Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste? paulgraham.com/goodtaste.html
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Conversation
Good taste is the ability to find things salient. Discernment means finding the right things salient, while generosity of spirit means finding lots of things salient, even things other judge mediocre or bad.
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Good art forces us into a state of salience. Good viewers make salience out of whatever they’ve been given. The latter point is made by artists like John Cage. Thoughts ?
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It’s similar to the distinction between being a good host vs. a good guest. Ideally, we’d be both; but some are only good at one, and that’s Ok.
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I'm finding myself confused here. My sense is that good viewers are disproportionately likely to make meaning from something meaningful. I'm not sure this implies that a "good viewer" is one who will make meaning from white noise.
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To your point, Cage's works are about exploring this boundary… but I think good viewers make meaning out of them *because* someone has delimited the noise and said "pay attention: what I'm trying to express is here"; and it's *that intention* which contains the meaning.