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Wrote professionally about taste in a previous life. It is related more closely than we expect to techne or competence from physical knowledge. When we think o

Wrote professionally about taste in a previous life. It is related more closely than we expect to techne or competence from physical knowledge. When we think of poor taste, we tend to think of symbols that are separated from their function and meaning, where instead of representing that, "I do this thing," something gaudy says, "I have this thing!" That's what crassness is, and it comes down to our relative apprehension of the real vs. the represented, where typically, something real is powerful independent of who is observing it, and the representation is not. It's whether something legitimately represents power. Taste may be an instinct for honest signals, which would seem like its own sort of intelligence. Viewed this way, taste is the expression of what you percieve to be power based on your experience, good taste is the inverse of the distance between them, and poor taste is measured in the gap between what is affected and of-what it is the effect. That difference between effect and affect is one of the sneakiest bits of the english language and perhaps even the culture's most cunningly set trap. Do not underestimate the value of good taste, it's an intuition about power.

LudwigNagasena 5y ago
>Wrote professionally about taste in a previous life. It is related more closely than we expect to techne or competence from physical knowledge. Closer than we expect? Huh? Competence and skill are the two most common concepts associated with taste, ask any person who hates contemporary art. > It's whether something legitimately represents power. Taste may be an instinct for honest signals, which would seem like its own sort of intelligence. I understand that nowadays everything in humanities has to be about power to be fashionable, but that sounds like quite a reach. I don’t really follow this logic on crassness.
achillesheels 5y ago
I write art reviews as a hobby and have published my theory in a work called Critique of the Last Man in Film. I view taste to be more biologically predicated in that, quality can ultimately be measured according to a gradient of "healthy" and "sick". Immediately we can perceive "sacred" and "vulgar" and its connotations as it pertains to the subject of the representation. Nevertheless, it is the representation itself which can be understood as a biological expression of life and its experience in the minds of others which we can judge to be good or not. Thus, good art is that which positively resonates with as universal a mind as possible. That claim infers an everlasting beauty is the best art. (Notice I am necessarily relating positive resonances with beauty, not as a metaphor but as an actual electromechanical experience of the brain upon receiving neural stimulation from the body's senses) Now with respect to originality...that's a separate topic altogether :P
beaconstudios 5y ago
Thanks for your contribution - this is similar to the impression I get about taste, not having studied aesthetics but having a passing familiarity with postmodern philosophy. Do you have any book or philosopher suggestions I could check out? I'm generally interested in epistemology and this sounds like a good angle for further reading.
- dwmbt 5y ago
  i'm not a philosophy nut or anything, but consider looking into empiricism versus rationalism and looking at Paul's writing, or conversations about the objectivity/subjectivity of aesthetics through that lens. Paul lives up to his rational roots here.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    PG's essay is awful - I was looking for something with more merit. PG is a logical positivist, which is just a philosophical position - it isn't inherently rational, especially outside the hard sciences.
    - dwmbt 5y ago
      i agree. personally, i tend to look at the world through something akin to Kant's empirical realism. though it's not epistemology, his work Critique of Judgement is unique in that he directly tackles how "the judgement of taste" (X is beautiful) is reached. i recommend reading critiques on the critique, as this is how i regularly consume philosophy. on that note, i was wondering if you had any recommendations for how to consume philosophy, since it is something of interest to you?
      - beaconstudios 5y ago
        I have to be honest, it's something I struggle with too - especially as the postmodernists are known to be quite difficult to read. I tend to start with secondary sources (books about a field, essays from academics, even YouTube video essays) to understand a philosopher's broader contentions and positions and the vocabulary that they have inevitably invented, then go back and read the primary source with that initial knowledge in mind.
mrcolin000 5y ago
Great comment... I would also like to ask for a book recommendation. Thanks!
- ativzzz 5y ago
  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance talks about this topic in depth.
tompccs 5y ago
I think this is very wrong, and the foundation of modernism in art and architecture (which is to say, you are wrong in a very unoriginal way!) The Greeks used all sorts of forced perspective tricks in their architecture. Columns aren't equally spaced and lines aren't straight, but when viewed by a human observer at ground level the buildings built to Greek aesthetic rules appear "nicer" than those built to pure geometric ones. Similarly, in art, there was a lot of talk about "authenticity" in the early 20th century, where it was believed that the more primitive the artist, the more authentic the art, since the true message of the artist would transmit undistorted by such Western constructs as technique or skill. Decoration, adornment, and "fakeness" in pursuit of aesthetics has always been with us, and it's really a curiosity of modernity to have done away with it so comprehensively. Looking at the burgeoning architectural revival movements, and the return in popularity of portraiture and classical painting techniques, I think we're nearing the end of an era encapsulated by your comment.
- motohagiography 5y ago
