This is really great and resonates with my experience of music. I've described it as sometimes being intense and psychedelic, like waves of intensity flowing through my entire body, and sometimes I get sad about not being able to share that experience with anyone, but it's meaningful on its own anyway.
Your post reminds me J.S. Mill's arguments for qualitative differences in pleasure in "Utilitarianism." I'm skeptical of the argument in your post for similar reasons that I am skeptical that Mill's argument really works.
Mill says that Good A is "qualitatively better" than Good B if all or almost all individuals who are experienced with both goods would choose Good A over any quantity of Good B, independent of any feeling of obligation towards either choice. (He is arguing against Bentham, who claimed that all goods are comparable (and can be reduced to pleasure), famously saying "if the quantity of pleasure be the same, pushpin [children's game] is as good as poetry.")
For example, Mill argues no human would give up their life for that of the most pampered pig. Hence, “enjoyment of human cognitive faculties” is qualitatively superior to “pig pleasures.” He says that if the pig disagrees, this owes only to its ignorance of the alternative.
Mill recognizes that people regularly choose lower pleasures over higher ones (a problem for his view). However, Mill argues that all such instances occur out of akrasia, and those who choose lower pleasures over higher never do so willingly. (He compares a love for the arts to a tender plant that can easily die, but which no one would willingly let perish.)
I think this defense doesn't work. First, though humans may not prefer to be pigs, it is a non-sequitur to conclude that pig existence is therefore less “pleasurable.” Mill must argue further that humans could not prefer something that does not maximize pleasure.
Worse, even well-educated individuals who have experienced the joys of intellectual pursuits and liberty regularly reject them in favor of hedonistic or materialistic pleasures. If Mill intends to dismiss these widespread choices as unwillingly made, and thus irrelevant in the calculus of qualitative pleasure determination, Mill must answer in what sense they are “unwilling” (evidently they are not *coerced*). I do not think he can provide a good reply; yet, without an independent explanation of which choices are made willingly, Mill is simply inconsistently applying his criterion of recourse to human preference for determining qualitative difference in pleasure.
Along these lines I'm skeptical that it really makes sense to say that people who appreciate great art (say, reading Hamlet) are really experiencing greater pleasure than people watching WWE.
The most mundane reply seems to me to be to say that people are value pluralists, and value more than just pleasure. Drinking or playing video games might be more pleasurable than reading Hamlet, but I'll read Hamlet anyway because I think it reveals profound truths about human life, and (as a very weak statement) I prefer spending some time learning deep truths about human life over spending all of my time on pleasure.
A more interesting line that I'm open to is that reading Hamlet can be a transformative experience, a la LA Paul (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_Experience). That is, it is hard to imagine before reading Hamlet really what it will be like, and it is hard to reason about the decision because it is likely to change your values. There are elements of this idea in your CS Lewis quote.
I think that reading Hamlet is a lot like having children. Adults with minor children in the house report lower moment to moment happiness, and plausibly less "pleasure" than nonparents. However, parents report that they believe their lives are better along dimensions other than moment-to-moment happiness (e.g. more meaning / purpose), which supports my argument that people are value pluralists. Furthermore, having children drastically changes your values (both from interviews and MRIs, which show that having kids changes fathers' brains), and is a classic example of a "transformative experience."
Very tempted now to write something like this but for video games, +/- to wonder if I can tease out whether there's a sort of generic taste gentrification going on there in real time (or has maybe already come and gone).
Also, I wonder if there's some sense in which "taste" as we're using it here is a subset of the kind of generalized "passion" element that I've written about before as an aspect of the "getting gud" duality of innate talent + conspicuous passion. Maybe not; I can't say I'm getting quite the same transcendent pleasure that you seem to be describing from my corresponding hobby.
Think I just realized that linking to it without being more clear that I was referring to the part on "passion" in the middle (as a sort of innate, compelling force) kind of makes it sound like I thought you were trying to describe enjoying literature as a competitive pursuit.
Though now that I say that I think you've made that joke before because I think I replied to it on twitter with the Monty Python Summarizing Proust Competition sketch.
Please let me know if you do end up writing about taste in video games. It's something that fascinates me and isn't written about much vs other artistic media.
I agree with your premise. I went to film school, extensively studied fiction (and write privately for pleasure), spent more than a decade under a self-imposed mandate to see every movie released to theaters in my region (admittedly I let myself out of The Barney Movie), and have sampled, if not fully consumed, most of Prestige TV. Or at least, more than anyone else I have ever met.
And I'm always consuming storytelling media on two levels:
1. What's going to happen next / empathizing with the characters.
2. "I see what you did there, Person Who Created This."
That second level feels like watching a live performance, like dance. I'm observing the chief storyteller's artistic choices moment to moment; story setups and payoffs, how the art direction supports the story beats, how the mood is maintained, how the editing lingers or cuts away from actors, etc. When I'm deeply moved by a work, I'm moved both because the story is satisfying, and because, against all the odds working against them, *the storyteller didn't fuck it up.* Great movies and TV leave me feeling profoundly grateful to the process itself.
Most audiences, uh, apparently don't consume media that way. And I find it a little hard to believe that a fellow audience member in a movie theater who only experiences storytelling on the #1 level could be experiencing the scope of pleasure I'm feeling experiencing the same story on both the #1 *and* #2 levels.
