the food one particularly galls me because it's literally just one restaurant (alinea) and its imitators that do the "weirdly colored foams" thing.
don't get me wrong, alinea is good! it's cool to see highly processed food in a high-culture setting (normally you only see food that processed in bags from Frito-Lay). but it is partially notable because it is so abnormal.
the overwhelming majority of very-high-end restaurant food is just regular food, prepared well from good ingredients, in many courses and with small portions for each course. (the two restaurants that regularly get called "the best restaurant in America" are The French Laundry and The Inn at Little Washington. they're both exactly this.)
Makes me laugh a bit how atonal music lives rent-free in so many people's heads. Schoenberg started writing over 120 years ago! It's not some coming wave of insanity that's about to sweep away everyone's pop music. Its not even that big of a deal in the classical world, really, there are far more performances of Beethoven and similar
My non-expert understanding is that *academic musicology in particular* is obsessed with atonality, and that's what's creating the sense among certain discourse participants that something has gone seriously wrong. Which makes sense to me; in our social class's understanding of the world, academia is supposed to be considered correct and deserving of deference, so if they've gone pathological and lost contact with what's actually good, then that does indeed seem like an alarming situation worth drawing attention to.
I strongly believe that every university should have a few eccentric professors who are into odd things. This adds a little spice to life, and it provides a wholesome opportunity for students to conclude that some experts are full of shit. Plus, it's better to err on the side of a bit of occasional weirdness than to err on the side of not risking weirdness at all.
When I worry more is when entire departments are deeply invested in specific fads. This can be really annoying for 20 years or so.
I've not had any contact with academic musicologists (and I'm sceptical most complainers have either), but I've found my way to enjoying some atonal music simply as a music enthusiast. So I'm not wholly on board with it being pathological at all.
BUT regardless, it still feels like weak-manning. The really egregious stuff I believe is related to 12 tone technique (which is only a subset of atonal music, it's just that Schoenberg really kicked off both). But for the vast majority of contemporary classical composers and listeners, that whole musical ideology has basically died out.
The thing is, I intuitively sort of agree with the framing, of the dense, unpleasant music being the 'final boss' of music, and hence the sense that you may be judged for disliking it. But I honestly think that's neurosis. There's never been a time when the lover of easy art has lacked company, the only way the grumpy professors can get you is if you're in their class, or they're in your head
This isn't rhetorical as I don't know anything about musicology, but how analogous is academic musicologists focusing on atonal music to physicists focusing on exotic particles we don't encounter and quantities of energy far vaster than we can manipulate, instead of normal every-day particles and energy? In other words, is "why is atonal music good?" just where there's still action intellectually?
This seems to be true for Bauhaus and Brutalist architecture also. There’s a kind of architecture critic - there are several of them on Substack - who is obsessed with concrete and steel boxes, as if that was what today’s architecture students are being taught to build to the exclusion of everything else
I think Schoenberg happened to release at just the right time to get popular with the culturati as an example of what the Nazis were throwing away, and then be used in early phases of the culture wars in the 60s as an example of bad 'elite' music.
Plus, it genuinely is pretty awful, at least to my ears.
The thing is, you can play Mozart for your kid! You can even play the Rick Rubin-produced Johnny Cash albums for your kid. This may result in them singing “Hurt” to their playmates and making teachers nervous.
Just like you don’t have to choose between nouvelle cuisine and Happy meals, you don’t have to choose between Schoenberg and that Choo-choo train song. Scott knows this but he really loves the Excluded Middle.
Some of the correlation between critically acclaimed art and the opinions of the average person is an artifact of cultural knowledge: it’s true both critics and normies like the Mona Lisa, but normies know you’re supposed to like the Mona Lisa.
I’m a visual art normie, and if you gave me a sample of 1,000 paintings from my local art college, I couldn’t tell who the good students were. I doubt my opinions on the paintings would correlate much at all with those of a critic, or even a reasonably sophisticated art enthusiast.
There's a chapter in Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman in which he talks about experiencing visual art as a complete novice - he finds that he does have opinions on what's better and worse without having any idea why he thinks some are better or worse, and it turns out that his opinions line up with the general consensus even though he had no idea which paintings were "supposed" to be better than others. So it's also possible that you might do better than you think at guessing who the "good students" were.
