In light of other recent discussions, Scott Alexander recently attempted a unified theory of taste, proposing several hypotheses. Is it like physics, a priesthood, a priesthood with fake justifications, a priesthood with good justifications, like increasingly bizarre porn preferences, like fashion (in the sense of trying to stay one step ahead in an endless cycling for signaling purposes), or like grammar?
He then got various reactions. This will now be one of them.
My answer is that taste is all of these, depending on context.
Taste is Most Centrally Like Grammar
Scott Alexander is very suspicious of taste in general, since people keep changing what is good taste and calling each other barbarians for taste reasons, and the experiments are unkind, and the actual arguments about taste look like power struggles.
Here’s another attempt from Zac Hill, which in some ways gets closer.
Zac Hill: ACX is so close to getting it right on ‘taste’, but then dismisses the closest (“grammar”) conclusion in favor of a much more elementary interpretation (“priesthood of esoterica”).
Art works by leveraging the mechanics of a given medium to create meaningful experiences for an audience. This is in turn bounded by three things:
—> The nature of what those mechanics are capable of emphasizing
—> The artist’s facility with those mechanics
—> The audience’s ability to meaningfully perceive how the artist is deploying the mechanics.
The standard ‘highbrow/lowbrow’ distinction is basically just a slider on the third variable. Similar to improving at an instrument with practice, the process of considered experience and reflection of art allows a broader and more textured perception and integration of deployed mechanics.
Menswear Guy is great because he lays this process bare for a medium most of us lack familiarity with; Ebert is the same way; Gardner had this effect on me for literature. One value of the critic is explicating some of these mechanical grammars/vocabularies so we don’t have to derive them independently.
The point is that artistic “quality” can in some sense be ‘empirically/objectively’ derived by understanding those three core variables in greater resolution. Obviously this is in practice impossible, which is why discursive reflection rules. But the process is not mysterious.
If we are going with one answer from Scott’s list, it is obviously grammar. The real answer is it is all of them at different times and places.
He points to one key aspect of grammar, which is that you can have different internally consistent grammars, and they are all valid in their own way, but within each you need to follow their logic and spirit, and there is better and worse Quality.
Languages also work this way overall. Or cuisines. So do artistic styles.
So does taste. You can ‘have taste’ or ‘not have taste’ within any type of taste, in addition to having the taste to prefer the right kinds of taste, by being able to properly sort things by Quality, and create and engineer high Quality yourself, and have the preference and appreciation for and ability to notice high Quality.
Sometimes ‘Taste’ Is Out to Get You
Sometimes, yes, taste is rotating in the sense of fashion, where everyone is trying to stay one step ahead in the status game, but also there is a skill of doing that while also ‘having taste’ both in general and within each context, which is also being tested.
Also, yes, as we saw in From Bauhaus To Our House, sometimes the underlying logic from which taste is being drawn is, as in modern architecture, a literal socialist conspiracy intended to make our lives worse, with a competition to see who can convince more people to suffer more.
And all of this is being combined, in places like the AI Art Test, with other preferences that are not about taste. And sometimes people are trying to apply the wrong kind of ‘good taste’ test to something in a different grammar, or saying that taste should apply on the meta level between the grammars.
You Are Low Quality and You Have No Taste
Thus, ‘having no taste’ can mean any combination of these (with some overlap):
Too little ability to distinguish, in a context, what is good versus bad taste.
Choosing taste preferences that are, at a meta level, considered bad taste.
Choosing types of things where Quality and taste have relatively low impact.
Failing to appreciate and take joy in good taste and high Quality.
Caring more about non-Quality aspects, thus often choosing low Q over high Q.
Caring about things ‘people with good taste’ think you shouldn’t care about.
Not playing along with today’s status game or power trip.
Failing to appreciate complex historical context that explains why a particular thing has been done before and is therefore bad, or is commenting on something else and therefore good, or other such things (see the Lantz discussion later).