This reminds me of Christopher Alexander ‘The nature of order’, which I think you will enjoy! To paraphrase, his core argument is - aesthetic & beauty is real & tangible, what is beautiful is what is whole, and direct us to be connected to the world, to ourselves in the process. taste is both the ability to recognize & create that connectedness. He also outlines the 15 principles of life that all beautiful works follow - which might explain why the first image does not draw people in as much as the second - so there is at least some underlying patterns to what we consider as taste, even if we don’t always recognize or articulate it.
Great article btw! Agree with it on multiple fronts
Having a direct, aesthetically pleasurable experience induced by this post. Taste has been discussed much around me in the last quarter; nowhere nearby have its character and value been dissected as well as they have been here.
This is a great post and I probably have a lot of things to say about it, but I’ll just say that I really really loved the hell out of UNSONG
and it has fuck all to do with agreeing with Scott
I read a lot, but I probably don’t experience it as deeply as you do. I sure as hell have never had a psychedelic experience with a book and I wish it was more frequent that I just couldn’t put a book down, but it’s not that frequent, but it does happen. And it happened with UNSONG
this is really good and reminds me of kettle's yard, a house in the UK preserved as a museum whose owner obsessively placed every object so as to create a sense of composition from every perspective. it is undeniably pleasurable and even spiritually fulfilling to walk through the house
i totally disagree with the porn analogy. i think aesthetic pleasure is of the sensual pleasures the most immune to the hedonism treadmill. like, the first book i read by myself was the brother's grimm collected fairytales--i still reread it and enjoy it, it didn't lose its freshness or start feeling cliche. "news that stays news."
i think to the degree that the bdsm analogy happens, its bc people who have some natural taste get into jobs where they have to evaluate things--publishing companies, reviewing books etc--so they get put into contact w much much more bad work than normal people are ever likely to see, and that degraded their taste & makes it worse--not by making them like the bad work more but by making them repelled from some features of their art that are common in bad work not because those features are bad in themselves but just because they're common in general
Yeah, just like I could watch some of my first movies or first books. But if I would find something similar but new - I would probably find it too safe
im not totally sure what you're saying--but if youre saying you dont reread or rewatch much--personally a main indicator of whether something is "in good taste" is whether people reread/rewatch it & find novel goodness every time to pay attention to--whether it stands up to continued attention
I wonder how you would apply this perspective to architecture, which was the topic that motivated Scott's post. Obviously, architecture needs to serve a practical purpose: people need to live/work in the buildings, which comes with several requirements. So, how do we appreciate a building "as a thing-in-itself"? Do we somehow take into account how well the building serves those purposes, or is that "a value beyond itself"? Does that imply aesthetic value trades-off against "use-value" in architecture?
the kinda funny thing about this q is that the architects scott didnt like were the ones who talked too much about function & didnt wanna do additional ornament
I wonder whether there is a certain "aesthetic hedonic treadmill" effect that also causes an increasing divergence between normal people and people who consume a lot of art, beyond just the different capability for feeling instantaneous aesthetic pleasure. While the larger instantaneous capacity for aesthetic pleasure is what brings you to art more often and for longer, I think the total accumulated time you spend with the art itself also makes a direct difference. That is, the more you dive into art and refine your taste, the bigger the gap becomes.
When you see a lot of art in some genre, you get very sensitive to the patterns that occur frequently in that genre, and so they have a tendency to become fairly predictable. You brain effectively learns them. But an object of beauty must always straddle in that fine-tuned zone of surprise and predictability, and so beauty is degraded. However, since you have now sharpened your brain's pattern recognition abilities, you can progress to new artworks with more complex patterns which earlier were not quite digestible enough for you. In that way, we get tiers of art, where certain tiers are only accessible if you have a sufficient capability for decoding the relevant complexities. That capability is influenced both by exposure and by genetics.
This is matches my experience of penetrating a new genre in music. As I enter a new genre, certain bands that people say are great doesn't quite work for me. A couple of years in, however, I came around. And that the stuff I listened to in the beginning isn't nearly that good anymore.
the perfume critic tania sanchez writes tjis about perfume & i think it might be true in other arts:
"Since then I have met scores of fellow perfume fanatics, and I believe I can sketch out a brief trajectory of the path many of us take when we come to perfume. I admit this archetypal pattern is not, perhaps, accurate in all or even most cases, but as you may find yourself or someone you love in it, I include it here.
Stage 1: Mother’s bathroom.
Early adventures splashing on Mom’s Shalimar/No. 5/Miss Dior/Tabu/Your-Memory-Here with the bathroom door shut. Belief that Old Spice/Brut/English Leather is the natural odor that God has caused fathers to emit after shaving.
Stage 2: Ambition and naïveté.
Either given a perfume by an adult or inspired to buy one at puberty: a sophisticated thing that embodies an unknown world of adult pleasures and/or a cheerful cheap spray to wear happily by the gallon.
Stage 3: Flowers and candy.
Phase of belief that feminine perfumes should smell flowery or candy-like and that everything else is an incomprehensible perversion.
Stage 4: First love.
Encounter with moving greatness. Wonder and awe. Monogamy.
Stage 5: Decadence.
An ideology of taste, either of the heavy-handed or of the barely there. The age of leathers, patchoulis, tobaccos, ambers; or, alternately, the age of pale watercolors in vegetal shades. An obsession with the hard-to-find.
Stage 6: Enlightenment.
Absence of ideology. Distrust of the overelaborate, overexpensive, and arcane. Satisfaction in things in themselves."
for me personally i still extremely enjoy the like grimm's fairy tales etc that were the first thing i read as a kid, i feel like its very possible to continue or return to pleasure in simplicity (if the thing is actually actually good in the first place)
glad you enjoyed it! Glad I recently discovered your Substack, much enjoying it so far. I think you convinced me I ought to read that C.S. Lewis book. It on the reading list (sigh) atleast.
