And what makes it trash? It's hard enough defending moral realism but trying to defend something like aesthetic realism is even more difficult especially if it's supposed to yield this kind of result.
Sure, you can talk about what people would most appreciate given unlimited time to reflect and appreciate. But that's particularly hard to apply to poetry where too much familiarity with a short work can render it trite/overly familiar etc. And you don't want to say that it's appreciation given time and exposure to other works because then you end up with the paradoxical result that poems which inspire battalions of imitations/homages aren't good.
Besides, its only coercive pressure that even sorta makes this seem to reach the right outcomes. Truth is lots of people most enjoy -- no matter how much they reflect or consume -- the most juvenile works (fart jokes etc) the most it's just those people tend not to become literature scholars or lie.
--
Seems to me that ultimately we should evaluate art merely on its ability to provide joy to those who consume it and dispense with this awful idea that it's even possible for the majority of people to have bad taste.
It's not that the majority of people have "bad" taste, it's that the majority lacks discernment about "taste" in general, often including their own taste. Therefore, they can't articulate "why" they like something with enough depth and detail to transfer their personal aesthetic judgements to the wider culture. If that doesn't happen, you get imitations that ape particularly salient aspects of the Art, but lack the connections between disparate elements that convey the Artists' intent and give the work "soul." If I had to define that, my initial take would be that "soul" in Art is about making the audience experience something through the Artist's perspective, which is difficult since people have so many emotional priors that getting them to feel a particular way takes skill. "Good taste" is partially an acknowledgement of skill - if someone makes something seem easy, but it's actually incredibly difficult, that's skillful - but it's also an acknowledgement of perceiving deep emotional content in their work. I think experiencing, expressing, and perceiving those emotions are abilities people are quite varied in - therefore we should expect differential aesthetic "quality" to be a feature of society.
To give a personal example, I am probably in the bottom decile in terms of musical ability - I am tone deaf, no rhythm, etc. - so appreciating music is not something that comes naturally to me, and I often wondered what all the fuss was about. But one time I was talking to a friend about why he liked a particular band, and he was pointing out things I never noticed about tone and composition, but weaving in personal anecdotes and our shared experiences, and then we listened to a song I had never heard before from them. After our conversation, I tried listening to it through "his" ears, and I just felt these waves of emotion roll through me. We talked about it afterward, and he was experiencing the same thing - but I realized he had been experiencing all their other songs like that. He "taught" me to appreciate them, and that unlocked a whole new kind of aesthetic experience I didn't even know I was missing. I suspect similar experiences are all over the place, but obviously people can't know what they're missing until they've discovered it later.
I think the creation of "new" aesthetic experiences is a deeply human desire and a worthy goal for people to strive for. But the only way to create something truly new is to develop an understanding on what already exists, and an appreciation for why and how it came to be. Those things are a part of "taste" that can absolutely be cultivated, and I think people should be lauded for their ability to do so (both the creation of new art and the ability to communicate their emotional experience of it). Now, obviously this can lead to runaway dynamics where the only thing that determines "good taste" is what other people with taste say, and then you get runaway dynamics where the taste is purely signaling without much reference to the quality of the work (I'd argue that's what happened to certain segments of the Modern Art and publishing culture industries). But, in general, there really are different levels of aesthetic experience, and some can only be achieved through "training" on how to understand something, and cultivation of the taste to appreciate it. So, yea, I think the majority of people have "bad taste" for the same reason I think the majority's opinions on economics and energy policy is bad - it's uninformed and unconsidered. But some people do specialize in in creating and thinking about Art, and they're able to separate wheat from chaff reliably, and tell everyone else how to do so, encouraging the best to rise to the top. When the process is working well, this gets the most talented people into the right fields, and enriches the entire culture by provides deeper and more emotionally resonant aesthetic experiences. Obviously, this process is culture-bound and not Objective, but I do think people with good taste make the world better when they encourage others to think like them, even if this can be snobbish at times.
My view is there is a kind of confusion here between liking the feeling of insight, connection and feeling you understand something you didn't before and the ascription of value to the thing that provides that.
I'd argue that art appreciation is basically akin to a video game. It is a way of hijacking the evolutionary pathways that reward us for feeling we've figured something out, overcome a barrier or learned a new skill.
