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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?

#241

Post by vasco »

I think a more applicable translation of this topic to general terms is one of good judgement and how to assess for that. Most people think they have good judgement, yet assessing for it very hard, similar to good taste, because of all the extraneous factors.

You can be right but have an unpopular opinion, similarly to how you can have good taste but maybe nobody knows about your art and therefore you can remain "undiscovered" forever, so experts might never have a chance to review your work and deem it good. You can also be right under most circunstances but a bigger factor making your judgement sound but wrong.

In engineering (programmers, managers, product managers) you have this a lot where you're trying to promote people with good judgement to own large codebases, or big projects, or teams of people, but identifying those is something that is hard to do.

It'd be interesting to have art experts quantifying art in similar ways that we quantify engineering work. If experts can classify art, surely there's a mental checklist they go over, even if they never tried to put it to paper. I imagine it'd be a mixture of from 1-10 "how much of a sense of awe did the piece cause you" and from 1-10 how "good are the porportions" or whatever, but this is where I struggle. Perhaps it's more complicated than that and there's a decision tree of each "criteria" but surely there must be one, the same way we'd assess a software engineer or a product manager or an engineering manager for good judgement in the quality of their work.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#242

Post by TimPC »

evrydayhustling wrote: post #172

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 thing…

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.”

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#243

Post by TimPC »

Levitz wrote: post #43

I think that this, sadly, boils down to semantics. It does seem to me that by his reasoning good taste exists since good art exists, problem being that what is considered good art and what people like change with time, present a piece of modern art to Michelangelo and chances are he would consider it some sort of insulting joke. Good taste then is not something objective, but depends on context and the importance of…

I think one could argue there is an objective good taste even if every attempt in society to find it results in quite different subjective approximations.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#244

Post by long_time_gone »

SilasX wrote: post #148
long_time_gone wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A Michelangelo work will win even when the viewer doesn’t know it’s Michelangelo or even who that is. This seems like a big assumption. Is there a study that tests this idea?

Why is it a big assumption that most people don't need to know "This is by Michelangelo and he is a high status artist" to enjoy the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (or whatever else)? If you're going to demand copious evidence solely of the hypotheses you don't like, you're going to be locked into confirmation bias. But yes, there are easy tests you could do: get the ratios of "can't identify who made this" to "I like…

I never demanded "copius evidence" I asked a clarifying question. If you are going to make specific claims, people might ask for evidence of those claims. It's not confirmation bias to ask for supporting details, quite the opposite.

> Why is it a big assumption that most people don't need to know "This is by Michelangelo and he is a high status artist" to enjoy the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (or whatever else)?

This is an entirely different statement than your original comment. Of course, you don't need to know Michelangelo to "enjoy" the Sistine Chapel, nobody argued otherwise. Your claim was that, "A Michelangelo work will win even if the viewer doesn't know it's Michelangelo or even who that is." This implies a measure of comparison to something or someone else, which is far different than enjoying a single piece of art.

Surely, there are people who prefer Bertoldo di Giovanni [1] to Michelangelo.

[1] https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-little-known-s...

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#245

Post by Igelau »

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…

In other words, he won so hard on proving the existence of bad taste that he's not allowed to play anymore.

This is a "pit boss asking you to leave the table for winning too much" moment.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#246

Post by wcarron »

cwmoore wrote: post #229
newbamboo wrote: post #185

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 wonder whether you think this essay is "great" mostly because you agree with it? That one must judge art, to enjoy art, appears fundamentally exclusionary, itself to my tastes, and to use PG's word, "crass", but in yours, his, and most people's, more or less innocently so.

Not OP but

> That one must judge art, to enjoy art, appears fundamentally exclusionary,

Well, yes. You must make a judgement in order to have a reaction. In order to have a positive reaction to something (enjoy) it, somewhere along the line, you must have decided if had positive attributes. If it had bad attributes, you would not enjoy it. But a decision/judement/evaluation IS made.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#247

Post by handrous »

Debug_Overload wrote: post #71
timdellinger wrote: post #67

Perhaps I'm under-informed here, but hasn't this all been covered by the philosophers who concentrate in Aesthetics? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetics

It's been my experience that if you read enough content online, you will realize that it's mostly people rediscovering old debates, and chiming in with what they think is new and insightful perspective which it usually isn't.

