In Defense Of The Reality Of Good Taste

Art appreciation is a skill

Scott Alexander recently wrote a post of Friendly and Hostile Analogies For Taste. He writes:

Many (most?) uneducated people like certain art which seems “obviously” pretty. But a small group of people who have studied the issue in depth say that in some deep sense, that art is actually bad (“kitsch”), and other art which normal people don’t appreciate is better. They can usually point to criteria which the “sophisticated” art follows and the “kitsch” art doesn’t, but to normal people these just seem like lists of pointless rules.

He ends up expressing the most sympathy to the viewpoint that good taste is like religious rules. That is, although good taste is self-consistent and rational, and it’s possible to make mistakes about what is and isn’t in good taste, ultimately the rules are arbitrary. The justifications people give for “good taste”—like that wearing black shoes with white socks is jarring—are semi-fake. He writes:

Still, unless you’re a Hindu, you believe the system is completely made up and has no relevance to the real world. You think that Hindu priests are (unintentionally) charlatans, getting angry at people for violating rules even though the violation of those rules has no negative consequences and nobody who wasn’t inculcated in Hinduism since birth would care about them. The solution is to stop inculcating people into Hinduism. Although this might have some other disadvantages (if the religion helps hold together communities or something), at least the relaxation of meaningless ritual purity laws would go on the benefits side of the ledger.

Maybe taste is like this too. Sophisticated artists come up with a set of rules that they all agree on, but which are otherwise arbitrary. Young art students, after getting scoffed at for violating the rules enough times, internalize a deep sense of cringe if they see a rule getting violated. But all of this is pointless and could be profitably eliminated.

I think this is wrong in several different ways.

People Have Preferences They Can’t Articulate

Scott Alexander writes:

In fact, we know that fashion rules are like this. @dieworkwear on Twitter often recounts his experience debating fashion in a menswear forum. A bunch of style-obsessed people go in and claim ridiculous things like “there is never any excuse for a man wearing a light blue tie, it looks passive and feminine” and then they all argue about it. Occasionally some of people win their arguments and then classy men who visit stylish forums stop wearing light blue ties. Is it really some truth about the universe that light blue ties are feminine? It kind of makes sense that I guess they’re more pastel and feminine-y than a bright red tie - but realistically this is just people trying to cause trouble. Or, more generously, they’re coming up with a secret pattern language that only other cool people understand, so they can all feel cool together.

I occasionally read Die Workwear, and I often have to peer at the pictures closely to figure out what distinctions he’s even making. But he often shows two outfits so people can compare them:

I’m not a fashion nerd, so my first reaction is always “uh, they both look fine, I guess?” But if I actually force myself to have a preference, it turns out that I agree with Die Workwear 90% of the time. The distinctions Die Workwear is making are accurately tracking preferences I have—just much less strongly than he does.

(for those who don’t want to click through, left is the outfit Die Workwear likes)

Similarly, my girlfriend cares deeply about graphic design. Much to her despair, I use the default font for everything and have never noticed kerning. But when I need some graphics to be designed, I go to her, because I actually do like what she comes up with far better than my “if the defaults weren’t good why would they be default” fumbling.

I mostly don’t think of myself as having opinions on interior design.¹ But Lighthaven is legitimately one of the most beautiful spaces I have ever been in. When I was at LessOnline, a perennial topic of small talk was how fucking gorgeous Lighthaven is.

Finally, to address a topic I know about: many people aren’t very sensitive to prose quality. I grew up in a writing family, so it seems fake to me that most people don’t know, say, not to use Latinate words unnecessarily. Reliable sources inform me that most people can’t even tell a word’s language of origin by looking at it.

To the uninitiated, “don’t use words that come from Latin” feels arbitrary.² And, sure, normal people don’t say “I didn’t like that blog post because the words had the wrong etymology.” If you ask them to edit the blog post, they’ll give it back to you with “I dunno, it seems fine”—the same as I do about fashion or graphic design or interior design.

But once you put out your blog post into the harsh and ruthless world of Substack—well. Your readers will be bored, or confused, or get a headache trying to follow your argument, and they’ll read something else. They don’t know why they don’t like it, but they know that they don’t.