And that's a valuable and fun thing but the problem is we keep mistaking the fact that it hijacks the rewards we get for learning new skills or better understanding of the world for actually doing so and therefore make the mistake of treating leveling up at art understanding as of real world value in the way we recognize becoming amazing at super smash isn't really.
A good game rewards you for the effort and investment you put into the game -- both emotionally and in terms of your player being able to do more shit. But it would be a huge mistake to think that the kinds of games which continue to offer that payout for more and more intense levels of investment and skill are better. I mean games like that do offer value for the tiny sliver of society who wants to invest years of life in tetris manipulation techniques but objectively they are if anything less valuable to society than games that can create those feelings in a much wider audience.
So yes it's certainly true that the kind of thing you mention about connections offers something some people crave -- it lets people who have already invested a bunch of time and energy into art get a sense of intellectual reward -- but it's ultimately no different than the fact a super hard souls like offers fun to people who have gotten too good and bored of most games. Create it in proportion to demand but don't make the mistake of thinking it's fundamentally different.
I think we basically agree on the reward mechanism and the features/dangers of it. I also think you're right that most people over-index intensity and skill as synonymous with "quality." But, I think the fundamental difference between art appreciation and Super Smash sophistication is that art as a game is inherently multiplayer, and part of the game is a "dialogue" between the Artist and the audience.
Just as there are fitness landscapes which describe how organisms evolve over time, I think there are "aesthetic fitness" landscapes which determine what is considered Art. The "peaks" of those aesthetic landscapes will obviously vary over time, and what is considered "great" will often not be remembered later, and there's probably no way to say which things are "objectively" Good. But, I'd argue if you cultivate taste, you can discern Better from Worse.
The reason you'd want to be able to do that is to spot Talent and aesthetic judgement in others and encourage them to develop it. That way, you can identify people with potential to be future Steven Spielbergs or Pablo Picassos and encourage them to pursue it. Spielberg doesn't make movies no one else could make, but his cinematic intuition is so strong that the average quality of his movies is so high that he can set a higher standard for directors to live up to, and those standards make the culture better. Picasso, even if you don't particularly like his stuff, was genuinely new in a way that pushes the aesthetic frontier out, allowing future artists to work in new ways. Both kinds of "genius" should be supported, but I don't think that happens unless you have large swaths of society thinking and arguing about their aesthetic opinions, and giving status to those people who seem to be doing things differently than everybody else.
To bring the analogy back to games, I think Monopoly is "objectively" a terrible game. It is poorly designed, long, and not particularly interesting in the gameplay dynamics. Settlers of Catan, while structurally quite similar, is simply "better" in ways that align with my intuition and ideals of game design. And I think that when people who enjoy Monopoly play Settlers instead, they have more fun (obviously this isn't universal, but it's also not far from it ime). Making Settlers the "default" board game over Monopoly is a sign of culture moving in a positive direction, and is part of making the world more fun.
Cultivating taste is more prosocial than mastering Dark Souls because (barring a The Last Starfighter scenario...) other people benefit more from the effort you put in, by being able to promote the good and denigrate the bad in Art. If we teach people to understand things that aren't immediately emotionally resonant, then they can perhaps learn to make a better version of that thing whose Quality is immediately obvious. Who knows if there's something we haven't discovered yet like perspective in the Renaissance that just immediately expands the aesthetic frontier by orders of magnitude?
Yes, I agree but the danger is the tendency towards showing one has better taste by liking harder and harder to appreciate works. It's not that all modern art is garbage or anything but alot of it is highly specialized work that offers less aesthetic benefit to society than more mass market work.
So I don't disagree but I think the second someone brings out the claim that other people just have worse taste absent some clear reason (hard to exactly deliniate) it's a warning sign. Even our most valued works like Shakespeare weren't seen as highbrow when created.
But, I figure I should actually try to see if I can actually find emotional depth from these short poems. I absolutely lack training/deep familiarity with poetry, so this is a test of "naive" judgement, but the ones that seemed the most human to me were:
I enjoyed the haikus because they are amusing, AI or otherwise. I'm wondering if AI whitman would possibly be worse than regular whitman. my guess is no.
Also, I took Scott's art test. I did poorly. It wasn't that I 'liked' AI art better. It was that I couldn't always tell.
And what makes it trash? It's hard enough defending moral realism but trying to defend something like aesthetic realism is even more difficult especially if it's supposed to yield this kind of result.
