> Because if there is such a thing as good art, it's easy to tell which of two people has better taste. Show them a lot of works by artists they've never seen b

> Because if there is such a thing as good art, it's easy to tell which of two people has better taste. Show them a lot of works by artists they've never seen before I mostly agree with the theory here, however doing that is impossible or very difficult, because the way you build taste is to educate it, by rubbing your senses against great art. So it's extremely unlikely you can find a person with good taste that would "never have seen before" a lot of great art in the domain they have taste in. Although he doesn't discuss this here, I fear the reason why PG imagines this setup is because he believes good taste is in fact innate; you either have good taste or you don't, and there's nothing you can do about it. That's just not true. As with most things, you start somewhere and then you grow.