Epistemic Status: Not a cohesive theory of community art perception/criticism, just speculation that two or more things are related
For those who haven't seen it, Scott posted his latest piece on architecture, last night, a review of Tom Wolfe's "From Bauhaus To Our House.". The comments are pretty similar to past comments. I'm less interested in the question of why people do or don't like modern architecture (there's a lot of variation in quality, and tastes vary - of course it's polarizing) than the variation in discernment over McMansions, a type of architecture defined by qualities that are a) bad and b) to me, fall in to the category of "once you see it, you can't unsee it."
For our purposes, I'll use the guide from McMansion Hell (https://mcmansionhell.com/post/149284377161/mansionvsmcmansion, https://mcmansionhell.com/post/149563260641/mcmansions-101-mansion-vs-mcmansion-part-2), which includes simple heuristics like Relationship to the Landscape: Often, a New Traditional mansion carefully considers its environment and is built to accentuate, rather than dominate it. A McMansion is out of scale with its landscape or lot, often too big for a tiny lot. and Architectural and Stylistic Integrity: The best New Traditional houses are those who are virtually indistinguishable from the styles they represent. McMansions tend to be either a chaotic mix of individual styles, or a poorly done imitation of a previous style. This house in Texas invokes four separate styles: the Gothic (the steep angle of the gables), Craftsman (the overhanging eaves with braces), French (the use of stone and arched 2nd story windows), and Tudor Revival (the EIFS half-timbering above the garage), each poorly rendered in a busy combination of EIFS coupled with stone and brick veneers. (Follow the links for annotated photos.)
These criteria are really heuristics - part two includes a house that could go either way, with arguments on each side - but they aren't "rocket surgery" to apply, it's just a matter of discernment; why can't everyone learn to apply the criteria, whether or not they share the opinion that McMansions are bad architecture? The criteria of mixing styles can require more consideration than the others - it takes some scrutiny to determine if stylistic elements were mixed in a thoughtful manner - and whether or not the styles are complementary is a matter of taste, but most of it is pretty simple.
[Edit 1: I was thinking of this at the time, but too lazy to go back to the ACX post to incorporate it - this is similar to how an artist friend of Scott's discribed how she identified an AI-generated image as AI art and why she disliked it. Once you see it, can you unsee it? Does it change how much you enjoy the image?]
This reminded me of a video jazz musician and YouTuber Adam Neely made on the question of whether Laufey's music is within the jazz genre. TL;DW, no, he puts her alongside 1950s pop that borrowed from the same set of musical styles as jazz of the period, but applied those stylistic elements to pop songs, rather than a musical form defined more by improvisation (especially group improvisation) than aesthetic. One clip used in the video is someone asking why it matters if jazz musicians don't recognize Laufey's music as jazz - good point; why are we asking the question, in the first place? My speculation is that Laufey's fans want her music to be considered jazz, not pop that has stylistic elements in common with jazz, because jazz has cultural cachet and drawing a distinction between jazz and superficially similar pop music would be perceived as gatekeeping or snobbery. In light of the precedent of 1950s pop, this is rather silly - jazz musicians aren't turning their noses up at Sinatra and Bennett - but, in addition to being denied the cachet associated with jazz appreciation, I can imagine that being told you lack the discernment to tell jazz from non-jazz feels like being told you lack taste.
Discernment and taste are distinct phenomena; if Scott tells me that he agrees with the criteria for distinguishing McMansions from other architecture, we establish inter-rater reliability for this, but he disagrees that they're bad design, I'll accept that he is capable of discerning the style, while declaring our tastes to be different. But Scott writes that architecture buffs tell him about superior modern architecture he might like and he can't discern the difference. To what extent is the discussion of architecture unproductive because people are conflating discernment and taste?
If you can't discern the difference between two things and someone else says that they have strong opinions over their respective quality, do you question your discernment or their taste? In the absence of a prior that you need to cultivate your abilities of discernment, I would speculate that you are more likely to question the other person's taste and are liable to come to the conclusion that their discernment is arbitrary, from which it follows that they're engaging in snobbery. Counter-Snobbery would be to reject the "arbitrary" distinction or, if conceding that there is a distinction, embrace the supposed "lesser" of the two things.
If you can't discern the difference between two things and someone else says that they have strong opinions over their respective quality... what do YOU do?
[Edit 2: While this was in the mod queue, Scott published a new post on theories of taste. Some of the commenters are commenting along the lines of a causal relationship between developing abilities of discernment with changes in taste, without using those terms. Interestingly, neither Scott nor a commenter went back to that section of the AI art post, even though the new post begins "Recently we’ve gotten into discussions about artistic taste (see comments to AI Art Turing Test..."]
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
This is adjacent to the subject, above, but an approach I found novel and interesting. I am trying to remember the podcast, and episode of it, that I listened to. The guest being interviewed was in charge of applying genre labels to musical acts for a streaming music service. He talked about including scene membership among his criteria.
His example was categorizing The Jam as punk. He noted that a lot of younger listeners didn’t think they sounded as would be expected for a punk band. But as part of the aforementioned guest’s criteria, the Jam toured around with and shared stage bills with other acts who were more recognizable and categorized as punk bands. The had other influences like mod-rock and new wave that confused younger listeners who didn’t think of them as an act that would be peers with the Buzzcocks, etc.
