A Plank in Reason Broke: Contra ACX on Aesthetic

I.

In his recent series on aesthetic, Scott Alexander questions whether much that is called art is in fact neither art nor worthy of being created. While his argument is as usual fairly comprehensive and reasonable, I find his conclusions unsatisfactory. The failures in his reasoning are perhaps to be expected from someone pursuing a Truth dao: he views art solely through the lens of his own goals and mindset, and thus misses how his individual priorities fit within a wider framework of art, rather than superseding it. Taking all of his advice to heart immediately would result in a diminishing of artistic potential, even if what Scott intends is a honing of it.

To start, Scott lists off a series of criteria by which people judge what is “good art,” then suggests many of them should be ignored. Ignoring them, though, would be an error, for he does not recognize that many of them are at heart the same thing, just pointed toward different daos and goals.

Recall that people pursue their own dao based on what has been fundamentally inscribed into the kernel of their soul. Thus, there are many differences, some irreconcilable, between one dao and another. But this does not mean the processes of pursuing them are utterly alien to one another. Techniques, and arts, carry over.

Scott’s first factor as to what makes good art is that people should be able to enjoy it based on its sensory impact – look or sound or taste – alone. Some of this effect is likely a human universal. Some of it surely varies by the individual. But while this factor is a part of what makes something good art, ultimately it is secondary to art’s true purpose. A surface-level prettiness gives people an incentive to view or return to a piece of art since they enjoy it more, the same way children like a colorful and illustrated textbook more than one containing only black-and-white text. But art is about beauty, and beauty is more than mere pleasure. After all, you don’t have to be a hedonist to appreciate art.

Scott’s second and third factors as to what makes good art are the art’s novelty and its conformity to a pattern. While these might seem contradictory, they are in fact part of the same requirement: that art must contain information – in other words, it must be interesting.

Information is, fundamentally, just an interesting pattern – something that tells you something both new and true. It must be new, because if you could generate it yourself already from your own knowledge there would be no point in seeking it externally. And it must contain a pattern, because otherwise it would be no better than random noise that cannot be used to create any kind of model or predict the future in any useful way. Information consists of interesting things that are simultaneously unexpected (new to you) and inevitable (patternful).

Scott’s next four factors are all related to the art’s position within its context, whether that be politics, fashion, history, or art development itself.

Scott’s fundamental objection to art that requires knowledge of an external context to be understood or appreciated seems to be that this makes the art “subjective”; he doubts whether something that cannot be taken outside of its context without losing its meaning, or that does not have meaning to people who cannot know the context, can still be art. But people have context too – they are embedded within the world – and should the fact we view others’ actions without knowing their full circumstances and web of relationships make them less whole, or less people? Likewise, art is embedded within the world, and having context does not make it less art. Everything that is real has a context – context-dependence is a fact of life outside of fiction and thought-experiments. Real art is contextful art.

This necessity of context is why Scott perceives such a difference between the names of companies that a less-informed person might find indistinguishable: the name “Infinita” is not beautiful to Scott, because though it might sound catchy on the surface, it contains no additional meaning. Whereas the name “Vitalia” has a deep meaning that he can ponder and discover. So even Scott recognizes that context plays a part in making things beautiful – but only insofar as that context is perceptible by the viewer. I think the Koran sounds quite pretty when recited. But it will never be as beautiful to me as it will to someone who understands 7th century Arabic and believes every word in it was written by Allah.

In order to see this more clearly, consider – is it art if no one sees it? No. All art starts as a vision within the eye of its creator. That observation is what makes it art, since without that Will within the soul of the artist molding it into the form of their dao, it would be no better than random noise. And that observer necessarily has a context of their own. All art is born of context.

For people, then, who do not or cannot perceive the context of the art, all that can be said is: the art is simply not for them. Not all clothes fit all people, and not all art fits all daos. And just as children grow, one grows when pursuing the dao – people can grow into and out of art as well.

Which brings us to Scott’s final factor, that good art must transform the viewer. This is in fact the primary factor that makes something art to the person for whom it is art. This is the purpose of art. Art is a tool in service of the dao, and the purpose of the dao is to change, and the purpose of art is to help you change in the way you want to be changed.

Consider: is a screwdriver a good tool? What makes a good tool? That depends on the task at hand. A screwdriver is good for putting in screws, not so much for lifting heavy bags of sand. The quality of the tool depends on the task. Art, then, is the tool of the dao, and whether some particular art is a good tool for its purpose depends on the purpose of the particular dao for which it is being used.

This does not mean that art is wholly subjective, or that art is whatever anyone wants it to be at any given time. Rather, something is art to a specific person within a specific context – but still according to a universal set of principles.  

