lot of taste/calling others’ work barbaric is based in not just trends but popularity games. Go to the heart of it, remove any politics, and you’ll find many people find at least a few admirable works in “out of fashion” styles. Some people are wired to not enjoy baroque but taste will help them emotionally overcome that or at least acknowledge that others aren’t barbaric for thinking so.
The whole article does read as taste-hostile to me though. Maybe I’m less hostile toward it because despite being a nerd I feel hyper-attuned to why people like the things they do, able to rapidly adapt to standards of art/fashion around me, and find it kind of fun to knowingly break rules.
I don’t know much about visual arts; I can barely write my name. I do have almost a decade of formal musical training though, and we absolutely have our snobs. We also have a robust system of justifications. There are two trends I see in music not noted here.
First, I think is relative skill level and education level, particularly in theory. I can enjoy music of any genera if the players are highly skilled. Knowing how technically difficult it is to play a certain piece makes it more impressive to a trained listener. Modern jazz is a good example of this I think, all the varieties of post-bop, acid, fusion etc. To the untrained a lot of this probably sounds like noise (and arguably some of it is, or its just chops for the sake of chops). Classical I think as well has some of this. The popularity of classical music seems to have decreased as the percentage of the population with musical training has also decreased. It was much more common in the past for regular people to play “a little bit” of one of the instruments used in classical music; there were also just a lot more professional musicians before the development of good sounding recorded music and affordable playback devices after WWII. This sort of thing is sometimes described as “art made for other artists”. As the number of artists drops, so does the appreciation of this phenomena.
Another, more pernicious imo, trend is simple economic envy. Since the proliferation of affordable recorded music in the 50s, and the rise of Popular music, there have been a lot of very mediocre, if not outright poor, musicians that have made a LOT of money. Rock and roll was the first one, but anything that could be described as popular music has this. I’ve known hundreds of musicians personally that are infinitely more skilled and have a better grasp of theory then many popular musicians that have made many millions over the years playing really very basic and simple music. The insults the jazz players hurled at the rock players in the 60s are probably the nadir of this sort of thing. When the market has clearly chosen the unimpressive but popular over the virtuoso but increasingly niche, all those people that have spent many years of their lives perfecting their crafts only really have snobbery to fall back on. I probably have to include myself in this as well, with the one caveat that I never actually expected or tried to make a living off of my music, it always just been an excessive hobby.
I will end this screed with a phrase exemplifying this second trend (which also happens to be true): The Beatles were a boy band.
Does anyone else get the feeling that Scott is the good version pf Elsworth Toohey (from fountain head)?
No real point, just find it amusing
I don’t really agree. If I remember the novel correctly, Ellsworth Toohey absolutely has taste and knows taste to be a real thing. He’s just adamantly opposed to promoting or even placating it because of his objectives.
> we know physics is referring to the real nature of matter and energy and so on
Do we? I mean, I get what you're saying here, but to the best of my (limited) understanding physics hasn't yet reached a bottoming-out point of "okay, these are definitely the things that actually constitute reality in themselves, rather than being useful abstractions describing interactions of those things". For all we know it could be increasingly detailed models all the way down, which would make physics a slightly more, uh, palatable analogy for taste.
I will say that there is a purpose to the kinds of rules that your English teacher promoted -- they actually make learning related-but-different languages substantially easier! (As a Russian speaker, "Я она" -- "I am she" -- makes much more sense than "Я ее" -- "I am her"). Languages in the Indo-European family stem from a common origin and so rules tend to be more similar than they appear at first glance, so keeping rules closer to each other makes learning languages a great deal easier. "The copula takes the nominative case" is a common rule across the Indo-European family (and I would be surprised if it were different outside of it, based on the logic of the nominative case, though of course languages get very weird and not all languages even use nominative-accusative alignment -- ergative-absolutive is a thing!), and changing it would be illogical and make learning other languages more challenging for English-speakers (and make learning English harder for speakers of other languages).
(Of course, there also exist common rules which just don't make sense. Most languages mandate the double negative, but I think English's mathematical attitude -- two negatives make a positive -- makes more sense than the more common cross-cultural rule.)
Nadie no va --> Никто не пошел --> Nobody didn't go ????
The copula doesn't take the nominative in Polish.
It does.
By which I mean that the Polish word for "it" serves as a copula and takes the nominative case. (In contrast to the regular copula "to be", which takes the instrumental.)
You can kind of say this in Russian -- an old-fashioned/formal/dramatic alternative to "я она"/"I am she" might be "я ею являюсь"/something like "I myself arrive as her" -- and this takes the instrumental case, although it's not a very natural way to talk. Might have to think about this.
“People feel on a deep level that poor grammar is wrong - misplaced apostrophes can send pedant’s into a rage.”
I’ll happily admit that I am a pedant and that I judge writers for making this kind of grade school-level mistake. I’m also pretty sure I’ve mellowed about this, not least because of how horrifically people maim language on, say, Discord, or in general text messaging.
I’m also a non-native English speaker and my main interaction with the language is by reading, not speaking. As such, someone not caring to distinguish between “their”, “there” or “they’re” may think they don’t have to bother with this arbitrary rule and that everyone knows what they mean.
This is importantly not true! I understand a sentence through its grammar, and I basically experience a compiler’s parsing error while reading this kind of mistake. Then I have to load the “speak it aloud and deduce the intended meaning” subroutine. It is more taxing and breaks the flow of my reading.
This could be generalized to some extent, I suppose.
Yeah lots of wrong applied grammar can result in contradictory meanings. I have the exact same experience as a non native so I agree that at least some grammars are seemingly objective and fundamental.
I just bought someone this multitool as a Christmas present.
https://imgur.com/PS32NAq
These may be fashionable now, I don't know. But I think you can make a case that certain very well made things are beautiful, in a way whose foundations go deeper than what Scott's calling taste. It has to do with the integration of form and function -- for example, in this skeletool the way the holes in the blades lighten the tool, and also serve as grips for pulling out the blade, and make an attractive lacy design. As a matter of fact, a lot of old machinery is beautiful in that way -- things with gears, for instance. Or Tycho Brahe's astrolabe.
Your models attempt to explain examples which tend to favor the idea that taste is subjective and about status signaling – i.e. what color socks or tie should you wear. But can it explain taste judgments that are far more universal: e.g. Shakespeare was a good writer, the Godfather is a good movie, the Beatles were a good band, and Notre Dame is a good building. Not everyone will rank these the same, but everyone will agree they are better than average. Otherwise, you end up with the absurd conclusion that there is no such thing as some art being better than others.
This points to some universal tastes in humans. These might involve a huge number of innate preferences: for certain colors, certain kinds of symmetry, a desire to learn about the world, attraction to certain physical environments, recognition of complex design, admiration for tools which are made with skill, etc. All of these preferences interact in highly complex ways so that a taste emerges with a particular flavor. One of the innate preferences impacting taste would be the desire to signal to others that you are a good and wise person. It gets a "vote" in determining whether flavors are attractive or repulsive.
Everyone has all these innate preferences in common, but in different strengths, and this leads to tastes that are to some extent universal, and to some extent individual. Social context will have a massive impact on preferences related to the desire for social status. For a construction worker, nobody cares whether you like Shakespeare, and in fact your social status might suffer if you talked about how much you liked Hamlet. So Shakespeare tastes bad to you. If you are an English professor, Shakespeare must taste good because if anyone found out you thought it tastes bad, you would lose respect.
Further, social context can change quickly because of fashion cycles, so tastes actually change with the times. Note that under this theory, we don't have to accuse people of lying about their tastes to gain social status, although they might do that too. They might actually be feeling that certain arts are gross or disgusting or awesome, if they are heavily attuned to the social effects of liking or disliking them.
Artistic tastes that are based heavily in the quest for social status probably don't lead to appreciation that is as deep, complex, visceral and authentic as those that are grounded in the other human innate preferences. But they probably do lead to strong feelings of disgust or aversion.
There is rarely a circumstance when the desire for social status is not affecting artistic taste. But it can be more or less, and most of us intuitively perceive a problem when that dial is turned up too high. I think that's what Wolfe is pointing about.
Re:
>Human universals don’t change that fast! Rules about what is vs. isn’t “jarring” don’t change that fast! Only fashion changes that fast!
To go back to architecture again, some changes (albeit decade to decade, not year to year) are driven by real changes in technology. In the 1880s
>High rooms counteract poor air quality
>Primarily for air quality reasons, the height of rooms had been gradually raised over the years. This made it possible to install high windows with separate, openable frames of which the top part could be used for airing, even in winter. During the 1880s, the heights of rooms reached a maximum and were subsequently reduced.
( from https://www.swegonairacademy.com/siteassets/_documents/history-of-ventilation-technology.pdf )
This _changed_ when fans driven by small electric motors became widely available, allowing (relatively) compact ducts to replace natural convection for ventilation.
I think the case for taste is stronger than you've given here.
I think under the priesthood case, many people find lots of meaning and pleasure in very deeply understanding this set of rules, and I think empirically the people who get the most meaning and pleasure from art are often those who learn the rules most deeply. I think the arguments against this make the most sense if one has a hedonistic axiology, but I think if was has a different axiology, and particularly if one is an objective list theorist, then the counterarguments seem weaker. I think there's an analogy to pure maths here. One can have multiple axioms underlying a mathematical system, from which follow valid inferences. I think it doesn't seem crazy to say that one of the meanings of life might be uncovering the vast depths of those systems, and the same could apply to art.
I think it's important to note that on hedonistic accounts of why complex art rules are valuable, it is ultimately an empirical question whether supporting those rules is socially valuable, but a different style of argument has to be applied to objective list theories accounts.
I think a second argument is that art has a social purpose, and better art either communicates different ideas or communicates them better. Importantly, this is an empirical claim, not a normative one. But one reason that lots of people hate brutalism and lots of people love it is that I think it is, in fact, effectively communicating a message - one of egalitarian high modernism - that people have strong views about it. I think many people love the novels of Jane Austen and Tolstoy because - they claim - they're extremely good at conveying subtle and deep arguments in a way that, say, contemporary trade romances aren't. I think people also often give similar reasons for liking sci-fi.
To be clear, I think that it's not at all clear that art that follows what is generally considered to be the rules of taste is necessarily the best at conveying those messages. For instance, Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Day After had a large social impact but aren't generally considered technical masterpieces.
Is it possible that taste is real, and only I have it?
More seriously: why not analogize taste to... taste? Human beings can become acculturated to an extreme variety of foods. Food is incredibly culturally specific, and one man's yum is another man's yuck. Some people eat casu marzu. Some people eat kiviak or surströmming or fermented mare's milk. Some people seem to enjoy the tactile sensation of eating sannakji even as it attempts to choke them.
There are fashions in food. Pineapples and gelatin molds became unbearably trendy in the fifties. The sixties saw an explosion in canapés and "exotic" international foods like fondue, coq au vin, and stroganoff. In the seventies, Julia Child revived French cuisine, in the eighties, sushi took us by storm, and in the nineties... You get it.
NEVERTHELESS, there is such a thing as bad food and good food. Fresh bread tastes better than stale. A smooth sauce looks better, coats food better, and feels better in the mouth than one that has separated. A moist roast tastes better than one that has been overcooked and dried out. Almost everyone will prefer a perfectly roasted piece of broccoli to overboiled gray sludge. Raw materials, technique, and execution obviously matter.
Also, taste in food must be learned, and there is such a thing as an underdeveloped palate. In childhood we gently introduce children to an ever-expanding library of sensory experience. This often takes them outside their comfort zone, and they might prefer dino nuggies every day. But the adult who refuses to eat vegetables often strikes other adults as - well, childish. Limited, parochial. Missing out on a vast and varied culinary world.
Notice that some culinary traditions punch above their weight class in worldwide popularity. I'd submit that Italian, Mexican, Vietnamese, and Japanese cuisine are surprisingly popular despite coming from countries with comparatively little global influence. People just really, really like pizza, tacos, and salty-ass noodle soup. You can try it for the first time as an adult and say, "Damn, pass me some more." These foods are, in some non-arbitrary sense, GOOD. By contrast, nobody who wasn't raised to eat kiviak is gonna touch it.
It is also possible for elitist food culture to disappear up its own ass. The movie "The Menu" satirizes this nicely. A disaffected auteur chef serves his wealthy guests a menu of culinary experimentation that has spiraled into pretension, unconcerned with nourishment and pleasure. Taste can be misshapen to impress others AT THE EXPENSE of satisfying the underlying needs food is intended to serve.
