I'm not an art guy and I haven't been to the MoMa but I have been to SFMOMA which is San Francisco's main modern art museum and I enjoyed it. Some of the modern art, I just find to be good in some way that is hard to put my finger on. Is my taste good, or bad, or naive or whatever? I don't know.
But, I think it would be worthwhile to at least *step foot inside* the MoMa. Worst case, you spend a little time unproductively, best case you discover something new and interesting.
Here is the blog post I wrote after going, fwiw. In particular there is this section of Proust that talks about art which I thought was convincing and helped me appreciate modern art.
MoMA's collection goes back to the 19th century and includes a lot of famous pre-WWII art. It's only totally irredeemable if you think painting was ruined by the Impressionists in 1874.
One fun aspect of taste is that as a martial artist, there’s a sense of good taste in fight and action scenes that is often quite independent of other aspects of taste: Transformers is a good example of a movie that does momentum super well, and is thus glorious to watch.
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.
It also started me on a chain of thought that isn't exactly what you mean, but is an interesting analogy to how I see taste that folks in this space might understand better: Actual board games.
I have a regular board game group, and unfortunately every person in it wants something different. Some (me) want to play their pet games again and again. Others want novel game experiences every time. Others will play any game that's based on an IP they enjoy. And others want experiences that aren't taxing to learn and think about while they're being social.
In my mind this goes well with the four kinds of art appreciation I've seen:
- Searching for novelty
- Searching for familiar/enjoyable elements and associations
- Not super into art and just trying to act pro-socially
- Looking for a high-quality experience from the art itself, where "high-quality" just means "there's a lot of depth here and I can revisit it (either mentally or by actually consuming the art again)"
In my mind, "taste" is that fourth thing - it's wanting to interact with an experience again and again and finding a lot to think about when interacting.
I don't think anyone wants that with every experience they have. For instance, some of my friends are deep into craft beer. That's a purely social experience for me. If someone starts talking about the flavor profile I smile and nod.
I'm also not sure that all kinds of depth are created equal, and that might make "taste" a harder problem even if we can get agreement that that's where it resides. For instance, Marvel movies have a lot of "depth" in that you can interact with them a lot - there's a lot of content that exists in that universe, a strong history in the comics that reside a layer deeper than the MCU, and references to that history are skillfully woven into the movies and shows. My initial reaction is to treat that "depth" as less meaningful than the depth you get with classic literature, and therefore not "good taste." But I don't immediately have a principled reason to do this.
I agree with the broad thrust here. I am hesitant, however, in drawing a line between “novelty” and depth. We could for example disambiguate breadth from depth. Preferring new games might be seeking novelty across rulesets, exploring a meta-game, or rulial, space. Preferring a few games with a lot of depth still involves searching for “novelties” in the sense of finding better strategies/tactics. Think of chess opening novelties.
> For instance, Marvel movies have a lot of "depth" in that you can interact with them a lot - there's a lot of content that exists in that universe, a strong history in the comics that reside a layer deeper than the MCU, and references to that history are skillfully woven into the movies and shows. My initial reaction is to treat that "depth" as less meaningful than the depth you get with classic literature, and therefore not "good taste." But I don't immediately have a principled reason to do this.
The best I've ever managed to do with this idea is to posit that: interacting deeply in the normative fashion with Marvel movies looks like memorizing fake histories and lots of arbitrary details about fictional worlds in a way that turns you away from reality. On the other hand, interacting deeply with e.g., Dostoyevsky (I assume) involves a lot of learning history and interrogating the human condition, or whatever, which turns you toward reality.
I think there are probably also ways to do the opposite with both of these classes of media, each just lends itself better to the normative way it is consumed. Also, the latter way is probably genuinely harder, while the former way is kind of LARPing as the latter in a way that is probably irritating to practitioners of the True Art.
I'm not sure how much I believe this thesis, but it fills some gaps when I squint at it.
I don't understand why what people tend to do or the failings of the people who do and don't have certain views about taste have anything to do with this.
As an analogy this feels like the response atheists sometimes get when they insist almost all religious claims are simply wrong, confused and would be awful if true. People push back and talk about the great benefits religion and spirituality have had in their life and suggest that the atheist is missing a really important aspect of the human experience. Sure, it wouldn't surprise me if they were and that they might feel much happier, connected and fufilled if they were religious but that doesn't bear in any way on whether they are correct that the object level claims are all bullshit.