I had not heard of Laufey before this post. Her Wikipedia bio doesn’t indicate she has ever been part of a jazz scene. She has played the London Jazz Festival after releasing her debut album, and surely studied jazz at Berklee. But her youth was spent as a classical cellist. Wikipedia had a list of venues from her 2024 tour, and jazz clubs aren’t among them.
In terms of tackiness, I think Laufey’s lack of connection with jazz artists in that scene as it currently exists comes across as a lack of authenticity. Those of her fans who resent the claim she is a jazz-inspired pop artist likely sense this and wish to avoid that stigma.
This could be applied to resentment of Beyonce and Shaboozey within the country music world, and counter-resentment by their fans of much of that industry.
Also, racial dynamics are at play. It’s an insult Beyoncé isn’t celebrated by the country music industry. But Snow, conversely, is a joke. Even though he grew up with Jamaican immigrants in public housing in Toronto and came to appreciate reggae because of his upbringing.
More options
Context Copy link
My brewing narcissistic self-injury vs masturbation theory explains this pretty well.
I believe myself to be an arbiter of taste. I think Laufey's music isn't jazz. Therefore, when I come across someone who thinks Laufey's music is jazz, they must be wrong about jazz.
Enter credentialism! What is that person's jazz credentials, and are they better than mine?
If they are, then either a) denigrate their credentials, because they clearly aren't worth shit if they can't tell what is and isn't jazz, or b) take the self-injury and engage in self-reflection.
If that person has worse jazz credentials, then that person is tasteless and my credentials are worthwhile.
Psyche protects itself. Go back to masturbation.
Some people might remember the utter asspain that exploded over virtually half the internet when Ebert had the temerity to say that video games were not art. What caused the massively disproportionate reaction? Was Ebert wrong or was he credentialed and respected in the field of film criticism, and therefore the collective narcissism of those who had spent too much time playing video games refused to take it on the chin?
Welcome back, Alone. We've missed you.
More options
Context Copy link
The Ebert comparison is strange. In the jazz case, experts on jazz are considered the best around to determine what is and isn't jazz. But Ebert is a movie critic, he can thus determine what is and isn't a movie, not what is and isn't art generally. For the latter one would need someone who is an expert in all art, so som sort of a philosopher.
The most Ebert can say is that Tetris isn't a movie, not that it isn't art.
Bad analogy (NB: they all are), and overall just bad analysis. Movie criticism is a subset of art critcism overall, and part and parcel of criticism is understanding what is, and the purpose of, art. Besides which, Ebert isn't standing on credentials to determine what is or isn't "art," he's making an argument.
clo is quite correct; fans of Laufy incorrectly believe that if they can win the argument over whether or not her music counts as "jazz" means that her music will be taken more seriously than if it were not. This is the same dynamic we saw in the "video games are too art!" debates, where gamers were confusing "art" with "merit," and made completely confused arguments in their defense (inevitably falling back on "I felt emotions!" (this is not what makes art "art"), driven by years of ridicule in the mainstream about video games being a "lesser" hobby.
How can anyone say an entire medium isn't 'art'? There's no agreed definition for art, just feelings and status. After decades of 'modern art' visually indistinguishable from detritus it's far too late for these pretentious critics to start battening down the hatches and enforcing rigorous standards.
But Ebert can't even do that, he can't even define what he's talking about. There is no reason given why player choice prevents art (and there are many games without player choice). There is no substance in his argument, just a vague assertion that it's unworthy of comparison with the great dramatists. Nor does he even know much about video games:
Literally everyone can say this. Selling pork chops at the supermarket isn't "art," no matter how many emotions it may make you feel to observe the process in action. This is a complete non sequitur. "Choice of medium" in fact has no bearing on whether an act can be considered "art," and, in truth, the correct question should be "how can anyone say an entire medium is art?" Art is defined by being an act whose principal purpose is creative expression of the creator (this is why video games fail to be art; once they're put in the hands of the player, the creator has no control over the creative expression. A "Let's Play" of a video game might be considered "art," depending upon the intent of the uploader; the game itself never can be). There are no shortage of films, television shows, and songs that are not, and do not aspire to be, anything more than commercial cash grabs. I am fully of the belief that, no matter how much I enjoyed The Transformers as a young boy glued to the TV set in the early 80's, those were 22-24 minute long commercials for toys, not art.
An artistic work being of poor quality doesn't change the fact that it's art; and in fact, pointing out how it's low quality is part of criticism.
Thank you for illustrating perfectly the point I mentioned in my post; that this isn't in fact a debate about whether video games are "art," but a completley confused, cargo-cult belief that if the skeptics can just be convinced that video games count as "art," then that means the hobby is valid.
Have you ever played a video game in your life? This is a serious question. If you have, then you would know that video games usually require the player to go through a linear series of challenges as designed by their creator. The creator controls the music, the art, they create the environment for the strategic and tactical choices of the player, they write out scripts and behaviours and scripted events. It's like a choose-your-own-adventure game but with more latitude. The creator has huge control over the creative expression their audience perceives. There are such things as horror games. There are such concepts as atmosphere and level design. Storytelling has been incorporated in video games for some years now!
