Wrote professionally about taste in a previous life. It is related more closely than we expect to techne or competence from physical knowledge.
When we think of poor taste, we tend to think of symbols that are separated from their function and meaning, where instead of representing that, "I do this thing," something gaudy says, "I have this thing!" That's what crassness is, and it comes down to our relative apprehension of the real vs. the represented, where typically, something real is powerful independent of who is observing it, and the representation is not. It's whether something legitimately represents power. Taste may be an instinct for honest signals, which would seem like its own sort of intelligence.
Viewed this way, taste is the expression of what you percieve to be power based on your experience, good taste is the inverse of the distance between them, and poor taste is measured in the gap between what is affected and of-what it is the effect.
That difference between effect and affect is one of the sneakiest bits of the english language and perhaps even the culture's most cunningly set trap. Do not underestimate the value of good taste, it's an intuition about power.
> That's what crassness is, and it comes down to our relative apprehension of the real vs. the represented, where typically, something real is powerful independent of who is observing it, and the representation is not.
> That difference between effect and affect is one of the sneakiest bits of the english language and perhaps even the culture's most cunningly set trap. Do not underestimate the value of good taste, it's an intuition about power.
Much of Fussell's Class ends up being about this, which amounts to how various classes choose to signal, and how good they are at it. One of the biggest tells for the Fussell's Middle—who easily come off as the most unfortunate of the bunch, being the most class-anxious but also very bad at signaling—versus the "higher" classes he outlines, whom members of the Middle are often trying to signal as or imitate, are 1) how much of their stuff, including clothing, involves synthetic materials, and 2) how much of their stuff imitates a real thing—fake flowers, fine art prints on the walls, that kind of thing.
That's a very pro-taste take on taste. I guess I should balance it out by saying that taste can also be knowing which overt signs of wealth are used by successful pharma salesmen, and which are used by successful drug dealers. ;)
Thanks for your contribution - this is similar to the impression I get about taste, not having studied aesthetics but having a passing familiarity with postmodern philosophy. Do you have any book or philosopher suggestions I could check out? I'm generally interested in epistemology and this sounds like a good angle for further reading.
> Viewed this way, taste is the expression of what you percieve to be power based on your experience
What about displays of disposable wealth, which demonstrate power in a way that is nonetheless gaudy?
I don't think anyone could seriously argue that a wealthy person is less powerful than a poorer person, and yet displaying that wealth (e.g. having a solid 18k gold toilet) is clearly tasteless in the extreme. I almost wonder if you meant to say the exact opposite of what these quoted parts of your message say.
I think this is very wrong, and the foundation of modernism in art and architecture (which is to say, you are wrong in a very unoriginal way!)
The Greeks used all sorts of forced perspective tricks in their architecture. Columns aren't equally spaced and lines aren't straight, but when viewed by a human observer at ground level the buildings built to Greek aesthetic rules appear "nicer" than those built to pure geometric ones.
Similarly, in art, there was a lot of talk about "authenticity" in the early 20th century, where it was believed that the more primitive the artist, the more authentic the art, since the true message of the artist would transmit undistorted by such Western constructs as technique or skill.
Decoration, adornment, and "fakeness" in pursuit of aesthetics has always been with us, and it's really a curiosity of modernity to have done away with it so comprehensively. Looking at the burgeoning architectural revival movements, and the return in popularity of portraiture and classical painting techniques, I think we're nearing the end of an era encapsulated by your comment.
Not sure that power is a sufficiently discriminating term for what you are describing. I agree with you but think that purposiveness may be a better fit.
I write art reviews as a hobby and have published my theory in a work called Critique of the Last Man in Film. I view taste to be more biologically predicated in that, quality can ultimately be measured according to a gradient of "healthy" and "sick". Immediately we can perceive "sacred" and "vulgar" and its connotations as it pertains to the subject of the representation. Nevertheless, it is the representation itself which can be understood as a biological expression of life and its experience in the minds of others which we can judge to be good or not. Thus, good art is that which positively resonates with as universal a mind as possible. That claim infers an everlasting beauty is the best art. (Notice I am necessarily relating positive resonances with beauty, not as a metaphor but as an actual electromechanical experience of the brain upon receiving neural stimulation from the body's senses)
Now with respect to originality...that's a separate topic altogether :P
>Wrote professionally about taste in a previous life. It is related more closely than we expect to techne or competence from physical knowledge.
Closer than we expect? Huh? Competence and skill are the two most common concepts associated with taste, ask any person who hates contemporary art.
> It's whether something legitimately represents power. Taste may be an instinct for honest signals, which would seem like its own sort of intelligence.
I understand that nowadays everything in humanities has to be about power to be fashionable, but that sounds like quite a reach. I don’t really follow this logic on crassness.
This seems much more about what is "tasteful" to display rather than the link's claim about "good taste" that objectively appreciates "good" art over "bad" art.
How would you say "bad taste" and "good taste" relates to how we define the political and the non-political? They both share the notion of power, but is there a more meaningful connection that could be examined?
At the end there you highlight the issue that makes me think good taste is still hand wave-y subjectivity.
Since you say early on good taste is the difference between “I have” and “I do” good taste can’t be anything we possess, so how can anyone “have” good taste. Round n round we go.
This continues to highlight for me the shortcomings of human languages. Chomsky calls them random noise formalized and controlled by political powers. It makes sense, they only show up 5,000 years ago and we had glyphs for process and ideas before then. Given our legal system is normalized to matters of object possession, so goes our discourse. Given your measure it’s about “I do” versus “I have” can anyone “have” good taste since it comes down to advertising and accepting one is possessed of certain character traits? Isn’t it still gaudy self promotion and idolatry?