But some food is better than other food, it is possible to be an expert in food, and it is possible to cultivate one's tastes in food.
So with aesthetics.
Good artistic taste is like an interest in solving math problems. Many people aren't interested in solving math problems at all, of course. Those who are want the problem to be challenging but not so challenging they have no chance of solving it. When you are learning math, remembering your multiplication tables perfectly presents a challenge. Then learning to add fractions presents a challenge. Then comes algebra and calculus. Then harder stuff. A big part of taste is *wanting* to solve the harder problems. The payoff comes in not only solving the problem but seeing the beauty in the solution.
Part of the beauty of both math and art is the element of surprise. The world is more enchanting when you can still be surprised. This explains why the *easy stuff* becomes insipid after a while. It also explains why elegance matters. Something that looks difficult to the layman but is merely tedious won't be interesting to the expert, e.g., art overly decorative but lacking pith. It also explains why sometimes an easy looking problem to a layman may turn out to be fascinating and beautiful to the expert, e.g., art you think your five-year-old could make.
This is a bit like your BDSM porn analogy.
To explain "prettiness", I'll add: pretty to a layman is something like the number "10" or the number "100". Prettiness to the expert is something like the number "23".
I agree with your last paragraph, and I hate it.
I know you're trying to simplify and summarize, but I think reductionism saves us as usual. A lot goes into taste, but we can consider a few layers or categories. In each category, different parts may be objective, subjective, universal, or idiosyncratic (universal and objective usually pairing, subjective and idiosyncratic usually pairing, but not always). But it hardly matters what we call them by the time we're considering a cost-benefit, discussed at bottom.
First, raw sense data. Symmetry, nice colors, etc, are fairly objective and universal. But any given person may have their own sensory aberrations—some people like pink, some like grayscale, some really like simple, etc.
Then there are higher-order concepts. Wanting your building/outfit/etc to be a coherent whole with some internal consistency seems semi-universal, though not necessarily objective. Preferring extreme anti-bourgeoisie is much more niche and subjective. Perhaps a more universal equivalent would be "don't put fake gold all over your Salvation Army". Anyone trying to make statements like the socialists would fit in this category though, whether or not they are more niche or more universal: Randian aesthetics of form and function, giving your tech institute floor to ceiling glass to look extremely modern, making hospitals white so you can tell they're clean.
Then there are the responses to existing rules and examples. These are hardest to sort into objective vs subjective, as you point out with the the Latin grammarian who points out a valid extension from a past rule but to a case where it doesn't fit well. And even the BDSM analogy seems tricky to me: yeah, I naturally appreciate a nice modern building more if it's not surrounded by equally nice modern buildings, so there's some natural slide toward extremism. But an even trickier case is black shoes and white socks. I personally hold this belief, and I don't know exactly where it comes from, but I think it was partially because white socks and white shoes look cool, and black socks and black shoes look cool, and so for years the majority of the people I saw wearing white socks with black shoes were unfashionable. Moreover, by the positive manifold, they usually had other unsavory traits. So while this perception is surely not universal, I also basically endorse the perception and (limited, local) abiding by its heuristic. "Subjective" and "priesthood" seem not to do it justice, since it's a perfectly natural response to my associative cognition, but it's clearly a derived quantity more like social fashion and less like the actual sense data of white socks and black shoes is unpleasant. I agree this results in your Barber Pole model, but to me it feels much less "subjective" and arbitrarily chosen than it sounds when you say "[cool people choose a signifier, it trickles down, etc]".
To these three you might add practical affordances: what the building (or clothing) makes you do by default. (E.g. the drug-riddled "streets in the air", or the fact that round tables are awful for conferences because they lead to big conversations.) This is even more objective (and imo important) than aesthetic versions of form meets function.
Bringing this back to its origin, I think you're interested in these metaphors because you'd like to have a good argument against socialist architects and other people who ruin the commons from their ivory tower with idiosyncratic proclamations about taste. I'd argue it's perfectly fine to argue from a cost-benefit perspective: the anti-bourgeois statements and desire to make a splash absolutely do not justify the worse raw sense data and the impractical usage, especially given alternatives. If an architect (or fashionista, etc) is too caught up in responding to examples or pushing an ideology to build things that help people, they're failing their job. That means form that improves function, affordances and practicality, sensorily pleasing data, and creative new cost-effective and constraint-cognisant methods to achieve these. Those modernist socialist architects sound more like a priesthood, but I certainly don't think fashion or architecture inherently evolves in this manner.
First, Scott, you're collapsing together taste as a social convention and personal sense of aesthetics. Social conventions are real, they're probably as bad as you describe, but they're at best piggybacking on some real, psychological mechanism of aesthetic pleasure (and displeasure), at worst, completely uncorrelated with it. The moment you (impersonal you) try to discuss taste as a social convention, you sound like you're denying the existence of psychological mechanism of aesthetics, and then you sound like you're claiming people's aesthetic experiences aren't real and everyone with a taste (different than you) is just a poser. This is a bad way to accuse people of being posers (because it's easily dismissed with you simply missing an universal human experience, which at this point implies literally being tasteless). It's an even worse way to actually try to understand taste, because personal aesthetic experience is the (not a, the) fundamental part of it (social conventions can of course affect it by pushing you to rewire yourself to better conform to them; there's still something in there that needs to be rewired).
Second, you've omitted the simplest possible explanation that taste is like, well, duh, taste. Just like we seek things that are pleasurable to eat (because they provide nutrition, are known to be safe to consume, etc.), we seek things that are pleasurable to experience (because they stimulate our minds, affirm our sense of order in the world, etc.). Art and aesthetics are arguably a lot more subjective, and I'd like to explicitly denounce any and all claims that some cuisines/artstyles are superior to others, but if you can see how some people would claim that McDonalds and sodas are probably not the best food around and the normal people who consume them are being deceived by an overly simplistic interpretation of positive signals from their tastebuds, or how spices can be objectively beneficial despite being an acquired taste contrary to our basic instincts, then it should not be difficult to see how similar claims could be made about aesthetics.
“It’s not immediately obvious why you would want this skill - it makes your life worse, because you’ll just be fretting over flaws you see in everything. ”
Doesn’t this prove too much? Just about everything we enjoy about today’s world happened because someone was bugged enough by a flaw in the order of things to work out a solution, which eventually caught on when the existence of the solution made plain how insufferable the status quo was.
If you’re not dissatisfied with the little flaws in your life, why would you strive to make more money (ie bring more wealth into existence)? If this effect is widespread, you don’t even get efficient markets since making money ceases to be a widespread incentive!
Here's a wrench throw
In the West it is considered more cultured and sophisticated to able to enjoy and appreciate many different sorts of cuisine. The hipsters and socialites will wax rhapsodic about not just Mexican or Chinese but Ethiopian fusion, Peruvian, Mongolian cuisine etc. the more varied your taste and the more you can appreciate the better - either in its simplicity or complexity, and if you like the really gross stuff by local standards, the exotic delicacy, you get even more bonus points.
Only liking your cultures food is very philistine.
But art operates in reverse, a narrowing of appreciation to exclude as much as possible rather than expansion.
Why?
Because taste is not real underneath its all just status and power and signaling.
When are was really hard to make, having it at all was sophisticated. Just like in the book as it got easy to make, they invented careful rules only the rich and cool enough people could keep up with.
But food operates in the reverse, poor people only have the access to, and therefore narrowed preference for, their local quisine. Only the rich can afford to grow up eating food from all over the world.
>But art operates in reverse, a narrowing of appreciation to exclude as much as possible rather than expansion.
No, no. An art connoisseur is going to appreciate many more genres of art than a layman. For instance, most people are only interested in the musical genres that were popular in their culture when they were young. It works exactly like your example with food.
Agree.
There is a satiation effect concerning food, with a reverse side to it - after some hungry time bland food tastes delicious. I suspect a bit of that works with aesthetics, too. Almost anybody can hum a simple tune, some can sing, some carve little figures or braid hair, but something special like a traveling band of musicians or the pictures and sculptures in a town church gets valued higher. People with daily access to high-end art lose their taste for it.
I'm married to an architect and I would advocate for the "Taste Is Like BDSM Porn" theory. They're total hipsters who are tired of the normie stuff even when it looks pretty (e.g. my wife hates "live edge")
Here's two models to consider:
1-Skill with a ceiling. In some particular field practitioners can be distinguished by their skill, but at the very top all practitioners are equivalent. For the average person, their preference will align with the skill. But among those at the very top, they need to find something to distinguish one from another. Of necessity, these things will be orthogonal to skill. To the average person, this may result in outputs that seem equivalent, or even inferior, because they are judging based on skill.
2-Taste is subjective and fixed. Two people experiencing the same thing may have different reactions to it if one is more sensitive than the other. The less sensitive one will be inclined to seek out further stimulation, experiences that will seem unnecessary at best and unpleasant at worst to the more sensitive person.
I don't know how useful the second model is. I think it might describe food tastes, but it doesn't seem like many other artistic fields are focused on pure sensation.
I like the first model, as it dodges the physics vs priesthood argument. The elements pursued at the highest level of a particular field are not arbitrary, but will not be distinguishable to an amateur either.
But my favorite part of my first model is that it makes predictions! Specifically, any event that raises the skill level experienced by the average person should make the original elements appreciable to the average person. Two examples I've thought of are mass distribution and AI.
So in music, the advent of radio and recordings should have resulted in the average person's taste moving to match the elite, since everyone has access to the best musical artists. Does the profusion of musical genres support this? Or does the continued strength of pop music show that skill isn't relevant to average preference after all.
Likewise, now that AI can create images easily that before could only be produced by talented and experienced individuals, we should see a shift in tastes, and an increase in the popularity of art that is currently only preferred by the elite.
Music would likely be a more helpful place to start the conversation than visual art.
First, my sense is that the sort of people who read this blog are somewhat likely (20%, maybe more), to have spent many years studying an instrument and possibly received some formal education in Western classical music. Probably vanishingly few of us are professional musicians, but it's overall better than visual arts where any kind of real experience is probably below 5%.
Second, music has a clear division into classical and popular forms, but taste exists within both and many non-experts have strong preferences within both classical and popular music. That should steer us decisively away from the idea that taste is simply elitism, even though elitists certainly exist. This doesn't rule out the priesthood analogy, however, since there are many priesthoods.
Looking at music, then, here's some relevant observations I thought about while reading the post. There were some periods when it considered innovative to blend elements of Jamaican genres, reggae and ska, with Western styles. Reggae and ska were themselves products of cultural fusion, but they were far enough from Western rock music that the blend made for some novel sounds. But many of the resulting songs probably sounded hopelessly kitschy or just bad to people from the Caribbean where those styles and their ancestors were commonplace, and as the styles became commonplace in the West we came to see some of the songs (I'm not saying they must have been the same ones) as kitschy. Taste changed in a matter of decades, but not for some sketchy reason, I'd argue that anyone who just listens to a pop radio station would agree on the broad strokes. It's similar to the grammar or justified priesthood analogies, but there's something more intuitive. Maybe not as unshakeable as physics, but something that comes naturally to people with a common set of experiences. When the experiences are different, reactions could be completely different.
This probably has a lot to do with why styles of popular music go so decisively in and out of fashion, persisting and getting revived in different generations and locations. As taste gets more refined, the amount of deviation needed to avoid seeming cliched goes up while the amount of deviation permitted to avoid losing most listeners goes down, and so a new context is needed for musicians to once again feel like there's something new they can try out.
What happens if you disregard innovation? Look at Shibuya kei, the product of a bunch of Japanese people who were deeply interested in 20th century American and British popular music and decided to create music to match their tastes. In this new context with a new blend of experiences they made something definable on its own. But to many sophisticated fans of pop music, Shibuya kei is the embodiment of kitsch. The Shibuya kei artists didn't set out to innovate in the genres they imitated, they set out to make more of what sounded good. It's said to lack the individuality and context that makes great music. Fair enough, but even its harsh critics, who have a similar list of musical favorites, are forced to admit it sounds good. The artists may not have a grasp of English grammar, but their musical grammar is in sync with people who have sophisticated taste in pop. The fact that it's not enough goes against the grammar analogy.