There are a lot of children's books I tire of rereading night after night, but Goodnight Moon is always great. It's up there with Each Peach Pear Plum for me.
To your main point: I agree, and I think people get confused because it's not true in the other direction: most popular art is not critically acclaimable.
"I claim that poor taste is what happens when an artist overuses the cheapest and easiest tricks that everyone naturally innately likes... 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..."
I think this is almost right, except that people *naturally* get bored of the obvious things. I think that *most* adults get bored of *most* childrens books, or at least baby books, because the things that were amazing for children, the adult has absorbed and doesn't have much more to think about. (Some amazing books do appeal to both, but I think by being really good in multiple ways.)
I was going to say something similar on Scott's post, but I wasn't sure I could say something useful.
And then, people who read in depth a lot, typically get bored of "normal" tropes, and want something different, or more challenging, or something that builds on what they already know in additional ways. Typically there's some "normal" things they go on liking too. (Like people who like fancy food but also basic burgers.)
And I think the thing Scott is concerned about is people start judging those "more challenging" things as "more sophisticated" and "better" and dismissing the less challenging things. I think this might be like, it's genuinely more impressive if your hobby is ultramarathons rather than gentle strolls. But if you do *every* hobby with ultramarathon intensity, it's unhealthy. Although it's also concerning if you never developed beyond a baby's sense of taste.
2001 does have bizarrely long tracking shots of deserts, lots of psychedelic sequences, and an ending cryptic enough that my mother made brochures explaining the movie to people when it came out and stood outside the theater distributing them! It's a fairly approachable movie wrapped in another movie possibly less accessible than Jeanne Dielman.
The sort of things that should count as critically good films are the Cannes official selection (the winners could occasionally have moderately mainstream appeal (eg. Anora, Anatomy of a Fall) but most of them would appeal to no-one who isn't a cinephile. Even looking at the Sight & Sound list, 8 1/2, Man with a Movie Camera, Mirror, Persona and Close-Up are all films I'd wager most people wouldn't enjoy. Critics who really like Toy Story (Roger Ebert or whomever) just aren't the people anyone's talking about.
Food has probably escaped having to be too tasteful because it has to keep appealing to very rich people who actually have to eat it, almost none of whom are chefs or interested in food (people who make food tend to be fairly low status until they really rise up, it's basically a service job even if the pay's ok). Hence even when food is froofy, it's froofy in a very fake, populist way (eg. Noma), and mostly you just pay a lot of money to get something that the non-food-obsessed will straightforwardly really like. Food criticism reflects this, with most food critics being journalists with no culinary experience who get given the food beat.
In art, most people still prefer Turner to Picasso to Hurst, the art community disagrees. In architecture, most people still prefer the Chateau Frontenac to any hotel built after 1950, the architecture community disagrees (the Temple of Heaven gets judged basically as an archaeological artefact; if someone built a new one now, no-one would like it and it would be considered tacky). Fashion is the most extreme example, because high fashion has been so obviously captured by a group of people with <coughs> different preferences to the mass market.
Music is an interesting one because there are pretty hard limits to how much you can innovate in a given space and on some level it just feels more real that some music is good, but if you compare Taylor Swift and, say, Ludovico Einaudi, while most people might enjoy both, they clearly seem to prefer the former. I think another factor is all you actually have to strip out of music is catchiness through repetition and bad poetry, so getting to good music is pretty close to the surface.
I'm willing to defend "Homage to the Square", Josef Albers' series of a thousand paintings of colorful squares. They are supposed to demonstrate interesting aspects of color perception.
You know that one optical illusion with the two gray dots that look different even though they are actually identical RGB. That kind of effect is pervasive in color perception, in many different ways, in fact perhaps the unusual case is when it's *not* happening. Albers had a whole theory worked out around this which, while non-scientific, is still pragmatically useful and taught in art schools.
You basically just need to know about this, and be willing to pay attention to your own perception, and you can get something out of one of the square paintings, they don't depend on being plugged in to any artistic subcultural scenes.
Lots of people draw coloured squares and lines. But when I see a Mondrian across the room, something goes "Ping!" and it stands out incredibly much, this guy could draw coloured squares and lines in a way that almost no-one else could touch. I thought I was kidding myself, but I did have a couple of instances of seeing several pieces of abstract art, and immediately noticing one, which turned out to be the Mondrian.