Within a given grammar and context, I will stand up for taste Platonism and physics. I believe that, for all practical purposes, yes, there is a right answer to the Quality level of a given work, to whether liking it reflects good taste.
That doesn’t mean you have to then care about it in every instance. You certainly get to rank things for other reasons too. My Letterboxd ratings (from 0.5-5 stars) are meant to largely reflect this Platonic form of Quality. And sometimes I think ‘oh this is going to be a 2-3 star movie’ and decide that’s what I want to watch today, anyway. When I differ from the critics, both high and low, it’s generally because of aspects they think you’re ‘not supposed to’ care about, that are ‘outside of taste’ to them and that they think shouldn’t matter if you’re in good enough taste, but that I think should count, and matter for Quality.
Don’t Be a Snob
I think you greatly benefit from good taste if and only if you are not a snob about it.
As in, you can develop the ability to appreciate what is good, without having disdain for things that are bad. Ebert can appreciate and understand both the great movie and the popcorn flick, so his taste means he wins. But if it meant he turned up his nose at the popcorn flicks, now it’s not clear, and maybe he loses.
Ideally, one has the ability to appreciate all the subtle things that make things in good taste, without recoiling in horror when someone has a bad color scheme or what not.
In Sympathetic Opposition’s Contra Scott on Taste, there seems to be the assumption that Scott is right that having taste and noticing Quality means noticing flaws and thus having the experience of low Quality things be worse. Their response is to say, if you have taste, then you can search out and experience higher Quality, so it’s fine.
They site C.S. Lewis and endorse my #4 in what bad taste primarily is - that good taste is the ability to experience the sublime in things. To which I say:
You can have this, while still appreciating low Quality things too.
Also often the failure to experience the sublime in things that people traditionally think are in bad taste, and of low quality, is a Skill Issue.
In particular, I think one skill I have is the ability to experience the sublime and aesthetic pleasure when consuming media that, objectively, is low Quality and in bad taste, that ‘objectively’ sucks, by isolating the elements that have it from the parts that suck, despite noticing the parts that suck.
When done properly, that makes it better, not worse.
Good as in Useful
I also think that SO hints at the distinction between ‘good taste’ and ‘good.’
it communicates a difficult concept, which makes it good
Literally no one defended it by saying anything about the image itself. No one was like “Look at the lines, the composition, the colors. I could just stare at it and drink it in.”
…
If these people aren’t having a direct aesthetic experience with this image, then it is just not possible to do so.
Which is why they weren’t saying the picture is good as in ‘in good taste.’ They are saying it is ‘good’ as in ‘fun’ or as in ‘is useful.’
Are they having a ‘direct aesthetic experience’ of its details? Not in the sense SO is thinking, presumably, but they are having a conceptual experience, and they are using it as a tool that serves a purpose. Several stars.
What is going on with AI art? It’s not good as in taste. But it’s good as in pretty.
I think that distinguishing this from the deep love and transformation of highbrow art risks assuming the conclusion - the guy who says Harry Potter changed his life is deluded or irrelevant, but the guy who says Dostoyevsky did has correctly intuited a deep truth. But we believe this precisely because we know Dostoyevsky is tasteful and Rowling isn’t - I would prefer a defense of taste which is less tautological.
So I would say, you can say that you got great aesthetic pleasure from Dostoyevsky’s prose, or you appreciated his deep understanding of character, or other neat things like that. If you say those things about Rowling then I’m going to laugh.
But Rowling still spun a good yarn (over and over again) in more basic ways, there is a lot more demand for that product than there is for Dostoyevsky’s product, and there’s no reason you can’t love Harry Potter or let it change your life. It’s fine. There are things there worth finding.
I care about this because I like these thinkers, and I think they’re missing something important and valuable about art. I would like to be able to defend art, fine art, modern art, as a project, in terms that they would find convincing, but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.
Perhaps, as a preliminary sketch of such a defense, I would start by calling attention to the dynamic nature of art - its necessary and unavoidable restlessness. Every work of art is both embedded within a process of perception, reaction, evaluation, and interpretation, and also an intervention into this process.