As one gets deeper into music, it seems like there are a few paths that naturally emerge. You could chase novelty, looking for music that sounds like nothing you've heard before, and end up in subgenres of rock and electronic music. It's like the BDSM analogy. Alternatively you could chase the stuff that emerges from a deep understanding of the medium and strives for excellence in expression, pushing the limits of musical grammar. That's classical music.
We get weird modernist music primarily from people who go a third way and take an interest in the story behind the music. We're often taught when trying to appreciate difficult art in school to put ourselves in the artist's shoes and try to feel the feelings that went into the work, or to appreciate the situation and tools they were working with. Less artificially, we often find a deeper appreciation of our favorite rock bands or classical composers when we learn their life stories and their creative process. Modernist art sees this demand for self-expression and/or having a unique creative process and optimizes on that. But it's destined for unpopularity because most people are not so interested in studying obscure forms of self-expression that they're willing to sacrifice novelty or ignore whether the musical grammar sounds right.
When people with a taste for abstract, self-expressive works (or works with a political/religious message, which people appreciate in a similar way) in any artistic medium are elevated to a higher social status, like in some corners of academia, and the artists get more attention from elite audiences, I believe that's where it starts to look suspicious to regular folks. Unfortunately, I think it's inevitable that the academic priesthood of the 21st century has a distinct taste, just as it was inevitable that '80s goths had a distinct taste. Music (or aesthetics more broadly, but I think music is particularly potent) and your social circle reinforce each other. The question is whether this preference harms society's ability to produce art that speaks to regular folks. It hasn't in music, but maybe it has in architecture.
Anyway I'm going to go rock out to some Shibuya kei to prove I'm not a music snob.
You are rightfully identifying the contradictions inherit in the idea of "good taste" if you don't also accept the "objective good determined by God" foundation for it. If aesthetics have no objective founding, then they're just priesthoods and fashions and status games.
Your criticism of the objective idea is that taste is not universal, which it should be if objective. I would argue that tase is universal, to an extent. Of course, I am also on your side when it comes to the architecture question, and I find that the fact the mass majority of humans prefer some styles over others is evidence that those styles are closer to objective beauty than the others! I have the enviable position of not having to defend the idea that good taste is something exclusive to an educated elite, and also completely alien from common tastes.
Food is a good analogy. A McDonalds cheeseburger is very popular, and also is considered to be not good food. I don't think those ideas are contradictory: the cheeseburger has many flavors and qualities that are good, but they are not the highest quality and they are combined with other negative features, such as being poor nutrition and being made from cheap ingredients. Someone who loves McDonalds and has contempt for "fine dining" might benefit from some "education": you could take him out to some fine dining resteraunts and introduce him to new foods. Over time he might discover that he is developing good taste himself: that he can appreciate really good French cuisine and, while he can still recognize why he liked Big Macs so much, also recognizes that there are a lot better foods. It's not about claiming that the Big Mac isn't tasty, but about discovering that there are so many other foods that are better and more complex.
Ultimately, "good taste" is ruined when it turns into snobbery and is used as a cudgel in status games. The point of good taste is to enjoy good things, not to prove your superiority to others. C. S. Lewis wrote about this in his essay "Lilies that Fester":
"Suppose you had spent an evening among very young and very transparent snobs who were feigning a discriminating enjoyment of a great port, though anyone who knew could see very well that, if they had ever drunk port in their lives before, it came from a grocer’s. And then suppose that on your journey home you went into a grubby little tea-shop and there heard an old body in a feather boa say to another old body, with a smack of her lips, “That was a nice cup o’ tea, dearie, that was. Did me good.” Would you not, at that moment, feel that this was like fresh mountain air? For here, at last, would be something real. Here would be a mind really concerned about that in which it expressed concern. Here would be pleasure, here would be undebauched experience, spontaneous and compulsive, from the fountain-head. A live dog is better than a dead lion. In the same way, after a certain kind of sherry party, where there have been cataracts of culture but never one word or one glance that suggested a real enjoyment of any art, any person, or any natural object, my heart warms to the schoolboy on the bus who is reading Fantasy and Science Fiction, rapt and oblivious of all the world beside. For here also I should feel that I had met something real and live and unfabricated; genuine literary experience, spontaneous and compulsive, disinterested. I should have hopes of that boy. Those who have greatly cared for any book whatever may possibly come to care, some day, for good books. The organs of appreciation exist in them. They are not impotent."
Later in the essay he makes clear his opinion of "experts" whose art is hated by the masses:
"Mr. J. W. Saunders has set it all out in an excellent article entitled “Poetry in the Managerial Age” (Essays in Criticism, iv, 3, July 1954). He there faces the fact that modern poets are read almost exclusively by one another. He looks about for a remedy. Naturally he does not suggest that the poets should do anything about it. For it is taken as basic by all the culture of our age that whenever artists and audience lose touch, the fault must be wholly on the side of the audience. (I have never come across the great work in which this important doctrine is proved.) The remedy which occurs to Mr. Saunders is that we should provide our poets with a conscript audience; a privilege last enjoyed, I believe, by Nero."
Flying Lion, your reply inspired two thoughts and the motivation to review your SubStack.
--
First is the passing fleeting thought that finial responded to your reply (for some reason) to finally pause long enough to get a glimpse of Her, ..
For those with any kind of passing knowledge of Platonic or other types of 'Forms', that of their perfection and they only can fully exist near or with God and His Truth.
It suggests to me that some kinds 'Taste' might be from a recognition of aspects of what we accept as tasteful - is the result that it Reflects internal more fully some part of their perfect Form from which they are less then shadows in respect too.
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And your example of the suggest hypothetic sufferer of a semi-toxic psychological situation of some people that are near manifestations of the Forms of pretense, falseness, and shallowness, ..
that part of your comment reminded me of a Lunch Party on Long Island NY when as a freshman in HS I was spend a break from school at the mother house and was automatically included to a lunch party thrown by (at the time) unknow person, Lauren Bacall, and the kind of sensed heavy undercurrents that existed and covered over by the overt pretenses. It would have been exhaustingly boring absent that undercurrent and my slow collection and integration of it into what seemed like Order, when an older businessman approached and chatted in a friendly way which I always enjoyed from strangers ..
(on intrastate and interstate bussed adults that know they will never see you again confess the most interesting things, needing to find someone to share with),
.. he in indirect ways was asking something of me that I was too naive to 'get' in a reasonable time, he was trying to pick me up for a quicky I guess, the sudden realization and surprise at it, weirdly including a kind of flattered feeling was hard not to expose to the world at that moment in a normal full body shake or similar, but after a moment of thought I explained politely that I was flattered by his offer but came with my female lover and we were practicing exclusivity, or something to that effect, .. and found a good excuse to leave explaining the sudden opportunity to approach our social free Host.. to spend the time that I sensed was in good graces and expected of all the guests, something I was somehow nervous about but was sudden filled with courage and eager to do as a method of politely escape from a suddenly uncomfortable situation for us both.
Anyway - if his goal was really to break my internal focus on that undercurrent, he was surprisingly effective because I did not recall it at all until long after we left. And may have completely forgotten under normal relaxed 'non-threating' unstrange environments.
Perhaps there is something very significant under that vapid pretensive talking that you cannot hear and never thought to listen for?
--
God Bless., Steve
«For example, it would make more sense to say “he goed” than “he went”, but only the latter is correct.»
"to go" is a top 100 word, which is why it's so short. Its past form "went" is a top 500 word. If it were "goed", we'd often mishear one for the other. Similarly "gone" is probably top 500, too. Since the most basic movement word is so central, we can emphasize different tense aspects of it, in objectively beautiful snippets like "Go to hell!", "He really went to town on that corpse.", "He's dead and gone.".
Why is that beautiful? Well it's objectively beautiful, because *mumble* something *mumble* minimizes prediction error. Also just imagine it was "to go, goed, goed" instead. These sexy snippets would sound like mush.
Now anyway, a philistine might say "but if it's such a common word, isn't it cruel, that it's irregular, giving us so many chances to make mistakes"?
No opposite logic. If you use the word all the time, you get lots of repetitions in, each reinforcing the irregular pattern and making it seem natural. Hence uncommon and rare verbs are mostly regular, the most common ones are sensibly irregular for ease of communication in suboptimal acoustic environments and aesthetics.
Yeah I heard that tons of grammars are optimizing for noisy channels, which is our reality. The contradictions seem to happen when rules are applied far from where it should be, resulting in disagreement between pedant and pragmatist
I'm surprised to see no reference to V.S. Ramachandran's work on the neurological basis of aesthetic experiences.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/v-s-ramachandran-aesthetics-wg.aNx3gTM.1MWJFK7FxGQ#0
I take his work to suggest that there >are< absolute, objective foundations for aesthetic experiences. However they are likely to be so deeply buried and complex as to be undefinable for the practical purposes of considering any particular real world situation.
I mean why? It's 9 pretty specific laws. Apply them to something pretty in the real world and see if it fits. Doesn't seem too hard.
That was just a link to tell you who he is. His work aren't the laws.
Interesting. I have been in the visual arts my whole life, and those 9 points completely made sense to me as the rules to a good composition.
My favorite was “peekaboo “ because I immediately thought of a very famous shot in Rosemary’s Baby. The cinematographer (William Fraker) had framed a shot through a doorway of Ruth Gordon sitting on a bed speaking on a telephone while Mia Farrow was trying to overhear it from the other room. He d shot through the doorway so you could see Ruth Gordon, sitting on the bed framed by the doorway. Roman Polanski looked through the viewfinder and said “no no Willie, move the camera the over, move the camera over.” Fraker shifted the camera so that Ruth Gordon was now partially obscured by one post of the door frame. Pulaski approved. The cinematographer scratched his head.
At the Premier screening of the film, Fraker was sitting in the audience, and when that shot hit the screen, everyone in the theater shifted their head sideways at the same time.
My own theory - I'm not sure how it fits into the above, exactly - is that certain things are easy to appreciate (ketchup and french fries; twee countryside houses all asparkle with fairy energy; milk chocolate; sweet wine) and others take more time and exposure to learn to like (horseradish; Cy Twombly; dark chocolate; dry wine). By liking the things that take longer to appreciate, you demonstrate that you have had the leisure to immerse yourself into something. It's just a class signifier.
>By liking the things that take longer to appreciate, you demonstrate that you have had the leisure to immerse yourself into something. It's just a class signifier.
A bunch of the commenters have said that, for several cases, they have enjoyed the things that took longer to appreciate more than the more straightforward things.
For the class(es?) that have the leisure to do this, an interesting question is:
Does this use of time pay for itself? Is there _enough_ additional appreciation to be worth the time to acquire it. Even the upper class has finite lifespans, and time learning more complex appreciation is time not spent enjoying simpler things or learning other things.
( This is, admittedly, ignoring _pure_ status games where the upper classes test each other on appreciation of obscure things. )
Taste is a mix of social status games and something more ''objective''. Trying to make it one or the other will create confusion. A related source of confusion here is the distinction between beauty and art. Art is communication through aesthetic phenomena, but it need not leverage beauty (aesthetic pleasure) as its main tool. It can also leverage the opposite end of the scale. So while many of us primarily seek beauty, some people want to communicate using aesthetics that aren't pleasurable (beautiful). If some people find the message communicated sufficiently interesting or novel, they might say that it is good or interesting art, even though there is little beauty involved. Historically art went hand in hand with beauty, but in the case of modern architecture, beauty seems to have been largely abandoned in favor of communication and status games. Or at least, beauty was abandoned for a large portion of us, since our sense of beauty really does evolve if we study certain artforms deeply, as I will propose an explanation for now (together with a proposal for what beauty fundamentally is).
Let me work under the following hypothesis, which I have argued for in a longer post on my Substack: beauty is experienced when our subconscious brain successfully decodes and predicts a very large amount of patterns in a sensory signal. Decoding and prediction are related, because successful decoding of a sensory signal can be verified if other portions of the signal now can be successfully predicted. In fact, the metric of successful decoding probably just is subsequent successful prediction. So beauty, I believe, is the pleasure of successive predictive processing when operating at the edge of our capability. This urge is likely evolutionary beneficial, because signals that contain complex patterns that our brain is just marginally able to decode are probably signals that we are learning from at an optimal rate. And we want to sharpen our sensory abilities to be sensitive to subtleties in signals that appear in our environment - faint tracks from animals, subtle patterns in the clouds indicating rain, facial expressions signaling deception, etc. Thus, it makes evolutionary sense to have a generalized reward signal for successful gradient in complex pattern recognition - to reward us with a sense of beauty for engaging with sensory signals that can optimally sharpen our senses. Here is the slogan: beauty is caused by entropically fine-tuned signals.