Ahh, that's a nice one I didn't have any insight into myself! I never got into perfumes, but every time I smell them in a store I am reminded that I totally understand how people can get into it. Anyway, such archetypical progressions are probably quite real most aesthetical domains. Happy to have gotten insight into the perfume one!
I definitely take your point on fairly tales. It shows that there certainly are asterisks to the mechanism I outlined. One of the asterisks clearly should have the headline "nostalgia", which I realized haven't thought very much about - I should!
Somehow the words "aesthetic core memory" keep showing up in my head, but I don't know how to say anything intelligent. Beyond nostalgia, its clear we do not completely loose our appreciation for simplicity, even when we don't have nostalgia to help us out. I can't quite settle my mind on this, but sometimes I also think that some good pieces that superficially seem simple really aren't so simple, in that they perhaps perfectly executed along the few dimensions that the art is playing with. And that sure, maybe it didn't play with unusual patterns, and maybe it didn't use a whole lot of them, but for those patterns that the art work it did play with, it was executed at a rarely high level. And perhaps Grimm's fairy tales are like that. Sorry for the rant :)
i think you're right about really well executed simplicity
but idt my liking for really perfect children's stories is necessarily about nostalgia. i'll sometimes read a children's story ive never read before & feel the same way
I can see the argument that if people consume more of something, they presumably enjoy it more than people who don't. Thus, when it comes to movies, people who watch every movie that comes out without earning any money from it presumably enjoy it more than professional critics. And the people who eat the most enjoy food the most.
perhaps obviously, i wouldnt say that, & my essay is bad insofar as it allows for that reading. in a lot of cases ppl who consume the most food obviously enjoy it the least--crave it the most & are the least satisfied w it
wrt movies--i would say people who are most likely to rewatch things enjoy movies the most, & people who only enjoy first watches & say like "i wish i could watch it again for the first tkme" dont like the movies, they like novelty
I would not agree on food. Remaining hungry doesn't mean you didn't enjoy the food you ate. And people who claim to be full will often find more room when informed there is dessert!
I am one of those people who rarely rewatch movies (although as a child I would have rewatched the same VHS tapes repeatedly). In my view there are so many more films I haven't seen yet vs films I have, and I know there's diminishing marginal returns. But part of that is the distinction Kahneman makes between experiencing something and having experienced it in the past. I read writing on film and listen to podcasts about it, and having seen the particular films being discussed complements that, even if in isolation rewatching Hundreds of Beavers would probably be more enjoyable than the vast majority of new watches.
i think really good movies have so much goodness that one can get more goodness, & even more novel goodness, from rewatching a good movie than from watching a new, mid movie
I've rewatched films, even very good ones, and haven't been surprised. I guess I was surprised that I still greatly disliked The Thin Red Line after disliking it as a youth and liking some of Malick's other films (like Badlands & Tree of Life).
Congrats, your text got a shout-out by Tyler Cowen! - Though I kinda agree with your main point*, the readership should be informed that Scott had mainly architecture in mind. An art/fashion not enjoyed in private, but pushed into the eyes and lives of all. As if we all were forced to listen to Stockhausen`s atonal pieces in supermarkets, metros, elevators ... . Arts that are privately consumed - novels, poems, even most visual art - were not considered. And with those arts the clergy of taste is preaching to its own.
Personally, I am not sure, Colleen Hoover lets her readers untouched. Too much kissing for me, but at least the Dickens of our times. Does Cervantes move his readers more deeply? Also: I see why that psychedelic pic is "kitsch", but why Hildegard`s illustration should touch one so much deeper - if it were not 900 years old, by an outstanding individual: nice colors. Those journals about celebs/royals - I read some, and I do agree, this is worthless waste of pulp. *Still, if
"The strongest argument for the reality of taste is the deep pleasure that some people get upon seeing beautiful work." - you must be very sure, there are no people getting deep pleasure from what-you-and-me-do-NOT-consider-´beautiful work`. My impression is, there are.
i know there are lots of people getting deep pleasure from things i can't. i think i'm genuinely missing out on something. i try to expand my taste when i can
w the architecture, i just don't consider that architects who can't enjoy circles on a concrete building have good taste. if an architect today can't enjoy the notre dame as much as its architects did, then the contemporary architect is the person missing something, not me.
i do have some thoughts on elite-specific bad taste & how it happens (that isn't just literally status signalling and fashion cycles--i think like robin hanson has already covered all that ground--but sincere errors of taste, or taste being degraded in predictable ways by being put in a tastemaker role & thus having to come into contact w a lot of bad work. seeing if i can write it up
also holy shit colleen hoover is absolutely not the dickens of our times jesus. like, dickens is enjoyable the way that hoover is enjoyable (which some people dismiss him for, being enjoyable in that way) but he is also enjoyable in ways that hoover is not. like the people who like colleen hoover, when you talk to them about it, it's very clear that they aren't paying that much attention to the books. which, there's no there there to pay attention to. that doesn't make them bad people, but in fact no one is deeply moved by hoover's structural balance, language choices, etc
"why Hildegard's illustration should touch one so much deeper"--i don't know the why, but in fact it is capable of being paid attention to. i'm not that good at understanding and enjoying visual art, but like, it's easy to find evidence of people paying attention to the actual images that the abbess made in a way you find zero evidence of people paying attn to the mask pic
Glad, you and me and Scott can agree on architecture. ;) For most of his readers, Dickens was enjoyable for the very same reasons Hoover is, wikipedia: "Reflecting on Hoover's success in 2022, Alexandra Alter of The New York Times wrote, "To say she's currently the best-selling novelist in the United States, to even compare her to other successful authors who have landed several books on the best seller lists, fails to capture the size and loyalty of her audience."" - I read less novels than I used too (there is ACX, Hoel, Kriss ...), finished one Dickens (Copperfield, very nice, though English is obviously not my first language), see no reason to pick up another; I dropped Hoover after 40 pages (first page was great, though); Knausgaard is great, Ferrante seems "Meh".