Sometimes good taste is a Faustian bargain. If you have bad taste, you’re going to go through your life with clothes and rooms you don’t like, because you don’t know how to choose ones you do like. But you also don’t think about these subjects, so not liking them doesn’t matter very much. If you have good taste, you’re going to be constantly bothered by the inadequacy of everything. But you’ll know how to find clothes and rooms that make you feel pleasure instead of indifference.³

But sometimes this Faustian bargain is worth making. If you want to be a graphic designer or writer or a proprietor of event spaces, you ought to invest in understanding what makes people like or dislike something. And if you want to get laid, it’s a really good idea to learn something about fashion.

Normal People’s Sense of Prettiness Is Based On Arbitrary Rules Too

Consider the work of Frank Gehry, a well-respected postmodernist architect.

I think, if you search your heart, you will realize that this building looks cool. If you saw it in a video game, you would be like “whoa, cool building. Futuristic. Kinda cyberpunk.”

But people object to Gehry’s work! Much of the time, they object to it because his buildings are generally bad as, you know, buildings, that possess desirable building traits like “it doesn’t leak” and “it doesn’t have mold problems” and “you can’t reach the first floor from the third floor by going up” and “it doesn’t cause persistent mild nausea in a small percentage of the population.” These are completely reasonable objections but not exactly aesthetic.

But people also object to Gehry’s buildings aesthetically. Two common objections are:

1. “I associate these buildings with postmodernism and I don’t like postmodernists.”

2. “I think buildings should look like normal buildings and not like weird statues.”

Both of these are reasonable preferences. But both of them are learned in the same way religious rules are learned. You have learned what “postmodernism” is and how to tell whether things are postmodernist. You have learned what buildings are supposed to look like, and dislike things that violate your expectations too much. That’s not any different from the fashion nerd who grimaces when you wear white socks with black shoes.

Another example: It is nice when walls are painted pretty colors. We can tell this is true because people keep painting their walls pretty colors. In fact, many of the complaints about Brutalist architecture (a canonical example of “good taste” stuff that normal people hate) is that it’s not brightly colored—everything has to be bland off-weight or beige.

So consider Kazimir Malevich’s Red Square.

I guess you could come up with some reason to like red walls and dislike Red Square as displayed in a museum.⁴ Maybe it is the wrong shade of red. Maybe red looks pretty when it is on stone or concrete, but it looks ugly when it’s on a canvas. Maybe red needs to take up the entire wall, and not just part of the wall. Maybe it’s a perfectly fine red square, but you paid to enter an art museum in the hopes of seeing things that are even prettier than red squares.

But when you ask people why they dislike Red Square, they don’t say any of that. They say “I could have painted that. My two-year-old could have painted that!” Their reactions have nothing to do with the aesthetic appeal of Red Square—which is, in fact, gorgeous in person. Their reactions are due to the socially mediated belief that things on display in an art museum need to display more skill than that possessed by a moderately competent interior designer.

Normal people care whether art is pretty, but they also care whether it displays mastery of a high-status skill. Are we to criticize people with good taste because they’re better at figuring out who the masters are?

Actually, Good Taste IS Like Grammar

Scott writes:

Grammar is a set of rules for speaking a language. Some of these rules are sensible and necessary, but others are arbitrary or even actively anti-rational. For example, it would make more sense to say “he goed” than “he went”, but only the latter is correct.

People feel on a deep level that poor grammar is wrong - misplaced apostrophes can send pedant’s into a rage. But descriptivists helpfully tell us that this is mostly arbitrary, and that some minority groups have alternate grammars which are just as good and consistent as ours, even though they sound atrocious (e.g. “I ain’t be going”).⁵

This is how fashion works. Let’s return to our example from Die Workwear.

Die Workwear continues:

To me, the outfit on the left looks good, but the right does not. Why is that? It's because the outfit on the left is styled in such a way that it draws from a familiar language: rock and roll. Skinny pants makes sense in this context because it works with the overall aesthetic.

Skinny pants don't work here because the aesthetic is nothing. It's bland, generic, and flavorless like grey wood floors. At best, it's business casual, which draws from a coat-and-tie aesthetic but loses the jacket. This type of pant doesn't work within that language.

In one sense, “skinny pants == rock-and-roll” is completely arbitrary, in the same way that it’s arbitrary that /dʒin/ means “a kind of close-fitting trouser that is made from heavy denim.” In another sense, neither are arbitrary, because they’re a form of communication.

