A handful of points, without any particular axe to grind, from a professional music scholar:
(1) The Great Fugue is difficult to like, difficult to know what to make of -- even most of its passionate advocates would agree to that -- and there's no particular reason to think that opinions from wildly positive to wildly negative are not all within the realm of the reasonable responses to this piece. A huge amount of scholarly ink has been spilled on why it, and the late string quartets, and the Missa Solemnis, are so peculiar.
(2) Relatedly, people who love it and think that it's obviously, uncomplicatedly lovable may well be putting on airs or signaling. And as with any piece of music that has gigantic prestige built up around it (partly due to its reputation for being super-profound and inscrutable), all opinions are probably to be somewhat taken with some suspicion of signaling behavior.
(3) Think of someone who has repeatedly shown herself to be a brilliant, extremely sound thinker. You come to trust her opinions on a wide range of topics. When she says something you find absolutely bizarre or inscrutable, you're going to at a very minimum think carefully about what she says to see ...
I am surprised no one has brought up http://www.xkcd.com/915/ yet.
(I may one day regret posting this comment, but... when that XKCD was published, I remarked in #lesswrong that it was entirely correct, and pointed to myself: as a result of my years cleaning a dog pen, I had developed distinct aesthetic preferences as far as feces went. They can vary widely in attractiveness based on coloring, water-content, foreign bodies, etc.)
Aesthetic judgment has no truth value in the sense that if I like something, it is not meaningful for someone else to say "You are wrong to like it." It may be meaningful for someone else to say "You think you like it, but you're wrong, you actually don't" -- which I think captures the dynamic you're concerned about in this post in some respects, and I think it's quite appropriate to be concerned about that and to want to avoid getting railroaded into thinking you like something that you really don't. But when I genuinely like something, there's just not any sense in which there is a truth or falsity condition to my liking. It's like our emotions -- there are always factual beliefs that condition our emotions, but various emotional states may all be reasonable responses to the same set of facts, because of the personal, individual element.
This is all somewhat distinct from the sense in which some things are widely and predictably liked by a lot of people. We say that someone has good taste when their judgment is a good predictor of others' judgment. These kinds of preference-clusters around some objects are about the closest we can get to saying that personal ae...
I don't think I have "better" musical taste than anyone. I like a lot of music that lots of other people like, and I also like some music that very few people like and hate a pretty great deal of music that a lot of people like. None of this qualifies me to tell other people that they are right or wrong to like anything.
If I understand what you are saying, you think that one could not be qualified to tell people that they are simply wrong to like what they like, but one could be qualified to tell them that they like what they like because they are stupid, or for similar reasons, including sometimes when those reasons are (or are due to) things either or both of you would rightfully label wrong according to each of your values.
I think the concept of inferential distance applies to art. As a kid, I was mostly exposed to classic rock (Led Zeppelin, Queen, and so on), and I felt something close to disgust when listening to anything significantly removed from that genre. However, I eventually bridged the gap between genres by finding music that mostly resembled classic rock but with a bit of something else. Eventually, this led me to enjoying entirely different genres that I'm fairly sure I'd otherwise hate.
It's the same with film. I moved from only enjoying blockbuster-type films to very strange films that some might say are pretentious or boring.
Before I thought there was an inferential distance for art, I tried to expose friends and family to some of my favorite movies. So, for example, I'd show them a movie like Festen--which I thought was actually somewhat tame and easy to like--and they'd hate it from the outset. The subtitles were a problem, the plot was a problem, it was boring, and so on. These were intelligent people with complex tastes in other areas. And now that I think about it, I'm confident that I'd feel the same way if I didn't have the progression of experiences that allowed me to love that movie the first time I watched it.
So, I'd say if you want to enjoy the things "you're supposed to like," bridge the distance with things similar to what you already enjoy.
Phil, I'll remind you of your own comment:
Incommensurate thoughts: People with different life-experiences are literally incapable of understanding each other...
