This certainly makes me a businessman, but does it make me a cook?

It might.

I don’t completely agree with it, but the doctrine of the intentionalist fallacy is relevant here.

Aside from that, it’s not clear to me at all that there’s no widely well-regarded works of art in the history of art that we can absolutely be sure weren’t created in a wholly “technocratic, pragmatic” manner. You seem to be assuming several disjunctions that I don’t see as justified. For example, there certainly must be some overlap between what people intrinsically like and what is art—that being the case, part of an artist’s talent is working within that context. If nothing else, an artist is likely to be creating to his own internal set of similar specifications and unless he is an alien, then he’s implicitly working towards others’, as well…at least to some degree.

I guess what bothers me most about your view is that it is very simplistic and idealistic about the process of artistic creation. It’s basically an expression of the culturally current idea that what is art is only what is produced ex nihilo from some mysterious creative source that has nothing to do with entertainment of others, popularity, or simply plying a trade. This is, incidentally, a very modern view of art.

No, it’s not about what actually becomes popular, and I don’t think the level of technical sophistication has anything to do with it. It’s about a technocratic, purely pragmatic approach vs. creative approach.

Suppose I do a massive research with electrodes attached to brains and calculate the exact ratio of fat, sugar, and salt the average human being of the targeted demographic finds most attractive. I then produce a meal by this formula, made from the cheapest ingredients I can find. This certainly makes me a businessman, but does it make me a cook?

SG, OK, I’ll bite: why is that music so undeniably bad? Seems typical of the genre in many ways. The lyrics are easily intelligible, a plus, which is unusual in hard rock. A lot of metal is better played than this, but so what? The singer is barely competent as a singer, but he yells effectively and does get the words across. At least he’s not trying to sound evil like many metal singers, which just reminds me of Halloween spooky sounds records. The sentiment is silly, but there’s lot of that around.

Yes, the singer’s not good, he is trying to sound evil, the lyrics are terrible really really terrible, a call to conform in a call to rebel, the playing’s unremarkable, there’s the naked Kashmirism, big blank spaces in the chorus where the attempted anthem should be, metal is a game of competence… It’s hard to say how this is in any sense good, so I’d submit that it’s bad.

I’m curious if Keith and others feel that there is such a phenomenon as objectively, undeniably poor-taste stuff

I go against the grain and believe that, in theory at least, there’s possibly some sense in which there is objective aesthetic value in art and that, to the limited degree to which “kitsch” is defined in those terms (and not merely in a culturally functional sense), kitsch exists.

But you seem to me to be conflating some concepts which are widely-regarded to be distinct. For example, “qualitatively bad” with “considered in poor taste”.

At any rate, I certainly don’t equate “kitsch” either as a judgment of aesthetic quality or as a cultural aesthetic category with either “popular” or “not the product of highly developed technique”. Works of art that are widely regarded to be of high artistic quality have been popular and/or the product of technical unsophistication; likewise works of art that are widely regarded to be other than culturally kitsch have been popular and/or the product of technical unsophistication.

It’s certainly true that both senses of “kitsch” notably overlap with popularity and technical unsophistication. That’s why so many people make that critical shortcut. But it’s often enough a mistake—and certainly often enough an egregious mistake in the history of art—that it really is inexcusable.

You know, I’m a musician myself. A trained musician. For the early part of my life until perhaps my late twenties, I very strongly associated technical mastery with artistic quality. At some point, I realized this was very naive. Later, I realized that “technical mastery” is itself a dubious idea insofar as it is thought to be only those things which we culturally tend to recognize as “technical mastery”. Technique arises organically out of the process of artistic creation—any good piece of art is technically competent implicitly. That is to say, it may exhibit the more recognizable forms of technical competence—say, education and experience with traditional and highly regarded techniques. But it also may exhibit new, highly competent technique. After all, fully formed technique wasn’t provided as a revelation from the Gods. If competency in fully-formed technique was a requirement for the creation of “true” art, then how could art have ever come to exist? I suppose someone would say that it arises from something less-than-art, from kitsch. But, you know, even a single contradictory example nullifies that argument—and we have many.