The left outfit communicates “I’m rebellious and I like rock music. I’m a good person to ask if you’re looking for the best local punk club or a new weed dealer.” The right outfit communicates “I’m trying to dress in the blandest, most inoffensive, lowest-common-denominator style possible, but I don’t understand how to dress in a bland, inoffensive, low-common-denominator style. These two facts combined mean I’m a dork.”

Similarly, Lighthaven’s interior design is communicating “this is a place where creative, ambitious people have serious conversations.” My Solstice program design communicates “welcome to our community event about how great humanity is!” Writerly voice is all about communicating a personality to a reader: “I’m authoritative and I know what I’m talking about”; “I’m your funny, self-deprecating friend”; “I’m perceptive and observant.”

It’s true that some good taste reflects universal truths about people’s preferences. People have a hard time understanding articles that use long words and snarled sentences. You have to squint to read text that doesn’t contrast well with the background. Some colors look good together; some colors don’t. People like symmetry, repetition, rhythm, fulfilling expectations in a way that simultaneously violates them, and hot naked people.

But most of good taste is fluently speaking the language you’re working in.

And normal people understand these languages. Even if you don’t know what “business casual” means, you can recognize a business casual outfit. You aren’t going to think a goth is signalling her intent to become a CEO or a man in a suit is signalling his interest in the poetry of Lord Byron. Someone who dislikes Gehry buildings because they’re postmodernist correctly recognizes that Gehry is communicating “I’m too cool and sophisticated to care about your normie preferences.” Someone who dislikes that the Gehry building looks like a weird statue is annoyed that Gehry is refusing to talk in the normal language of buildings and instead doing the equivalent of wearing a Vermeer canvas instead of clothes.⁶

Normal people can fluently understand and speak their native languages, because humans have a bunch of special mental equipment for learning languages. But normal people understand the languages of fashion or interior design or architecture much better than they speak them. You are immersed in a culture that has taught you that skinny jeans, chains, and band shirts mean “rock-and-roll.” But that doesn’t mean you can look at forty jeans and pick out the one that is most rock-and-roll. The development of good taste is learning these languages so you can speak them and not merely understand them.

If you understand a language well, you can play with or even break its rules: fluent English speakers can dgjeag;eakgd;gk elgjaeklvak;feakge to communicate frustration. And people who are deft with a language can make up new units of meaning: Malcolm McLaren is the William Shakespeare of fashion.

People with good taste disagree strenuously about what art is good, because (I think) it’s rare for a person to be able to rigorously distinguish:

1. “You don’t understand the universal truths of this subject: humans tend to think those colors look ugly together and you clearly didn’t choose ugly colors on purpose.”

2. “You’re bad at communicating: you’re trying to say “I’m bland and inoffensive” but you’re actually saying “I’m a dork.””

3. “I don’t like the thing that you’re trying to communicate.”

   1. “You’re goth and I don’t like goths.”

   2. “I think you should dress professionally, that is, in a way that shows your intent to conform to the standard norms of the business world.”

   3. “I am nostalgic for the traditional past and you’re not cooperating.”

   4. “I want this city to look like a Communist utopia and The People are not cooperating.”

   5. “I want this city to look like a capitalist utopia and the artists aren’t cooperating.”

   6. “You don’t seem to care about being sexually attractive and this annoys me.”

   7. “You’re saying that you don’t care about wearing interesting clothes and I think people should care about wearing interesting clothes.”

   8. “You’re saying that you do care about wearing interesting clothes and I think people shouldn’t care about wearing interesting clothes.”

4. “I have an idiosyncratic personal aesthetic preference: I just hate that shade of blue, okay?”

I think people should acquire this skill but I think most people spend less time than I do reflecting on why they like what they like.

Art Appreciation Is A Skill

If you know someone who never consumes speculative fiction, ask them to read A Fire Upon The Deep. They’ll return to you fifty pages later going “this book is completely nonsensical. I couldn’t make any sense of what was going on. I’m going to read some nice, understandable book, like Remembrance of Things Past or Ulysses.”

