Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste [in art]? [...] If everything a particle interacts with behaves as if the particle had a mass of m, then it has a mass of m.

u/JimmyPWatts 41 points at 1636984234.000000

I’d be way more likely -which is to say still not all that likely - to accept the conclusions here and among the various other rationalist (I realize he is rat-adjacent, not rat-proper) screeds if they didn’t always count themselves among the chosen ones. Genes and IQ are important and I have the good genes. Art appreciation is objective and I have good taste. The singularity is coming and I will be among the first 100 people to bootstrap the hive mind! If I had even 10% of the sense of self-importance of this lot, life would look very different.

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u/AbsolutelyExcellent -3 points at 1637043927.000000

I think you'd be missing out; Paul has some good writing. People let their (fabulously wealthy) success get to their heads and that's where the self-superiority stuff begins to creep in.

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u/DELETED 9 points at 1637108240.000000

[deleted]

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u/Plorkyeran 5 points at 1637174468.000000

I've sort of come around to the view that he's skilled at half of the writing process. He's very good at turning his thoughts into words, but not very good at having thoughts worth writing down.

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u/tagghuding 1 points at 1637389248.000000

See for example "dabblers and blowhards"

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u/Gndwyn 25 points at 1636996638.000000

His basic error is he doesn’t seem to know the difference between something good and something done skillfully. It takes a lot of skill to make a Michael Bay movie. I certainly couldn’t do it. But his movies are still bad by the standards I judge movies. And they are great by the standards lots of other people use.

His argument is that if lots of people like chocolate and lots of people also like hamburgers, then that correlation is evidence that my preference for vanilla and hot dogs is objectively wrong.

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u/loquinatus 23 points at 1636984548.000000

What’s even worse than this essay being complete drivel is that people actually sat down and listened to him present this as a speech - “This essay is derived from a talk at the Cambridge Union”.

The only time I’d want to hear Paul Graham mouth off about taste would be moments after I’d whanged a rotten tomato at his head.

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u/Epistaxis 25 points at 1636987964.000000

He also thanks several people for editing it. Imagine asking other people to edit your work despite reading zero other people who've already argued about this topic for hundreds or thousands of years. Ignorance is not knowing that you're speculating your way into well-trod ground, and arrogance is not caring.

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u/Own_Deer7486 22 points at 1636996274.000000

“art can be objectively good so long as you reduce the scope so much there is no subjectivity left”

truly a great mind

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u/typell 16 points at 1637010314.000000

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.

Ah, there’s the trick. He’s confusing two different senses of the word ‘good’.

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u/birdcontent 9 points at 1637012467.000000

at least three or four different senses, by my count

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u/nodying 8 points at 1637018298.000000

> So if you want to discard the concept of good taste Does this guy just not know the history of art and how much of it for thousands of years was about telling rich people how cool they were? And that expense and extravagance and the dedicated skill to making rich people look good was how far "taste" went. That's a lot of "good taste" even now, judging something by how effectively it flatters the audience.

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u/hamgeezer 6 points at 1637108615.000000

You can measure how good subjective things are by eliminating aesthetics, a discipline as old as human civilisation, and then seeing which one has more colors in it.

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u/AbsolutelyExcellent 2 points at 1637043471.000000

I enjoy Paul Graham’s writing on startups and ideas but didn’t get much out of this one; it’s more of a train of thought rambling than a well-thought out and tested idea.

First: what is art? Can it be specified, or will it always be expansive and inclusive to all human experience and expression?

Secondly, my issue with the word “good taste”, which evokes a certain elitism. Is certain art better than other art? We can compare certain books or paintings and say “this one has more intertwining themes than the other”, but does that make it better? What if the other, less complex one was more influential and moving in my life? I think what’s happening is Paul recognizes something to be skillful; a beautifully drawn portrait, and recognizes that he does not have the current skill to draw the portrait. This skill is what he uses to distinguish tasteful art from distasteful / less tasteful art, but because of the inclusiveness of art I don’t think that distinction can ever be made. You can always say something is more skillfully drawn though.

Paul highlights this problem in his essay without recognizing it’s implication.

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.

Who originally defined the better art?

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u/dgerard 4 points at 1637140515.000000

Graham's writing on ideas gets me doubting his ideas on startups, especially as you notice that they're marketing for his startup meat grinder. The more I read, the less he seems to have anything worth saying.

