9 ms·

Culture is not about esthetics (2011)

41 points by monort 12y ago

diydsp 12y ago
This is a long, but brilliant essay. I especially enjoyed the section on Music Instruments about 1/4 down the page. The theme argues the idea that civilization/society/humans create for the sake of social status, not for the effect of the creation. For example: We choose to learn to play guitar to "be cool," or piano to indicate we want to be thought of as high-class rather than because we value the sounds of either of these instruments. This can be incredibly earth-shattering to realize. I hope it's not 100% true, but there is plenty of evidence to show it is. This type of thinking may also inform the famous "Mac vs. PC vs. Linux" debates. Do we choose our OS based on it's social significance or its technical, productive and visual benefits?
- calpaterson 12y ago
  It's not a novel idea - consumption for identity purposes is a very, very old and well explored meme: https://www.google.co.uk/?q=consumption%20and%20identity#q=consumption+and+identity https://www.google.co.uk/?q=consumption%20and%20identity#q=c... A lot of basic sales books/courses discuss it. I've met a few people in the traditional publishing and they seem to well understand that the majority of books sold are never read. I am actually having great trouble getting motivated to read the whole essay. Gwern's writing suffers a lot from poor sequencing, excessive footnotes/hyperlinks/digressions and a general reluctance/inability to summarise. Wish he could find a way to make his writing "skim-able", so that I can at least tell what the rough subject is before investing an hour to understand it.
  - wpietri 12y ago
    Yeah. When I write like this, it's because I'm really writing for me. It's my way of processing a topic. But if I'm going to publish something, I'd rather write for the reader. I just threw out half a book manuscript because I realized that while my intended audience was novice entrepreneurs, my actual audience would be grizzled, grumpy old veterans like myself. Eventually I hope I'll start fresh and really write for my readers.
- wpietri 12y ago
  We are social animals, hardwired for status, so it's pretty easy to find status elements in anything we do. But I think it's a mistake to say that because X has a status aspect, it's about status. I also think this argument assumes everybody's optimizing for a particular characteristic: sound. But for most decisions people are satisficers [1], not optimizers. If one tries instruments more or less at random until one crosses the "good enough" line, then instrument choice will mainly be about availability. In which case, people will tend to converge on a small number of instruments without any need for "cool" as an explanation. There are also other characteristics people value about instruments. For example, the ability to play with other people, or the ability to participate in a style of music that they like. Those are definitionally social, but not necessarily driven by status-seeking. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing
- derefr 12y ago
  And insofar as human intelligence evolved for the sake of being able to use "hypocritical" strategies in iterated tribe-sized prisoners' dilemmas (a constant refrain of economists like Robin Hanson), art (in its propagandist status-enhancing role) is the fulcrum by which sentience was plucked out of the evolutionary soup. We do not produce art such that there will be better art to consume; we consume art as an alliance maneuver such that when we have something important (and self-serving) to say, others will listen. And, of course, we make this game-theoretic compromise completely unconsciously; it is an adaptation we are merely executing.
  - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
    Does your model yield any novel predictions other than a smug feeling for you?
- davidgerard 12y ago
  Well, yes. This shows the way forward for artists in the Silver Age of way too much plenty: work those niches.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
geargrinder 12y ago
If the author had just summarized his points in a thesis paragraph I wouldn't have had to wade through so many words just to try and figure out what he was ultimately trying to say. Ironically, he spent much of the post complaining about how much there is to read.
- pizza 12y ago
  Not to try to sound like I'm appealing to authority or his greatness or anything, but I think gwern's essays are fantastic. I think their length is fine because of how rich they tend to be.
  - geargrinder 12y ago
    Long articles are fine and there is good content in this one. Just help me navigate it better by using a familiar hierarchy more common to informational essays.
foolrush 12y ago
Argh. Wrong on dozens of levels, and arguably nothing more than a ridiculous and repetitive summation of Modernist industrial / capital ideology. In short, the author shouldn't be so quick to dismiss Postmodern artwork because it eloquently dismisses his reduction of culture to commodity. Culture _is_ aesthetics. If you need a tell, glimpse at late Modernist aesthetics that sought to separate symbology from it. Form vs. Function is precisely such an ignorant axis model. Culture communicates via its symbology, and some of that ethic / ideology is inexpressible via commodification; hence the need for late Modernists to attempt to exorcise such an emergent phenomenon. If anything, the aesthetics of a culture (and important symbology) needs to be emancipated from the late Modernist industrial complex.
- orasis 12y ago
  foolrush - you seem well studied on the subject. Are there any books you'd recommend?
  - foolrush 12y ago
    Not well studied beyond a BFa at a rather liberal / avant-garde school. And of course a lifelong fascination with the subject that carried on long past postsecondary education. Hard to suggest one book, or even a few to be honest. The hardest thing about much of these sorts of topics is to find the willpower and passion that can carry you through study. That and the extremely difficult act of extending a humility to believe there may be some substance to difficult texts; all too common (and easy) for people to dismiss difficult texts as meaningless / confusing. Any recommendation would have to start with you and what you understand, what you have been exposed to, what interests you, and so on.
    - llamataboot 12y ago
      I'll bite. I'd start with Ways of Seeing by John Berger http://www.amazon.com/Ways-Seeing-John-Berger/dp/014103579X http://www.amazon.com/Ways-Seeing-John-Berger/dp/014103579X