Analogy: Take some problem domain in which each data point is a 500-dimensional vector. Take a big set of 500D vectors and apply PCA to them to get a new reduced space of 25 dimensions. Store all data in the 25D space, and operate on it in that space.
Two programs exposed to different sets of 500D vectors, which differ in a biased way, will construct different basic vectors during PCA, and so will reduce all vectors in the future into a different 25D space.
In just this way, two people with life experiences that differ in a biased way (due to eg socioeconomic status, country of birth, culture) will construct different underlying compression schemes. You can give them each a text with the same words in it, but the representations that each constructs internally are incommensurate; they exist in different spaces, which introduce different errors.
It seems entirely plausible that a person's appreciation of a piece of music depends strongly on all the music to which she's previously been exposed. Two different observers with different music-histories may have very different internal representations of the same piece of new music. A given piece of music may be well-formed or high quality in one representation, but not another.
I read somewhere that people who have seen few movies tend to appreciate different kinds of movies than people who have seen lots of movies. Part of the reason is obvious: something that is clichéd and trite to one person may seem like amazingly original and creative to someone who hasn't seen it done over and over. At the same time, a newbie might not appreciate the way some movie turns the cliche upside down.
Something similar probably also applies to other forms of fiction, and possibly to music as well.
"Burning Man changed my life completely" - I liked Burning Man; but if it changed your life completely, you probably had a vapid life.
That isn't required. Just a good drug that you hadn't had before. Having the right drug in the right environment is perhaps the simplest way to make a significant long(ish) term change. Excluding "change by damaging something" which is easy! Also excluding "met my significant other".
To understand musical consonance/dissonance, you must understand that consonance of simple harmonic ratios is an artifact of a much simpler underlying rule. The human hearing system does not analyze frequency ratios of individual notes, it examines the frequency domain clustering of partials of the sound as a whole.
If you listen to two sine waves of near identical frequency they sound consonant. Widen the frequency difference and they become dissonant. Further widen the frequency difference and they become consonant again. This was measured back in 1967 by R. Plomp and W. J. M. Levelt. The consonance of a musical harmony depends on the separation of the individual partials. We need a "critical bandwidth" of separation between frequencies to clearly distinguish them. You could think of dissonance as the unpleasant feeling of hearing different frequencies but failing to resolve them.
The majority of musical instruments used in Western classical music create sound by vibration constrained at two points, either the ends of a string or the ends of a column of air. Therefore the partials are all integer multiples [2] of the fundamental. It turns out that if these sounds are play...
It is a runaway peacock's-tail phenomenon: Someone made something that stood out in some way, and it got attention; and people learned to like things like that, and so others made things that stood out more in the same way, until we ended up with Alban Berg.
As people learn more about an art form, they can more-easily predict it, and need more and more novelty to keep them interested;
I suspect Methods of Rationality may be the end product of a similar phenomenon with respect to a number of trends in speculative fiction, e.g., of putting in more and more elaborate Xanatos Gambits and more and more subtle pop culture references.
Or as Eliezer put it:
it's hard to beat the Algorithm of Awesome, which works as follows:
First, know the overarching direction in which your fic is going. Then, think of possible events that move in this direction. If they are awesome, add them to the plot. If they are not awesome, leave them out.
Try looking at the above quote while tabooing the word "awesome", or better yet replace it with a word that has a similar meaning to an art movement you aren't involved in e.g., "groovy" for psychedelic, "transgresive" for modern art, etc.
it's hard to beat the Algorithm of [Applause Light], which works as follows:
First, know the overarching direction in which your fic is going. Then, think of possible events that move in this direction. If they are [applause light], add them to the plot. If they are not [applause light], leave them out.
I am reminded of this classic paper on wine-tasting:
Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better? Evidence from a Large Sample of Blind Tastings
Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. In a sample of more than 6,000 blind tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less.
Experts do prefer the more expensive wines, but this only means that for the non-experts, the negative correlation between price and popularity is even stronger.