Similarly here, I get the sense that you (likely correctly) feel that appreciating art and taking aesthetics seriously have really important benefits. But I don't see why that tells us anything about whether the claims made about aesthetic value are literally meaningful or anything else.
It's perfectly possible to believe that when people say things like "this piece of art is objectively better than that" they are confused or at best expressing something very different than what they think without denying they get valuable experiences out of the process. Just like I don't need to think I really saw god on LSD to value the experience.
And yes it's probably true that those of us who don't take art that seriously are missing out on important experiences. But, just like with religion, sometimes true beliefs make it really hard to have those valuable experiences. So I might prefer to be someone who takes aesthetics seriously but that doesn't make it a true belief.
--
And the complaint about status games or physics seems weird. I mean it all depends on what aspect you want to look at. I mean I could divide all activities into wet and dry if I wanted..might not be the most interesting way to describe things but doesn't make it false. It seems like you find the way Scott wants to conceptualize this space unappealing but that isn't necessarily a mistake just a preference about what would be interesting.
I don’t see where I refer to “benefits” like those that might be derived from a therapeutic spirituality. You’ll have to be a bit more specific about what the “this” is that you think has nothing to do with what I’ve said.
It seems, and I might be wrong, that you are positing a platonic “meaning” out there—if only to deny it—and then asking what I’m talking about when I say that meaning is not a universal truth, is not an eternal Form, does not subsist in “object level” claims.
In other words, it seems to me like you are question begging when you refer to “literally meaningful.” You do the same thing again, at the end, when you say that Scott’s way of looking at things “isn’t false.”
What do you mean by “literally meaningful” and what is “not literally meaningful”?
I tried to indicate that I think aesthetic claims are only “meaningful” within a sociocultural context. Zvi says something similar above. I don’t see where I make any claims about the truth value of a statement like “this piece of art is objectively better than that,” nor where I say that having taste is equivalent to having “true beliefs” about aesthetics. Unpacking what all those statements might mean would require a lot more space.
Yes, I am rejecting a platonic interpretation because it's something lots of actual people do believe -- and it's a view that's been advanced philosophically as well. And I take it that is what Scott was largely rejecting as well.
What does it mean to say they are "meaningful within a societal context"? When I say 'literally meaningful' I mean in the original sense of meaningful not a metaphorical one -- a statement about the world that is capable of being true or false. And part of that requirement is that you can't just reinterpret it to mean something that differs massively from its surface/apparent meaning (obv you could give some meaning to any sequence of sounds).
To me saying it has "meaningful within a societal context" sounds like a way of saying that it isn't the kind of statement that is true or false in the way claims about physics or how many chairs there are in a room or even claims about what the stock market will do tomorrow. In other words it isn't literally meaningful.
If you agree that it's not the kind of thing that is true or false in the way those other claims are then what's the problem with what I or Scott is saying? Is it that you feel calling something false or meaningless is somehow derogatory? I certainly don't intend it that way.
--
For context, what I find frustrating about the discussions of aesthetic value is that every time someone tries to argue against the idea that there are just aesthetic facts out there that make aesthetic judgements true or false people pushback in ways that are a form of "well sure that naive view is wrong but c'mon we should understand these aesthetic claims in this much more complex way" and this ends up being taken as a defense of the naively realist understanding that most people I talk to about this seem to understand aesthetic claims to be making.
I mean there is an obvious confusion with the platonic view from calling the claims meaningful in some different way. I don't see what calling them not literally meaningful but playing an important social role risks confusion with. Your saying they do work in our interactions and communication but they just don't have truth conditions -- or at least not the kind of truth conditions most speakers take them to have.
"what is X?" where X is something like love, or fellowship, or purpose, or trust, or identity, or humor, or *taste*, but you also say "your answers must be literally meaningful, by which I mean that they must be verifiable by physics, like 'how many chairs are in this room' or 'is it raining'"
then you are going to get really boring answers.
Let me highlight where we agree: we both reject a Platonic realism about such matters. Also I don't deny that everyday language, used by the "person on the street" often treats aesthetic judgments in an unsophisticated manner. Taste is not like the number of chairs in a room.
We disagree that this makes a concept like "taste" not meaningful. We disagree that the phrase "not literally meaningful" even supplies any additional meaning beyond "not an objective fact." Pure rhetorical pleonasm.
