How Art Can Be Good

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| December 2006I 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?AudienceI 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.
[1]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?
[2]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.
[3]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.
[4]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.
[5]
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.
ErrorSo 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

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