In terms of a 100 point scale (such as that used by Wine Spectator), the extended model predicts that for a wine that costs ten times more than another wine, non-experts will on average assign an overall rating that is about four points lower.
Because I accidentally derailed my last post into pedantry, let me try again with a clearer heuristic:
A TEST FOR ART YOU REALLY LIKE:
Try to make fun of it.
If you can make fun of it, and you still like it, then you don't like it just because it's sacred.
This doesn't have to be a deep parody - I don't really think I could write a deep parody of Bach's Magnificat in D. But I can definitely imagine the parts that move me the most, the sublime moments that touch me to my core, played by a synthesizer orchestra that only does fart noises.
The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry
The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy
The books that people talk about we never can recall
And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.
- Carolyn Wells
If there were departments of pornography at ivy-league universities, they would scoff at the simplicity of films lacking bondage, machines, or animals.
It is called 4chan.
Without at all answering your question, and on an entirely unrelated note, why hasn't "fag" become more parts of speech in English?
Because it based on petty bigotry rather than wholesome sexual abandon.
I unintentionally hurt someone on Hacker News when I mentioned that:
I played Deus Ex when I was in high school and was more impressed by its storyline than anything I read in English lit.
I know I am "supposed" to like Of Mice and Men, Animal Farm, The Catcher in the Rye, The Crucible, Moby Dick, A Doll’s House, The Scarlet Letter, etc... more than a "mere video game", but the fact is, I don't.
Those have different meta-levels of "supposed to".
I think one is supposed to like Animal Farm, "supposed to" like The Catcher in the Rye, and only "'supposed to'" like Moby Dick.
All joking aside, I really mean this. Try listening to it as a solemn piece. I don't think it's that great of a fugue, but it has some nice stuff in there. The lack of rhythmic and tonal movement becomes more appropriate all of a sudden if you put on a sour-puss face. If you imagine that its torturous, repetitive nature, is an intentional part of the emotional experience Ludwig wanted to give you, it becomes less annoying and more powerful, to my ear anyway.
and also:
I could keep listening to the Great Fugue, and see if I, too, come to love it in time. But what would that prove? Of course I would come to love it in time,
Why not just make an earnest attempt to like all art in that case. You'll be better off. Is there some artistic merit out there which you would not be rewarding accurately if you liked all art? If you end up liking the great fugue after you listen to it a bunch, even though you didn't like it at first, sweet deal.
I got into jazz, essentially because i thought that it was cool to be into jazz. I did not like it when I bought my first jazz album, and I probably didn't like the next ten I bought either. But I'm really glad I thought it so cool that i was willing ...
This may shed light on the phenomenon and start value judgement-fuelled arguments in equal measure: what works are we "supposed to like" in the Less Wrong community?
I may get the ball rolling by mentioning that although I like GEB and think it has plenty of merit, I think it's ridiculously non-commensurate with the amount of praise it receives.
It appears that the more someone already knows about mathematical logic, the less highly they rate GEB, to the point of weary eye-rolling from professionals in the field.
That's why you're supposed to read it in high school.
Gosh I've been reading LessWrong since before it existed and I didn't realize I was supposed to like anime.
We're now basing judgments of highbrow status-seeking behavior by sampling YouTube commenters?
Oy.
It might not be as off-base as you think. There's a huge selection effect for who would listen to the Great Fugue, and if there's one thing that YouTube commenters do in spades it's play signalling games.
Go look at the page. It may be the only YouTube channel on the internet without grammatical errors.
Point of evidence re learning to like any kind of music:
Until I was about 11 years old, I didn't like music. I didn't dislike it, per se, but I didn't pay much attention to whether there was music playing or not. I have memories of going to the local Folk Festival and playing at the crafts table or playing tag, but no memories of actually noticing the live music that was playing. I was pretty much completely tone deaf at the time, and my parents decided not to put me in piano lessons along with my siblings, partly because they didn't think there was much point for someone as unmusical as I appeared to be.
