In this post Scott Alexander returns to the topic of artistic taste, responding to thoughtful replies from Ozy, Frank Lantz, and Sympathetic Opposition on a piece he wrote last year. He opens by unpacking eight distinct things people tend to bundle together under the heading of "good art" — from raw sensory delight to historical novelty to political point-making — and then sets out to argue, contra his interlocutors, that letting these blur into one another is doing real damage. Along the way he draws on analogies from restaurant criticism, medical research, modern literary fiction, and his own relationship with poetry to defend a particular view of what aesthetic judgment is actually for.
