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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?

#321

Post by WA »

newbamboo wrote: post #255
cwmoore wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

“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…

Assume all art was generated randomly by algorithms, but the observers are not aware of it. Would the same thoughts and conclusions about taste and art emerge in this world?

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#322

Post by wpietri »

Afforess wrote: post #262
wpietri wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly appreciate and enjoy your points here. But given that you are not out eating a gourmet meal while galloping a horse toward your ski chalet, it seems that you and the postmodern crowd both value highly the creation of a shared narrative about what's important and what's going on. A narrative specifically shaped toward political ends. So in the end I don't see you as much different.

>it seems that you and the postmodern crowd both value highly the creation of a shared narrative about what's important and what's going on This is a fairly widely mocked opinion, it;'s the same caliber of criticism as the "we should improve society" meme. The fact that both sides participate in shared narrative isn't a sign that both are corrupt, it's a sign the narrative is important. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes…

I agree that shared narratives are important. But one important distinction in various approaches is the extent to which a given side acknowledges their promoted narrative as a narrative.

To take a toy example, consider the George Washington cherry tree myth: https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-e...

I was taught that as a kid as a straight-up truth as a package of patriotic narratives. If I had said, "Well that's a good story, but that never happened," the people teaching it wouldn't have said, "You're right! But it's a good story that has a nice moral." They would have been mad at me for contradicting patriotic truth. And madder still if I asked why they were feeding me false stories as if they were true.

In contrast, the people I've read who would point out the issues with the cherry tree story are generally more frank about why they're doing it and more honest about the limits of knowledge and narrative. Many are happy to appreciate myths as myths, for example, and to have nuanced discussions about the role of myth.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#323

Post by jmacd »

rossdavidh wrote: post #141

If PG's arguments were true, then a lot of people whose taste seemed to be quite good, were completely wrong about the Impressionists when they first appeared on the scene. Ditto almost every other new art school. So no one prior to that had good taste? You take a time machine to the century prior to Van Gogh's life, and you might not find anyone in Europe who thought his paintings were good if you showed them what t…

I agree. This is a very Jordan Peterson-esque line of reasoning. (I'm sure this has a lot more history than that, but it strikes me as a current flavour)

This thing is true now, so it has always been true, and it must be true in the future.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#325

Post by analog31 »

rojoca wrote: post #254

Ira Glass has a practical take on the idea of exposing good taste (e.g. trying to paint like Bellini): https://youtu.be/X2wLP0izeJE where he talks about how your good taste informs you that the work you are doing doesn’t yet match your ambition, and that this can be both motivating and discouraging

This is certainly the case for learning jazz improvisation. The primary obstacle, even for otherwise good musicians, is knowing you're going to suck at it for a long time before you get good. Even if you have an unorthodox idea of what you want it to sound like.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#326

Post by hardwaregeek »

Nition wrote: post #316
anm89 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 amazin…

There's nuances and an art to pop though. Take Ocean's Eleven. It's fundamentally a crowd pleaser movie with a star studded cast, a conventional genre and a happy ending. But it's executed perfectly. Soderbergh has a mastery of the form that shows even when he's making pop. You see this with The Beach Boys or The Beatles or even Ed Sheeran, where the music is superficially enjoyable but there's a depth to it nonetheless. Take Jacob Collier's deconstruction of Stevie Wonder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZP6nogQYPg

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#327

Post by thom »

andi999 wrote: post #91
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #49

Go to guy on this is Bourdieu. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu#Theory_of_capi... PG may say that his father pushed him in a different direction. But I suspect - like me - PG grew up with the cultural direction of the BBC and its mission to "inform, educate, and entertain." So if you were a bright curious kid your parents wouldn't necessarily be the ultimate authorities on culture and taste. There were o…

Next thing you want to tell me is that wine doesn't really taste good? (the high quality wine of course)

I love good wine and I like to think I can tell the difference between wines with an order of magnitude price difference, at the very least. But I don’t think you can call it anything but an acquired taste.

I tell myself I like coffee but I can’t imagine I enjoyed my very first cup. Even now I find third wave coffee (the fancy coffees of fancy coffee people) to be genuinely undrinkable compost water, but maybe with enough time I’ll change my mind.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#328

Post by keiferski »

rhines wrote: post #283
keiferski wrote: post #104

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…

Hmm, I'm not sure this necessarily follows. 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 arti…

It’s not that we can’t define it, but that we are not in the habit of doing so. Because it’s become culturally preferable to just be agreeable about others’ preferences. Since we aren’t in the habit of discussing the topic, our ability to formulate a firm position on it atrophies. Consequently we don’t actually have a good reason why we think X is better than Y and so we just revert to “everyone’s opinion is subjective anyway.”

It’s not totally dissimilar from the idea of Newspeak in 1984, except we lose the ability to articulate concepts rather than lose the concept entirely.

Taylor goes into this far more than me, so I really wouldn’t base the entire argument on my comment. Unfortunately I do not remember the exact lecture he said this but I think it was in this series:

https://youtu.be/j_losVdiARc

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#329

Post by circlefavshape »

guerrilla wrote: post #239
TimPC wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only assumes production skill is correlated it doesn’t require a perfect correspondence. I’d argue it is hard to have a meaningful concept of production skill that is either independent of or anticorrelated to taste. Yes production skill alone does not make the piece of art. But if it contributes in any way shape or form that’s enough to establish there is such thing as taste.

> It only assumes production skill is correlated it doesn’t require a perfect correspondence This is fair. As for the rest, I don't think you made your argument and I think a massive amount of emperical evidence contradicts that. Pop music, mass produced movies, memes, etc. It's all low effort shit and people love it more than anything else and avoid high-skilled art like the plague. We have a ton of statistics on th…

> Pop music ... it's all low effort shit

What? You clearly know very little about how pop music is produced. If you think the stuff people like Lady Gaga and Dua Lipa (and their teams of writers and producers) put out is low-effort then you're just another clueless snob

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#330

Post by tonymet »

rossdavidh wrote: post #141

If PG's arguments were true, then a lot of people whose taste seemed to be quite good, were completely wrong about the Impressionists when they first appeared on the scene. Ditto almost every other new art school. So no one prior to that had good taste? You take a time machine to the century prior to Van Gogh's life, and you might not find anyone in Europe who thought his paintings were good if you showed them what t…

It's possible there are a few standards–not only one, but also not infinite.
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