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This is a continuation of my Better Art Vocabulary series. You don’t need to have read the others, but feel free.

I grew up encouraged to an old-school sense of taste. Not as old-school as opera and $300 bottles of wine, but as old-school as liking literature and paintings and museums for no real reason other than that I was supposed to, and thinking that other stuff was kind of…unclean. I have two peculiarly strong memories from when I was young: one was my mother saving up to take me to a DaVinci show in New York, and the other was being caught watching Pokemon–which struck about the same fear in my heart as being caught masturbating might have done. Taking me to that show was a truly beautiful thing to do, and an important youthful artistic experience, but it caused some internal conflict. Why did certain artistic things deserve sacrifice, and others shame?

As not even teenage rebellion, but simply frustration at my own judgmentalness, I made a deliberate decision at age 15 to watch every single science fiction show I could get ahold of. I scoured forums, made a list, and went down it. Star Trek: TOS to Dark Angel. Lexx. Blake’s 7. I got a LiveJournal to post about Farscape, and I liked it. Nerdism is good for art, but more importantly good for people, because it operates at the level of pleasure. Whether the pleasure is from the work of art itself, a character, or a community, it at least produces an honest answer to the question: Do I really like this? It gives you permission to pay attention to how something makes you feel. Nerdism is also good for art because it operates at the level of obsession. The mid-00’s is when online popular art criticism really started to take off, and I benefited from writers who were obsessed enough with artworks to shamelessly, and in depth, explain why the works were actually artistically successful (or not). Which is something no one bothers to do for your high school or even college reading. At least not nearly as often as they should. Essentially, nerdism gave teenage me a roadmap for how to interact with art in a more casual, authentic, and desacralized way.

I stopped participating in fandom around the time I started college because I realized I didn’t like the source material any more, and I didn’t like the conversations I was having about it either. It increasingly seemed that while nerdism was valuable (or at the very worst, harmless) for art in general, it was often bad for artworks in particular. On the other hand, college art history classes gave me a first row seat to performative taste. And to that murky inner region where the pleasure from performing taste was satisfying enough that it was nigh-indistinguishable from genuine enjoyment (for more on this, I always recommend Peli Grietzer’s take). The questions such experiences makes me ask are these: when a work of art makes you feel good, when does it indicate that the art itself is some vaguely more objective version of ‘good art’? Good at what? Conversely: when a work of art makes you feel bad, when does it indicate that the art itself is bad?

Effectiveness

Art that is good is effective at achieving its goals. Effectiveness is a subset of skill. If an artist wants to make you feel afraid, and not only succeeds in making you afraid, but afraid in some very precise version of afraid the artist had in mind, we’d call that work effective. I find Indiana Jones better than Guardians of the Galaxy, because relative to their seemingly shared goal of engineering fun, Indiana Jones is more successful at it, at many more levels, and for more people.

People argue that the reason it’s immoral to fetishize things like race and disability, is because fetishistic admiration exists independently of the qualities a person actually possesses, making the admiration shallow and suspect. A fetish is distinct from a preference in two important ways. One: its value is symbolic. Consider: someone with a preference for missionary sex because it’s comfortable and easy, versus someone with a fetish for missionary sex because it’s so conventional. The pleasure of the latter is abstract. Two: the inclusion of a fetish alone makes an experience satisfying, all other qualities remaining the same. Consider: someone who doesn’t like ice cream sandwiches liking ice cream sandwiches when they are green, because having a green ice cream sandwich is sufficiently whimsical.

When an artist indulges their own fetishes, this can also be a failure mode, and the reason is that it produces extraneous information. When Woody Allen portrays May-December relationships, or Murakami writes a mysterious spritely ingenue, or your friend writes a Harry Potter fic except all the characters are gay, to what extent is this just the artist writing what they want to read, a choice on the level of genre, or some kind of aesthetic flaw? In theory, it’s really just the former. But in practice indulging fetish often inhibits self-examination. Moreover, it makes inhibiting self-examination feel good. Woody Allen is not gonna be looking too hard at why he loves pairing older men with much younger women, even though by now the pattern is glaringly obvious and cries out for some kind of engagement. It become something extra and random. This weakness makes his art just slightly less effective, slightly less coherent, and slightly less pleasant. On the other hand, sometimes fetish just means fascination, or sensibility, and it produces insight into something that others would not otherwise bother with. Peter Greenaway, for example, is clearly obsessed with the contradictions of beauty and decay, and he makes highly theatrical movies full of images of food, rotting, bodies, and death. His movies aren’t quite coherent or always effective either, but not because of lack of self-awareness.

When an artist appeals to an audience‘s fetishes, it is kind of like playing art on cheat mode. Appealing to an audience’s fetish will be extremely effective at producing a reaction–but only as long as everyone in the audience shares the fetish. Thank goodness Sarah Perry’s “Fungibility and the Loss of Demandingness” (an extremely good essay that you should read) showed up on Twitter yesterday, because it provides at least one answer to this piece’s title. In her essay Perry suggests that items that demand time and effort from their users are perceived as more valuable (and the people that own them are perceived as more interesting), because owning them is truly a costly signal. Describing the implications of buying and caring for a carbon steel knife, versus buying one at Bed Bath and Beyond, she writes:

“The market, exemplified by the Bed, Bath and Beyond I mentioned, removes near ‘pain’ – non-monetary costs and demandingness – and renders items legible to the purchaser without culture, knowledge, or care.”