Anyone was "deeply moved by Dicken's structural balance, language choices" - nope, it is the story, well told. And if ones tries really hard, one will find "structural balance, language choices" in Hoover, too. Her readers are awed by the plot, though. See Scotts text https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/17/the-goddess-of-everything-else-2/ Yep, it is in dactyls: "I've never understood why people think English is bad for dactyls. I really like them and wrote a piece entirely in dactyls once to see what would happen" But the readers say: "WOW this has made me think of that post in a new light. Read it at least four times and had no clue."
Scott Alexander 7. Nov. 2023
Many people have said this! I'm torn between "I guess I wasted my time doing this" and "people seemed to find it beautiful, and I wonder if it's because subconsciously they noticed it was poetry even if they couldn't exactly put their finger on why." -
i was deeply moved by dickens structural balance (which isnt like different from the story) & language choices??? & i think that even if most of his readers didnt enjoy it on that level, the ones who do, probably account for most of the enjoyment.
no one will be reading hoover in 100 years--except, ironically, academics studying todays pop lit
How can we compare taste between genres? Who is better, Beethoven, or the Beatles? This has implications for whether we can truly call anything good or bad taste.
Comparing quality inside a genre is easy: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, etc. are pretty consistently ranked among the top classical composers.
But your definitions for good taste (capacity for deep aesthetic pleasure, rewards time with more enjoyment, exists in people with much more interest and pleasure in that art form) don't shed light here. Both lovers of Beethoven and the Beatles can be very interested in and get deep pleasure out of their art.
We can take this further to other "genres" of art, even considering art forms many consider bad taste: Modern pop music (Sabrina Carpenter, Taylor Swift), Harry Potter fanfiction, Cliche psychedelic images... each genre might have "good" and "bad" examples of it, where obsessives in that genre generally agree as to what is better and worse. One could put a lot of the burden on the term "deep" here to enable, arguing that Harry Potter fanfiction isn't deep, while The Beatles are. But I don't find this answer satisfying. What do we do?
Here is my solution: instead of gatekeeping taste, we should take your definition to the fullest, which is to realize that good taste exists even in areas like Harry Potter fanfiction and cliche psychedelic images. The tastefulness of music can't really be objectively compared between genres such as classical music and Taylor Swift.
True, there can be better and worse classical music, and better and worse Harry Potter fanfiction. There can be better and worse Mozart. But when you zoom out, it gets confusing because often what one might consider "bad taste" might actually just be satisfying the obsessive interest of someone with "different genre" taste.
Only when you understand this can you understand aesthetics. My mantra is "I can recognize good art, but I can never definitively say a given piece of art is bad." This is because I may not have the interest in the type of art the bad art is proposing. I can only argue why a given art is bad **for a certain purpose** — for example, Taylor Swift is bad for feeling a sublime sense of beauty, but Bach is bad as a soundtrack to a short story about love.
Now someone might argue for a "ladder of taste" (like Plato's "Ladder of love") where someone with a high interest in and the capacity for intense enjoyment of music might start with an obsession with Sabrina Carpenter, then move on to Taylor Swift, then Joni Mitchell, then John Fahey, then Bach, each time improving their overall taste. But I find these arguments hard to defend, given the equal interest and enjoyment of the earlier rungs of the ladder. Instead of calling the higher rungs of the ladder aesthetically superior, they are just different perspectives. For example, Derek "Die, Workwear" Guy is on a very high rung of fashion, but most of us would consider that "different" taste, and not necessarily relevant for our day to day fashion choices. Similarly, the "high taste handcrafted obsessive" chef knives aren't necessarily the best for the "Michelin star" chef knives. There can be "top rung" pop and classical music, but it doesn't always do well on the charts.
i mean, it seems really easy to compare taste between genres. ask the person what their experience of the stuff they enjoy is & see whether they seem to be paying continued, receptive attention to it or just vaguely liking it. if sthg is capable of creating a deep aesthetic experience, even if i dont get it, then im the one who's missing something.
im not interested in gatekeeping in the sense of making sure my taste is associated w elites. i find that depressing & alienating. but i am & always will be interested in gatekeeping in the "is this an A reader or a B reader" sense bc different things are happening!
This is really great and resonates with my experience of music. I've described it as sometimes being intense and psychedelic, like waves of intensity flowing through my entire body, and sometimes I get sad about not being able to share that experience with anyone, but it's meaningful on its own anyway.
What's a piece of music that's recently given you that intensity??
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98XRKr19jIE
Amonamonesia by Chairlift
Your post reminds me J.S. Mill's arguments for qualitative differences in pleasure in "Utilitarianism." I'm skeptical of the argument in your post for similar reasons that I am skeptical that Mill's argument really works.
Mill says that Good A is "qualitatively better" than Good B if all or almost all individuals who are experienced with both goods would choose Good A over any quantity of Good B, independent of any feeling of obligation towards either choice. (He is arguing against Bentham, who claimed that all goods are comparable (and can be reduced to pleasure), famously saying "if the quantity of pleasure be the same, pushpin [children's game] is as good as poetry.")