  I replied to another comment related, but the anti- version of modernism is of course post-modernism, where nothing is real and everything is mainly its symbolic value. The conceit of that argument is that aesthetics are somehow trivial because anyone can appreciate them but very few can produce them - whereas you take anything post-modern and everyone can produce them but almost nobody can appreciate them sincerely. The unspoken but founding lie of post-modernity is that criticism is equivalent to competence, and that critics are the equals of performers, but there's just all this false consciousness standing in the way that we can solve by indoctrinating people into narrative anyway. The whole enterprise is predicated on this original deception, and once you have accepted that, you can accept anything, which is why I think they teach it to undergrads. The authenticity of "primitive" art as being a reaction to the skill and western artifice remains controversial, as if the art does not express the skill of the artist, what does it represent? Not everything has to represent something, but art is purely representation, so if it's not representing skill, there isn't a lot left. There is certainly an anti-competence movement borne out of critical theories that need for competence to be isolated, as competence and risk are sources of truth themselves* and this physical truth competes with critical narrative, so on this, I don't know that it's a bridgable gulf. This may be the most important part: I think po-mo thinkers exist in a simulation founded on that base deception, and they try to convince others that their story (made of language!) is the substrate of our reality, but every time someone gets on a motorcycle, skis down a mountain, prevails over an MMA opponent, hunts food, rides a horse, jumps out of a plane, has sex for pleasure, or has some other peak human experience, the simulation disappears. All the neuroticism that forms the hall of mirrors of false equivalencies, evaporates, and what remains is gravity and time, the physical and the real, and our aesthetic experience of it. That era has not ended, I'd argue criticism is just telling stories in a very shallow tide pool of history.
whatshisface 5y ago
That's a very pro-taste take on taste. I guess I should balance it out by saying that taste can also be knowing which overt signs of wealth are used by successful pharma salesmen, and which are used by successful drug dealers. ;)
oopsyDoodl 5y ago
At the end there you highlight the issue that makes me think good taste is still hand wave-y subjectivity. Since you say early on good taste is the difference between “I have” and “I do” good taste can’t be anything we possess, so how can anyone “have” good taste. Round n round we go. This continues to highlight for me the shortcomings of human languages. Chomsky calls them random noise formalized and controlled by political powers. It makes sense, they only show up 5,000 years ago and we had glyphs for process and ideas before then. Given our legal system is normalized to matters of object possession, so goes our discourse. Given your measure it’s about “I do” versus “I have” can anyone “have” good taste since it comes down to advertising and accepting one is possessed of certain character traits? Isn’t it still gaudy self promotion and idolatry? I’m still leaning towards peoples social power being due to their relative closeness to social power. Not that they’re uniquely beyond human. Why accept that in a system politically and academically normalized abstraction “good taste” is a useful language object itself?
- simiones 5y ago
  > Since you say early on good taste is the difference between “I have” and “I do” good taste can’t be anything we possess, so how can anyone “have” good taste. Round n round we go. There is no contradiction and no circularity here. You are mixing levels of meaning. The concept of possession in "I have lots of gold" is different from the concept in "I have good taste". One refers to property ("I own lots of gold"), while the other refers to an attribute ("I am well-tasting"). The fact that they happen to use the same word is mostly a coincidence, and in no way makes anything circular.
  - oopsyDoodl 5y ago
    Sure if you dissect the language syntax; no circles. If I try to consider what this means to my agency, we’re saying I have to accept others are possessed by good taste or act in good taste, so I should emulate them. Conformity is good taste. So, IMO, this self fulfilling meta-nonsense to generate self fulfilling meta-nonsense.
- motohagiography 5y ago
handrous 5y ago
> That's what crassness is, and it comes down to our relative apprehension of the real vs. the represented, where typically, something real is powerful independent of who is observing it, and the representation is not. > That difference between effect and affect is one of the sneakiest bits of the english language and perhaps even the culture's most cunningly set trap. Do not underestimate the value of good taste, it's an intuition about power. Much of Fussell's Class ends up being about this, which amounts to how various classes choose to signal, and how good they are at it. One of the biggest tells for the Fussell's Middle—who easily come off as the most unfortunate of the bunch, being the most class-anxious but also very bad at signaling—versus the "higher" classes he outlines, whom members of the Middle are often trying to signal as or imitate, are 1) how much of their stuff, including clothing, involves synthetic materials, and 2) how much of their stuff imitates a real thing—fake flowers, fine art prints on the walls, that kind of thing.
- golemotron 5y ago
  Interesting take on Fussell. I just realized there's a connection to the taxonomy that Venkatesh Rao uses in the Gervais Principle. Middle class and middle management having the same qualities in relation to their adjacent groups.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  This nicely explains overpriced T shirts with the name of some designer on it. It's a T shirt! But it screams 'I could afford to pay too much for this T shirt'.
  - WhisperingShiba 5y ago
    Upper Middles selling Upper Middles and Middles fake status symbols, but really elevating the esteem of a singular Upper Middle, and making themselves stand out as fake Upper Middle class. Fascinating meta gameplay here.
  - kazinator 5y ago
    Or, "the overseas factory shipped this to me for 3 dollars and the designer couldn't do anything about it".
sharadov 5y ago
Isn't taste in art what your peers judge as good or bad?
auggierose 5y ago
What?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
itronitron 5y ago
Not sure that power is a sufficiently discriminating term for what you are describing. I agree with you but think that purposiveness may be a better fit.
- ellyagg 5y ago
  What a tasteful word substitution.
majormajor 5y ago
This seems much more about what is "tasteful" to display rather than the link's claim about "good taste" that objectively appreciates "good" art over "bad" art.
marifjeren 5y ago
> It's whether something legitimately represents power. > Viewed this way, taste is the expression of what you percieve to be power based on your experience What about displays of disposable wealth, which demonstrate power in a way that is nonetheless gaudy? I don't think anyone could seriously argue that a wealthy person is less powerful than a poorer person, and yet displaying that wealth (e.g. having a solid 18k gold toilet) is clearly tasteless in the extreme. I almost wonder if you meant to say the exact opposite of what these quoted parts of your message say.
- analog31 5y ago
  My mom, from whom I inherited many attitudes, would say that this example illustrates the difference between wealth and class.
- jhrmnn 5y ago
  So we just go one step further into the rabbit hole, now discussing what is truly power.
hitekker 5y ago
This comment warrants deep introspection. How would you say "bad taste" and "good taste" relates to how we define the political and the non-political? They both share the notion of power, but is there a more meaningful connection that could be examined?