While I stand by my statements there, and I still wouldn’t set foot in the MoMa, and you can see above what I think about modern architecture regarding From Bauhaus To Our House, that doesn’t mean I am against art or appreciating art, in general.
Lantz’s most important contribution to this discussion, as I see it, is to point out that art and taste are largely in response to the desire to avoid the boring and predictable and what has already been done while also matching expectations, and that a lot of artistic choices and good taste emerge from the detailed context of what had existed before and also what came after.
And I think all of that really is legitimate, and investing in understanding that context can pay off, and that earlier works very much are enriched and ‘get a free pass’ in various ways by the fact that they came earlier, and they were original and innovative at the time, and in what they then led to, and so on. There’s an elegant, important dance going on there.
Sometimes.
Stand Up For What You Believe In
Other times, taste is functionally being fashion, or it is being a priesthood, and for Modern Art I strongly suspect it’s best classified (in Scott’s taxonomy) as bizarre porn, except in a bad way and as buildings displayed on the street.
I’m going to double down that most - not all, but most - of all this modern ‘conceptual art’ is rather bogus and masterbatory, and mostly a scam or a status game or at best some kind of weird in-group abstract zero-sum contest of one-upmanship, at worst a ‘speculative market in tax-avoidant ultra-luxury hyper-objects, obscene wealth and abject, hipster coolness,’ and also a giant f*** you to humanity, and I want it kept locked behind the doors of places like MoMa so I can choose to not set foot in there.
I’m definitely doubling down on Modern Architecture.
I’m not bad at aesthetics, you’re bad at aesthetics, in that you stopped believing in them at all, and tried to darvo and gaslight the rest of us into thinking it was our fault.
Or, I’m not the one who doesn’t care about aesthetics, you’re the one who doesn’t care about aesthetics, and you’re gaslighting the rest of us.
You’re pretending to do grammar when you’re obviously doing something else.
I’m not skeptical of art. I’m skeptical of your particular art, which happens to be the dominant thing called ‘Art’ in some circles. Whereas the people I think of as ‘artists’ today that I admire tend to work with video, or audio, or games, or text, or make visual art within one of those contexts that the capital-A Art World would scoff at.
(Yes, the AI poem most liked in the AI poetry study is horrible slop, and I don’t think you need problematic assumptions to explain why, it’s generic slop with no there there, it’s not particular, it doesn’t make interesting choices, it is just a series of cliche phrases, see, that’s it, I did it, no LLM consult required.)
And in other places, like the stuff Sarah Constantin is describing in Naming the Nameless (interesting historical note: Sarah did eventually leave the Bay, and I think she’s happier for it and that this essay is related to why), they are weaponizing a certain kind of aesthetics as a form of, essentially, fraud and associative vibe-based marketing and attempt to control people’s perceptions of things like ‘cool’ in ways that falsify their true preferences, for reasons political, personal and commercial. And they are attempting to attack us with the resulting paradox spirits when we try to call them out on this. Yes.
Being Technically In Good Taste Is Not a Free Pass
I also think there’s an implicit claim that if you are in good enough taste, enough ‘part of a project,’ then you don’t have to be accessible, you don’t have to stand outside the ‘project,’ and you don’t have to have aesthetic or other value absent your place in that project.
I think that’s very wrong. Doing all of that is also part of your job as an artist and creator. You can sacrifice it in some situations, and certainly you shouldn’t always be able to come in ‘in the middle’ of everything, but this very much counts against you, and reduces not only the reach of the work but also its value even to those who can handle it, because you’re operating without key constraints and that too is important context - you now owe us a worthwhile payoff.
As a writer, I have to continuously strike the balance of accessibility versus repetition, of knowing people don’t read these posts in any particular order. I make trade-offs that I’m learning to improve over time, and everyone else has to make them as well.