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u/Plorkyeran 5 points at 1637174712.000000

His early writings on programming are extrapolating extensively from a single data point, and his essays on startups consistently say that you should be doing the thing which helps him get richer. That doesn't mean that any of the things he wrote is automatically incorrect, but they certainly should be read with a healthy dose of skepticism.

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u/glaringconstraint -12 points at 1636980853.000000

Why is Paul Graham lumped with the rest of the invalids here? Not an earth-shattering essay, but it’s not wrong, and it’s not ridiculous.

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u/Dr_Gonzo13 27 points at 1636981422.000000

It kinda is ridiculous though... the whole article is basically just a load of assertions as to why 'good taste' is real without any arguments aside from 'I know it when I see it'. It completely ignores the fact that taste is inherently subject to cultural mores and good taste in the modern world versus, say, classical China would likely be very different. I'd posit that the idea of good taste as an objective idea rather than a very specific set of cultural signifiers is nonsense and this article has done nothing to leave me less convinced of that.

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u/AbsolutelyExcellent 3 points at 1637044312.000000

Well said

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u/glaringconstraint -8 points at 1636984111.000000

But that’s not what he is saying. On one side you have complete objective taste: there exists a decision rule to put all works of art in a specific order from worst to best, and whoever disagrees with it is wrong. On the other side you have complete subjective taste: for every kind of ordering of works of art there exists a person/culture/subject who favors it. Both views sit at the poles and are clearly wrong and frankly boring. Complete subjectivity implies, for example, that there can be a human society that highly values smearing shit on canvases while smirking at anything Rembrandt or Gu Kaizhi authored. Or, focusing just on the visual medium, that one set of noisy pixels is superior to another. What Graham is saying is somewhere in the continuum: "it's not possible to have perfect taste, it is possible to have good taste". If you can somehow sanely sum up the opinions of cultural groups you believe to be distinct, the vectors will vary, but they won’t be completely random. There is a vast difference in taste and view between groups and individuals, but to to think things are utterly subjective is as equally sneerable as any attempt to quantify the one true taste.

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 24 points at 1636984522.000000

But this is fundamentally trite. If you’re giving a lecture on the subject that “sometimes somewhere something is considered good art, and other art is considered bad” that’s all you need to say, and you can walk away from the podium. A good lecture would investigate the means and hows of why that is, and this isn’t that: it’s almost culture war level, in that the worst daily papers regularly publish columns about this, which at least openly admit that they’re talking more about cultural politics than aesthetics.

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u/JimmyPWatts 9 points at 1636984618.000000

What we need is someone to write blog posts in 144 words or less…oh shit wait nevermind!

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 4 points at 1637020784.000000

As somebody who spends far too much time scrolling down my twitter feed: fuck you

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u/JimmyPWatts 3 points at 1637020818.000000

Hahaha much appreciated

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u/glaringconstraint 1 points at 1636984819.000000

It is a boring blog post that adds nothing to the conversation. (Like most everything he wrote in the last ten years). I want my sneers fresher than that.

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 11 points at 1636985054.000000

We like having content, even drama, and you’ve certainly done some work to help with that

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 12 points at 1636985172.000000

Not to mention: he does note that this is derived from a lecture or event or whateverthefuck at the Cambridge Union (cursed institution that it is), which lends it an amusing significance

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u/Dr_Gonzo13 11 points at 1636984411.000000

>Complete subjectivity implies, for example, that there can be a human society that highly values smearing shit on canvases while smirking at anything Rembrandt or Gu Kaizhi authored. I wasn't arguing for complete subjectivity, only for the meaninglessness of the idea of good taste outside of cultural context. However, I find myself wondering in response to your point what makes you think that the above society isn't possible? Or in fact what is the relevance of this example? Are you saying the objective nature of good taste means that that particular society's view of what is good taste is inherently wrong?

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u/pusillanimouslist 4 points at 1637035737.000000

Humans have believed some weird stuff. In fact the world that we currently occupy would be utterly incomprehensible even two centuries ago on a cultural level, even from the same geographic area. I don’t think that the possible scope of views and tastes is limitless, but I do think that what limits might exist are entirely impossible to predict if they do indeed exist. After all, while smearing shit on a canvas does not seem like a possible definition of art, it’s worth remembering that skat fetishism is a thing. The difference between a private fetish and a cultural value is merely a difference in number of people, not magnitude of the belief.

