Is there such a thing as good taste?

Some people find original Star Wars to be a truly great movie. Those same people may find the movies that inspired Star Wars, like Kurosawa’s “Hidden Fortress” or Midway boring or solely on technical factors like color vs black and white. In a mass market product those technical factors make the work less approachable.

I spent several years walking through a pretty good collection of mid-20th century modern art. Most of it made no impression on me at all, but one installation’s aesthetic appealed to me for reasons that I cannot really describe. Part of it was the absurdity of what the facility did to that space — they literally dropped a random howitzer in the room. But if I nerded out and studied the artists and their art, I’d develop a more nuanced understanding and appreciation.

"It means we can't say that any painter is better than a randomly chosen eight year old."

First, this is a non-literal arguement and so is disconnected from reality in a literal sense. We CAN say this. We can also make taste claims AND we can admit it's arbitrarily driven by many different decisions and biases developed before this lifetime, as artists and art don't exist in vacuums. We can also admit it's absolutely an adultist perspective to dismiss a person's contributions by the age of their current body. Literally everyone has different skills and the impact art has can be wildly different depending on the piece and the context it's viewed in. A person (namely me) can become inspired to change the world by witnessing a 1-year old creating a realistic drawing of pumpkin seeds. Is that art good based on whether or not the person is successful at changing the world? Who cares! It's an arbitrary and unnecessary judgment being made out of a habit of judging things, rather than observing and accepting whatever's being received.

This post represents a continuation of the cultural norms of preference-making (which is a form of limited identity), avoiding absurdity, over-reliance on classical logic instead of uncertainty logic to process reality (since it doesn't leave room for art that exists in multiple classes of equivalence of good and bad and judges art based on too short of a timeline).

Anyone who abandons their preferences gets to realize how limiting thinking like PG proposes here is, how it limits the joy and value of any artist or work of art, and how this creates a hostile environment for artists of literally every kind.

Good... bad...meh.... there exists art that meets all needs while denying none and then there's the rest.

If you've never abandoned the automated judgment and preference-making most of the world teaches, you can never realize a perspective that transcends arbitrarily subjective thinking.

Also, as an aside, tastes are, in part driven by trauma. I hypothesize this is why some people in addiction recovery develop different tastes after having spiritual experiences/awakenings: they heal from and release the stuck feelings from some past trauma(s) which were being used to judge other things in life.

So does anyone want to abandon their preferences as an attempt to falsify this perspective for science? I have a practice that worked for me and want to conduct an experiment where some people genuinely/sincerely commit to it without being aware of the practice and others choose to try it only after learning about the practice. Any brave souls want to seek deeper joy and release from cultural/ trauma programming?

Narrative is critical, and often external, coming from the curator, dealer, critic, etc. Humans love stories.

“Death and Transfiguration” by Strauss is a beautiful, skillfully written piece of music. A story I heard is that Strauss on his deathbed exclaimed “it’s just like I wrote it!” Is it true? Did he say this? I have no idea, and in a sense it doesn’t matter. The piece is made better by the story I remember when I listen to it. It’s not in the music, it’s with the music.

I think he is still correct though but for a different reason. When someone first creates art they may begin naively and create art that is lacking in subtlety, perhaps speaking to the more immature aspects of our human nature?

A good artist graduates from that phase and begins to recognize it in other artists — can say, "Yeah, I used to do art like that but I have moved on." In the same way the art connoisseur should be able to say, "Ahhh, I used to like art like that once, but my tastes now appreciate the more nuanced."

Maybe an example is a car that the owner did as "black-on-black", like Darth Vader, blacked out badges, blacked-out windows, black paint job.... You recognize that "Hey, all black, cool, right?"

Am I being too elitist?

(Hello user, BTW.)