Either you have not played video games, or you do not understand them at any significant depth.
And even in the more freeform games like minecraft, why does giving the audience more opportunities to do their own thing render it not artistic? Why have you arrived at this definition? Did you even know that this was the reasoning Ebert gave when he said that video games weren't art before I brought it up? I see no shadow of it in your earlier post.
It would be trivial to argue that because video games grant a higher and more expansive level of creator-audience interaction than lesser mediums like prose or sculpture, that they are a higher form of art, encompassing and surpassing all other mediums.
I also find it rather bizarre that you introduce selling pork chops at the supermarket - something that is clearly not a medium in the sense that I meant it. Any reasonable person would not consider selling pork chops at the supermarket to be a medium. A non sequitur indeed.
No, it is not a serious question. I will not entertain this discussion any further, as you are incapable of being reasoned with.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
(Emphasis added)
The bolded part just isn't true, though. The creator of a video game has complete control over the creative expression when the game is being played, because the creative expression of the game creator isn't in the playing of the game, it's in the structure and rules of the game. In Mario, the creative expression of Nintendo isn't something like "Mario moving from left to right to hit the flag" or whatever, it's "when A is pressed on the button, the pixels and audio coming out of the TV adjust such that the player character appears to hop in the air, when the right button is pressed, they adjust such that the player character appears to walk to the right, accelerating to a run if the button is held down," and every other rule that makes up the game, along with the images, animations, sound effects that accompany those. Those are all within the control of the game creator and outside the control of the player if modding isn't considered (modding would be a whole other case, akin to someone cutting out pages of a published novel and taping in new pages that they wrote themselves).
The fact that each individual player would - and usually should - interact with the rules of game in their own individual unique way based on their own personal quirks and idiosyncratic preferences doesn't change the fact that the rules they're interacting with is under full control of - in fact, it's the only creative expression of - the creators of the game.
I think one can argue that almost every video game doesn't have creative expression of the creators as its principal purpose or even a particular purpose and, as such, they don't count as "art," for whatever it's worth. But I don't see how game creators have any less control over their creative expression than a movie director or painter, just because they're working in an interactive medium. The players interacting with the game all have to interact with the same set of rules and audiovisual representations of those rules, which were set by the creators of the game.
It is, when taken in context with the rest of the statement. Part of the reason I resisted making the jump from the reddit to this site was precisely this sort of argumentative style, where a statement is plucked entirely from its context, and debated with assumptions not part of the original claim. It's a waste of everyone's time.
The claim is that creative expression cannot exist since the player interacts with the programming to create the "work." Therefore, the programmer cannot say what the creative expression "is" any more than the coder of tax preparation software can say his program has "artistic meaning" without the user inputing values, or any more than the designer of a car's ignition system can say his diagram is "artistic expression."
No, it's still false while taking the context of your statement and the entire comment thread here.
But this claim is, again, simply wrong. So what if the player interacts with the programming to create the "work?" The creative expression of the creator of the software is the boundaries that are set on how the player can interact with the programming. As long as the player isn't hacking the game, no matter what choices the player makes while playing the game, the player's choices are within the boundaries that are the creative expression of the game devs.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That's like saying once a picture is out of the hands of the painter, it stops being art because the viewer might look at the right side of it first or the left, with no control from the creator. How can one ensure proper creative expression?
I don't see how the existence of options in a videogame takes away control from the creator. They literally made all that, and chose to make no more and no less.
No, that's not even close to being a valid inference from my statement. If I change the orientation of a piece of art such that it no longer communicates what the artist intended, then the piece does not cease to be art, but instead becomes my art, as it now expresses what I desire it to, and not the creator intended.
That you would jump to such an unfounded conclusion speaks volumes about the base assumptions on one side of this debate.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I have a ton of thoughts on this. First, I want to revive an ancient Reddit comment I once made in MaleFashionAdvice in answer to the question "What is Tacky?” To define good taste, we must first define poor taste:
"Tacky" find its closest synonym in "uppity" with all the racist and classist implications thereof. Tackiness is when an actor attempts to signify higher status or class through a social act (whether a verbal statement, wearing clothing, throwing a party), but fails to signify higher status and instead reveals their lower status by 'cheaping out' on some aspect of the presentation. It is in the eye of the beholder, and depends on the simultaneous judgments that the act was intended to signal high status and that it failed to do so.
You invite me to come out to a local bar to have a few drinks after work to celebrate your 30th birthday. I pay for my own drinks. Not tacky.
Vs
You rent out a local hotel ballroom to throw a black tie only blowout 30th birthday bash and invite me. I arrive at the event, suitably suited, and find a cash bar. Tacky.
The difference that makes paying for my drinks at your birthday party tacky is that in the first case you've simply invited me to a bar, which isn't perceived as a signal of wealth or status. In the second, you've attempted to signal wealth and status by holding a large event, but cheaped out on the standards expected at such an event.
Jamie Dimon repeatedly mentions at dinner his 2nd cousin, who is a postman in Queens. Weird, perhaps, but not tacky.
