Is there such a thing as good taste?

It may well be that taste is initially acquired through feigning, but it can develop into something more personal down the line. Charles Rosen mentioned it at the end of his Critical Entertainments:

"It is not at all natural to want to listen to classical music. Learning to appreciate it is like Pascal's wager: you pretend to be religious, and suddenly you have faith. You pretend to love Beethoven-or Stravinsky-because you think that will make you appear educated and cultured and intelligent, because that kind of music is prestigious in professional circles, and suddenly you really love it, you have become a fanatic, you go to concerts and buy records and experience true ecstasy when you hear a good performance (or even when you hear a mediocre one if you have little judgment)."

Because his argument is not good. The structure is “If there is no X, then there is no Y. Because Y, X.” This is circular reasoning which is more obvious if we use the same structure as

“If carbon exists, then carbon-based alien life forms exist. Because carbon-based aliens exist, carbon exists.”

Logically, not wrong, but you missed the most interesting part of the proof: aliens exist?! PG missed proving the most interesting part of his post: that good taste exists. I don’t think reductio ad absurdum really works here because there are millions of possible explanations for the “effects” of good taste. In his example, the fact that people have non-random responses to art.

The problem here is just the fact that people have consistent responses to art does not suppose that there exists some inherent reasoning called “taste.” In fact, many popular things are abhorred as poor taste. I think we can agree that liking Citizen Kane more than Twilight would be called “good taste.” The problem here of course is that “taste” is a sociological construct - not a logical or philosophical one - designed by humans to distinguish class upon non-obvious signifiers. Perhaps you could dress a lower class person in fancy dress and perfume, but any upper class person could snuff them out in a moment by any hundreds of small little signifiers.

PG seems to want to talk about taste without having to say any of the unfashionable things about it, not naming any specific art works or signifiers of taste. He wants to “prove” taste exists without ever even defining it. Without a single example in this framework that lends credence to his ideas. By his logic, Marvel movies and Twilight should be more tasteful than Vertigo because more people more consistently like it. In reality, taste works the opposite way, but it’s not that simple either. Most people would hate Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, but that does not mean that liking it means you have good taste. Rather the opposite in fact. The truth here, of course, is that “taste” is a cultural, social, and economic property and lens, not a logical one. You have to get into real world to argue about taste, which PG seems entirely uninterested in doing.

If I may be a bit tongue in cheek, I would advise Paul that if you want to start talking about taste, you must first talk about scarcity and then irony.

None of what Rosen writes there resonates with me. This almost reads like the insufferable reddit comments where people claim you don't like Moby Dick or Shakespeare, that you are just parroting opinions you were told to hold in school. I read and listened widely, often discursively, and ended up liking stuff that none of my peers even knew about for the most part. And no, I wasn't trying to be an iconoclast, the endless teasing was oppressive, but what can you do, you like what you like.

Like I started with Bach because my mom showed me how to read music, then let me loose on the piano. I had a songbook, and it had Bach's (actually Petzold's) Minuet in G major&minor. That grabbed me in a way nothing else in the book did (kid's book, so stuff like silent night, camptown races, etc). No one 'told' me to like it, or even play it, and there was certainly no social pressure to do so, quite the opposite. It was entirely internal, and contrary to everything happening around me (pop, C&W, think rural uneducated population with a disdain for learning and the arts).

I'm not arguing that people can't develop appreciation via faking, but I find it a rather dismissive and cynical way to look at it in general. I would say it takes a bit of openness if you are approaching something that you didn't consume naturally in social situations, but not too much, except perhaps for very abstract things, or complex things far removed from your experience (Chinese opera for an American, for example, which fascinates yet eludes me at some level).

Sometimes it's not explicitly faking, but rather you subconsciously associate value in things that bring you more prestige, even some inner prestige that nobody knows about.

For example, if you think that being nerd is cool, nerdy things will make you happier, and you may even be proud of liking all things nerd. You're not faking; it's a genuine part of how you see yourself.