Is Good Taste Objective?

There's no quality of mind called good taste that discerns good art to be good and bad art bad. This is because artworks aren't objectively good or bad to begin with; after all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You can't have a mechanism to detect something that does not exist. And therefore, there's no such thing as (objective) good taste.

There are weaker notions of good taste which do survive scrutiny, but they all boil down to subjective considerations; mere opinions and feelings. "Taste in music" is a simple idea; it is just what you like. But what is a good taste in music? One interpretation is that there's some objective hierarchy in the quality of music, and your taste in music is only good to the degree that it tracks this hierarchy. You must like those things at the top and dislike what's at the bottom. Of course, there's no such hierarchy in reality; there only seems to be.

In the way I'm saying there's no objective goodness, there's also no objective colour. Here too we're confusing a quality of our mind as a property of things. Colour blind people don't see what you see. Bears and beavers and bees don't see what you see. This isn't to say that red and yellow are not real, just that claims of the type "this apple is red" and "this banana is yellow" correspond only to your experience, not to objects themselves; atoms don't come coloured. A certain wavelength of light may appear to you as a fixed colour, but a differently designed mind might see it differently.

Yet this poses no problem for us, since for most people, the sky is, in fact, blue. Our colour-detection neural circuitry evolved to its final form millions of years ago, and barring a few exceptions, all humans share them. Universality does not necessitate objectivity.

It is for similar reasons that we can have large consensus on which art is good and which bad. But when it comes to aesthetics, the terrain is much murkier, and consequently, our opinions diverge.

Aesthetic judgements are one level over and above the subjectivity of colours. Suppose we see the same blue sky; the question is, do we find the same blue skies beautiful? And here, the circuitry that causes you to go one way or the other isn't solely determined by your genes. To be sure, it is anchored by the genes, but more importantly, it's morphed through your lived experiences. In many cases, it's directed to its final judgements, through cultural memes that you've inherited.

Whether you will like a piece of art depends on, among other things, what type of art it is. In the case of paintings, though it started off in its history as determined by ancient circuits that program for beauty and symmetry, these days a big part of it is conceptual and driven by its meaning. And so it is that certain educated circles prefer works like Jean-Michel Basquiat's contemporary paintings, which in my opinion amounts to scribbles of a man with no technical prowess, over more classical paintings that perfected the standards of realism and composition. And this is largely driven by the creative projection of meaning. The more the art strays from our primitive aesthetic sensibilities, the more space there is to make a case for it through words. This isn't to say that I'm right in any sense to find Basquiat's work unimpressive; only that I do, and wherever it may have come from, I have different standards from those that think he's a genius.

For modern art, cultural attitudes and norms have overruled the innate judgements driven by the genes. Breaking away from established standards is routine and celebrated. When they pay enough attention and spend enough time on them, humans find all sorts of grotesque objects beautiful. So in these circles, good taste is about loving things that ordinary people don't find deserving of any love; it's about loving things that ordinary people scoff at.

In music, there's much less leeway because whatever be the meaning that's conveyed through the lyrics, the sound has to be pleasant to the ear. You can't bullshit your way into liking a song that's noise to you no matter how compelling a story is woven to provide context for it. In this way, music is different from paintings. However, you can start appreciating songs that you didn't previously like. All sorts of niche artists, unpopular to the larger masses, can start appealing to you when you keep hearing it over and over. Your musical adventures can take you to interesting places, but those destinations will be unique, and it's based on who you are, your history, and the world you inhabit. In music, good taste (as I've heard it) is merely having spent enough time outside the mainstream, and as a consequence, having grown a liking for them. But with one important caveat: whoever is praising the other of having good taste, usually themselves aspire to like those artists; they might think it is cool to like Black Sabbath or Bach but cannot at present find them enjoyable.

In the case of products sold to the consumer, there's also the element of utility that colours good taste. A chair, however beautifully decorated, must first and foremost be comfortable to sit in. And an app, however beautifully designed, must first and foremost solve the problem of its user. Steve Jobs is considered to be a man of good taste, and here all it means is that he was good at predicting what people will like, even when they themselves wouldn't have known they'll come to like it. He envisioned the iPhone and the iPad and the iPod, had strong opinions on how it should look and how it should feel. And he was right. Product designers with poor taste, on the other hand, build things that don't make sense. It fails in the market because they're confused about what people like. They have incorrect theories of mind and broken intuitions.

Curiously, in both music and art, good taste is associated with finding pleasure in the unusual, whereas for products, it's about what appeals to everyone.

In none of these cases do we have to seek a metaphysical grounding of objectiveness of taste to explain what we see. Our minds come with aesthetic dispositions and we share those dispositions with our fellow humans. Where we diverge, that is also explained easily. That you can predict what others might like is not surprising given we share a lot of the cognitive machinery. So in my opinion there is no mystery here. The question, as Paul Graham (rhetorically) put it, of how there can be no such thing as good taste when some art is obviously better than others, dissolves away when you consider that people simply inherit their standards, either genetically or memetically. The standards seep so deep and operate so unconsciously that you are left with strong intuitions of what is good and what is bad. But the standards themselves can be augmented through mere exposure to more art or even some critical thinking.

All that said, taste doesn't have to be objective for it to be valuable. If you know what you like, can articulate it, and can be decisive about it, then you exist as a strong curation point over the barrage of content produced in the world. People who share your sensibilities will find that valuable. Your articulation of why you find something good can bring clarity to those people who feel the same way but can't find the words for it. When you form theories of what's good and what's bad (even just to you), it can prompt people to notice things they haven't noticed and interpret things in ways they haven't interpreted, and as a result, find much more pleasure attending to works of art. So the quest for developing your taste is by no means a lost cause.

It's just that none of these point to an objective notion of good taste. But why care about that anyway?