LudwigNagasena 5y ago

>Wrote professionally about taste in a previous life. It is related more closely than we expect to techne or competence from physical knowledge. Closer than we expect? Huh? Competence and skill are the two most common concepts associated with taste, ask any person who hates contemporary art. > It's whether something legitimately represents power. Taste may be an instinct for honest signals, which would seem like its own sort of intelligence. I understand that nowadays everything in humanities has to be about power to be fashionable, but that sounds like quite a reach. I don’t really follow this logic on crassness.

achillesheels 5y ago

I write art reviews as a hobby and have published my theory in a work called Critique of the Last Man in Film. I view taste to be more biologically predicated in that, quality can ultimately be measured according to a gradient of "healthy" and "sick". Immediately we can perceive "sacred" and "vulgar" and its connotations as it pertains to the subject of the representation. Nevertheless, it is the representation itself which can be understood as a biological expression of life and its experience in the minds of others which we can judge to be good or not. Thus, good art is that which positively resonates with as universal a mind as possible. That claim infers an everlasting beauty is the best art. (Notice I am necessarily relating positive resonances with beauty, not as a metaphor but as an actual electromechanical experience of the brain upon receiving neural stimulation from the body's senses) Now with respect to originality...that's a separate topic altogether :P

beaconstudios 5y ago

Thanks for your contribution - this is similar to the impression I get about taste, not having studied aesthetics but having a passing familiarity with postmodern philosophy. Do you have any book or philosopher suggestions I could check out? I'm generally interested in epistemology and this sounds like a good angle for further reading.