I just don't see how your frustration with "naively realist" responses to the question has anything to do with my answer. My answer is explicitly *not* a defense of such views, although I can see how you might interpret it as such if the only answer you will accept is the one that is basically guaranteed by your own framing of the question.
You want to refer to an "original" rather than "metaphorical" meaning of "meaning." You might be surprised to learn that your preferred definition is quite new in the history of language.
My objection to Scott and to you is that reducing the possible answers for "what is taste?" to an either an objective fact like the number of chairs in a game or to "status games" (or mere "social role/function") is to miss something important, that is to say meaningful, about "taste" that is not reducible to those categories.
So it looks like you are saying, "what is taste?" and then when someone says, "well, it's this complex intersubjective entity," you object that admitting this explanation will lead *other* people to think that taste is some platonic fact. Is that about right?
If you want to reserve the word “meaning” for the kind of statement that purports to describe an empirical state of affairs (the “chairs in a room” type), then yes, you’ll call aesthetic statements “not literally meaningful.” From my perspective, and I suspect most people's perspective, this is a world devoid of the only meaning that really matters.
Things get much more complicated, of course, when you start to investigate the real, "objective" influence that intersubjective entities have on human behavior. What's the meaning of Versailles?
Love your take on modern “conceptual” art. Glad I’m not the only crazy one. I remember thinking I was the crazy one because I was the seemingly the only person alive who wasn’t fawning over Kentucky Route Zero as the first “real” example of “games as art.”
It’s neither of those things. It fails as a game and it fails as art. It’s pretension masquerading as art. But all the critics were tripping over themselves to praise it as proof that games had finally “made it” as an art form. 🤦🏻♂️
Having played that game, the notion of taste as a priesthood really makes a whole lot of sense to me.
Here is my model of what taste and art are and how they works.
First there is taste, in the sense of 'what people like' :
1. There are some human universals that everyone (or almost everyone) uncomplicatedly likes. Ex : Symmetry.
2. Everyone has some personal preferences. Ex : Some people prefer red to blue, or prefer salty to sugary food.
3. Variety of experience is valued for its own sake, to a different degree by different people. Ex : Even if someone prefer red to any other color, they probably don't want to be surrounded by red literally all the time, they will just want more red things in their live.
4. Complexity is valued too, probably because it enables greater variety - a greater number of different mental states, and combination thereof, become possible. Of course, this means accepting that these experience are, by nature, less uncomplicatedly good (compared to just (1) and (2)). Ex : Someone who reads comment on this blog probably doesn't do it because it's fundamentally more rewarding than many entertainment that our modern media provides, nor is it that likely to be directly instrumentally useful. We do it mostly because we like the mental hoops these comments gets us through.
Then there is the social aspect of it :
5. Through culture, everything is given some kind of meaning, some associations, which makes every one of your choices a form of communication. Some of these, like fashion choices, are deeply understood as having meaning for various reasons. You cannot avoid this by claiming you're not intending to use that form of communication : If you come to a funeral wearing a clown costume you're going to be judged for it, even if you genuinely only wear it because you think it's comfy.
6. As we know, it's possible to be better or worse at communicating something, or to be communicating something without intending too, or to successfully and deliberately communicate something others find unpleasant.
There is the concept of 'art' :
7. Art is .. stuff - let's say an amenity - that has been optimized along different axes that would be required for the amenity to strictly provide its service. Of course everyone disagrees about which axes matter, or where the thresholds are, but typical criteria would be 'exceptionally aesthetically pleasing' or 'communicate something' or 'is weird' or 'required skill'. Ex : A very usable building is a good facility, while a very beautiful one would be considered art.
8. Whichever axes we think matter for something to get this 'art' quality, it is perfectly reasonable to also care about the value it brings along other axes. It is even perfectly reasonable when the thing we're considering is explicitly meant to be art. Ex : Many people found The Joker (2019 movie) to be an good piece of art while being a terrible entertainment, to the point of being actively disturbing, and didn't like it because of that.
9. The result of all the previous point is that the concept of art, what is good art, and if something even should be art, are all a big mess. People don't just have different preferences (2) but also different types of preferences (see (1) and (2) vs (3) and (4), they can communicate things without intending to (5) or fail to communicated something they wanted (6), they argue about whether 'looks nice' or 'is enjoyable' should be considered a criteria for 'art' (7), or should be something that we care about even if it's not 'art', or something we should not care about at all (8).
