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Is there such a thing as good taste?

paulgraham.com

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Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#81

Post by dagw »

fsloth wrote: post #29
lr4444lr wrote: post #2

I don't get into these kinds of discussions with people anymore, because they're not socially palatable. I try to stay open minded too about perspectives that are not mine, and try to be objective about my own biases. But I can't shake the feeling that much as someone might validly prefer some abstract dot on a white canvas to the Sistine Chapel ceiling, who would more likely impress the fans of the other, that artis…

Paul did not discuss the merits of academic art versus modern art. He simply attempted to proof that it is "less wrong" to say there can be good taste, than that there is no taste. The argument works in any recognized genre or art - the claim is "In a particular chosen genre, a person can be more skilled than an 8 year old who has no idea what they are doing". The genre can be whatever that has no known established n…

sports do not generally qualify for this argument as they most of the time have a metric that is more or less objective

You see arguments about aesthetics and taste all the time in sport. "Team A may have won the championship, but they have a very ugly style. Team B played a much more beautiful game" or "I love watching Team C play even if they lose almost all the time, because they have such a fun and interesting way of playing". In some sports like MMA you have fighters with near perfect records and impressive win streaks against the best in the league, but no one watches them because they're "boring".

Essentially there are two ways of viewing sport. From the player/teams point of view where it is all about winning, or from the spectators point of view where the primary goal is to be entertained.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#82

Post by beaconstudios »

gpjanik wrote: post #77
beaconstudios wrote: post #74

nice to see the comment section is criticising PG for an extremely amateur take on sociology, aesthetics and art. I don't know why, but there's a fairly strong association between being in STEM and thinking that the humanities are easy and obvious and people study them just because they don't understand STEM. Thus we get blog posts like this, about how a reductio ad absurdum thought experiment is enough to resolve a…

Paul Graham writing about good taste (and people actually reading this) looks to me like either good trolling on his side, or just the usual startup misery - an extrovert narcissist convinced that he has intellectual capacity to analyse absolutely everything (and that analysis is worth sharing) because he's running a VC. It's sad either way.

I think it's the latter - you see the same thing with Naval too, as well as a slew of rationalists who seem to consider it their role in life to reinvent sociology from the perspective of a software developer without having read any of the existing academic works.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#83

Post by pfraze »

ritchiea wrote: post #36
lr4444lr wrote: post #2

I don't get into these kinds of discussions with people anymore, because they're not socially palatable. I try to stay open minded too about perspectives that are not mine, and try to be objective about my own biases. But I can't shake the feeling that much as someone might validly prefer some abstract dot on a white canvas to the Sistine Chapel ceiling, who would more likely impress the fans of the other, that artis…

It's really not that anyone prefers an abstract dot on a white canvas over the Sistine Chapel. It helps to think of art as a historical dialogue with other art, as well as an exploration of how our senses experience the world. Minimalist abstract art (Ad Reinhardt is one of the more famous practitioners) was pushing viewers to pay attentions to subtleties and small differences in our perceptions of color and shapes.…

This might be overly reductive, but if you use Twitter or any social platform where people indirectly reference other posts, I think you can maybe understand how a dot on a white canvas can have impact. The "Loss" meme [1] borders on being that exact thing.

1. https://news.knowyourmeme.com/news/heres-to-loss-the-interne...

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#84

Post by jccalhoun »

As others have mentioned, Bourdieu would like a word with him https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinction_(book)

Graham seems to be conflating skill with taste. The artists he mentions are skilled at art and he states that he is not. Distinguishing between skilled and unskilled work may be "good taste" but what is considered good art is more than just skill.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#85

Post by etrautmann »

beaconstudios wrote: post #74

nice to see the comment section is criticising PG for an extremely amateur take on sociology, aesthetics and art. I don't know why, but there's a fairly strong association between being in STEM and thinking that the humanities are easy and obvious and people study them just because they don't understand STEM. Thus we get blog posts like this, about how a reductio ad absurdum thought experiment is enough to resolve a…

This is overly dismissive - why not attack the ideas directly?

I find these ideas overly reductive since the essay presupposes that art should be judged in a vacuum outside of it's societal context, as if that's somehow more objective. The emotional impact of the art (PG's stated objective function to maximize) cannot be pulled out of its context. Said differently, the emotional impact of a piece of art often leans heavily on the story of the artist. PG seems to argue against this, but unconvincingly.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#86

Post by ryanSrich »

codeulike wrote: post #7

This ignores the sociological aspects - having 'good taste' in something (art, sneakers, car modifications, tattoos) is a way of signalling membership of a group or distinction within that group. Even being interested in [classical] 'art' in the first place is a signifier of being in a certain strata of society. The way this essay is written seems anchored in one very particular social strata and the signifiers that…

This is easily disproven by showing a child two paintings.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#87

Post by stordoff »

brigandish wrote: post #26

The evening of that talk had another speech that led to events of more import. On the side of Paul Graham (at least in the debate) Andrew Graham-Dixon gave a speech[1] that was against fascism, against racism, and against anti-semitism and yet Cambridge Union put him on a list of speakers that will not be invited back because of their racism and anti-semitism. Why? Because he did a satirical impression of Hitler. I k…

Video of the debate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5cXXE3jlpc

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#88

Post by tdrdt »

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.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#89

Post by long_time_gone »

mojuba wrote: post #48
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that definition the worst movies should be more novel. There are definitely movies that exist in which the reaction of everyone is that how can anyone produce movie this bad. If you think there is no such thing as universally bad, search for worst song in youtube. Also theoretically a random static is the most novel thing that could be present.

Can you bring some examples of films that are considered bad, rated say below IMDB 5, but are novel in some way? I don't know of any. There are some edge cases "so bad it's good" like The Room, but I personally don't get the appeal of it. And then it's an edge case anyway.

IMBD might not be a great source because that is graded by regular people, not critics. A better measure might be differences in Metacritic scores between critics and users.

That said, Zoolander has a 6.5 rating on IMDB and is considered a classic. Perhaps comedy as a genre is more likely to have that anomaly.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#90

Post by jackcosgrove »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #70
abernard1 wrote: post #15

For once I agree with Paul Graham. 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…

While you claim to oppose the postmodern idea that there is no truth, you’ve ceded the premise to the postmodernists by framing truth in their terms of objectivity and subjectivity. The success of the postmodernists was precisely to discredit all “subjective” truths by way of distinguishing them from “objective” truths, which no common person can deny. A stronger position is one that does not require the truth to be…

I'm curious do you believe abstract truths are immanent or transcendent?
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