Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste?

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.

2021 年 11 月（本文摘自剑桥联盟的一次演讲。）当我还是个孩子的时候，我会说没有。

My father told me so.

我父亲是这么告诉我的。

Some people like some things, and other people like other things, and who's to say who's right?

有些人喜欢某些东西，有些人喜欢另一些东西，谁说谁是对的呢？

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.

似乎很明显，没有所谓的好品味，只有通过间接证据，我才意识到我父亲错了。

And that's what I'm going to give you here: a proof by

这就是我要给你的：证明

reductio ad absurdum.

反证法。

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.

如果我们从不存在高品味这样的前提出发，我们最终会得到明显错误的结论，因此前提一定是错误的。

We'd better start by saying what good taste is.

我们最好先说什么是好品味。

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.

狭义上它指的是审美判断，广义上它指的是任何类型的偏好。

The strongest proof would be to show that taste exists in the narrowest sense, so I'm

最有力的证据就是证明品味存在于最狭义的意义上，所以我

going to talk about taste in art.

来谈谈艺术品味。

You have better taste than me if the art you like is better than the art I like.

如果你喜欢的艺术比我喜欢的艺术好，那你的品味就比我好。

If there's no such thing as good taste, then there's no such thing as good art .

如果没有好的品味，那么也就没有好的艺术。

Because if there is such a thing as good art, it's easy to tell which of two people has better taste.

因为如果有好的艺术这回事，很容易就能看出两个人谁的品味更好。

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

向他们展示很多他们以前从未见过的艺术家的作品，并要求他们选择最好的，谁选择更好的艺术就更好

taste.

味道。

So if you want to discard the concept of good taste, you also have to discard the concept of good art.

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。

And that means you have to discard the possibility of people being good at making it.

这意味着你必须放弃人们擅长创造的可能性。

Which means there's no way for artists to be good at their jobs.

这意味着艺术家无法做好他们的工作。

And not just visual artists, but anyone who is in any sense an artist.

不仅仅是视觉艺术家，而是任何意义上的艺术家。

You can't have good actors, or novelists, or composers, or dancers either.

你也不可能有好的演员、小说家、作曲家或舞者。

You can have popular novelists, but not good ones.

你可以有受欢迎的小说家，但不能有优秀的小说家。

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.

我们没有意识到，如果我们放弃好品味的概念，我们会走多远，因为我们甚至不讨论最明显的案例。

But it doesn't just mean we can't say which of two famous painters is better.

但这不仅仅意味着我们不能说两位著名画家谁更好。

It means we can't say that any painter is better than a randomly chosen eight year old.

这意味着我们不能说任何画家都比随机选择的八岁孩子更好。

That was how I realized my father was wrong.

那时我才意识到父亲错了。

I started studying painting.

我开始学习绘画。

And it was just like other kinds of work I'd done: you

这就像我做过的其他工作一样：你

could do it well, or badly, and if you tried hard, you could get better at it.

可以做得好，也可以做得不好，如果你努力尝试，你就能做得更好。

And it was obvious that Leonardo and Bellini were much better at it than me.

很明显，莱昂纳多和贝利尼在这方面比我强得多。

That gap between us was not imaginary.

我们之间的差距并不是想象出来的。

They were so good.

他们太棒了。

And if they could be good, then art could be good, and there was such a thing as good taste after all.

如果它们可以是好的，那么艺术也可以是好的，毕竟还有高品味这样的东西。

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.

既然我已经解释了如何表明良好品味的存在，我还应该解释为什么人们认为不存在。

There

那里

are two reasons.

有两个原因。

One is that there's always so much disagreement about taste.

一是关于品味总是存在很多分歧。

Most people's response to art is a tangle of unexamined impulses.

大多数人对艺术的反应是一堆未经审视的冲动。

Is the artist famous?

这位艺术家很有名吗？

Is the subject attractive?

主题是否有吸引力？

Is this the sort of art they're supposed to like?

这是他们应该喜欢的艺术吗？

Is it hanging in a famous museum, or reproduced in a big, expensive book?