And there are the various ways things get truly out of hand, on top of that :
10. Since 'art' is a powerful social concept, pretty much all ideologies always try to co-opt it, to argue that 'art' should be defined as 'something that communicate what we think it's important to communicate'. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail, and sometimes they have partial success, but in any case it ends up complicating further the already messy discourse.
11. Since 'art' is a powerful social concept, people are of course using it to play status games. They will publicly say that their art is good because of X, but their art is really meant to communicate to their peers 'Isn't it great how we're all better than the plebs that don't understand this' or some variation. This also complicate further the discourse around art.
"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. "
Uhh why? As far as understanding character Dostoyevsky is pretty awful. Nothing the main character in crime and punishment makes as much sense as the plenty of perfectly reasonable behaviors in Potter. And insofar as prose goes unless you've read the Russian your really responding to some random translator of varying quality. People can have aesthetic pleasure in response to a bewildering array of stimuli.
Indeed, I'd go so far as to claim that if you tricked people into believing Rowling was a high status classic and Dostoyevsky was a hack they'd manage to will their aesthetic experiences to match. I mean how else do you explain non-christians having deep aesthetic appreciation of a crap catalog of genealogy and war crimes.
On a broader level I feel these discussions could really benefit from carefully distinguishing multiple questions. I mean I feel like much of this discussion has a flavor like certain discussions about religion which mix up questions about the object level truth, benefits of believing that truth and the social structures created by people who have those beliefs.
I mean just for starters you can have different answers for all of the following. Unfortunately they too often are munged together into a for or against position (tho u did pretty well as did Scott relative to many comments).
--
1) Are claims of aesthetic merit the kind of thing that can be true or false? If so what grounds them. Are they mind independent?
2) If the answer to 1 is yes do our judgements and arguments about taste actually track the truth conditions for aesthetic merit? And does studying art and great books improve or damage accuracy?
3) Even if 1 is false is Is there something valuable gained directly from appreciating art (more than other fun)? Does it matter if it's great art or Rowling?
4) Is there something valuable gained from **believing** there are aesthetic facts?
5) Do discussions and debates about aesthetic facts have an important social role -- eg in helping us signal group membership or coordinate to have common interests?
6) Does the kind of argument/dispositions that cause us to treat art as if there was objective aesthetic merit play other important social roles even if they aren't important themselves?
7) Do the benefits of 5,6 require us to at least pretend there are objective aesthetic facts outside the philosophy room?
--
My ans: no, n/a, no, kinda see 5, yes, yes, maybe.
Thank you for this. Reading it confirmed my suspicion that we actually have a lot in common on this topic. I was especially excited to read about your preference to like as many things as possible. Your perspective on this, which I think a lot of people would find weird, is almost identical to mine, which I wrote about here: https://franklantz.substack.com/p/affect-is-protocol
I do think it would be fun and useful to have a debate, or some kind of more in-depth discussion, on the specific topic of the value of modern art and the 20th century avant garde. I'm fairly confident I could get you to update towards my position, although I also suspect that, in the process, I might update a bit towards yours. In any event, I live in the Bay Area now, so we probably can't do it live at MOMA.
Not distinguishing between personal and collective taste is deadly here.
You're largely talking about collective taste, but personal taste is what I think about when I think about taste. And my definition is this: it's the ability to notice and describe aspects of an aesthetic object.
"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."
As long as it doesn't take up too much time, why not? I mean, I agree that self delusion is a problem. And 'praising things you don't actually like' might cause you to associate with people who aren't that compatible with you. But why is it compulsory to insult your boss or your kid or your social group if their aesthetics are different than yours, and praise helps with otherwise desirable social integration?
Good take, I largely agree with this! But I think we can add a some significant additional meat and first principles understanding by understanding how beauty arises as the pleasure of successive predictive processing at the boundary of our capabilities. That explains exactly how aesthetic grammar works, on how high and low Quality art arises. I will shamelessly plug my new post elaborating this: "Taste is like physics, porn, and grammar".
Podcast episode for this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/a-matter-of-taste
I'm not an art guy and I haven't been to the MoMa but I have been to SFMOMA which is San Francisco's main modern art museum and I enjoyed it. Some of the modern art, I just find to be good in some way that is hard to put my finger on. Is my taste good, or bad, or naive or whatever? I don't know.