Vs
A postman in Queens repeatedly mentions his 2nd cousin, Jamie Dimon, in conversation about the economy at dinner. Tacky.
Bringing up your second cousin isn't tacky in itself, but the positions of speakers alters the nature of the act. The postman seems like he is attempting to imbue himself with higher status by virtue of his association with a bank president, but fails because it is meaningless and desperate.
Interestingly, a shift in context can make Jamie the tacky one. Say the conversation is about the middle class and its economic struggles, and Jamie repeatedly brings up his cousin as proof he understands and cares about the middle class. That would be tacky of him.
In car enthusiast culture putting custom paint, wheels, and aesthetic enhancements on your Mustang GT V8. Not inherently tacky if done well.
Vs
Putting aesthetic enhancements on your V6 or 4 cylinder Mustang, particularly those that make it look like a factory GT. Always tacky, no matter how tastefully done.
The two cars are aesthetically identical after theoretical customization, but the bigger engine makes one less tacky than the other. Because the customization attempts to signal high status (hey! Look at me! My car is awesome!), but what one car has under the hood is superior to the other, the v8 is what we think of when we think Mustang. Customizing a v6 mustang is at some level promising a level of performance your car doesn't deliver.
The tacky isn't merely, or even necessarily, ugly or in poor taste. It's an attempt to flex, to show off, which fails in its execution by its transparency.
The salesman's garish knockoff Rolex is tacky, because of its attempt at association with wealth. The real LV belt buckle worn with Kmart jeans is tacky, because the wearer clearly overspent their means on the piece. The designer created knockoff of a vintage event or resort t shirt is tacky, because of the effort to use money to stand in for cool experiences or cultural signifiers. Overdressing and citing Barney Stinson is tacky, so is underdressing and citing Zuckerberg. The common element is the failed attempt to signal high status.
McMansions
Let's apply this to architecture, and McMansions in particular. What makes a Mansion Mc is its tackiness. It is the effort to signal wealth, while cheating out on some details which render the whole display tacky. I walk my dog through a McMansion neighborhood this time of year when it snows and there’s no cars on the road, I love the lights they put up. It’s a pleasant enough neighborhood, full of fine people, many friends of mine grew up there, I knew the family of the builder, but I find the houses aesthetically disgusting. They’re all around 4,500 square feet, with a 2.5 car garage, on half an acre. A fine house. But they all have this stucco exterior, with a fifteen foot high narrow archway over the door. And it drives me nuts to look at, because every single house has it, exactly the same, just in different colors of stucco. It looks so trashy, because at the end of the day, you have this big house that looks like it ought to signal wealth, and it looks just like all the other big houses. It’s tacky.
And what offends me about it isn’t ultimately the style, it’s the expense for that style. When my wife and I were shopping for a house, I told her that in our market I basically needed to love the house if it was over $500k. Under $500k, I might be persuaded to settle for liking the house, for a house with good future resale value, for a house that made sense to get us out of my parents’ basement. But above that, I wanted to love it, because it’s generally a tougher proposition to move on from a half million dollar house in our area, both in terms of selling it and in terms of upgrading from it. It’s a reach, so the people who own a house like that, they clearly like that house. They bought it to show it off. But, ultimately, they didn’t have the real money to build a real house, only to buy cookie cutter luxury. Which is tacky.
I live in a 1962 ranch, which I love. It’s worth maybe half as much as one of the stucco McMansions. In 1962, it was more or less what Pete Seeger was singing about, other than that it wasn’t in a tract neighborhood, when it was build most of the land around it was farm or forest. For a variety of reasons my house is tasteful rather than tacky to me. The size makes it unostentatious, it’s carefully decorated with appropriately chosen furniture. But mostly, it is old. Age imparts class. It is lived in. Practical.
Public Architecture
Consider a particular form of public architecture: the stadium. I grew up going to Veteran’s Stadium in Philly for baseball and football games. In 2003 it was replaced by two new stadiums purpose built for football and baseball respectively: Citizen’s Bank Park and Lincoln Financial Field. At the time of the change, there was widespread outcry and displeasure. While the Vet was no architectural marvel, it was imbued with meaning for fans. Players in Sports Illustrated surveys said it was a heap, and executives on TV would say that it was getting so expensive to maintain it wasn’t worth it, but for fans that lived in feeling was part of the charm. As a young teen, I remember the Vet as having a lot of hallways and warrens, a lot of places one could wander around in. Looking back, it’s funny how as a kid I couldn’t sit still for a whole game, it felt like forever, I always needed to take a walk around the stadium, get something to eat, etc. Now as an adult I get one quart of beer, and the game is over before I know it. All the season ticket holders, the guys who used to form the “Wolf Pack” for Phillies’ “Ace” Randy Wolf in the bleachers, bitched and moaned. The new stadiums were soulless, the fact that they were named after corporations (that most people had never heard of) only made it worse. They were sterile. By design there were no more blind corners on the staircases leading to balconies reeking of marijuana on game day. We were all sure that no one would ever love the new stadiums.