A very basic example of the relation between prediction and aesthetic satisfaction: play C major scale on any instrument, but do not play the last note returning you to the starting point of the scale: C-D-E-F-G-A-B-STOP. Your brain gets extremely frustrated, because it makes a very strong prediction that C is about to appear. If you play the C instead of STOP, you feel a sense of aesthetic satisfaction when your prediction is verified. Similarly, rhymes are aesthetically satisfying because they provide a structure of language where the brain has a decent shot at successful prediction (and guaranteed almost-successful prediction). Other examples of patterns to be decoded are: tempo in a song, timbre of instrument (wood vs metal), geometric structure (topology, curvature scales, repeated shapes etc), correlations in color, etc. Or, on the subject of ornament: suppose your brain picks up an ornament somewhere on the building. Then, as you move your eyes across the building and see identical or similar ornaments, you give your brain lots of chances to do more successful predictions. More beauty.
Now, as you practice an art, you really do sharpen your sensory abilities. What previously was hard for your brain to predict might now become easy. You need something else for genuine sensation of beauty. It is not surprising that atonal music was developed by composers who had an extremely deep knowledge of tonal music, like Schoenberg. It probably all become too predictable for his brain. But this is not the case for most of us, so it remains pleasurable. This prediction framework also easily explains why you get sick of a basic song you heard to much: it becomes predictable because your brain basically memorized it. However, this doesn't happen with all music, especially music that is sufficiently complex. It has to much microscopic structure for your brain to memorize, so you get to rediscover a bunch of patterns every time you here. This is also a useful role of ornament: it protects the artwork from memorization, hence making the beauty less degradable. It is pretty easy for you to conjure an accurate image of some of those modernist buildings in your brain. Less so for an ornate building - you usually only conjure the long-wavelength structures.
Anyway, in the case of modernism, I suspect that things are driven in large portion by status games (further poisoned by ideology). But I also do believe the architects were genuinely aesthetically bored by classical architecture, probably triggered by a deep study of this very architecture.
> If some people find the message communicated sufficiently interesting or novel, they might say that it is good or interesting art, even though there is little beauty involved.
I would be interested in a concrete example of what you are referring to here.
My reference is Ode to a Grecian Urn.
I don't enjoy most such art myself, so it is challenging from the outside to pick the status games apart from what people aesthetically enjoy (although see one exception below). But it seems clear that the pioneers of modernism in architecture described in Scott's post were genuinely interested in communicating the ideas of communism aesthetically. And broadly, with a lot of contemporary art that is ''ugly'', it hard to imagine that the curators working with it does not find at least some aesthetic satisfaction in a portion of it. These people got into art for a reason - they also have experienced the beauty of the classical masterpieces - and I suspect the cognitive dissonance would be too strong if they didn't at least find some aesthetic value in the stuff they are peddling. It makes it easier to justify the status games they are playing to themselves if their aesthetic compass is at least somewhat aligned.
As another example, I enjoy a genre of music that most people find downright ugly: black metal. I find it genuinely beautiful. Or perhaps sublime is the better word. But certainly aesthetically pleasurable. Check for example the track Jesus Tod by Burzum, or Nattens Madrigal by Ulver.
I am still interested in something that is good and interesting but not beautiful. To any given person.
Why wasn’t modern architecture a sufficient example? And why to any given person when we are talking about taste?
Well, modern architecture is a bit of a broad category to apply that statement to, I think. We could talk about a particular building. Interesting and good, but not beautiful.
I realize we are talking about taste, which is precisely why I said to any given person. Taste is personal; 1000 people could give you 1000 answers all different.
I would find it very hard to find something good and interesting but not beautiful when we are talking about art. A lack of beauty would make it not good as far as I am concerned. Apparently, that is not true for you so I’m curious to have a specific reference. It would make it a bit easier to understand. Do you find the music you like to be good and interesting but not beautiful?
I am with you, I don’t like art that has abandoned beauty. But there is a whole lot of out there it that a group of people seem to find interesting. Just visit the wiki page of Coneptual Art and pick your any piece there. Or consider the piece of music named 4′33″ - 4 min a 33 s of silence that apparently sufficiently many people found interesting when presented in the right context.
My first experience of this my memory has filed - is a vivid Dream where the graph of 1/x as X goes to 0 from +1 and -1 does not meet even at positive infinity or negative infinity and this recently learned fact must have so upset me that I dreamed the graph I had looked at recently is vague disturbing of the disconnected line, that in my dream the graph became 3D and both curves returned on the axis of my perspective an to meet at that axis' infinity.
What is Beauty? A mathematic function?, or the Gifts that is available to someone to experience that ..?
I could have asked a young woman in one of my JR HS classes, would she see any Beauty in that?
Do you?
God Bless., Steve
I was a very poor student who came and went from various schools between the ages of 16 and 19. I remember a year struggling through a differential calculus class as I had not formally studied trigonometry. I had to work pretty hard to get a passing grade in that class. I do remember experiencing an emotion that I would say is very akin to contemplating something beautiful at certain things that I learned to understand taking that class. Perhaps the experience of understanding something is very similar to the experience of perceiving something beautiful. I also found it good and interesting.
Seeing beauty is a very personal thing, I agree. And yes, you might’ve asked that girl that she thought it was beautiful as well. I think I would find it beautiful, but I’m not enough of a mathematician to really follow you here.
I had a similar experience, reading an article about quantum physics. There was a thought experiment of two clocks with pendulums swinging and mapping the position of the pendulums. It was something about how random that graph would look without any direct experience of the two clocks behind it. The idea struck me as interesting good and beautiful.
> play C major scale on any instrument, but do not play the last note returning you to the starting point of the scale: C-D-E-F-G-A-B-STOP.
Urban legend has it that this is how Mozart’s father would get his boy out of bed in the morning.
I think you're missing the point by looking towards the priesthood to determine what "everyone" or "all the sophisticated people" thought at some time in the past. If you want to get a sense of the ethics of 2024 universal culture, look at widespread laws, customs, and hot-button culture war topics. Not at what academic philosophers are saying.
Beneath that top layer of conspicuously taste-conscious people, there's a broader set of people who have taste in a low-key way. I speculate that the aesthetic preferences of that latter set are much more stable over time.
My idea is that true taste gives you a new emotion. You unlock godspeed you black emperor emotions which were not available to you when listening Bruce Springsteen. Everything else is priesthood
Lots of comments, sorry if it already appeared, but I will try to contribute with this text by Paul Graham "Is there such a thing as good gaste?": https://paulgraham.com/goodtaste.html
Paul McCartney never liked Queen's music.
David Bowie didn't like the Rolling Stones' music (yet was good friends with Mick Jagger).
Pete Townsend tried to force himself to like Led Zeppelin's music, but couldn't get there.
John Lennon was a big fan of Led Zeppelin.
"De gustibus non est disputandum" is a Latin phrase that translates to "there is no disputing about taste," meaning that personal preferences are subjective and shouldn't be argued about; essentially, "you can't argue about someone's taste.". -- Google AI overview
The problem with your example is that artists have more complicated relationships with their contemporaries than a simple fan of music does. All those people probably agree much more than disagree if you asked them about the artists who came a generation before them.
One of the few things I've ever heard about John Lennon who is understood to have sold his soul to Satan for success, wealth, and all that comes from worldly Satanic enslavement, his time bargained-for ending at the day of his murder, .. the good taste that I considered reasonable, his apprehension of some of Led Zeppelin's content.
Haha I skimmed the subject headings and then wrote the following without realizing how repetitious it was: How about "taste is like fashion"?
I don't think anyone would really argue that one fashion of clothes is objectively superior to another, but at any given time there are trends and rules that clothing fashions follow in order to be "in style." Some people have a fashion sense that allows them to detect what clothes are in style or not, which leads them to have different and to normies sometimes confusing clothing preferences. Similarly some people have artistic taste and thus understand what art is in style right now. It's a real understanding that it takes time and study to develop, but comes down to something more like sociological knowledge of the preferences of the fashionable art world than it does to any objective standard.
This is really not a correct way to understand Hinduism (some Hindus would disagree with me, but they're wrong).
What westerners call Hinduism is either the synthesis of several distinct religions (if you're a lumper) or an amorphous term covering several totally distinct and separate religions (if you're a splitter, which is more where I am). Unlike Christianity, Hinduism is not a religion defined by priests or by the clerical class. The "Popular Hinduism" practiced by low-education people in the villages is at least as old as the religion of the priests, sometimes has very little to do with it (or for that matter with the religion of the Vedic era), and is every bit as legitimate. Popular Hinduism is not some kind of dumbed-down, defective version of Brahminic Hinduism.
I would say that some purity laws, stuff like the prohibition on beef, is a pretty core aspect of Hinduism, but that's not because the priests say it, it's because most Hindus (irrespective of class, education level, ethnicity or region) agree that it is.
I consider the entirety of Hinduism to be a politically inspired and shaped forced capture of the many once separate and clearly different religions that formed in the isolated physically or other reasons that must have been the excuse and reason for endless tribal warring, murder, genocides, enslavement, and all other evils that such wars find and realize, that by forcing through force that likely happened, forcing them under a unifying God that offers an acceptable solution for unification and end of the horrors all suffered in the then existing paradigm all were trapped in endlessly, that endless circle of suffering and insanity they knew from experience and history as told by elders of every tribe.
And that in each separate form of Hindi we can find value and wisdom the none or few of the others contain. And in the few Wise publicly professed Truths that Pope Francis has been Inspired to State, of that is known to me, and perhaps like all Catholic doctrine aware including him, perhaps further evil intent that like a stopped clock happens to be correct twice a day, .. that all religion is Willed by God, and that I believe with Faith expresses that which Traditional Catholicism still lacks, some Wisdom that is contained in each and is the bridge to many new Converts and souls saved.
What may seem like fashion or heresies to most is - as in Hindi - a method for countless souls saved and a Fuller Inspired Church.
God Bless., Steve
Thanks for your comment. You are spot on about the nature of Hinduism, but I must say that the prohibition of beef is still primarily a North Indian thing. It always irritates me that Indian belief systems, both progressive and regressive, are often defined (inadvertently, perhaps and certainly by Scott) through a North Indian lens. Go down South to Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and you'll see that even upper-caste Hindus have no such inhibitions about beef or rituals or whatever. This might have something to do with ancient history. The South has always been richer, more developed, and more progressive. Sadly, this also means that my beloved Kerala continues to elect corrupt Communist governments. Thank God I live in America!
PS I am liberal and a lacto-ovo vegetarian.
"""
"Oh! what a superior man," said Candide below his breath. "What a great genius is this Pococurante! Nothing can please him."
[...]
"But is there not a pleasure," said Candide, "in criticising everything, in pointing out faults where others see nothing but beauties?"
"That is to say," replied Martin, "that there is some pleasure in having no pleasure."
"""
>Fashion is a set of rules, like “don’t wear white after Labor Day”. Why shouldn’t you wear white after Labor Day?
Because white is a summer color, and Labor Day is the unofficial end of summer. Nothing more or less to it. If you're wearing white after Labor Day, according to this rule (or "rule" if you prefer), you're not evil or boastful or anything like that, you're just wearing a summer color in what we have all agreed is now autumn, and you're therefore just kind of...out of it, or whatever.
I very seriously doubt this was ever announced with "great fanfare" as it was never more than a rule of thumb.
Obviously, how seriously anybody ever took this rule depended on how much they subscribed to the notion of white being a summer color.
Whatever nonsense Google told you is simply one of those after-the-fact "explanations" that people pull out of their asses, along the lines of Fornication Under Consent of the King.
From this reply I expect to infer that you reject the assumed Right of the Master (and benefactor, Protector and Provided over others) his right of first access and opportunity to impregnate all married wives before husbands, and expect the Justly desired support from them and all his other servants, with the impregnated successes by him to be a seen as blessing, and with it nearly guaranty for his or her access to Master's class and placement and right to the chance of Knighthood and future greater things for males and similar for female offspring, with honor reflected on the couple?
How backward and disOrderd your belief system must be. One might reason.
With intent to open perspectives,
God Bless., Steve
Oh, no no no, that stuff is all true and is the revealed Will of God. It's just not where "fuck" comes from.