But, I think it would be worthwhile to at least *step foot inside* the MoMa. Worst case, you spend a little time unproductively, best case you discover something new and interesting.
Here is the blog post I wrote after going, fwiw. In particular there is this section of Proust that talks about art which I thought was convincing and helped me appreciate modern art.
https://lacker.io/art/2022/03/04/visiting-sfmoma.html
If you are ever in San Francisco then I offer to take you to the SFMOMA and try to convince you there is some iota of value to modern art.
MoMA's collection goes back to the 19th century and includes a lot of famous pre-WWII art. It's only totally irredeemable if you think painting was ruined by the Impressionists in 1874.
One fun aspect of taste is that as a martial artist, there’s a sense of good taste in fight and action scenes that is often quite independent of other aspects of taste: Transformers is a good example of a movie that does momentum super well, and is thus glorious to watch.
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.
This was an excellent comment.
It also started me on a chain of thought that isn't exactly what you mean, but is an interesting analogy to how I see taste that folks in this space might understand better: Actual board games.
I have a regular board game group, and unfortunately every person in it wants something different. Some (me) want to play their pet games again and again. Others want novel game experiences every time. Others will play any game that's based on an IP they enjoy. And others want experiences that aren't taxing to learn and think about while they're being social.
In my mind this goes well with the four kinds of art appreciation I've seen:
- Searching for novelty
- Searching for familiar/enjoyable elements and associations
- Not super into art and just trying to act pro-socially
- Looking for a high-quality experience from the art itself, where "high-quality" just means "there's a lot of depth here and I can revisit it (either mentally or by actually consuming the art again)"
In my mind, "taste" is that fourth thing - it's wanting to interact with an experience again and again and finding a lot to think about when interacting.
I don't think anyone wants that with every experience they have. For instance, some of my friends are deep into craft beer. That's a purely social experience for me. If someone starts talking about the flavor profile I smile and nod.
I'm also not sure that all kinds of depth are created equal, and that might make "taste" a harder problem even if we can get agreement that that's where it resides. For instance, Marvel movies have a lot of "depth" in that you can interact with them a lot - there's a lot of content that exists in that universe, a strong history in the comics that reside a layer deeper than the MCU, and references to that history are skillfully woven into the movies and shows. My initial reaction is to treat that "depth" as less meaningful than the depth you get with classic literature, and therefore not "good taste." But I don't immediately have a principled reason to do this.
I agree with the broad thrust here. I am hesitant, however, in drawing a line between “novelty” and depth. We could for example disambiguate breadth from depth. Preferring new games might be seeking novelty across rulesets, exploring a meta-game, or rulial, space. Preferring a few games with a lot of depth still involves searching for “novelties” in the sense of finding better strategies/tactics. Think of chess opening novelties.
> For instance, Marvel movies have a lot of "depth" in that you can interact with them a lot - there's a lot of content that exists in that universe, a strong history in the comics that reside a layer deeper than the MCU, and references to that history are skillfully woven into the movies and shows. My initial reaction is to treat that "depth" as less meaningful than the depth you get with classic literature, and therefore not "good taste." But I don't immediately have a principled reason to do this.
The best I've ever managed to do with this idea is to posit that: interacting deeply in the normative fashion with Marvel movies looks like memorizing fake histories and lots of arbitrary details about fictional worlds in a way that turns you away from reality. On the other hand, interacting deeply with e.g., Dostoyevsky (I assume) involves a lot of learning history and interrogating the human condition, or whatever, which turns you toward reality.
I think there are probably also ways to do the opposite with both of these classes of media, each just lends itself better to the normative way it is consumed. Also, the latter way is probably genuinely harder, while the former way is kind of LARPing as the latter in a way that is probably irritating to practitioners of the True Art.
I'm not sure how much I believe this thesis, but it fills some gaps when I squint at it.
I don't understand why what people tend to do or the failings of the people who do and don't have certain views about taste have anything to do with this.
As an analogy this feels like the response atheists sometimes get when they insist almost all religious claims are simply wrong, confused and would be awful if true. People push back and talk about the great benefits religion and spirituality have had in their life and suggest that the atheist is missing a really important aspect of the human experience. Sure, it wouldn't surprise me if they were and that they might feel much happier, connected and fufilled if they were religious but that doesn't bear in any way on whether they are correct that the object level claims are all bullshit.