I agree with Scott's basic claim about cheap tricks and the things that good without the cheap trick. but it's sort of miss the point.
in my model, people tend to fall to status games. it's pretty close, in concept-space, to be someone who don't like the cheap juice and prefer something less sugary and with actually good test, and to signal you better then the plebs.
those are two very different algorithms! people who signal they are not the poor unsophisticated masses do different thing then people who want to consume good art.
but they look sorta similar, and people tend to fall top status games by accident, and people may trust the authority and fail to notice that high status and good is not the same thing.
but in the end, there is "art" that is complicated status game that aiming for looking not like the plebs, and there is art that is trying to do art. and it's look to me that criticism of the status games sometime ignoring that good art actually exist, even of the places that should curate it tend, like all humans, fall to stupid status games.
I literally was telling my 10yo daughter this last week lmao.
I was explaining my favourite painter was JMW Turner, and was slightly sheepish about how popular he was, and then I criticised myself for having been sheepish about it! He’s popular because he’s good!
Okay, but what if the critics are praising these things because they've sold their souls to poptimism? If you went back to the 20th century I think the establishment would've been aghast at the idea that "Respect" is a song even worthy of serious critical attention, much less the greatest song of all time. I don't agree with that myself, but it speaks to the diminished influence of a form of critical inquiry that is much more consonant with Scott's diagnosis of the situation, as far as I see it. Walter Benjamin's tastes in literature did not have much if any overlap with those of the common man.
The establishment also started out highly conflicted over Rhapsody in Blue, and that was just classical with elements of jazz. I think it's spent a long while overcoming its natural bias against popular music. Perhaps now it's swung too far the other way, but I expect it to self-correct over time.
the food one particularly galls me because it's literally just one restaurant (alinea) and its imitators that do the "weirdly colored foams" thing.
don't get me wrong, alinea is good! it's cool to see highly processed food in a high-culture setting (normally you only see food that processed in bags from Frito-Lay). but it is partially notable because it is so abnormal.
the overwhelming majority of very-high-end restaurant food is just regular food, prepared well from good ingredients, in many courses and with small portions for each course. (the two restaurants that regularly get called "the best restaurant in America" are The French Laundry and The Inn at Little Washington. they're both exactly this.)
Makes me laugh a bit how atonal music lives rent-free in so many people's heads. Schoenberg started writing over 120 years ago! It's not some coming wave of insanity that's about to sweep away everyone's pop music. Its not even that big of a deal in the classical world, really, there are far more performances of Beethoven and similar
My non-expert understanding is that *academic musicology in particular* is obsessed with atonality, and that's what's creating the sense among certain discourse participants that something has gone seriously wrong. Which makes sense to me; in our social class's understanding of the world, academia is supposed to be considered correct and deserving of deference, so if they've gone pathological and lost contact with what's actually good, then that does indeed seem like an alarming situation worth drawing attention to.
I strongly believe that every university should have a few eccentric professors who are into odd things. This adds a little spice to life, and it provides a wholesome opportunity for students to conclude that some experts are full of shit. Plus, it's better to err on the side of a bit of occasional weirdness than to err on the side of not risking weirdness at all.
When I worry more is when entire departments are deeply invested in specific fads. This can be really annoying for 20 years or so.
That's the thing, I think, most of academia is so left-partisan it's hard to take seriously anymore if you don't share their ideological priors.
'Let's deconstruct and overthrow Western society and rationality!' Wait, why would I want to do that? I live here.
I've not had any contact with academic musicologists (and I'm sceptical most complainers have either), but I've found my way to enjoying some atonal music simply as a music enthusiast. So I'm not wholly on board with it being pathological at all.
BUT regardless, it still feels like weak-manning. The really egregious stuff I believe is related to 12 tone technique (which is only a subset of atonal music, it's just that Schoenberg really kicked off both). But for the vast majority of contemporary classical composers and listeners, that whole musical ideology has basically died out.
The thing is, I intuitively sort of agree with the framing, of the dense, unpleasant music being the 'final boss' of music, and hence the sense that you may be judged for disliking it. But I honestly think that's neurosis. There's never been a time when the lover of easy art has lacked company, the only way the grumpy professors can get you is if you're in their class, or they're in your head
This isn't rhetorical as I don't know anything about musicology, but how analogous is academic musicologists focusing on atonal music to physicists focusing on exotic particles we don't encounter and quantities of energy far vaster than we can manipulate, instead of normal every-day particles and energy? In other words, is "why is atonal music good?" just where there's still action intellectually?
