Is there such a thing as "good taste"?

Author: Paul Graham

Original address: http://paulgraham.com/goodtaste.html

Posted on: 2021/11

I might have said as a child that there is no such thing as "good taste". My father once said to me that green vegetables and radishes each have their own preferences, how can there be any right or wrong?

The conclusion that there is no such thing as good taste seems obvious. I later discovered through circumstantial evidence that my father was wrong. I am here to prove this to you by reductio ad absurdum. Let's start with the premise that "good taste doesn't exist", and we'll end up with a clearly wrong conclusion, which is enough to show that this premise is false.

We'd better talk about what "good taste" means. In a narrow sense, it refers to aesthetic judgment, while in a broad sense it can refer to a preference for anything. Since the strongest evidence comes from the narrow definition of good taste, let's take the example of artistic taste: If you like art better than I like, then we say your taste is better than mine.

Since there is no so-called good taste, there is no good art either - because if there is good art, it is easy to tell who has better taste. You just show them works of art they haven't seen before and ask them to choose what they think is the best, and whoever chooses better art has better taste.

That is, if you want to deny the concept of "good taste", you have to discard the concept of "good art" as well. This also means that you deny the possibility that "there are people who can make good art". That said, it's impossible for an artist to make good art—not just a visual artist, but any artist in general. There are no good actors, good novelists, good composers, or good dancers. Maybe novelists can be popular, but they can't be.

We don't realize how far we've come down the road when we drop the concept of "good taste", because we haven't even discussed the most obvious case: it doesn't just mean that we can't compare the level of two famous painters , we can't even compare any painter to an eight-year-old.

When I started learning to draw, I realized that my father was wrong. Painting is like any other type of work I do: you can do it well or not, but if you work hard, you can do it better. Apparently Leonardo and Giovanni Bellini did a lot better than me. These artists are so good, the gap between us is not imaginary. If they can be good artists, then the artwork can be good, that is, good taste exists.

I explained above how to prove that good taste exists, and now I want to talk about why some people think it does not exist. There are two main reasons. The first reason is that people's tastes are always divided. Most people's feelings about art come from a whole bunch of unthought-out impulses: Is this artist famous? Is the subject matter attractive? Is this the kind of art they should love? Did it hang in a famous museum, or was it printed in a big, expensive book? In reality, most people's reactions to art are governed by these unrelated factors.

Furthermore, those who claim to have good taste are often misunderstood. Works that are admired by this generation of so-called art experts may be appraised very differently by subsequent generations, making it easy to feel that art appreciation is unwarranted. It's only when you block those thoughts and try to do something like paint a picture yourself and compare it to Bellini's that you realize that there is such a thing as artistic appreciation.

The second reason people would question the existence of good and bad artworks comes from the fact that this "good/bad" attribute does not seem to be inherent in the artwork itself. This questioning goes like this: Suppose a group of people are looking at the same work of art and tasting it. If "good/bad" is an attribute of the artwork itself, it should exist in the artwork itself - which doesn't seem to be the case. This "good/bad" seems to come from the subjective feelings of the connoisseur. If connoisseurs are at odds with one another, how do you make a choice?

The solution to this problem is to recognize that the purpose of art is to serve the viewer as human beings, and humans have a lot in common. If a thing has the same effect on the things around it, you can say that the thing has corresponding properties. If a particle's interactions with everything around it indicate that the particle has a mass of m, then its mass is m. So the difference between "objective" and "subjective" is not binary, but a matter of degree, depending on how much in common between "subjective" and "subjective". Particle interactions are one extreme example, but human-human interactions are not the other extreme -- people's reactions to artworks are not random .

Since people's reactions to artworks are not random, the effect of the artwork on the audience can be deliberately designed, and its quality depends on whether it effectively evokes the desired effect. It's like a vaccine. When it comes to immunity provided by vaccines, it seems rash to assume that "immunity" is not an intrinsic property of vaccines simply because acquiring immunity is something that happens individually in each individual 's immune system. Of course, everyone's immune system is different, and a vaccine that works for one person may not work for that person, but that doesn't mean talking about vaccine effectiveness is pointless.

Of course, the topic of artistic taste is much more confusing than vaccines, and you can't appreciate art in the same way that you can vote on vaccines. You need to imagine the reaction of a connoisseur with a deep artistic background and a clear mind that blocks external factors such as the artist's popularity. Even so, differences persist. People are really different, and it's really hard to judge art, especially more recent art. Whether it is a work of art or people's taste, there is definitely no total order relationship , but there is definitely a partial order relationship . So while it is impossible for a person to have perfect taste, it is possible to have good taste.