221–230 of 479 posts
Yes there's good taste. As one example that I've experienced: walk into the Pixar building in Emeryville and it feels amazing, and different, and better. And it turns out that Steve Jobs created it. https://www.buzzfeed.com/adambvary/inside-steve-jobs-mindblo...
in a turtleneck tucked into his mom jeans, and glaring white sneakers.
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 b…
This is entirely plausible. If you are used to eating some food regularly over the course of decades, you will be able to discriminate between good vs. mediocre versions. If you have only eaten a food a few times, the most relevant comparisons will be with other types of food, and you won’t necessarily notice the difference between two separate experiences of it. When compared to pizza, tacos, or bagels, all scallion pancakes are pretty similar.
For instance, a person who drinks red wine every day will be able to tell you the difference between varietals, regions, distinguish $100 vs. $7 bottles, maybe notice good vs. bad years from some vineyard; someone who has only rarely had red wine might think that they all taste about the same.
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 apprehens…
> 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.
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 h…
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 b…
> friend remarked that he didn't think there was any difference, that indeed all scallion pancakes were exactly alike to him. This is entirely plausible. If you are used to eating some food regularly over the course of decades, you will be able to discriminate between good vs. mediocre versions. If you have only eaten a food a few times, the most relevant comparisons will be with other types of food, and you won’t ne…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 geome…
I replied to another comment related, but the anti- version of modernism is of course post-modernism, where nothing is real and everything is mainly its symbolic value. The conceit of that argument is that aesthetics are somehow trivial because anyone can appreciate them but very few can produce them - whereas you take anything post-modern and everyone can produce them but almost nobody can appreciate them sincerely.…
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 rel…
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, espe…
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.
this is a little trite and definitely isn't universal, let alone well defined (as to what 'love' means in this context) so doesn't really help anyone trying to understand more about what makes good taste (or good design, in your instance) - i think there can be plenty examples of good design and good taste that come from hate, or from indifference; all sorts of emotions and rationales...
Picasso's Guernica is the poster child for art made from hate, in this case against the Spanish Civil War. But it's equally a painting centered on love for the victims of the war. After all, it's mostly a painting of those victims.
I don't think much good of anything can come from a position of indifference.