[BlackFly]

Rarely do people get the right takeaway from this effect. Take a normal bottle of red wine and some top tier, swap them around so the ordinary is in the expensive bottle and vice versa. Serve them. People prefer the ordinary wine in the expensive bottle.

Bad takeaway: taste is meaningless.

Good takeaway: qualia depends on many contextual cues beyond the obvious.

Part of the appreciation of Monet is the fact that it was made by Monet. The art pieces 4′33″ or Black Square are early examples of this within the are world. Many pieces will have you saying, my 8 year old could have done this, so why is this piece famous? Critiques and appreciation are often not literal because we cannot properly express these subconscious effects.

[lukko]

Exactly - context is everything in art, in how it's experienced and how it is created.

I think it's important to note that a jpg of Monet is not fully experiencing the painting in any sense. Colours will not be accurately captured, the texture, the framing, the scale - it's sort of like getting a heavily watered down version of the expensive wine, saying it's cheap wine, and asking what people think.

[surgical_fire]

This reminds me the day I went to see in person Starry Night Over The Rhone.

I am not exactly an art person, but I once was explained why that painting is a big deal, the whole impasto thing, etc.

I get there and there's an horde of morons taking selfies next to the painting, and another horde of morons taking photos of the painting. I just wanted to observe a bit the depth of the carved layers of ink and how light reflected on them.

Why bother taking a photo when I can find professional high definition photos of it online?

In the end I was unable to observe anything. It was sort of a let down, and the experience made me hate people a wee bit more than before. Nobody wanted to fucking look at the painting.

[etrautmann]

I love deeply observing paintings and also love taking a photo while in a museum. It helps me remember the details and review like spaced repetition the things I saw, or spend more time observing nuance later. Are many people ticking boxes? Probably, but the issue is the too many people. Even with people just looking, I feel uncomfortable spending time if there’s a line.

[surgical_fire]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/94/St...

I don't think any picture you take with your cellphone will have as much detail as this.

The act of taking photos of paintings in museums is meaningless.

[AlecSchueler]

> It helps me remember the details and review

Note that they said "remember the details" not "capture the details."

[tasuki]

> The act of taking photos of paintings in museums is meaningless.

No. I found some paintings I liked in a museum and took photos of them with a serious-at-the-time camera and uploaded them to wikimedia and found the endeavour worthwhile. Not all the paintings are super-famous and been scanned at infinite resolution!

[aworks]

This is why John Cage's 4'33" mentioned above is genius. If you listen to the composition with sincerity and seriousness, you get the full, unadulterated (non-silent) experience as opposed to an interpretation.

[unparagoned]

I feel really sorry for people that find context is key for art.

For them often context is more important than the actual art. Lie about the context and their view of art changes completely. I would say these people have objectively bad taste in art. These are the worst kinds of people.

In respect to your point about jpeg, you could have had a jpeg marked as real and one ai, and you would have had all the same comments about how the real jpeg was much better for all kinds of reasons. There is going to be almost zero chance anyone commented how they did due to it being a JPEG, vs them thinking it was ai.

[kergonath]

> Colours will not be accurately captured

Even looking at the real thing, as most pigments degrade with age. There is no way of experiencing it as it was painted.

[andybak]

Yes and no. Whilst I agree with your broad point, the point being made here is largely that the people dumping on the "AI" Monet are claiming objectivity about their opinions. And in many cases claiming that it's obvious to anyone with an eye for such things.

[therealpygon]

My 2 cents is that qualia is definitely a fancy way to say “opinions”. As in:

“My opinion is that this brand is good because others have told me it is. My opinion is that it is expensive because it must in fact be good. The bottle looks old, therefore it is old, which means it must be good because anything good takes time. Everyone has told me how this is amazing, so I need to ensure my refined palette can identify the blah…blah..”

Opinions all the way down, rarely ever based on concrete objectivity. Even for Monet.

In abstract you take the same paintings, stick them in some old dead dudes attic in Nowhere, Montana because he just did them for fun, I’d be surprised if they even ended up at a yard sale.

And that is the point. Value is entirely subjective and built through opinions. If your opinion begins with “I don’t like this,” you don’t tend to then overlook the same characteristics you willingly ignored or even embellished when you believed you are expected to like said thing.

[madaxe_again]

I think far closer is “people want to be part of the in-group”.

Closer yet is “look at me! I am sexy and cool! Have sex with me!”.

“Taste” is social signalling, end to end, so strike me down.

I say this as someone who gets writeups of their work in design magazines fairly often - and I am not a designer - it’s just like dressing a theatre set with the correct objects to signal the thing you want to signal.

Fuck, I fed people cat food at a dinner party when I was 20 and they all said it was delicious pâté.

All artifice.

[wongarsu]

I suspect this particular painting wouldn't do particularly well anytime you remove the framing of "this is a genuine Monet". It's not one of Monet's best. Monet would almost certainly agree.

Some of the comments reflect this, critiquing the art for what it is, not for who it is from. But at the same time a lot of them clearly go in with the mindset that they don't like it, then try to rationalize that with art critique.

[pwillia7]

I heard about an experiment on some podcast where they switched organ donation to opt-in from opt-out and before and after the change they interviewed people coming out of the DMV and asked them _why_ they chose to or chose not to be an organ donor.

No one said -- Oh that's just what the default option was.

Everyone had a thought out reasoned answer why they did what they did. But the data showed none of them did that and they in fact just did what the default was and justified their choice afterwards.

I wish I could remember/find the podcast but I haven't been able to. It feels like an old freakonomics but I don't think it is.

[nayroclade]

The point is that "part" of the appreciation appears here to be all of the appreciation.

Yes, the context of who created a piece of art will have an affect on how you interpret it. But if the question of who/what created it can literally flip your interpretation between "it's genius" and "it's garbage", then that's the only thing you care about. All the actual characteristics of the thing itself are irrelevant. And if literally the only thing that matters about art is who created it, what exactly is the point of art?

[amelius]

Your comment reminded me of this urban legend:

https://sciencesnopes.blogspot.com/2013/05/about-that-wine-e...

[unparagoned]

It’s perfectly fine to like cheap wine and not like expensive wine.

Those that like wine just because they think it’s expensive just have objectively bad taste.

So your defence only works for people with objectively bad taste. It’s not something that applies to everyone.

[thunky]

> objectively bad taste

Oxymoron.

[potsandpans]

Id argue that your dichotomy in of itself requires context.

While the idea that qualia depends on contextual cues might be valuable to understand how culture evolves, it's also indicative that that these cultural phenomena evolve to preserve in group/out group dynamics.

It's not so much, "taste is meaningless" and more, "taste is an arbitrary construction." These kinds of tests are the natural tools of the cynics and satirists of the world.

Critics and purveyors of the Fine Arts and Refined Tastes tend to get a little "up their own asses" about the things that they like.

So, while I agree that the framing of "taste is meaningless" is a bad take, it's valid to point out that there's natural humor here.

This kind of playful mockery is as old as the arts themselves. See: Diogenes.

[627467]

The takeaway i see here is you attach "AI" to anything and people automatically go into AI-yuk mode.

It's mindless tribalism/wokism in different form.