Their reaction is because reading speculative fiction is a skill, and some people—even experienced readers—don’t have it. Speculative fiction readers can pick up on incluing, the subtle inclusion of worldbuilding information in the text. A speculative fiction reader reads “the door dilated” and goes “oh, the doors open like pupils, and this is familiar to the narrator and the expected way for doors to work.” An inexperienced reader misses this information. A speculative fiction reader is comfortable with the normal confusion that comes from reading a book that depicts a new setting, and can distinguish it from the abnormal confusion that means she missed something. An inexperienced reader finds it unpleasant to be dropped off in a world she doesn’t immediately understand. If she forces herself through it anyway, she can’t tell when she should reread and when she should hold on because the author will explain in three pages. And, of course, A Fire Upon The Deep is just less mysterious to speculative fiction readers: they are familiar with the genre conversation, so they know concepts like cryosleep and the Singularity. An inexperienced reader doesn’t have the necessary background.

Acquiring the skill of reading speculative fiction makes you pickier about speculative fiction. An inexperienced reader might find “what if a robot learned to love?” groundbreaking; a speculative fiction reader yawns. A speculative fiction reader complains about technobabble and infodumps and characters explaining things to each other that they already know. A speculative fiction reader wants the world to be coherent and to make scientific, economic and sociological sense; an inexperienced reader doesn’t even know she’s supposed to care about that.

Now, someone who doesn’t read speculative fiction might go, “I don’t think ‘learning to read science fiction’ is a real thing. You’re way pickier about Star Trek episodes, and you like bad books normal people don’t like such as A Fire Upon The Deep. It’s all ingroup signalling.” But I think that person is wrong.

Consuming many forms of art is a skill. Learning to read speculative fiction unlocks certain aesthetic experiences, such as A Fire Upon The Deep. It adds new layers to other experiences, allowing you to appreciate the rich worldbuilding in Lord of the Rings or the genre commentary in A Song of Ice and Fire.

I think (say) learning to look at pictures with an artist’s eye is similar. If you can look at a single painting for an hour, staring enraptured at all the details, your experience is rich and deep and pleasurable in a way that mine isn’t. But if you learn this skill, you’ll get frustrated at AI art that looks pretty to me, because the details you’ve learned to appreciate don’t make any sense.

Scott says:

You could say [the reasons for the rules are] obvious “once you pay attention”, but that paying attention to them is itself a trained skill.

It’s not immediately obvious why you would want this skill - it makes your life worse, because you’ll just be fretting over flaws you see in everything. But maybe some people are born with the skill, and other people should cultivate the skill so as to not offend those people.

The answer is “because then you get to read A Fire Upon The Deep.” Some pleasurable experiences only exist if you know how to pay attention, or to pay attention the right way.

But is this a Faustian bargain, too? You lose the ability to like schlock and gain A Fire Upon The Deep?

I don’t think so. People do like both Star Trek and A Fire Upon The Deep, after all.

Quentin Tarantino once allegedly said: “Never hate a movie. Never, under any circumstances, hate a movie. It won't help you and it's a waste of time… I mean [I] like everything and I ain't trying to get you to be like fucking me or anything. I'm just saying I think it's better for you. And it makes me way, way happier. Never hate a movie. They're gifts. Every fucking one of em."

I recommend never hating art as an ascetic discipline for all aspiring aesthetes. Let’s be clear on the parameters here. You are certainly allowed to not enjoy art; your feelings are your feelings and can’t be argued with. You are allowed to say that a certain piece of art is not to your taste. You are allowed to conclude that, all things considered, you think a piece of art isn’t very good.

The ascetic discipline is this:

1. When you consume a piece of art, always start out wanting to like it. Be on the art’s side. Root for it.

2. Always look for things that are good, even in the worst art. (The Phantom Menace had fantastic costumes.)

3. Unless you’re literally providing recommendations, avoid rankings. “Is it good or bad?” is the most boring conversation to have about art.

4. If a bunch of people love something, it’s because there’s something good about it. If it were just bad, there wouldn’t be anything for them to love. Approach art you don’t like with humility. If you can’t figure out why people like something, that’s your fault. Never say “you have bad taste”; always say “I don’t get it.”

   1. Normies are people.

   2. Art critics are also people.

I believe this approach, through denying you the easy pleasure of judgment, will ultimately cause you to love more art and to have more interesting, sophisticated, and pleasurable experiences of the art you love. It’s good to like Star Trek; better to like A Fire Upon The Deep; best to like both.

