Aesthetic judgement

[liv]

So my link to Ann Leckie's piece on liking things that are in some sense not "good" has lead to a really interesting discussion. I'd like to pull up some of my thoughts here, and separate the abstract underpinnings out from discussing the Hugo slates, which was one of the examples given.

Leckie writes:

I have no difficulty telling the difference between a pop tart and a gourmet pastry, velveeta and some of the certifiably best cheese in the US. And not because I think there’s no such thing as standards–just because I like something doesn’t mean it’s particularly good [...] It’s entirely possible to criticize things you like. It’s entirely possible to like bad things and dislike good things.

Several people had a problem with the formulation of liking bad things. Surely if you like something, you by definition don't think it's bad.

Part of the issue here, I think, is that "bad" and "good" are incredibly generic words and people will understand all kinds of different things by them. There's the moral sense; part of Leckie's point is that personal tastes aren't moral or immoral. It's not morally bad to like popular and accessible stuff, nor is it morally bad to like obscure, expensive high culture things.

At the same time, I don't think personal taste is the only criterion other than moral by which anything can be judged. I do believe there's such a thing as artistic merit, and this is a meaningful way to consider creations. I'm reluctant to use terms such as "objective" because that adds confusion, not clarity to this sort of discussion. But artistic merit has a basis in external reality, it's not just whether or not you like something, nor the consensus of whether lots of people like it. There is such a thing as standards.

There are works which take substantial effort and skill to produce, which bring something truly new and original into the world, which have the capacity to move people profoundly. And there are works which don't have any of these properties, and it's not bad that they exist or that people enjoy them, but they aren't great art. My feeling is that the reason this claim is controversial is that the judgement of artistic merit requires a certain degree of specialist knowledge of the field of endeavour and surrounding culture. That means that the judgement can't be measured mechanically, it requires actual human experts, and even they are not going to line up absolutely perfectly in how they rank works. So this kind of judgement has something in common with assessments which are merely personal preference and don't have much reference to external reality, but that doesn't make it the same kind of thing.

Further, artistic judgement isn't at all democratic and often isn't very accessible. Each individual is the expert, indeed the only person who can decide, in their own tastes and whether they like something or not. Not so in deciding what is artistically valuable. I picked up the idea from my brother the philosopher of connoisseurism. That is, if I've understood it correctly, the concept that making artistic judgements is a learnable skill which can be mastered. And people who are more expert in it are more right than amateurs. Which is not to say that such judgements can't be biased; certainly, works that conform more to what is socially valued will tend to be more favourably rated, eg if they're made by high status people such as hegemonic men, or if they come from a historical period currently in favour, or if they're like the sort of thing previously decided to be good. And I have no doubt that artistic judgements fail to be completely pure of any influence from just whether the person deciding likes the thing; still, part of the point of connoisseurship is that you put effort into learning to separate your own personal tastes from a more shared idea of what is worthy.

The other problem with needing a certain level of expertise is that acquiring such means picking up the culture and values of the existing cultural gatekeepers. People who are already on top of society are more likely to have opportunities to become experts, and therefore their judgements tend to reinforce existing hierarchies. For example, I've come across people who are totally convinced that Western art music is inherently superior to the music of any other culture, because they're unconsciously or even explicitly setting criteria for good music that conform to the trajectory of European music development since the Renaissance. And judging one type of cultural product by standards that belong to a different context is going to lead to meaningless results. Again, that doesn't mean that all such judgements or all standards are meaningless.

So I have no problem with Leckie's claim that it's possible to like bad things and dislike good things, assuming that bad and good here refer to artistic or other creative merit. The thorny issue here is what happens when two people disagree about a judgement. If the judgement is about personal taste, it's foolish and probably pointlessly rude to disagree about it; you shouldn't judge other people for liking what they like. But if it's about artistic merit, then it may in fact be correct to say, I know more about this area of culture than you do, and I consider that what you rate highly isn't that good. There's still an issue of tact; outright calling someone ignorant isn't really helpful, but that's true equally when the disagreement is about a matter of scientific fact. Sometimes there's just horrible crossed wires because of the multiple meanings of "good"; it's easy to confuse criticizing someone's aesthetic judgement with criticizing their personal taste, or even calling them a (morally) bad person.

