Some Sincere Errors of Elite Taste

I’m sure you know the joke about the Soviet official who only reads American newspapers. “Our newspapers are too depressing. In their newspapers, we’re taking over the world!” The week-ish since my last piece has been unexpectedly delightful because people, even/especially people who disagree with me, keep calling my taste “elite” and “high status.” Unfortunately that reinforcement means you now get more of me talking about taste.¹

So the question that started this was, basically: “why do some people like what normal people dislike & dislike what normal people like, and why is that associated with status?” Last week I talked about the cases where the “few” are genuinely on to something, and the many are missing out. I think this is the most important part of the answer to this question, because it’s the most fruitful, it’s a path to good art. But obviously, “good taste is real” doesn’t cover every difference between elite taste and normie taste. Often the highbrows of a given era get into something that even other highbrows from other times would hate, and/or highbrows of a given era hate what highbrows from every other time are capable of enjoying. I’m personally willing to call these aberrations “bad taste” even if it’s cultural elites doing it. Some “elite bad taste” is fully explained by fashion cycles, status signalling, etc, other people can & have described this better than I can, so I won’t say more than that I agree, yes, this happens. But there are also highbrow-specific errors of taste that are as sincere as the normie penchant for Thomas Kinkade paintings.

Scott Alexander gives an analogy for a sort of weirdness treadmill effect that definitely happens to some 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.

I agree that this treadmill effect happens, but I think the way it happens is less like BDSM porn and more like (although not exactly like) allergies. Not desensitization, but oversensitization.

I don’t think that actually beautiful things become boring over time. Of all the pleasures, aesthetic pleasure is in my experience probably the least subject to the hedonism treadmill. Lewis talks about this in An Experiment in Criticism: one of his criteria for evaluating a book’s literary quality is whether it gets reread; a book is likely to be literary if it has readers for whom it “had been a lifelong delight, who had read and reread it.”

So I think what happens is less “continued exposure to pretty things desensitizes you to prettiness” & more “continued exposure to aesthetically bad things oversensitizes you to things that tend to go along with aesthetic badness.” And not even the most tasteless normie is exposed to more bad work (like, more work in quantity and worse in quality) than high-tier cultural elites—because cultural elites are inevitably, definitionally the people that are tasked with evaluating the quality of work. If you’re the filter that is supposed to catch bad work and pass good work forward, you are inevitably going to spend a lot of time with work so bad that it can’t pass your filter.

Eg. One time I had a little litmag tell me they had rejected my submission because it was about the moon. I’m not saying my poem was good,² it was probably one of hundreds of mid poems about the moon that the overworked and unpaid slush pile readers flip through every day, because most poems are mid at best and the moon is a very likely thing to find in a poem. But being unable to enjoy poetry about the moon is a genuine loss. If your aesthetic immune system rejects the moon because you’ve encountered it along with bad poetry so many times, you’re missing out.

I think being in that evaluative position tends to give people an aesthetic allergy to anything they’re likely to encounter a lot. Someone who just reads ad lib is likely to enjoy and appreciate archetypes; someone who reads a lot of bad work—a reviewer, a professor reading student work (which may be good eventually! but is likely to be bad at the raw unfinished stage when the professor encounters it) will start having an allergic reaction to archetypes and think of them as tropes or cliches. That’s how you get into the search for novelty qua novelty, weird qua weird.

So that is a specific type of (in my opinion) sincere bad taste which ironically tends to fall specifically on tastemakers.

Another type of sincere, elite bad taste comes from people noticing how peopke experience tasteful art differently than non-tasteful art, and trying to optimize specifically for that difference instead of for the thing-in-itself. I feel like I’m explaining this very poorly. Like, people notice, “Hm, a quality of great art is that some people like it much more than most people do,” and then they respond to that by purposely doing something most people don’t like. Or they notice, “Hm, a quality of great art is that it’s not exhausted by the first viewing or the first reading, it always has more to give,” and they respond to that observation by making something that is inaccessible on first viewing/reading. Or: “Hm, a quality of great art is that it has goodness beyond or apart from its representational content,” and then they make something that has no representational content. Or, “Hm, great art always feels fresh and new,” so they try purposefully for novelty, which in my opinion is generally doomed to failure: for some reason, people who purposefully attempt novelty for its own sake tend to find trendiness instead; people who want something else more than novelty are the ones who end up being original. Then Naomi Kanakia has a great piece about people noticing, “Hm, great art can transcend the limitations of its genre,” and responding to this by intentionally writing stuff that doesn’t even fulfil the requirements of its genre—although I think she is more on the track of people doing this insincerely.

Obviously, great work can be unpopular, can be inaccessible, can be non-representational, can be non-commercial. But so can very bad art. The world of experimental art and literature is like a topsy-turvy version of the world of experimental psychology: every experiment is replicated extensively, and we have a robust record of the failures.

1. not “contra Scott Alexander” anymore, because he copped to having taste in poetry.

2. although it did get published by a different little litmag….