There's a certain breadth of taste in reading you can only aquire by reading (and enjoying!) low quality internet novels after you've already developed sophisticated taste.
Hey fun! (maybe more than fun when it impacts reality, as when people talk about "taste" in meaningful research, esp. WRT alignment research..."
I believe the answer is all of the above. Taste has similarities to all of the things you mention at the top.
The proof won't fit in the margin. This is one of those things I'd love to write about, but won't find time for until after the singularity.
This is something I've thought about an awful lot, while studying the neuroscience of dopamine and decision-making. I think those mechanisms are central to taste.
Steve Byrnes' Valence sequence doesn't mention dopamine, but it captures my theory of how the dopamine system "spreads around" estimated value between associated concepts.
That's taste. It can be formed by all sorts of positive associations, including accurate estimates of creativity, craftmanship, etc, and associations to respected people or ideas.
Based on this theory, I have limited patience for people who think or claim that their taste is the objectively better. It is often better on the dimensions they mention, but worse on some other dimensions they haven't thought about.
Since AI's are proving to be superhuman persuaders I thought I'd ask o1 to take a crack at persuading you that there is a worthwhile and Platonic "there" there w/r/t modern art. As a lover of most all art, including modern art, I agree with all of the points made by o1 here. Wondering if anything sways you!
o1 says:
Below is an attempt at a thorough, good‐faith refutation of your stance—one that tries to speak directly to the lens you’re using when you say that the bulk of modern/conceptual art is “worthless,” “masturbatory,” or “a defrauding of an entire culture.” I’ll assume, per your own framing, that you’re open to persuasion if someone can show you there’s a genuine “there” there. This is my best shot.
1) You Already Believe Taste Is a Grammar—So Modern Art Has One Too
By your own account, taste is fundamentally like grammar: each art form has internal rules, conventions, and a sense of structure that lets us decide how well something is executed and whether we find it compelling. Modern/conceptual art has those same grammar‐like structures; they’re just trickier to perceive from the outside. Often, that grammar draws heavily on historical‐contextual references (e.g. twisting artistic tradition X, highlighting visual device Y, or subverting aesthetic principle Z). It’s possible to see “low skill” or “vacuousness,” but that might be akin to only halfway learning a new language’s grammar and concluding that the language itself must be nonsense.
That doesn’t mean every “modern” piece is correct or “good.” A random word‐soup sentence in French is junk no matter how it’s dressed up. But it also means there is an objective measure of quality in modern art if you’re sufficiently fluent. Sometimes, pieces that look like status‐posturing or in‐jokes really do have a coherent grammar behind them—one that’s invisible unless you trace the particular conversation (historical, aesthetic, conceptual) in which these works participate. They can still be nonsense, but not always.
2) Novelty and “Avoiding the Boring” Are Also Aesthetics
You rightly point out that much of the art world tries “not to be the same old thing,” and that a work’s power often flows from when and how it appears in the flow of artistic history. But that drive to avoid boredom and stagnation is itself an aesthetic. It’s not just “fashion.” It’s creative restlessness, the desire to see new shapes, new ways of seeing or feeling, even ways of responding to problems that older aesthetics had left unspoken. Sometimes that quest is superficial or pretentious. But sometimes it’s precisely the spark that births new grammars—like Impressionism once was, or Cubism, or 12‐tone music, or hip‐hop scratch DJing. When critics and curators champion “some weird new style,” they’re hoping that behind the hype, a more lasting grammar grows.
In other words: the modern art ecosystem’s pursuit of novelty doesn’t automatically undermine the existence of real quality. It’s precisely because grammar needs to evolve.
3) “Bizarre Porn” or “Priesthood” Doesn’t Preclude Real Skill
Saying modern or conceptual art is “bizarre porn” or a “priesthood” or primarily a “status game” might be partly right! But acknowledging competition, esoterica, and prestige‐hunting doesn’t mean there’s no “there” there. Opera, classical composition, or the Baroque masters were also financed by status‐hungry elites enjoying “luxury hyper‐objects.” Those same elites used commissions as a symbolic “Look how sophisticated I am!” game. Yet you can’t deny that behind all that, masters refined their craft and discovered new forms of aesthetic beauty. Plenty of brilliant art emerges from or thrives in an environment of moneyed people playing complicated social games. Yes, some art is just naked snobbery. But social competition doesn’t always erase underlying artistic achievement.
