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It's a good summary and he gets it much better than his previous self but not completely. He writes on early Scott:
This is probably how many on the autism spectrum see things, without intuiting the interpersonal aspects. You have atomized, mostly fungible human individuals, and to decide whether a thing is good or bad, you administer the thing to the human and see if he or she gains utilions. And utilions are a kind of irreducible thing like qualia, a kind of pleasure, the opposite of pain. If utilions go up, thing is good, otherwise bad. It's a clean, legible, well understandable rule, and can serve as a basis for an engineering mindset to work on. As a kid, this is also how I would have wanted the world to work.
Mature Scott comes around to see social context etc. as being also relevant but still sees it as a bit of a sham.
But in listening to a bunch of Jonathan Pageau recently, I've come around to seeing art as serving community orientation. Scott should recognize this too, it's a kind of rallying point, defining Schelling points and common knowledge, a coordination mechanism. What is our community going through currently? What happened with recent generations and what are our aspirations for the next generation, and for the next next and then for beyond? What kind of picture do we want to paint of ourselves and how we relate to each other, the past, our neighbors, our future etc? What is good and what do people around me look up to with reverence? What do they doubt and look down upon as stupid or evil or nonsensical or pointless? Art is functional, it tells concrete stories, delivers concrete messages. Beauty that is stripped of all this is quite pedestrian. Symmetry, nice color combinations, intricate patterns here and there, balanced proportions etc and you're good to go. Just like a delicious taste is in fact not super hard to achieve, you need fat, salt and sugar in reasonable proportions and it will taste good from a tastebud perspective. Food that tastes good indicates caloric density and that we are in good times, the hunt was good, we are doing well in life.
Beauty in art, architecture etc has a similar role, it says that things are well-kept, in order, people have extra time to spare for beautifying things beyond just keeping things afloat. Its opposite, decay and trash shows that people around you don't give a fuck or there are hostilities going on where people deface the common living space etc. Or a clean but gray, flat, unbeautified space also communicates something, that there is no extra effort spent on this, there are tasks to be done, no time to wander, to look beyond the immediate task you were given, it's all about efficiency etc.
Art has both a message and some weight backing it. It can't be cheap, because for me to take your message seriously, a proof of cost helps to see you're truly standing behind it and are willing to expend time, effort and money to express it. The costly signal is not sufficient, but certainly a component. This is in part why ornaments or fancy clothes or colorful dresses are not as impressive today, it's just too cheap to produce that appearance. It's like, in my grandmother's time, having a table full of meals that included meat was a big deal and a central point around holidays, like Christmas or Easter, because it couldn't be taken for granted. It's excess and waste in a sense, just like ornaments, but they orient people to a shared vision and goal.
Back to beauty: When things are beautiful, you'll feel things are on a good track. But what if the zeitgeist is all about how things are not on a good track? The 20th century artists wanted to explicitly wake people up from their slumber, so they don't think that everything is fine. To upset and shake people by the shoulders. The second industrial revolution, then the industrial-scale meat grinder of WWI, then the Holocaust. They wanted to express that things are very much not normal, and the man on the street should not be seeing some idyllic space, where he can just go about his day. Everything about the old order was tainted in their minds. You may say that it's not true, a lot of things from the old times is valuable and worth preserving, but this becomes a more substantial discussion about history, the good, how people should live, what the events of the 20th century mean for humankind etc.
That's the steelman. Of course, like anytime, there will be posers and imitators and indeed making something ugly and repellent needs much less effort and skill than making something beautiful, so you end up with a race to the bottom and a bunch or ridiculous bullshit.
My point is that it's a much better discussion if you address the actual reasons that those ugly artworks got made. Unpack your view on the trajectory of Western civilization, what is to be preserved and what is to be tossed aside, what was a dead end and what was an eternally valid compass? Or at least say that you don't care about history or what people did generations ago, and you just want to be entertained and pleased, but then don't be surprised when the world becomes an algorithmic tiktok feed of VR brainrot that tickles people's brains just the right way to make it feel mildly engaging and in a kind of homeostasis.
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