Similarly here, I get the sense that you (likely correctly) feel that appreciating art and taking aesthetics seriously have really important benefits. But I don't see why that tells us anything about whether the claims made about aesthetic value are literally meaningful or anything else.
It's perfectly possible to believe that when people say things like "this piece of art is objectively better than that" they are confused or at best expressing something very different than what they think without denying they get valuable experiences out of the process. Just like I don't need to think I really saw god on LSD to value the experience.
And yes it's probably true that those of us who don't take art that seriously are missing out on important experiences. But, just like with religion, sometimes true beliefs make it really hard to have those valuable experiences. So I might prefer to be someone who takes aesthetics seriously but that doesn't make it a true belief.
--
And the complaint about status games or physics seems weird. I mean it all depends on what aspect you want to look at. I mean I could divide all activities into wet and dry if I wanted..might not be the most interesting way to describe things but doesn't make it false. It seems like you find the way Scott wants to conceptualize this space unappealing but that isn't necessarily a mistake just a preference about what would be interesting.
I don’t see where I refer to “benefits” like those that might be derived from a therapeutic spirituality. You’ll have to be a bit more specific about what the “this” is that you think has nothing to do with what I’ve said.
It seems, and I might be wrong, that you are positing a platonic “meaning” out there—if only to deny it—and then asking what I’m talking about when I say that meaning is not a universal truth, is not an eternal Form, does not subsist in “object level” claims.
In other words, it seems to me like you are question begging when you refer to “literally meaningful.” You do the same thing again, at the end, when you say that Scott’s way of looking at things “isn’t false.”
What do you mean by “literally meaningful” and what is “not literally meaningful”?
I tried to indicate that I think aesthetic claims are only “meaningful” within a sociocultural context. Zvi says something similar above. I don’t see where I make any claims about the truth value of a statement like “this piece of art is objectively better than that,” nor where I say that having taste is equivalent to having “true beliefs” about aesthetics. Unpacking what all those statements might mean would require a lot more space.
Yes, I am rejecting a platonic interpretation because it's something lots of actual people do believe -- and it's a view that's been advanced philosophically as well. And I take it that is what Scott was largely rejecting as well.
What does it mean to say they are "meaningful within a societal context"? When I say 'literally meaningful' I mean in the original sense of meaningful not a metaphorical one -- a statement about the world that is capable of being true or false. And part of that requirement is that you can't just reinterpret it to mean something that differs massively from its surface/apparent meaning (obv you could give some meaning to any sequence of sounds).
To me saying it has "meaningful within a societal context" sounds like a way of saying that it isn't the kind of statement that is true or false in the way claims about physics or how many chairs there are in a room or even claims about what the stock market will do tomorrow. In other words it isn't literally meaningful.
If you agree that it's not the kind of thing that is true or false in the way those other claims are then what's the problem with what I or Scott is saying? Is it that you feel calling something false or meaningless is somehow derogatory? I certainly don't intend it that way.
--
For context, what I find frustrating about the discussions of aesthetic value is that every time someone tries to argue against the idea that there are just aesthetic facts out there that make aesthetic judgements true or false people pushback in ways that are a form of "well sure that naive view is wrong but c'mon we should understand these aesthetic claims in this much more complex way" and this ends up being taken as a defense of the naively realist understanding that most people I talk to about this seem to understand aesthetic claims to be making.
I mean there is an obvious confusion with the platonic view from calling the claims meaningful in some different way. I don't see what calling them not literally meaningful but playing an important social role risks confusion with. Your saying they do work in our interactions and communication but they just don't have truth conditions -- or at least not the kind of truth conditions most speakers take them to have.
Look, if you ask,
"what is X?" where X is something like love, or fellowship, or purpose, or trust, or identity, or humor, or *taste*, but you also say "your answers must be literally meaningful, by which I mean that they must be verifiable by physics, like 'how many chairs are in this room' or 'is it raining'"
then you are going to get really boring answers.
Let me highlight where we agree: we both reject a Platonic realism about such matters. Also I don't deny that everyday language, used by the "person on the street" often treats aesthetic judgments in an unsophisticated manner. Taste is not like the number of chairs in a room.
