(2024-12-18) Zvim A Matter Of Taste

Zvi Mowshowitz: A Matter of Taste. In light of other recent discussions, Scott Alexander recently attempted a unified theory of taste, proposing several hypotheses. Is it like physics, a priesthood, a priesthood with fake justifications, a priesthood with good justifications, like increasingly bizarre porn preferences, like fashion (in the sense of trying to stay one step ahead in an endless cycling for signaling purposes), or like grammar?

My answer is that taste is all of these, depending on context.

Taste is Most Centrally Like Grammar

Scott Alexander is very suspicious of taste in general, since people keep changing what is good taste and calling each other barbarians for taste reasons, and the experiments are unkind, and the actual arguments about taste look like power struggles.

He points to one key aspect of grammar, which is that you can have different internally consistent grammars, and they are all valid in their own way, but within each you need to follow their logic and spirit, and there is better and worse Quality.
Languages also work this way overall. Or cuisines. So do artistic styles.

Sometimes ‘Taste’ Is Out to Get You

as we saw in From Bauhaus To Our House, sometimes the underlying logic from which taste is being drawn is, as in modern architecture, a literal socialist conspiracy intended to make our lives worse, with a competition to see who can convince more people to suffer more.

You Are Low Quality and You Have No Taste

Thus, ‘having no taste’ can mean any combination of these (with some overlap): (List of 8)

Don’t Be a Snob

Good as in Useful

What is going on with AI art? It’s not good as in taste. But it’s good as in pretty.
And for a lot of people, that’s what they want.

Critic Tells Me I Have No Taste

We also have Frank Lantz contra Scott on taste. It’s quite something to see your past self quoted like this:
Frank Lantz: Art skepticism seems to be a common stance among a lot of rationalist and rationalist-adjacent thinkers. This general attitude ranges from Scott’s sincere attempt to carefully think through his skepticism (he followed up his AI art quiz with a post about modern architecture and a discussion of artistic taste) to Zvi Mowshowitz proudly declaring he would never set foot inside the MoMa and bluntly proclaiming that “an entire culture is being defrauded by aesthetics”.

While I stand by my statements there, and I still wouldn’t set foot in the MoMa, and you can see above what I think about modern architecture regarding From Bauhaus To Our House, that doesn’t mean I am against art or appreciating art, in general.

Lantz’s most important contribution to this discussion, as I see it, is to point out that art and taste are largely in response to the desire to avoid the boring and predictable and what has already been done while also matching expectations

And I think all of that really is legitimate, and investing in understanding that context can pay off

There’s an elegant, important dance going on there.
Sometimes.

Other times, taste is functionally being fashion, or it is being a priesthood, and for Modern Art I strongly suspect it’s best classified (in Scott’s taxonomy) as bizarre porn, except in a bad way and as buildings displayed on the street.

I’m going to double down that most - not all, but most - of all this modern ‘conceptual art’ is rather bogus and masterbatory, and mostly a scam or a status game

Or, I’m not the one who doesn’t care about aesthetics, you’re the one who doesn’t care about aesthetics, and you’re gaslighting the rest of us.
You’re pretending to do grammar when you’re obviously doing something else.

I’m not skeptical of art. I’m skeptical of your particular art, which happens to be the dominant thing called ‘Art’ in some circles. Whereas the people I think of as ‘artists’ today that I admire tend to work with video, or audio, or games, or text, or make visual art within one of those contexts that the capital-A Art World would scoff at.

Yes, the AI poem most liked in the AI poetry study is horrible slop, and I don’t think you need problematic assumptions to explain why

And in other places, like the stuff Sarah Constantin is describing in Naming the Nameless

they are weaponizing a certain kind of aesthetics as a form of, essentially, fraud and associative vibe-based marketing and attempt to control people’s perceptions of things like ‘cool’ in ways that falsify their true preferences, for reasons political, personal and commercial

Being Technically In Good Taste Is Not a Free Pass

I also think there’s an implicit claim that if you are in good enough taste, enough ‘part of a project,’ then you don’t have to be accessible, you don’t have to stand outside the ‘project,’ and you don’t have to have aesthetic or other value absent your place in that project. (scene)

I think that’s very wrong. Doing all of that is also part of your job as an artist and creator.

As a writer, I have to continuously strike the balance of accessibility versus repetition, of knowing people don’t read these posts in any particular order.

It Is Good To Like and Appreciate Things

This concept seems important:
If you pay close attention to how your own taste operates, you can sometimes catch yourself deciding to like a thing.

But you can’t make yourself like something. Often, your existing preferences, as they already are, stubbornly refuse to budge. And sometimes they don’t.
If you pay close attention to this process, you will eventually see this as the terrain of artistic taste.

I attempt to like things all the time. Ceteris paribus, I would prefer to like as many things (and people!) as possible, while keeping them in proper rank order

I went far enough down the rabbit hole to find this:
Frank Lantz: Wow, I just realized that in the comments to that post, Zvi actually makes the following comment: “The post is explaining why she and an entire culture is being defrauded by aesthetics. That is it used to justify all sorts of things, including high prices and what is cool, based on things that have no underlying value.”
So this attitude I thought was more implicit is actually a deliberate, considered position. I find that kind of exciting, honestly. How would I go about convincing Zvi to change his mind on this question?

*what exactly it is that you might want to change my mind about?
Convince me, essentially, that there is a worthwhile and Platonic there there.

If Lantz wants to take a crack at convincing me, maybe even in person in NYC (and potentially even literally at MoMa), I’d be down, on the theory that given story value it’s hard for that to be an unsuccessful failure.