Defensiveness may have a more subtle origin than that, though, it might be to do with the fact that being an expert requires access to appropriate education and not everybody has that access. There's also the snobbism side of it; there are plenty of people who don't really know how to judge the artistic merits of something for themselves, but have had access to the kind of education where they're simply told what to value. And people like that may be perceived, sometimes correctly, as looking down on others who don't like the right things. That encourages the sort of reverse snobbery that Leckie refers to: if privileged people are setting themselves up as false experts because they know what sort of wine or food or art or music or literature is worthy, it's understandable that others will simply reject anything that seems to be valued by the cultural elites.

I slightly have the feeling that I'm rehashing Plato here, but there are worse things.

Comments

[flippac]

I may've moaned to you before about how one of my exes used to treat my music? I minded less the stuff about skill involved - but holy crap I am not happy about being told she fell in love with me when we sat down for a couple of hours for me to play her old work, then her treating everything I did afterwards equivalently. Including the blatant "I made a mildly interesting bass sound and now I want to test it out" 8 second chunk of by-the-book drum'n'bass with zero emotional content.

The cultural stuff around dance music is a bit more complex, of course - at least, if you're not still trying to figure out who to name that isn't Aphex Twin because it's not the 90s any more. But the same goes for any kind of music that hasn't become assimilated as at least an upper-middle-class plaything, where there are values being expressed that the overall connoisseurs are still getting their heads around or finding where the relevant cultural knowledge got buried.

I'm guessing you won't be totally shocked to know I don't think I've handed you anything I consider to be "good" drum work by my own standards, anyway!

[liv]

I definitely do over-rate creative stuff by people I'm in love with, but I can see that's really annoying as an artist if someone can't tell the difference between your best work and some random doodle trying out a technique.

Really interesting point about dance music. There are starting to be university courses where people study that sort of thing, but you're absolutely right that it's not generally valued as part of middle-class culture, and there are lots of genres where the expertise is much more within a particular subculture than written down and analysed by the usual gatekeepers.

[flippac]

There was a major respectability wave in the late 90s as the trance boom led to more synth covers of classical pieces, but that's not the same effect directly of course. Which chunks of the Amen break are your favourite to chop around with isn't dinner-table conversation pretty much anywhere!

Nothing wrong with over-rating the work of loved ones - it's a piece of them made manifest so if it's at all expressive it would be hard not to. The one partner I've actually lived with liked watching me work too (I guess someone with a "do the track in 3-5 hours" workflow is a certain kind of intense to see, the same way as someone jamming what they feel can be?).

But yes, the uniform response that only even makes sense as a response to assumptions about my mental health that don't hold ("person is overly self-critical and needs positive reinforcement") is... well, especially annoying coming from someone who's familiar with some of the literature on conditioning from a game design POV and should know it's demotivating!

[silveradept]

I wonder how much judgment of artistic value relies on either the creator or the critic and not the work, and how much of the snobbishness, whether on display or in reverse, is someone attempting to substitute judgment of the person for the work.

For example, I'd like to believe that Roger Ebert, regardless of what I personally believe about how taste in movies, knows them well enough and expertly that his pronouncements on whether a movie had artistic merit should hold weight, based on his career and knowledge. Someone, however, who doesn't believe Ebert knows anything at all about movies is less inclined to believe that works he chooses have artistic merit. Not because of the work itself, but because Ebert thinks it's good, they think it isn't. The judgment of the arbiter has substituted for judgment of the work, and it may not have anything to do with the amount of knowledge the person passing judgment on the arbiter has of the subject matter.

[liv]

Ooh, really interesting point! Humans have evolved and developed a lot of short-cuts for assessing second-hand judgements (in all areas, not just art), and deciding whether someone is a competent critic is a really good example of that. And some of the shortcuts are snobbery or other prejudice, but it's really a good point that those prejudices apply to critics not just creators. Sometimes an individual critic, sometimes just, this is the kind of thing that people like me, or people with high social status, approve of.

[lilacsigil]

the kind of education where they're simply told what to value

Yes! Especially as this kind of education (whether at home or at school) tends to go as far as telling you what to value and not how or why it's valued. For example, I don't know much about painting beyond a surface level, but I could rattle off a whole list of valued painters and identify certain paintings without being able to say more about why they're "good". This is a social and class skill, nothing to do with knowledge. I had more education in music and literature, so as well as knowing what's supposed to be "good", I can also identify patterns and make more informed value judgements. People with more learning in the field (and not necessarily formal learning at all!) can go into much more depth again.