I’m still leaning towards peoples social power being due to their relative closeness to social power. Not that they’re uniquely beyond human. Why accept that in a system politically and academically normalized abstraction “good taste” is a useful language object itself?
> If there's no such thing as good taste, then there's no such thing as good art.
No problem.
> So if you want to discard the concept of good taste, you also have to discard the concept of good art. And that means you have to discard the possibility of people being good at making it.
This skips a step. It assumes without argument that production skill corresponds to subjective preferences. There are many people who are extremely skilled who produce things people hate and there are many productions which take virtually no effort which people love. Again, good blahblah is just consensus of subjective preferences. The whole article is just a disguised appeal to popularity fallacy that depends on confounding skill and value through equivocation on "good."
> and there are many productions which take virtually no effort which people love
It only takes a quick trip to reddit to see this in action.
In a thread where people were talking about the jails and the overall penal system, someone said "heh...penal" and it had several Golds and thousands of points.
> > If there's no such thing as good taste, then there's no such thing as good art. Because if there is such a thing as good art, it's easy to tell which of two people has better taste. Show them a lot of works by artists they've never seen before and ask them to choose the best, and whoever chooses the better art has better taste.
Not so fast there! I don't buy the "no good taste implies no good art" argument. If there is an objective standard of how good a piece of art is, that's fine, but his proposed experiment doesn't make sense. What if someone simply knows this objective standard and can thus simply evaluate how good each piece of art is? Is that anything like what we consider to be "taste"? I wouldn't say that someone has good taste in prime numbers if they can be shown a large number and can compute whether it's prime. I'd say their mental arithmetic abilities are good, but I wouldn't think to describe that as "taste."
I've had a longstanding debate with a close friend on this topic. He thinks that there is such a thing as objectively good taste, and I do not.
I usually cite art as an example of my point. There is no "good" art or "bad" art. There is successful and unsuccessful art.
Art is intended to make you feel something. If it has done that, it's successful. And making you feel revulsion due to the aesthetic choices made or execution of the piece counts as "feeling something".
It only assumes production skill is correlated it doesn’t require a perfect correspondence. I’d argue it is hard to have a meaningful concept of production skill that is either independent of or anticorrelated to taste. Yes production skill alone does not make the piece of art. But if it contributes in any way shape or form that’s enough to establish there is such thing as taste.
PG may say that his father pushed him in a different direction. But I suspect - like me - PG grew up with the cultural direction of the BBC and its mission to "inform, educate, and entertain."
So if you were a bright curious kid your parents wouldn't necessarily be the ultimate authorities on culture and taste. There were other authorities. If you were interested.
I was genuinely shocked a few years ago when I realised how much my cultural interests had been shaped by that kind of social programming. I still enjoy art and music, but I'm little more circumspect about them now.
The point: cultural taste is an aspirational social marker. It correlates loosely with some observable features in various kinds of art. But the real goal of "having taste" is to convince yourself and others you're a certain class of person, and also to reassure yourself and others you're not a certain other class of person.
What you say is true, but there's something missing, which is that a working-class person who was extremely fashionable by the standards of their own class would, if transplanted into the world of penthousees in SOHO, figure out quite quickly how to tastefully decorate their house, how to dress to impress, and so on. And the same would be true of the penhouse asthete if transplanted into a working-class milieu. Some people are just better than other people at figuring out aesethic systems.
> cultural taste is an aspirational social marker.
"Aspirational" means "you don't have it".
So all cultural taste is people trying to fake being in a better class than they are? Baloney. There are plenty of people who like things because they like those things, not because they think liking those things will make them look more upper class.
"Aspirational" taste is exactly what you get when people don't have taste, but want to look like they do. They copy someone else's taste (or a group average). And because they're aspirational, they try really hard to pretend that they do in fact have taste. But they just wind up cluttering up the discussion, because they don't actually know anything.
But there are people who actually do know some things about taste, and what is worthwhile, and value. They exist. They just get lost in the noise of a bunch of people who are trying to look like they know, even though they don't...
It may well be that taste is initially acquired through feigning, but it can develop into something more personal down the line. Charles Rosen mentioned it at the end of his Critical Entertainments:
"It is not at all natural to want to listen to classical music. Learning to appreciate it is like Pascal's wager: you pretend to be religious, and suddenly you have faith. You pretend to love Beethoven-or Stravinsky-because you think that will make you appear educated and cultured and intelligent, because that kind of music is prestigious in professional circles, and suddenly you really love it, you have become a fanatic, you go to concerts and buy records and experience true ecstasy when you hear a good performance (or even when you hear a mediocre one if you have little judgment)."
So if you disagree with "taste-as-a-measure-of-quality-within-a-genre" do you disagree with the concept works of art can be better than other works of art (within a genre) or do you just disagree this non-numerical measure is called 'taste'? What would you call it instead?
> I was genuinely shocked a few years ago when I realised how much my cultural interests had been shaped by that kind of social programming. I still enjoy art and music, but I'm little more circumspect about them now.
I had similar realization, but it did not made me more circumspect about art, music etc. It made me to be more willing to try stuff I assumed I wont like. More likely to look at the context at which something odd to me appeared and then more likely to understand/like it.
> cultural taste is an aspirational social marker.
I agree. It is also identity. It also explains why aesthetic culture wars appears. It is not so much about what it is or liking or disliking it. It is about who is assumed to like the thing and performative acceptance/rejection.
> But the real goal of "having taste" is to convince yourself and others you're a certain class of person, and also to reassure yourself and others you're not a certain other class of person.
Of course someone with no taste would say this. :) I'm kidding.
