281–290 of 479 posts
Take for example coffee. If you have bad taste, you just buy supermarket instant coffee and use the cheapest cafetiere. If you have taste, you've researched what makes coffee good or bad, buy whole beans roasted locally, and acquired a coffee brewer where you can control the extraction to get a good result.
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“I wonder whether you think this essay is "great" mostly because you agree with it?” An odd question but yes I think it’s great, as I explained in post, mostly because I agree with it. Not sure if you’re asking a real question or making a rhetorical point about thinking people are crass for believing in taste, in beauty. Assuming it is a real question, part of the reason I think it’s a great essay, as I allude to be…
To disabuse you of an apparent misunderstanding, I do not at all find art to be crass. I enjoy it immensely and it enriches every aspect of my life, even elevating the ordinary. The judgement of merit by a non-artist of an artist's work is the part I found to be crass and rather a shadow of the social benefits of taste than good taste itself. A friend once asked me for a drawing of mine to hang on his wall. I offered…
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…
Just because we may not be able to concretely define what makes art "good", does not mean we can not discuss why we like it.
If one person enjoys a piece because they appreciate the technical mastery of the brushwork, another enjoys it for how accurately it mimics reality, and another finds it special for the feelings evoked by the composition, each of those people can articulate why the piece speaks to them. They can describe why they like it, there's no reason anyone should suffer any sort of explanatory atrophy.
Now, can any of them convince another that the work is better than another? Probably not. The person who enjoyed the brushwork may find an even more masterfully painted piece, which they think is better. But perhaps the new piece doesn't demonstrate quite so much clarity in portraying reality, so the person who enjoyed that from the first piece still prefers the first. Who is to say whose values are more important?
For this reason, I think the multi-axis view is more constructive. Rather than spending our time arguing if technique or novelty or emotions or whatever else are what matters most, we can focus on appreciating each aspect as we see fit. And we can certainly articulate what a piece does well on any axis.
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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 not sure what you mean by the universality of math. There exist different algebras which define addition differently. In the case of 2+2=4, this is formalized by the Peano axioms [1], which define addition of natural numbers. However, in tropical geometry [2], addition returns the minimum of the numbers, not their sum. The author of the original tweet makes this point, and I strongly agree with it: https://twitte…
Yet each one is self-consistent and potentially independently discoverable by sentient life forms light years away from us, even though these different algebras have no material form.
> But consider 0.1 + 0.2. Ask a human, and they'll tell you it's 0.3. Ask a computer, and it'll likely tell you it's 0.3000000000000004
Just because the computer performs imprecise arithmetic does not make .1+.2=.300000004 a meaningful statement from which an entire self-consistent arithmetic system can be derived. The computer’s result is in error. It’s called floating point error.
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> 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…
Lots of TV shows showing "experts" where they blind taste test them between expensive and cheap wine or expensive vs cheap chocolate and blind folded they can not tell the difference. That is not to say there is no good vs bad wine/chocolate/name your food. But it has nothing to do with price.
They took a bottle of cheap vodka, took a sample out, filtered the rest, took another sample and set it aside, and re-filtered the remaining vodka, and repeated this 10 times, so that they had a spectrum of vodka samples from filtered zero times to 10 times. They then brought on a vodka expert to taste test them and randomized the order of the samples to see if he could re-order them based on the number of times they went through the filter.
And he did it PERFECTLY.
IIRC, Adam and Jamie could tell the difference after 1 run through the filter, but not further runs.
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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.…
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…
Bad example, as most pizzas _are_ pretty similar. And in my opinion the best pizzas are not too different from average pizzas. And yes, I had a lot of pizzas in my life, in Naples and elsewhere.
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I have to be honest, it's something I struggle with too - especially as the postmodernists are known to be quite difficult to read. I tend to start with secondary sources (books about a field, essays from academics, even YouTube video essays) to understand a philosopher's broader contentions and positions and the vocabulary that they have inevitably invented, then go back and read the primary source with that initial…
Kant is not a postmodern, he is the modern if anything. If you are even remotely interested in the subject of aesthetics, it is required reading. It's still quite a subtle and difficult read but not because of him trying to be convoluted, but the opposite as he's trying so hard to be clear that it ends up being a bit of a slog. One of my favorite books of philosophy.
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 always bothers me specifically about music. I don't claim to have some universal say on what is good and bad music, there is tons of music out there which I think is tasteful but I simply don't like. But like 10% of music let's say is absolute garbage, mostly top 40 stuff made from cosntructed bands with some models as front men, written by a team constructed by a label to create the most generically likeable mu…
A few years ago, a group engineered the most unlikeable song ever:
Featuring bagpipes, a rapping opera singer, country music, and a children's choir singing holiday music that ends with telling you to do your shopping at Wal-mart.
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This always bothers me specifically about music. I don't claim to have some universal say on what is good and bad music, there is tons of music out there which I think is tasteful but I simply don't like. But like 10% of music let's say is absolute garbage, mostly top 40 stuff made from cosntructed bands with some models as front men, written by a team constructed by a label to create the most generically likeable mu…
Part of the answer is that such people aren’t actually listening to the music. They are getting something else out of it, like using it as background noise, or just as a beat to dance to, or as in-group signaling, or maybe access to the culture associated with the music, or perhaps they are self-medicating with it, or maybe they are ogling the performer, or perhaps it reminds them of something positive that happened…
And again I have nothing against the genre. I listen to non pop country. But people are specifically attracted to the worst of it and they seem to very actively like it.