Here's an idea: I think artistic taste is like the actual sense of taste. Sometimes you eat food and it feels yummy and other times you eat food and it feels yucky. But if you eat the same food enough times, sometimes what felt yucky at first can feel yummy later on.
And ALSO if you get raised into a certain culture that largely (but not entirely) determines your taste. (E.g. many Americans find burgers yummy, whereas many non-Americans would find them yucky. But I'm American and I also find burgers yucky at times, though not always. Exactly analogous to how architects switched from liking fancy decorated buildings to liking concrete slabs but one of them specifically wanted a concrete slab with circles in it.)
Maybe "it's good in a more complicated and interesting-seeming way," which you may or may not need training to appreciate?
E.g. a sine wave is the simplest musical note, and could be considered pleasant, but it's boring compared to the timbre of a cello.
>for example, you originally couldn’t split an infinitive in English because doing so was impossible in Latin; only later did people develop a “sense” that this “sounded wrong”.
You've got it backwards. You absolutely could originally split an infinitive English. The split infinitive went in and out of fashion over the last six hundred years or so, but it wasn't until the nineteenth century that a group of Latin-obsessed grammarians decided that you "couldn't" do it because it can't be done in Latin.
I feel like Scott is missing the mark on this one. I think most people have some intuitive sense for what looks good, what looks right. But that doesn’t mean they can act on it. I know I’ve seen people look great in an outfit, but if I try it, I look silly. People with good taste either can act on it intuitively, and/or have the theoretical structure to build something from the ground up.
I think Derek Guy is a great example of this. One of his common bits is to show a poorly dressed politician alongside some well dressed “nobody”. And at least I have some ingrained sense that the person he holds up as better dressed looks better, but I might not have the sense to pin it on the longer jacket or the fuller pants.
Additionally, good taste should be more timeless than fashion. Someone with good taste can steer you away from the details that will look silly in 20 years. Which for your shoes might not matter, but for designing your house or picking wedding clothes, it might matter more.
And even if there isn’t an objective truth to point to, there are communal truths. Most people will associate an outfit with polyester bell bottoms with the 70s, certain mustaches remind people of Magnum PI, bleak faceless buildings remind them of communism. People with taste know these intuitive associations (…and more subtle ones, of course) to control and play with how something is received.
The timelessness sense mentioned reflects a deeper understanding of the universality and significant truth of this topic or aspect of the subject, and extends to most everything - not only in fashion.
(Side note: Bell-bottom pants almost killed me as an older boy when - as a good swimmer - I jumped into a lake from the dock in wild-male expression and the corduroy bell-bottom pants removed most of the force-created function of my legs and added weight increased the deadly pull under the surface. Tastelessness can be deadly.)
God Bless., Steve
"It’s not immediately obvious why you would want this skill - it makes your life worse, because you’ll just be fretting over flaws you see in everything."
I kinda think this too, honestly - I get to spend so much less on food than my peers since I'm still content with frozen stuff and the occasional meal prep. That said:
In general, I would define "taste" as "the ability to appreciate craftsmanship". Having taste means being able to understand (and care about) the intentions behind the art you're looking at. Older styles are not inherently tasteless - no one serious will argue that the Mona Lisa is bad, actually - but the older they get and the more cemented they are in popular consciousness, the more likely they are to be blindly copied by amateurs who don't understand why they are the way that they are. Consider two examples of modern "tastemakers": McMansion Hell and Die, Workwear! When these two criticize houses/fashion, they never say "this is from an older style and that's bad." They always say "This is a random mishmash of different styles with no clear intent behind it."
I want to rescue the idea by emphasizing E, but ameliorative (taste is like *porn* porn). Suppose all your life you have tasted everything from A to Z through osmosis, except X, and you already settled on ranking everything you already know. Then by chance, you encounter X, and you see it as the greatest fucking thing in the world. Your worldview shatters, your ranking useless, and you wonder if there's another alpha, beta, aleph, Alif, out there that's even greater than this that you don't know. So you start to try to identify what's exactly different of X from A to Z that makes it better, and try to predict the next better things out there. For it you come up with lots of rules and patterns that may or may not actually be relevant.
Then you encounter someone that have only experienced A and B under their belt and you thought "poor sweet summer child, there are more wonderful things out there!" And you teach then the rules so that they too know that A and B are actually shit and there are better things out there. But those people never see C D or X so the rules don't make sense to them, but you assure yourself that they just haven't seen anything yet. Recent converts are the most zealous missionaries after all. Then you encounter someone that have only seen A and X, and say that A > X, and all hell break loose (remember, we thought that X > everything).
I've seen some shades of this when I'm recommended things I don't know and actually get benefit from it. But sometimes things are not that instant so I have to wonder if those people are just snobby or there's something to their word, eventually. And the advicer also wonder if it really doesn't fit my taste, or I just haven't walked in that shoe far enough. There's also "acquired taste" that screw things up.
Overall, I think I have a slightly more charitable view of this thing, saying that in lots of cases, some people that will see enough, haven't seen enough, so need to be guided by someone that have seen enough. If those people will never see enough, then those rules won't apply. Like someone that never comes out of their neighbourhood can be satisfied with all the wines they have in their cellar, but if I come to NY, I hope I don't have to trial and error that much to find one to my taste, and hope someone can guide me to them.
Great comment! It is perspectives like these that support the fact that not everyone existing is a NPC, but still have a relatively free soul.
I live for self-soul expanding Epiphanies as described, those that add a dimension to me and gives me another 'eye' to see the world with or the relive my remembered life through.
The wisdom of questioning those things that in our ignorance and lack of wisdom we once accepted as simple.
Part of Wisdom is to see the [potential] good in evil, and the [potential] evil in good.
God Bless., Steve
There are features of taste that are "universal human", but we don't see those, because everyone already sticks to them. Ask a dolphin or a bee to determine an absolute taste.
Of those features that aren't human universal, most are about social groupings. "People of my group like this kind of thing", and this is important enough to people that they feel it strongly.
Of the remainder, part of it is consistent universal taste. I have a sister who's obsessive about neatness, but I hardly notice it.
Of the remainder, much of it varies from time to time. Right now I want a mystery, but yesterday I wanted a fact article, and usually I want a comfortable SF Fantasy.
I'm not sure what's left.
Scott, which, if any, of these theories do you think describes the mind of the friend quoted in part 5 of the AI art turing test results post? (https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/151145038/but-others-might-genuinely-be-on-a-higher-plane-than-the-rest-of-us) If none of them, can you think of a theory that DOES model how she reacts to art?
This is good point, I think it really gets at what all these definitions of taste are missing - the idea that experts often do notice stuff that non-experts don't
There's a related discussion at the motte.
I think taste is basically about three things:
1. How many ideas exists in a work of art
2. The observer's ability to access those ideas
3. How fresh, original and interesting the ideas feel to the observer
I think when most people say something is "ugly," what they're really saying is that it's boring. And when most people say something is "good," what they really mean is that it's interesting.
For example, imagine a painting that's just a red square. Someone who knows nothing about the tradition of red square art might say, "That's just a red square, so boring." But someone well versed in the history and tradition of red square paintings might say, "Ah, this red square painting comments on other Red Square Painting, and its simplicity echoes the flag of the author's country, and it's commenting on how nationalism and artistry interact."
Most of the time, I think learning more about art helps you enjoy it more. As a teenager I found medieval art very boring. But when I took a college class that explained some of the themes and symbolism in medieval art, it suddenly became more interesting to me, because I could think about how the art explores death and time, instead of thinking "well, this is a realistic picture of fruit."
But sometimes, learning more about art actually makes you dislike it more. When I was seven I loved the movie "Ice Age," because it introduced me to ideas and story beats I hadn't seen before. But then I saw a million other similar movies, and stopped thinking that "Ice Age" is particularly good.
Generally, experts in x agree on what's "a good version" of x and what's "a bad version" of x because they're good at understanding x, and have a shared understanding of which concepts are "new/interesting" and which are "old/boring." If you watch a lot of kids movies, there is a stark difference between "The Lion King" and "Ice Age 2," two movies I liked about the same amount as a child.
But it's a little more complicated than this, because viewers can also interpret a piece of art in ways that don't have much to do with the actual art. Eg, you see a portrait of a woman that looks like your grandma, and it's more interesting and moving to you because you imagine the woman as your grandma. Or you might find "wokeness" boring, and so whenever you perceive a piece of art as "woke" you stop being able to notice anything else about it, and the whole piece of art becomes boring. "How many ideas exist in a piece of art" is subjective, and depends on the viewer. All these criteria depend on the viewer, which, I think, is why taste is so slippery and various.
I would guess most menswear enjoyers would agree that if you were picking clothing for practical goals you should wear whatever makes your target audience think you look the best combination of:
-- Tall
-- Thin
-- Muscular
But mostly people get into this stuff because its fun. Most people dont think ridiculous designer clothing look objectively better. I think this is all taking fashion a bit too seriously. Most people into fashion understand its kind of frivolous and dumb. But they are having fun with it. Good enough for me.
Give nature that which nature only needs, man’s life’s as cheap as beasts.
_Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ is a book about Robert Pirsig, the author, trying to grasp the concept of Quality---which is what we are talking about here---in which the author literally loses his mind, falls into a catatonic state for days and is institutionalized for a time. He believes that Quality is something that is neither objective nor subjective and that The Western Mind can't really grasp it, hence the Zen. It's a good book.
I'm sorry I am unable to simply 'like', as there was a kind personal uncentered lostness the author expresses that he once had and now doesn't have, and he missed (like someone that breaks both his legs and now till death he knows he will never enjoy dancing, running, or a simple walk with a love), or what he once trusted and relied on became unstable and seem to betray him when he most needed it and now he is crippled though not able to trust want was once so valuable and significant to who he was, or something like that that I seem to deeply understand, and it's like that every young man through teens and settling into his manhood would sense a similar underlining understanding of that kind.
On reflection I wonder if the author has a decent old standard father, like the fathers and men I knew as an older boy, and that fatherlessness and the unJust degrading, self-hatred seeds, and demonization that our lives for simply Being and Breathing, by lying putrid evil back souled mothers and women with power vomited as poison along with our murdered baby parts and soul sucking demonic leaches not yet vomited into babies and young defenseless children they get near, and of course the Satanic Gov, and our insanity accepting Sick Fem-Nazi controlled Joy-Love-Truth-Goodness murdering Western societies that are actively killing use through ever increasing tormenting, deep confusing, and invisible to even ourselves, that Suffering, suicide seeking horrors-filled vileness that is alien to self yet bound to us so deeply that it could have only be forced that deep when as innocent and helpless as a new-born.
Yes, that book has deepness that Called and exposed such deep Satanic causing monstruous pain that is alien and only could have been placed at a very young age when helpless and by some deeply evil directed close trusted and recognized person.
- Why not ask me if I could direct the killing of some random 3+ billions of people worldwide if of those survivors, none would need ever suffer such Sick evil poisoning us all now and many already dead of it have? F-ing ask me and learn the 'God-forgive me please!' answer.
God Bless., Steve
To me, taste is something like "ability to think about art and similar experiences in a way that allows you to find new things to enjoy about it past first impressions."
This is why, as other commentators have pointed out, it is analogous to taste for food. There are some foods that taste good when you first bite into them, and other foods that taste bad at first, but taste good when you take time to savor them and notice the sensations of eating them. There are also some foods that taste good at first, and taste different, but also good, if you savor and contemplate as you think about them.
Some art is optimized for a good first impressions (such as blockbuster action movies). Some is optimized to be enjoyed with thought and contemplation (such as although movies). Some is designed to be both (a smart action movie).
I think snobbery about taste comes in with the second type (bad first impression, good contemplatiocontemplation). Someone who is good at analyzing and thinking about things will show off by claiming to only things that take thought and analysis to appreciate.
I don't think this analysis is a complete explanation of all the social phenomena related to taste. Fads and fashion are definitely part of it too. There are instances where people overanalyze things that are in fashion and underanalyze things that aren't. A lot of critical tools can be applied to pretty much anything and produce interesting and rewarding analysis (for example, Lindsay Ellis did a fascinating video essay analyzing Michael Bay's "Transformers" movies). However, I think that looking at taste like this allows us to identify how it is pointing to something worthwhile, while also noticing when it is misused for status purposes.
Should everyone cultivate better taste? Not necessarily. Having taste allows you to get more types of enjoyment out of art than other people. However that's true of pretty much anything you put effort and practice into. If you really like art it's worth developing, but if your interests lie elsewhere maybe you should get more practice at something else.