For example, Mill argues no human would give up their life for that of the most pampered pig. Hence, “enjoyment of human cognitive faculties” is qualitatively superior to “pig pleasures.” He says that if the pig disagrees, this owes only to its ignorance of the alternative.
Mill recognizes that people regularly choose lower pleasures over higher ones (a problem for his view). However, Mill argues that all such instances occur out of akrasia, and those who choose lower pleasures over higher never do so willingly. (He compares a love for the arts to a tender plant that can easily die, but which no one would willingly let perish.)
I think this defense doesn't work. First, though humans may not prefer to be pigs, it is a non-sequitur to conclude that pig existence is therefore less “pleasurable.” Mill must argue further that humans could not prefer something that does not maximize pleasure.
Worse, even well-educated individuals who have experienced the joys of intellectual pursuits and liberty regularly reject them in favor of hedonistic or materialistic pleasures. If Mill intends to dismiss these widespread choices as unwillingly made, and thus irrelevant in the calculus of qualitative pleasure determination, Mill must answer in what sense they are “unwilling” (evidently they are not *coerced*). I do not think he can provide a good reply; yet, without an independent explanation of which choices are made willingly, Mill is simply inconsistently applying his criterion of recourse to human preference for determining qualitative difference in pleasure.
Along these lines I'm skeptical that it really makes sense to say that people who appreciate great art (say, reading Hamlet) are really experiencing greater pleasure than people watching WWE.
The most mundane reply seems to me to be to say that people are value pluralists, and value more than just pleasure. Drinking or playing video games might be more pleasurable than reading Hamlet, but I'll read Hamlet anyway because I think it reveals profound truths about human life, and (as a very weak statement) I prefer spending some time learning deep truths about human life over spending all of my time on pleasure.
A more interesting line that I'm open to is that reading Hamlet can be a transformative experience, a la LA Paul (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_Experience). That is, it is hard to imagine before reading Hamlet really what it will be like, and it is hard to reason about the decision because it is likely to change your values. There are elements of this idea in your CS Lewis quote.
I think that reading Hamlet is a lot like having children. Adults with minor children in the house report lower moment to moment happiness, and plausibly less "pleasure" than nonparents. However, parents report that they believe their lives are better along dimensions other than moment-to-moment happiness (e.g. more meaning / purpose), which supports my argument that people are value pluralists. Furthermore, having children drastically changes your values (both from interviews and MRIs, which show that having kids changes fathers' brains), and is a classic example of a "transformative experience."
Love this blog post
Also the mask image
And the fact that you dislike the mask image so much
i could never stand "horrible lithographs of the Saviour (apparently seven feet high, with the face of a consumptive girl)" either
Very tempted now to write something like this but for video games, +/- to wonder if I can tease out whether there's a sort of generic taste gentrification going on there in real time (or has maybe already come and gone).
Also, I wonder if there's some sense in which "taste" as we're using it here is a subset of the kind of generalized "passion" element that I've written about before as an aspect of the "getting gud" duality of innate talent + conspicuous passion. Maybe not; I can't say I'm getting quite the same transcendent pleasure that you seem to be describing from my corresponding hobby.
Feels really gauche to be constantly linking my own writing in other people's comments but I'm curious if you find any resonance with https://scpantera.substack.com/p/the-skill-issue-issue
i don't totally understand your essay im sorry but your points about technical skill & taste both being functions of enjoyment seems right
Think I just realized that linking to it without being more clear that I was referring to the part on "passion" in the middle (as a sort of innate, compelling force) kind of makes it sound like I thought you were trying to describe enjoying literature as a competitive pursuit.
Though now that I say that I think you've made that joke before because I think I replied to it on twitter with the Monty Python Summarizing Proust Competition sketch.
Please let me know if you do end up writing about taste in video games. It's something that fascinates me and isn't written about much vs other artistic media.
Alright, so I wrote a thing: https://scpantera.substack.com/p/zeitgust
I kind of got sidetracked from describing more specifically what I think constitutes good taste in games but that might be for a follow-up later.
Did a follow-up with a lil more on games
https://scpantera.substack.com/p/more-on-taste-in-video-games
I agree with your premise. I went to film school, extensively studied fiction (and write privately for pleasure), spent more than a decade under a self-imposed mandate to see every movie released to theaters in my region (admittedly I let myself out of The Barney Movie), and have sampled, if not fully consumed, most of Prestige TV. Or at least, more than anyone else I have ever met.
And I'm always consuming storytelling media on two levels:
1. What's going to happen next / empathizing with the characters.
2. "I see what you did there, Person Who Created This."
That second level feels like watching a live performance, like dance. I'm observing the chief storyteller's artistic choices moment to moment; story setups and payoffs, how the art direction supports the story beats, how the mood is maintained, how the editing lingers or cuts away from actors, etc. When I'm deeply moved by a work, I'm moved both because the story is satisfying, and because, against all the odds working against them, *the storyteller didn't fuck it up.* Great movies and TV leave me feeling profoundly grateful to the process itself.
Most audiences, uh, apparently don't consume media that way. And I find it a little hard to believe that a fellow audience member in a movie theater who only experiences storytelling on the #1 level could be experiencing the scope of pleasure I'm feeling experiencing the same story on both the #1 *and* #2 levels.