Your statement reads like a punitive judgement, constructed to paint anyone who pursues enlightenment as entirely performative for external validation. Am I wrong?
What makes you so certain it is correct?
In your world does no one pursue enlightenment for its own ends?
The piece just seems to fully encapsulate Silicon Valley Hubris. It's amazing that he thinks he's settled a debate on 'quality' or 'taste' with a logical argument, and that people consider this an 'objective' answer to the question.
The rhetorical trick is one that many have pointed out: 'technically' superior is - in fact - easy to recognize. That doesn't mean that objective judgment of technique is synonymous with taste.
"Taste" in that sense becomes something more about having a pulse on how humans will ingest certain ideas. You can have an intuitive understanding of this in a given time and space (creatives get paid a great deal to do this). But that has nothing to do with 'taste' as an objective quality metric, it has to do with how humans will perceive or interact with an object.
If PG's arguments were true, then a lot of people whose taste seemed to be quite good, were completely wrong about the Impressionists when they first appeared on the scene. Ditto almost every other new art school. So no one prior to that had good taste? You take a time machine to the century prior to Van Gogh's life, and you might not find anyone in Europe who thought his paintings were good if you showed them what they looked like. So no one in Europe had good taste then?
Nonsense. One can have "refined taste", which means that you can detect all the subtleties of a particular kind of art (e.g. modern abstract art, or modern jazz) that I cannot. My taste in other fields is considerably more refined than the person who likes modern jazz and abstract art; perhaps they cannot stand any science fiction, whereas I have strong opinions about which is good and which is not.
The phrase "good taste" implies there is one standard, one dimension on which one can rate art, but clearly there are many different ones, depending on ones tastes.
It amazes me when people seem to lack taste. I'm not even saying the ability to rank items in a way that agrees to some general standard. I'm saying the ability to notice that there is even a difference. I'll talk about taste in the literal sense but this extends to everything. I remember being at a Chinese restaurant with some friends where we were eating scallion pancakes. I said, boastfully, that my family makes better scallion pancakes and a friend remarked that he didn't think there was any difference, that indeed all scallion pancakes were exactly alike to him. Or another friend couldn't tell the difference between orange juice from concentrate and not from concentrate.
I wonder how much of this is physiological and how much is mental. I can't help but think you'd need some sort of color blindness for taste to genuinely not notice any difference between scallion pancakes. But perhaps my friend was exaggerating.
My theory is that taste is one quality that separates the academics from the business people. Academia doesn't necessitate a lot of taste. If you have it, great. If you don't have it, no big deal. On the other hand, stuff such as product design, user interfaces, even software engineering, requires taste. You need to understand what makes a good piece of software or a good product. One could argue that Steve Jobs was a product supertaster. He was finely attuned to stuff that the average user (or the average HN reader) would not see. As PG notes, taste is being attuned to the collective unconsciousness, to a collective aesthetic. If you can tap into that, you can attract customers.
I had the opposite conversation with my father. I claimed "there's no accounting for taste" and my father said "that's not true, you can claim Shakespeare isn't good but you're wrong".
In Kantian aesthetics, judgements of taste are subjective (because they differ between people) but are normative in that they claim universal validity (when we judge art to be good, we will all others to agree). Kant calls this "subjective universality". This explains why people disagree about art and why we can argue about it. It bothers us when people disagree with our judgements of taste. When we claim it doesn't bother us ("there's no accounting for taste"), we're either lying or not making judgements of taste.
Compare this to judgements about flavor (which Kant calls judgments of the agreeable). We don't argue about whether vanilla is better than chocolate or, if we do, we consider the argument trivial and subjective with no right answer. This is not the case when we argue about art.
The heart of the matter is whether beauty is objective or if it is merely relative to something. PG's essay argues that it is relative to being human, Kant similarly argues that it is relative to being a rational being (a somewhat broader category). This contrasts with the common argument that beauty is relative to some socio-cultural standard.
We don't realize how far we'd have to go if we discarded the concept of good taste, because we don't even debate the most obvious cases. But it doesn't just mean we can't say which of two famous painters is better. It means we can't say that any painter is better than a randomly chosen eight year old.
I don't have an answer for whether or not there is a universal good taste, but this argument is fundamentally flawed because it conflates skill and expression. Of course any practiced painter is going to be better at painting, but that doesn't mean that what they paint is tasteful.
That said, did anyone else get the feeling that pg got into the mushrooms before writing this?
As a painter and hacker[1] myself, I understand the message, believe the answer to the headline is "yes, but you can't have it" and I (as surely too would you) understand the vast gulf between my artwork and Rembrandt's, or my code and Norvig's, or my swimming and Phelps', but I've got to say, using "better art" as a test of taste is the irreducible absurdity, and I'd hoped for better after his introduction purported to propose a proof. In principle of charity I'll assume that other speakers at the talk this essay was adapted from may have covered those other considerations, and that PG was attempting or invited to fill an experiential gap which in this extracted form left the piece without some necessary reification.
In the conversational spaces that attempt to account for taste are the same human conflicts that set one true believer against another of a different religion.
I think the proper reductio ad absurdum is the more trivial one. Taste some rotten meat-- and either spit it out and rinse with strong liquor, or endure (survive?) the GI infection, then tell someone else to eat it, and see what you feel about the subjectivity of taste afterwards. See how the person your recommended the rotten meat feels about it, if anything. Finer points of arguments for or against some artist or movement are unsubstantiable when there is, I think we can agree, such a thing as guts.
[1] I originally found HN after reading PG's book "Hackers and Painters"[2] and realized his practice of implementing the techniques of Old Masters in the late-20th Century, was not at all the kind of work that drew me to visual art.
