Is there such a thing as good taste?

It is when you don't ask for the same evidence of the opposite, original assertion, and when the test you demand/clarify-the-existence-of is a strangely narrow test that no one would have reason to do in the first place because the core problem is that no one is subjecting the more modern art to that kind of rigor to begin with! (Which would obviate the whole debate.[1])

So yes, when you come in and single out my response as needing a very specific test before you'll consider it plausible, aren't being epistemically fair.

>Of course, you don't need to know Michelangelo to "enjoy" the Sistine Chapel, nobody argued otherwise.

Are we looking at the same thread? From earlier in this same thread:

>>Anything recognizable as a Michelangelo will automatically win just because he's Michelangelo.

The assertion is that the knowledge of Michelangelo and his association with that work is artificially raising the viewer's appreciation of it. My contrary claim was that it's appreciated as good work, more so than the garbage you see in modern art museums, because it's good, not because the average viewer cares about Michelangelo specifically, which dagw was saying that the later art does (apparently) require (knowledge of the artist and other "context").

>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.

It implies exactly what it meant in the original comment and thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29227817

That is, a comparison against the later super-edgey modern art.

[1] Except maybe the time that troll passed off a monkey's art as prestigious, which made the duped critics double down and say, "well ... maybe that monkey has artistic talent!"

Fascinating meta gameplay here.

For example, two decades ago when I was double majoring in both geology and English, I found the poststructuralist idea that a 'text' exists separately from narratives about its meaning, but the narratives of meaning were inseparable from the broader social constructs use to build the narratives, both clearly correct and very useful in understanding the process of scientific inquiry. The Earth exists, you know, somewhat independently of us; however geological theory is a human construct and every part of the process from measurement to analysis to interpretation to presentation is a human act that carries with it the stamp of human ingenuity and human flaws: The sample sites selected for measurement, and the measurements themselves, contain biases and other uncertainties related to the selection process (mostly based on theoretical considerations), the engineering of the measurement tools, and other constraints (e.g. physical and budgetary limits). Obviously, scientific methodologies are centered around scientific theories, one or two of which is tested and refined in the process, but a thousand others are invoked as assumption and context, i.e. a larger theoretical structure. And presentation is communication, and additional choices are made as to what to highlight and what to gloss over.

Similarly, postmodernism's stance that there is no objective and unbiased observation and interpretation, and therefore all perspectives use one or more lenses that basically basically bias or filter the results, is clearly and often quite literally applicable to the sciences (think microscopy or remote sensing). Beyond those trivial cases, I think postmodernist theory helped me be able to disentangle the literature a bit and think, "OK, when someone interested in river erosion and landscape evolution looks at this dataset, they see X but I am interested in tectonics and Y stands out", or (in a wider theoretical context) "the geophysicists who come into the geosciences from physics use mathematical tools and make assumptions that assume the processes and configurations are time-invariant; on the other hand, the geologists know this area has evolved over the past 2 million years but their data analysis is trash--and that's why the groups can't talk to each other".

The major difference here I think is intentionality. The STEM communities do generally operate on good faith and have some sense of shared purpose, and scientific advancements are real, positive sum phenomena. So it's possible to apply these tools to the literature and to one's colleagues in a way that doesn't really involve value/moral judgements or seek to diminish or purposefully misinterpret the work of others. However this is missing in much of the liberal arts world where there is no clear definition of progress, and as a result much can be reduced to controlling unfalsifiable narratives and battles for influence.

That said, for all of its possible utility, critical theory's current escape from academia into the wider world doesn't seem to be going well. (For what it's worth, I also see modern Identitarianism as a full-throated but unwitting rejection of postmodernism, by holding that meaning is really implicit in texts, and that only some identity groups can legitimately produce and/or interpret texts. So they have moved on from Derrida's nihilism and are establishing a new priesthood even while canonizing him.)

Edit: I'd also like to emphasize that the ability to make somewhat accurate measurements, quantify misfits between modeled (i.e. theoretical) and observational data, and the ability to downweight, modify and/or reject hypotheses is also a major factor that allows for progress in STEM fields vs. the liberal arts, which limits the proliferation of bad-faith narratives that can use the offenses and defenses of post-(and post-post-)modernist theory.