4) Conceptual and Emotional Payoffs Can Be Aesthetic
A lot of conceptual art focuses more on ideas, illusions, historical commentary, or intellectual tension than on purely “direct visual pleasure.” You say: “No one’s even talking about the lines or color scheme; they’re only praising the concept.” But sometimes the concept itself can be “the lines, the composition, the structure,” just at a more abstract or historical scale. Think of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain; you might dismiss it as one of the ultimate “scams” in art history. But part of its “grammar” was a deeply self‐aware conversation about what art is, who decides, how the context of a gallery changes the meaning of a manufactured object, etc. That might sound intangible or “silly,” but it was a linguistic shift in how we perceive the simplest readymade artifact. That shift is as “real” as an innovative chord progression in Beethoven—it shaped entire future grammars for painting, design, and sculpture.
If that doesn’t appeal to you personally, no problem. But you’re an experienced enough taste‐observer to see that this is not just a random scam; it’s an example of someone discovering a new “move” that later gained traction in the aesthetic ecosystem. That’s part of what conceptual art can do.
5) Historical Context Means Some “Middling” Modern Art Rides Coattails
One reason you might see baffling conceptual art with million‐dollar price tags is that the big breakthroughs of the 20th century gave “conceptual grammar” serious credibility. People realized that an artwork’s shape, context, or idea could be deeply meaningful. But once the conceptual door was opened by Duchamp, Dada, and Surrealists, many lesser talents trotted in behind, repeating the idea “You’ll only get it if you’re sophisticated.” Even so, that doesn’t negate the original conceptual breakthroughs (Mai ’68 was a real moment, for instance, and it triggered some brilliant stuff). Yes, a lot of conceptual art might be unsubtle or purely derivative. That’s not a condemnation of the entire “langue” just because many new “speakers” produce dreck.
6) Instrumental Value, Not Just “Natural Beauty”
You reference people who defend a piece because “it gets people talking” or “it’s a tool for protest or reflection.” But that’s a legitimate form of artistic worth. If something is used as a rhetorical or conceptual tool—especially if it sparks conversation or reorients how people see the world—then it’s producing a layer of intangible aesthetic or emotional value. No, it might not be “pretty.” But the fact that it changes people’s frames or vantage points can itself be the relevant aesthetic dimension, just as the brilliance of a novel’s structure can override its inability to produce purely “uplifting” emotions.
7) The “Con Games” and “Fraud” Are Real—But They Don’t Capture the Whole
You’re correct: the modern art world includes speculation, tax avoidance, insider trading, cronyism, and a thousand forms of shallow preening. But that doesn’t force the conclusion that the art itself is worthless or intellectually hollow. Where there’s big money and social capital, there will be con artists, parasites, priest‐like status hierarchies, “bizarre porn” extremes, and so on. That’s not unique to modern or conceptual art—nor does it prove that someone can’t also do something amazing within that environment.
8) Give Modern Art Its Own “Ebert” or “Menswear Guy” Chance
In your broader discussion of taste, you note that critics like Ebert or Menswear Guy can help novices see deeper grammars in films or tailoring. The exact same dynamic could apply to (some) conceptual or modern art. Maybe you haven’t yet found the “Menswear Guy of conceptual art” you trust to point out real skill in a way that resonates with you. Or maybe you would never find them compelling, which is valid! But the fact that no critic has convinced you yet doesn’t prove that no compelling grammar is there. Ebert might have disliked some arthouse flicks that eventually turned out to be masterpieces, even if they weren’t “accessible” at first.