It Is Good To Like and Appreciate Things
This concept seems important:
If you pay close attention to how your own taste operates, you can sometimes catch yourself deciding to like a thing. Sometimes this is because your friends like it, or some cool person you want to impress likes it. But other times it’s because part of you, a good part, a part you trust, recognizes something in the thing, a missing piece for a new person you are in the process of becoming.
You say to yourself “I want to like this thing because it is the kind of thing that the kind of person I want to be likes”. And you put yourself in the right posture to like the thing, build the necessary literacy, make the ritual gestures. But you can’t make yourself like something. Often, your existing preferences, as they already are, stubbornly refuse to budge. And sometimes they don’t.
If you pay close attention to this process, you will eventually see this as the terrain of artistic taste.
Weird to say ‘catch yourself’ as if it’s something to avoid or be ashamed about. I attempt to like things all the time. Ceteris paribus, I would prefer to like as many things (and people!) as possible, while keeping them in proper rank order. Find the good in it. But you don’t want to engage in preference falsification. You don’t want to pretend, especially to yourself, to like things you don’t like or especially things you despise, because you’re ‘supposed’ to like them, or it would benefit you to like them.
Frank Lantz: Wow, I just realized that in the comments to that post, Zvi actually makes the following comment: “The post is explaining why she and an entire culture is being defrauded by aesthetics. That is it used to justify all sorts of things, including high prices and what is cool, based on things that have no underlying value.”
So this attitude I thought was more implicit is actually a deliberate, considered position. I find that kind of exciting, honestly. How would I go about convincing Zvi to change his mind on this question?
In turn, I love Lantz’s attitude here that he finds this exciting, and it’s a lot of why I’m giving him so much consideration.
I presume this post should provide a lot of information on how one might go about convincing Zvi to change his mind on this, and what exactly it is that you might want to change my mind about?
Convince me, essentially, that there is a worthwhile and Platonic there there.
If Lantz wants to take a crack at convincing me, maybe even in person in NYC (and potentially even literally at MoMa), I’d be down, on the theory that given story value it’s hard for that to be an unsuccessful failure.
I think the problem with Scott Alexander's explanation of taste is that it seeks to reduce everything to either "physics" or "status games." On the physics side, we have "innate, natural" preferences for things like beauty. On the "status games" side we have priesthoods playing arbitrary games that are only tangentially related to natural preferences, if at all.
The first problem is that preferences are never simply innate, they are impacted by the environment in complex, contingent ways. Our preferences develop within a field of overlapping discursive games. One could cite Freud, or Girard, or Adam Smith, depending on "taste."
The second problem is that "taste" is intimately tied to "meaning" in the world, and meaning is an interpersonal entity. I think this is kind of what you mean by "Quality" up above. To do something "well" it has to be evaluated by others. It is not clear what it would mean to live a "meaningful" life totally isolated from the judgments of others. It is almost, by definition, "insanity"—talking endlessly only to yourself.
I assume Sarah Constantin liked the dominant Bay area aesthetic partly for its own sensuous merits, and partly because it signaled professional competence. Many people genuinely like the sheer, sensuous experience of places and objects with a "clean, minimalist" style. Why people like that aesthetic cannot be reduced purely to status signaling. The somatic expression of pleasure when viewing such things is multilayered, even if one of those layers actually is tied to a deep internalization of the status signal associated with some of the aesthetic markers.
Below I restate some of what you explicitly say and some of what you imply, above. I basically agree with most of what you say above. I think the kernel of the problem is in whether "interestingness" is "Platonic" or not. One can make arguments about complexity, from information theoretic standpoints, but Platonic forms are essentially a matter of faith.
Assume the "grammar" theory of taste. Assume that the modernist plastic arts project of the early 20th century was something like a working out of content through form. See Clement Greenberg, or Michael Fried's "Art and Objecthood," or Nicholas Brown's book "Autonomy" if you want accounts from art theorists about why modern art is doing something interesting.
An ungenerous reading of the modern art project is that it is "just" a game of one-upsmanship. Something like a zero-sum status game. A more generous reading is that it was a game bounded by rules understood by those who played it—each novel thing was responding to the prior set of things and "good taste" involved understanding the entire history, more or less, of the game's consensus winners.