Within a few years, fans simply bonded with the new corporate soulless sterile capitalist monstrosity. When Phillies fans travel to Nationals Park in DC, they wave homemade signs calling it “Citizen’s Bank South” because there are more Phillies fans in the stands than there are DC fans. ((Oddly, Citizens Bank of the South is a different bank entirely))
What counts isn’t the space, it’s what goes on there. Going to a ballgame is inherently a meaning making experience, naming the stadium for a bank doesn’t change anything. Kids who are now the age I was when the Vet was demolished were born ten years after the Phillies moved to Citizen’s Bank Park.
Im with you on the fashion and car examples. But a big house really is better in several objective ways. If I had a half acre plot I would strongly prefer a 4500 sqft house even if it didn't comfortably fit the plot. Ideally I would have a multi-story box that was 20K sqft.
I'm with @FiveHourMarathon on this. Trust me, a big house isn't all it's cracked up to be, especially if you don't have kids. From 2017 to 2023 I lived in a rather large house and used it thus:
The entryway led into a large combination living and dining area. The dining side had a sliding glass door that led out onto a patio. The living side was 12 feet from the wall to the back of the couch. While this is actually a little closer than at my current house, I don't think anything is gained by more distance. Actually, a bit is lost because now I have to keep my stereo speakers wider to maintain proper imaging in the sweet spot. The dining side was probably a tad smaller than a standalone dining room would have been, but it was still big enough to fit a sideboard and had the added advantage of making it easy to eat in front of the TV without feeling like a piece of shit.
There was a reasonably sized eat-in kitchen that the dining area made redundant. I seldom ate in there, and the kitchen table became a pile of junk mail and grocery bags. Having multiple dining areas is redundant; in houses that have both a formal dining room and an eat-in kitchen, the kitchen isn't really a place you can have a dinner party, but I've noticed a trend toward just making a larger kitchen where the dining area can be as formal as it needs to be for most people. I'm not going to complain about having both, but if you have both, one or the other is rarely used for its intended purpose.
There was another, smaller living area with a small fireplace. I put my bookshelves in here along with a smaller stereo and used it for reading. I entertained people in here on exactly one occasion (excepting larger parties where people can go anywhere) when I invited some friends over for drinks after going out to dinner and I wanted to have a fire.
The master bedroom wasn't particularly large but since I only used it for sleeping it didn't matter. A king-size bed would have been cramped once you included dressers, BUT it had a walk-in closet the size of a small bedroom. The idea clearly was that all the clothing storage/laundry/dressing would be relegated to the closet, and that's how I used it. With a queen and a couple nightstands the bedroom was quite roomy. Now, some of these larger houses have master bedrooms that are big enough to have their own separate sitting areas with couches and televisions, but I don't really see the point in this. To cosplay living in a studio apartment?
Bedroom 2 was used as a home office. This was necessary since I was working almost exclusively from home for most of the time I had the house, but if I weren't then I would have preferred to have the computer in the small living room.
Bedroom 3 was used as a guest bedroom for the once or twice a year I had overnight guests.
Bedroom 4 was a junk collector.
There was a powder room off the entryway that was used frequently and a full bath upstairs apart from the master that was used rarely. I once thought about asking my girlfriend to move all of her hair stuff, etc. into the other bathroom but decided against bringing it up because a) she didn't live there so it's not like there was a ton of it and b) the master had a jack and jill so it would seem a bit ridiculous.
It had a finished basement that contained a couch that the prior owner left there and a bike trainer. I had a small stereo to listen to while on the bike and a 40" TV for Zwift, but that's about it. I only used the bike trainer in the winter. No one ever sat on the couch. The room was primarily used as a way to get from the garage to the upstairs. The basement also had a separate laundry/utility area. I couldn't feasibly use this as a junk collector because if I entertained guests had to go through here to get to the kegerator.
I had a two car garage that I used for storing my car. I used the other side to work on bikes, except I let my girlfriend park here when she stayed over in the winter.
At the time I was living there, the house seemed entirely too large. Cleaning it was a pain in the ass. Heating it was a pain in the ass. Cooling it was fine, but I only turn my AC on if it's going to be above 85 for more than a few days, which in Pittsburgh is only a couple times a year. If I lived in a hotter area or was more sensitive it would have been a pain in the ass. I was able to find use for all the space, but I'd be lying if I said I used it all that much. I bought the house because the price was well below what one would expect due to certain topographic complications involving the lot. For one person, it felt huge.
How big was it? About 2,000 square feet. For someone with kids, it would have been fine. I could understand going a little bigger. My uncle's house is 2600 square feet and it seemed more than big enough for three kids. But 4,000? Larger living rooms just put you farther away from the TV. Larger bedrooms add nothing. A larger kitchen does nothing once you have sufficient counter space. There are only so many rooms you can hang out in. The house I'm in now is about 1400 square feet and I don't see any appreciable decrease in my standard of living.
I'd add that overly large houses are a classic example of upper middle class tacky, in that they would be nicer or make more sense if one were richer and had servants and leisure class hobbies.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't dislike big houses, though I don't think you've totally thought through the implications of that kind of square footage (absent servants).
