Philosophy of aesthetics does not seem to progress, probably because we are fixated on the wrong questions. I took up another angle with connoisseurship once; & this might take us some ways, if only we could jettison chacun à son goût & all its fnord-minions. Maybe what we need is not critics telling us how to do it, but art-sherpas helping us to go where we might not go on our own. A schema is not a map.
posted by graywyvern at 11:33 AM on December 15 [1 favorite]

Well that was not a particularly kink-friendly analogy.
posted by Ishbadiddle at 12:21 PM on December 15

As La Rochefoucauld said:

Our pride is more offended by attacks on our taste than on our opinions.
posted by y2karl at 1:08 PM on December 15 [2 favorites]

“This is a bit mysterious. Most people like certain art which seems obviously pretty. But a small group of people who have studied the issue in depth say that in some deep sense, that art is actually bad (‘kitsch’), and other art which normal people don’t appreciate is better. They can usually point to criteria which the ‘sophisticated’ art follows and the ‘kitsch’ art doesn’t, but to normal people these just seem like lists of pointless rules.”

This might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever read. I was going to add “on art”, but I couldn’t think of anything stupider on any other subject. There might be something equally stupid somewhere out there, but please don’t tell me about it.

“This is a bit mysterious.”

Just because you say something is mysterious doesn’t mean it is.

“Most people like certain art which seems obviously pretty.”

What do any of these phrases refer to: “most people”, “certain art”, “obviously pretty”.

Every art style that is popular started off as either obscure or widely mocked, and what was once considered conventionally beautiful has fallen out of favor.

Furthermore, no one is most people, and every single person has idiosyncratic tastes and opinions about beauty.

“But a small group of people who have studied the issue in depth say that in some deep sense, that art is actually bad (‘kitsch’), and other art which normal people don’t appreciate is better.”

Is this man from the sixties? Kitsch has been a term of endearment by the “small group of people who have studied the issue in depth” since at least the nineties.

Also, every group of people defines themselves in opposition to the larger mass of humanity, thinking that your subculture has better modes of dress or patterns of thought than others is the most basic of social behaviors.

“They can usually point to criteria which the ‘sophisticated’ art follows and the ‘kitsch’ art doesn’t, but to normal people these just seem like lists of pointless rules.”

Is this man from the nineteenth century? Art theorists stopped making general proclamations about what makes art “sophisticated” or not sometime around the time people stopped wearing spats.

Sure, there are people who make up rules for art, and sometimes they intrude on your life (e.g. apps which divide the frame of a photo into a grid of nine boxes when you’re taking a picture) but mostly they’re extremely niche, and reside in manifestos no one ever reads, and “normal people” (again a phrase which has no referent) won’t ever encounter them.

This man has absolutely no idea about the subject he pretends to expound on.
posted by Kattullus at 1:17 PM on December 15 [4 favorites]

I'm reminded of this call coming from inside the "rationalist" house.

Once, she showed me some companies she had proved were fraudulent, and my first reaction was “I could have told you that in seconds; their web design looks scammy.”


Of course, it’s not really the same thing. She had hard evidence; I only had an intuition, and intuition can be wrong.

[...]

But my friend, like a lot of nerds, couldn’t see that difference in branding at a glance. She couldn’t see the difference in connotations that different aesthetic choices evoke. She was almost completely style-blind.

posted by doubtfulpalace at 1:37 PM on December 15

This man has absolutely no idea about the subject he pretends to expound on.

That's his whole brand. Being very generous, C is a variant of Bourdieu's position and F is a variant of Dick Hebdige's position. What connects them isn't a grand unified picture of how taste works but rather that taste can work in different ways depending on the local relevance and specific histories of social class, economic class, personal symbolism, medium / material culture, genre, subject matter and more--like, a lot more.
posted by Wobbuffet at 2:15 PM on December 15 [4 favorites]

Nothing on fashions changing, or novelty and attenuation playing a part in exhausting a fashion before movingon? Nor about trying different things and taking a journey through varied styles?

Thanks for the links, I'll have a think about what they add to my aesthetic and appreciation.
posted by k3ninho at 2:17 PM on December 15

Ugh, on re-reading, that's F and the poorly-expressed ideas of E, respectively.

Comrades, this piece again failed to conduct a power analysis, who's declaring what's good taste and not or who gains and loses by being considered good taste and bad taste. (It seems to consider that the drivers for aesthetics are universal and the experience of aesthetics universal, where I'd say it depends where you sit on the power chart.)
posted by k3ninho at 2:38 PM on December 15 [2 favorites]

This also seems to force the hyper-american viewpoint that it's somehow another persons problem what my tastes are. I guess this is the new consensus reality, what with the situation and all, but maybe these dudebros could imagine a position where they are not the people feeling left out? Maybe everything not being the same could be good? But it sure does sound like people who 'aren't political'.
posted by mayoarchitect at 3:50 PM on December 15

“Most people like certain art which seems obviously pretty.”

Or to rephrase: "my tastes are very mainstream, and I cannot for a moment entertain the thought that the stuff I think is ugly is not considered ugly by the people who like it, beauty is subjective. But no, if I think something looks ugly, then the person who likes it must just like ugly things, not disagree about that assessment.'

What a complete shitgibbon.
posted by Dysk at 4:29 PM on December 15

The headline piece seems absurdly mean-spirited. Instead of giving the people who claim to like "highbrow" art the benefit of the doubt, the author prefers to construct elaborate psychological theories to explain why they are not telling the truth. The only concession to the idea that people might be reporting their taste honestly is theory E, in which enjoyment of art is compared to an addiction in which ever-larger doses are required due to increasing tolerance. I don't think I am over-interpreting the piece when I detect a chip on the author's shoulder: if they really believed that aesthetics is purely subjective and that no-one's taste is better than anyone else's, there would be no need to lash out in this way.
posted by cyanistes at 4:32 PM on December 15

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