Critically acclaimed art is also popular

Scott Alexander has been writing more about good taste.

My daughter’s favorite song is “Choo Choo Train” (my son’s favorite song shifts with time of day, mood, and the alignment of the planets). It’s the auditory equivalent of the Lisa Frank poster. A woman who sounds like she is on several hundred milligrams of cocaine sings “Cha cha cha cha CHOO CHOO TRAIN!” in the most chipper voice you can imagine, accompanied by an in-your-face melody and the sound of train whistles. My wife and I have both gotten it stuck in our heads and it will likely stay there until the day we die. Both twins like the song “If You’re Happy And You Know It”, because it contains the word “happy”, which makes it cheerful, and it gives them an excuse to dance and clap their hands.

(meanwhile, the sophisticated people are into atonal music with no detectable melody or lyrics, which has systematically stripped away all of the things normal people like about music to produce a form of quality that hinges entirely on a set of mathematical relationships incomprehensible to 99% of the world).¹

My children’s favorite food item is juice. Their particular favorite orange juice is calorically 90% sugar, with a tiny amount of orange-associated chemicals for flavoring. There’s no mystery why we are innately/evolutionarily attracted to sugar, and it’s hardly difficult to make this: I’ve created similarly delicious lemonades with just lemon and sugar.

(meanwhile, the sophisticated people are into some kind of incomprehensible foam with 296 ingredients, which only one chef in the world can prepare properly, which tastes slightly like the color chartreuse).

I previously talked about cases where I think taste is fake, but admitted there was a core definition that seemed to be “really there”. I claim that poor taste is what happens when an artist overuses the cheapest and easiest tricks that everyone naturally innately likes, the sort you could compress into a small AI model, and which people with long exposure to the form find irritating through overuse. Good taste is when you deliberately avoid these blaring klaxons, leaving room for the attention to settle on subtler, more complex patterns that only a master could get right. This definition lets me voice both my pro-taste and anti-taste cases in explicit language...

If we ban all the cheap tricks for making people happy, and then all the medium-cost tricks, then we end with strategies so difficult that only ten geniuses in the world are skilled enough to execute them, and only ten connoisseurs sophisticated enough to appreciate them. Then the overwhelming majority of everything is ugly to everyone, broken only by a tiny minority of genius-crafted objects that are ugly to everyone except a tiny sophisticated minority. Remind me again why is this is good?

Not to be an autist hung up on the literal truth of statements, but this is just... false?

I once managed to persuade a more well-to-do friend that he wanted to take me to Chez Panisse. Chez Panisse is the kind of restaurant sophisticated people like (its owner was declared one of the most influential figures in the past fifty years of American cooking). Chez Panisse serves normal food. At time of writing, its weekly menu included “potato gnocchi with porcini mushrooms and mint” and “wild king salmon carpaccio with cucumbers, gold beets, and Little Gem lettuce”—not toddler-friendly dishes, but hardly incomprehensible foam that tastes like chartreuse.

Chez Panisse is amazing. My first bite of their risotto was a revelation. I have always enjoyed risottos, but Chez Panisse’s risotto was on another plane. Until that moment, I didn’t realize that it was possible for food to taste that good. Probably if I were a food writer, I would have some kind of vocabulary for this, but as it is words fail me. It was transcendent.

It’s not a mystery why Chez Panisse’s risotto is so good. They use ingredients that are much fresher and higher-quality than would be available in a home kitchen. Their cooks have, like, studied the art of flavoring and spicing a risotto for many decades in a remote monastery,² allowing them to taste the food and say “oh, this needs 0.25 standard pinches of tarragon to be perfect.”

Now, there are surely people who will fail to appreciate Chez Panisse (picky eaters, toddlers, vegans, people who rarely pay much attention to what they’re eating, people who hate gnocchi and salmon and risotto and Little Gem lettuce). But I think if you took the average open-minded, attentive person to Chez Panisse, they would also realize that this risotto is good on a level they had not previously imagined risottos could be good.

I think a similar experience is actually common for great art.

Consider The Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll. The Critics admittedly made the confusing decision to declare the absolute best movie of all time to be Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a three-and-a-half-hour long slice-of-life film about a housewife which apparently includes a lot of scintillating scenes of her cleaning the house. But look at the rest of the list! 2001: A Space Odyssey! The Godfather! Vertigo! Singin’ in the Rain! These are not abstruse movies that it is impossible for normal people to appreciate!

If this is too complex and sophisticated for you to understand, try showing it to a local toddler.

Or consider Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. They contain such outre, unpopular, unlistenable works as Aretha Franklin’s Respect, Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, The Rolling Stones’s (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, and Outkast’s Hey Ya.

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Outkast’s Hey Ya. The hook is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of chemical thermodynamics lines like “what’s cooler than being cool” will go over a typical viewer’s head.