This reminds me of Christopher Alexander ‘The nature of order’, which I think you will enjoy! To paraphrase, his core argument is - aesthetic & beauty is real & tangible, what is beautiful is what is whole, and direct us to be connected to the world, to ourselves in the process. taste is both the ability to recognize & create that connectedness. He also outlines the 15 principles of life that all beautiful works follow - which might explain why the first image does not draw people in as much as the second - so there is at least some underlying patterns to what we consider as taste, even if we don’t always recognize or articulate it.
Great article btw! Agree with it on multiple fronts
ooooh requested it from the library
Having a direct, aesthetically pleasurable experience induced by this post. Taste has been discussed much around me in the last quarter; nowhere nearby have its character and value been dissected as well as they have been here.
This is a great post and I probably have a lot of things to say about it, but I’ll just say that I really really loved the hell out of UNSONG
and it has fuck all to do with agreeing with Scott
I read a lot, but I probably don’t experience it as deeply as you do. I sure as hell have never had a psychedelic experience with a book and I wish it was more frequent that I just couldn’t put a book down, but it’s not that frequent, but it does happen. And it happened with UNSONG
this is really good and reminds me of kettle's yard, a house in the UK preserved as a museum whose owner obsessively placed every object so as to create a sense of composition from every perspective. it is undeniably pleasurable and even spiritually fulfilling to walk through the house
According to me:
Good taste is cultivating a love for beauty.
Good character is cultivating a love for virtue.
Good thinking is cultivating a love for truth.
A corollary of this is that the 20th century architect's hatred of ornament was a quintessential example of bad taste.
Not sure you disagree much. He just used porn analogy to make it sound less sophisticated
i totally disagree with the porn analogy. i think aesthetic pleasure is of the sensual pleasures the most immune to the hedonism treadmill. like, the first book i read by myself was the brother's grimm collected fairytales--i still reread it and enjoy it, it didn't lose its freshness or start feeling cliche. "news that stays news."
i think to the degree that the bdsm analogy happens, its bc people who have some natural taste get into jobs where they have to evaluate things--publishing companies, reviewing books etc--so they get put into contact w much much more bad work than normal people are ever likely to see, and that degraded their taste & makes it worse--not by making them like the bad work more but by making them repelled from some features of their art that are common in bad work not because those features are bad in themselves but just because they're common in general
Yeah, just like I could watch some of my first movies or first books. But if I would find something similar but new - I would probably find it too safe
im not totally sure what you're saying--but if youre saying you dont reread or rewatch much--personally a main indicator of whether something is "in good taste" is whether people reread/rewatch it & find novel goodness every time to pay attention to--whether it stands up to continued attention
I wonder how you would apply this perspective to architecture, which was the topic that motivated Scott's post. Obviously, architecture needs to serve a practical purpose: people need to live/work in the buildings, which comes with several requirements. So, how do we appreciate a building "as a thing-in-itself"? Do we somehow take into account how well the building serves those purposes, or is that "a value beyond itself"? Does that imply aesthetic value trades-off against "use-value" in architecture?
the kinda funny thing about this q is that the architects scott didnt like were the ones who talked too much about function & didnt wanna do additional ornament
Yeah, and they wanted to change people's desires on function too - annoying blinders, less individual rooms.
I wonder whether there is a certain "aesthetic hedonic treadmill" effect that also causes an increasing divergence between normal people and people who consume a lot of art, beyond just the different capability for feeling instantaneous aesthetic pleasure. While the larger instantaneous capacity for aesthetic pleasure is what brings you to art more often and for longer, I think the total accumulated time you spend with the art itself also makes a direct difference. That is, the more you dive into art and refine your taste, the bigger the gap becomes.
When you see a lot of art in some genre, you get very sensitive to the patterns that occur frequently in that genre, and so they have a tendency to become fairly predictable. You brain effectively learns them. But an object of beauty must always straddle in that fine-tuned zone of surprise and predictability, and so beauty is degraded. However, since you have now sharpened your brain's pattern recognition abilities, you can progress to new artworks with more complex patterns which earlier were not quite digestible enough for you. In that way, we get tiers of art, where certain tiers are only accessible if you have a sufficient capability for decoding the relevant complexities. That capability is influenced both by exposure and by genetics.
This is matches my experience of penetrating a new genre in music. As I enter a new genre, certain bands that people say are great doesn't quite work for me. A couple of years in, however, I came around. And that the stuff I listened to in the beginning isn't nearly that good anymore.
the perfume critic tania sanchez writes tjis about perfume & i think it might be true in other arts:
"Since then I have met scores of fellow perfume fanatics, and I believe I can sketch out a brief trajectory of the path many of us take when we come to perfume. I admit this archetypal pattern is not, perhaps, accurate in all or even most cases, but as you may find yourself or someone you love in it, I include it here.
Stage 1: Mother’s bathroom.
Early adventures splashing on Mom’s Shalimar/No. 5/Miss Dior/Tabu/Your-Memory-Here with the bathroom door shut. Belief that Old Spice/Brut/English Leather is the natural odor that God has caused fathers to emit after shaving.
Stage 2: Ambition and naïveté.
Either given a perfume by an adult or inspired to buy one at puberty: a sophisticated thing that embodies an unknown world of adult pleasures and/or a cheerful cheap spray to wear happily by the gallon.
Stage 3: Flowers and candy.
Phase of belief that feminine perfumes should smell flowery or candy-like and that everything else is an incomprehensible perversion.
Stage 4: First love.
Encounter with moving greatness. Wonder and awe. Monogamy.
Stage 5: Decadence.