This changed when I started learning an instrument at school (flute) in seventh grade. Once I was actually using my own fingers and lips to produce notes, I started to notice melodies, and get them stuck in my head sometimes. I joined choir originally so that I wouldn't have to go outside for recess in winter, but after a few months I started having emotional responses to music, having favourite songs, etc.
Skip forwards by 7 years of playing in various school bands, singing in various choirs, and learning enough classical music theory to start composing singable choir pieces, and almost all music affects me deeply once I know the song, whether it's 16th century sacred choral music or modern heavy metal.
Summary: I see nothing contradictory about having to learn how to appreciate music.
Feeling as if you "should" enjoy something seems like a natural reaction to a -wanting/-liking/+approving behavior, in this case enjoying the Great Fugue. For the most part +approving behaviors have high status, so feeling confused that you don't like it isn't surprising--different parts of your desire are conflicting.
There is a fifth hypothesis, which is a more general form of #4, that could explain the popularity of the piece: when appreciation for an art form becomes sufficiently developed, the criteria for judging it changes as a result of the psychologies of the people who make up the institutions devoted to that art form. For example: literary criticism. What the layman looks for in a novel is drastically different from what an English professor looks for, and that's because of the institution of literary criticism and the kinds of people it attracts. This trend probably has a self-reinforcing effect for two reasons: a) there are strong status reasons to signal enjoying +approving works, e.g. literary critics gain status by saying they enjoy Shakespeare, and b) institutions devoted to art forms can become more homogenous over time. Thus, a popular piece of art need not be more novel to be "fine art," it just needs to be better optimized for the new criteria. This hypothesis is consistent with pattern features 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6.
I've been listening to it as I read your post, and I like it well enough so far, despite not being a huge classical music person. (I will probably get bored of it before the end though since I don't really have the patience for long classical works.) I also liked Pollock's paintings the first time I saw them in person, and generally prefer abstractish art to representational, despite not being an art connoisseur. My point being, some people really do like these things without having to try :).
I do think you have a point overall, in that stuff that's harder to appreciate can become higher in status for precisely that reason. However, just because it takes a while to "get" something doesn't mean that it's secretly bad. In particular, listening to music multiple times could have a "key" effect similar to the effect where an incomprehensible distorted sentence can be understood clearly after hearing a non-distorted version (I can't find a video of this right now). Similarly, just because you don't understand some piece of mathematics the first time (or two) you read it doesn't mean that people who claim to find it beautiful are lying or have tricked themselves into liking it. Some things really do require more effort to appreciate.
The problem is more dramatic in architecture. The latter is the point where the crisis of modern art moves from a bugbear of the chattering classes to a genuine problem. If someone insists that you just need to learn to appreciate some ear destroying extended technique violin piece, you have a difference of opinion. If someone insists that the solution to the residents of the new brutalist tower block wanting to kill themselves is to educate them on the finer points of architectural theory, then you have a civic problem. (Incidentally, are there any other forms of art that require the destruction of old pieces?)
With food though, "just learn to like it" is absolutely good advice as, a childish aversion to, say, cabbage is an unnecessary barrier to eating arrangements that could be solved with a few meals. And because food is such a flexible art form, learning to appreciate new elements dramatically increases your enjoyment. Though I suppose these are really two sides of the same coin, like the OPs definition of art snobbery as insisting that art should not contain certain features that indicate the wrong culture: perspective, raw meat, any consideration for the surrounding...
Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste is a good little book about the formation of taste and learning to like something you'd been avoiding. It's by an indie rock critic/snob who decided to find out what there was of value in Celine Dion's music, and discovered there was a fair amount even if it wasn't the best thing ever.
How confident are you that your Beethoven fugue informants are reliable?
