Recently we’ve gotten into discussions about artistic taste (see comments to AI Art Turing Test and From Bauhaus To Our House).

This is a bit mysterious. Most 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.

But most of these people aren’t Platonists - they don’t believe that aesthetics are an objective good determined by God. So what does it mean to say that someone else is wrong?

Most of the comments discussion devolved into analogies. Here are some that I find especially helpful:

A. Taste Is Like Physics

Okay, fine, maybe it is an objective good determined by God. Just as non-physicists may have plausible but false folk theories of physics (“atoms are like little billiard balls, right?”) but real physicists know better, so rubes may have bad taste, but professional artists know what is actually tasteful.

This one would be pretty mysterious - we know physics is referring to the real nature of matter and energy and so on, but what is taste referring to?

Perhaps a less fraught version of this would avoid talk of objective aesthetics in favor of talking about human universals - for example, people seem to prefer symmetry for various reasons, and even if they didn’t, symmetry has a certain mathematical elegance even separate from its aesthetic appeal. If there were lots of things like this, maybe this could be a foundation for taste.

But the whole mystery is that taste isn’t universal. It seems perverse to dismiss the sort of art untrained people like, proclaim other art which most people hate to be better, then plead that you’re basing your judgment in “human universals”.

B. Taste Is Like A Priesthood

Hindu priests have a deep and complex system of ritual purity. X food can only be eaten at Y time unless it has touched a member of Z caste or been purified using P product and Q blessing, unless . . . (and so on).

Uneducated Hindus don’t understand this system and may make mistakes. Sophisticated priests understand the system very well, and they all agree on what the rules are. The system is self-consistent and evolves in a rational way (ie when confronted with a new problem that no Hindu had ever considered before, like the purity laws around New World products, priests will extend existing laws in a reasonable way, and all priests will agree about how to do this). Priests probably feel a visceral sense of disgust or violation when they see someone eat a taboo food or prepare a ritual the wrong way.

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.

C. Taste Is Like A Priesthood, But With A Fig Leaf Of Semi-Fake Justifications

This makes the most sense to me when I think of fashion.

Fashion is a set of rules, like “don’t wear white after Labor Day”. Why shouldn’t you wear white after Labor Day? Google tells me that it’s because in the old days, it was hard to keep white clothes clean in the autumn, so if you wore them anyway, it seemed like boasting that you could afford a staff of hard-working maids, and boasting is uncultured. This sort of kind of makes sense. But I find it hard to believe that people were ever really going around deeply offended at other people’s implied braggadocio when they wore a white shirt in late September. It seems more like the sort of thing someone came up with as a clever rule that could sort of be justified, and then announced, to great fanfare in a fashion column. Presumably that person was important enough that other people listened, and then afterwards anyone who saw someone wear white after Labor Day had an instinctive cringe reaction: “Wow, what a faux pas”.

What about more basic rules, like “don’t wear white socks with black shoes”? Google says this is because it creates a “visually jarring look”. I can sort of see this. But I also think that less than 1% of people who had never heard this rule, if they saw someone wearing white socks with black shoes, would think “That’s visually jarring”, in a way that they wouldn’t think with some other acceptable combination like a white shirt and black tie (which a priori should be exactly equally jarring, but which is considered classy). I certainly don’t expect that this is such a natural feature of human perception that eg China, India, and the Aztecs all independently invented this rule where white socks + black shoes were bad but white shirt + black tie is great. I think a couple very sensitive people were jarred once, made this rule, gave a vaguely reasonable-sounding explanation, and then it actually became jarring because people knew you weren’t not supposed to do it.

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.

We saw this in our discussion of architecture too. Someone proposed that if you need to have fake shutters as ornament on your windows, they must be the right size to actually shutter your windows, otherwise it’s tacky and unrealistic. Most people said they’d never thought about this before and didn’t care, but - fine - I agree if you think about it really hard, there’s some sort of extremely vague sense in which this resembles being true, the same sort of vague fake sense where it makes sense that you shouldn’t wear white after Labor Day. Get enough people like this together, and if they all agree it’s true, then if you use the wrong kind of shutters you’re “not sophisticated” and “don’t really understand architecture”.

D. As Above, Except The Justifications Are Good And Important

I should probably explain why I’m skipping this one. It’s the same reason - if the facts were obvious to everyone, then taste would be universal, not limited to a few sophisticates.

Still, there are ways to rescue this. You could say they’re 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.