My problem is big ugly houses. Because I think the big ugly house indicates that one is trying to convey status (spending on a house) without having enough status to afford a big nice house.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The issue is that if you want real traditional classical architecture in the American tradition, you’re looking at least $3m for a modest house after land and every other cost. A handful of architects design it. A handful of skilled artisans still exist for the masonry and other details. Many materials will need to be imported, many fixtures designed abroad. Most importantly, the construction method will be radically different than the standard for a modern American home, may be made out of brick etc. I follow some New Classical Architecture instagram pages and there are excellent new proportionate classical homes being built in the US today, but they’re unaffordable for all but the wealthy.
The McMansion represents a desperate attempt to live in an aesthetically pleasing home that doesn’t quite land. Women are obsessed with bags in part because of status, of course, but also because the most popular classic bags (Kelly, Birkin, Chanel Flap) are some of the few beautiful objects unruined (at least in their usual form) by modernity. They are symmetrical, polished, beautiful, aligned, have OK (yes, even today) stitching. Men feel the same way about watches, some about expensive suits or dress shoes.
In the McMansion neighborhoods of Utah and Arizona, there is no legitimate classical architecture possible at even an affluent upper-middle class budget (new or old), so where does that leave the homebuyer? She can accept the discordant, soulless, anarchic emptiness of (post)modern architecture, which almost all normal people agree is usually ugly especially in a domestic context, or she can have the McMansion which at least features a big great room with a fireplace, a kitchen that feels something like an American kitchen, wood and decoration and a sloping roof and some the architectural elements that most people think should be part of a house.
Sure, if they could live in a McMansion that looked like a Gilded Age Newport villa, they would. But they can’t, and architecture is unable to offer them a remotely aesthetic substitute.
I don't buy that. Americans are building five-over-one apartment buildings out of 2x4s, there's no reason why a colonial revival mansion cannot be built out of the same materials.
As I've written in another comment, you can build a stylistically congruent McMansion out of the best traditional materials and it will still be a McMansion, so I think it's the floor plan that is to blame.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That (and the whole of your reply) is a very thought-provoking take. Thank you.
I've been thinking about McMansions last night. One thing they have about them is that they are big, larger than many older styles. If your house is small enough, let's say under 150sqm/1500sqft for one floor and under 250sqm/2500sqmft for two floors, you can build a literal box and it will look good if you don't mess with it.
Beyond that size, a box-shaped house starts to look like a cow shed. You have to break up the silhouette, so the house sprouts wings, the roof becomes complex, the monotony of the facade is broken up with bay windows and balconettes, etc. But if your house is slightly bigger than the upper limit, it is still small enough to be comprehended as a whole.
And this is where McMansion proves its surprising link with modernism. In it form still follows function. Think of it this way: if I want a neo-Georgian house, I will build a symmetrical main building with two regular rows of windows and a front door smack in the center. All the rooms in the main building will be subordinate to this form. All unusual rooms will be moved to the wings or the outbuildings, which, if they are unsightly, will be hidden behind the main building or some strategically placed trees.
But if I want a McMansion, I will design it from the inside out. I want a living room with panoramic windows? I draw a living room with panoramic windows. I want a three-car garage? I draw a three-car garage. I want another bedroom? I draw another bedroom. Then I draw the building envelope around the resulting shape. If I plaster this house with white stucco and use flat roofs, I will get a typical functionalist villa that is "honest about its function", because it always forces the form to conform to the function and never vice versa. If I decorate this form, I will get a McMansion even if I use the best traditional materials and don't mix existing styles, simply because the complexity of the form is already overwhelming.
Honestly, I wonder if McMansions aren't just the way they are because of a lack of people who are capable of and willing to competently design a beautiful New Traditional building while still meeting a client's requirements - after all, we sure seemed capable of doing that just a relatively short time ago. As Scott's post notes, even if we wanted to go back to the previous architectural styles, we can't. Modernism and the rise of the International Style basically killed the careers of many architects and artisans who made livings out of this stuff, and they've become increasingly hard to find as a result; the people who would've known how to do these things properly are just not around anymore, and trying to find them would add too much cost and inefficiency to the project.
Architects who know how to design anything but modernist/postmodernist structures are increasingly rare, and there are fewer and fewer people who know how to integrate certain types of design features into a building in an aesthetically pleasing way while still mostly preserving the client's requirements. I actually read the book Scott is referencing in his post, and one of the quotes that stuck out to me is that "deans of architecture went about instructing the janitors to throw out all plaster casts of classical details, pedagogical props that had been accumulated over a half century or more". Learning how to reasonably achieve a client's specific requirements while still making a building look beautiful and stately in the Beaux-Arts or Art Deco style is just less and less relevant to your average architect now, and much less of their education will be focused around that. Sure, a lot of McMansion design styles scream "cost-cutting", but part of the reason why it seems so difficult and costly to build anything traditional and beautiful nowadays is due to there being a lack of people actually well-versed in designing in the old ways, and the lack of artisans capable of actually implementing these designs. We can no longer competently mass-produce traditional architecture.