This seems to be true for Bauhaus and Brutalist architecture also. There’s a kind of architecture critic - there are several of them on Substack - who is obsessed with concrete and steel boxes, as if that was what today’s architecture students are being taught to build to the exclusion of everything else
I think Schoenberg happened to release at just the right time to get popular with the culturati as an example of what the Nazis were throwing away, and then be used in early phases of the culture wars in the 60s as an example of bad 'elite' music.
Plus, it genuinely is pretty awful, at least to my ears.
The thing is, you can play Mozart for your kid! You can even play the Rick Rubin-produced Johnny Cash albums for your kid. This may result in them singing “Hurt” to their playmates and making teachers nervous.
Just like you don’t have to choose between nouvelle cuisine and Happy meals, you don’t have to choose between Schoenberg and that Choo-choo train song. Scott knows this but he really loves the Excluded Middle.
Some of the correlation between critically acclaimed art and the opinions of the average person is an artifact of cultural knowledge: it’s true both critics and normies like the Mona Lisa, but normies know you’re supposed to like the Mona Lisa.
I’m a visual art normie, and if you gave me a sample of 1,000 paintings from my local art college, I couldn’t tell who the good students were. I doubt my opinions on the paintings would correlate much at all with those of a critic, or even a reasonably sophisticated art enthusiast.
There's a chapter in Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman in which he talks about experiencing visual art as a complete novice - he finds that he does have opinions on what's better and worse without having any idea why he thinks some are better or worse, and it turns out that his opinions line up with the general consensus even though he had no idea which paintings were "supposed" to be better than others. So it's also possible that you might do better than you think at guessing who the "good students" were.
There are a lot of children's books I tire of rereading night after night, but Goodnight Moon is always great. It's up there with Each Peach Pear Plum for me.
To your main point: I agree, and I think people get confused because it's not true in the other direction: most popular art is not critically acclaimable.
> I think people get confused because it's not true in the other direction: most popular art is not critically acclaimable.
Also, overindexing on the few cases where critical taste went pathological, because it’s noticeable.
"I claim that poor taste is what happens when an artist overuses the cheapest and easiest tricks that everyone naturally innately likes... 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..."
I think this is almost right, except that people *naturally* get bored of the obvious things. I think that *most* adults get bored of *most* childrens books, or at least baby books, because the things that were amazing for children, the adult has absorbed and doesn't have much more to think about. (Some amazing books do appeal to both, but I think by being really good in multiple ways.)
I was going to say something similar on Scott's post, but I wasn't sure I could say something useful.
And then, people who read in depth a lot, typically get bored of "normal" tropes, and want something different, or more challenging, or something that builds on what they already know in additional ways. Typically there's some "normal" things they go on liking too. (Like people who like fancy food but also basic burgers.)
And I think the thing Scott is concerned about is people start judging those "more challenging" things as "more sophisticated" and "better" and dismissing the less challenging things. I think this might be like, it's genuinely more impressive if your hobby is ultramarathons rather than gentle strolls. But if you do *every* hobby with ultramarathon intensity, it's unhealthy. Although it's also concerning if you never developed beyond a baby's sense of taste.
"Of course it's hard. If it wasn't hard, anyone could do it. The hard is what makes it great." - A League of Their Own
2001 does have bizarrely long tracking shots of deserts, lots of psychedelic sequences, and an ending cryptic enough that my mother made brochures explaining the movie to people when it came out and stood outside the theater distributing them! It's a fairly approachable movie wrapped in another movie possibly less accessible than Jeanne Dielman.
I think you've been quite selective here.
The sort of things that should count as critically good films are the Cannes official selection (the winners could occasionally have moderately mainstream appeal (eg. Anora, Anatomy of a Fall) but most of them would appeal to no-one who isn't a cinephile. Even looking at the Sight & Sound list, 8 1/2, Man with a Movie Camera, Mirror, Persona and Close-Up are all films I'd wager most people wouldn't enjoy. Critics who really like Toy Story (Roger Ebert or whomever) just aren't the people anyone's talking about.
