Is Good Taste Subjective?
Last week I was discussing the soporific music i've come to expect from gay dance clubs, namely the repetitive type that tweakers like to zone out to at 4am on the dance floor of Velvet Nation (now TOWN). I tried to make an argument that this music is not a high quality product, despite its popularity. I was met with the inevitable response: Quality is relative, just a matter of personal preference.
This afternoon during lunch I was rereading programmer Paul Graham's essay on How Art Can Be Good, and was intrigued by his attempt to put a stake through the heart of relativism, at least as it pertains to discerning quality in art. By my estimation, he does a good job of making a case for the superiority of the Sistine Chapel over a blank white canvas.
Graham argues that good taste is nothing more than the ability to recognize good art (quality), and that good art is knowable by its universal appeal. In other words, there are qualities inherent in the subject of a piece of good art that most people will connect with. If a work of art has these universal qualities, it is good art. Graham goes on to say that where we go wrong in our judgement is when we bring our own context to the art (which clouds our perspective) and when we fall prey to artistic "tricks" that may draw a crowd, but are nothing more than cheap gimmicks that create smoke but no real fire. In other words, we are unable to recognize quality because we either have some tangential prejudice that we associate with the art, or we are gullible to manipulative tricks that are done with "contempt for the audience", which pull us in and make us think we are seeing something of quality when we are not.
To this point in my experience of gay dance music, I feel that I have mostly seen tricks, but is there a case for being more objective? Is it possible that there is quality present in (Insert your disdained music genre here) that you may not be seeing due to your prejudices? Does the circuit boy deserve more credit for personal taste?
5 comments:
"we are unable to recognize quality because we either have some tangential prejudice that we associate with the art"
I think that may be the flaw in what you're saying. Being able to think outside a constrictive box would seem to be his point, if one wants to elevate one's taste.
Just as there is no comparison between Maroon 5 and the Velvet Underground, there are different levels of quality when it comes to Dance or House. Being able to distinguish between the wheat and the chaff within your own preferred genre is probably more important in this case than being able to choose a preferred genre in the first place.
Just a thought...
Ben, sounds like Zen & Motorcycle Maintenance revisited...
I think the problem with speaking in terms of "universality" is that it is far too lofty and has no real, tangible relation to WHY we think what we do and how our opinions are formed. You have to consider time/place/culture when trying to determine some sort of universal quality traits.
It's often been said that Beethoven's 9th Symphony is among the more perfect pieces of music and one could make a very strong arguement for why this is so. But we're only considering those with an ear trained in Western musical traditions. It's specific to a time/place/culture.
That said, when I'm ready to dance at a club, I don't request Beethoven 9. I want dance music.
The Sistine Chapel is indeed beautiful, but it would really suck as a mural at an elementary school playground.
Context! Time/place/culture! Trying to define quality in a bubble as some sort of thing that spans time and space just doesn't work.
I definitely agree with chris on the issue of context for artwork. There has to be some set of agreed upon measures to define what's quality and what's crap.
I'm confused by your paraphrasal of Graham when you say "good art is knowable by its universal appeal."
That seems to suggest that popularity is the measure of quality in art, which is certainly very democratic of Graham. But what happens when something that was universally appealing becomes universally apauling, and vice versa?
Maybe he wants to argue that it must stand the "test of time" like the Sistine Chapel, but if time is infinite I think it's silly to argue we can ever know something will be popular forever....
And doesn't that fly in the face of the much more common argument favoring universalism in art crit: that there exists a standard of quality outside the whims of public opinion? Experts in the field [artists, curators, critics, etc.] spend years developing a knowledge of art history in order to participate in a specialized discourse in negotiation with that "universal" standard.
And yes, I'm clearly a relativist...
only people with bad taste think good taste is subjective.
i dunno. that definition only seems true in a really classical sense. greek urns still look nice today?...bingo! that's good art. especially with something like dance music which often doesn't make any sense without context. it's meant to be played in a big room of people who are dancing (duh). haven't you ever been to a big dance party where everyone is just dancing and losing their shit? (without necessarily losing their shirts). it's a pretty incredible feeling. that's what that music is trying to do -- make you lose your shit dancing. don't you like dancing ben? have you no soul?
that said i think a lot of dance music is predictable and boring.
Post a Comment