Official Class Blog of "I590: Interaction Culture" (Indiana University School of Informatics)
I’m still only part of the way through it, but I wanted to post it here because I think it would be interesting to talk about
http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html
I found it while doing research for my capstone. This guy is perty cool, and his essays are too.
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2 comments
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January 28, 2012 at 8:14 pm
altoombs
“After dinning into you that taste is merely a matter of personal preference, they take you to the museum and tell you that you should pay attention because Leonardo is a great artist.
What goes through the kid’s head at this point? What does he think “great artist” means? After having been told for years that everyone just likes to do things their own way, he is unlikely to head straight for the conclusion that a great artist is someone whose work is better than the others’. A far more likely theory, in his Ptolemaic model of the universe, is that a great artist is something that’s good for you, like broccoli, because someone said so in a book.”
January 30, 2012 at 1:35 am
Jeff Wain
One thing to add would also be interpretation. Even if he were to appreciate Leonardo’s works as coming from a great artist, he’d still likely not gain anything from that appreciation without careful study. Like with the Mona Lisa, many people know it’s “great” but don’t know why. Without being told, most people would never pick up on the innovative perspective (for the time), form, and careful precision (in artistic form, style, and physical medium) of the piece, like the fact that there are no discernable brush strokes on the entire painting. Likewise, without an expert eye, most of the public would probably regard Caravaggio (my wife Sarah’s favorite artist) as just another Renaissance painter and not as someone who widely influenced painting techniques through his use of chiaroscuro.
New wine drinkers have a hard time distinguishing tannin levels and types of grapes, much less vintage. I guess if I would have kept reading before starting to write a response I would have seen that Graham then goes on to say….
“As in any job, as you continue to design things, you’ll get better at it. Your tastes will change. And, like anyone who gets better at their job, you’ll know you’re getting better. If so, your old tastes were not merely different, but worse. Poof goes the axiom that taste can’t be wrong.”
I think sometimes it’s better to be blissfully ignorant, but then you get hooked on something and next thing you know you’re trying to make artisanal sourdough breads. I need to feed my starter, now.
Good find!