  - potatolicious 12y ago
lotsofmangos 12y ago
Culture is about many things, one of which is aesthetics. The idea that creative arts are valued by some absolute aesthetic quality is to ignore not only the changing nature of quality itself, but also all the other purposes that art has. Art is also about commentary on the current culture, and that is just as good a reason to produce it as any. Not everything has to reach for the sublime, some people are just trying to illuminate something rather small and innocuous in a fairly humble manner and if their audience is small, no matter. As to the question of if we need more books, given we have more of a high quality than one person could read in a lifetime, like I said, quality isn't everything. I want books that comment on the current world, not just books that are the best written. Also, the idea that there is too much fiction available is a very anglo-centric position. There are many languages around the world where the novel is still relatively novel.
mikeash 12y ago
This article has a completely backwards approach. People prefer new art. This is a clearly observable fact. The article's approach to this fact seems to be to declare everybody as making the wrong choice, essentially by fiat. It would be much more interesting to examine why people prefer new art and ask the question of whether the classics are underappreciated and if there would be a net benefit to encouraging them, rather than basically assuming the author's tastes are some sort of objective fact and deriving a bunch of nonsense from it. Personally, I think there's a ton to be said for context. People want characters and situations they can relate to. At the end of the day, I'd generally prefer to read something where the protagonist uses an iPhone and cooks with a microwave than one where the protagonist writes letters and has his food cooked by slaves. And of course it doesn't have to be as dramatic as smartphones and slavery. Even a book from just a couple of decades ago is going to feel remarkably different due to changing attitudes towards everything from homosexuality to nuclear war. But he completely refuses to consider such contextual advantages. He states flat out, "People are better off reading the best books, and the best ones are predominately the ones that already exist, there is more than can be read, and new books have no compelling advantage over the classics." (Emphasis from the author.) The concluding sentence is an excellent summary of the article, although not the way it's meant to be: "I have started with common-sense grounds and wound up somewhere strange." In my experience, when people justify things with "common sense" they often mean unsubstantiated claims that they don't want to have to justify explicitly. If you start with "common-sense grounds" and end up somewhere strange, consider that maybe your starting assumptions are faulty!
- autarch 12y ago
  I think you may be misinterpreting "the best ones are predominately the ones that already exist" a bit. Most cultural production in any medium is forgettable. How many composers do you think were alive at the same time as Beethoven? Hundreds? Thousands? How many of them do we still listen to today? Tens, maybe less. Even more recently, let's take The Beatles and their contemporaries. Of course, The Beatles were not the only seminal artists of their time. They were active at the same time as David Bowie and The Rolling Stones. But again, how many of their contemporaries produced albums that are now forgotten by everyone who listened to them? How much of what's left even now will be gone in another 75 years, when basically everyone who was alive in the 60s is dead? The only difference between the 60s (or early 1800s) and now is that we haven't yet forgotten all the crap that is being put out today. Will future historians of pop music assign more than a footnote to Katie Perry or Taylor Swift 50 years from now? Will they even get a footnote? So the reason old art is the best art is simply that we've had time to weed out all the crap. The remaining art that we still remember is the best of what was released at the time. It's not the best because all old was better, it's the best because it's been better curated. In fact, for all we know, the overall proportion of art that is good might be even better today, but that doesn't change his proposition that we don't really need new art in order to experience great art for the rest of our lives.
davidgerard 12y ago
I nicked the title for this essay: http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-aesthetics-punk-rock-is-now-enforced-by-law/ http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-aesthe... Culture is not primarily about aesthetics: it's about monkeys' mutual grooming. It's about aesthetics after the piece of culture has fulfilled subcultural needs. Is your typical metalhead going to choose an exquisite harp symphony over a pretty-good slab of loud metally rock'n'roll? Probably not.
- wpietri 12y ago
  You're normally so sharp about deflating dodgy ideas that I'm surprised to see you say this. As I read it, you and Gwern seem to assume that a) there is an objective "best" measure for art, and b) the purpose of experiencing art is is to consume "best" art. I don't think either of those are true. I agree there's a status component to things, but we're monkeys; there's a status component to everything. (If I avoided everything where status behavior was an important driver, I'd have to stop typing right now; open-source software is filled with it.) Culture, being the summation of everything we talk about, is "about" a lot of things. Really, it's about everything. Sure, everything social that we do is socially mediated, and therefore has status components. But to say that's what it's primarily about is to me like saying that all of marine biology is really about water. Sure, it's there, and sure, anything you point at is related to seawater. But saying it's all about seawater strikes me as a rhetorical technique used to dismiss something, not a serious analysis.
  - davidgerard 12y ago
    Oh, it's totally all mixed up. It's intersubjective, which means you can sorta rank stuff but not really. However, I do think culture is primarily about culture, i.e. mutual grooming and good feelings with our fellow monkeys. I speak here as a superannuated rock journalist with a ridiculously large record collection.

