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December 2006  
  
I grew up believing that taste is just a matter of personal preference. Each
person has things they like, but no one's preferences are any better 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 be false, and I'm
going to try to explain why.  
  
One problem with saying there's no such thing as good taste is that it also
means there's no such thing as good art. If there were good art, then people
who liked it would have better taste than people who didn't. So if you discard
taste, you also have to discard the idea of art being good, and artists being
good at making it.  
  
It was pulling on that thread that unravelled my childhood faith in
relativism. When you're trying to make things, taste becomes a practical
matter. You have to decide what to do next. Would it make the painting better
if I changed that part? If there's no such thing as better, it doesn't matter
what you do. In fact, it doesn't matter if you paint at all. You could just go
out and buy a ready-made blank canvas. If there's no such thing as good, that
would be just as great an achievement as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Less laborious, certainly, but if you can achieve the same level of
performance with less effort, surely that's more impressive, not less.  
  
Yet that doesn't seem quite right, does it?  
  
**Audience**  
  
I think the key to this puzzle is to remember that art has an audience. Art
has a purpose, which is to interest its audience. Good art (like good
anything) is art that achieves its purpose particularly well. The meaning of
"interest" can vary. Some works of art are meant to shock, and others to
please; some are meant to jump out at you, and others to sit quietly in the
background. But all 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 seems to be wired
into us. Babies can recognize faces practically from birth. In fact, faces
seem to have co-evolved with our interest in them; the face is the body's
billboard. So all other things being equal, a painting with faces in it will
interest people more than one without.   
  
One reason it's easy to believe that taste is merely personal preference is
that, if it isn't, how do you pick out the people with better taste? There are
billions of people, each with their own opinion; on what grounds can you
prefer one to another?   
  
But if audiences have a lot in common, you're not in a position of having 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 so having a notion of good art, in the sense of
art that does its job well, doesn't require you to pick out a few individuals
and label their opinions as correct. No matter who you pick, they'll find
faces engaging.  
  
Of course, space aliens probably wouldn't find human faces engaging. But there
might be other things they shared in common with us. The most likely source of
examples is math. I expect space aliens would agree with us most of the time
about which of two proofs was better. Erdos thought so. He called a maximally
elegant proof one out of God's book, and presumably God's book is universal.
  
  
Once you start talking about audiences, you don't have to argue simply that
there are or aren't standards of taste. Instead tastes are a series of
concentric rings, like ripples in a pond. There are some things that will
appeal to you and your friends, others that will appeal to most people your
age, others that will appeal to most humans, and perhaps others that would
appeal to most sentient beings (whatever that means).  
  
The picture is slightly more complicated than that, because in the middle of
the pond there are overlapping sets of ripples. For example, 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 talk about art
being good, you also have to say for what audience. So is it meaningless to
talk about art simply being good or bad? No, because one audience is the set
of all possible humans. I think that's the audience people are implicitly
talking about when they say a work of art is good: they mean it would engage
any human.   
  
And that is a meaningful test, because although, like any everyday concept,
"human" is fuzzy around the edges, there are a lot of things practically all
humans have in common. In addition to our interest in faces, there's something
special about primary colors for nearly all of us, because it's an artifact of
the way our eyes work. Most humans will also find images of 3D objects
engaging, because that also seems to be built into our visual perception. 
And beneath that there's edge-finding, which makes images with definite shapes
more engaging than mere blur.  
  
Humans have a lot more in common than this, of course. My goal is not to
compile a complete list, just to show that there's some solid ground here.
People's preferences aren't random. So an artist working on a painting and
trying to decide whether to change some part of it doesn't have to think "Why
bother? I might as well flip a coin." Instead he can ask "What would make the
painting more interesting to people?" And the reason you can't equal
Michelangelo by going out and buying a blank canvas is that the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel is more interesting to people.  
  
A lot of philosophers have had a hard time believing it was possible for there
to be objective standards for art. It seemed obvious that beauty, 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 the definition of beauty to something that works a
certain way on humans, and you observe how much humans have in common, it
turns out to be a property of objects after all. You don't have 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, being toxic to humans is: it's good art if it consistently affects humans
in a certain way.  
  
**Error**  
  
So could we figure out what the best art is by taking a vote? After all, if
appealing to humans is the test, we should be able to just ask them, right?  
  
Well, not quite. For products of nature that might work. I'd be willing to eat
the apple the world's population had voted most delicious, and I'd probably be
willing to visit the beach they voted most beautiful, but having to look at
the painting they voted the best would be a crapshoot.  
  
Man-made stuff is different. For one thing, artists, unlike apple trees, often
deliberately try to trick us. Some tricks are quite subtle. For example, any
work of art sets expectations by its level of finish. You don't expect
photographic accuracy in something that looks like a quick sketch. So one
widely used trick, especially among illustrators, is to intentionally make a
painting or drawing look like it was done faster than it was. The average
person looks at it and thinks: how amazingly skillful. It's like saying
something clever in a conversation as if you'd thought of it on the spur of
the moment, when in fact you'd worked it out the day before.  
  
Another much less subtle influence is brand. If you go to see the Mona Lisa,
you'll probably be disappointed, because it's hidden behind a thick glass wall
and surrounded by a frenzied crowd taking pictures of themselves in front of
it. At best you can see it the way you see a friend across the room at a
crowded party. The Louvre might 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 found
people who'd never seen an image of it and sent them to a museum in which it
was hanging among other paintings with a tag labelling it as a portrait by an
unknown fifteenth century artist, most would walk by without giving it a
second look.  
  
For the average person, brand dominates all other factors in the judgement of
art. Seeing a painting they recognize from reproductions is so overwhelming
that their response to it as a painting is drowned out.  
  