I am not an expert, but I do own a dozen or so Beethoven CD's and I have never heard of "Beethoven's fugue" as a standalone title. I do know that there are some pieces he wrote which are widely disliked. In particular there is one called "Wellington's Victory" which the current wikipedia page says, among other things,
...The novelty of the work has worn down over the last two-hundred years; as a result, "Wellington's Victory" is not much heard in concert ha
Just a couple of thoughts about this:
1) This paper by Juergen Schmidhuber was very helpful in un-confusing me about a lot of aesthetic things. But in particular, it accounts for things like subjectivity of preference and the way you can learn to like things with continual exposure. Whether you want to learn to appreciate a piece of art seems like a matter of preference, in general it doesn't seem like there should be any reason to get normative about it.
2) Like most people, I have experienced things that I was supposed to like and actually liked them, and ...
On further reflection, I don't think disliking any particular highbrow cultural symbol necessarily conveys low status. People in the know are only supposed to like the works of either Tolstoy or Dostoevskiy, but not both. Having an opinion either way is fine. Not being able to offer an opinion -- now that's low status.
I've found that a lot of music takes 5+ listens before I really start to enjoy it. This is particularly the case of complex, subtle music. This could be just me adjusting to social demands but I find it can happen even with music I want to dislike. Katie Perry grows on you.
...As people learn more about an art form, they can more-easily predict it, and need more and more novelty to keep them interested; like porn viewers who seek out movies with continually-stranger sex acts. (This is a cognitively-plausible variant of "there is no such thing as object
I think whenever you have the scenario of other people enjoying a musical work (or an artwork) that you don't enjoy, you can reduce the explanation to three possibilities: (1) Everyone else is under some kind of mass delusion and you're sane (or stupid/smart) (2) Everyone else is correct and there's something wrong with me or (3) there's no objective "greatness" in music (or art or food etc.)
I think believing (1) is a symptom of extreme narcissism, and believing (2) is a symptom of low self esteem. But (3) is unsatisfactory and incomplete, althou...
...In a 2003 study, psychologist James Cutting (2003, 2006) briefly exposed undergraduate psychology students to canonical and lesser-known Impressionist paintings (the lesser-known works exposed four times as often), with the result that after exposure, subjects preferred the lesser-known works more often than did the control group. Cutting took this result to show that canon formation is a result of cultural exposure over time. He furt
I think that a significant component of the enjoyment of certain kinds of art comes from subverted expectations. When, for example, what begins as a lighthearted romantic comedy ends up with both leads killing themselves. Or when the killer turns out to be the last person you'd have suspected, even when you take into account that the author was trying to trick you.. You can't have subverted expectations, however, if you don't have expectations in the first place - which is one reason that some works need "experience" in order to appreciate.
Hm. If you put Jackson Pollock in the same category as The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, maybe I should re-evaluate my opinion of Jackson Pollock.
The real question is, why do you care about peer pressure?
EDIT: I just listened to it for the first time, and really liked it. Still, tastes differ.
Because not everyone we'd want to associate with are people who can mentally just up and decide to not be status signalling creatures. And thus we want to model how and why the status signalling happens, both to understand how to react normally as well as how we can act without falling into the same traps. Not to mention this is something just glossed over in everyday status signalling interactions; maybe we can optimize the situations.
I will submit two things first: (1) Jackson Pollock paintings are excellent, that you don't like them just demonstrates you're not in their audience; (2) the normal way for Burning Man to change someone's life completely is through drug use.
Over the course of my art history degree, not once did anyone insist I had to like any work. I had to recognize its importance--either as inspiration others drew on or as an exemplar of some type--but never actually be attached to any of the work. I think this tendency to demand others like a work is unserious. But this...
Anybody else drink IPAs just cause they are cool? I know there's someone in here. I admit it: I hated it when I first tried it. And I would have never drank that bitter^10 garbage long enough to like it, if I didn't know it was hip first.
Maybe if it wasn't for people doing things cause they're hip, hard things to like at first with high future payoffs, would not even get as popular as they are today. AND THAT INCLUDES LW! Did you really love LW the first time you came across it? I did honestly fall in love with LW upon first contact, but I was already an ...