We disagree that this makes a concept like "taste" not meaningful. We disagree that the phrase "not literally meaningful" even supplies any additional meaning beyond "not an objective fact." Pure rhetorical pleonasm.
I just don't see how your frustration with "naively realist" responses to the question has anything to do with my answer. My answer is explicitly *not* a defense of such views, although I can see how you might interpret it as such if the only answer you will accept is the one that is basically guaranteed by your own framing of the question.
You want to refer to an "original" rather than "metaphorical" meaning of "meaning." You might be surprised to learn that your preferred definition is quite new in the history of language.
My objection to Scott and to you is that reducing the possible answers for "what is taste?" to an either an objective fact like the number of chairs in a game or to "status games" (or mere "social role/function") is to miss something important, that is to say meaningful, about "taste" that is not reducible to those categories.
So it looks like you are saying, "what is taste?" and then when someone says, "well, it's this complex intersubjective entity," you object that admitting this explanation will lead *other* people to think that taste is some platonic fact. Is that about right?
If you want to reserve the word “meaning” for the kind of statement that purports to describe an empirical state of affairs (the “chairs in a room” type), then yes, you’ll call aesthetic statements “not literally meaningful.” From my perspective, and I suspect most people's perspective, this is a world devoid of the only meaning that really matters.
Things get much more complicated, of course, when you start to investigate the real, "objective" influence that intersubjective entities have on human behavior. What's the meaning of Versailles?
Love your take on modern “conceptual” art. Glad I’m not the only crazy one. I remember thinking I was the crazy one because I was the seemingly the only person alive who wasn’t fawning over Kentucky Route Zero as the first “real” example of “games as art.”
It’s neither of those things. It fails as a game and it fails as art. It’s pretension masquerading as art. But all the critics were tripping over themselves to praise it as proof that games had finally “made it” as an art form. 🤦🏻♂️
Having played that game, the notion of taste as a priesthood really makes a whole lot of sense to me.
So this is how Zvi asks people out
Here is my model of what taste and art are and how they works.
First there is taste, in the sense of 'what people like' :
1. There are some human universals that everyone (or almost everyone) uncomplicatedly likes. Ex : Symmetry.
2. Everyone has some personal preferences. Ex : Some people prefer red to blue, or prefer salty to sugary food.
3. Variety of experience is valued for its own sake, to a different degree by different people. Ex : Even if someone prefer red to any other color, they probably don't want to be surrounded by red literally all the time, they will just want more red things in their live.
4. Complexity is valued too, probably because it enables greater variety - a greater number of different mental states, and combination thereof, become possible. Of course, this means accepting that these experience are, by nature, less uncomplicatedly good (compared to just (1) and (2)). Ex : Someone who reads comment on this blog probably doesn't do it because it's fundamentally more rewarding than many entertainment that our modern media provides, nor is it that likely to be directly instrumentally useful. We do it mostly because we like the mental hoops these comments gets us through.
Then there is the social aspect of it :
5. Through culture, everything is given some kind of meaning, some associations, which makes every one of your choices a form of communication. Some of these, like fashion choices, are deeply understood as having meaning for various reasons. You cannot avoid this by claiming you're not intending to use that form of communication : If you come to a funeral wearing a clown costume you're going to be judged for it, even if you genuinely only wear it because you think it's comfy.
6. As we know, it's possible to be better or worse at communicating something, or to be communicating something without intending too, or to successfully and deliberately communicate something others find unpleasant.
There is the concept of 'art' :
7. Art is .. stuff - let's say an amenity - that has been optimized along different axes that would be required for the amenity to strictly provide its service. Of course everyone disagrees about which axes matter, or where the thresholds are, but typical criteria would be 'exceptionally aesthetically pleasing' or 'communicate something' or 'is weird' or 'required skill'. Ex : A very usable building is a good facility, while a very beautiful one would be considered art.
8. Whichever axes we think matter for something to get this 'art' quality, it is perfectly reasonable to also care about the value it brings along other axes. It is even perfectly reasonable when the thing we're considering is explicitly meant to be art. Ex : Many people found The Joker (2019 movie) to be an good piece of art while being a terrible entertainment, to the point of being actively disturbing, and didn't like it because of that.