41 points by monort 12y ago

This is a long, but brilliant essay. I especially enjoyed the section on Music Instruments about 1/4 down the page. The theme argues the idea that civilization/society/humans create for the sake of social status, not for the effect of the creation. For example: We choose to learn to play guitar to "be cool," or piano to indicate we want to be thought of as high-class rather than because we value the sounds of either of these instruments. This can be incredibly earth-shattering to realize. I hope it's not 100% true, but there is plenty of evidence to show it is. This type of thinking may also inform the famous "Mac vs. PC vs. Linux" debates. Do we choose our OS based on it's social significance or its technical, productive and visual benefits?

calpaterson 12y ago
It's not a novel idea - consumption for identity purposes is a very, very old and well explored meme: https://www.google.co.uk/?q=consumption%20and%20identity#q=consumption+and+identity https://www.google.co.uk/?q=consumption%20and%20identity#q=c... A lot of basic sales books/courses discuss it. I've met a few people in the traditional publishing and they seem to well understand that the majority of books sold are never read. I am actually having great trouble getting motivated to read the whole essay. Gwern's writing suffers a lot from poor sequencing, excessive footnotes/hyperlinks/digressions and a general reluctance/inability to summarise. Wish he could find a way to make his writing "skim-able", so that I can at least tell what the rough subject is before investing an hour to understand it.
- wpietri 12y ago
  Yeah. When I write like this, it's because I'm really writing for me. It's my way of processing a topic. But if I'm going to publish something, I'd rather write for the reader. I just threw out half a book manuscript because I realized that while my intended audience was novice entrepreneurs, my actual audience would be grizzled, grumpy old veterans like myself. Eventually I hope I'll start fresh and really write for my readers.
wpietri 12y ago
We are social animals, hardwired for status, so it's pretty easy to find status elements in anything we do. But I think it's a mistake to say that because X has a status aspect, it's about status. I also think this argument assumes everybody's optimizing for a particular characteristic: sound. But for most decisions people are satisficers [1], not optimizers. If one tries instruments more or less at random until one crosses the "good enough" line, then instrument choice will mainly be about availability. In which case, people will tend to converge on a small number of instruments without any need for "cool" as an explanation. There are also other characteristics people value about instruments. For example, the ability to play with other people, or the ability to participate in a style of music that they like. Those are definitionally social, but not necessarily driven by status-seeking. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing
derefr 12y ago
And insofar as human intelligence evolved for the sake of being able to use "hypocritical" strategies in iterated tribe-sized prisoners' dilemmas (a constant refrain of economists like Robin Hanson), art (in its propagandist status-enhancing role) is the fulcrum by which sentience was plucked out of the evolutionary soup. We do not produce art such that there will be better art to consume; we consume art as an alliance maneuver such that when we have something important (and self-serving) to say, others will listen. And, of course, we make this game-theoretic compromise completely unconsciously; it is an adaptation we are merely executing.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  Does your model yield any novel predictions other than a smug feeling for you?
davidgerard 12y ago
Well, yes. This shows the way forward for artists in the Silver Age of way too much plenty: work those niches.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