More specific to the particular argument in this thread, I long ago expanded my awareness of “technique” in music (popular and otherwise) beyond what most people think is taught in music school. In fact, most of that stuff, the most schematic forms of technique, account for very little of what is required to write (and perform) good music. For example, people here and elsewhere seem to believe that the simple blues progression necessarily belies a vast ignorance of technique in music when, in fact, one only needs to be informed enough as a musician to watch a blues musician play and realize how much implicit, often not taught, and wide-ranging technique there really is. And with regard to songwriting? At least as true, if not more so.

Technical competency is, in fact, a pretty good metric for evaluating the quality of art. The catch is that almost everyone who is eager to use this metric vastly underestimates the scope of what truly qualifies as “technique”. In the crudest terms, if it looks or sounds “difficult” to the novice, the assumption is made that it must imply technical mastery and that is a reasonable basis upon which to judge artistic merit. Often, though, the stuff that looks and sounds easy is the most difficult and requires the most mastery. And this is what I was getting at with my “middlebrow” comment. This “seems difficult so it’s good art” is the middlebrow aesthetic.

John, well, that’s kind of what they said over 50 years ago, when this whole rock thing got off the ground.

The problem is styles that get classicized stop developing, or develop only in subtle ways noticeable to connoisseurs . When did you last hear anything new in blues? This is why classical and jazz developed avant guards: to keep from being musics that could be reduced to set of rules. Of course, both of those avant guards produced music that is much an acquired taste and thereby lost their audiences. But rehashing Dvorak or Mingus can’t help but get boring, and those are both brilliant musics drawing on brilliant forebears. Arguably, rock has an avant guard too.

SG, OK, I’ll bite: why is that music so undeniably bad? Seems typical of the genre in many ways. The lyrics are easily intelligible, a plus, which is unusual in hard rock. A lot of metal is better played than this, but so what? The singer is barely competent as a singer, but he yells effectively and does get the words across. At least he’s not trying to sound evil like many metal singers, which just reminds me of Halloween spooky sounds records. The sentiment is silly, but there’s lot of that around.

My son, who is in the music biz, separates out highly developed, well-defined styles like flamenco, jazz, bluegrass, classical, blues, old-timey—stuff that can be classicized and taught by rules—and gives each its proper designation, and calls everything else pop. Will people be playing classicized rock in 2109? I suppose so, but not yet, and some of the most definitive rock songs—“Wild Thing”, “Louie Louie”, etc.—will be hard to classicize. A lot of rock lyrics, changes, and tunes don’t give you much to work with.

I’m curious if Keith and others feel that there is such a phenomenon as objectively, undeniably poor-taste stuff

less is better, who apparently didn’t know Mancini, mentioned how he used to get panned by jazz musicians. His reputation has improved retrospectively. He wrote “Peter Gunn” (appropriated by everyone from Sarah Vaughan to the B-52’s to Art of Noise), the theme from “The Pink Panther”, “Moon River”, “Days of Wine and Roses”, and the music for “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. He was in the mold of sophisticated pop composer with jazz influences after the heyday of such had passed. Jazz was in its most avant guard phase and trying to have nothing to do with pop, and pop was reacting to rock & roll; he had a home in neither world. He had an audience, but nothing critics would respect. So he was panned as kitsch at the time. And a lot of his arranging sounds kitsch to me too, not the brassy stuff, but a lot of his orchestration is very “muzacky” – he is actually one of the fathers of that style. I hate the choir on “days of wine and roses”. I had to hear a jazz version to realize it’s actually a good song. I don’t like “Moon River” at all. I won’t defend these things as “objective taste”, however. They are just my taste. I can’t say the composer of Peter Gunn and Pink Panther has no imagination when it comes to arranging music.

Bloix – ‘He doesn’t understand that the singer (actually the band) is more important because rock values the personal expression of the band over all else.’ Axl Rose is laughing at you. Really, really loudly.

Karl Marx: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”