December 2006I grew up believing that taste is just a matter of personal preference.Each person has things they like, but no one's preferences are anybetter than anyone else's. There is no such thing as good taste.Like a lot of things I grew up believing, this turns out to befalse, and I'm going to try to explain why.One problem with saying there's no such thing as good taste is thatit also means there's no such thing as good art. If there weregood art, then people who liked it would have better taste thanpeople who didn't. So if you discard taste, you also have to discardthe idea of art being good, and artists being good at making it.It was pulling on that thread that unravelled my childhood faithin relativism. When you're trying to make things, taste becomes apractical matter. You have to decide what to do next. Would itmake the painting better if I changed that part? If there's nosuch thing as better, it doesn't matter what you do. In fact, itdoesn't matter if you paint at all. You could just go out and buya ready-made blank canvas. If there's no such thing as good, thatwould be just as great an achievement as the ceiling of the SistineChapel. Less laborious, certainly, but if you can achieve the samelevel of performance with less effort, surely that's more impressive,not less.Yet that doesn't seem quite right, does it?AudienceI think the key to this puzzle is to remember that art has anaudience. Art has a purpose, which is to interest its audience.Good art (like good anything) is art that achieves its purposeparticularly well. The meaning of "interest" can vary. Some worksof art are meant to shock, and others to please; some are meant tojump out at you, and others to sit quietly in the background. Butall art has to work on an audience, and—here's the critical point—members of the audience share things in common.For example, nearly all humans find human faces engaging. It seemsto be wired into us. Babies can recognize faces practically frombirth. In fact, faces seem to have co-evolved with our interestin them; the face is the body's billboard. So all other thingsbeing equal, a painting with faces in it will interest people morethan one without. [1]One reason it's easy to believe that taste is merely personalpreference is that, if it isn't, how do you pick out the peoplewith better taste? There are billions of people, each with theirown opinion; on what grounds can you prefer one to another?[2]But if audiences have a lot in common, you're not in a position ofhaving to choose one out of a random set of individual biases,because the set isn't random. All humans find faces engaging—practically by definition: face recognition is in our DNA. And sohaving a notion of good art, in the sense of art that does its jobwell, doesn't require you to pick out a few individuals and labeltheir opinions as correct. No matter who you pick, they'll findfaces engaging.Of course, space aliens probably wouldn't find human faces engaging.But there might be other things they shared in common with us. Themost likely source of examples is math. I expect space aliens wouldagree with us most of the time about which of two proofs was better.Erdos thought so. He called a maximally elegant proof one out ofGod's book, and presumably God's book is universal.[3]Once you start talking about audiences, you don't have to arguesimply that there are or aren't standards of taste. Instead tastesare a series of concentric rings, like ripples in a pond. Thereare some things that will appeal to you and your friends, othersthat will appeal to most people your age, others that will appealto most humans, and perhaps others that would appeal to most sentientbeings (whatever that means).The picture is slightly more complicated than that, because in themiddle of the pond there are overlapping sets of ripples. Forexample, there might be things that appealed particularly to men,or to people from a certain culture.If good art is art that interests its audience, then when you talkabout art being good, you also have to say for what audience. Sois it meaningless to talk about art simply being good or bad? No,because one audience is the set of all possible humans. I thinkthat's the audience people are implicitly talking about when theysay a work of art is good: they mean it would engage any human.[4]And that is a meaningful test, because although, like any everydayconcept, "human" is fuzzy around the edges, there are a lot ofthings practically all humans have in common. In addition to ourinterest in faces, there's something special about primary colorsfor nearly all of us, because it's an artifact of the way our eyeswork. Most humans will also find images of 3D objects engaging,because that also seems to be built into our visual perception.