When promoting the truth, if you value the truth, it is wise to use especially those methods that rely on the truth being true. That way, if you have accidentally misidentified the truth, there is an automatic safety valve.
I think having the idea that one should like a work of art is going to distract from the chance of actually liking it.
If you're confused about whether or not you like it, there might be something interesting going on. Trying to find out what it is might or might not distract you from the music.
It probably isn't pretentious garbage, though it might not be the greatest thing ever.
For what it's worth, I liked the beginning, but find it hard to believe people think this is better than the more popular Beethoven symphonies. It seemed like bits of Beethoven, and...
My suspicion is this:
You can learn to appreciate anything that requires creativity if you understand what they're trying to do and stuff like that. It starts out that they're creatively trying to accomplish something, like making a soothing sound in this case. Once people start appreciating it for the art, rather than just sounding nice, people will then create it for the art, rather than to sound nice. After a while, you end up with an art form that's very different than what it started as. It's still good. It's just something completely different, and ea...
As a freshman in college, I feel I am 'supposed to like' beer and parties. I don't. I like Cuba Libres, and relaxing in the dorm with floor-mates, but that's beside the point. As an avid reader, I feel I am 'supposed to like' the accepted classics of literature (Mrs. Dalloway, Ulysses, etc.), but I don't. I generally consume pulp fantasy and thrillers, despite being perfectly capable of reading said classics. I liked the Great Gatsby, Les Miserables, and Dracula, but that's beside the point.
In my opinion, when you feel you're supposed to like something, i...
I am afraid to listen to the Great Fugue. I would come to like it, whether it is great art, or whether it is pretentious garbage. That would not rule out any of my theories. How can I figure out which it is before listening to it repeatedly?
Do you want to know enough to administer a musical taste test for this?
If you give people links to two fugues (unlabeled and untitled at the link source), and do not tell them which is which, and they aren't familiar with either, enough responses of which is better might give you at least a rough idea of to what ...
People say they hated it at first, but over time, grew to love it. One must be trained to like it.
This can raise a warning flag but I've experienced this myself with coffee and some other foods. It didn't take any training for me but a lot of people who like beer don't like the bitter, hoppy beers like IPAs without some training - and while pretentious beer snobs are annoying and amusing on several levels I can't quite doubt them when I have the same preferences.
I've been listening to the Fugue now while reading Less Wrong and enjoying it! Thanks!
I hate bitter cabernets though.
I had forgotten about this until just now, but there are examples where the connoisseurs actually are on to something that the average viewer/listener is missing. In a class I once took on Russian art, we watched a wordless documentary that was meant help one see the world the way avant-garde artists like Malevich or Kandinskiy did when they were painting. It changed my appreciation of this kind of art considerably -- I would now tend to dispute claims that these sorts of paintings are not representational. (I still have to regard this as a joke, thoug...
W. H. Auden had an excellent heuristic for dealing with this problem:
"Between the ages of 20 and 40, the surest sign that a man has a taste of his own is that he is unsure of it."
I can like or dislike anything I want, as long as I'm willing to update. The space of possible art is huge, and I would cheat my future self if I excluded entire genres from consideration on the belief that they exist solely as pedant-bait.
I was slightly unhappy to see "Prufrock" mentioned in the same rhetorical breath as modern poetry that relaxes the demand...
hating all modern art because one is supposed to hate it.
I don't think this actually happens. In my experience most people who hate modern art hate it because it's more-or-less uniformly absolutely awful. In my experience even the "good" pieces of modern art are only good compared to the absolute drek that is most modern art.
Edit: By modern art I mean "art belonging the the genre commonly called 'modern art' ", not "any art produced since the mid 20th century".
Another crucial issue is that art nowadays is financed to a large degree by the government (either overtly or via its formally "non-governmental" organs such as large tax-exempt foundations, academic institutions, etc.). This creates the same perverse incentives as government-financed science: the work is optimized for the bureaucratic process that determines who gets funding and official recognition, not for any direct measure of quality.