E. Taste Is Like BDSM Porn

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.

F. Taste Is Like Fashion (Derogatory)

We talked about actual clothes fashion above, but what about the fashion cycle more generally? Every so often, somebody says that red is now the stylish color, and everyone has to wear red. The next year, it’s blue, and if you wear red you’re the world’s biggest loser.

Back in 2014, I wrote about a theory of the fashion cycle. Cool people want to show everyone else they’re cool. But uncool people want to pretend to be cool. We assume that cool people are mostly friends with other cool people, and that coolness radiates outward along the social graph. So the cool people pick a signifier, at first only other cool people know it, and over a few months it gradually radiates to the less cool people, the uncool people, the very uncool people, and finally, years later, me. Then the cool people pick a different signifier and the process begins again.

The signifier may or may not actually be good in any way. In fact, it helps if it isn’t - ripped jeans work great - because cool people get to show their confidence by wearing something that would look stupid on anyone else, and uncool people hesitate to adopt it since they worry they would actually look stupid.

Different groups of cool people then signal allegiance (and lack of subordination to the original group of cool people) by coming up with signifiers of their own. These signifiers should preferably be opaque and complicated, to make it as hard as possible for the uncool people to copy them without being immersed in cool people culture.

G. Taste Is Like Grammar

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 (eg “I ain’t be going”).

Even though in some sense grammar is about agreeing on a set of rules for easy communication, some people are more sophisticated than others and “know” that the majority way of speaking is wrong. My former English teacher spent her life waiting for someone to ask “Is Mrs. So-And-So here?” so that she could answer “I am she!” and follow it with an explanation of why the natural instinct to say “I am her” was “wrong”. This particular rule has a sort of rational explanation - the copula takes the nominative case. But when you get into why the copula takes the nominative case, it’s hard to tell whether this is a natural fact about the definition of cases, or whether Latin-obsessed grammarians unfairly demanded that Anglophones follow the Latin usage. Other examples are more clearly inappropriate extensions from the Latin - for example, you originally couldn’t split an infinitive in English because doing so was impossible in Latin, and only later did people develop a “sense” that this “sounded wrong”.

So the sophisticates do have reasons behind what they do - but the reasons are arbitrary and kind of stupid. Still, if you do it the wrong way, they’ll laugh at you. Most people don’t want to be laughed at by sophisticated people, and we summarize this situation as “it’s bad grammar, but only grammarians are sophisticated enough to realize this.”

I think this is just the “Priesthood With Semi-Fake Justifications” story again, but it helped me understand it better and get a more visceral feel.

Which Of These Is True?

In the comments, I’ve argued that we should mostly be suspicious of taste, for a few reasons:

1. Taste seems to constantly change. In 1930, all the sophisticated people said that Beaux-Arts architecture was very tasteful. In 1950, everyone would laugh at you if you built Beaux-Arts; everyone with good taste was into International Style. This is very suspicious! Human universals don’t change that fast! Rules about what is vs. isn’t “jarring” don’t change that fast! Only fashion changes that fast!

2. Even very sophisticated people seem to disagree about taste. Many architects hate each others’ buildings; many artists hate each others’ paintings. And not just a little! They call them barbaric and immoral! This seems more like fashion - where preppies and Goths and whoever else battle it out - as opposed to anything based on real timeless aesthetic truths.

3. When we see how the sausage gets made, it often involves politics or power struggles. For example, the principles of modern architecture were decided by socialists arguing about whose style seemed more “bourgeois”. Now capitalists who normally wouldn’t dream of caring what socialists thought call the winners of those fights “tasteful” and the losers “kitsch”, and claim to feel this viscerally in their bones. This suggests that taste is downstream of who wins non-taste-related fights, which suggest it’s more about a Schelling point (ie parroting received opinion) than about having some particular virtue.

4. The few scientific experiments we have - hoaxes, blind tests, etc - are not very kind to taste as a concept. Consider eg the Ern Malley hoax, my article about wine appreciation, and the AI Art Turing Test.

5. The strongest argument for the reality of taste is the visceral feeling of violation that some people get upon seeing tasteless work, but I think the Grammar analogy demonstrates that this can happen even when standards are made up. You could even make a Trapped Prior analogy here - once people start feeling a minor zap of dissonance at a violation, this retroactively justifies the system and perpetuates the minor zap of dissonance

I think all of these analogies have merit, but these considerations make me most sympathetic to Priesthood With Semi-Fake Justifications.