[5]And beneath that there's edge-finding, which makes imageswith definite shapes more engaging than mere blur.Humans have a lot more in common than this, of course. My goal isnot to compile a complete list, just to show that there's some solidground here. People's preferences aren't random. So an artistworking on a painting and trying to decide whether to change somepart of it doesn't have to think "Why bother? I might as well flipa coin." Instead he can ask "What would make the painting moreinteresting to people?" And the reason you can't equal Michelangeloby going out and buying a blank canvas is that the ceiling of theSistine Chapel is more interesting to people.A lot of philosophers have had a hard time believing it was possiblefor there to be objective standards for art. It seemed obvious thatbeauty, for example, was something that happened in the head of the observer,not something that was a property of objects. It was thus "subjective" rather than "objective." But in fact if you narrow thedefinition of beauty to something that works a certain way onhumans, and you observe how much humans have in common, it turns outto be a property of objects after all. You don'thave to choose between something being a property of the subject or the object if subjects all react similarly.Being good art is thus a property of objects as much as, say, beingtoxic to humans is: it's good art if it consistently affects humans in a certain way.ErrorSo could we figure out what the best art is by taking a vote? Afterall, if appealing to humans is the test, we should be able to justask them, right?Well, not quite. For products of nature that might work. I'd bewilling to eat the apple the world's population had voted mostdelicious, and I'd probably be willing to visit the beach they votedmost beautiful, but having to look at the painting they voted thebest would be a crapshoot.Man-made stuff is different. For one thing, artists, unlike appletrees, often deliberately try to trick us. Some tricks are quitesubtle. For example, any work of art sets expectations by its levelof finish. You don't expect photographic accuracy in somethingthat looks like a quick sketch. So one widely used trick, especiallyamong illustrators, is to intentionally make a painting or drawinglook like it was done faster than it was. The average person looksat it and thinks: how amazingly skillful. It's like saying somethingclever in a conversation as if you'd thought of it on the spur ofthe moment, when in fact you'd worked it out the day before.Another much less subtle influence is brand. If you go to see theMona Lisa, you'll probably be disappointed, because it's hiddenbehind a thick glass wall and surrounded by a frenzied crowd takingpictures of themselves in front of it. At best you can see it theway you see a friend across the room at a crowded party. The Louvremight as well replace it with copy; no one would be able to tell.And yet the Mona Lisa is a small, dark painting. If you foundpeople who'd never seen an image of it and sent them to a museumin which it was hanging among other paintings with a tag labellingit as a portrait by an unknown fifteenth century artist, most wouldwalk by without giving it a second look.For the average person, brand dominates all other factors in thejudgement of art. Seeing a painting they recognize from reproductionsis so overwhelming that their response to it as a painting is drownedout.And then of course there are the tricks people play on themselves.Most adults looking at art worry that if they don't like what they'resupposed to, they'll be thought uncultured. This doesn't justaffect what they claim to like; they actually make themselves likethings they're supposed to.That's why you can't just take a vote. Though appeal to people isa meaningful test, in practice you can't measure it, just as youcan't find north using a compass with a magnet sitting next to it.There are sources of error so powerful that if you take a vote, allyou're measuring is the error.We can, however, approach our goal from another direction, by usingourselves as guinea pigs. You're human. If you want to know whatthe basic human reaction to a piece of art would be, you can atleast approach that by getting rid of the sources of error in yourown judgements.For example, while anyone's reaction to a famous painting will bewarped at first by its fame, there are ways to decrease its effects.One is to come back to the painting over and over. After a fewdays the fame wears off, and you can start to see it as a painting.Another is to stand close. A painting familiar from reproductionslooks more familiar from ten feet away; close in you see detailsthat get lost in reproductions, and which you're therefore seeingfor the first time.There are two main kinds of error that get in the way of seeing awork of art: biases you bring from your own circumstances, andtricks played by the artist. Tricks are straightforward to correctfor. Merely being aware of them usually prevents them from working.For example, when I was ten I used to be very impressed by airbrushedlettering