9) You Already Embrace Many “Modern” Aesthetics in Other Media
You mention you love excellent video, audio, or game experiences (often “outside capital‐A Art”). Yet lots of the same conceptual or futuristic grammar is alive there—video is full of boundary‐pushing visuals, subtle references, and ephemeral subcultures. Think of cutting‐edge music videos or interactive pieces that disrupt the usual “synesthesia” expectations. Some of that might belong to the “dominant thing called Art in some circles,” except it’s been rebranded as design, or marketing, or game dev. If you can see those works as having real grammar and aesthetic payoff, then you’re acknowledging that “modern art” sensibilities do bear fruit in other contexts. It’s not a radical leap to accept that the same grammar can produce interesting, valuable objects in a museum—assuming they’re done with skill.
10) The Platonic “There” There: Modern Art as “Discovery”
Finally, the core question you pose is: “Show me the worthwhile, Platonic ‘there’ there.” The best short version is: modern/conceptual art is a systematic exploration of how meaning, symbol, form, context, and novelty can shift aesthetic perception. In other words, it tries to discover new capacities of vision, new ways of relating an object to an idea, a time, or a culture. And since “taste is grammar,” yes—some attempts will be sloppy, derivative, or purely social‐competitive. But many others truly innovate, as Picasso, Duchamp, or Hilma af Klint did in their day, laying entire new alphabets for seeing. That has a “Platonic dimension” every bit as real, in principle, as the 19th‐century quest for painting’s illusions of light.
If you come at it from that angle, modern‐art grammar is not the extraneous, ephemeral “scam” part. It’s the small fraction of genuinely fresh, imaginative moves that expand the map of what’s artistically possible. That fraction just gets drowned in hype and speculation—but it still exists.
Conclusion
None of this claims you have to like modern or conceptual art, or show it any special courtesy. If you remain unconvinced that its grammar yields enough aesthetic payoff for you personally, that’s fair. But I do hope it demonstrates that the presence of hype, status competition, or even a certain conceptual exclusivity doesn’t automatically kill real creative exploration. The crucial distinction is between “lots of faddish nonsense is produced under the modern‐art banner” (true) and “the grammar itself is worthless, with no deeper structure or value” (incorrect).
If you’re willing to try, with a guide you trust, to see some modern or conceptual works as part of an evolving grammar aimed at discovering new corners of the aesthetic space, you might discover something genuinely interesting—something that meets the standard of “taste as grammar,” not just “taste as con.” You may never prefer it; but at least you might see why it can exist as real art and not just a sophisticated con game.
And if one day you find a piece that has that flash of insight—where you say, “Oh, they really did something I haven’t seen or felt before, not just tried to posture”—you’ll know there is, in fact, a “there” there after all.
In light of other recent discussions, Scott Alexander recently attempted a unified theory of taste, proposing several hypotheses. Is it like physics, a priesthood, a priesthood with fake justifications, a priesthood with good justifications, like increasingly bizarre porn preferences, like fashion (in the sense of trying to stay one step ahead in an endless cycling for signaling purposes), or like grammar?
He then got various reactions. This will now be one of them.
My answer is that taste is all of these, depending on context.
Taste is Most Centrally Like Grammar
Scott Alexander is very suspicious of taste in general, since people keep changing what is good taste and calling each other barbarians for taste reasons, and the experiments are unkind, and the actual arguments about taste look like power struggles.
Here’s another attempt from Zac Hill, which in some ways gets closer.
Zac Hill: ACX is so close to getting it right on ‘taste’, but then dismisses the closest (“grammar”) conclusion in favor of a much more elementary interpretation (“priesthood of esoterica”).
Art works by leveraging the mechanics of a given medium to create meaningful experiences for an audience. This is in turn bounded by three things:
—> The nature of what those mechanics are capable of emphasizing
—> The artist’s facility with those mechanics
—> The audience’s ability to meaningfully perceive how the artist is deploying the mechanics.
The standard ‘highbrow/lowbrow’ distinction is basically just a slider on the third variable. Similar to improving at an instrument with practice, the process of considered experience and reflection of art allows a broader and more textured perception and integration of deployed mechanics.
Menswear Guy is great because he lays this process bare for a medium most of us lack familiarity with; Ebert is the same way; Gardner had this effect on me for literature. One value of the critic is explicating some of these mechanical grammars/vocabularies so we don’t have to derive them independently.