Even the money that enters the system from private buyers doesn't change these incentives much, since these buyers want to buy high-status art, not low-status kitsch -- and people in charge of sorting these out are nowadays, for all practical purposes, government bureaucrats just as much as those in charge of renewing your driver's licence. (Which makes their attempts at a "rebellious" image only more farcical.)
Moldbug once wrote a hilarious (and yet highly insightful) article about how this system works in poetry.
I think the hatred of all modern art is such a common meme that there are a good many people who repeat it without knowing anything about modern art.
You've probably got an argument from physics about healing crystals.
However, in the case of modern art, you might contemplate people who think they know enough about science fiction to condemn it even though they know almost nothing about it.
Bruce Pollack, a contemporary abstract artist I like a lot. A little discussion of his work-- the first picture is presumably something more current from the gallery where he was displayed-- I think it's the sort of modern art neither of us like.
They have nothing to them except rebellion for its own sake.
In modern art, there hasn't even been any real rebellion in a very long time. What we see is a pretense of rebellion by doing the same old tired épater la bourgeoisie act that has lost all its shock value many decades ago, or "creative" breaking of long-gone traditional norms. At the same time, these people would never dream of touching any real taboos of the present day, and are bending over backwards to signal their unreserved allegiance to every single respectable high-status belief -- and their professional world is a dreary pyramid of bureaucratic patronage that makes the bureaucracy of a typical government department look free-spirited in comparison.
To take only one illustrative example, even in Catholic Church -- an institution that is often considered as the very epitome of hidebound reaction -- a preference for traditional church art and architecture is likely to mark one as a contrarian these days.
I think this helped me enjoy Godel, Escher, Bach more, on my second reading, after reading lesswrong. I am happy about this.
This post has generated enough interesting comments that I would ordinarily move it to LessWrong at this point. But I posted it to Discussion because it is a discussion; I don't have answers. What do you think - should I move it?
I have an experience that seems relevant.
I was assigned several chapters of the high-status The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War for a class, and fell in love with it, reading it over and over. I don't say status had nothing to do with it, for every effect has multiple causes (and every cause affects multiple things).
When the translator finished the similar-status and somewhat similar content The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories, I bought it and began reading it with the expectation I would find it stimulating on multipl...
I feel like I feel a similar thing, but with regards to effective altruism and learning intellectual things. I sometimes ask myself, "are my beliefs around EA and utilitarianism just 'signaling'", especially since I'm only in high school and don't really have any immediate plans. But I'm also not a very social person, and when I do talk to others I don't usually talk about EA. I guess I'm not a very conscientious person: I like the idea of "maximizing utility" and learning cool things, but my day-to-day fun things (outside of "addictions": social media, ga...
People's judgements on music often amount to "The pattern in which your brain releases dopamine in response to music is inferior to mine."
I can definitely imagine coming to love Beethoven's Fugue (which I played in the background while reading this post & comments) because - it's not fundamentally different to other pieces I've come to love. But I seem to be a neophile in many ways, and I've been exposed to certain types of music, so I count tastes as personal and I find the Youtube comments you quote to be ridiculous.
Re repeated exposure: T...
I watched the video, and I must say I like the colors and shapes and the way the light is moving through them.
4 and 5 are anecdotally true for me, as a trained practitioner of two artforms (music and theatre); I often find that I can appreciate something greatly for its technical expertise and novelty of style or content at the same time as acknowledging that some things that achieve greatly in those areas actually fail at being accessibly entertaining.
I also definitely think 2 and 3 come into play a lot, especially when it comes to considering the monetary difference people are willing to pay artists (in terms of the price of paintings/sculptures, ticket prices, ...
I'm pretty comfortable liking things that others don't, but less comfortable not liking things others consider great. I do know that after listening to bluegrass music for a few years, learning it on the mandolin was challenging but doable. When I switched to jazz, both listening and learning at the same time, it was much harder. Now, I can hear jazz melodies and rhythms and structure that was just not reaching my brain earier. And they are lovely.
