There are some interesting points in there, especially about the fact that most people make themselves like what seems ‘cultured’ (I’ve definitely seen this type of appeal to majority among my friends—I was nearly roasted alive when I mentioned I honestly don’t enjoy a particular classical composer).
There are also some fallacies in there too.
Anyway, the part where he talks about trickery is interesting:
What counts as a trick? Roughly, it’s something done with contempt for the audience. For example, the guys designing Ferraris in the 1950s were probably designing cars that they themselves admired. Whereas I suspect over at General Motors the marketing people are telling the designers, “Most people who buy SUVs do it to seem manly, not to drive off-road. So don’t worry about the suspension; just make that sucker as big and tough-looking as you can.”
I question this premise. It seems to imply that the purpose behind the art determines its quality, and not the art itself. For instance, if you have two identical paintings, but one was drawn with the intention of making money, and the other was drawn for true artistic merit, the latter one somehow has more value (and is thus of ‘better taste’) than the former.
At any rate, in the end that paragraph was the closest I got to his definition of ‘taste’ - the ability to recognize trickery in artistic works.
And especially this paragraph about people with good taste:
Or to put it more prosaically, they’re the people who (a) are hard to trick, and (b) don’t just like whatever they grew up with.
Finally,
I wrote this essay because I was tired of hearing “taste is subjective” and wanted to kill it once and for all.
While the insights presented are interesting (in providing a window to the author’s mind, at least), It has not actually succeeded in this purpose.
I think it’s just elliptic rather than fallacious.
Paul Graham basically argues for artistic quality as something people have a natural instinct to recognize. The sexual attractiveness of bodies might be a more obvious example of this kind of thing. If you ask 100 people to rank pictures another 100 people of the opposite sex by hotness, the ranks will correlate very highly even if the rankers don’t get to communicate. So there is something they are all picking up on, but it isn’t a single property. (Symmetry might come closest but not really close, i.e. it explains more than any other factor but not most of the phenomenon.)
Paul Graham basically thinks artistic quality works the same way. Then taste is talent at picking up on it. For in-metaphor comparison, perhaps a professional photographer has an intuitive appreciation of how a tired woman would look awake, can adjust for halo effects, etc., so he has a less confounded appreciation of the actual beauty factor than I do. Likewise someone with good taste would be less confounded about artistic quality than someone with bad taste.
That’s his basic argument for taste being a thing and it doesn’t need a precise definition, in fact it would suggest giving a precise definition is probably AI-complete.
Now the contempt thing is not a definition, it is a suggested heuristic for identifying confounders. To look at my metaphor again, if I wanted to learn about beauty-confounders, tricks people use to make people they have no respect for think woman are hotter than they are (in other words porn methods) would be a good place to start.
This really isn’t about the thing (beuty/artistic quality) per se, more about the delta between the thing and the average person’s perception of it. And that actually is quite dependent on how much respect the artist/”artist” has for his audience.
There are some interesting points in there, especially about the fact that most people make themselves like what seems ‘cultured’ (I’ve definitely seen this type of appeal to majority among my friends—I was nearly roasted alive when I mentioned I honestly don’t enjoy a particular classical composer).
There are also some fallacies in there too.
Anyway, the part where he talks about trickery is interesting:
I question this premise. It seems to imply that the purpose behind the art determines its quality, and not the art itself. For instance, if you have two identical paintings, but one was drawn with the intention of making money, and the other was drawn for true artistic merit, the latter one somehow has more value (and is thus of ‘better taste’) than the former.
At any rate, in the end that paragraph was the closest I got to his definition of ‘taste’ - the ability to recognize trickery in artistic works.
And especially this paragraph about people with good taste:
Finally,
While the insights presented are interesting (in providing a window to the author’s mind, at least), It has not actually succeeded in this purpose.
I think it’s just elliptic rather than fallacious.
Paul Graham basically argues for artistic quality as something people have a natural instinct to recognize. The sexual attractiveness of bodies might be a more obvious example of this kind of thing. If you ask 100 people to rank pictures another 100 people of the opposite sex by hotness, the ranks will correlate very highly even if the rankers don’t get to communicate. So there is something they are all picking up on, but it isn’t a single property. (Symmetry might come closest but not really close, i.e. it explains more than any other factor but not most of the phenomenon.)
Paul Graham basically thinks artistic quality works the same way. Then taste is talent at picking up on it. For in-metaphor comparison, perhaps a professional photographer has an intuitive appreciation of how a tired woman would look awake, can adjust for halo effects, etc., so he has a less confounded appreciation of the actual beauty factor than I do. Likewise someone with good taste would be less confounded about artistic quality than someone with bad taste.
That’s his basic argument for taste being a thing and it doesn’t need a precise definition, in fact it would suggest giving a precise definition is probably AI-complete.
Now the contempt thing is not a definition, it is a suggested heuristic for identifying confounders. To look at my metaphor again, if I wanted to learn about beauty-confounders, tricks people use to make people they have no respect for think woman are hotter than they are (in other words porn methods) would be a good place to start.
This really isn’t about the thing (beuty/artistic quality) per se, more about the delta between the thing and the average person’s perception of it. And that actually is quite dependent on how much respect the artist/”artist” has for his audience.