I think in choosing rotten meat, you haven't gotten close to the limits - see Surstromming for an example.
There are very few universals of taste. Even looking only at food: some people routinely consume, for pleasure, rotten meats, rotten milk (cheese), various bitter poisonous seeds, extremely painful hot peppers, painful acidic or basic substances, and even feces or other bodily fluids. Of course, no one could enjoy drinking concentrated sulfuric acid for example, so there are some ultimate limits.
Similarly in all arts, there is rarely any style that is not seen as more refined than any other by some group of people, or profoundly distasteful. There are certainly people who would rather hang up children's paintings in their house than something like Malevich's Black square.
This is a question of relativism. Taste is ultimately about value, and "good taste" in art is just one aspect of culture at large. So, if you doubt if "good taste" exists, you also probably think that everyone has the right to believe whatever they want and everyone should be able to exist how they want. You can call this relativistic individualism.
I bring this up because the topic reminds me of a philosopher of religion, Charles Taylor. One of his points is that this relativistic individualism inevitably leads to our own inability to express what we value. It's a kind of "explanatory atrophy." If your default position is I have my way and he has his, and that's all there really is to it you lose the ability to present and shape your own opinion in reaction to others. Most people don't have the vocabulary to articulate this, so "that's in bad taste" ends up just turning into Dudeism.. that's just your opinion, man.
So when confronted with something we think is in bad taste, we can't put vague thoughts into words, and therefore just fall back to "it's his/her personal taste, who I am to criticize?"
Ultimately, this question arises from a lack of education and cultural interest in the arts and in aesthetics. Without it, the definition of good taste will ultimately boil down to the opinions of whoever has money, power, or popularity.
I was expecting this essay to mention novelty. What we appreciate in art really comes down to novelty and therefore good taste is the ability to recognize it. Which in turn requires the observer to have a solid background in the genre (i.e. having seen a lot of it already) to judge how novel and original a work of art is. That's why art critics, collectors generally agree on things more often than not: they've dealt with enough of previous samples to identify novelty.
The rest, pretty much all the other aspects of art other than novelty are debatable and subjective, I think.
I expect his post to be surprisingly unpopular with this crowd, as it sleights a core tenet of our postmodern age. Namely, he's arguing for a form of objective truth and of "the good". A statistical derivation of this good for sure (and qualitative as opposed to a Benthamist, quantitative utilitarianism), but a good nonetheless.
But I applaud PG for taking this stance. Truth is not like your favorite flavor of ice cream. Software isn't either, and certain software either works or doesn't. Human culture and beliefs—our ideological software—has objectively superior results depending upon what your measuring stick is. Some beliefs are objectively better.
I don't agree with his argument. I'd argue that it's perfectly possible for something that took huge skill and execution brilliance to create to be ugly / tasteless / vulgar, indeed completely tasteless.
>"So if you want to discard the concept of good taste, you also have to discard the concept of good art. And that means you have to discard the possibility of people being good at making it"
This is I think the central argument of the piece and I think it is very wrong. He conflates the notion of goodness in a teleological sense with proficiency. When people talk about good or bad taste they try to make an objective claim about the purpose of art, that's to say what end a piece of art serves, or to judge the quality of what it ultimately expresses.
You can be 'good' in the sense of proficient on utterly meaningless tasks. Someone can memorize ten thousand digits of a random sequence. You can be good or bad at it, and we can objectively figure out if you are, but the task isn't objectively meaningful.
To say that there is no good or bad taste is to say there is, ultimately no non-subjective standard for a piece of art. This does not imply that any subject that produces art cannot be judged on their merits by their own standards.
Great essay. Paul does here what others take much longer to do and I can’t help but grin when reading the comments here that take issue. Just mentioning the obvious triggers a lot of people. I used to be one of those people, but like Paul, experience and reflection allowed me to grow out of. The world makes more sense once you abandon the position that taste or beauty do not exist. The line “judging art is hard, especially recent art” is key. It’s also what makes art so enjoyable and worthwhile. Anything worth doing requires effort. Enjoying art is challenging and seeing beyond what’s extraneous is a great muscle to strengthen. It pays dividends elsewhere in one’s life. That taste exists is more parsimonious that the other position.
I think Christopher Alexander has a better answer to this question. He states that anything that is designed is good when love was put into it. People can taste this love.
So it's more like: when love was put into it, it tastes good.
> I started studying painting. And it was just like other kinds of work I'd done: you could do it well, or badly, and if you tried hard, you could get better at it. And it was obvious that Leonardo and Bellini were much better at it than me. That gap between us was not imaginary. They were so good. And if they could be good, then art could be good, and there was such a thing as good taste after all.
This doesn’t hold up for me. We’re comparing PGs painting ability to two renaissance artists who painted in fairly similar ways. When you go and try to paint in a style, I can 100% agree that you can execute better or worse than another person. I don’t doubt that PGs paintings are not as good as famous renaissance paintings.
I don’t think that’s what people mean when they talk about good taste.
PG uses a narrow definition of taste, so let’s make sure we’re using that:
> There's a narrow sense in which it refers to aesthetic judgements and a broader one in which it refers to preferences of any kind. The strongest proof would be to show that taste exists in the narrowest sense…
I don’t know that comparing art to Renaissance greats is actually engaging in aesthetic judgements. Maybe others look at each piece of art as if it has no cultural significance, and see each thing as if divorced from all of history. I cannot, despite my best efforts, imagine viewing each piece of art like that.
I can certainly tell when a style of art I am familiar with is executed well. That is what I think PG is talking about here.