An ideology of taste, either of the heavy-handed or of the barely there. The age of leathers, patchoulis, tobaccos, ambers; or, alternately, the age of pale watercolors in vegetal shades. An obsession with the hard-to-find.
Stage 6: Enlightenment.
Absence of ideology. Distrust of the overelaborate, overexpensive, and arcane. Satisfaction in things in themselves."
for me personally i still extremely enjoy the like grimm's fairy tales etc that were the first thing i read as a kid, i feel like its very possible to continue or return to pleasure in simplicity (if the thing is actually actually good in the first place)
i enjoyed your post about self expression a while back btw
glad you enjoyed it! Glad I recently discovered your Substack, much enjoying it so far. I think you convinced me I ought to read that C.S. Lewis book. It on the reading list (sigh) atleast.
Ahh, that's a nice one I didn't have any insight into myself! I never got into perfumes, but every time I smell them in a store I am reminded that I totally understand how people can get into it. Anyway, such archetypical progressions are probably quite real most aesthetical domains. Happy to have gotten insight into the perfume one!
I definitely take your point on fairly tales. It shows that there certainly are asterisks to the mechanism I outlined. One of the asterisks clearly should have the headline "nostalgia", which I realized haven't thought very much about - I should!
Somehow the words "aesthetic core memory" keep showing up in my head, but I don't know how to say anything intelligent. Beyond nostalgia, its clear we do not completely loose our appreciation for simplicity, even when we don't have nostalgia to help us out. I can't quite settle my mind on this, but sometimes I also think that some good pieces that superficially seem simple really aren't so simple, in that they perhaps perfectly executed along the few dimensions that the art is playing with. And that sure, maybe it didn't play with unusual patterns, and maybe it didn't use a whole lot of them, but for those patterns that the art work it did play with, it was executed at a rarely high level. And perhaps Grimm's fairy tales are like that. Sorry for the rant :)
i think you're right about really well executed simplicity
but idt my liking for really perfect children's stories is necessarily about nostalgia. i'll sometimes read a children's story ive never read before & feel the same way
I can see the argument that if people consume more of something, they presumably enjoy it more than people who don't. Thus, when it comes to movies, people who watch every movie that comes out without earning any money from it presumably enjoy it more than professional critics. And the people who eat the most enjoy food the most.
perhaps obviously, i wouldnt say that, & my essay is bad insofar as it allows for that reading. in a lot of cases ppl who consume the most food obviously enjoy it the least--crave it the most & are the least satisfied w it
wrt movies--i would say people who are most likely to rewatch things enjoy movies the most, & people who only enjoy first watches & say like "i wish i could watch it again for the first tkme" dont like the movies, they like novelty
I would not agree on food. Remaining hungry doesn't mean you didn't enjoy the food you ate. And people who claim to be full will often find more room when informed there is dessert!
I am one of those people who rarely rewatch movies (although as a child I would have rewatched the same VHS tapes repeatedly). In my view there are so many more films I haven't seen yet vs films I have, and I know there's diminishing marginal returns. But part of that is the distinction Kahneman makes between experiencing something and having experienced it in the past. I read writing on film and listen to podcasts about it, and having seen the particular films being discussed complements that, even if in isolation rewatching Hundreds of Beavers would probably be more enjoyable than the vast majority of new watches.
i think really good movies have so much goodness that one can get more goodness, & even more novel goodness, from rewatching a good movie than from watching a new, mid movie
Like I said, there are different kinds of goodness one gets from them.
if you havent tried rewatching a great great movie in a while then experimenting w rewatching may surprise you
I've rewatched films, even very good ones, and haven't been surprised. I guess I was surprised that I still greatly disliked The Thin Red Line after disliking it as a youth and liking some of Malick's other films (like Badlands & Tree of Life).
Congrats, your text got a shout-out by Tyler Cowen! - Though I kinda agree with your main point*, the readership should be informed that Scott had mainly architecture in mind. An art/fashion not enjoyed in private, but pushed into the eyes and lives of all. As if we all were forced to listen to Stockhausen`s atonal pieces in supermarkets, metros, elevators ... . Arts that are privately consumed - novels, poems, even most visual art - were not considered. And with those arts the clergy of taste is preaching to its own.
Personally, I am not sure, Colleen Hoover lets her readers untouched. Too much kissing for me, but at least the Dickens of our times. Does Cervantes move his readers more deeply? Also: I see why that psychedelic pic is "kitsch", but why Hildegard`s illustration should touch one so much deeper - if it were not 900 years old, by an outstanding individual: nice colors. Those journals about celebs/royals - I read some, and I do agree, this is worthless waste of pulp. *Still, if
"The strongest argument for the reality of taste is the deep pleasure that some people get upon seeing beautiful work." - you must be very sure, there are no people getting deep pleasure from what-you-and-me-do-NOT-consider-´beautiful work`. My impression is, there are.
