The Hierarchy of Taste

~ Clarissa

High culture was always and will always be enjoyed only by a tiny minority. Most people don’t have the IQ and the depth of subjectivity to understand or derive any pleasure from it.

We don’t need a solution for this situation just like we don’t need a solution to the fact that the overwhelming majority of the population isn’t physically capable of playing in the NBA. The idea that “anybody can be whatever they choose” is cute in middle school but it’s not based in reality. Most people (including me) can never become neurosurgeons, professional athletes, or opera singers no matter how hard we try. And that’s perfectly fine.

As to whether you can cultivate your taste in art, it’s like your taste in food. You can definitely improve your palate. You’ll always hanker for a boiled sausage that’s familiar from your childhood. So it’s possible to an extent without ever becoming a mass phenomena.

We should abandon the ludicrous idea that hierarchies are bad. This idea, and not “slop”, is the real problem. Hierarchies are good and important everywhere. At home, at work, in church, at school, everywhere.

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Published by Clarissa

21 thoughts on “The Hierarchy of Taste”

  1. Hierarchies are ok when they are malleable and usually require massive ignorance on the bottom to endure outside limited contexts. Otherwise they lead to revolution – see today’s Trumpian revolt against the woke hierarchy that was taking over the west; the jury is out on its duration and success as too many people of power benefited from the woke hierarchy and imho the odds are it will be suppressed and historically will be perceived like Wat Tyler, the Duke of Monmouth or Yemelyan Pugachev rebellions etc

    However I strongly disagree about art, taste at least as literature goes; music is more universal though even there I do not think we have enough historical data to truly assess – they depend on the dominant culture to a very large extent; just as a thought example assume that in 200 years Chinese culture takes the dominant position in the world and English language culture vanishes or becomes like Celtic culture today say; how many writers of the current pantheon will be in the new pantheon – (hint very few that can be repurposed like some classical Chinese writers have been today, but the so called universal ones like Shakespeare, Dickens etc will be relegated to minor footnotes and a few specialists with most people having not heard of them like today most people do not know about say The Plum in the Golden Vase or other Chinese classics)

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    1. I wouldn’t worry much about some Chinese dude making Shakespeare outdated. 😀 Nobody does anything valuable in art unless it’s Western or heavily Westernized. Forget high culture. Even low-brow is either completely Westernized or … nothing at all.

      As for literary taste, can you enjoy Trollope? How about Faulkner? Fernanda Melchor, Thomas Bernhard or Jennifer Egan? If you can understand and derive pleasure from all 3 groups, then you are right up there at the top of the literary sophistication ladder.

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  2. “Forget high culture.” Because despite centuries of the feminine efforts, regardless of cultural level and maturity, boys will always be boys ;-D

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  3. The older I get, the more utilitarian my ideas on art have become. I no longer ask “Do I like this piece” or even primarily “is this beautiful” whether it’s visual art, music, architecture (haven’t got there with books yet, but I can feel it coming)…

    More and more it’s: what does this do? What is its function? Does it perform that function well?

    This is inconvenient. I can’t talk about liturgical music anymore, because Byzantine modes pretty clearly have functions, and there are some composers who like to do arrangements and settings that are very very beautiful, but which negate the function of the music… like when people add harmony to tone 2 to give it a warm sound. Tone 2 is supposed to have tension in it. Penitence. Adding harmony wipes that out. I am not the choir director, so it is not OK to have opinions on the music and I am keeping a lid on that. But I am so done with Bortniansky. He is what happens when you say: I will compose something very beautiful, but I will not ask what function it is supposed to serve. Why not have a funeral polka? Why not John Williams themes for weddings? Why not Simon and Garfunkel’s greatest hits as communion hymns? I mean, everybody likes them, right? That’s what matters, right?

    Do not get me started on techno.

    Same principle applies across the board. What is this painting for? What is this sculpture for? What is this building for? What is this dress for? What is this music for? What function is it supposed to serve? A roof is no good if it doesn’t keep the rain out, no matter how clever a statement it makes.

    AI art has the same problem as pre-raphaelite paintings: let’s push all the visual stimulation buttons at once! Bright! Luscious! Bright lips! Big eyes! Big hair! Colorful! High contrast! Exclamation points! Like, OK, you got my attention. Did you have something to say? No? Oh. Then why did you yank on my attention like that?

    Aesthetics… it’s not that it’s unimportant, more that it’s dropped in importance from top ranking to maybe third. “Does this work?” is first. Second might be… is it honest? Or is it reinforcing something blasphemous or destructive?

    -ethyl

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    1. I see those AI videos that Elon Musk keeps pushing, and they are the height of soulless, dumb vulgarity. I don’t mean sexual vulgarity, I mean simply that these images appeal to the lowest common denominator. That people would choose to look at something like that is beyond my comprehension.

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      1. Yeah. They exude cheap stimulation. The Cheetos-and-Sprite of visual media– what food scientists have done in the lab to maximize oral stimulation, AI is doing that same thing for visual stimuli. What grabs the attention of homo erectus, in his clever-monkey visual cortex? Movement. Flashing. Bright colors. Smooth skin. OK, turn that knob up to 11. Excite Excite Excite.

        It’s about as artistic as the Vegas strip.

        -ethyl

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      2. Clarissa

        Hmmm, I do not consider Elon souless, he is a driven man. He understands that man will be safer if some of us can travel in space. Meanwhile, his purchase of Twitter may have saved Western civilization, saving free speech has at least bought us some time. Remember girls ;-D

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        1. I agree completely, especially since without Elon’s efforts, Ukraine wouldn’t be on the offensive and regaining territory as we speak. I’m very grateful to him. But those Grok Imagine videos are still horrid.