它是挂在著名的博物馆里，还是复制在一本昂贵的大书中？

In practice most people's response to art is dominated by such extraneous factors.

实际上，大多数人对艺术的反应都是由这些无关因素主导的。

And the people who do claim to have good taste are so often mistaken.

那些自称品味高的人常常是错误的。

The paintings admired by the so-called experts in one generation are often so different from those admired a few generations later.

一代人所欣赏的所谓专家的画作，往往与几代人之后所欣赏的画作有天壤之别。

It's easy to conclude there's nothing real there at all.

很容易得出结论，那里根本没有任何真实的东西。

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.

只有当你隔离这种力量时，例如通过尝试绘画并将你的作品与贝利尼的作品进行比较，你才能看到它确实存在。

The other reason people doubt that art can be good is that there

人们怀疑艺术是否美好的另一个原因是

doesn't seem to be any room in the art for this goodness.

艺术中似乎没有任何空间来容纳这种善良。

The argument goes like this.

争论是这样的。

Imagine several people looking at a work of art and judging how good it is.

想象一下几个人正在观看一件艺术品并判断它的好坏。

If being good art really is a property of objects, it should be in the object somehow.

如果优秀的艺术确实是物体的一种属性，那么它就应该以某种方式存在于物体之中。

But it doesn't seem to be; it seems to be something happening in the heads of each of the observers.

但似乎并非如此；这似乎是每个观察者脑海中正在发生的事情。

And if they disagree, how do you choose between them?

如果他们不同意，你如何在他们之间做出选择？

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.

这个难题的解决方案是认识到艺术的目的是为人类观众服务，而人类有很多共同点。

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.

如果一个对象所作用的事物以相同的方式做出响应，那么可以说这就是该对象具有相应属性的含义。

If everything a particle interacts with behaves as if the particle had a mass of m , then it has a mass of m .

如果与粒子相互作用的所有物体的行为就好像该粒子的质量为 m ，那么它的质量为 m 。

So the distinction between "objective" and "subjective" is not

所以“客观”和“主观”的区别并不大

binary, but a matter of degree, depending on how much the subjects have in common.

二进制，但程度问题，取决于主题有多少共同点。

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 .

相互作用的粒子处于一极，但人们与艺术的相互作用却并非一直处于另一极；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.

因为人们对艺术的反应不是随机的，所以艺术可以被设计为对人起作用，并且好坏取决于它的效果如何。

Much as a vaccine can be.

就像疫苗一样。

If someone were talking about

如果有人在谈论

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.

尽管疫苗赋予免疫力的能力，但反对赋予免疫力实际上并不是疫苗的属性似乎是非常轻率的，因为获得免疫力是每个人的免疫系统中发生的事情。

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.

当然，人们的免疫系统各不相同，对一个人有效的疫苗可能对另一个人无效，但这并不意味着谈论疫苗的有效性毫无意义。

The situation with art is messier, of course.

当然，艺术的情况更加混乱。

You can't measure effectiveness by simply taking a vote, as you do with vaccines.

你不能像对待疫苗那样通过简单的投票来衡量有效性。

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.

你必须想象具有深厚艺术知识和足够清晰头脑的主体的反应，以便能够忽略诸如艺术家的名声之类的无关影响。

And even then you'd still see some disagreement.

即便如此，你仍然会看到一些分歧。

People do vary, and judging art is hard, especially recent art.

人们确实各有不同，评判艺术是很困难的，尤其是最近的艺术。

There is definitely not a total order either

肯定也没有总订单

of works or of people's ability to judge them.

作品或人们评判作品的能力。

But there is equally definitely a partial order of both.

但两者同样肯定存在偏序。

So while it's not possible to have perfect taste, it is possible to have good taste.

因此，虽然不可能拥有完美的品味，但有可能拥有良好的品味。

Thanks to the Cambridge Union for inviting me, and to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.

感谢剑桥联盟邀请我，感谢特雷弗·布莱克威尔、杰西卡·利文斯顿和罗伯特·莫里斯阅读本文的草稿。