Q&A: Aesthetic Truth and Falsehood
Aesthetic Truth and Falsehood
Question
Have a good week.
A well-known saying is that “there’s no arguing about taste and smell,” or in other words, it isn’t really correct to speak about aesthetics in terms of truth and falsehood, but rather in terms of subjective beauty or lack of beauty.
So my question is: take the culinary world, for example. On the one hand, every person likes certain food and dislikes other food, but on the other hand there are chefs who judge the culinary value of dishes.
And likewise in music or painting. A person may love one kind of music and suffer through another, while on the other side a musician will express an opinion about the musical value of the music and its performance.
By what standards can aesthetic values be judged in terms of good and bad? Or is this really just something people invented, and all the arguments between artists are empty debates? Is there any way to determine, for example, that classical music is more “correct” than rock music, or that one painting is better than another?
Answer
Whether something is beautiful or not seems to me to really be a subjective matter. No expert can tell me what tastes good to me or what looks beautiful to me. But when it comes to how much complexity and sophistication something has, how good the technique is, and so on—there, expertise does have a place.
Discussion on Answer
It is possible to know whether a person experiences pleasure from hearing a certain piece of music. In that sense, it is indeed objective to say that a certain piece of music gives a certain person pleasure. It may even be possible to predict from the structure of the brain what kind of music will give that person pleasure.
Beyond that, there is no reason to think that certain connections between neurons that cause you to like one thing and be repulsed by another are more correct or less correct than a different person’s connections. Especially since even the same person can like different music at different times. That is, it is not only connections between neurons but also a chemical state within the brain.
And correlations to other things that are more objective are a matter for stigma.
Every great artist has some true critical standard of what good taste is, and just as his works are meant to give pleasure, so too their purpose is to teach good taste. Sometimes they even explain their approach. Bach said that the purpose of all music is the praise of God and the refreshment of the soul. Mozart said that music is not the notes but the silence between them. Not every piece of classical music meets those definitions, and perhaps there are works of rock music that do meet them. In any case, good taste is usually acquired through lots of listening/looking and study. The pianist Leopold Godowsky said: “If I do not practice the piano for one day—I notice it; two days—my colleagues notice it; three days—the audience notices it; four days—the critics notice it.” 🙂