geargrinder 12y ago

If the author had just summarized his points in a thesis paragraph I wouldn't have had to wade through so many words just to try and figure out what he was ultimately trying to say. Ironically, he spent much of the post complaining about how much there is to read.

pizza 12y ago
Not to try to sound like I'm appealing to authority or his greatness or anything, but I think gwern's essays are fantastic. I think their length is fine because of how rich they tend to be.
- geargrinder 12y ago
  Long articles are fine and there is good content in this one. Just help me navigate it better by using a familiar hierarchy more common to informational essays.

foolrush 12y ago

Argh. Wrong on dozens of levels, and arguably nothing more than a ridiculous and repetitive summation of Modernist industrial / capital ideology. In short, the author shouldn't be so quick to dismiss Postmodern artwork because it eloquently dismisses his reduction of culture to commodity. Culture _is_ aesthetics. If you need a tell, glimpse at late Modernist aesthetics that sought to separate symbology from it. Form vs. Function is precisely such an ignorant axis model. Culture communicates via its symbology, and some of that ethic / ideology is inexpressible via commodification; hence the need for late Modernists to attempt to exorcise such an emergent phenomenon. If anything, the aesthetics of a culture (and important symbology) needs to be emancipated from the late Modernist industrial complex.

orasis 12y ago
foolrush - you seem well studied on the subject. Are there any books you'd recommend?
- foolrush 12y ago
  Not well studied beyond a BFa at a rather liberal / avant-garde school. And of course a lifelong fascination with the subject that carried on long past postsecondary education. Hard to suggest one book, or even a few to be honest. The hardest thing about much of these sorts of topics is to find the willpower and passion that can carry you through study. That and the extremely difficult act of extending a humility to believe there may be some substance to difficult texts; all too common (and easy) for people to dismiss difficult texts as meaningless / confusing. Any recommendation would have to start with you and what you understand, what you have been exposed to, what interests you, and so on.
  - llamataboot 12y ago
    I'll bite. I'd start with Ways of Seeing by John Berger http://www.amazon.com/Ways-Seeing-John-Berger/dp/014103579X http://www.amazon.com/Ways-Seeing-John-Berger/dp/014103579X
- potatolicious 12y ago

lotsofmangos 12y ago

Culture is about many things, one of which is aesthetics. The idea that creative arts are valued by some absolute aesthetic quality is to ignore not only the changing nature of quality itself, but also all the other purposes that art has. Art is also about commentary on the current culture, and that is just as good a reason to produce it as any. Not everything has to reach for the sublime, some people are just trying to illuminate something rather small and innocuous in a fairly humble manner and if their audience is small, no matter. As to the question of if we need more books, given we have more of a high quality than one person could read in a lifetime, like I said, quality isn't everything. I want books that comment on the current world, not just books that are the best written. Also, the idea that there is too much fiction available is a very anglo-centric position. There are many languages around the world where the novel is still relatively novel.