Scott misses the mark on art because he does not conceive of beauty as something that has a goal. He does not see it as a tool of his dao, but rather a potentially interesting side quest at best, and a distraction or inefficiency at worst. Scott says his dao is one of Truth, and he does not have time for Beauty. Yet within the framework of his dao, Truth is Beauty, and this determines what Art is for him.

You do not have to appreciate every piece of art ever made in order to appreciate Art in general. It is inevitable that some art will not be aligned with your dao, and trying to incorporate it will be useless at best and lead to distortions in your dao at worst. So, Scott is right in that much that is considered art is not art to him. But this in no way precludes it from being art in general. Art is a window into the structure of being, but some windows are polarized, and some of y’all are wearing sunglasses.

II.

People change as they ascend their dao. As art helps them ascend, it changes them or helps them change. But what changes will it make?

Scott notes that experienced architects might find a building that others think beautiful too basic for their refined architectural palates. But all these judgmental architects did not spring out of the womb as fully formed Howard Roarks. Once upon a time they were baby architects who designed basic buildings, and appreciated the basics just like all the rest of the plebs. Only after years of staring at ornamented facades and pretty cornices did they lose their child-like joy in a casement window and come to appreciate instead the subtleties of brutalism and deconstructivism. But these changes were not beaten into them with T-squares (we hope) – jaded brutalists are what these architecture students were intending to become when they signed on.

The role of art, then, is to allow one to progress through one’s dao by creating, viewing, or pondering it. That is, art has much the same role as a textbook, but in a prettier and less academic form (though pricing wise probably about the same, since modern textbooks seem to go for about as much as a Pollack or a Koons). Like textbooks, art also differs in what might be called its translucent presentation of depth. That is, some textbook series are best studied in a straightforward manner – volume 1, then volume 2, and so on, where volume 1 is so basic it is useless to reread for students on volume 5, and volume 5 is so jargon-filled as to be incomprehensible to volume 1 students. Other textbooks are famous for rewarding re-reading and contain information interesting to both beginners and experts. Still other textbooks don’t even reach the former standard, and are useless or incomprehensible to any student no matter their knowledge base. But how do you know which textbooks are good and which to trust? You wouldn’t want to study bridge building by reading an AI-hallucinated textbook filled with inaccuracies and waste countless hours learning false knowledge about imaginary bridge designs. You want to read the textbooks that trusted experts have written and recommended, because they will change you towards a known outcome – for example, into someone who knows a lot of true information about bridge design.

Likewise with art: art is intended to change you into someone further along your dao path, and the very best art contains mysteries and meaning that make it useful as a catalyst to both beginners and experts. But just as beginners lack the expertise to recognize a good textbook versus a poor one, the people who stand to benefit most from a piece of art lack the discernment to recognize which art will change them in the ways they want to change.

Michelangelo’s art is commonly acclaimed to be of a higher type – the kind that contains profound mysteries and extraordinary meanings, where the more you look the more you see. The goal of a Michelangelo appreciator is to look so hard they change their soul into the right shape to appreciate it even more, and the way they do that is by appreciating it now. The more they look, the more their soul becomes able to appreciate. Assuming that someone who liked Michelangelo and looked at a lot of Michelangelo’s art would soon come to think they had seen “enough” Michelangelo and no longer be transformed by it, underestimates the depth of dao it is possible to embed in a work.

If you want to appreciate anything fully, you start by appreciating it a little bit. Over time you come to appreciate it more and more as you perceive more of its mysteries and meaning. In the same way, classic novels are more interesting as you read more and more of them and start to understand all the references they make to each other, and studying history becomes more interesting the more history you know as everything gets put into its historical context. Art appreciation is not teleportation – to reach the heights or depths of appreciation you must first traverse the intervening space.

This is also why a Michelangelo fan would be upset to discover something thought to have been created by Michelangelo was a forgery. If you had been studying Michelangelo because you trusted him, as a great master of his art, to have embedded a beauty into his work that could change your soul in a desirable way, then learning you had studied a forgery would be a terrible betrayal of that trust. You would feel that the forger had tricked you into attuning your soul, not to Michelangelo’s dao as you had intended, but to the entirely unknown dao of the forger.

This betrayal would be the worst for people who had studied Michelangelo the least, since these people would be least able to tell they were being led along the wrong path when they had never walked the path before to recognize the way. Someone who was already so far along in the dao of Michelangelo that they felt competent to judge the forgery on how close to a true Michaelangelo it had actually come might just laugh and not care; in that case they may well have noticed it was a forgery in the first place. In this light, anger at discovering forgeries is much more understandable. The sin of art forgery is that it is risking turning people away from their true daos; people are mad at forgers for hijacking the evolution of their souls.