The point is that artistic “quality” can in some sense be ‘empirically/objectively’ derived by understanding those three core variables in greater resolution. Obviously this is in practice impossible, which is why discursive reflection rules. But the process is not mysterious.
If we are going with one answer from Scott’s list, it is obviously grammar. The real answer is it is all of them at different times and places.
He points to one key aspect of grammar, which is that you can have different internally consistent grammars, and they are all valid in their own way, but within each you need to follow their logic and spirit, and there is better and worse Quality.
Languages also work this way overall. Or cuisines. So do artistic styles.
So does taste. You can ‘have taste’ or ‘not have taste’ within any type of taste, in addition to having the taste to prefer the right kinds of taste, by being able to properly sort things by Quality, and create and engineer high Quality yourself, and have the preference and appreciation for and ability to notice high Quality.
Sometimes ‘Taste’ Is Out to Get You
Sometimes, yes, taste is rotating in the sense of fashion, where everyone is trying to stay one step ahead in the status game, but also there is a skill of doing that while also ‘having taste’ both in general and within each context, which is also being tested.
Also, yes, as we saw in From Bauhaus To Our House, sometimes the underlying logic from which taste is being drawn is, as in modern architecture, a literal socialist conspiracy intended to make our lives worse, with a competition to see who can convince more people to suffer more.
And all of this is being combined, in places like the AI Art Test, with other preferences that are not about taste. And sometimes people are trying to apply the wrong kind of ‘good taste’ test to something in a different grammar, or saying that taste should apply on the meta level between the grammars.
You Are Low Quality and You Have No Taste
Thus, ‘having no taste’ can mean any combination of these (with some overlap):
Too little ability to distinguish, in a context, what is good versus bad taste.
Choosing taste preferences that are, at a meta level, considered bad taste.
Choosing types of things where Quality and taste have relatively low impact.
Failing to appreciate and take joy in good taste and high Quality.
Caring more about non-Quality aspects, thus often choosing low Q over high Q.
Caring about things ‘people with good taste’ think you shouldn’t care about.
Not playing along with today’s status game or power trip.
Failing to appreciate complex historical context that explains why a particular thing has been done before and is therefore bad, or is commenting on something else and therefore good, or other such things (see the Lantz discussion later).
Within a given grammar and context, I will stand up for taste Platonism and physics. I believe that, for all practical purposes, yes, there is a right answer to the Quality level of a given work, to whether liking it reflects good taste.
That doesn’t mean you have to then care about it in every instance. You certainly get to rank things for other reasons too. My Letterboxd ratings (from 0.5-5 stars) are meant to largely reflect this Platonic form of Quality. And sometimes I think ‘oh this is going to be a 2-3 star movie’ and decide that’s what I want to watch today, anyway. When I differ from the critics, both high and low, it’s generally because of aspects they think you’re ‘not supposed to’ care about, that are ‘outside of taste’ to them and that they think shouldn’t matter if you’re in good enough taste, but that I think should count, and matter for Quality.
Don’t Be a Snob
I think you greatly benefit from good taste if and only if you are not a snob about it.
As in, you can develop the ability to appreciate what is good, without having disdain for things that are bad. Ebert can appreciate and understand both the great movie and the popcorn flick, so his taste means he wins. But if it meant he turned up his nose at the popcorn flicks, now it’s not clear, and maybe he loses.
Ideally, one has the ability to appreciate all the subtle things that make things in good taste, without recoiling in horror when someone has a bad color scheme or what not.
In Sympathetic Opposition’s Contra Scott on Taste, there seems to be the assumption that Scott is right that having taste and noticing Quality means noticing flaws and thus having the experience of low Quality things be worse. Their response is to say, if you have taste, then you can search out and experience higher Quality, so it’s fine.
They site C.S. Lewis and endorse my #4 in what bad taste primarily is – that good taste is the ability to experience the sublime in things. To which I say:
You can have this, while still appreciating low Quality things too.
Also often the failure to experience the sublime in things that people traditionally think are in bad taste, and of low quality, is a Skill Issue.