Actually, Good Taste IS Like BDSM

Scott writes:

People say that if you watch too much regular porn, you get desensitized to it and need weirder stuff. Eventually you get desensitized to the weirder stuff too, until finally you’re watching horrible taboo BDSM snuff porn or whatever.

Maybe taste is also like this. You look at all the nice pretty houses on your block until you’re bored of nice pretty houses and want something new and exciting. For a while, you’re satisfied with glass boxes, until you’re bored of glass boxes too, and you need something more exciting than that. Finally you’re masturbating to living in buildings made of jarringly-colored metallic blobs that look like Cthulhu might emerge from them at any moment.

Numerous questions have been raised about my taste in fiction. I like House of Leaves, and the main body of the text is a lengthy piece of badly written film criticism. I loved Farewell My Concubine, and it lasts two hours and thirty minutes and depicts approximately twenty seconds of happiness. I describe Solaris as a horror novel except instead of fear the emotion is boredom, and then, with malice aforethought, I try to get other people to read it.

Sometimes an experience can be interesting or satisfying without being conventionally fun, or even pleasant? I want to feel what it’s like to read one of those brain-eating books Lovecraft keeps going on about, or to live in China during World War II and the Cultural Revolution, or to try to understand something fundamentally incomprehensible to humans. I don’t really expect any of those to be a good time.⁷ That’s not why I want it.

I think this is similar to BDSM.

Some people have their thing and stick to it forever regardless of how much porn they consume. Sometimes their thing is attractive naked women having orgasms, sometimes it’s hypnotized amputees dressed up as clowns, but either way they imprinted on it by puberty and can’t be moved away from it. Other people are restless. They like new things. They hop from weird porn genre to weird porn genre. “Oh, detransition kink? That was last month, I’m into nagas now.”

I think the desensitization story is usually wrong.⁸ In general, those people don’t stop being interested in naked attractive people. Their tastes don’t change; they expand. There isn’t a set amount of horny you can be, and if you’re hornier about nagas you lose your interest in breasts.

“Novelty” and “excitement” feel, to me, like the naked-orgasming-hottie and hypnotized-amputee-clown fetishists trying to explain something they don’t really understand. It’s not the pure newness that’s good. It’s just—experiences are good? I like having them? I want to have lots of different experiences? I especially want experiences that are interesting, interesting because they’re textured and complex or interesting because they’re unfamiliar? I also especially want experiences that appeal to these basic human preferences, for rhythm and symmetry and accuracy and simplicity and fulfilling expectations in a way that violates them? All things equal, I prefer pleasant experiences, but I don’t want to cut myself off entirely from the potential of unpleasant ones?

Or, to put it another way, I’m 99.5th percentile Big Five Openness to New Experience.

“Daydreams” and “loves art” and “has a rich inner life” and “always picking up new hobbies” and “is curious about everything” are all correlated. There’s a reason for that. There’s something that connects all those things that doesn’t connect to “likes fast cars and parties.” BDSM isn’t even an analogy, I don’t think: it’s the same impulse, expressed as sex.

People with good taste usually like unpleasant things, but I don’t think good taste makes you like unpleasant things. I think, if you love experiences enough that you acquire good taste, you love some unpleasant experiences too.

1. If you’ve been to my house, you can tell.

2. Two words that come from Latin in one sentence… somewhere George Orwell is crying.

3. Fortunately, professionals design our graphics and write our nonfiction, so even people with bad taste get graphic design and nonfiction they like.

4. There is plenty of reason to dislike it as displayed on your laptop, because everyone agrees red squares on a laptop aren’t very pretty.

5. [Ozy’s footnote] Actually, rejection of “I ain’t be going” is an example of an anti-rational grammar rule—AAVE’s tense aspect system elegantly incorporates subtleties that Standard English can only handle awkwardly.

6. It turns out both buildings and clothes are the way they are for reasons, and refusing to use any standard language gets you unwearable clothes and unlivable buildings.

7. House of Leaves has its moments.

8. I don’t mean to imply that there isn’t a normal process of habituation. If you’ve never gotten to look at naked people before, then any opportunity to look at naked people is exciting. If nudity is a commonplace part of life—in pictures because of the Infinite Porn Machine or in real life because you know nudists—you get used to it. Similarly, it’s more exciting to see your long-distance girlfriend than your wife, but you still like your wife.