Another aspect of the problem is also that because of the rise of modern architecture, very few people who seek to make a name for themselves in architecture care to tackle old architectural styles anymore - it's mostly the people who want to make a quick buck who go into doing that kind of thing now, since there is no more cultural cachet in designing beautiful old-style townhouses and so on. Everyone knows the new thing is making terrible dystopian structures that look like they were commissioned by The Empire, so why would any competent architect try to attempt anything even remotely traditional? The masses want traditional vernacular architecture, but the institutional incentives aren't there for any self-respecting architect to meet their sets of preferences, and so rows and rows of unsightly McMansions proliferate across the suburbs like cancer, designed by architects with no reputation to lose and who lack incentive to tell the client (or their company) "no, you can either have X or Y".
Of course, then the proponents of modernist architecture point at these and sneer about how kitschy they are, as if that's not a consequence of them percolating their disgustingly ugly style into the mainstream and cancelling architects who dared to add any ornamentation as "bourgeois". Personally, I consider it a great loss for humanity - with our technology today we could have democratised the beauty that was once the sole domain of the upper class, we could've had public spaces as beautiful as the Alhambra Palace or the gardens of Suzhou. But instead we get endless wastelands of concrete blocks, and "traditional" architecture that's a poor echo of what came before.
More options
Context Copy link
Oddly, my experience of how most owners live in these houses is the opposite. They realistically don't need or use all the space, and the rooms either repeat or are imagined into uses that are rather pointless. Either you have three different rooms devoted to watching TV. Or you have a gift-wrapping room and a home gym even though you don't really do either activity.
They started with wanting a BIG BIG house, and then moved in and realized they couldn't figure out what to do with the space.
Why are they so weirdly shaped, then? Someone had to design them that way.
Maybe the client said "I want a big house", and the architect failed to explain to the client that a big house was not needed. (Bigger house → more billable hours?)
From what I know, most houses in the US aren't custom built. An in-house architect for a construction company designs them and the customers just pick one. Which makes is much more baffling.
In-house architects in Russia are known for designing terrible houses (ugly and impractical), but that's because the whole industry is ten years old there. The US has been building tract housing since WWII, how come everyone has forgotten how to design a house that doesn't look like ass?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You can be right about how they were designed at the same time that people don't really know how to live in them.
Is it one of these "no one knows how we got there, but everyone's unhappy" situations, like American healthcare?
I went looking for large houses in Kansas on Zillow, and you can find a nice-looking one still. Here's one, but it's a 1998 custom build. If I restrict myself to 2020+ houses, then almost every damn house over 3500sqft is a McMansion:
They're all ugly in my opinion, but I don't think these >3500sqft mansions really prove the case that they're ugly because of their size: perhaps in part they are, but mostly I think they're ugly because they're not actually traditional designs. They're a weird mix of styles that end up coming out absolutely disgusting because they're combining the boxy, undecorated modernist aesthetic with various other architectural conventions all mixed together in the worst way possible. No. 2 in your list doesn't even possess any huge windows or gigantic rooms far in excess of what you would find in traditional architecture, the features of the house aren't inherently that demanding and could probably fit into a typical Georgian mansion, but they've been put together in an ugly and nonsensical way.
They look like they were put together cheaply and without skill, designed by architects who either don't know how to design anything remotely traditional or don't care to do so. It almost seems like they were made just by checking off an incoherent list of design things they think houses should have without considering how best to put them together.
That's exactly my point. They are modernist houses in disguise.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You forgot to add the URL.
Thanks, fixed
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
IMO tacky can also just mean art that is bad, or art that's attempting to imitate good art while missing the point. I think there are objective (at least with respect to human perception and nature as it actually exists) qualities that this has that this doesn't, without reference to status. If I saw someone express fondness for the latter painting I would think less of their taste and them a small amount, but as a practical assessment of their judgement. That something is often misused doesn't mean the original concept isn't there. The same goes for McMansions - in a well architected house the different pieces fit together nicely, and in a McMansion the individual pieces are exaggerated and they don't fit together at all, and it just doesn't work, in a way that is IMO fairly universal in the way humans perceive architecture.
To a large extent yes, in the same way that any pejorative can be used as a pure negative. Marxist means bad left wing and Racist means bad right wing in typical use, but that doesn't prevent those words from having actual meanings. Just as when my father says something is Nigger Rigged he doesn't mean it was done by actual black people.
Tacky is often used just to mean bad, but it has a more precise meaning and implication. Not everything that is bad is tacky. A trailer home can be bad without being tacky, it can simply be ugly. It's when the owner starts trying to put lipstick on the pig that it becomes tacky.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think this is good, and I would add "unless you're popular" to it. Because my observation is that all the fashion "rules" are capricious in that nobody gives a shit what you do if you're popular. In fact, someone popular who breaks the "rules" is likely to be looked on as someone who should be imitated.
What you are seeing as an exception is the exact dynamic I'm outlining, which is essentially an outgrowth of the old barber pole theory of fashion in action.
Popularity, or hotness, is essentially a synonym for high status. Tackiness is a false signal of high status. If one is high status and signals high status, it is congruent and not tacky. If one is high status and intentionally does something that would normally be read as tacky and indicating low status, it's a demonstration that they are so high status that they can indicate low status and it won't impact them.