[liv]

Yes, this really does put the point I was trying to make more clearly. Being able to list great works is a class skill and not really related to the ability to actually judge art. And informal, personal learning can be as good or better at instilling real critical skills rather than just the list of canonical works.

[sfred]

This is all reminding me of Dead Poets Society.
I agree with lots of your points here.

[liv]

Yes, good connection!

[naath]

I feel a bit lost in this argument, because I use "guilty pleasure" for things I enjoy but consider *morally* bad. Like *$ hot chocolate (filthy tax avoiding scum) or driving to Wales to climb mountains (unnecessary planet-killing emissions) or a book that is an enjoyable read but is also problematic in the SJW sense.

[siderea]

Thank you, I just logged in here to say that. For me, an exemplar "guilty pleasure" is seafood, because from shrimp being shelled by slaves to overfishing of the important banks to the unnecessary destructiveness of popular fishing methods to the pollution caused by fish farming to the incentivizing working class people to risk their lives to put delicacies on fancy tables, as much as I love seafood I don't really feel okay eating anything out of the ocean any more. :(

Every once in a while I'll cave, but it's hard to enjoy knowing the costs, human and natural.

The beginning of a journey to ethics

[hairyears]

If you are ever in London, ewt and I will treat you to ethically- and sustainably-sourced sushi.

Yes, there really is such a thing, and that's an orthogonal line to liv's logic about liking bad things: bad things can be done well, and for good.

Ethics are not aesthetics, nor vice versa.

That being said, MoshiMoshi's sushi is beautiful as well as tasty and you get to watch the trains depart from Liverpool Street Station. Which is, as every banker knows, the Great Eastern Railway to the County of Ethics.

[liv]

My feeling is that exactly what Leckie is complaining about is conflating moral with aesthetic matters. It's reasonable to feel guilty about things that actually do harm, even if indirectly, but eating mass-produced food or enjoying formulaic, ephemeral art are often referred to as "guilty" pleasures and really they should be just pleasures. Since you and naath don't make that linguistic slip you're probably not the targets for Leckie's post.

[rysmiel]

The ability to only feel guilty about things that actually do harm sounds like it would be rather nice, but I think a fair number of people are for one reason or another equipped with oodles of extra guilt beyond that - I certainly am. And accepting "guilty pleasures" as things that can be legitimately enjoyable is a way, though not the only or the best way, of fighting against a weight of inappropriate guilt. (Guilt that I rationally know is inappropriate but am feeling anyway, I mean.)

[liv]

That's completely valid as a use of the term, and yes, I do feel legitimately guilty when things I enjoy are actually harmful. Smartphones and electronic gadgets is the big one for me, and to some extent not being exacting about the welfare and environmental impact of dairy animals (I don't eat meat anyway). I don't feel especially guilty about problematic media personally; I don't think I'm really perpetuating colonialism by enjoying Kipling. It might slightly influence me to be more racist, I suppose, but honestly the level of harm seems basically neglible to me, certainly compared to just my everyday existence as a rich Western consumer.

I think idiomatically a lot of people use "guilty pleasure" to mean something that they enjoy but don't rate or value highly, though. The sense that Leckie's referring to seems more common to me than the specifically moral sense of guilty. Liking books that are low-quality and in non-prestigious genres, rather than liking books that are bigoted.

[seekingferret]

I want to repeat my question here about Britten. Supposing this is true, that there are some people who by virtue of their training and immersion in cultural norms and experience and innate responsivity or whatever other factors you want to assign, have greater ability to judge this external aesthetic value than other people. What value do you, either as a person who in some cases is that superior aesthetic judge or in other cases are not that person, find in this external system of judgement? What does it matter to you that experts at musical aesthetic judgement think of Britten as a great composer?

[flippac]

I am not Liv, but here's one reason:

Where the system is not in decay, it helps us understand where the frontiers of what's been done are (including what's been done in what kinds of context) and thus helps us not keep doing the same old shit.

One of my criteria for the design of fighting games, for example, is how quickly I can convince a competent player of other games who's at "button masher" level in fighters that there is substantial depth present using footage of high-level play ("high-level play" generally meaning tournaments such as EVO and the regionals that the same players attend, where it's far from unheard of to see two past world champions trying to get in each others' heads in realtime while grappling with a level of strategy that comparatively few players manage in a well-understood board game of similar length).

edit to add: The presence and effect of resources other than health and space is a source of much debate between fans of different games and series. This sort of thing is exactly why.