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  4. methyl ethyl

    “What is this sculpture for?…What function is it supposed to serve?”

    Why did largely unnamed Master Masons spend their entire lives creating the great European cathedrals? What about this sculptor ;-D

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    1. Totally amazing technical execution there. But I still have to ask: what was this made for? If it’s portraiture and it projected the image the sitter or the artist wanted to project then bravo. If it’s religious statuary, then it’s wildly inappropriate.

      -ethyl

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        1. Nothing wrong with that. But things can be beautifully done, and still be the wrong thing, in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing. And as I get older and crankier, that has edged out the sheer wonder of amazing technical execution.

          I used to buy, for example, that “great art” of the last several centuries had so many nudes in it because of “the wonder of the human form” or somesuch. it took a while to realize that this was mostly BS and the reason Susannah is such a weirdly popular theme for old religious paintings was… “religious” was an excuse to have nudie pics in your high-toned household gallery. Now that anybody can look at nudie pics on the internet any time for free, you *never* see Susanna art anymore. Hmmm.

          -ethyl

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      2. I don’t think intentions matter at all. Not just in art. In anything. We can’t know anybody’s intentions. People don’t know their own intentions. I’m interested in what a work of art does for me. What the author wanted or thought he wanted – I can’t begin to care because it’s all complete guesswork.

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        1. I said it badly. You can fail at intent and still produce good work. Intent isn’t that important. How it’s used is. Function. I can appreciate Bortniansky’s choral work everywhere except in church. It doesn’t do what the liturgy needs it to do, IMO. It’s no more appropriate than plastering decals of DaVinci’s Last Supper on the walls of fast-food joints. Dude worked for Catherine the Great, and was part of that whole massive effort to westernize Russia, including the Russian church, which led to a whole school if neo-renaissance looking iconography that’s… now falling out of use because it doesn’t function the way iconography is supposed to function. Same deal with the music. Lovely. Not functional.

          There is a lot of art that’s been abstracted from its original context by time or commerce, and which we enjoy looking at as a curiosity (Lascaux onward), but which we can’t really grok because… that function is lost. All those wonderful sculptures of Roman emperors that helped project their authority and presence out into all the far satellites of the empire… we admire them aesthetically but for us there’s a lot missing. That’s OK. But for anything contemporary, we do have the context and we can and should weigh that. What’s it doing? Is it good?

          -ethyl

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  6. My two cent is this.

    To me there is a gap period. Art existed up until about the 1950s then you had the modern style start. It is not art. It was the equivalent of taking decay and rot and demanding everyone ohh and aww and call it good.

    Music is much the someway, well kind of. Oh there were still a fair number of masterpieces created in the last 90 years, but most of it has been either noise, or demonic.

    Movies are similar, though in their case, their decline started much later on. If you go back to what was coming out and then compare to what we have today, even the black and white movies blow the modern stuff out of the water. With the exception of in effects, the modern stuff has them beat there.

    Ironically enough a lot people complain about AI and say it will kill the artists, music, and movie world. However what I am seeing out of the AI artists, the independents mind you, not the big corp types, is an absolute resurgence of art and music.

    I’ve got several people saved on youtube who are producing what would be considered full orchestral performances practically every other week. Let me clarify myself. These are new works, not simply adaptations of older ones, they are new.

    There are people I watch who use AI to build video shorts, three minutes to five minute long. These are not quite there yet, but given time and improvement it will get to the point where you can’t tell. And best yet they are independent so the woke mob in Hellwood can’t force them to produce woke abominations.

    As for AI art a lot of it is in fact slop, but that being said, a fair amount is absolutely stunning. Though to be fair even when art still existed not everything was a winner, a lot of what was produced was slop.

    As for the debate about the nude art. I am of two minds about it. One the one hand people at the time were a lot more open about stuff. So it is certainly possible. On the other hand there was the train of thought that the female form was one of the most beautiful sights in nature. So it would certainly qualify as art.

    What I think a lot of people forget is that most of that stopped around the very early 1900s. Most of this style was coming from Europe and to some extent America. If you will recall most of the West was busy dealing with groups who would have opposed such things.

    The Temperance movement in America. No alcohol, no beer, no gambling, and a thousand other such things.

    There was WWI across Europe, and the spread of Communism during and afterwards, which correct me if I am wrong as I mostly tend to focus on the military, logistical, and political side of things. But I seem to recall they frowned heavily on or tended to suppress traditional art types in areas under their control.

    And in case anyone has forgotten Europe came extremely close to having Germany, France, and Spain flip to communism before the Fascist rose to fight them. England, Italy, and other areas also had strong communist parties, but the three above were under the largest threat of takeover.

    • – W

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    1. It occurred to me that I forgot to add this in. So allow me to clarify my point.

      I believe the reason it stopped was not because suddenly we had access to nudes in magazines, movies, etc. But rather it stopped because the chief groups producing this form of artwork were busy.

      Either by being dead – WWI

      Suppressed – Temperance Movement

      Forced not to and brainwashed to think modern art was the way to go. – Communism.

      Considering that this state of affairs lasted from about 1914-late 1940s, it basically seems to have killed it off as a mainline art form. And instead we got the so called modern art which is rot and decay and not worth even being considered.

      • – W

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