dwmbt 5y ago
i'm not a philosophy nut or anything, but consider looking into empiricism versus rationalism and looking at Paul's writing, or conversations about the objectivity/subjectivity of aesthetics through that lens. Paul lives up to his rational roots here.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  PG's essay is awful - I was looking for something with more merit. PG is a logical positivist, which is just a philosophical position - it isn't inherently rational, especially outside the hard sciences.
  - dwmbt 5y ago
    i agree. personally, i tend to look at the world through something akin to Kant's empirical realism. though it's not epistemology, his work Critique of Judgement is unique in that he directly tackles how "the judgement of taste" (X is beautiful) is reached. i recommend reading critiques on the critique, as this is how i regularly consume philosophy. on that note, i was wondering if you had any recommendations for how to consume philosophy, since it is something of interest to you?
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
      I have to be honest, it's something I struggle with too - especially as the postmodernists are known to be quite difficult to read. I tend to start with secondary sources (books about a field, essays from academics, even YouTube video essays) to understand a philosopher's broader contentions and positions and the vocabulary that they have inevitably invented, then go back and read the primary source with that initial knowledge in mind.

mrcolin000 5y ago

Great comment... I would also like to ask for a book recommendation. Thanks!

ativzzz 5y ago
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance talks about this topic in depth.

tompccs 5y ago

I think this is very wrong, and the foundation of modernism in art and architecture (which is to say, you are wrong in a very unoriginal way!) The Greeks used all sorts of forced perspective tricks in their architecture. Columns aren't equally spaced and lines aren't straight, but when viewed by a human observer at ground level the buildings built to Greek aesthetic rules appear "nicer" than those built to pure geometric ones. Similarly, in art, there was a lot of talk about "authenticity" in the early 20th century, where it was believed that the more primitive the artist, the more authentic the art, since the true message of the artist would transmit undistorted by such Western constructs as technique or skill. Decoration, adornment, and "fakeness" in pursuit of aesthetics has always been with us, and it's really a curiosity of modernity to have done away with it so comprehensively. Looking at the burgeoning architectural revival movements, and the return in popularity of portraiture and classical painting techniques, I think we're nearing the end of an era encapsulated by your comment.

motohagiography 5y ago
I replied to another comment related, but the anti- version of modernism is of course post-modernism, where nothing is real and everything is mainly its symbolic value. The conceit of that argument is that aesthetics are somehow trivial because anyone can appreciate them but very few can produce them - whereas you take anything post-modern and everyone can produce them but almost nobody can appreciate them sincerely. The unspoken but founding lie of post-modernity is that criticism is equivalent to competence, and that critics are the equals of performers, but there's just all this false consciousness standing in the way that we can solve by indoctrinating people into narrative anyway. The whole enterprise is predicated on this original deception, and once you have accepted that, you can accept anything, which is why I think they teach it to undergrads. The authenticity of "primitive" art as being a reaction to the skill and western artifice remains controversial, as if the art does not express the skill of the artist, what does it represent? Not everything has to represent something, but art is purely representation, so if it's not representing skill, there isn't a lot left. There is certainly an anti-competence movement borne out of critical theories that need for competence to be isolated, as competence and risk are sources of truth themselves* and this physical truth competes with critical narrative, so on this, I don't know that it's a bridgable gulf. This may be the most important part: I think po-mo thinkers exist in a simulation founded on that base deception, and they try to convince others that their story (made of language!) is the substrate of our reality, but every time someone gets on a motorcycle, skis down a mountain, prevails over an MMA opponent, hunts food, rides a horse, jumps out of a plane, has sex for pleasure, or has some other peak human experience, the simulation disappears. All the neuroticism that forms the hall of mirrors of false equivalencies, evaporates, and what remains is gravity and time, the physical and the real, and our aesthetic experience of it. That era has not ended, I'd argue criticism is just telling stories in a very shallow tide pool of history.

whatshisface 5y ago

That's a very pro-taste take on taste. I guess I should balance it out by saying that taste can also be knowing which overt signs of wealth are used by successful pharma salesmen, and which are used by successful drug dealers. ;)

oopsyDoodl 5y ago

At the end there you highlight the issue that makes me think good taste is still hand wave-y subjectivity. Since you say early on good taste is the difference between “I have” and “I do” good taste can’t be anything we possess, so how can anyone “have” good taste. Round n round we go. This continues to highlight for me the shortcomings of human languages. Chomsky calls them random noise formalized and controlled by political powers. It makes sense, they only show up 5,000 years ago and we had glyphs for process and ideas before then. Given our legal system is normalized to matters of object possession, so goes our discourse. Given your measure it’s about “I do” versus “I have” can anyone “have” good taste since it comes down to advertising and accepting one is possessed of certain character traits? Isn’t it still gaudy self promotion and idolatry? I’m still leaning towards peoples social power being due to their relative closeness to social power. Not that they’re uniquely beyond human. Why accept that in a system politically and academically normalized abstraction “good taste” is a useful language object itself?