On another note: one time on a bicycle trip I passed through Paris and wandered into the Louvre. I hadn't pla...
This brings up another issue that is more extreme. Here we find the piece boring, which is certainly a bad thing for artistic ideas. But what if the piece is the other way: actually unappealing?
Anyone who hears Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfEye2YBGTM) for the first time gets an idea of what I mean.
Like anyone, my first reaction to the piece is negative. And I think with any work you can find legitimate criticisms of it in terms of form or construction or whatever. But I just don't see it as simple as t...
I am afraid to keep listening to the Great Fugue. I would come to like it, whether it is great art, or whether it is pretentious garbage. That would not rule out any of my theories.
How can I figure out which it is before listening to it repeatedly?
Can't believe I didn't notice this. Who cares man? Caring about whether its "pretentious garbage" or "actually complicated hard to like art", is just as silly as liking something cause you think it makes you cool to like it. That;s not the point. The question is will you dig your time here more, have more musi-gasms, if you keep listening, or less.
The SkyTopia site that grouchymusicologist dislikes posted its raw survey results here. It would be interesting to break the survey results down according to whether or not respondents believed in God or the soul.
As someone who considers himself an unusually general art connoisseur, I can simply tell you the answer as more or less fact from personal experience:
While within at least some art forms (taste based ones seem prone to it, probably due to how taste works biologically...) all of these might exists, most of them only do so as rare exceptions.
The main mechanism behind the vast majority is a combination of something very similar to your 4, and that MAKING art changes your evaluation relative someone who has merely consumed and studied existing works. The reas...
I'm trying to like Beethoven's Great Fugue.
"This piece alone completely changed my life and how I perceive and appreciate music."
"Those that claim to love Beethoven but not this are fakers, frauds, wannabees, but most of all are people who are incapable of stopping everything for 10 minutes and reveling in absolute beauty, absolute perfection. Beethoven at his finest."
"This is the absolute peak of Beethoven."
"It's now my favorite piece by Beethoven."
These are some of the comments on the page. Articulate music lovers with excellent taste praise this piece to heaven. Plus, it was written by Beethoven.
It bores me.
The first two times I listened to it, it stirred no feelings in me except irritation and impatience for its end. I found it devoid of small-scale or large-scale structure or transitions, aimless, unharmonious, and deficient in melody, rhythm, and melodic or rhythmic coordination between the four parts, none of which I would care to hear by themselves (which is a key measure of the quality of a fugue).
Yet I feel strong pressure to like it. Liking Beethoven's Great Fugue marks you out as a music connoisseur.
I feel pressure to like other things as well. Bitter cabernets, Jackson Pollack paintings, James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the music of Arnold Schoenberg, and Burning Man. This is a pattern common to all arts. You recognize this pattern in a work when:
Here are some theories as to how a work becomes the darling of its medium or genre:
(Don't assume that the same theory is true for each of my examples. I think that the wine hierarchy and Alban Berg are nonsense, Jackson Pollack is an interesting one-trick pony, and Burning Man is great but would be even better with showers.)
I could keep listening to the Great Fugue, and see if I, too, come to love it in time. But what would that prove? Of course I would come to love it in time, if I listen to it over and over, earnestly trying to like it, convinced that by liking the Great Fugue I, too, would attain the heights of musical sophistication.
The fact that people come to like it over time is not even suggested by theory 1 - even supposing the music is simply so great as to be beyond the appreciation of the typical listener, why would listening to it repeatedly grant the listener this skill?
I have listened to it a few times, and am growing confused as to whether I like it or not. Why is this? Since when does one have to wonder whether one likes something or not?
I am afraid to keep listening to the Great Fugue. I would come to like it, whether it is great art or pretentious garbage. That wouldn't rule out any of my theories.
How can I figure out which it is before listening to it repeatedly?
