Friendly And Hostile Analogies For Taste

A taxonomy of analogies for artistic 'taste' — why sophisticates call popular art 'kitsch' and obscure art 'better,' despite mostly not being aesthetic Platonists. Taste is like: Physics (objective — but what does it refer to?); a Priesthood (self-consistent but made-up rules, like Hindu purity laws); a Priesthood With Semi-Fake Justifications (fashion's 'no white after Labor Day' — invented, then made real by the cringe reaction; the menswear-forum debates); BDSM Porn (desensitization escalating toward ever-weirder architecture); Fashion-derogatory (his 2014 coolness-radiation cycle); and Grammar (arbitrary prescriptivist rules like the un-splittable infinitive that come to 'feel' wrong). He lands on 'Priesthood With Semi-Fake Justifications,' citing that taste changes too fast for human universals (Beaux-Arts to International in twenty years), sophisticates disagree violently, the sausage-making is political (modern architecture decided by socialists arguing over 'bourgeois'), and blind tests (Ern Malley, wine, the AI Art Turing Test) are unkind — with a Trapped-Prior account of why made-up standards still feel viscerally real.

Quality 74 · Strong. Strong band, upper. A clean, useful taxonomy of theories of aesthetic taste with a clear deflationary payoff (taste as semi-fake priesthood) and a sharp mechanism (the Trapped-Prior loop that makes invented standards feel real). Upper-Strong; a well-organized survey rather than a single deep thesis.

Claude’s paradigm shift 45 · Moderate. Moderate. Synthesizes his own fashion-cycle and Trapped-Priors work into a fresh taxonomy; the components pre-exist.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. A clean, useful taxonomy of theories of aesthetic taste with a deflationary payoff (taste as a semi-fake priesthood) and a sharp mechanism (the trapped-prior loop that makes invented standards feel real). Conceptual influence within aesthetics discourse, a survey rather than a deep thesis, no material change — low RWI.