III.

Of course, Scott is surely correct that there are some things people call art that the creators and appreciators are using solely or primarily as a status symbol. Yet, is not status a dao in itself? Of course, these people’s “art” that is only a tool for gaining status is an unsuitable tool for those seeking other forms of beauty. But people must make their own judgments about what art is useful for them, and what tools are right for their own dao.

Scott might argue that this method of judging art isn’t “scientific” or “studies-based” or that it sometimes fails to “replicate”. The assumption here is that science and studies are more “baked-in” to the fundamental nature of the world than any other dao. I agree that some aspects of science certainly seem very baked-in – mathematics and physics, for example. Other things like morality seem more of a grey area, where it takes religious assumptions or complicated game-theoretic arguments to provide any basis for a fundamental underlying morality, and even then the question seems far from closed. Science as a whole, though, is just another art, and like all art must be taken within its context. When people say “science” has shown something, the study’s results must be considered in the context of who did the study, what their motivations were and how those might have influence it, human and other natural limitations on precision and the vagaries of measurement in the real world, and so on. Science is a dao, it is true, but it is one among many, and I see no reason to consider it primary above all others, much less the only basis of Beauty – or even of Truth.

Another type of art Scott doubts deserves the classifier is AI-generated art. Going back to first principles, art is what is useful, so the question is really whether AI-generated text, images, or anything else are useful for any given dao. If they are useful, use them, and if not, don’t. Many people seem to think AI is useful for the dao of coding. For visual art, music, and literature based dao, there are a few more caveats. Some of the reasons for caution are the same as with coding – that is, is the AI’s output accurate? Is it creating art in the correct style that captures the matching currents of thought and mirrors the correct revolutions of the soul? And even if it does this correctly some of the time, can it be trusted to be accurate by a beginner who might not be able to judge for themselves?

Unfortunately, I don’t think AI is yet trustworthy in this regard, primarily because it is by no means guaranteed to think the way a human thinks. In the case of Michelangelo, we can be pretty sure he thought like a human, and had thus created a dao that was pursuable by humans. Claude and company are another species entirely – and I mean this literally – and thus cannot be trusted to create new dao or even understand existing human dao enough to mirror them.

The issue with AI generated art and poems isn’t that they are “ugly” in some absolute sense. Many may be beautiful in Scott’s first, sensory-only mode of beauty. They may even be beautiful in some strange inhuman conceptual dao way. But AIs’ souls, if they have souls, are not human shaped, and hence the art they produce is not attenuated to human dao. It may be beautiful to other AIs, but for humans, it will not have the same mysteries and meaning as human art forged in a human soul. AIs may someday create great art that humans will appreciate, but that time is not upon us, and will not be upon us until AI is powerful enough to model humans in fullness to such an extent that it can deeply model human dao and create art in alignment with them.

This does not mean that AI output cannot be interesting and useful for an expert. When it comes to poetry, I have decided I will judge all new poetry I encounter based on my own criteria, rather than its provenance – my dao is far along enough that I feel confident in my own judgement (whether I really should be that confident in my skillz is an open question). Unlike Scott, I wouldn’t be upset at all if poems I liked turned out to be modern forgeries or AI generated. (That being said, there are very few modern poems I have encountered that I feel are as good as ones written in the 19th century or before. I’m not exactly sure why this is. Do people just think and perceive differently now? Is it that people gave up on rhyme and meter (probably this is at least part of it)? Is it because people are putting too many cell phones in their poems? I don’t believe that there is anything about cell phones that makes it impossible to write a good poem containing them, but I still have yet to find one. Perhaps there’s something about cell phones and modernism that pulls poems toward an unesthetic attractor, and few modern poets have the strength to pull back. Or perhaps I have aligned my dao too closely to pre-20^th century poems and gotten stuck in a false optimum. The closest poetry to modern times I actually like is probably Roald Dahl’s fairy tale poems, but I would be very happy to encounter modern poetry I did like.)

What art is true Art, then, depends on who the art is for – but, who is it for? Artists? Critics? Plebs? Logically, it must be primarily for the artist, since they are the ones creating it out of their own dao, and in their own image. Secondarily, I believe art is for anyone who wants to look – he who has eyes let him see – and anyone whose dao is aligned, and whose sunglasses are polarized in the proper direction to see through the window. Thus, there is no purpose in critiquing contemporaries for having bad art. Bad art will not help your dao, unless your dao is one of indiscriminate critique. Only good art, as defined by you and your own context, is your arrow towards the beyond.