simiones 5y ago
> Since you say early on good taste is the difference between “I have” and “I do” good taste can’t be anything we possess, so how can anyone “have” good taste. Round n round we go. There is no contradiction and no circularity here. You are mixing levels of meaning. The concept of possession in "I have lots of gold" is different from the concept in "I have good taste". One refers to property ("I own lots of gold"), while the other refers to an attribute ("I am well-tasting"). The fact that they happen to use the same word is mostly a coincidence, and in no way makes anything circular.
- oopsyDoodl 5y ago
  Sure if you dissect the language syntax; no circles. If I try to consider what this means to my agency, we’re saying I have to accept others are possessed by good taste or act in good taste, so I should emulate them. Conformity is good taste. So, IMO, this self fulfilling meta-nonsense to generate self fulfilling meta-nonsense.
motohagiography 5y ago

handrous 5y ago

> That's what crassness is, and it comes down to our relative apprehension of the real vs. the represented, where typically, something real is powerful independent of who is observing it, and the representation is not. > That difference between effect and affect is one of the sneakiest bits of the english language and perhaps even the culture's most cunningly set trap. Do not underestimate the value of good taste, it's an intuition about power. Much of Fussell's Class ends up being about this, which amounts to how various classes choose to signal, and how good they are at it. One of the biggest tells for the Fussell's Middle—who easily come off as the most unfortunate of the bunch, being the most class-anxious but also very bad at signaling—versus the "higher" classes he outlines, whom members of the Middle are often trying to signal as or imitate, are 1) how much of their stuff, including clothing, involves synthetic materials, and 2) how much of their stuff imitates a real thing—fake flowers, fine art prints on the walls, that kind of thing.

golemotron 5y ago
Interesting take on Fussell. I just realized there's a connection to the taxonomy that Venkatesh Rao uses in the Gervais Principle. Middle class and middle management having the same qualities in relation to their adjacent groups.
jacquesm 5y ago
This nicely explains overpriced T shirts with the name of some designer on it. It's a T shirt! But it screams 'I could afford to pay too much for this T shirt'.
- WhisperingShiba 5y ago
  Upper Middles selling Upper Middles and Middles fake status symbols, but really elevating the esteem of a singular Upper Middle, and making themselves stand out as fake Upper Middle class. Fascinating meta gameplay here.
- kazinator 5y ago
  Or, "the overseas factory shipped this to me for 3 dollars and the designer couldn't do anything about it".

sharadov 5y ago

Isn't taste in art what your peers judge as good or bad?

auggierose 5y ago

What?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

itronitron 5y ago

Not sure that power is a sufficiently discriminating term for what you are describing. I agree with you but think that purposiveness may be a better fit.

ellyagg 5y ago
What a tasteful word substitution.

majormajor 5y ago

This seems much more about what is "tasteful" to display rather than the link's claim about "good taste" that objectively appreciates "good" art over "bad" art.

marifjeren 5y ago

> It's whether something legitimately represents power. > Viewed this way, taste is the expression of what you percieve to be power based on your experience What about displays of disposable wealth, which demonstrate power in a way that is nonetheless gaudy? I don't think anyone could seriously argue that a wealthy person is less powerful than a poorer person, and yet displaying that wealth (e.g. having a solid 18k gold toilet) is clearly tasteless in the extreme. I almost wonder if you meant to say the exact opposite of what these quoted parts of your message say.

analog31 5y ago
My mom, from whom I inherited many attitudes, would say that this example illustrates the difference between wealth and class.
jhrmnn 5y ago
So we just go one step further into the rabbit hole, now discussing what is truly power.

hitekker 5y ago

This comment warrants deep introspection. How would you say "bad taste" and "good taste" relates to how we define the political and the non-political? They both share the notion of power, but is there a more meaningful connection that could be examined?