[siderea]

I'm not Liv, but I wanted to chime in that even though I actively dislike the Britten I've heard, I find value in knowing other people, particularly people who have reasonably sophisticated understandings of music like Britten, think highly of him. I do for a variety of reasons.

One of them is that, presumably, if I cared, I could go to those people and ask them to tell me about what they hear in Britten that's laudatory – to tell me what I'm missing – and by their instruction come to appreciate Britten's work more than I presently do. This is an experience I've had in a variety of ways in the past with other artists and artistic genres and movements. When it happens, even when I'm not wholly converted to their tastes, I can come to appreciate what is innovative or compelling about a work that previously I didn't appreciate, and that's always keen. I'm never going to be a lover of cool, "uptown" jazz or of the Ars Subtillior or of pioneering mid-20th electronic music, but due to exposure and edification from those who esteem them highly, I can appreciate these as artistic achievements.

Another way I find it of value is that when experts at musical aesthetic judgment explicate what it is they find great in Britten or Miles Davis or Senleches or tape-loop experiments is that it reveals to me interesting differences in human minds. It reveals something to me of how other people hear and relate to music differently than I do, which in turn broadens my own options for how I hear and relate to music. Even if I don't take those options, a consequence is that I wind up with a better understanding of what I do like and why I like it – what it does for me.

For instance, one of the things I've learned listening to experts in classical music is that people who get really excited by what they see as the excellence of Bach necessarily hear motifs and structure a certain way. What is awesome to them, as a listening experience, is how Bach's music builds a whole system of relationships between figures in this way that is both tonally/melodically pleasing and really, really clever and sometimes surprising. I don't perceive music that way, and as such Bach generally strikes me a incredibly boring and precious. To me, far more salient than such motif relational structures are melodicism, rhythm, texture, and timbre. Bach basically doesn't do anything interesting in those three dimensions, so leaves me cold. But I am totally willing to grant that if you're into that sort of motif relational structural stuff, it doesn't get better than Bach. Bach is a total bonbon for the ears, Bach is pure delight, if that's what you listen for, if that's what you hear in music.

I'm okay with – I'm declaring a momentary ceasefire in my otherwise relentless ragging on Bach fans – experts at musical aesthetic judgment designating Bach as "great music", because I see their point, even if Bach's music doesn't speak to me, personally. And as I said above, it's not impossible I someday will learn to attend more to the dimensions of music in which he excelled, and come to dig his work. Things like this have happened in the past. If it does happen, it will have something to do with how those who have designated Bach's music great have been able to explicate what about it makes their socks roll up and down, so that I can know where to focus my listening attention to hear the awesome for myself.

[flippac]

Bach leaves me cold too, and you've certainly summed up why - I'd add that a degree of the sort of thing he does while paying attention to those things will have a very different effect on me and I'm pretty sure I've perpetrated it once or twice! There's a tendency to overvalue monodimensional excellence in directions considered "intelligent" while undervaluing the same when experts Don't Get It - do the same thing using fragments of drum loops as your motif-components and they'll just lose time and not understand what they're hearing.

[siderea]

There's a tendency to overvalue monodimensional excellence in directions considered "intelligent"

Absolutely, for the obvious social reasons.

Additionally – full disclosure: I'm an early musician – I think we're still seeing the fall out of the invention of audio recording. If not the printing press.

It's the intellectual parts of music which are captured on the written page. The first music printed on a press was in 1501. The explosion in music publishing that followed privileged those parts of musical creativity that could be expressed on paper: the parts specified by the composer, not the parts contributed by the performer.

One of the things that surprises classically trained musicians moving back into earlier periods (baroque and before) is how there is a whole body of musical convention about taking a written work and turning it into music that requires the performer's improvisational creativity. There were whole books of "music" that consist solely of bass parts, over which the performer was expected to improvise melodies; there were books of accompanied song which have lyrics and melody, and only implications for how the accompaniment should be rendered; there were written vocal trios where only two lines were written down because the third was implicit if you know the rules; there are pieces which look mindnumbingly boring on the page, because the whole point of their existence was to provide a framework on which virtuosos could improvise ornament.