For me, taste is when I decide whether I like a style of art. Style, here, can be as broad as an era, or extremely specific.
My ‘taste’ is how much I enjoy a particular category, be it an era or a very specific thing. I really am not a fan of Renaissance paintings despite how many times I’ve walked through art galleries. I _can_ pretty clearly point out which are more or less successful. But almost none are too my taste.
And that’s the difference, to me. The taste is orthogonal to execution. But this argument for there being good taste relies on the belief that people who say there’s no such thing as good taste also meaning that one cannot execute well.
The differences between execution and taste become murkier for nascent art forms, where it’s possible to get into a position where it’s hard to tell if you have a taste for the style execution is not yet there. But that’s not really the point here.
This essay seems to conflate skill with... oh, let's call it vision.
Skill is the difference between Picasso's scribbles and the dribbles of a random 8-year-old. Or between pg and Bellini. It's the ability to convey what you want to convey.
Vision is harder to pin down. It's deciding to convey something worthwhile. And that's the hard part. What's worthwhile? It's so dependent on context. Is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel meaningful to somebody that has never heard of Christianity? Is impressionism all that impressive without the photograph? For that matter, why aren't we impressed by new works of impressionism? How come some artists aren't celebrated in their own time?
So yeah, clearly there's such a thing as skillful art, and maybe being able to recognize that could be considered "good taste". But I'm not sure that there's such a thing as objectively meaningful art. If there is, it'd take more than a few paragraphs to prove it.
There is definitely such a thing as "popular" taste (and indeed, there are many variations of it, since the populace is large and varied - this alone starts to make a sole idea of "good taste" difficult to accept), and there is definitely such a thing as skill at producing works that those with a popular taste appreciates.
The presented "proof" doesn't go any further than that, though. It mentions that it changes a lot over time, but instead of engaging with that as an indicator that taste is always a moment-by-moment subjective thing, then IMO goes off the rails a bit with weird analogies. It ends up circular. Good art is that which causes the desired reaction in those with good taste?
The best counter-argument to this skill/practice-based argument is that you can put a lot of skill and practice into something that people end up rejecting. Literature, film, and music shows plenty of examples of this. Even software shows this - you can spend a lot of effort to make a very intricate piece of software, that someone with "taste" may sneer at because of how fragile it is, even if they couldn't create it themselves. And then you are left just with that circular "your effort and practice and skill doesn't matter if it doesn't focus on the right things that hit your audience the right way, so the important skill is that of hitting your audience the right way, so a lot of it is up to the audience, so good taste is defined by ... itself and its audience"?
What I heard: "I find it useful to distinguish products on a single axis of quality, and therefore to distinguish talent on a single axis of being able to produce it. I can't imagine living without doing this ranking, so that single axis must be an objective truth others should align with."
For what it's worth, I agree with Paul about valuing art that demonstrates a type of technical mastery, and I like ranking things. But having multiple axes of quality, and disagreeing about how to assess and prioritize them, is far more useful: it's what makes a market. Just because your ranking is useful to you doesn't make it an objective truth. On the other hand, the absence of objective "good taste" doesn't make discussions about merit useless.
I think a more favourable interpretation is “Taste is multidimensional and complex but to show it exists it is sufficient to show it exists for the simplest to prove dimension. Technical talent is that least subjective dimension. Argument follows.”
[+] [-] motohagiography|4 years ago|reply
When we think of poor taste, we tend to think of symbols that are separated from their function and meaning, where instead of representing that, "I do this thing," something gaudy says, "I have this thing!" That's what crassness is, and it comes down to our relative apprehension of the real vs. the represented, where typically, something real is powerful independent of who is observing it, and the representation is not. It's whether something legitimately represents power. Taste may be an instinct for honest signals, which would seem like its own sort of intelligence.
Viewed this way, taste is the expression of what you percieve to be power based on your experience, good taste is the inverse of the distance between them, and poor taste is measured in the gap between what is affected and of-what it is the effect.
That difference between effect and affect is one of the sneakiest bits of the english language and perhaps even the culture's most cunningly set trap. Do not underestimate the value of good taste, it's an intuition about power.
[+] [-] handrous|4 years ago|reply
> That difference between effect and affect is one of the sneakiest bits of the english language and perhaps even the culture's most cunningly set trap. Do not underestimate the value of good taste, it's an intuition about power.
Much of Fussell's Class ends up being about this, which amounts to how various classes choose to signal, and how good they are at it. One of the biggest tells for the Fussell's Middle—who easily come off as the most unfortunate of the bunch, being the most class-anxious but also very bad at signaling—versus the "higher" classes he outlines, whom members of the Middle are often trying to signal as or imitate, are 1) how much of their stuff, including clothing, involves synthetic materials, and 2) how much of their stuff imitates a real thing—fake flowers, fine art prints on the walls, that kind of thing.
[+] [-] whatshisface|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beaconstudios|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marifjeren|4 years ago|reply
> Viewed this way, taste is the expression of what you percieve to be power based on your experience
What about displays of disposable wealth, which demonstrate power in a way that is nonetheless gaudy?
I don't think anyone could seriously argue that a wealthy person is less powerful than a poorer person, and yet displaying that wealth (e.g. having a solid 18k gold toilet) is clearly tasteless in the extreme. I almost wonder if you meant to say the exact opposite of what these quoted parts of your message say.
[+] [-] tompccs|4 years ago|reply
The Greeks used all sorts of forced perspective tricks in their architecture. Columns aren't equally spaced and lines aren't straight, but when viewed by a human observer at ground level the buildings built to Greek aesthetic rules appear "nicer" than those built to pure geometric ones.