Food has probably escaped having to be too tasteful because it has to keep appealing to very rich people who actually have to eat it, almost none of whom are chefs or interested in food (people who make food tend to be fairly low status until they really rise up, it's basically a service job even if the pay's ok). Hence even when food is froofy, it's froofy in a very fake, populist way (eg. Noma), and mostly you just pay a lot of money to get something that the non-food-obsessed will straightforwardly really like. Food criticism reflects this, with most food critics being journalists with no culinary experience who get given the food beat.
In art, most people still prefer Turner to Picasso to Hurst, the art community disagrees. In architecture, most people still prefer the Chateau Frontenac to any hotel built after 1950, the architecture community disagrees (the Temple of Heaven gets judged basically as an archaeological artefact; if someone built a new one now, no-one would like it and it would be considered tacky). Fashion is the most extreme example, because high fashion has been so obviously captured by a group of people with <coughs> different preferences to the mass market.
Music is an interesting one because there are pretty hard limits to how much you can innovate in a given space and on some level it just feels more real that some music is good, but if you compare Taylor Swift and, say, Ludovico Einaudi, while most people might enjoy both, they clearly seem to prefer the former. I think another factor is all you actually have to strip out of music is catchiness through repetition and bad poetry, so getting to good music is pretty close to the surface.
The best young children's book of all time is "The Monster At The End Of This Book" and I will die on this hill.
I'm willing to defend "Homage to the Square", Josef Albers' series of a thousand paintings of colorful squares. They are supposed to demonstrate interesting aspects of color perception.
You know that one optical illusion with the two gray dots that look different even though they are actually identical RGB. That kind of effect is pervasive in color perception, in many different ways, in fact perhaps the unusual case is when it's *not* happening. Albers had a whole theory worked out around this which, while non-scientific, is still pragmatically useful and taught in art schools.
You basically just need to know about this, and be willing to pay attention to your own perception, and you can get something out of one of the square paintings, they don't depend on being plugged in to any artistic subcultural scenes.
I was also going to say something like this :)
Lots of people draw coloured squares and lines. But when I see a Mondrian across the room, something goes "Ping!" and it stands out incredibly much, this guy could draw coloured squares and lines in a way that almost no-one else could touch. I thought I was kidding myself, but I did have a couple of instances of seeing several pieces of abstract art, and immediately noticing one, which turned out to be the Mondrian.
My understanding is that a lot of "modern art" needs to be seen in person for it to "click"...
I agree with Scott's basic claim about cheap tricks and the things that good without the cheap trick. but it's sort of miss the point.
in my model, people tend to fall to status games. it's pretty close, in concept-space, to be someone who don't like the cheap juice and prefer something less sugary and with actually good test, and to signal you better then the plebs.
those are two very different algorithms! people who signal they are not the poor unsophisticated masses do different thing then people who want to consume good art.
but they look sorta similar, and people tend to fall top status games by accident, and people may trust the authority and fail to notice that high status and good is not the same thing.
but in the end, there is "art" that is complicated status game that aiming for looking not like the plebs, and there is art that is trying to do art. and it's look to me that criticism of the status games sometime ignoring that good art actually exist, even of the places that should curate it tend, like all humans, fall to stupid status games.
Love this take
I literally was telling my 10yo daughter this last week lmao.
I was explaining my favourite painter was JMW Turner, and was slightly sheepish about how popular he was, and then I criticised myself for having been sheepish about it! He’s popular because he’s good!
Tassajara! My family has a beloved recipe book from their bakery (corn muffins <3) but I hadn’t realized they were also a monastery.
Okay, but what if the critics are praising these things because they've sold their souls to poptimism? If you went back to the 20th century I think the establishment would've been aghast at the idea that "Respect" is a song even worthy of serious critical attention, much less the greatest song of all time. I don't agree with that myself, but it speaks to the diminished influence of a form of critical inquiry that is much more consonant with Scott's diagnosis of the situation, as far as I see it. Walter Benjamin's tastes in literature did not have much if any overlap with those of the common man.
The establishment also started out highly conflicted over Rhapsody in Blue, and that was just classical with elements of jazz. I think it's spent a long while overcoming its natural bias against popular music. Perhaps now it's swung too far the other way, but I expect it to self-correct over time.
Some examples of batshit insane composition in video game music:
https://danbruno.net/writing/mother3/
Who the hell writes tunes in 29/16 time? O_o
Given how popular the Mother series was, if it's batshit and it works, it ain't batshit.