All of that was pretty much stamped out by the mid 17th century. A sort of balance of power had been swung from the excellences of the performer to the excellences of the "composer". I blame the printing press. Once music was predominantly promulgated through writing, instead of through performance, you get people really focused on the sorts of excellences that writing captures. So structure, yes; timbre, no.

I think that the rise of audio recordings in the 20th century has a lot to do with the fact we're even having this conversation, and the way the hegemony of the intellectually daring in music has been challenged. The pendulum is swinging back to the performer, because it's not the narrow informational channel of paper that's promulgating the music, but the fullness of audio.

[flippac]

That figures - jazz improv and sampled cutting of drum loops are a bit too obviously "something like this must have come before" - but interesting to hear confirmed!

Of course, I'm in the odd position of being neither "just composer" nor strictly speaking a performer. Which is to say: I'm some nerd with a laptop loaded down with softsynths and the like. And language for timbre is still limited enough that I'm left specifying how a virtual performer would twiddle the knobs if I want anything but the most fixed of sounds (however exciting it first might be when one presses a key). Current techniques for creating eg drum sounds are still laughably primitive and tedious even when you've got something like Chromaphone in your toolkit.

So I mostly just use an emulated TR909 and some effects at the moment, but funnily enough I consider the last few years one of my least interesting periods for drum programming. Yes, I can get a lot out of a good emulation of an infamously bad emulation of a bass guitar, but so what?

[ewt]

I think we're still seeing the fall out of the invention of audio recording. If not the printing press.

I strongly agree.

I tend to lump it all under "Reformation" (which was also hugely about data transmission) but that's just me...

I think that the rise of audio recordings in the 20th century has a lot to do with the fact we're even having this conversation, and the way the hegemony of the intellectually daring in music has been challenged. The pendulum is swinging back to the performer, because it's not the narrow informational channel of paper that's promulgating the music, but the fullness of audio.

Yes; additionally, I think the effect on amateur music-making is striking. Before audio recording if you wanted to hear music you had to make the noise yourself or be in the same room as someone else doing so. And there were work songs and songs for children playing and songs for singing your baby to sleep and songs for war.

Today most people hear most music through recordings -- often studio recordings, where there are multiple chances to get everything right -- and when they try to sing, themselves, the result isn't anything like that, and sometimes they get discouraged and don't sing at all. One of the struggles I had with the choir at St A's was convincing them that no, they do NOT need to sound like the boys of King's College Cambridge, they need to sound like the best version of what they are: mostly women, mostly older, in a smaller group, singing mostly different repertoire.

The tide is turning with this too, though: recording equipment is now easy enough to come by that lots of amateur groups and individuals are putting their music online, warts and all. :-)

[siderea]

I tend to lump it all under "Reformation" (which was also hugely about data transmission) but that's just me...

Not just you! :)

I agree with all of this.

[seekingferret]

Re: Bach, his Fantasia in G Major was for me an entryway into seeing Bach's lyricism and attention to some of the other elements of musical beauty that as you say can take a backseat to the relational, structural beauty of Bach.

I first heard it in an arrangement for wind ensemble buried in the middle of the brilliant Frederick Fennell recording of the Holst Suites, and the wind arrangement exaggerates the timbral nuances that are present in organ renditions, to the point that I almost couldn't believe it was Bach at first. But everything in the Fennell version is in the original, and as I said, it represented an early key for me in finding that third dimension in Bach's work.

[ewt]

[melodicism, rhythm, texture, and timbre]
Bach basically doesn't do anything interesting in those three dimensions,

I'm not entirely sure I agree that Bach doesn't do anything interesting with these; but the performance practice that tends to be used for Bach today doesn't draw attention to them.

I think a lot of people suffer from having been made to learn various standard bits of Bach on the piano, and without the accompanying performance practice context (which, in fairness, can seem less necessary on the piano than on, say, the harpsichord, due to the much longer time for note decay) or understanding of the underlying dance forms and other idioms Bach writes in for his solo works. Many recordings of Bach don't take these into account either; and even live performances of his larger choral works tend to rely on much larger choirs and orchestras than he would have been working with, such that the texture is completely different.

I will grant that there are times when he's just being too clever by half, though, and on the whole I like his music.

[siderea]

I will always be open to argument of the form, "the problem is lack of HIP." :)

[siderea]

Wait! I need to tell you an illustrative story.