Similarly, in art, there was a lot of talk about "authenticity" in the early 20th century, where it was believed that the more primitive the artist, the more authentic the art, since the true message of the artist would transmit undistorted by such Western constructs as technique or skill.
Decoration, adornment, and "fakeness" in pursuit of aesthetics has always been with us, and it's really a curiosity of modernity to have done away with it so comprehensively. Looking at the burgeoning architectural revival movements, and the return in popularity of portraiture and classical painting techniques, I think we're nearing the end of an era encapsulated by your comment.
[+] [-] mrcolin000|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] itronitron|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] achillesheels|4 years ago|reply
Now with respect to originality...that's a separate topic altogether :P
[+] [-] LudwigNagasena|4 years ago|reply
Closer than we expect? Huh? Competence and skill are the two most common concepts associated with taste, ask any person who hates contemporary art.
> It's whether something legitimately represents power. Taste may be an instinct for honest signals, which would seem like its own sort of intelligence.
I understand that nowadays everything in humanities has to be about power to be fashionable, but that sounds like quite a reach. I don’t really follow this logic on crassness.
[+] [-] majormajor|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hitekker|4 years ago|reply
How would you say "bad taste" and "good taste" relates to how we define the political and the non-political? They both share the notion of power, but is there a more meaningful connection that could be examined?
[+] [-] auggierose|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sharadov|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oopsyDoodl|4 years ago|reply
Since you say early on good taste is the difference between “I have” and “I do” good taste can’t be anything we possess, so how can anyone “have” good taste. Round n round we go.
This continues to highlight for me the shortcomings of human languages. Chomsky calls them random noise formalized and controlled by political powers. It makes sense, they only show up 5,000 years ago and we had glyphs for process and ideas before then. Given our legal system is normalized to matters of object possession, so goes our discourse. Given your measure it’s about “I do” versus “I have” can anyone “have” good taste since it comes down to advertising and accepting one is possessed of certain character traits? Isn’t it still gaudy self promotion and idolatry?
I’m still leaning towards peoples social power being due to their relative closeness to social power. Not that they’re uniquely beyond human. Why accept that in a system politically and academically normalized abstraction “good taste” is a useful language object itself?
[+] [-] guerrilla|4 years ago|reply
No problem.
> So if you want to discard the concept of good taste, you also have to discard the concept of good art. And that means you have to discard the possibility of people being good at making it.
This skips a step. It assumes without argument that production skill corresponds to subjective preferences. There are many people who are extremely skilled who produce things people hate and there are many productions which take virtually no effort which people love. Again, good blahblah is just consensus of subjective preferences. The whole article is just a disguised appeal to popularity fallacy that depends on confounding skill and value through equivocation on "good."
[+] [-] bajsejohannes|4 years ago|reply
> There are many people who are extremely skilled who produce things people hate
There's a dedicated subreddit for this, even using the word "taste": Awful Taste But Great Execution https://www.reddit.com/r/ATBGE/
[+] [-] Sohcahtoa82|4 years ago|reply
It only takes a quick trip to reddit to see this in action.
In a thread where people were talking about the jails and the overall penal system, someone said "heh...penal" and it had several Golds and thousands of points.
[+] [-] robofanatic|4 years ago|reply
How does one determine "better art"?
[+] [-] tshaddox|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnFen|4 years ago|reply
I usually cite art as an example of my point. There is no "good" art or "bad" art. There is successful and unsuccessful art.
Art is intended to make you feel something. If it has done that, it's successful. And making you feel revulsion due to the aesthetic choices made or execution of the piece counts as "feeling something".
[+] [-] TimPC|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheOtherHobbes|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu#Theory_of_capi...
PG may say that his father pushed him in a different direction. But I suspect - like me - PG grew up with the cultural direction of the BBC and its mission to "inform, educate, and entertain."
So if you were a bright curious kid your parents wouldn't necessarily be the ultimate authorities on culture and taste. There were other authorities. If you were interested.
I was genuinely shocked a few years ago when I realised how much my cultural interests had been shaped by that kind of social programming. I still enjoy art and music, but I'm little more circumspect about them now.
The point: cultural taste is an aspirational social marker. It correlates loosely with some observable features in various kinds of art. But the real goal of "having taste" is to convince yourself and others you're a certain class of person, and also to reassure yourself and others you're not a certain other class of person.
[+] [-] ambrozk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|4 years ago|reply
"Aspirational" means "you don't have it".
So all cultural taste is people trying to fake being in a better class than they are? Baloney. There are plenty of people who like things because they like those things, not because they think liking those things will make them look more upper class.
"Aspirational" taste is exactly what you get when people don't have taste, but want to look like they do. They copy someone else's taste (or a group average). And because they're aspirational, they try really hard to pretend that they do in fact have taste. But they just wind up cluttering up the discussion, because they don't actually know anything.
But there are people who actually do know some things about taste, and what is worthwhile, and value. They exist. They just get lost in the noise of a bunch of people who are trying to look like they know, even though they don't...
[+] [-] Aidevah|4 years ago|reply
"It is not at all natural to want to listen to classical music. Learning to appreciate it is like Pascal's wager: you pretend to be religious, and suddenly you have faith. You pretend to love Beethoven-or Stravinsky-because you think that will make you appear educated and cultured and intelligent, because that kind of music is prestigious in professional circles, and suddenly you really love it, you have become a fanatic, you go to concerts and buy records and experience true ecstasy when you hear a good performance (or even when you hear a mediocre one if you have little judgment)."
[+] [-] fsloth|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] watwut|4 years ago|reply
I had similar realization, but it did not made me more circumspect about art, music etc. It made me to be more willing to try stuff I assumed I wont like. More likely to look at the context at which something odd to me appeared and then more likely to understand/like it.