🥳 i saw!
i know there are lots of people getting deep pleasure from things i can't. i think i'm genuinely missing out on something. i try to expand my taste when i can
w the architecture, i just don't consider that architects who can't enjoy circles on a concrete building have good taste. if an architect today can't enjoy the notre dame as much as its architects did, then the contemporary architect is the person missing something, not me.
i do have some thoughts on elite-specific bad taste & how it happens (that isn't just literally status signalling and fashion cycles--i think like robin hanson has already covered all that ground--but sincere errors of taste, or taste being degraded in predictable ways by being put in a tastemaker role & thus having to come into contact w a lot of bad work. seeing if i can write it up
also holy shit colleen hoover is absolutely not the dickens of our times jesus. like, dickens is enjoyable the way that hoover is enjoyable (which some people dismiss him for, being enjoyable in that way) but he is also enjoyable in ways that hoover is not. like the people who like colleen hoover, when you talk to them about it, it's very clear that they aren't paying that much attention to the books. which, there's no there there to pay attention to. that doesn't make them bad people, but in fact no one is deeply moved by hoover's structural balance, language choices, etc
"why Hildegard's illustration should touch one so much deeper"--i don't know the why, but in fact it is capable of being paid attention to. i'm not that good at understanding and enjoying visual art, but like, it's easy to find evidence of people paying attention to the actual images that the abbess made in a way you find zero evidence of people paying attn to the mask pic
Glad, you and me and Scott can agree on architecture. ;) For most of his readers, Dickens was enjoyable for the very same reasons Hoover is, wikipedia: "Reflecting on Hoover's success in 2022, Alexandra Alter of The New York Times wrote, "To say she's currently the best-selling novelist in the United States, to even compare her to other successful authors who have landed several books on the best seller lists, fails to capture the size and loyalty of her audience."" - I read less novels than I used too (there is ACX, Hoel, Kriss ...), finished one Dickens (Copperfield, very nice, though English is obviously not my first language), see no reason to pick up another; I dropped Hoover after 40 pages (first page was great, though); Knausgaard is great, Ferrante seems "Meh".
Anyone was "deeply moved by Dicken's structural balance, language choices" - nope, it is the story, well told. And if ones tries really hard, one will find "structural balance, language choices" in Hoover, too. Her readers are awed by the plot, though. See Scotts text https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/17/the-goddess-of-everything-else-2/ Yep, it is in dactyls: "I've never understood why people think English is bad for dactyls. I really like them and wrote a piece entirely in dactyls once to see what would happen" But the readers say: "WOW this has made me think of that post in a new light. Read it at least four times and had no clue."
Scott Alexander 7. Nov. 2023
Many people have said this! I'm torn between "I guess I wasted my time doing this" and "people seemed to find it beautiful, and I wonder if it's because subconsciously they noticed it was poetry even if they couldn't exactly put their finger on why." -
- I recommend the video-rendition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bbwp4PbWYzw
i was deeply moved by dickens structural balance (which isnt like different from the story) & language choices??? & i think that even if most of his readers didnt enjoy it on that level, the ones who do, probably account for most of the enjoyment.
no one will be reading hoover in 100 years--except, ironically, academics studying todays pop lit
How can we compare taste between genres? Who is better, Beethoven, or the Beatles? This has implications for whether we can truly call anything good or bad taste.
Comparing quality inside a genre is easy: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, etc. are pretty consistently ranked among the top classical composers.
But your definitions for good taste (capacity for deep aesthetic pleasure, rewards time with more enjoyment, exists in people with much more interest and pleasure in that art form) don't shed light here. Both lovers of Beethoven and the Beatles can be very interested in and get deep pleasure out of their art.
We can take this further to other "genres" of art, even considering art forms many consider bad taste: Modern pop music (Sabrina Carpenter, Taylor Swift), Harry Potter fanfiction, Cliche psychedelic images... each genre might have "good" and "bad" examples of it, where obsessives in that genre generally agree as to what is better and worse. One could put a lot of the burden on the term "deep" here to enable, arguing that Harry Potter fanfiction isn't deep, while The Beatles are. But I don't find this answer satisfying. What do we do?
Here is my solution: instead of gatekeeping taste, we should take your definition to the fullest, which is to realize that good taste exists even in areas like Harry Potter fanfiction and cliche psychedelic images. The tastefulness of music can't really be objectively compared between genres such as classical music and Taylor Swift.
True, there can be better and worse classical music, and better and worse Harry Potter fanfiction. There can be better and worse Mozart. But when you zoom out, it gets confusing because often what one might consider "bad taste" might actually just be satisfying the obsessive interest of someone with "different genre" taste.
Only when you understand this can you understand aesthetics. My mantra is "I can recognize good art, but I can never definitively say a given piece of art is bad." This is because I may not have the interest in the type of art the bad art is proposing. I can only argue why a given art is bad **for a certain purpose** — for example, Taylor Swift is bad for feeling a sublime sense of beauty, but Bach is bad as a soundtrack to a short story about love.
Now someone might argue for a "ladder of taste" (like Plato's "Ladder of love") where someone with a high interest in and the capacity for intense enjoyment of music might start with an obsession with Sabrina Carpenter, then move on to Taylor Swift, then Joni Mitchell, then John Fahey, then Bach, each time improving their overall taste. But I find these arguments hard to defend, given the equal interest and enjoyment of the earlier rungs of the ladder. Instead of calling the higher rungs of the ladder aesthetically superior, they are just different perspectives. For example, Derek "Die, Workwear" Guy is on a very high rung of fashion, but most of us would consider that "different" taste, and not necessarily relevant for our day to day fashion choices. Similarly, the "high taste handcrafted obsessive" chef knives aren't necessarily the best for the "Michelin star" chef knives. There can be "top rung" pop and classical music, but it doesn't always do well on the charts.
i mean, it seems really easy to compare taste between genres. ask the person what their experience of the stuff they enjoy is & see whether they seem to be paying continued, receptive attention to it or just vaguely liking it. if sthg is capable of creating a deep aesthetic experience, even if i dont get it, then im the one who's missing something.
im not interested in gatekeeping in the sense of making sure my taste is associated w elites. i find that depressing & alienating. but i am & always will be interested in gatekeeping in the "is this an A reader or a B reader" sense bc different things are happening!