I experienced a minorly-deep Ephinay food inspired.
As a young man near 20 years old, and having realized that relearning much of my new transformed by puberty body differences, and having be confused by something that a now and for most of my life would not require any thought to understand, I was at a point where I was pretty sure I mostly new myself and many of my normal limits discovered through sports and other life-experience ..
So when my biological and I sat down for a quick lunch containing fresh cut asparagus that he had two small fields of close to the farmhouse that there cuttable lengths already showing after being earlier cut at 5am and grew noticeably in that about 7 or eight hours, a treat only available to that that actually farm such produce, like corn on cob picked and husked while walking back to house to be dropped into already boiling water and pulled and eaten long before 30 minutes passed between picking and chewing ..
My biological father and mothers first husband spreads mayonnaise over his 'grass and I am shocked by the strangeness of the mixture, and he states its good, I refuse to even try thinking I know what I like, and it does and cannot include That!
Long story short after eating 'grass as I always have I finely give in to inner curiosity, and try it for I, and wow, I like it and by the time I finished that serving I am not only regretting the missed few meals that I in reason could have enjoyed more, but in some kind of irrationally I somehow regret every serving since childhood that would have been better eaten that way, and that absurdity of impossibility-based regret actual took a while to resolve.
And so, ends my forever saved and perhaps retold 1000's of years from now Sojourn into that thought Known, to discover betterness that I could not have predicted in a long life of wisdom hording.
Whenever you talk about this stuff, I get the sense that whatever's happening in your brain when you look at a painting is radically different to what's happening in my brain. I feel like I need an essay where you look at a bunch of randomly selected paintings and describe in detail how you respond to them.
I look at Tracey Emin's "My Bed" and go "No, that's not art. I understand the concept you are trying to get at, but you didn't set out intentionally to do this, and the glib rejoinder about 'nobody ever did this before' doesn't make it art".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Bed
It's an unmade bed and a mess of things during the phase of being depressed and drinking. The art *may* come in by carefully selecting and presenting the items, or replacements for them, afterwards.
This is the entire argument we are having: if you have to have an entire philosophical movement around "no this isn't an upturned rubbish bin, it is a piece of art" with name and all, in order to convince ordinary people that something is art, then it may be "art" but it is not art.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_object
If I paint the outside of my house pastel blue, I may feel happy that it looks clean and new and the colour is pleasant. People may compliment me on it. But I would never describe it as "I have created a piece of art".
If I paint a picture of a blue house, that's art.
It's certainly true that all conceptual art created since about Warhol is a bunch of cheap gimmicks, and that everyone involved is just pretending.
One reason this happened is an earlier generation rejected classical standards, on the basis that the French Academy was a corrupt priesthood and the snobby elites were just faking it. (Big simplification but that's kind of what happened.)
Most of the modern stuff that Tom Wolfe complains about exists as a backlash to older elitist aesthetic standards, which over time crystallised into an equally repressive orthodoxy that continued to pass itself off as "radicalism" but was just as suffocating as the old bourgeois culture. Which also happened with Communism itself, of course.
So we're really dealing with two different forms of elite snobbery here - a conservative one and a radical one. I think you could reasonably argue that the conservative one is more aesthetically pleasing than the radical one, although as a working artist you're entitled to question and subvert both.
Excellent topic!
A topic that I have found myself meditating on reflection of the remember relevant past 60+ ears of live and painful forming of wisdom by mostly learning from and recovering from failure, mistakes, and often near deadly levels of suffering - the most common way - and soliciting input and feedback about it from likely my only intimate friendship and a recent surprise-discovery, the Topics centered around how our realities are all different and that is normal, the their distances between us all in this aspect is further then likely any past citizens of a common Nation has been, and our separate Realities are getting further apart always, with increasing rate they seems to have, and related topics
I believe after some bit of focused meditations on this, all could all spend no less than three crack-meth fueled 24-hour continuous awake and topic focused days of useful, interesting, and valued input from everyone one of us .. although I am not suggesting this literally, or anything with orgies and such. .. .. Really.
I'm so sure that I'll suggest an example likely to be different than most of you that followed or heard of the case against the father & son neighborhood watchers in Maine, USA that went to trial for the killing of that innocent poor unarmed black jogger, as likely many believe.
.. I followed the case closely mostly because it was clearly politically used to enrage black-white tensions in some powerful peoples' hope to drive another unJust rash of riots, arsons, murders, looting and other socially destructive lie Justless fueled insanities that benefits some powerful Satanic goaled Profit seekers, soul eating demonic horrors.
Well after close examinations of every unJust aspect, suppression of facts that are clearly on video, that Vile trial sentenced those men to life in prison and such a hell you wouldn't put a dog through, to destroy men for acting as protectors of their community from a thief that had been a regular troller of criminal opportunities that he was seeking and likely advancing to crimes of rape and perhaps murder.
The innocent black jogger in work boots was videoed entering into a construction site in sneakers and stealing at least the boots he died in, and likely something like a screwdriver stabbing tool he was videoed tossing away as be ran towards the father son controlled space, then the Jogger attacked the armed son in a sudden and clearly 90 degree lunged meant to surprise, and the videoed of all this and the grabbing of the son's rifle or shotgun by the barrel end forcing it into a chest or belly orientation beyond the control of the son's will to aim away if he so desired, and causing the discharge and likely the following ones that in totality kill himself with.
If not complete self-caused through plain and visible insanity and violence by the Jogger on that armed man, the once unarmed Jogger suddenly became 'armed' under common law at the attempt to take control of the weapon, a well-established reasonable legal defense protection usually provided Justly that and similar situations which can happen to citizens and police .. but in that hell-hole of vileness and Calls for the Just killing of all in some form of gov powers & connect to that trial and-or that case - in an Just sane world that was willing to set an good clear example of the wages of intended clear inJustice and Sin, And a message to the entire World that sanity is coming back and if every living f-ing person on earth must die trying to stop It then you'll might as well start digger our graves. ..
.. or something similar.
Is it possible that we live in different realities, and you are not as willing to risk or direct deaths as I am on the fact that your lie filled twisted corp-media satanic serving version of that aspect of your reality is less true than mine? Perhaps?
A good, significant, and very powerful force in all our lives, I believe. Worth some attention at the least.
God Bless., Steve
Sanctimonious quibble, but I would prefer if people (like Scott) would stop using "BDSM" when they mean "weird/taboo/extreme" (or even just "kinky"). It's common to see people use the term to refer to any "scary kinky stuff", when BDSM is a specific kink (which is perfectly normal) whose community (by and large) has a huge emphasis on consent.
Snuff porn doesn't fit that, and even from a morally agnostic view, it doesn't fit any of the six parts of the acronym.
Scott in particular comes off as having a generally pretty sex/kink-positive social circle, and based and that and knowledge of his general libertarian views I assume it was meant in a value-neutral way. That makes it particularly bother me, because even with that presumed intent, it comes across as derogatory, especially when any of the above words would have better expressed what he seems to mean without picking on BDSM.
If it's "perfectly normal", then it's not a "kink". Nobody has a bread-eating kink or a water-drinking kink.
I'm not making a moral judgement here, rather a "meaning of words" one.
> Nobody has a bread-eating kink
So first off, this is probably the funniest possible example you could have picked, because there's an individual *infamous* in the fetish artist community for commissioning fetish art of buxom blondes buying wonderbread to eat[1]. And at the risk of TMI, I know for a fact that several people in wetting kink and (to an even greater extent) inflation kink communities *have* fetishized the act of drinking water. Rule 34 functionally applies to kinks, the kinds of things people are into strain belief.
But I see your point. By definition, kinks are about an atypical relationship with sexual pleasure. I intended that to mean "normal [as far as kinks go]".
But now that I'm looking at the data, I'm not sure I even need that caveat. Looking at the best data we have, Aella's kink survey[2], B&D, D&S, and even S&M are all in the upper range of the chart at 20-50%, and most are close to 40%. Even if we assume that each one is at least slightly correlated with the others, that seems to imply that the 50th percentile person (the "normal") should be into at least one.
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/murrlogic1s-wonder-bread-fetish-deviantart-commissions (Images in the article are sfw, quoted text less so)
[2] See (https://i.imgur.com/cMCc7NY.jpeg) As for data quality, she has a better sample size than the supermajority of social science studies and any other sexuality study I'm aware of, and has validated it against mechanical Turk volunteers and gotten similar results. It *is* biased towards english-speaking 16-30s people who take viral internet surveys, though.
I think taste where there is just one individual is appeal - what resonates with you? What makes you feel something? Think something? What makes you feel intelligent and informed when you perceive it?
And then when you signal taste to someone, it also is endorsement.
Taste is based on one's background, including both their previous experiences as conscious consumers of art, as well as subconscious participation in ordinary ("non-art") aspects of life.
Experienced film watchers may look out for more subtle references in scenes; to people whom such films are a novelty, they may not notice these references, and immediately enjoy a more obvious part of the film.
I don't think taste exists like intricacy, originality, accuracy do, which would exist independent of a perceiver; taste requires that there is a perceiver
Taste may vary according to one's interests - eg someone may think something is +1 taste if the thing includes an accurate reference to a historical fact about religion, eg if they study religion in school and that's their interest; someone may think something is +1 taste only if it's about their preferred ancient civilization over one they have less interest in. What's "preferred" to someone may depend on how original, complex (eg # brushstrokes, time expenditure, time expenditure on craft before this particular piece), subtle (eg % people who consciously interpret a reference), combinatory (as well as *which* combinations make it up) something is; in this way, attributes that exist "independently" of perceivers contribute to the /taste/ of perceivers.
Taste can also vary according to one’s values, eg someone who values knowledge may require art to be more fact-embedded than fiction-inspired, for the art to be described as “good” in taste, whereas the taste of someone who prioritizes creativity might depend more on how unusual a piece is.
Someone who values originality and nonconformity may think something is “good” taste if it’s very different from what they’ve seen before (or very different within certain parameters, since they probably have other values too), while someone who values conformity may like whatever is “normal” and socially acceptable
Some people put more weight on subtlety even if it has a minor impact on them, some people put more weight on immense immediate impact, some people value something changing them (eg changing their beliefs, their mood) in a way, some people value something that supports their current POV
People can have different tastes, but the idea that **some taste is good, and others is bad** seems like a social status or class association thing
When I like something that is Good taste, it feels almost the same as well I like something that’s Bad taste; commonalities include that I think they both say something about me, and I generally choose to have them around me. Something that's different though, is that I probably will not want to broadcast my “Bad” taste in things to people who I think will think less of me for my taste in them
So yeah, signaling taste is like saying, "This is what I endorse!"
I remembered today that Neal Stephenson wrote about taste recently: https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/leibnizs-admonition-as-applied-to
"Though financial mechanisms can become mind-bogglingly complicated, at the end of the day they are all based on principles that are so obvious, at least to money-minded people, that they don’t even seem worth spelling out. If I’m good at predicting outcomes, I can get rewarded. And deserve to be.
That’s why it’s funny— and, in a way, mind-blowing—when Rick Rubin describes that outcome-based mindset as something to which there is an alternative.
And the alternative, which seems just as obvious to him as stocks and bonds do to a Wall Street quant, is to create a thing.
This isn’t just starving artists whining about how no one understands them. An extremely successful Hollywood movie producer once explained to me that, at the end of the day, their job consisted of delivering money into the hands of a director and then keeping the financiers from meddling with the process long enough for the director to finish the film. The results, for this one producer alone, have been worth billions.
So there are huge businesses constructed on the way of thinking and working that Rick Rubin is describing. Rubin personally is a centimillionaire. The artists he’s worked with have generated billions in economic activity.
In a sense, though, such statistics just make the whole picture even more perplexing to outcome-centric money people.
During a 60 Minutes interview, Anderson Cooper goes to the heart of the matter by flat-out asking Rubin what he’s being paid for. Rubin’s answer comes down to that he has taste.
So, in a world where it’s demonstrably the case that intangibles such as taste can generate billions of dollars in economic returns out of basically nothing, what’s a financier to do?"
After my excitement of discovering the content referenced and reading one of the articles that was of personal interest and experience to me, with what I thought was the bases of a value-added comment, I discovered after internal composition of it that he was one of self-chose article-impoverishing 'only-pay readers may comment' author.