> cultural taste is an aspirational social marker.
I agree. It is also identity. It also explains why aesthetic culture wars appears. It is not so much about what it is or liking or disliking it. It is about who is assumed to like the thing and performative acceptance/rejection.
[+] [-] andi999|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SavantIdiot|4 years ago|reply
Of course someone with no taste would say this. :) I'm kidding.
Your statement reads like a punitive judgement, constructed to paint anyone who pursues enlightenment as entirely performative for external validation. Am I wrong?
What makes you so certain it is correct?
In your world does no one pursue enlightenment for its own ends?
[+] [-] ryanyde|4 years ago|reply
The rhetorical trick is one that many have pointed out: 'technically' superior is - in fact - easy to recognize. That doesn't mean that objective judgment of technique is synonymous with taste.
"Taste" in that sense becomes something more about having a pulse on how humans will ingest certain ideas. You can have an intuitive understanding of this in a given time and space (creatives get paid a great deal to do this). But that has nothing to do with 'taste' as an objective quality metric, it has to do with how humans will perceive or interact with an object.
[+] [-] rossdavidh|4 years ago|reply
Nonsense. One can have "refined taste", which means that you can detect all the subtleties of a particular kind of art (e.g. modern abstract art, or modern jazz) that I cannot. My taste in other fields is considerably more refined than the person who likes modern jazz and abstract art; perhaps they cannot stand any science fiction, whereas I have strong opinions about which is good and which is not.
The phrase "good taste" implies there is one standard, one dimension on which one can rate art, but clearly there are many different ones, depending on ones tastes.
[+] [-] hardwaregeek|4 years ago|reply
I wonder how much of this is physiological and how much is mental. I can't help but think you'd need some sort of color blindness for taste to genuinely not notice any difference between scallion pancakes. But perhaps my friend was exaggerating.
My theory is that taste is one quality that separates the academics from the business people. Academia doesn't necessitate a lot of taste. If you have it, great. If you don't have it, no big deal. On the other hand, stuff such as product design, user interfaces, even software engineering, requires taste. You need to understand what makes a good piece of software or a good product. One could argue that Steve Jobs was a product supertaster. He was finely attuned to stuff that the average user (or the average HN reader) would not see. As PG notes, taste is being attuned to the collective unconsciousness, to a collective aesthetic. If you can tap into that, you can attract customers.
[+] [-] slibhb|4 years ago|reply
For judgements of taste, no one is better than Kant. I recommend this essay: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetic-judgment/
In Kantian aesthetics, judgements of taste are subjective (because they differ between people) but are normative in that they claim universal validity (when we judge art to be good, we will all others to agree). Kant calls this "subjective universality". This explains why people disagree about art and why we can argue about it. It bothers us when people disagree with our judgements of taste. When we claim it doesn't bother us ("there's no accounting for taste"), we're either lying or not making judgements of taste.
Compare this to judgements about flavor (which Kant calls judgments of the agreeable). We don't argue about whether vanilla is better than chocolate or, if we do, we consider the argument trivial and subjective with no right answer. This is not the case when we argue about art.
The heart of the matter is whether beauty is objective or if it is merely relative to something. PG's essay argues that it is relative to being human, Kant similarly argues that it is relative to being a rational being (a somewhat broader category). This contrasts with the common argument that beauty is relative to some socio-cultural standard.
[+] [-] dec0dedab0de|4 years ago|reply
I don't have an answer for whether or not there is a universal good taste, but this argument is fundamentally flawed because it conflates skill and expression. Of course any practiced painter is going to be better at painting, but that doesn't mean that what they paint is tasteful.
That said, did anyone else get the feeling that pg got into the mushrooms before writing this?
[+] [-] cwmoore|4 years ago|reply
In the conversational spaces that attempt to account for taste are the same human conflicts that set one true believer against another of a different religion.
I think the proper reductio ad absurdum is the more trivial one. Taste some rotten meat-- and either spit it out and rinse with strong liquor, or endure (survive?) the GI infection, then tell someone else to eat it, and see what you feel about the subjectivity of taste afterwards. See how the person your recommended the rotten meat feels about it, if anything. Finer points of arguments for or against some artist or movement are unsubstantiable when there is, I think we can agree, such a thing as guts.
[1] I originally found HN after reading PG's book "Hackers and Painters"[2] and realized his practice of implementing the techniques of Old Masters in the late-20th Century, was not at all the kind of work that drew me to visual art.
[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/hackpaint.html
[+] [-] simiones|4 years ago|reply
There are very few universals of taste. Even looking only at food: some people routinely consume, for pleasure, rotten meats, rotten milk (cheese), various bitter poisonous seeds, extremely painful hot peppers, painful acidic or basic substances, and even feces or other bodily fluids. Of course, no one could enjoy drinking concentrated sulfuric acid for example, so there are some ultimate limits.
Similarly in all arts, there is rarely any style that is not seen as more refined than any other by some group of people, or profoundly distasteful. There are certainly people who would rather hang up children's paintings in their house than something like Malevich's Black square.
[+] [-] keiferski|4 years ago|reply
I bring this up because the topic reminds me of a philosopher of religion, Charles Taylor. One of his points is that this relativistic individualism inevitably leads to our own inability to express what we value. It's a kind of "explanatory atrophy." If your default position is I have my way and he has his, and that's all there really is to it you lose the ability to present and shape your own opinion in reaction to others. Most people don't have the vocabulary to articulate this, so "that's in bad taste" ends up just turning into Dudeism.. that's just your opinion, man.