Okay, but Rolling Stone is a pop-culture magazine. Maybe they’re not praising the music truly sophisticated people like. Well, some guy collated a bunch of lists of the best classical music of all time and found the one that was on the most lists was Bach’s Six Brandenburg Concertos. I have never listened to this before, as far as I’m aware, and I have terrible taste in music.³ So I am as close to a normal person as you can get here. And I will tell you, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 is a fucking bop:

Finally, Scott says that liking a Buddhist temple (which seems to be Chin Swee Caves Temple) is lowbrow architecture, while liking Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye is highbrow. It’s true that, as far as I can tell, Chin Swee Caves Temple is widely liked by tourists but not generally considered very interesting or architecturally innovative. But the problem is clearly not that Chin Swee Caves Temple is ornamented, colorful, curvy, symmetric, or covered with statues of awesome dragons. Other Chinese Buddhist Temples, such as the Temple of Heaven, are critically acclaimed by architects:

By xiquinhosilva - Temple of Heaven, CC BY 2.0. Link

LOOK AT ALL THOSE FUCKING DRAGONS.

Sometimes an artistic community goes pathological and starts spending all its time writing MFA novels or questioning whether brightly colored squares are art (or for that matter producing Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, popular art can go pathological too). Sometimes people—like the participants in r/vexillology—confuse the rules of the particular artistic game they’re playing with good artistic taste.⁴ Sometimes a piece of art is good for reasons normal people have trouble appreciating, like Jeanne Dielman’s cinematography or Permutation City’s rigorous exploration of the implications of its novum. Sometimes a piece of art is inaccessible, perhaps to create a particular artistic effect or perhaps because it’s just old.

And, sometimes, people who care a lot about an artform want weird and novel experiences. The one time I went to a Michelin starred restaurant they gave me a bizarre tomato jelly thing that had the texture of fish eggs. People who pay $200 for a restaurant meal are curious about tomato jelly fish egg stuff, and so the restaurants cater to their core audience. That doesn’t mean that sophisticated people think only tomato jelly fish egg stuff is good food; it means that only sophisticated people want to eat tomato jelly fish egg stuff.

Far from Scott’s world of miserable people surrounded by rare geniuses and connoisseurs, this is a way that people who care a lot about art actually have more expansive tastes than normal people. Normal people only like Chez Panisse; food critics like Chez Panisse and tomato jelly fish egg stuff. Normal people only like Singin’ in the Rain; movie critics like Jeanne Dielman and Singin’ in the Rain. In between commanding you to buy out half the Asian grocery store before making a stir-fry, Serious Eats reviews the best fast food. Movie critics go apeshit for Toy Story. The world where everyone has sophisticated taste in food isn’t a world where no one eats McDonalds’ fries; it’s a world where McDonalds always has the good fries and can no longer get away with giving people soggy saltless fries without their customers going all Karen on their asses.

And most of the time, when a work of art is widely critically acclaimed, it also kicks ass. William Shakespeare’s plays are great. 2001: A Space Odyssey is great. Aretha Franklin’s Respect is great. The Temple of Heaven is great. Even the restaurant that served me a bizarre tomato-jelly-fish-egg had fantastic pancakes. I had previously thought of pancakes as a low-variance albeit delicious food, and Hilda & Jesse opened my eyes to previously unimagined worlds of pancake goodness.

Admittedly, high-quality art is usually not high-quality to two-year-olds. Most humans like, for example, a particular balance between novelty and repetition. Because fucking everything is novel to two-year-olds, the amount of repetition in things they like makes adults want to stab out their eardrums with a Q-Tip. Similarly, two-year-olds don’t have the cultural context or attention span to understand 2001: A Space Odyssey, and they don’t like Little Gem lettuce because evolution has gifted them an extremely overactive poison sensor in a failed bid to keep them from putting random rocks in their mouths.

But in general critically acclaimed art is remarkably well-correlated with the opinion of the average adult. Critics have stronger opinions and are harder to please, but their opinions aren’t that different.

Even in the case of two-year-olds... consider Goodnight Moon, the most beloved toddler book of all time, the one everyone gets as a baby shower gift, a perennial bestseller, the one weird trick that gets your child to go the fuck to sleep. If there’s anything toddlers love, it’s Goodnight Moon.

And Goodnight Moon is great fucking art.

1. [Ozy’s footnote:] My life partner Lindsey listens to atonal music and strenuously objects to the idea that this means he has good taste instead of meaning that he likes weird shit. I’ll back him up that he doesn’t have good taste, he recently declared Cats “one of the greatest musicals ever made.”

2. Actually not a joke, a lot of Californian cuisine is heavily influenced by people trained at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center.

3. I mostly listen to metal covers of Disney songs.

4. This is an ancient problem—I think the first recorded person to have it was Aristotle, who claimed that a good play took place in one location over the course of 24 hours.