9. The result of all the previous point is that the concept of art, what is good art, and if something even should be art, are all a big mess. People don't just have different preferences (2) but also different types of preferences (see (1) and (2) vs (3) and (4), they can communicate things without intending to (5) or fail to communicated something they wanted (6), they argue about whether 'looks nice' or 'is enjoyable' should be considered a criteria for 'art' (7), or should be something that we care about even if it's not 'art', or something we should not care about at all (8).
And there are the various ways things get truly out of hand, on top of that :
10. Since 'art' is a powerful social concept, pretty much all ideologies always try to co-opt it, to argue that 'art' should be defined as 'something that communicate what we think it's important to communicate'. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail, and sometimes they have partial success, but in any case it ends up complicating further the already messy discourse.
11. Since 'art' is a powerful social concept, people are of course using it to play status games. They will publicly say that their art is good because of X, but their art is really meant to communicate to their peers 'Isn't it great how we're all better than the plebs that don't understand this' or some variation. This also complicate further the discourse around art.
"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. "
Uhh why? As far as understanding character Dostoyevsky is pretty awful. Nothing the main character in crime and punishment makes as much sense as the plenty of perfectly reasonable behaviors in Potter. And insofar as prose goes unless you've read the Russian your really responding to some random translator of varying quality. People can have aesthetic pleasure in response to a bewildering array of stimuli.
Indeed, I'd go so far as to claim that if you tricked people into believing Rowling was a high status classic and Dostoyevsky was a hack they'd manage to will their aesthetic experiences to match. I mean how else do you explain non-christians having deep aesthetic appreciation of a crap catalog of genealogy and war crimes.
Or did u just mean that in fact you would laugh but not mean to claim it reflects any implausibility of the claim?
On a broader level I feel these discussions could really benefit from carefully distinguishing multiple questions. I mean I feel like much of this discussion has a flavor like certain discussions about religion which mix up questions about the object level truth, benefits of believing that truth and the social structures created by people who have those beliefs.
I mean just for starters you can have different answers for all of the following. Unfortunately they too often are munged together into a for or against position (tho u did pretty well as did Scott relative to many comments).
--
1) Are claims of aesthetic merit the kind of thing that can be true or false? If so what grounds them. Are they mind independent?
2) If the answer to 1 is yes do our judgements and arguments about taste actually track the truth conditions for aesthetic merit? And does studying art and great books improve or damage accuracy?
3) Even if 1 is false is Is there something valuable gained directly from appreciating art (more than other fun)? Does it matter if it's great art or Rowling?
4) Is there something valuable gained from **believing** there are aesthetic facts?
5) Do discussions and debates about aesthetic facts have an important social role -- eg in helping us signal group membership or coordinate to have common interests?
6) Does the kind of argument/dispositions that cause us to treat art as if there was objective aesthetic merit play other important social roles even if they aren't important themselves?
7) Do the benefits of 5,6 require us to at least pretend there are objective aesthetic facts outside the philosophy room?
--
My ans: no, n/a, no, kinda see 5, yes, yes, maybe.
Thank you for this. Reading it confirmed my suspicion that we actually have a lot in common on this topic. I was especially excited to read about your preference to like as many things as possible. Your perspective on this, which I think a lot of people would find weird, is almost identical to mine, which I wrote about here: https://franklantz.substack.com/p/affect-is-protocol
I do think it would be fun and useful to have a debate, or some kind of more in-depth discussion, on the specific topic of the value of modern art and the 20th century avant garde. I'm fairly confident I could get you to update towards my position, although I also suspect that, in the process, I might update a bit towards yours. In any event, I live in the Bay Area now, so we probably can't do it live at MOMA.
Not distinguishing between personal and collective taste is deadly here.
You're largely talking about collective taste, but personal taste is what I think about when I think about taste. And my definition is this: it's the ability to notice and describe aspects of an aesthetic object.
"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."
As long as it doesn't take up too much time, why not? I mean, I agree that self delusion is a problem. And 'praising things you don't actually like' might cause you to associate with people who aren't that compatible with you. But why is it compulsory to insult your boss or your kid or your social group if their aesthetics are different than yours, and praise helps with otherwise desirable social integration?
Good take, I largely agree with this! But I think we can add a some significant additional meat and first principles understanding by understanding how beauty arises as the pleasure of successive predictive processing at the boundary of our capabilities. That explains exactly how aesthetic grammar works, on how high and low Quality art arises. I will shamelessly plug my new post elaborating this: "Taste is like physics, porn, and grammar".