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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?

#311

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #297
asiachick wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do they? Can you give an example? Because there's a recurring Epicurious series where an expert tries to determine of two samples which one is cheap and which is expensive. They're not always right but they're right quite often.

This is just your casual periodic reminder that if choosing between two possibilities, you could expect someone to be right about half the time by just guessing.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#312

Post by danielmarkbruce »

majormajor wrote: post #273

There is definitely such a thing as "popular" taste (and indeed, there are many variations of it, since the populace is large and varied - this alone starts to make a sole idea of "good taste" difficult to accept), and there is definitely such a thing as skill at producing works that those with a popular taste appreciates. The presented "proof" doesn't go any further than that, though. It mentions that it changes a l…

Yes, I got the same thing from it. It seems like pg is confused by the existing definition of "good taste". At least one definition of good taste is being able to spot what will be popular. It doesn't mean the things you like are "good" in some vague sense. Anecdotally some people have insight into humans which allows them to figure if something will be popular.

The entire essay should be a short proposal to a dictionary publisher :

"Please make it clear that the definition of taste is "being able to spot what lots of other people will like"".

People could debate that and you don't need the silly "proofs".

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#313

Post by [deleted] »

asiachick wrote: post #268
jacobolus wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#314

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

bobthechef wrote: post #310

This is where I'd differentiate between taste and beauty. Taste is a property of people. Beauty is a property of things. Taste is the ability to recognize and respond to the beauty of things in proportion to how beautiful they actually are. Thus, taste is ultimately a matter of intellectual refinement. The intellect, property developed, recognizes beauty effectively. Someone with bad taste can be said to either lack…

And yet for centuries we've had *"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", which insists that you're wrong.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#315

Post by cwmoore »

newbamboo wrote: post #282
cwmoore wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your point, that some art is better, is exactly the point Paul was making. A point I agree with. So I’m not sure what you find crass? Is it non-artists forming their own independent judgements about art? I’m sincerely interested in what your disagreement is.

Summarizing my comments with the conclusion that "some art is better" and you, Paul, or anyone else can reliably judge which it is, does not come anywhere close to my meaning.

I have to conclude that we are not in disagreement, because we are not even communicating.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#316

Post by Nition »

anm89 wrote: post #209
hardwaregeek wrote: post #191

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…

I think part of it is how much other music you've listened to, and how much you know about music.

For example I watched Shang-Chi the other day, which is basically pop music in film form. As someone who's watched a fair amount of films, it's easy to see how it follows all the usual generic story beats - it's good but formulaic and relatively predictable. But if it was the first film you'd ever seen it would be amazing.

You have films that intentionally subvert expectations, relying on the fact that the audience knows how the story usually goes. That's jazz music. Classical often as well. But that relies on people both knowing the usual tropes and also wanting something different - there's some comfort in the known. Many people just want the superhero film. After all, the simple formula is the most inherently powerful regardless of the audience's internal knowledge of narrative or notation - that's why it's so commonly used.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#317

Post by auggierose »

motohagiography wrote: post #103

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…

What?

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#318

Post by hardwaregeek »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #311
hardwaregeek wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they? Can you give an example? Because there's a recurring Epicurious series where an expert tries to determine of two samples which one is cheap and which is expensive. They're not always right but they're right quite often.

This is just your casual periodic reminder that if choosing between two possibilities, you could expect someone to be right about half the time by just guessing.

Yes yes. But the experts are consistently 90 percent plus accurate. Check out the videos! They elucidate their reasoning quite well. It's not hocus pocus

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#319

Post by circlefavshape »

motohagiography wrote: post #205
tompccs wrote: post #173

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.…

> every time someone gets on a motorcycle, skis down a mountain ...

I always use stubbing one's toe as an example of a direct experience of reality in all its realness.

(+1 to the favourable comments on your posts - complex ideas expressed skilfully and clearly!)

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#320

Post by simiones »

cwmoore wrote: post #212

As a painter and hacker[1] myself, I understand the message, believe the answer to the headline is "yes, but you can't have it" and I (as surely too would you) understand the vast gulf between my artwork and Rembrandt's, or my code and Norvig's, or my swimming and Phelps', but I've got to say, using "better art" as a test of taste is the irreducible absurdity, and I'd hoped for better after his introduction purported…

I think in choosing rotten meat, you haven't gotten close to the limits - see Surstromming for an example.

There are very few universals of taste. Even looking only at food: some people routinely consume, for pleasure, rotten meats, rotten milk (cheese), various bitter poisonous seeds, extremely painful hot peppers, painful acidic or basic substances, and even feces or other bodily fluids. Of course, no one could enjoy drinking concentrated sulfuric acid for example, so there are some ultimate limits.

Similarly in all arts, there is rarely any style that is not seen as more refined than any other by some group of people, or profoundly distasteful. There are certainly people who would rather hang up children's paintings in their house than something like Malevich's Black square.

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