Sure, you can talk about what people would most appreciate given unlimited time to reflect and appreciate. But that's particularly hard to apply to poetry where too much familiarity with a short work can render it trite/overly familiar etc. And you don't want to say that it's appreciation given time and exposure to other works because then you end up with the paradoxical result that poems which inspire battalions of imitations/homages aren't good.
Besides, its only coercive pressure that even sorta makes this seem to reach the right outcomes. Truth is lots of people most enjoy -- no matter how much they reflect or consume -- the most juvenile works (fart jokes etc) the most it's just those people tend not to become literature scholars or lie.
--
Seems to me that ultimately we should evaluate art merely on its ability to provide joy to those who consume it and dispense with this awful idea that it's even possible for the majority of people to have bad taste.
It's not that the majority of people have "bad" taste, it's that the majority lacks discernment about "taste" in general, often including their own taste. Therefore, they can't articulate "why" they like something with enough depth and detail to transfer their personal aesthetic judgements to the wider culture. If that doesn't happen, you get imitations that ape particularly salient aspects of the Art, but lack the connections between disparate elements that convey the Artists' intent and give the work "soul." If I had to define that, my initial take would be that "soul" in Art is about making the audience experience something through the Artist's perspective, which is difficult since people have so many emotional priors that getting them to feel a particular way takes skill. "Good taste" is partially an acknowledgement of skill - if someone makes something seem easy, but it's actually incredibly difficult, that's skillful - but it's also an acknowledgement of perceiving deep emotional content in their work. I think experiencing, expressing, and perceiving those emotions are abilities people are quite varied in - therefore we should expect differential aesthetic "quality" to be a feature of society.
To give a personal example, I am probably in the bottom decile in terms of musical ability - I am tone deaf, no rhythm, etc. - so appreciating music is not something that comes naturally to me, and I often wondered what all the fuss was about. But one time I was talking to a friend about why he liked a particular band, and he was pointing out things I never noticed about tone and composition, but weaving in personal anecdotes and our shared experiences, and then we listened to a song I had never heard before from them. After our conversation, I tried listening to it through "his" ears, and I just felt these waves of emotion roll through me. We talked about it afterward, and he was experiencing the same thing - but I realized he had been experiencing all their other songs like that. He "taught" me to appreciate them, and that unlocked a whole new kind of aesthetic experience I didn't even know I was missing. I suspect similar experiences are all over the place, but obviously people can't know what they're missing until they've discovered it later.
I think the creation of "new" aesthetic experiences is a deeply human desire and a worthy goal for people to strive for. But the only way to create something truly new is to develop an understanding on what already exists, and an appreciation for why and how it came to be. Those things are a part of "taste" that can absolutely be cultivated, and I think people should be lauded for their ability to do so (both the creation of new art and the ability to communicate their emotional experience of it). Now, obviously this can lead to runaway dynamics where the only thing that determines "good taste" is what other people with taste say, and then you get runaway dynamics where the taste is purely signaling without much reference to the quality of the work (I'd argue that's what happened to certain segments of the Modern Art and publishing culture industries). But, in general, there really are different levels of aesthetic experience, and some can only be achieved through "training" on how to understand something, and cultivation of the taste to appreciate it. So, yea, I think the majority of people have "bad taste" for the same reason I think the majority's opinions on economics and energy policy is bad - it's uninformed and unconsidered. But some people do specialize in in creating and thinking about Art, and they're able to separate wheat from chaff reliably, and tell everyone else how to do so, encouraging the best to rise to the top. When the process is working well, this gets the most talented people into the right fields, and enriches the entire culture by provides deeper and more emotionally resonant aesthetic experiences. Obviously, this process is culture-bound and not Objective, but I do think people with good taste make the world better when they encourage others to think like them, even if this can be snobbish at times.
My view is there is a kind of confusion here between liking the feeling of insight, connection and feeling you understand something you didn't before and the ascription of value to the thing that provides that.
I'd argue that art appreciation is basically akin to a video game. It is a way of hijacking the evolutionary pathways that reward us for feeling we've figured something out, overcome a barrier or learned a new skill.
And that's a valuable and fun thing but the problem is we keep mistaking the fact that it hijacks the rewards we get for learning new skills or better understanding of the world for actually doing so and therefore make the mistake of treating leveling up at art understanding as of real world value in the way we recognize becoming amazing at super smash isn't really.