that looked like shiny metal. But once you study howit's done, you see that it's a pretty cheesy trick—one of thesort that relies on pushing a few visual buttons really hard totemporarily overwhelm the viewer. It's like trying to convincesomeone by shouting at them.The way not to be vulnerable to tricks is to explicitly seek outand catalog them. When you notice a whiff of dishonesty comingfrom some kind of art, stop and figure out what's going on. Whensomeone is obviously pandering to an audience that's easily fooled,whether it's someone making shiny stuff to impress ten year olds,or someone making conspicuously avant-garde stuff to impress would-beintellectuals, learn how they do it. Once you've seen enoughexamples of specific types of tricks, you start to become a connoisseurof trickery in general, just as professional magicians are.What counts as a trick? Roughly, it's something done with contemptfor the audience. For example, the guys designing Ferraris in the1950s were probably designing cars that they themselves admired.Whereas I suspect over at General Motors the marketing people aretelling the designers, "Most people who buy SUVs do it to seemmanly, not to drive off-road. So don't worry about the suspension;just make that sucker as big and tough-looking as you can." [6]I think with some effort you can make yourself nearly immune totricks. It's harder to escape the influence of your own circumstances,but you can at least move in that direction. The way to do it isto travel widely, in both time and space. If you go and see allthe different kinds of things people like in other cultures, andlearn about all the different things people have liked in the past,you'll probably find it changes what you like. I doubt you couldever make yourself into a completely universal person, if onlybecause you can only travel in one direction in time. But if youfind a work of art that would appeal equally to your friends, topeople in Nepal, and to the ancient Greeks, you're probably ontosomething.My main point here is not how to have good taste, but that therecan even be such a thing. And I think I've shown that. There issuch a thing as good art. It's art that interests its human audience,and since humans have a lot in common, what interests them is notrandom. Since there's such a thing as good art, there'salso such a thing as good taste, which is the ability to recognizeit.If we were talking about the taste of apples, I'd agree that tasteis just personal preference. Some people like certain kinds ofapples and others like other kinds, but how can you say that oneis right and the other wrong? [7]The thing is, art isn't apples. Art is man-made. It comes with alot of cultural baggage, and in addition the people who make itoften try to trick us. Most people's judgement of art is dominatedby these extraneous factors; they're like someone trying to judgethe taste of apples in a dish made of equal parts apples and jalapenopeppers. All they're tasting is the peppers. So it turns out youcan pick out some people and say that they have better taste thanothers: they're the ones who actually taste art like apples.Or to put it more prosaically, they're the people who (a) are hardto trick, and (b) don't just like whatever they grew up with. Ifyou could find people who'd eliminated all such influences on theirjudgement, you'd probably still see variation in what they liked.But because humans have so much in common, you'd also find theyagreed on a lot. They'd nearly all prefer the ceiling of the SistineChapel to a blank canvas.Making ItI wrote this essay because I was tired of hearing "taste is subjective"and wanted to kill it once and for all. Anyone who makes thingsknows intuitively that's not true. When you're trying to make art,the temptation to be lazy is as great as in any other kind of work.Of course it matters to do a good job. And yet you can see howgreat a hold "taste is subjective" has even in the art world by hownervous it makes people to talk about art being good or bad. Thosewhose jobs require them to judge art, like curators, mostly resortto euphemisms like "significant" or "important" or (getting dangerouslyclose) "realized." [8]I don't have any illusions that being able to talk about art beinggood or bad will cause the people who talk about it to have anythingmore useful to say. Indeed, one of the reasons "taste is subjective"found such a receptive audience is that, historically, the thingspeople have said about good taste have generally been such nonsense.It's not for the people who talk about art that I want to free theidea of good art, but for those who make it. Right now, ambitiouskids going to art school run smack into a brick wall. They arrivehoping one day to be as good as the famous artists they've seen inbooks, and the first thing they learn is that the concept of goodhas been retired. Instead everyone is just supposed to exploretheir own personal