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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?

#351

Post by AnimalMuppet »

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…

> cultural taste is an aspirational social marker.

"Aspirational" means "you don't have it".

So all cultural taste is people trying to fake being in a better class than they are? Baloney. There are plenty of people who like things because they like those things, not because they think liking those things will make them look more upper class.

"Aspirational" taste is exactly what you get when people don't have taste, but want to look like they do. They copy someone else's taste (or a group average). And because they're aspirational, they try really hard to pretend that they do in fact have taste. But they just wind up cluttering up the discussion, because they don't actually know anything.

But there are people who actually do know some things about taste, and what is worthwhile, and value. They exist. They just get lost in the noise of a bunch of people who are trying to look like they know, even though they don't...

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#352

Post by borski »

guerrilla wrote: post #342
circlefavshape wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

For every two of those, there are thousands of counterexamples.

But those 'thousands of counterexamples' do not tend to have lasting success; fleeting success is fairly clearly popularity-driven. Lasting success takes producing works that appeal to good taste. Both Lady Gaga and Dua Lipa are great examples of artists that have produced works with lasting success. I would put Lil Nas X, 2Pac, Eminem in that category too, as another example from 'not pop.' T-Pain, less so. :)

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#353

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #345
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How can I when its identity is that of a basic, unhealthy, cheap, low-class food That's an assertion, not a self-evident fact. And one that I (and I am certain, many other people) would dispute.

Skimming through some recipes I searched, it seems it is mostly all purpose flour and a ton of oil to make it flaky. It seems to be in the "unhealthy" camp assuming carbs and sat fats are unhealthy. Also in the cheap camp considering the ingredients are cheap and making it does not seem too time or equipment intensive. I find working with dough to always be complicated, but the recipe itself seems simple enough, so i…

> basic, unhealthy, cheap, low-class

"Basic" is clearly not a useful adjective, when a grilled cheese sandwich can be made with a variety of different ingredients some of which are easily available in most parts of the world, and some are not. Certainly you can make a basic grilled cheese sandwich, but it's a logical fallacy to leap from there to "all grilled cheese sandwiches are basic".

"Low class" is again highly ingredient dependent. A grilled cheese sandwich made with some "rare" sourdough bread, irish grass fed butter and 3 kinds of artisanal cheese from different parts of the world is just as much as grilled cheese sandwich as one made with wonderbread and slices of american "cheese product". It's a similar logical fallacy: just because you can make a "low class grilled cheese" doesn't imply that "all grilled cheese sandwiches are low class".

"Cheap" is also covered in a similar way.

Unhealthy I will generally concede, other than to note that our ideas about what is and is not healthy or unhealthy food shift a lot over time (and often loop back on themselves).

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#354

Post by fsloth »

etage3 wrote: post #274
fsloth wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 k…

>Please, we can discuss art theory without political dimension. Bourdieu discusses this very point in the Preface of The Rules of Art . "(...) countless are those who forbid sociology any profaning contact with the work of art. (...) I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by d…

(The below is with an intent of explaining my view of Paul's essay and is written with the tone of a devil's advocate)

Sorry I prefer quoting Feynman - art theory is about as usefull for enjoying and doing art as ornithology is for birds. The original quote was "Philosophy of science is about as useful for science as ornithology is for birds."

Note! This does not denigrate the "useless" fields as such - but the point of view is that their usefulness for the field they claim to study is at most limited.

As a trained physicist and hobbyist artist I can pretty much agree with this. Doing physics and doing art is so friggin hard that while focusing on them, human cognition has no space for analysis in any other domain.

Want to analyse a classical painting? Well, there is a very good technique for this but it requires a huge amount of labour - replicate it.

I realize this is a very technical point of view, but having a hands-on experience, it's very hard to convince me any other way would offer superior understanding of the core issues at play.

I must repeat that I am not discounting analysis - but they are only secondary in importance to the ding an sich.

Sorry. This is getting a very long winded way of expressing my point of view.

I read Paul's essay from this very specifically technical point of view that acknowledges the inherent complexity in the chosen domain (classical art) and hence takes it obvious that there are some works 'better' than others. But there is no numerical metric we can use to gauge paintings - hence we must refer to an intuitive understanding of the quality of a work. Paul calls this 'intuitive understanding of quality' taste.

I think the whole point was to point out that some things can be considered rationally better than others, even though we don't have an objective numerical measure for this goodness.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#355

Post by arcanon »

I disagree with Paul when he weakened his argument from perfect to good taste. There are some artists who have more control over details than others. By perfect you would be able to perfectly recreate the reality of the subject/scene.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#356

Post by quesera »

Igelau wrote: post #221
jph wrote: post #3

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...

I'm picturing Steve Jobs on stage to make an industry-shaking announcement... in a turtleneck tucked into his mom jeans, and glaring white sneakers.

I think you're making a derisive judgement on his fashion choices, from the distance of a couple decades. This is always an error, but you should see his "vest" years!

As it happens, there's a story behind the choices of black turtleneck (very specific maker), Levi's (5xx?), and New Balance (993s). They are the results of deliberate application and prioritization of optimizations -- evaluated by his personal criteria only, of course. You might think I'm kidding, but I am not.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#357

Post by itronitron »

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…

Not sure that power is a sufficiently discriminating term for what you are describing. I agree with you but think that purposiveness may be a better fit.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#358

Post by oopsyDoodl »

simiones wrote: post #332
oopsyDoodl wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the end there you highlight the issue that makes me think good taste is still hand wave-y subjectivity. Since you say early on good taste is the difference between “I have” and “I do” good taste can’t be anything we possess, so how can anyone “have” good taste. Round n round we go. This continues to highlight for me the shortcomings of human languages. Chomsky calls them random noise formalized and controlled by p…

> Since you say early on good taste is the difference between “I have” and “I do” good taste can’t be anything we possess, so how can anyone “have” good taste. Round n round we go. There is no contradiction and no circularity here. You are mixing levels of meaning. The concept of possession in "I have lots of gold" is different from the concept in "I have good taste". One refers to property ("I own lots of gold"), wh…

Sure if you dissect the language syntax; no circles. If I try to consider what this means to my agency, we’re saying I have to accept others are possessed by good taste or act in good taste, so I should emulate them. Conformity is good taste.

So, IMO, this self fulfilling meta-nonsense to generate self fulfilling meta-nonsense.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#360

Post by JohnFen »

guerrilla wrote: post #139

> If there's no such thing as good taste, then there's no such thing as good art. No problem. > So if you want to discard the concept of good taste, you also have to discard the concept of good art. And that means you have to discard the possibility of people being good at making it. This skips a step. It assumes without argument that production skill corresponds to subjective preferences. There are many people who a…

I've had a longstanding debate with a close friend on this topic. He thinks that there is such a thing as objectively good taste, and I do not.

I usually cite art as an example of my point. There is no "good" art or "bad" art. There is successful and unsuccessful art.

Art is intended to make you feel something. If it has done that, it's successful. And making you feel revulsion due to the aesthetic choices made or execution of the piece counts as "feeling something".

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