In particular, I think one skill I have is the ability to experience the sublime and aesthetic pleasure when consuming media that, objectively, is low Quality and in bad taste, that ‘objectively’ sucks, by isolating the elements that have it from the parts that suck, despite noticing the parts that suck.
When done properly, that makes it better, not worse.
Good as in Useful
I also think that SO hints at the distinction between ‘good taste’ and ‘good.’
it communicates a difficult concept, which makes it good
Literally no one defended it by saying anything about the image itself. No one was like “Look at the lines, the composition, the colors. I could just stare at it and drink it in.”
…
If these people aren’t having a direct aesthetic experience with this image, then it is just not possible to do so.
Which is why they weren’t saying the picture is good as in ‘in good taste.’ They are saying it is ‘good’ as in ‘fun’ or as in ‘is useful.’
Are they having a ‘direct aesthetic experience’ of its details? Not in the sense SO is thinking, presumably, but they are having a conceptual experience, and they are using it as a tool that serves a purpose. Several stars.
What is going on with AI art? It’s not good as in taste. But it’s good as in pretty.
I think that distinguishing this from the deep love and transformation of highbrow art risks assuming the conclusion – the guy who says Harry Potter changed his life is deluded or irrelevant, but the guy who says Dostoyevsky did has correctly intuited a deep truth. But we believe this precisely because we know Dostoyevsky is tasteful and Rowling isn’t – I would prefer a defense of taste which is less tautological.
So I would say, you can say that you got great aesthetic pleasure from Dostoyevsky’s prose, or you appreciated his deep understanding of character, or other neat things like that. If you say those things about Rowling then I’m going to laugh.
But Rowling still spun a good yarn (over and over again) in more basic ways, there is a lot more demand for that product than there is for Dostoyevsky’s product, and there’s no reason you can’t love Harry Potter or let it change your life. It’s fine. There are things there worth finding.
I care about this because I like these thinkers, and I think they’re missing something important and valuable about art. I would like to be able to defend art, fine art, modern art, as a project, in terms that they would find convincing, but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.
Perhaps, as a preliminary sketch of such a defense, I would start by calling attention to the dynamic nature of art – its necessary and unavoidable restlessness. Every work of art is both embedded within a process of perception, reaction, evaluation, and interpretation, and also an intervention into this process.
While I stand by my statements there, and I still wouldn’t set foot in the MoMa, and you can see above what I think about modern architecture regarding From Bauhaus To Our House, that doesn’t mean I am against art or appreciating art, in general.
Lantz’s most important contribution to this discussion, as I see it, is to point out that art and taste are largely in response to the desire to avoid the boring and predictable and what has already been done while also matching expectations, and that a lot of artistic choices and good taste emerge from the detailed context of what had existed before and also what came after.
And I think all of that really is legitimate, and investing in understanding that context can pay off, and that earlier works very much are enriched and ‘get a free pass’ in various ways by the fact that they came earlier, and they were original and innovative at the time, and in what they then led to, and so on. There’s an elegant, important dance going on there.
Sometimes.
Stand Up For What You Believe In
Other times, taste is functionally being fashion, or it is being a priesthood, and for Modern Art I strongly suspect it’s best classified (in Scott’s taxonomy) as bizarre porn, except in a bad way and as buildings displayed on the street.
I’m going to double down that most – not all, but most – of all this modern ‘conceptual art’ is rather bogus and masterbatory, and mostly a scam or a status game or at best some kind of weird in-group abstract zero-sum contest of one-upmanship, at worst a ‘speculative market in tax-avoidant ultra-luxury hyper-objects, obscene wealth and abject, hipster coolness,’ and also a giant f*** you to humanity, and I want it kept locked behind the doors of places like MoMa so I can choose to not set foot in there.
I’m definitely doubling down on Modern Architecture.
I’m not bad at aesthetics, you’re bad at aesthetics, in that you stopped believing in them at all, and tried to darvo and gaslight the rest of us into thinking it was our fault.
Or, I’m not the one who doesn’t care about aesthetics, you’re the one who doesn’t care about aesthetics, and you’re gaslighting the rest of us.
