Is there such a thing as good taste?

Re:Is there such a thing as good taste? by nickelpro on Monday November 15, 2021 @10:36AM (#29228598)

The conflation of skill with taste demonstrates exactly why Graham is wrong. There's many widely recognized works of art, by critics of similarly recognized taste, that are far less skillful than what a competent art student can put out today and yet held in higher acclaim.

Post-modernism, Dada, and surrealism drove the stake through this point, The Treachery of Images or Fountain (Duchamp) aren't extremely skillful, but they're world class art from a certain point of view.

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Re:Is there such a thing as good taste? by havermeyer on Monday November 15, 2021 @10:45AM (#29228696)

There's even a subreddit dedicated to awful taste but great execution :) https://old.reddit.com/r/ATBGE/

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Re:Is there such a thing as good taste? by rp1 on Monday November 15, 2021 @10:41AM (#29228655)

I think you’re taking too narrow a definition of skill. True, drawing a straight line is a skill, but the vision to draw a particular line in an innovative way is also a skill.

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Re:Is there such a thing as good taste? by nickelpro on Monday November 15, 2021 @10:53AM (#29228797)

And what counts as visionary and what counts as nonsense is entirely subjective. We can judge how straight a line is objectively, but we can't judge "vision" objectively, and thus "taste" is inherently subjective.

That Graham wrote an entire essay rubbing up against this point without once encountering any literature that explains this (seminally Bourdieu, but there are many others) is surprising.

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Re:Is there such a thing as good taste? by rp1 on Monday November 15, 2021 @11:26AM (#29229192)

But subjectiveness applies to everything. For instance, whether or not something is moral is subjective, and yet there is a collective notion of morality.

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