Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is there such a thing as good taste?

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 479 posts

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#401

Post by GoblinSlayer »

slibhb wrote: post #118

I had the opposite conversation with my father. I claimed "there's no accounting for taste" and my father said "that's not true, you can claim Shakespeare isn't good but you're wrong". For judgements of taste, no one is better than Kant. I recommend this essay: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetic-judgment/ In Kantian aesthetics, judgements of taste are subjective (because they differ between people) but are…

Disagreement is a property of values, not a property of universalism. Kant just assumes universalism, but assumption is not an argument.

Some people have a strong opinion on pineapple pizza. I have a strong opinion that wine and tobacco have bad taste.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#402

Post by anm89 »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #326
Nition wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nonethel…

I feel personally attacked that you are lumping Ed Sheeran in with the Beatles or Beach Boys.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#403

Post by rhines »

keiferski wrote: post #328
rhines wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 subjecti…

I'm not sure I see how arguing for goodness as an overarching quality promotes more discussion than arguing for goodness of various qualities. Perhaps you get more disagreement, as people who may agree about each individual quality will argue about the value of each quality, but the comments about the art itself will be unchanged - it's merely the discussion about the relative value of each quality that flourishes when we feel we can measure goodness as a whole.

Now, perhaps this is the discussion you would like to see survive. If you feel that making arguments for things like why novelty is more valuable than technique is important, then I can understand your perspective and agree that we lose those conversations if we use a multi-axis approach. But if you care about articulating why a technique is impressive, or why a piece speaks to you, then I don't think we need to be able to rank all art on a single axis to have those discussions.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#404

Post by tshaddox »

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…

Not so fast there! I don't buy the "no good taste implies no good art" argument. If there is an objective standard of how good a piece of art is, that's fine, but his proposed experiment doesn't make sense. What if someone simply knows this objective standard and can thus simply evaluate how good each piece of art is? Is that anything like what we consider to be "taste"? I wouldn't say that someone has good taste in prime numbers if they can be shown a large number and can compute whether it's prime. I'd say their mental arithmetic abilities are good, but I wouldn't think to describe that as "taste."

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#405

Post by anm89 »

watwut wrote: post #381
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…

> written by a team constructed by a label to create the most generically likeable music possible, edited to the point where it doesn't matter that the models are bad singers. Maybe it is just the case where team of experts created music many people like. People really don't mind generic when serving foods daydreaming or eating. Generic is often better, because it won't break flow of what they are doing.

I also don't buy this one. Modern pop is not meant to be tuned out. It's super loud and aggressive and in your face.

If anything it feels engineered (and I use that term literally) to break your attention and make you focus on it. There tend to be lots of weird and drastic pitch and key changes that are designed to grab interest.

There is tons of music that is better background music than modern pop.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#406

Post by sombremesa »

tshaddox wrote: post #404
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…

Not so fast there! I don't buy the "no good taste implies no good art" argument. If there is an objective standard of how good a piece of art is, that's fine, but his proposed experiment doesn't make sense. What if someone simply knows this objective standard and can thus simply evaluate how good each piece of art is? Is that anything like what we consider to be "taste"? I wouldn't say that someone has good taste in…

Indeed, no tasty food doesn’t imply no good (e.g. relatively nutritious) food.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#407

Post by cwp »

This essay seems to conflate skill with... oh, let's call it vision.

Skill is the difference between Picasso's scribbles and the dribbles of a random 8-year-old. Or between pg and Bellini. It's the ability to convey what you want to convey.

Vision is harder to pin down. It's deciding to convey something worthwhile. And that's the hard part. What's worthwhile? It's so dependent on context. Is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel meaningful to somebody that has never heard of Christianity? Is impressionism all that impressive without the photograph? For that matter, why aren't we impressed by new works of impressionism? How come some artists aren't celebrated in their own time?

So yeah, clearly there's such a thing as skillful art, and maybe being able to recognize that could be considered "good taste". But I'm not sure that there's such a thing as objectively meaningful art. If there is, it'd take more than a few paragraphs to prove it.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#408

Post by marifjeren »

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…

> It's whether something legitimately represents power.

> Viewed this way, taste is the expression of what you percieve to be power based on your experience

What about displays of disposable wealth, which demonstrate power in a way that is nonetheless gaudy?

I don't think anyone could seriously argue that a wealthy person is less powerful than a poorer person, and yet displaying that wealth (e.g. having a solid 18k gold toilet) is clearly tasteless in the extreme. I almost wonder if you meant to say the exact opposite of what these quoted parts of your message say.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#410

Post by mostlylurks »

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.…

>The authenticity of "primitive" art as being a reaction to the skill and western artifice remains controversial, as if the art does not express the skill of the artist, what does it represent? Not everything has to represent something, but art is purely representation, so if it's not representing skill, there isn't a lot left.

Art is, at it's core, communication. More precisely, it's the name we've given to the wide variety of traditions that we've developed for communicating in manners distinct from plain everyday communication. Thus, art necessarily represents something, but each individual piece of art represents something different from the next. The message conveyed by a piece of art can indeed be to direct the recipient's attention to the technical skill of the artist, but in most cases skill is secondary, and only matters insofar as it aids the artist in communicating their actual intent.

As such, art which only exists to showcase the artist's skill is essentially devoid of meaning outside of vanity, such pieces of art representing something directly comparable to the significance of a sentence like "Don't you just love my accent?" - a self-referential display of conceit.

Post reply on HN