Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste?
This essay argues that there is such a thing as good taste, using reductio ad absurdum. If good taste doesn't exist, then good art doesn't exist, meaning no artist can be better than a random eight-year-old—an absurd conclusion. The author, Paul Graham, shares his own experience learning to paint and realizing that masters like Leonardo and Bellini are objectively better. He addresses common objections: that taste is too subjective and that experts often disagree. He concludes that while perfect taste is impossible, good taste is real, and art can be judged by how effectively it works on an audience with deep knowledge and clarity. The piece is a philosophical reflection, not a technical engineering article.
November 2021(This essay is derived from a talk at the Cambridge Union.)
When I was a kid, I'd have said there wasn't. My father told me so. Some people like some things, and other people like other things, and who's to say who's right?
It seemed so obvious that there was no such thing as good taste that it was only through indirect evidence that I realized my father was wrong. And that's what I'm going to give you here: a proof by reductio ad absurdum. If we start from the premise that there's no such thing as good taste, we end up with conclusions that are obviously false, and therefore the premise must be wrong.
2021年11月（本文源自于在剑桥联合会的演讲。）
小时候，我会说没有好品味这回事。我父亲就是这么告诉我的。有些人喜欢某些东西，另一些人喜欢别的，谁能说谁对呢？
好的品味不存在——这似乎显而易见，以至于我只有通过间接证据才意识到父亲错了。而我要在这里呈现的正是：一个归谬法证明。如果我们从“不存在好品味”这一前提出发，会得出明显错误的结论，因此前提必定错误。
We'd better start by saying what good taste is. There's a narrow sense in which it refers to aesthetic judgements and a broader one in which it refers to preferences of any kind. The strongest proof would be to show that taste exists in the narrowest sense, so I'm going to talk about taste in art. You have better taste than me if the art you like is better than the art I like.
我们最好先定义什么是好品味。狭义上它指审美判断，广义上指任何种类的偏好。最有力的证明是展示品味在狭义上存在，所以我将谈论艺术品味。如果你喜欢的艺术比我喜欢的更好，那么你的品味就比我好。
If there's no such thing as good taste, then there's no such thing as good art. Because if there is such a thing as good art, it's easy to tell which of two people has better taste. Show them a lot of works by artists they've never seen before and ask them to choose the best, and whoever chooses the better art has better taste.
So if you want to discard the concept of good taste, you also have to discard the concept of good art. And that means you have to discard the possibility of people being good at making it. Which means there's no way for artists to be good at their jobs. And not just visual artists, but anyone who is in any sense an artist. You can't have good actors, or novelists, or composers, or dancers either. You can have popular novelists, but not good ones.
We don't realize how far we'd have to go if we discarded the concept of good taste, because we don't even debate the most obvious cases. But it doesn't just mean we can't say which of two famous painters is better. It means we can't say that any painter is better than a randomly chosen eight year old.
如果没有好品味，也就没有好艺术。因为如果存在好艺术，那么很容易看出两个人谁品味更好：给他们看许多从未见过的艺术家的作品，要求他们选出最好的，谁选出了更好的艺术，谁就有更好的品味。
所以，如果你想抛弃好品味的概念，你也必须抛弃好艺术的概念。这意味着你必须抛弃人们擅长创造艺术的可能性。也就是说，艺术家不可能擅长他们的工作。不仅仅是视觉艺术家，任何意义上的艺术家都是如此。也不会有好演员、好小说家、好作曲家或好舞者。你可以有流行小说家，但不是好的小说家。
我们没有意识到抛弃好品味概念要走多远，因为我们甚至不去辩论最明显的案例。但这不仅仅意味着我们不能说两位著名画家中谁更好，而是意味着我们不能说任何一位画家比随机选出的八岁小孩更好。
That was how I realized my father was wrong. I started studying painting. And it was just like other kinds of work I'd done: you could do it well, or badly, and if you tried hard, you could get better at it. And it was obvious that Leonardo and Bellini were much better at it than me. That gap between us was not imaginary. They were so good. And if they could be good, then art could be good, and there was such a thing as good taste after all.
我就是这样意识到父亲错了。我开始学习绘画。这就像我做过的其他类型的工作：你可以做得好或差，如果努力尝试，就能变得更好。显然，列奥纳多和贝利尼比我强得多。我们之间的差距不是虚构的。他们太棒了。如果他们能很棒，那么艺术就能很棒，所以毕竟存在好品味。
Now that I've explained how to show there is such a thing as good taste, I should also explain why people think there isn't. There are two reasons. One is that there's always so much disagreement about taste. Most people's response to art is a tangle of unexamined impulses. Is the artist famous? Is the subject attractive? Is this the sort of art they're supposed to like? Is it hanging in a famous museum, or reproduced in a big, expensive book? In practice most people's response to art is dominated by such extraneous factors.