I think the proponent of "Platonic good taste," when arguing with someone who lacks taste or doesn't see the "there" there, usually assumes something like: well you just don't understand the game. If you understood the game you would see how the rules are being manipulated, how each player is submitting a new entry that comments on and goes beyond the prior entries, and so you would see how the sequence of artistic objects is advancing the game. (Coincidentally, the modern art game seemed to become exhausted at some point, and the rules had to be changed to keep it interesting, but only some people liked the new rules, or didn't like the meta-rules, or whatever)
The proponent of good taste finds aesthetic pleasure not just in the objects as individual objects, but in how they reflect, comment on, subvert, and advance the game in which they are embedded. The proponent of good taste assumes that the person who lacks good taste just doesn't understand the game, and so can't see the beauty.
The problem of course is that not everyone likes the same things in a game. For all kinds of reasons. This is why there is no "Platonic there there." Some games are better than others. But not everyone likes the same kind of games, etc. You are familiar with this line of argumentation. You still have to rank games which you find interesting, in order of interestingness.
The key point is that interestingness is rarely, if ever, wholly intrinsic. Games where you are the only player are usually not interesting to most people. Games take on a social significance, both because they grant status to good players, and because they are fields for demonstrating human excellence. Aspiration is an important part of meaning, in a very broad sense.
So the proponent of Platonic good taste assumes one *must* find the game they are interested in to be equally interesting to everyone else. This is empirically false.
Yet it is also true that some games have complex dynamics that are not immediately apparent. One has to work to understand what the game is about, how its been played, who is playing it, what the underlying dynamics are. Maybe upon doing that work you find that the game you initially thought looked boring or unfun is actually much more fun and interesting than you thought. Maybe not.
In any case, hard-line skeptics of "taste" are typically people who resent being asked to do the hard work of figuring out a game that society highly values, has high barriers to entry, and is not immediately promising. Some games have certainly ossified and become stale, or were more or less captured by arbitrary status competitions early on. Others are deeper than that.
The issue of commercialization presents further challenges for "good taste." In the special case of "scaled-up" and repackaged "good taste"-as-consumption-good, it is hard to see how the commercial players are "playing the game" in the way that e.g. the artists at the MoMA are. They are playing a market game, targeting a particular niche.
A generous reading is that the market game involves coordination along at least two axes: one, exploiting willingness to pay for status markers, and two, offering an aesthetic object phenomenally experienced on its own merits.
FYI this article reminds me of your old ones, like the simulacra series, that got me to read you to begin with. I definitely don't agree with everything you had to say here but it's given me interesting reading material and things to think about.
Scott's articles on this were super disappointing to me. I read him for careful, thought-out analysis and he seems to just be trying to dismiss the idea of taste by implication and innuendo without really engaging with the idea on its proponents' terms. It's good to see someone break down their feelings on this into specific, explicit arguments that we can actually engage with.
I think the problem with Scott Alexander's explanation of taste is that it seeks to reduce everything to either "physics" or "status games." On the physics side, we have "innate, natural" preferences for things like beauty. On the "status games" side we have priesthoods playing arbitrary games that are only tangentially related to natural preferences, if at all.
The first problem is that preferences are never simply innate, they are impacted by the environment in complex, contingent ways. Our preferences develop within a field of overlapping discursive games. One could cite Freud, or Girard, or Adam Smith, depending on "taste."
The second problem is that "taste" is intimately tied to "meaning" in the world, and meaning is an interpersonal entity. I think this is kind of what you mean by "Quality" up above. To do something "well" it has to be evaluated by others. It is not clear what it would mean to live a "meaningful" life totally isolated from the judgments of others. It is almost, by definition, "insanity"—talking endlessly only to yourself.