mikeash 12y ago

This article has a completely backwards approach. People prefer new art. This is a clearly observable fact. The article's approach to this fact seems to be to declare everybody as making the wrong choice, essentially by fiat. It would be much more interesting to examine why people prefer new art and ask the question of whether the classics are underappreciated and if there would be a net benefit to encouraging them, rather than basically assuming the author's tastes are some sort of objective fact and deriving a bunch of nonsense from it. Personally, I think there's a ton to be said for context. People want characters and situations they can relate to. At the end of the day, I'd generally prefer to read something where the protagonist uses an iPhone and cooks with a microwave than one where the protagonist writes letters and has his food cooked by slaves. And of course it doesn't have to be as dramatic as smartphones and slavery. Even a book from just a couple of decades ago is going to feel remarkably different due to changing attitudes towards everything from homosexuality to nuclear war. But he completely refuses to consider such contextual advantages. He states flat out, "People are better off reading the best books, and the best ones are predominately the ones that already exist, there is more than can be read, and new books have no compelling advantage over the classics." (Emphasis from the author.) The concluding sentence is an excellent summary of the article, although not the way it's meant to be: "I have started with common-sense grounds and wound up somewhere strange." In my experience, when people justify things with "common sense" they often mean unsubstantiated claims that they don't want to have to justify explicitly. If you start with "common-sense grounds" and end up somewhere strange, consider that maybe your starting assumptions are faulty!

autarch 12y ago
I think you may be misinterpreting "the best ones are predominately the ones that already exist" a bit. Most cultural production in any medium is forgettable. How many composers do you think were alive at the same time as Beethoven? Hundreds? Thousands? How many of them do we still listen to today? Tens, maybe less. Even more recently, let's take The Beatles and their contemporaries. Of course, The Beatles were not the only seminal artists of their time. They were active at the same time as David Bowie and The Rolling Stones. But again, how many of their contemporaries produced albums that are now forgotten by everyone who listened to them? How much of what's left even now will be gone in another 75 years, when basically everyone who was alive in the 60s is dead? The only difference between the 60s (or early 1800s) and now is that we haven't yet forgotten all the crap that is being put out today. Will future historians of pop music assign more than a footnote to Katie Perry or Taylor Swift 50 years from now? Will they even get a footnote? So the reason old art is the best art is simply that we've had time to weed out all the crap. The remaining art that we still remember is the best of what was released at the time. It's not the best because all old was better, it's the best because it's been better curated. In fact, for all we know, the overall proportion of art that is good might be even better today, but that doesn't change his proposition that we don't really need new art in order to experience great art for the rest of our lives.

davidgerard 12y ago

I nicked the title for this essay: http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-aesthetics-punk-rock-is-now-enforced-by-law/ http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-aesthe... Culture is not primarily about aesthetics: it's about monkeys' mutual grooming. It's about aesthetics after the piece of culture has fulfilled subcultural needs. Is your typical metalhead going to choose an exquisite harp symphony over a pretty-good slab of loud metally rock'n'roll? Probably not.

wpietri 12y ago
You're normally so sharp about deflating dodgy ideas that I'm surprised to see you say this. As I read it, you and Gwern seem to assume that a) there is an objective "best" measure for art, and b) the purpose of experiencing art is is to consume "best" art. I don't think either of those are true. I agree there's a status component to things, but we're monkeys; there's a status component to everything. (If I avoided everything where status behavior was an important driver, I'd have to stop typing right now; open-source software is filled with it.) Culture, being the summation of everything we talk about, is "about" a lot of things. Really, it's about everything. Sure, everything social that we do is socially mediated, and therefore has status components. But to say that's what it's primarily about is to me like saying that all of marine biology is really about water. Sure, it's there, and sure, anything you point at is related to seawater. But saying it's all about seawater strikes me as a rhetorical technique used to dismiss something, not a serious analysis.
- davidgerard 12y ago
  Oh, it's totally all mixed up. It's intersubjective, which means you can sorta rank stuff but not really. However, I do think culture is primarily about culture, i.e. mutual grooming and good feelings with our fellow monkeys. I speak here as a superannuated rock journalist with a ridiculously large record collection.