It follows that because art that panders to fetishes demands little in the way of effort or virtuosity on the part of the people consuming or providing it, preferring or fawning over such art indicates a “lack of taste.”

While reading Infinite Jest might have once been a costly signal, choosing to read Infinite Jest is no longer a decision that requires connoisseurship to make, at least within certain circles. Which diminishes its value. This suggests that just because some things are hard to do–and reading a long book remains hard, even when deciding which long book does not–doesn’t mean that the people that do the things have good taste. Just because you didn’t like reading Shakespeare, it does not mean that Shakespeare is good. Though it doesn’t mean Shakespeare is bad either.

I won’t say much about the ‘sublime’ reaction to art, as this deserves its own post. However, I’m aware that one of the reasons DaVinci is higher in status than Pokemon is not ‘merely’ for social reasons, but because DaVinci supposedly induces some higher order of experience. Not merely effectiveness or nutrition, but beauty. I am careful about talking about ‘sublime’ experiences, because they have much in common with spiritual experiences, in that it’s unclear how much they have been provoked by something external to the person having the experience (whether the provocation is God existing, or an artwork being good).

Nutrition

Still, in theory some kinds of effort are good for you, and some kinds aren’t. Some kinds of laziness are bad for you and some kinds aren’t. ‘Taste’ can be an upsetting concept because it suggests that one should feel shame at one’s own pleasure, only the rules are opaque and if you weren’t born understanding them, you never will.

I like the word nutrition because it’s neutral. People who like the tastes of different foods can usually agree on what’s nutritious. The idea that the best food tastes good and is good for you is, to me, comfortingly non-controversial. Unfortunately, what counts as art that’s good for you, is.

My friend Gabriel Duquette says that what the meaning-making, argumentative, understanding-the-world part of art does is “improve our intuitions about reality.” Art can accomplish this a lot of different ways. One of the ways is compression, or mapmaking, which I’ve talked about before. Compression is what happens when you try to impart information of a certain quantity and complexity in a smaller amount of space, like a caricature. Another way is charting territory, or coming up with ideas that never existed before. For example, and this is a terrible summation, one could say the Cubist style compresses the experience of looking at someone, or unsettlement, but it also helped create the idea that abstraction did not necessitate a loss of information. And in fact provided new kinds of information. Imagine seeing a Picasso for the first time having only seen realistic or religious paintings in your life, and imagine the stretching your mind would have to do to accommodate it.

People are drawn into a strange Twinkie/Broccoli dichotomy when it comes to art. Where if I say that a movie that people like is bad, I must be suggesting that they go read Ivanhoe instead (is Ivanhoe good?). On the other hand, some people think that making something hard to read or filling it with fashionable morals will make it good for you. As if the only way to eat brussels sprouts is boiled. What nutrition really feels like, in art, is that Picasso feeling of stretching. Nutrition feels like something rewarding your attention on multiple levels. Monty Python is nutritious because its manner of funniness is so complete. It is surprising, intelligent, always complicating itself, and causes you to make strange, mind-stretching leaps. These aspects don’t make it less funny, they make it more funny. They make you enjoy the funniness more. Go watch a sketch, like “Self Defense Against Fresh Fruit” and pay attention every time it switches ideas. It starts out being funny just from seeing John Cleese do military bluster accurately, and seeing the others do middle-class haplessness accurately. Then you find out members of the class are missing. Why? “Perhaps they’ve got flu.” Every line of Python has some unexpectedly perfect phrasing like that. Then you find out the class is to defend against fresh fruit (where did that association come from). Then the sergeant announces the dangers of fresh fruit (is he serious, is he not?). Then just as that’s about to get tiresome, he defends himself by shooting a student. Then by dropping a 16-ton anvil on another. When the sketch runs out of escalation, it ends.

Or read some of Jack Handy’s Deep Thoughts, or @dril’s tweets and think about why they’re funnier than SNL’s latest impression of a celebrity. The former give you the feeling of finding two puzzle pieces at opposite sides of a room and putting them together. Once you’ve found them, you want to keep taking the two pieces apart and putting them back together just because it’s so delightful.

When the stretching that nutritious artwork does is not pleasant, it’s usually because the artwork is confronting a cognitive dissonance. It’s understandable that one might not like The Piano Teacher, because European ‘psychosexual drama’ (as every movie review is required to call it) can be an acquired taste, but not because it’s giving you bad intuitions about reality. If you wanted to fetishize feminism, you’d make a female Ghostbusters, and if you wanted to fetishize BDSM (ironic!) you’d make 50 Shades of Gray. Because The Piano Teacher is neither it tells me something real about a particularly female psychology, even if it’s not a pleasant real thing. There is something inherently respectful about reality.

I never feel apocalyptic about much with regards to art. Nothing bad happens to art, in the long term, if people like Frozen. When it comes to nutrition in art, the question is not whether you should read War and Peace instead of Harry Potter. But whether, if you’re choosing between Harry Potter and a worse YA book, you’d grudgingly conclude that you’d prefer a world where all of the options were at least as satisfying as Harry Potter. If you’re not equipped to absorb whatever nutrients Shakespeare has to offer, the nutritional model suggests you should consume artworks whose nutrients you can absorb. People are going to react to art however they like. While it’s true that not everyone can parse the difference between Monty Python and SNL, and might enjoy them both, or might like Monty Python for a ‘wrong’ reason, a consumer can enjoy the effects of art being good without understanding how the effects are created. Just because people find a drug store cookie fine doesn’t mean they wouldn’t find a fresh baked cookie better.