So when confronted with something we think is in bad taste, we can't put vague thoughts into words, and therefore just fall back to "it's his/her personal taste, who I am to criticize?"
Ultimately, this question arises from a lack of education and cultural interest in the arts and in aesthetics. Without it, the definition of good taste will ultimately boil down to the opinions of whoever has money, power, or popularity.
[+] [-] mojuba|4 years ago|reply
The rest, pretty much all the other aspects of art other than novelty are debatable and subjective, I think.
[+] [-] abernard1|4 years ago|reply
I expect his post to be surprisingly unpopular with this crowd, as it sleights a core tenet of our postmodern age. Namely, he's arguing for a form of objective truth and of "the good". A statistical derivation of this good for sure (and qualitative as opposed to a Benthamist, quantitative utilitarianism), but a good nonetheless.
But I applaud PG for taking this stance. Truth is not like your favorite flavor of ice cream. Software isn't either, and certain software either works or doesn't. Human culture and beliefs—our ideological software—has objectively superior results depending upon what your measuring stick is. Some beliefs are objectively better.
[+] [-] retube|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Barrin92|4 years ago|reply
This is I think the central argument of the piece and I think it is very wrong. He conflates the notion of goodness in a teleological sense with proficiency. When people talk about good or bad taste they try to make an objective claim about the purpose of art, that's to say what end a piece of art serves, or to judge the quality of what it ultimately expresses.
You can be 'good' in the sense of proficient on utterly meaningless tasks. Someone can memorize ten thousand digits of a random sequence. You can be good or bad at it, and we can objectively figure out if you are, but the task isn't objectively meaningful.
To say that there is no good or bad taste is to say there is, ultimately no non-subjective standard for a piece of art. This does not imply that any subject that produces art cannot be judged on their merits by their own standards.
[+] [-] newbamboo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tdrdt|4 years ago|reply
So it's more like: when love was put into it, it tastes good.
[+] [-] FemmeAndroid|4 years ago|reply
This doesn’t hold up for me. We’re comparing PGs painting ability to two renaissance artists who painted in fairly similar ways. When you go and try to paint in a style, I can 100% agree that you can execute better or worse than another person. I don’t doubt that PGs paintings are not as good as famous renaissance paintings.
I don’t think that’s what people mean when they talk about good taste.
PG uses a narrow definition of taste, so let’s make sure we’re using that:
> There's a narrow sense in which it refers to aesthetic judgements and a broader one in which it refers to preferences of any kind. The strongest proof would be to show that taste exists in the narrowest sense…
I don’t know that comparing art to Renaissance greats is actually engaging in aesthetic judgements. Maybe others look at each piece of art as if it has no cultural significance, and see each thing as if divorced from all of history. I cannot, despite my best efforts, imagine viewing each piece of art like that.
I can certainly tell when a style of art I am familiar with is executed well. That is what I think PG is talking about here.
For me, taste is when I decide whether I like a style of art. Style, here, can be as broad as an era, or extremely specific.
My ‘taste’ is how much I enjoy a particular category, be it an era or a very specific thing. I really am not a fan of Renaissance paintings despite how many times I’ve walked through art galleries. I _can_ pretty clearly point out which are more or less successful. But almost none are too my taste.
And that’s the difference, to me. The taste is orthogonal to execution. But this argument for there being good taste relies on the belief that people who say there’s no such thing as good taste also meaning that one cannot execute well.
The differences between execution and taste become murkier for nascent art forms, where it’s possible to get into a position where it’s hard to tell if you have a taste for the style execution is not yet there. But that’s not really the point here.
[+] [-] cwp|4 years ago|reply
Skill is the difference between Picasso's scribbles and the dribbles of a random 8-year-old. Or between pg and Bellini. It's the ability to convey what you want to convey.
Vision is harder to pin down. It's deciding to convey something worthwhile. And that's the hard part. What's worthwhile? It's so dependent on context. Is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel meaningful to somebody that has never heard of Christianity? Is impressionism all that impressive without the photograph? For that matter, why aren't we impressed by new works of impressionism? How come some artists aren't celebrated in their own time?
So yeah, clearly there's such a thing as skillful art, and maybe being able to recognize that could be considered "good taste". But I'm not sure that there's such a thing as objectively meaningful art. If there is, it'd take more than a few paragraphs to prove it.
[+] [-] majormajor|4 years ago|reply
The presented "proof" doesn't go any further than that, though. It mentions that it changes a lot over time, but instead of engaging with that as an indicator that taste is always a moment-by-moment subjective thing, then IMO goes off the rails a bit with weird analogies. It ends up circular. Good art is that which causes the desired reaction in those with good taste?
The best counter-argument to this skill/practice-based argument is that you can put a lot of skill and practice into something that people end up rejecting. Literature, film, and music shows plenty of examples of this. Even software shows this - you can spend a lot of effort to make a very intricate piece of software, that someone with "taste" may sneer at because of how fragile it is, even if they couldn't create it themselves. And then you are left just with that circular "your effort and practice and skill doesn't matter if it doesn't focus on the right things that hit your audience the right way, so the important skill is that of hitting your audience the right way, so a lot of it is up to the audience, so good taste is defined by ... itself and its audience"?
[+] [-] evrydayhustling|4 years ago|reply
For what it's worth, I agree with Paul about valuing art that demonstrates a type of technical mastery, and I like ranking things. But having multiple axes of quality, and disagreeing about how to assess and prioritize them, is far more useful: it's what makes a market. Just because your ranking is useful to you doesn't make it an objective truth. On the other hand, the absence of objective "good taste" doesn't make discussions about merit useless.
[+] [-] TimPC|4 years ago|reply