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're supposed to, they'll
be thought uncultured. This doesn't just affect what they claim to like; they
actually make themselves like things they're supposed to.  
  
That's why you can't just take a vote. Though appeal to people is a meaningful
test, in practice you can't measure it, just as you can'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, all you're measuring is the error.  
  
We can, however, approach our goal from another direction, by using ourselves
as guinea pigs. You're human. If you want to know what the basic human
reaction to a piece of art would be, you can at least approach that by getting
rid of the sources of error in your own judgements.  
  
For example, while anyone's reaction to a famous painting will be warped 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 few days the fame wears off, and you
can start to see it as a painting. Another is to stand close. A painting
familiar from reproductions looks more familiar from ten feet away; close in
you see details that get lost in reproductions, and which you're therefore
seeing for the first time.  
  
There are two main kinds of error that get in the way of seeing a work of art:
biases you bring from your own circumstances, and tricks played by the artist.
Tricks are straightforward to correct for. Merely being aware of them usually
prevents them from working. For example, when I was ten I used to be very
impressed by airbrushed lettering that looked like shiny metal. But once you
study how it's done, you see that it's a pretty cheesy trick—one of the sort
that relies on pushing a few visual buttons really hard to temporarily
overwhelm the viewer. It's like trying to convince someone by shouting at
them.  
  
The way not to be vulnerable to tricks is to explicitly seek out and catalog
them. When you notice a whiff of dishonesty coming from some kind of art, stop
and figure out what's going on. When someone 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-be intellectuals, learn how they do it. Once you've seen enough
examples of specific types of tricks, you start to become a connoisseur of
trickery in general, just as professional magicians are.  
  
What counts as a trick? Roughly, it's something done with contempt for the
audience. For example, the guys designing Ferraris in the 1950s were probably
designing cars that they themselves admired. Whereas I suspect over at General
Motors the marketing people are telling the designers, "Most people who buy
SUVs do it to seem manly, not to drive off-road. So don't worry about the
suspension; just make that sucker as big and tough-looking as you can."   
  
I think with some effort you can make yourself nearly immune to tricks. 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 is to travel widely, in both time and
space. If you go and see all the different kinds of things people like in
other cultures, and learn about all the different things people have liked in
the past, you'll probably find it changes what you like. I doubt you could
ever make yourself into a completely universal person, if only because you can
only travel in one direction in time. But if you find a work of art that would
appeal equally to your friends, to people in Nepal, and to the ancient Greeks,
you're probably onto something.  
  
My main point here is not how to have good taste, but that there can even be
such a thing. And I think I've shown that. There is such 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 not random. Since there's such a thing as good
art, there's also such a thing as good taste, which is the ability to
recognize it.  
  
If we were talking about the taste of apples, I'd agree that taste is just
personal preference. Some people like certain kinds of apples and others like
other kinds, but how can you say that one is right and the other wrong?   
  
The thing is, art isn't apples. Art is man-made. It comes with a lot of
cultural baggage, and in addition the people who make it often try to trick
us. Most people's judgement of art is dominated by these extraneous factors;
they're like someone trying to judge the taste of apples in a dish made of
equal parts apples and jalapeno peppers. All they're tasting is the peppers.
So it turns out you can pick out some people and say that they have better
taste than others: they're the ones who actually taste art like apples.  
  
Or to put it more prosaically, they're the people who (a) are hard to trick,
and (b) don't just like whatever they grew up with. If you could find people
who'd eliminated all such influences on their judgement, you'd probably still
see variation in what they liked. But because humans have so much in common,
you'd also find they agreed on a lot. They'd nearly all prefer the ceiling of
the Sistine Chapel to a blank canvas.  
  
**Making It**  
  
I wrote this essay because I was tired of hearing "taste is subjective" and
wanted to kill it once and for all. Anyone who makes things knows 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 how great a hold "taste is subjective" has even in the art
world by how nervous it makes people to talk about art being good or bad.
Those whose jobs require them to judge art, like curators, mostly resort to
euphemisms like "significant" or "important" or (getting dangerously close)
"realized."   
  
I don't have any illusions that being able to talk about art being good or bad
will cause the people who talk about it to have anything more useful to say.
Indeed, one of the reasons "taste is subjective" found such a receptive
audience is that, historically, the things people 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 the idea of
good art, but for those who make it. Right now, ambitious kids going to art
school run smack into a brick wall. They arrive hoping one day to be as good
as the famous artists they've seen in books, and the first thing they learn is
that the concept of good has been retired. Instead everyone is just supposed
to explore their own personal vision.   
  
When I was in art school, we were looking one day at a slide of some great
fifteenth century painting, and one of the students asked "Why don't artists
paint like that now?" The room suddenly got quiet. Though rarely asked out
loud, this question lurks uncomfortably in the back of every art student's
mind. It was as if someone had brought up the topic of lung cancer in a
meeting within Philip Morris.  
  
"Well," the professor replied, "we're interested in different questions now."
He was a pretty nice guy, but at the time I couldn't help wishing I could send
him back to fifteenth century Florence to explain in person to Leonardo & Co.
how we had moved beyond their early, limited concept of art. Just imagine that
conversation.  
  
In fact, one of the reasons artists in fifteenth century Florence made such
great things was that they believed you could make great things.  They
were intensely competitive and were always trying to outdo one another, like
mathematicians or physicists today—maybe like anyone who has ever done
anything really well.  
  
The idea that you could make great things was not just a useful illusion. They
were actually right. So the most important consequence of realizing there can
be good art is that it frees artists to try to make it. To the ambitious kids
arriving at art school this year hoping one day to make great things, I say:
don't believe it when they tell you this is a naive and outdated ambition.
There is such a thing as good art, and if you try to make it, there are people
who will notice.  
  
  
  
  
  
**