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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23251 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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And if we must evaluate art on some scale, I actually find myself most sympathetic to the idea of pure majoritarianism when it comes to taste; the only meaningful way to measure beauty is to evaluate it through what the eyes of the majority consider beautiful, and that would change the ranking of esteemed art in a way that would very hugely deprioritise the opinions of art critics.

I disagree with that point of view. The issue is the that majority has no deep interest in music, or art, or movies. And in turn the deep interest is what drives the genre and the art medium forward. Nothing about Angelus Novus moves me, but there's so many albums that move me, while I doubt most people would even be willing to stand to listen to it for more than a few moments.

While I don't like art critics, and it can certainly create insular communities where they make art for their own clique and nobody else, it's important for communities to exist where people can push their medium forward in novel ways.

Nothing about Angelus Novus moves me, but there's so many albums that move me, while I doubt most people would even be willing to stand to listen to it for more than a few moments.

My music taste is strange enough that nobody passes me the aux cord anymore and they haven't for a decade now. And I'm not saying that people shouldn't be able to create their own art free from the preferences of the majority! Far from it. I enjoy a lot of these weird communities where people can innovate.

It's more that if we must evaluate beauty in some way (that doesn't involve appointing one group of elites as the arbiter of taste), I can't think of any other coherent way to do so outside of a simple appeal-to-majority; it at least intuitively makes sense and seems most likely to separate apart the components of aesthetic sentiments that are universally held vs. those that are culturally acquired within a certain context. But nobody ever seems to be happy with that either and every conversation about art eventually devolves into incoherence anyway because majoritarianism is an exceptionally restrictive framework for art, so perhaps discussing the quality of art is ultimately always a fruitless endeavour.

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