You’re pretending to do grammar when you’re obviously doing something else.
I’m not skeptical of art. I’m skeptical of your particular art, which happens to be the dominant thing called ‘Art’ in some circles. Whereas the people I think of as ‘artists’ today that I admire tend to work with video, or audio, or games, or text, or make visual art within one of those contexts that the capital-A Art World would scoff at.
(Yes, the AI poem most liked in the AI poetry study is horrible slop, and I don’t think you need problematic assumptions to explain why, it’s generic slop with no there there, it’s not particular, it doesn’t make interesting choices, it is just a series of cliche phrases, see, that’s it, I did it, no LLM consult required.)
And in other places, like the stuff Sarah Constantin is describing in Naming the Nameless (interesting historical note: Sarah did eventually leave the Bay, and I think she’s happier for it and that this essay is related to why), they are weaponizing a certain kind of aesthetics as a form of, essentially, fraud and associative vibe-based marketing and attempt to control people’s perceptions of things like ‘cool’ in ways that falsify their true preferences, for reasons political, personal and commercial. And they are attempting to attack us with the resulting paradox spirits when we try to call them out on this. Yes.
Being Technically In Good Taste Is Not a Free Pass
I also think there’s an implicit claim that if you are in good enough taste, enough ‘part of a project,’ then you don’t have to be accessible, you don’t have to stand outside the ‘project,’ and you don’t have to have aesthetic or other value absent your place in that project.
I think that’s very wrong. Doing all of that is also part of your job as an artist and creator. You can sacrifice it in some situations, and certainly you shouldn’t always be able to come in ‘in the middle’ of everything, but this very much counts against you, and reduces not only the reach of the work but also its value even to those who can handle it, because you’re operating without key constraints and that too is important context – you now owe us a worthwhile payoff.
As a writer, I have to continuously strike the balance of accessibility versus repetition, of knowing people don’t read these posts in any particular order. I make trade-offs that I’m learning to improve over time, and everyone else has to make them as well.
It Is Good To Like and Appreciate Things
This concept seems important:
If you pay close attention to how your own taste operates, you can sometimes catch yourself deciding to like a thing. Sometimes this is because your friends like it, or some cool person you want to impress likes it. But other times it’s because part of you, a good part, a part you trust, recognizes something in the thing, a missing piece for a new person you are in the process of becoming.
You say to yourself “I want to like this thing because it is the kind of thing that the kind of person I want to be likes”. And you put yourself in the right posture to like the thing, build the necessary literacy, make the ritual gestures. But you can’t make yourself like something. Often, your existing preferences, as they already are, stubbornly refuse to budge. And sometimes they don’t.
If you pay close attention to this process, you will eventually see this as the terrain of artistic taste.
Weird to say ‘catch yourself’ as if it’s something to avoid or be ashamed about. I attempt to like things all the time. Ceteris paribus, I would prefer to like as many things (and people!) as possible, while keeping them in proper rank order. Find the good in it. But you don’t want to engage in preference falsification. You don’t want to pretend, especially to yourself, to like things you don’t like or especially things you despise, because you’re ‘supposed’ to like them, or it would benefit you to like them.
Frank Lantz: Wow, I just realized that in the comments to that post, Zvi actually makes the following comment: “The post is explaining why she and an entire culture is being defrauded by aesthetics. That is it used to justify all sorts of things, including high prices and what is cool, based on things that have no underlying value.”
So this attitude I thought was more implicit is actually a deliberate, considered position. I find that kind of exciting, honestly. How would I go about convincing Zvi to change his mind on this question?
In turn, I love Lantz’s attitude here that he finds this exciting, and it’s a lot of why I’m giving him so much consideration.
I presume this post should provide a lot of information on how one might go about convincing Zvi to change his mind on this, and what exactly it is that you might want to change my mind about?
Convince me, essentially, that there is a worthwhile and Platonic there there.
If Lantz wants to take a crack at convincing me, maybe even in person in NYC (and potentially even literally at MoMa), I’d be down, on the theory that given story value it’s hard for that to be an unsuccessful failure.