vision. [9]When I was in art school, we were looking one day at a slide ofsome great fifteenth century painting, and one of the students asked"Why don't artists paint like that now?" The room suddenly gotquiet. Though rarely asked out loud, this question lurks uncomfortablyin the back of every art student's mind. It was as if someone hadbrought up the topic of lung cancer in a meeting within PhilipMorris."Well," the professor replied, "we're interested in differentquestions now." He was a pretty nice guy, but at the time I couldn'thelp wishing I could send him back to fifteenth century Florenceto explain in person to Leonardo & Co. how we had moved beyond theirearly, limited concept of art. Just imagine that conversation.In fact, one of the reasons artists in fifteenth century Florence madesuch great things was that they believed you could make great things.[10]They were intensely competitive and were always trying to outdoone another, like mathematicians or physicists today—maybe likeanyone who has ever done anything really well.The idea that you could make great things was not just a usefulillusion. They were actually right. So the most important consequenceof realizing there can be good art is that it frees artists to tryto make it. To the ambitious kids arriving at art school this yearhoping one day to make great things, I say: don't believe it whenthey tell you this is a naive and outdated ambition. There is sucha thing as good art, and if you try to make it, there are peoplewho will notice.Notes[1]This is not to say, of course, that good paintings musthave faces in them, just that everyone's visual piano has that keyon it. There are situations in which you want to avoid faces,precisely because they attract so much attention. But you can seehow universally faces work by their prevalence inadvertising.[2]The other reason it's easy to believe is that it makes peoplefeel good. To a kid, this idea is crack. In every other respectthey're constantly being told that they have a lot to learn. Butin this they're perfect. Their opinion carries the same weight asany adult's. You should probably question anything you believedas a kid that you'd want to believe this much.[3]It's conceivable that the elegance of proofs is quantifiable,in the sense that there may be some formal measure that turns outto coincide with mathematicians' judgements. Perhaps it would beworth trying to make a formal language for proofs in which thoseconsidered more elegant consistently came out shorter (perhaps afterbeing macroexpanded or compiled).[4]Maybe it would be possible to make art that would appeal tospace aliens, but I'm not going to get into that because (a) it'stoo hard to answer, and (b) I'm satisfied if I can establish thatgood art is a meaningful idea for human audiences.[5]If early abstract paintings seem more interesting than laterones, it may be because the first abstract painters were trainedto paint from life, and their hands thus tended to make the kindof gestures you use in representing physical things. In effectthey were saying "scaramara" instead of "uebfgbsb."[6]It's a bit more complicated, because sometimes artistsunconsciously use tricks by imitating art that does.[7]I phrased this in terms of the taste of apples because ifpeople can see the apples, they can be fooled. When I was a kidmost apples were a variety called Red Delicious that had been bredto look appealing in stores, but which didn't taste very good.[8]To be fair, curators are in a difficult position. If they'redealing with recent art, they have to include things in shows thatthey think are bad. That's because the test for what gets includedin shows is basically the market price, and for recent art that islargely determined by successful businessmen and their wives. Soit's not always intellectual dishonesty that makes curators anddealers use neutral-sounding language.[9]What happens in practice is that everyone gets really good attalking about art. As the art itself gets more random, the effortthat would have gone into the work goes instead into the intellectualsounding theory behind it. "My work represents an exploration ofgender and sexuality in an urban context," etc. Different peoplewin at that game.[10]There were several other reasons, including that Florence wasthen the richest and most sophisticated city in the world, and thatthey lived in a time before photography had (a) killed portraitureas a source of income and (b) made brand the dominant factor in thesale of art.Incidentally, I'm not saying that good art = fifteenth centuryEuropean art. I'm not saying we should make what they made, butthat we should work like they worked. There are fields now in whichmany people work with the same energy and honesty that fifteenthcentury artists did, but art is not one of them.Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this, and to Paul Watson for permission to use the image at the top.
