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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?

#431

Post by Igelau »

quesera wrote: post #356
Igelau wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> black turtleneck (very specific maker)

Pretty sure that's Issey Miyaki.

> 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.

I believe you 100%. None of those words is synonymous with "good taste".

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#432

Post by nixpulvis »

ryanyde wrote: post #379

The piece just seems to fully encapsulate Silicon Valley Hubris. It's amazing that he thinks he's settled a debate on 'quality' or 'taste' with a logical argument, and that people consider this an 'objective' answer to the question. The rhetorical trick is one that many have pointed out: 'technically' superior is - in fact - easy to recognize. That doesn't mean that objective judgment of technique is synonymous with…

I don't bother reading these peices anymore, they no longer suit me. I suppose commenting on this forum will fall out of fashion completely one day as well. For my tastes change and my perpectives widen and narrow.

I do however hope that I find more people in tune with my current flavor, perhaps more who can add their own spice. Wouldn't that be nice.

;)

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#433

Post by killjoywashere »

motohagiography wrote: post #175
beaconstudios wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your contribution - this is similar to the impression I get about taste, not having studied aesthetics but having a passing familiarity with postmodern philosophy. Do you have any book or philosopher suggestions I could check out? I'm generally interested in epistemology and this sounds like a good angle for further reading.

Thank you, while I can't recommend original philosophical sources, I can say I like Matthew B. Craford's "Shopclass as Soulcraft," was the best recent version of these ideas I've read, and it is a much more in-depth treatise than one would typically expect from a popular book. Only tangentially related by motorcycles is zen and the art..., which was also about these kinds of qualities. The other influences might be A…

You're writing has the pattern and thematic elements I'd expect of the Arts & Letters Daily crowd. This has to be some sort of in-crowd signaling. How long do you think the average member of that crowd took to learn the lingo?

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#434

Post by kbelder »

zzbzq wrote: post #347
hardwaregeek wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhh I can't really understand this argument frankly. You're making a value judgement of grilled cheese as a commodity food but still, if someone put a grilled cheese in front of you that used plain white bread and one that used sourdough, you'd notice the difference, right? Sure you could argue that the sourdough grilled cheese is not a real grilled cheese but in doing so, you are inherently distinguishing the two it…

The argument is that I can distinguish them, but not rank them, because I distinguish them with respect to their essential character. Grilled cheese's essential character is something I view with derision, and its rank increases only by shedding that essential character. Grilled cheese with sourdough bread, or with veggies and barbecued meat, would rank as "better food" precisely because they rank as "worse grilled c…

So, you've embraced the 'no true scottsman' fallacy as the primary arbiter of your taste.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#437

Post by Gatsky »

ryanyde wrote: post #379

The piece just seems to fully encapsulate Silicon Valley Hubris. It's amazing that he thinks he's settled a debate on 'quality' or 'taste' with a logical argument, and that people consider this an 'objective' answer to the question. The rhetorical trick is one that many have pointed out: 'technically' superior is - in fact - easy to recognize. That doesn't mean that objective judgment of technique is synonymous with…

He is making an argument that in a narrow sense good taste exists. He does not judge that that Italian artist that canned his own faeces is inferior to the Italian artist that sculpted the statue of David. One can appreciate the size and labelling of the can, the way it was lit and photographed, the fact that it was sealed. It is possible to imagine an inferior version of the canned faeces. This doesn't seem to be a crazy claim to make? To be honest I think taste is somewhat the wrong word, it seems to get hackles up about elitism.

To me he missed the easiest way to argue that good taste exists - due to the constraints of human perception, we can generate every possible work of art that fits on a canvas of a certain size. Should we do this, fill an online gallery with all these pictures and then declare that the visual medium is finished? That is a reasonable claim if there is no good taste, and it is absurd.

Furthermore, in the face of this omni-corpus an artist then transforms into a critic, who will browse this archive and highlight pictures they find interesting. Nothing is created, only curated. The outcome of this process is a work of art that someone may appreciate, which exists purely as the outcome of the artist/critic's taste, divorced from any act of creation. Yet this work of art is equivalent to one which was 'created' in the usual sense. The conclusion from this equivalence is that if you don't accept there is good taste, then you also accept that nothing is worth creating.

Post-modernism amounts to making a weaker claim, essentially saying that nothing is worth creating any more.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#438

Post by bmitc »

> The strongest proof would be to show that taste exists in the narrowest sense, so I'm going to talk about taste in art. You have better taste than me if the art you like is better than the art I like.

> If there's no such thing as good taste, then there's no such thing as good art. Because if there is such a thing as good art, it's easy to tell which of two people has better taste. Show them a lot of works by artists they've never seen before and ask them to choose the best, and whoever chooses the better art has better taste.

This makes no sense to me.

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#439

Post by baud147258 »

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.

I don't know for the other, but for chocolate, price _has_ an influence on the resulting taste

Re: Is there such a thing as good taste?

#440

Post by baud147258 »

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…

> So no one in Europe had good taste then?

Quite a few artists imitated his style, so some had apparently good taste

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