The piece just seems to fully encapsulate Silicon Valley Hubris. It's amazing that he thinks he's settled a debate on 'quality' or 'taste' with a logical argument, and that people consider this an 'objective' answer to the question.
The rhetorical trick is one that many have pointed out: 'technically' superior is - in fact - easy to recognize. That doesn't mean that objective judgment of technique is synonymous with taste.
"Taste" in that sense becomes something more about having a pulse on how humans will ingest certain ideas. You can have an intuitive understanding of this in a given time and space (creatives get paid a great deal to do this). But that has nothing to do with 'taste' as an objective quality metric, it has to do with how humans will perceive or interact with an object.
He is making an argument that in a narrow sense good taste exists. He does not judge that that Italian artist that canned his own faeces is inferior to the Italian artist that sculpted the statue of David. One can appreciate the size and labelling of the can, the way it was lit and photographed, the fact that it was sealed. It is possible to imagine an inferior version of the canned faeces. This doesn't seem to be a crazy claim to make? To be honest I think taste is somewhat the wrong word, it seems to get hackles up about elitism.
To me he missed the easiest way to argue that good taste exists - due to the constraints of human perception, we can generate every possible work of art that fits on a canvas of a certain size. Should we do this, fill an online gallery with all these pictures and then declare that the visual medium is finished? That is a reasonable claim if there is no good taste, and it is absurd.
Furthermore, in the face of this omni-corpus an artist then transforms into a critic, who will browse this archive and highlight pictures they find interesting. Nothing is created, only curated. The outcome of this process is a work of art that someone may appreciate, which exists purely as the outcome of the artist/critic's taste, divorced from any act of creation. Yet this work of art is equivalent to one which was 'created' in the usual sense. The conclusion from this equivalence is that if you don't accept there is good taste, then you also accept that nothing is worth creating.
Post-modernism amounts to making a weaker claim, essentially saying that nothing is worth creating any more.
I don't bother reading these peices anymore, they no longer suit me. I suppose commenting on this forum will fall out of fashion completely one day as well. For my tastes change and my perpectives widen and narrow.
I do however hope that I find more people in tune with my current flavor, perhaps more who can add their own spice. Wouldn't that be nice.
The rhetorical trick is one that many have pointed out: 'technically' superior is - in fact - easy to recognize. That doesn't mean that objective judgment of technique is synonymous with taste.
"Taste" in that sense becomes something more about having a pulse on how humans will ingest certain ideas. You can have an intuitive understanding of this in a given time and space (creatives get paid a great deal to do this). But that has nothing to do with 'taste' as an objective quality metric, it has to do with how humans will perceive or interact with an object.