Every once in a while, I wind up attending some sort of sight-signing function where somebody passes out copies of Josquin's "Nymphes des bois". It has never been the case that on any occasion anybody else had any idea of the significance of the work, so I explain it to them. I always start the same way, "Listen up, everybody! You're being addressed! Josquin is calling you out in the second line: 'expert singers of all nations'."

Approached in ignorance, "Nymphes des bois" is, at best, very pretty, though if you don't pay attention to the lyrics, you're likely to go charging in with insufficient tenderness and miss the musical mark.

If you know a little bit more, enough to pick up on how it sounds incongruous for its historical period, it might make you puzzled.

But if you know what the piece also known as "La Déploration de Johannes Ockeghem" is about, and what it is up to, it becomes at once absolutely heartbreaking and one of the shining achievements of humanity.

It's Josquin's memorial to his predecessor, Ockeghem. The first part of the piece, he didn't write in his own style. He wrote it in Ockeghem's. He wrote half this beautiful piece of music in the style of the man it is dedicated to. The lyrics, by Molinet, call out to every mortal singer on earth, every wood nymph and the Muses themselves, to join in the grieving for the death of the man described by the lyrics as Josquin's "bon pere" – "good father".

It is, to quote Wikipedia, "often considered one of the most haunting and moving memorial works ever penned."

My favorite recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2on2P7syDzQ

This astonishing work of love, grief, and beauty was all but lost to Western civilization for about 400 years! It was only in the 20th century that it was rediscovered, when scholars started taking an interest in revisiting the pre-classical musical periods and developing expertise in them. We needed those experts to be able to realize for us how extraordinary this piece was, and to surface this wonder and return it to human voices and ears.

And it's only with a certain amount of knowing what's going on – the knowledge of experts as to what makes this piece great – that one can access the emotional beauty and artistic triumph of this piece, and participate in its deep feeling. Without the benefit of that expertise, we miss out on all this beauty.

[flippac]

I've a sneaking suspicion that at some stage we're going to see people "resurrect" eg house DJing based on recordings, albeit without as long a gap. Not that it doesn't happen to some extent on a cyclic basis already, but thankfully that's only measured in a few years! Which is a relief, tbh.

[seekingferret]

Hmm... So, I didn't really need this example- though I used Britten as the example in my question because in the last post liv cited him as an example of a composer who leaves her cold, but she still thinks of as a great composer, I am actually myself an admirer of Britten who has written at some length on my blog about the way that Peter Grimes and Billy Budd have moved me. I understand quite well how learning context can deepen one's appreciation of a piece of art. I can also see how that is at least somewhat connected to the question I asked, but I'm not sure it's actually an answer to my question.

What I'm still not clear on, and none of the examples so far have helped me, is what value the assessment of what I have been terming 'external aesthetic value' (I was using 'objectively good' in the last post, but liv has rejected the term, I think because she has asserted that although she still thinks that some external aesthetic scale exists, it is culturally and in other ways contingent and thus not truly objective) has to those who are unwilling or unable to pick up that context.

liv's original quote, specifically, was "
For example, I can't stand Britten, but I can still perfectly well tell that he's a great composer."

And that to me seems unconnected to your example of someone listening to a piece of music and benefiting from the context provided by experts to gain access to the emotional beauty of the music. liv, by saying "I can still perfectly well tell that he's a great composer," is saying that she possesses sufficient intellectual context to recognize this quality of 'external aesthetic value' in Britten's work- and she still can't stand his music!

To me that says that this idea of 'external aesthetic value' is divorced from taste. It is not necessarily the case, that is to say, that if there is a work of art that is judged to have 'external aesthetic beauty' and you don't personally like it, that if only you gained additional education and context you would change your mind and like it.

So, then, what value does 'external aesthetic value' have if it doesn't tell you anything about your taste?

You seem to be answering that a)although it's not an absolute proxy for taste, it is sometimes a proxy for taste, and thus has value as an inaccurate guide to works that you might like more if you gave it the effort and b)Thinking about why it fails as an accurate guide to works that you might like more with effort trains your aesthetic senses to better process other works where external aesthetic judgement does not align with your taste.