And the people who do claim to have good taste are so often mistaken. The paintings admired by the so-called experts in one generation are often so different from those admired a few generations later. It's easy to conclude there's nothing real there at all. It's only when you isolate this force, for example by trying to paint and comparing your work to Bellini's, that you can see that it does in fact exist.
既然我已经解释了如何证明好品味存在，我还应该解释为什么人们认为不存在。有两个原因。一是关于品味的争论总是太多。大多数人对艺术的反应是一团未经审视的冲动：艺术家出名吗？主题吸引人吗？这是他们应该喜欢的艺术吗？它是否挂在著名博物馆里，或者被复制在一本又大又贵的书中？实际上，大多数人对艺术的反应被这类外部因素主导。
而那些声称有好品味的人又常常犯错。一代所谓专家欣赏的画作，往往与几代后欣赏的截然不同。很容易得出结论：根本没有任何真实的东西存在。只有当你隔离这股力量，例如通过尝试绘画并将你的作品与贝利尼比较时，你才能看到它确实存在。
The other reason people doubt that art can be good is that there doesn't seem to be any room in the art for this goodness. The argument goes like this. Imagine several people looking at a work of art and judging how good it is. If being good art really is a property of objects, it should be in the object somehow. But it doesn't seem to be; it seems to be something happening in the heads of each of the observers. And if they disagree, how do you choose between them?
人们怀疑艺术可以好的另一个原因是，艺术中似乎没有容纳这种“好”的空间。论证如下：想象几个人看着一件艺术品并判断它有多好。如果好艺术真的是物品的属性，它应该以某种方式存在于物品之中。但它似乎并非如此；它更像是每个观察者头脑中发生的过程。如果他们意见不一，你如何在其中做出选择？
The solution to this puzzle is to realize that the purpose of art is to work on its human audience, and humans have a lot in common. And to the extent the things an object acts upon respond in the same way, that's arguably what it means for the object to have the corresponding property. If everything a particle interacts with behaves as if the particle had a mass of m, then it has a mass of m. So the distinction between "objective" and "subjective" is not binary, but a matter of degree, depending on how much the subjects have in common. Particles interacting with one another are at one pole, but people interacting with art are not all the way at the other; their reactions aren't random.
解决这个难题的方法是认识到艺术的目的是作用于其人类观众，而人类有很多共同点。如果一个物体作用的对象以相同方式响应，那么这可以说就是该对象具有相应属性的含义。如果一个粒子与之交互的一切都表现得好像该粒子具有质量 m，那么它就具有质量 m。因此，“客观”和“主观”的区别不是二元的，而是一个程度问题，取决于主体之间有多少共同点。相互作用的粒子处于一极，但与艺术互动的人们并非完全处于另一极；他们的反应不是随机的。
Because people's responses to art aren't random, art can be designed to operate on people, and be good or bad depending on how effectively it does so. Much as a vaccine can be. If someone were talking about the ability of a vaccine to confer immunity, it would seem very frivolous to object that conferring immunity wasn't really a property of vaccines, because acquiring immunity is something that happens in the immune system of each individual person. Sure, people's immune systems vary, and a vaccine that worked on one might not work on another, but that doesn't make it meaningless to talk about the effectiveness of a vaccine.
因为人们对艺术的反应不是随机的，艺术可以被设计来作用于人，并根据其作用效果的好坏而成为好或坏的艺术。就像疫苗一样。如果有人谈论疫苗赋予免疫力的能力，那么反对说赋予免疫力并非疫苗的真正属性——因为获得免疫力是每个人免疫系统中发生的事情——会显得非常轻率。当然，人们的免疫系统各不相同，一种对一个人有效的疫苗可能对另一个人无效，但这并不使得谈论疫苗的有效性变得毫无意义。
The situation with art is messier, of course. You can't measure effectiveness by simply taking a vote, as you do with vaccines. You have to imagine the responses of subjects with a deep knowledge of art, and enough clarity of mind to be able to ignore extraneous influences like the fame of the artist. And even then you'd still see some disagreement. People do vary, and judging art is hard, especially recent art. There is definitely not a total order either of works or of people's ability to judge them. But there is equally definitely a partial order of both. So while it's not possible to have perfect taste, it is possible to have good taste.
当然，艺术的情况更复杂。你不能像疫苗那样简单地通过投票来衡量效果。你需要想象那些对艺术有深刻知识、并且头脑清晰到能够忽略艺术家名声等外部影响的受试者的反应。即便如此，你仍然会看到一些分歧。人们确实各不相同，评判艺术很难，尤其是当代艺术。作品或人们评判它们的能力绝对不存在全序关系。但同样确定的是，两者都存在偏序关系。因此，虽然不可能拥有完美的品味，但拥有好品味是可能的。
Thanks to the Cambridge Union for inviting me, and to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
感谢剑桥联合会的邀请，以及 Trevor Blackwell、Jessica Livingston 和 Robert Morris 对本文初稿的阅读。