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u/glaringconstraint 0 points at 1636985505.000000

What he’s saying is that you can apply this cultural context to all of humanity through all of history and the result will not be a random scattering of points but a murky arrow that points to some things and not others.

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 13 points at 1636986030.000000

WHICH IS FUNDAMENTALLY TRITE, EVEN IF TRUE

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u/pusillanimouslist 5 points at 1637035883.000000

I also think it’s only true because existing art becomes part of the cultural milieu, not because there’s something inherent to the art. Show a modern person a bunch of cubist works, and they’ll be able to pick roughly the best ones out because that person comes from the same society that produced cubism. Show those same paintings to a Gregorian monk and they’ll ask if you’ve suffered a recent blow to the head.

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 4 points at 1637037338.000000

I will say this… As an occasionally paid up member of the postmodern mafia, I love fakery. One of my favourite movies is Orson Welles’s *F for Fake*, which in a very po-mo fashion - lots of silly, flashy cuts and digressions - documents the story of Elmyr de Hory, who is primarily known for forging modernist paintings, and doing so with incredible success until being caught out by sharp-eyed experts with a lot of tools and money at their disposal. Fine, honestly as with Welles I take my hat off to the guy who scammed the totally corrupt and abysmal market for modernist art before Warhol and later Koons made it central to that market. But I like those paintings, and I like the fakes too, and there has to be some deeper reason why I feel that way than “this guy did representations pretty well”.

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u/Dr_Gonzo13 6 points at 1636997917.000000

Like what? That human art is usually produced in mediums that humans can access? I mean, where is the message here? It just seems like a tautology now. And what's that got to do with why paintings are better than poop sculptures?

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 8 points at 1636985563.000000

The problem for Graham is that he doesn’t say that. Naturally there will be some non-random psychological function involved in aesthetic appreciation: hunter-gatherers in what is now France made aesthetic choices when they made cave paintings, which is common fucking knowledge. I can’t let this go: why the fuck is Paul Graham even giving or indeed on his own website bothering to publish this drivel?

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 23 points at 1636982782.000000

Well, to begin with, there are a handful of people who are quote unquote “designated targets” for this sub in spite of maybe not being pally with Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Paul Graham is considered fair game here, along with Steven Pinker and a few others I can’t come up with off the top of my head: it’s contextual. If anything Graham is fairer game than Pinker on the basis that he’s genuinely Silicon Valley shithead rather than East Coast esteemed academic. But there’s other things to sneer at: 1. It’s trite, it’s boring, it’s self-aggrandising and takes far too many words to say what it wants to say. 2. While the ultimate conclusion isn’t wrong (to my mind) *as such*, it’s incredibly poorly argued aesthetic philosophy. There is a *wealth* of resources which argue back and forth about the subjective or objective or transcendent nature of artistic judgement. The way I would have structured it - much more concisely I might add - is to first address the common conception of taste as fundamentally subjective (which to his credit Graham does), but then denied the implicit premise that there is such a distinction. Graham accepts the dichotomy between subjective and objective taste and goes to bat for objectivity, without ever thinking about how to sort his premises to his conclusions, and just winds up concluding de Vinci was pretty good with a pen or a paintbrush. The much stronger logical argument is that the very fact of such a psychological distinction (objective vs subjective taste) reveals deeper premises to be explored about the *nature* of art, why art exists at all, etc. As /u/Dr_Gonzo13 correctly points out, not only is artistic appreciation divergent between individuals, but craft itself is culturally loaded across different places and times, and yet art is still made regardless. Graham wants to say that because he personally can’t match up to the European masters they were better at something. That isn’t an argument, it’s a pallid reflection on the fact that some people are better with their hands than others: I could say the same thing about doing architectural drawings for a steel-mill, or certain genres of porn. Psychological observations cast around more or less at random here don’t suffice, and casting yourself as a serious art commentator really deserves a much more sophisticated justification for the views you yourself happen to hold.

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u/Soyweiser 22 points at 1636983019.000000

Just as fascism has Ur-fascism, which is the precursor of all the variants of fascism, Rationalism has ... well this: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html So imho, paul being talked about here is a sort of talking about the smallest domino. (Have not read this article so no judgment if this fits here btw) E: unrelated, wanted to share with the group, but don't want to make a post about it. But Elon musk follows 100 people on twitter. One of them is Scott Alexander.

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u/JimmyPWatts 10 points at 1636983846.000000

Oh it fits!

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