Nearly every politics-related thread I participate in on HN ends up with my needing to start back at Book I of The Republic so we can get on the same page about how complex the idea of "Justice" actually is. Literally the first part of one of the first primary works a political philosophy student is likely to read, and it's news to people confidently presenting their ideas about how the economy or social policy or whatever ought to work.

In a sense, I think the social sciences, philosophy, and the arts get "cranks" thinking they've figured them out, just like physics and math et c., do, except at a much higher volume, to the point that any discussion of those topics outside of highly specialized forums ends up consisting mostly of cranks arguing with one another, most of whom, if they have put any actual time into studying the topic at all, have fallen down some narrow crank-dominated rabbit hole of bad ideas. It's like if Flat Earthers were treated as having valid opinions.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#248

Post by TimPC »

not_fin_advice wrote: post #142
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…

> pitting a group of PhD physicists vs. French lit. PhDs in a contest to reproduce each other's work better - whom would you bet on? I know that Thiel is clearly trying to get the audience to go "oh wow, physics is harder than lit!" But strangely enough this runs counter to my personal experience. While not physics in particular, I know far more lit/classics/humanities people doing advanced/research work in technical…

You’ve substantially moved the goalposts. Your argument about the French Lit. PhDs involves understanding the field at a roughly undergraduate level not producing new work. Developing a deep enough understanding of physics to create novel ideas in it is far harder than this. I’d argue that producing relevant new work in French Lit. is easier because of the high degree of subjectivity creating a low bar for relevance. The low bar for relevance makes it far easier to be novel since one can explore almost any tangential point of the work one can imagine. It’s far harder to come up with new interesting ideas in a field where ideas have standards of correctness than in a field where it’s sufficient to be novel and vaguely relevant.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#249

Post by fsloth »

pyrale wrote: post #171
fsloth wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 believe Bourdieu's point is that this ability to rank art within a genre is an attribute of belonging to a cultural group. As such, this cultural knowledge you have will be valued depending on the social importance of that group. Some groups will speak highly of a genre while other will despise it. Cultural knowledge will be a more useful capital if it is associated with a more prominent group. Within the group, th…

Please, we can discuss art theory without political dimension.

Hackers like to build and respect people who build cool things without getting political. Similarly classical art can be appreciated from the point of view of pure craftmanship.

Is Doom more impressive piece of software than a Javascript "Hello world"?

I claim it is. Similar claims can be applied to specific art genres without political dimension if you know the genre.

I find Bourdeaus analysis to be - frankly - a form of navel gazing that has nothing of merit to give to politics, or art.

Yes, everything people do have a political dimension. But one should be able to discuss art theory without confusing it with class warfare.

While everything can and will be weaponized as an instrument of oppression, I don't see the added value of starting from the point of view.

It's like a silly action movie trope, only applied to a political context.

I.e. in a fancy restaurant - that's a nice steak knife you have there - it would work really well in a combat setting. Really?

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#250

Post by levmiseri »

I really enjoy an article "Learning to See" on a similar topic from designer's point of view - from the founder of iA: https://ia.net/topics/learning-to-see

A small excerpt:

> Personally (dis-)liking a color, form, or image is not a matter of design, it is a question of personal taste. And as we all know, when it comes to personal taste there is not much to talk about there. But in addition to personal taste there is something that we can call “trained taste” or “sophistication”. Let me recapitulate:

- Whether I like pink or not, sugar in my coffee, red or white wine, these things are a matter of personal taste. These are personal preferences, and both designers and non-designers have them. This is the taste we shouldn’t bother discussing.

- Whether I set a text’s line height to 100% or 150% is not a matter of taste, it is a matter of knowing the principles of typography.

- However, whether I set a text’s line height at 150% or 145% is a matter of Fingerspitzengefühl; wisdom in craft, or sophistication.

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