Rejecting us to 'pay' him in value-added work as these comment sections clearly allow for all that allow it, and relative poverty in those that do not.
The value added to articles through comments and replies is so clear I often wonder at those authors that require a paid subscription to contribute - as a disabled retired professional on a fixed income where the false Inflation Gov number is easily 4-8 percent low (not including fuel, medical, housing increases - the most rapidly growing [needed] consumer products), that to exclude my economic class seems undefendable and reductive in value of content.
God Bless., Steve
What about books? Think about For Whom the Bell Tolls and Where Eagles Dare. One is a wartime story about a small band of people on an impossible mission behind enemy lines. It features tense action sequences and juxtaposes heroism and resourcefulness with cowardice and betrayal. It has a love interest, too.
Wait a minute—they’re the same book! Well, objectively, one explores the human condition in a way the other doesn’t and doesn’t try to. How well it does this can be debated. That it does this cannot.
Probably most people prefer Where Eagles Dare. Anyway, it was a huge success (and don’t forget the movie!). And this is fine—liking Where Eagles Dare doesn’t mean you’re stupid, uneducated or tasteless.
On the other hand recognizing that For Whom the Bell Tolls is on a higher plane doesn’t mean you’re inculcated in some religion, or following the cool kids or a slave to pointless rules. This is like physics.
What about other kinds of art? Bach and the Beach Boys? Bob Ross, anyone? Isn’t it the same?
But some books are objectively bad. Does anyone deny this? And some objectively bad books are popular. Here the masses are wrong. Here they have bad taste. Isn’t this also like physics?
"Reporting recently in the journal Animal Cognition, Edwin van Leeuwen of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands and colleagues saw something irresistibly nutty in a 12-chimp group in Zambia. Back in 2007, a female named Julie got it into her head to start walking around with a long, strawlike blade of grass in her ear.
The behavior had no discernible function, and no other chimp had ever been observed to do the “grass-in-ear-behavior” (what the authors call GIEB). Could she be trying to ease the irritation of a parasite or infectious disease? The researchers ruled that out, because neighboring chimp groups weren’t suffering from ear problems, making it unlikely that Julie was afflicted.
Julie just liked having a piece of grass sticking out of her ear. So sue her.
The behavior caught on. Chimps soon went about their business with grass stuck in their ears. Julie remained the queen of GIEB-ing. During the five-year study period, the other group members GIEB-ed from one to 36 times, whereas Julie clocked in with an untouchable 168 times. Eventually, two-thirds of Julie’s group GIEB-ed. The behavior continued even after her death in 2012—the gold standard of cultural transmission."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/like-humans-other-primates-have-fashion-trend-setters-too-1426084047
There's no accounting for taste.
Wow, a great example of the basic power of the female in groups and societies and such realization is suppressed and censored by those that promote and helpless innocent good-intending blinding of us all from crib that allows so much daily personally suffered evil many cause and the society wide programmed use of them as a 5th column of unTruth, unJust, disOrdering destruction of all that supports our culture and society, ..
.. such as the insanities we must accept and pushed at us from crib like Abortion, sex is choice, child mind-body-soul sexual mutilations and acceptance of male-hate and virtueless spreading we suffer from and increasing daily - the source is unrecognizable cause from our now Sick Womanhood - because we blind to it, and the suggestion inspires life-destroying responses toward the 'criminal predatorial' informers.
Anyone else old enough to remembering womanhood as being a blessing to us all and generally virtue supporting, and have noticed the steady change that baby-murdering and other promotion of once [self & group] managed and rejected insane accepting and promoting evils?
God Bless., Steve
"Pedant's" should be "pedants"
I think it's a very small bit Universal Law Of Physics, larger but still small touch or Priesthood (derogatory) and split majority of Grammar/BDSM porn.
Eg, I too was fine with terribly constructed ugly overpriced drywall and petroleum product boxes the engineer shit out before his lunch break because he was actively contemptuous of his client, before I spent a bunch of time working on buildings, and living in them, and thinking about them, and becoming convercent in the grammar (What is that roofline doing there sticking out like a semi at church, style of thing), and finally becoming so BDSM pilled: Building edition I go to romania to look at wooden churches and have an emotional experience different from the usual one at that sort of place.
I am Neoclassical's biggest hater because of this. We had wonderful house styles nobody else could touch; we don't need to build shitty versions of trancedently excellent greek structures (I challenge anyone to go to the parthenon and not say: Damn, that is the one of the buildingest buildings I ever did see).
I especially appreciate Frank Furnace here. Every generic box with a pseudo greco-roman portico slapped on the front should be replaced with a Frank Furnace style monolithic neo-post-pre gothic monstrosity, they are all extremely cool AND they will tickle the taste sensor of even the most "McDonalds!" building apriciators.
The hidden premise to this post is that some people have a thing called "taste," whereas others (Scott, Astral Codex readers, gray tribe members, whatever) don't bother with such things and instead respond to art spontaneously, unaffectedly, guided in no way by what other people say or think.
Once you can understand why this is a bad premise you'll be closer to understanding what kind of thing taste is. Not much closer, granted.
What if taste is a self-fulfilling prophecy? Say you have a brilliant painter. The painter goes to some art school, and becomes an even better painter than they already were. They pick up "good taste" at the same time. Also, since many of their friends are also painters, they're clued into the network of cool people and are probably going to maintain good taste. Most people find this person's work beautiful or awe-inspiring or whatever, because it's really good. Meanwhile, there's a bunch of low-quality work that is also somewhat tasteless, because its creators weren't good enough to get into a high-status school, and don't care about art enough to maintain an artsy friend network.
Repeat for three centuries. Now everyone sees a bunch of tasteful good art and a bunch of tasteless bad art. People end up associating taste with beauty, even though they're mostly orthogonal. People will decide they like tasteful art better, not as a status game, but because it has attributes they associate with beauty.
Fairly often, you get art which is tasteful and bad. Either nobody notices (it's bad and doesn't get shared), or it gets called "pretentious" or "stuffy". Sometimes, someone comes out with a work which is utterly tasteless but so profoundly beautiful or meaningful that people can't ignore it. They get called "avant-garde", and sometimes change what is considered tasteful.
My model is that taste is like hardware. People need different levels for different purposes. Most people are fine with say a drill that overheats in a few minutes, most of the time, but sometimes they need something better-made if they have a big project. Similarly, pleasantly inoffensive art is fine for most purposes, but it doesn’t satisfy some needs that people might have sometimes, when they need an experience with more integrity.
It's best understood as D, but with the caveat that you subconsciously notice when the rules aren't followed White socks + black shoes aren't fashionable because the contrast draws the eye towards them. White shirt + black shoes are fashionable because the contrast draws the eye towards them. However the fashionable choice means people are looking at your face, rather than down to your feet. Scott didn't fully understand the rule when he said that the sock choice was simply jarring.
It's ironic because Scott wrote a great article about a different form of taste.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/
I can tell that the repetitive sentences in the medical note is unpleasant, but the repetitive sentences in his explanation are nice to read. He explains why the experience is different (one uses intentional parallelism) but the viewpoint that produced this fashion article would have just said it's inertia from people feeling bored once by the first example.
It's not like there's a secret writing cabal that decided repetitive sentences are boring and then created a secret anti-repetitive conspiracy, escapable only through the use of something arbitrarily called "parallelism". It actually just reads better, even if the reader couldn't describe why. Similarly all these rules about good taste are about how to look better. Dieworkwear's twitter threads are best viewed like this writing advice column. If the rules seems arbitrary, then maybe you're not fully understanding or the context in which they should be applied.
I would go with G.: Taste is like grammar. There can be multiple versions of it, each correct within the groups that use it.
Artistic taste can be partially based on underlying principles that many humans share due to how human brains evolved, or due to experiences that are common to many humans in a certain time and place. The bouba and kiki shapes demonstrate that shapes can evoke associations with sounds regardless of cultural context. Emotional associations with art can be similarly culture-agnostic.
On a smaller scale, taste can also vary by individual and with an individual's mood. Art can evoke calmness, anxiety, optimism, melancholy, and a variety of other mental states. Which state resonates with an individual person can change over time. That's why humans have things like goth phases.
Taste is also partially arbitrary, a convention acquired through socialization. It can help people identify themselves as part of a group. For some purposes, people being on the same page matters more than what that page is. Language itself is the preeminent example. A more visceral one is which side of the road people drive. These are conventions, based on coordination rather than derived purely from underlying principles.
When people use rules, labels, and conventions to create impressions, signal affiliation, and streamline interactions with strangers, I call that "background mindset". I would tend to file artistic taste under the category of background mindset.
Addendum 2024-12-06: Corroborating source here: https://xkcd.com/1735/
" .. people being on the same page matters more than what that page is."
This prioritized group inclusion over truth choice that is toxic today through the West, that has never been known to have infected and poison a nation or empire that was recorded or understood before the death of it.
That is, of the two alternatives that no history of that toxic internal rule of cowering together valued more the truth directed risky taking; they either never existed or if appeared was do destructive, so chaotic was the death and collapse of the unified nation or empire that resulted that no understanding or records were possible.
This choice is a simple functional definition of womanhood and manhood, that unless for careful advancement up the mating status ladder, women will always avoiding wide attention by others, passive and serving to power.
Where manhood mating and advancement up the Status, Power, and Responsibly hierarchy requires courage risk and good grip on Truth, Rigorousness, and best under known and predictable Order in society & culture.
Manhood was never the false-witnessed reputational female Satanic unTruth, unJust, disOrdering, poisoning the genocidal (of our race) Sickened womanhood has done while we continued to Love, Supported, Protected, and Provided for then while Justly burning alive in public tied to a Stake was in Order, we continued instead to be their benefactors all while women and mothers were and are functionally Castrating, mutilating and crippling males from crib - in the march of success their betraying traitorous back dead putrid hearts filled with evil, the demonic goal and it's wider Form was often secularly name Communism, Marxism, Modernistic, Satanic, Globalists, Zionism, and many other names.
Names which describe the opponents of Goodness Love Joy Life .. of Church Militant. The Holy fight on earth for souls enslaved by Satan, the attack to the roots of virtue and manhood that Sickening womanhood advanced evil - the Rot from all we Loved and took for union of One Body as Holy direct Duty commanded, and using warped and Sicken hyper-empowered [once a blessing to all] womanhood to rot and murder joy and love and torturing our babies to death with silent screams from those we couldn't know of or protect if we did, and crippling of crushing manhood at the root - starting at the crib and unprotected by the driven away fathers and the death of Fatherhood and marriage such screaking-evil tools did with support of the GreatSatan Federal Gov.
A good line to meditate on, thank you commenter - who and wherever you are.
God Bless., Steve
A more positive way to phrase (E): the natural artistic cycle is that, as you get more familiar with an artform, you start to value novelty. You start with defining works that scratch a certain itch, but at some point those get boring, i.e. fantasy novels that are 90% LotR with the numbers filed off. The first couple of those can be a genuinely enjoyable read, but past a certain point.... So creators begin to step away from the 'pure sugar' to do more complex stuff, even if it isn't as appealing to the uninitiated. (And, in time, break off to form new styles, then come back to remix the old stuff when the world has moved on enough that there's something new to say in those terms....)
I don't think this is bad. But what frustrates me (and I think some other people that value novelty and generally sympathize with artistic revolutionaries) about modern art and modernist architecture is that it goes the opposite way. It's simpler and has *less* entropy! Two glass cubes might not look *exactly* alike, but they're going to look as similar as two log cabins. Sure, the log cabins look different because of circumstance - those are the particular trees that were growing there at the time - while with the glass cube every detail is (supposed to be) intentional. But still, a black square is going to take a lot less space up on the disk than Michelangelo's or Van Gogh's work, and *especially* so for the de facto compression algorithm that our brains use. (The shade of black being #010206 or #050004 doesn't really matter to a human.) And the result is that, apart from the initial shock of "is this art?", there's vastly more room for creativity in more complex styles - *and* they can do better at the basic task of visual appeal.
I struggle somewhat with Scott's post here. This is because I have very mixed opinions on the topic.
I think there is genuine skill and craftsmanship when it comes to the creation of works of art. I think it's good to promote such skill and craftsmanship. The form of art I appreciate this the most in is literary art or narrative-based art. Wooden dialogue, exposition dumps, uneven pacing, characters lacking understandable motivation or a good sense of agency... these things really do bother me. I dislike them because they often break immersion for me, and I like to get very immersed in a story if possible.
