Punting on a tasty post
Sorry, I was meant to write my Beeminder-obligated blog post by tonight, but I got mad writer's block and failed to come up with something I was happy with in time. Basically I wanted to write a response to the recent ACX posts on the subject of Taste, but I got sucked into some deep rabbit holes and didn't get anywhere in time. As a consolation here are some notes I made on those posts when I first read them:
The big flaw in Scott Alexander's taste essays seems to be is that he is taking the top 4% least accessible works and using them as representative of all 'refined' works, despite that most of these still draw from conventional techniques as well as avant-garde ones (e.g. an indie rock album like Ants From Up Here has Phillip Glass influences and unconventional song structures but also recognisable narrative songwriting and melodies)
Elements that seem weird and abstruse when they make up the entirety of a work (avant-garde drones) can influence other genres and can be used alongside more traditional/'beautiful' techniques
Though there does seem to be a real problem where the 'middlebrow' of a genre gets hollowed out and so there's no counter-factor against the genre becoming hyper-optimised for a very narrow range of tastes which may as well be just elitist signalling (e.g. for poetry and to an extent modern literary fiction)
There might be a Bourdieu angle to this to cover how subcultures evolve in terms of the ratios between the different 'categories' in class-space
Kinda unrelated but whenever he talks about architecture I always think of (the now-closed) Venus Fort shopping mall in Tokyo, which was a windowless metal box from the outside (picture) but a detailed replica of Venice on the inside (picture)
I wonder if his conception of taste is a consequence of mostly observing how people talk about taste online and especially on Twitter (which probably focuses more on the zero-sum snippy signalling parts of it) and not through enjoying things for their own sake
- Or he is interested in controversial stuff, and works that are controversial frequently involve deliberately harsh / off-putting elements
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