I assume Sarah Constantin liked the dominant Bay area aesthetic partly for its own sensuous merits, and partly because it signaled professional competence. Many people genuinely like the sheer, sensuous experience of places and objects with a "clean, minimalist" style. Why people like that aesthetic cannot be reduced purely to status signaling. The somatic expression of pleasure when viewing such things is multilayered, even if one of those layers actually is tied to a deep internalization of the status signal associated with some of the aesthetic markers.
Below I restate some of what you explicitly say and some of what you imply, above. I basically agree with most of what you say above. I think the kernel of the problem is in whether "interestingness" is "Platonic" or not. One can make arguments about complexity, from information theoretic standpoints, but Platonic forms are essentially a matter of faith.
Assume the "grammar" theory of taste. Assume that the modernist plastic arts project of the early 20th century was something like a working out of content through form. See Clement Greenberg, or Michael Fried's "Art and Objecthood," or Nicholas Brown's book "Autonomy" if you want accounts from art theorists about why modern art is doing something interesting.
An ungenerous reading of the modern art project is that it is "just" a game of one-upsmanship. Something like a zero-sum status game. A more generous reading is that it was a game bounded by rules understood by those who played it—each novel thing was responding to the prior set of things and "good taste" involved understanding the entire history, more or less, of the game's consensus winners.
I think the proponent of "Platonic good taste," when arguing with someone who lacks taste or doesn't see the "there" there, usually assumes something like: well you just don't understand the game. If you understood the game you would see how the rules are being manipulated, how each player is submitting a new entry that comments on and goes beyond the prior entries, and so you would see how the sequence of artistic objects is advancing the game. (Coincidentally, the modern art game seemed to become exhausted at some point, and the rules had to be changed to keep it interesting, but only some people liked the new rules, or didn't like the meta-rules, or whatever)
The proponent of good taste finds aesthetic pleasure not just in the objects as individual objects, but in how they reflect, comment on, subvert, and advance the game in which they are embedded. The proponent of good taste assumes that the person who lacks good taste just doesn't understand the game, and so can't see the beauty.
The problem of course is that not everyone likes the same things in a game. For all kinds of reasons. This is why there is no "Platonic there there." Some games are better than others. But not everyone likes the same kind of games, etc. You are familiar with this line of argumentation. You still have to rank games which you find interesting, in order of interestingness.
The key point is that interestingness is rarely, if ever, wholly intrinsic. Games where you are the only player are usually not interesting to most people. Games take on a social significance, both because they grant status to good players, and because they are fields for demonstrating human excellence. Aspiration is an important part of meaning, in a very broad sense.
So the proponent of Platonic good taste assumes one *must* find the game they are interested in to be equally interesting to everyone else. This is empirically false.
Yet it is also true that some games have complex dynamics that are not immediately apparent. One has to work to understand what the game is about, how its been played, who is playing it, what the underlying dynamics are. Maybe upon doing that work you find that the game you initially thought looked boring or unfun is actually much more fun and interesting than you thought. Maybe not.
In any case, hard-line skeptics of "taste" are typically people who resent being asked to do the hard work of figuring out a game that society highly values, has high barriers to entry, and is not immediately promising. Some games have certainly ossified and become stale, or were more or less captured by arbitrary status competitions early on. Others are deeper than that.
The issue of commercialization presents further challenges for "good taste." In the special case of "scaled-up" and repackaged "good taste"-as-consumption-good, it is hard to see how the commercial players are "playing the game" in the way that e.g. the artists at the MoMA are. They are playing a market game, targeting a particular niche.
A generous reading is that the market game involves coordination along at least two axes: one, exploiting willingness to pay for status markers, and two, offering an aesthetic object phenomenally experienced on its own merits.
FYI this article reminds me of your old ones, like the simulacra series, that got me to read you to begin with. I definitely don't agree with everything you had to say here but it's given me interesting reading material and things to think about.
Scott's articles on this were super disappointing to me. I read him for careful, thought-out analysis and he seems to just be trying to dismiss the idea of taste by implication and innuendo without really engaging with the idea on its proponents' terms. It's good to see someone break down their feelings on this into specific, explicit arguments that we can actually engage with.