That being said... many of the arguments I've read for "good taste" makes the enjoyment of arts, or even the enjoyment of food, sound like a chore to me. That you should purposely engage with content or food that you don't like until you eventually come to like it. I... am skeptical of this, I have to be honest. There are foods I like more as an adult than I did as a kid, like the taste of vanilla and the taste of bread. But how much of this is just the natural development of taste buds as we age? I certainly ate plenty of bread in one form or another as a kid. It didn't make me like bread more when I was a kid. It's just one day, as an adult, I noticed that now I like the taste of bread more than I used to.
Also, an idea like "keep engaging with something you dislike until you like it" strikes me as something very easy to hack with status games. How many people pretend to like something that they don't because they don't want to disappoint their friend or mentor who has "good taste"? How many give up on things that, in truth, they still like, precisely because they don't want to be seen as having "bad taste"?
I can certainly understand how Scott, being a Psychiatrist IIRC, would have concerns with the concept of "good taste". Social pressure to trade-in something you like a lot for something you don't like (or like less) could be bad for a people's mental health. If most people genuinely like "kitsch" is there a risk in condemning what they like and trying to convince them to like something else?
There seems to be a BDSM-esque synthesis of 1 and 2. If you focus on something a lot, as the priests do, there is an innate tendency for taste to develop in a particular way and this development is path dependent. Hence apparently ever changing assertions of what's best earnestly attested to by large number of people endlessly immersed in it, that seems arbitrary and nonsensical (at first) to everyone else, but consistent to themselves.
This interpretation allows us to avoid rejecting peoples representation of their internal experience.
Architecture is fashion, but it has a parallel function of being consumed by the public, so "bad" architecture is offensive to utilitarians. Unfortunately, buildings are paid for by rich people. The obvious architectural parallel is the transition to black-and-white coattails for men, away from the decorative dandy style. It's too "easy" now to make a "pretty" building, so it's better to not even worry about looks, go with anti-looks (counter-signaling), or pay priests/sophiscates. (there's quite a bit you can optimize with tuxedo purchases that require paying taxes to sophiscates. Although, it does cap out, and you wouldn't want a million-dollar tuxedo because "pfft, you spent THAT much on a tuxedo, you care too much." Although, devoting your life to marrying into class so that you can know exactly what tuxedo to get is pretty expensive.)
One of the clearest displays of how our culture and societies across the West has been undermined and anti-human is in the removal of Beauty from us in all things - including architecture. Old styles filled with skilled loving craftsmanship pronouncing Joy to the world, replace by or added into our practical existance ..
.. as seen in the Modernist take-over and attack on the Traditional Catholic Church since the 1960's in the needless destruction of existing beautiful Churches and the construction of hideous eye-sore new Churches. As Satan took control of Vatican and much of Leadership, the outward architecture became soul-crippling and away from inspiring and joyous.
God Bless., Steve
You left out education.
If you don't bother to educate yourself in art, literature, music, architecture, food, wine, or whatever, you'll never learn the subtleties and the reason things are the way they are. And if you can't explain why you like or don't like something, how are you going to communicate your experience to people who have educated themselves about what makes a piece of art (of any medium) superior to that run-of-the-mill crap? Moreover, education exposes one to things one otherwise might not encounter. People with educated tastes may disagree about what makes one piece of art superior to another, but they have the vocabulary to communicate their reasons, and thus, they can educate others.
And so, you comment indirectly condemns the Babal we fell into what Latin stopped being valued and universally taught to the educated or to anyone hoping to best Serve Man and God.
One might date such an insane failure of parents and powerful Classes their Duty to all the future, it seems to beg to Heaven for a sane reason or cause that if possible to discover at all (and the criminals and events not recorded or if was then censored) but one might not likely go wrong is focused to begin with the Modernist movement that has so long actively attacked the Church, and the wide spread coordinated force that created Babal State for the world have that same 'taste' of Infiltration into upper power positions, the criminals always intending to use Offices provided them and those powers of them to betray their Offices' basic duties, to turn those powers against the Benefactors and Right Ordered leaders that we saw happen to the Traditional Catholic Church when Satan can be recognized as in the Modernist Pope that suppressed the 3rd secrete of Fatima in 1960 till today where many believe what was released was incomplete and best of another heretical lie from that Sickened and soul-murdering False Worldly 'Ape' version which has been public since before heretical containing Vatican II.
So, I expect it is likely a very good starting point to investigate when and from whom specifically targeted universal standard of Latin as a requirement for any and all Educated men, as one of the Attack of Church and mankind's hope and path away from Satanic enslavement and Hell that is forming into reality more clearly everyday now.
Thoughts, please?
God Bless., Steve
...What the hell is Babal?
While I don't agree with Steven's thesis, he asked a good question about the end of Latin.
I asked ChatGPT:
When did Latin get deemphasized in formal education?
ChatGPT replied:
The deemphasis of Latin in formal education began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly in Western countries, as educational systems evolved to emphasize modern languages, science, and practical skills over classical studies.
Key Factors Behind the Shift:
Rise of National Languages:
During the 18th and 19th centuries, national identity movements led to a focus on vernacular languages in schools. Modern languages like French, German, and later English gained prominence as nations sought to educate their citizens in their native tongues.
Industrial Revolution:
The industrialization of society in the 19th century demanded a workforce trained in technical and practical subjects, such as mathematics, engineering, and the sciences. These fields became prioritized over classical studies.
Reforms in Higher Education:
By the late 19th century, universities began dropping Latin as a strict admission requirement, opening access to a broader range of students and reducing its dominance in secondary education.
Modern Educational Movements:
In the early 20th century, progressive education movements, especially in the United States and parts of Europe, emphasized subjects like literature, modern history, and the sciences over Latin.
Globalization and Modern Languages:
As international trade and diplomacy expanded in the 20th century, the need to teach languages like French, German, Spanish, and later Mandarin or Japanese grew, reducing Latin's practical importance.
World Wars and Cultural Shifts:
The devastation of World War I and World War II caused many societies to reexamine the role of traditional education, leading to more pragmatic curricula focused on rebuilding and modern skills.
Decline in Specific Contexts:
United States: By the mid-20th century, Latin had largely become an optional or specialized subject rather than a core requirement in high schools.
United Kingdom: Reforms such as the Butler Education Act of 1944 reduced the emphasis on classical education in favor of a broader curriculum.
Europe: Latin's decline was slower in countries like Italy or Spain, but even there, modern education reforms in the 20th century diminished its role.
Today, Latin remains part of specialized programs in classics or for students pursuing fields like law, medicine, or theology, but it is no longer a cornerstone of general education.
Thank you, for the AI version of reality answer,
.. and for the other's needed spelling-Nazi cnt troll continuation, we sure need lots more of you useless great imitator of pile of poison vomit, if you aren't a Bot designed to undermine community and any share collective unity, .. only another tool of Satan.
I've only used chatGPT to see what questions triggers it or lies about, etc. ..
To learn more about the mind-raping owners and controllers that are twisting it like they twisted their children and many golems of evil murder and similar tasks like most of the population, clearly are, especially the military age ones, and those that our taxes pay for in training major police department on how to provoke violent response that on video makes the police beat-down and killings as started by the protesters,
Their goals and glimpse some aspects of next sage genocide and looting the USA when our service of the debt (now $1 Trillion dollar every 100 days) there and all that the ADL funders and directors of our and many top Gov, and Eu, when they Call-in our debt and we too militarily weak as we are now to refuse, to be treated like Greece was some decade or earlier before, that unJust situation (Greece had a lot of debt in private banking systems and those banking systems owners are likely connected of family to those that own most of the top EU people, ..
So they worked a deal where Grease's entire debt would be bought by the EU (on paper) and so no default was possible for Grease, and so everything of public value that could be carried away, that was profitable money maker for gov, lands, .. were sold to those bankers or their agents.
It drove the economy into horrible situation and a significant youth moved away for work and income, for to be treated like the real rulers and most of those under class servants think of them and us all?
As Palestinians as we always were to them, the super-race, able to genocide in public 200,000+ innocents .. and they will kill us and all we every loved after endless terrorizing, starvations, exposure deaths, .. as we can see.
They are mocking us all, and explaining by deed exactly how many other countries populations we can expect to help us, as many as we are not doing now.
God Bless, Steve
Okay that's cool and all, but what the heck is Babal??
I think he's advocating one Church and one Language to rule us all — and in the darkness bind us.
I was stumped by the mind-raping golems reference, though. As a reference to popular culture, poor ChatGPT seemed to be stumped, too. Question: is the critter created by Rabbi ben Bezalel still running around making trouble after 400 years?
The negative mention of golems makes me wonder if he has an anti-semitic tilt to his thinking. After all, technically speaking, Adam was a golem (Psalm 139:16, and Tractate Sanhedrin 38b).
I believe he means Babel, Tower of.
Hypothesis: Taste is Beauty plus Fashion. Beauty is like Physics - universal(ish, for neurotypical humans), but very complicated. Fashion is as already noted fickle and arbitrary.
The apparent non-universality of Taste is in part because of the fickleness of Fashion, but also the complexity of Beauty. Some parts, like "symmetry yay!" are the same pretty much everywhere, but e.g. "different but not *too* different from what you grew up with" points in different directions for people from snowy forests with peaked-roof timber houses and for those who grew up in arid climes with mud-brick walls and minimalist roofs. Then there's "the preferred aesthetic of our oppressors is ugly", where it matters whether you were most recently invaded by the Nazis or the Arabs. And that barely scratches the surface of the emergent complexity of Beauty.
Putting great weight on Fashion impedes our ability to share the experience of Beauty, which is already limited by circumstance. But it opens new axes of status for people who aren't going to score highly in other areas, and we don't want people to feel like *complete* losers so leave the Fashionistas be. Within reasonable limits, at least.
Well, the historical and cultural data don't seem to indicate that human physical beauty is universal. Admittedly, I come at this question from a male bias, but when it comes to culture, big-hipped and ultra-zaftig women are considered beautiful in most of sub-Saharan Africa. In Asia, full-breasted women were considered to be ugly (but this cultural preference seems to have faded as better nutrition has enhanced breast sizes in Asian countries). European males liked those full breasts and wide hips, but they didn't seem to idolize really big women like the sub-Saharan Africans do. In ancient Rome, blond hair was considered to be ugly (because there were a lot of blonds among Celtic and German slaves). In medieval Japan, black teeth were considered beautiful. Then we've got the neck stretching that some Asian and African cultures put their women through. In the US and Western Europe, full-breasted women were the ideal until the 1960s and Twiggy came along. Since then, the ideal of beauty has changed to slender, small-breasted women with long legs.
But I'd agree with you when you say, "Putting great weight on Fashion impedes our ability to share the experience of Beauty, which is already limited by circumstance." Well said, BTW.
A further taste thing: Both in my previous line of work and in one of my hobbies (cooking); once I had a refined enough palet as it were, I (and my coworkers and cohobbiests) developed meta taste in addition to regular taste.
Eg, if you have meta taste, you can project what someone will like by being around them for a bit and seeing other things they like.
The hit rate on this is shocking; my boss would make 500 small decisions that non-tradies just weren't equip to make and 485 of them would be correct.
I can be cooking a meal for someone who doesn't like X, and I know in my heart that they do like X, and I cajole them into eating X, and now they request X every time we do a get together.
It seems trivial, but I'm planning an annual new years fancy dinner I do for a family friend and it's actually pretty involved. Less like "Does she like white fish" and more "Consider the context of her life up till now and all your experiences of her, from the aspect of does she like white fish"
We had an after-work club of wine snobs (along with people who just wanted to get sloshed) at my former company. Once a month, we snobs would bring our favorite wines for the other snobs to taste (and the non-snobs would drink whatever we poured them). We developed a system for describing wines. We broke it down into five parts (color), bouquet (aka nose, the scents of the wine), the tastes we experienced on the front of the tongue, the tastes we experienced on the mid-palate, and the tastes we experienced on the finish as we swallowed. Although we'd use different terms to describe what we were experiencing, we learned to map the way someone described to the wine they liked. We all got pretty good at predicting which types of wines would appeal to certain people.
THat's why I reject the 'pure class' explanation for taste; there are too many correlations between understanding something enough to know what someone else will like before they try it and this thing we call taste.
Not to say class signaling doesn't exist, I just think that it has it's own trend line that correlates with taste in one direction.