So I think maybe where that leads is that what 'external aesthetic taste' is about is the ways in which our culture tries to impose its aesthetic values on us so that we have a shared culture and worldview. That kind of makes sense, I think, and possibly explains why there are emotions like 'guilt' involved, and why there are class conflicts in how people process this information, because if one's taste is out of alignment with the shared cultural zeitgeist one feels pressure to come back into alignment. And maybe that pressure is even sometimes a good thing, because shared cultural values are a glue that makes other kinds of social cooperation possible, but sometimes it's also a problem because it has a tendency to drown out the expert knowledge of minority cultures and less privileged cultures. Maybe? Does any of this seem at all where you thought you were going?

[rysmiel]

what value does 'external aesthetic value' have if it doesn't tell you anything about your taste?

Your talking about this here feels to me to be about advantage to one person rather than advantage to communication between people.

As a writer, external aesthetic value helps guide me towards a reasonable point of balance between things that are fun for me to write and things that have some hope of being appealing (and if I am lucky, maybe even marketable at some point) to people who are not me. There's no point in writing things sufficiently embedded in my own emotional context that hardly anyone will understand the points I am making.

[flippac]

Hell, "write once for yourself, once for your audience" wouldn't be a piece of advice without that.

I know full well my current writing's been therapy first, which is one reason I haven't got round to uploading it. The fact that doesn't seem to've been flagrantly obvious to friends who've read it without the specific background pointed out suggests I might be doing something potentially useful for others, because it means I'm getting to issues beyond my own.

[seekingferret]

I can see this to a certain degree, but only to a point, since liv's definition explicit separates this 'external aesthetic value' from audience appeal- i.e. she asserts that much of the pop music she likes does not have this value.

[rysmiel]

I'm not sure I am equating it with audience appeal either. Or at least, I would like it to be meaningful to some people, but I don't think that is the same thing as trying to reach as many people as possible in a broad but shallow way.

[seekingferret]

So in what sense is this not just elitism and the assertion that elitist taste is inherently superior to popular taste?

[rysmiel]

Oh, in an ideal world, I would like what I write to have a deep and meaningful impact on a huge number of people that makes their lives better, of course. This just does not seem a particularly realistic goal, and investing a lot emotionally in trying to do that seems to be a good way to frustration, disappointment and depression.

As far as things that might actually be attainable go, I think writing things that have a deep and meaningful impact on a few people is something I might be able to achieve - for values of "a few people" I can count on one hand, I have already done so. Whereas reaching a large number of people by writing is not something it is really possible to plan for doing, and seems doubly unlikely to me given ways in which I am out of synch with many examples of mass taste. (By far the biggest-selling fiction market in English worldwide is Mills and Boon/Harlequin Romance, for example, and as someone essentially aromantic, that subgenre makes no emotional sense to me whatsoever, which seems a pretty major obstacle to meaningful work in that direction.)

It's not, in other words, elitism. It's humility.

[vatine]

I guess it all depends on what you mean by "good".

Venturing momentarily from the land of books to the land of edibles, I am quite fond of crisps with dip. It is really tasty. And in moderation, perfectly fine. I would, however, have a hard time describing it as "good food" or "good for me", whereas "tastes good" is a perfectly adequate description.

Venturing back into the land of writing, there are things I read merely to fill time (while, hopefully, amuse or distract myself). These works are probably more "pleasant reads" than "good books", but I find it fascinatingly hard to elucidate exactly what I think "good book" actually means. It can't be "I like it" (that being neither a necessary nor a sufficient criterion; since I'm sure there are things I would class as "good book" that I would also never consider reading again).

I think it boils down to sufficient elements of "causes interesting thoughts", "well-executed craft" and "spark" (and that last I definitely cannot articulate very well at all).

[siderea]

Just a thought I want to throw into the mix: things can have multiple dimensions of goodness. For instance, a book with a great plot and terrible characterization, or fabulous worldbuilding and crappy dialog.

I think sometimes "guilty pleasure" means something like "suspension of judgment", and enjoying something for what it does well, by deliberately ignoring what it's doing poorly. Someone might, say, overlook the faults in the craft of a book because they so love the sort of story it tells.

Like Leckie, I don't think these are reasons to be guilty about liking what one likes. But I think it's possible to like something and still think it's not all that good by one's own standards.

Honestly, that may be the foundational truth of most fan fiction writers: rescuing promising shows and stories from their original creators, media loved even while one cringes at the execution.

None of this is meant to contradict Leckie's observations about classism and snobbery, but supplement it.

[ceb]

Yes, all of this! Thank you, you have saved me much typing ;-)