A good game rewards you for the effort and investment you put into the game -- both emotionally and in terms of your player being able to do more shit. But it would be a huge mistake to think that the kinds of games which continue to offer that payout for more and more intense levels of investment and skill are better. I mean games like that do offer value for the tiny sliver of society who wants to invest years of life in tetris manipulation techniques but objectively they are if anything less valuable to society than games that can create those feelings in a much wider audience.
So yes it's certainly true that the kind of thing you mention about connections offers something some people crave -- it lets people who have already invested a bunch of time and energy into art get a sense of intellectual reward -- but it's ultimately no different than the fact a super hard souls like offers fun to people who have gotten too good and bored of most games. Create it in proportion to demand but don't make the mistake of thinking it's fundamentally different.
I think we basically agree on the reward mechanism and the features/dangers of it. I also think you're right that most people over-index intensity and skill as synonymous with "quality." But, I think the fundamental difference between art appreciation and Super Smash sophistication is that art as a game is inherently multiplayer, and part of the game is a "dialogue" between the Artist and the audience.
Just as there are fitness landscapes which describe how organisms evolve over time, I think there are "aesthetic fitness" landscapes which determine what is considered Art. The "peaks" of those aesthetic landscapes will obviously vary over time, and what is considered "great" will often not be remembered later, and there's probably no way to say which things are "objectively" Good. But, I'd argue if you cultivate taste, you can discern Better from Worse.
The reason you'd want to be able to do that is to spot Talent and aesthetic judgement in others and encourage them to develop it. That way, you can identify people with potential to be future Steven Spielbergs or Pablo Picassos and encourage them to pursue it. Spielberg doesn't make movies no one else could make, but his cinematic intuition is so strong that the average quality of his movies is so high that he can set a higher standard for directors to live up to, and those standards make the culture better. Picasso, even if you don't particularly like his stuff, was genuinely new in a way that pushes the aesthetic frontier out, allowing future artists to work in new ways. Both kinds of "genius" should be supported, but I don't think that happens unless you have large swaths of society thinking and arguing about their aesthetic opinions, and giving status to those people who seem to be doing things differently than everybody else.
To bring the analogy back to games, I think Monopoly is "objectively" a terrible game. It is poorly designed, long, and not particularly interesting in the gameplay dynamics. Settlers of Catan, while structurally quite similar, is simply "better" in ways that align with my intuition and ideals of game design. And I think that when people who enjoy Monopoly play Settlers instead, they have more fun (obviously this isn't universal, but it's also not far from it ime). Making Settlers the "default" board game over Monopoly is a sign of culture moving in a positive direction, and is part of making the world more fun.
Cultivating taste is more prosocial than mastering Dark Souls because (barring a The Last Starfighter scenario...) other people benefit more from the effort you put in, by being able to promote the good and denigrate the bad in Art. If we teach people to understand things that aren't immediately emotionally resonant, then they can perhaps learn to make a better version of that thing whose Quality is immediately obvious. Who knows if there's something we haven't discovered yet like perspective in the Renaissance that just immediately expands the aesthetic frontier by orders of magnitude?
Yes, I agree but the danger is the tendency towards showing one has better taste by liking harder and harder to appreciate works. It's not that all modern art is garbage or anything but alot of it is highly specialized work that offers less aesthetic benefit to society than more mass market work.
So I don't disagree but I think the second someone brings out the claim that other people just have worse taste absent some clear reason (hard to exactly deliniate) it's a warning sign. Even our most valued works like Shakespeare weren't seen as highbrow when created.
But, I figure I should actually try to see if I can actually find emotional depth from these short poems. I absolutely lack training/deep familiarity with poetry, so this is a test of "naive" judgement, but the ones that seemed the most human to me were:
Icicles grow teeth,
a frozen growl scars the woods—
wind bares its white fangs.
The moon drinks the sea
Sipping tides with silver lips
Stars toast silently
The letter falls down,
shaking hands cannot unfold—
a life shifts, undone.
All AI!
I enjoyed the haikus because they are amusing, AI or otherwise. I'm wondering if AI whitman would possibly be worse than regular whitman. my guess is no.
Also, I took Scott's art test. I did poorly. It wasn't that I 'liked' AI art better. It was that I couldn't always tell.
That one about the metro station was pretty good!