Think of the Boston Cracked Shoe look in trad ivy style at mid-century. A poor person who wears old shoes with holes in them looks poor, so a middle class person makes sure his shoes don't have holes in them so as not to look poor. A real rich person, a Harvard educated Boston Brahmin like Adlai Stevenson, ostentatiously wore a destroyed pair of shoes, the kind that even a street sweeper would have felt the need to throw away, precisely to signal that he isn't middle class because he isn't worried about anyone looking at his shoes and thinking he is broke.
With tackiness, a poor guy wears a garish cheap brassy gold chain to signal his high status, but because it's such obvious amazon junk it shows you that he's poor. A middle class guy knows not to wear a cheap brassy Amazon gold chain, because it will make him look poor. A really rich guy, say Elon Musk, can wear it anyway, because nothing can make you think Elon Musk is poor.
But if, in turn, Elon Musk's broke-ass hustle-culture ball washers on Twitter start wearing cheap garish gold chains to ape his style, it becomes tacky again, because it shows their low status.
More options
Context Copy link
The line between status and popularity is blurry, though. Some may even say it really is the same at its core.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think that's a good contribution to the conversation.
When looping back to the conversation about modern architecture, we have to consider that much of it was incidentally or purposefully uncomfortable to use.
Much of it was. And much of that was then forced on poor people who lacked options, which both made it lower status, and caused it to become associated with negative or poor memories and associations.
But, for example, at 11 years old I cried when they built walls and closed up my old open-concept elementary school. They wrote articles about how the open concept was hippy-dippy 1970s crap, and that they wanted to build walls to replace the makeshift bookshelves that teachers had put up, and that this was going to be better and correct the failures of modernist design. And for me, that was all nonsense, I grew up in that elementary school and I loved it the way it was. That was where we played yugioh and passed cards between the bookshelves.
Where you have a piece of modern architecture that people come to like and have positive memories of, the modernism doesn't stop it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes I believe this is the essence of McMansions. It is a house that is too large and too grandiose for their budget and setting. Construction and materials are cheap, lot is too small, interior often features empty rooms or areas too sparsely furnished, has features like a grand staircase in the entryway that is too large for the house. The key is that for the same budget they could have had a smaller house, well constructed with quality and attention to detail, but they chose to opt for superficial grandiosity above all else. It is this surface level artifice and superficiality that reveals the tasteless mindset one focused on appearances rather than more important qualities. A tasteful person is supposed to recognize that a what qualities are more important, but furthermore they are supposed to recognize that others will perceive this in them.
For me, a home lot should be either <1/3 Acre or >10 Acres. Anything in between isn't really that private or that useful, while causing you to spend too much time or money on your lawn.
The budgetary compromise most common to the McMansion in my neighborhood is the standardization. I could accept Levittown style tract housing, I can't accept it in status housing.
I don't think house to lot size is all that important in itself, it depends on the character of the area. There are dense suburbs that look very nice (although when this is in some isolated exurb then then it is kind of ridiculous).
If all houses have 1/3 and you have 2/3 then that's going to look ridiculous but if the area is designed to be 2/3 and you have 1/3 then that is equally strange.
Yeah it depends on the construction of the house. If you put a grand window on the side of your house, but it's so close to your neighbor's house that you can high five through the windows, it looks and is stupid.
For me lot size is just a function of the fact that I don't really go in for mowing lawns, landscaping, gardening on the weekend, so I want either the minimum practical amount of lawn, or I want enough forest to have complete privacy while I can ignore it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm glad you mentioned Laufey because I wanted to make a post about her shortly after that video came out but never got around to it. Anyway, I think that a big part of the problem when it comes to determining whether or not something qualifies as jazz is that, like with most genres, it's hard to define jazz to begin with. Most books on the subject start with a perfunctory description that goes something like this: Jazz is an African American music, is based in the blues, is heavily improvised, and relies on a swing feel. But none of these elements are exclusive to jazz, and none applies to all jazz.
African Americans were obviously central to the development of jazz throughout its history, and continue to be central in the present day. But people of all races and ethnicities have participated in its development as far back as New Orleans, and since then it has seen continued development from nationalities across the globe, from Euorope to Africa to Japan. And it isn't especially popular among African Americans today, much as it isn't especially popular among any demographic group, at least in the US.
We associate jazz as having derived from the blues and being closely associated with it, but what is the blues, exactly? A scale? A lyrical style? A feeling? An attitude? Trying to define the blues is fraught with the same problems as trying to define jazz. And whatever the blues is,there's plenty of jazz out there whose incorporation of it is arguable at best, and plenty else with no discernable bluesinfluence whatsoever. Not only that, but pretty much every style of American music, from rock to soul to country, derives from the blues to the same degree that jazz does, so this isn't exactly a unique feature.
The level of improvisation in jazz runs the gamut from styles that are almost wholly improvised (such as free jazz) to styles with little to no improvisation at all (much of the very early New Orleans stuff wasn't improvised). And there's plenty of other music from around the world that's improvised; even classical music, the composed music par excellence, often includes improvised cadenzas.
Swing presents even more problems than the blues does when it comes to defining it, and titans such as John Coltrane and Duke Ellington have openly questioned its necessity to jazz.
I'm not going to belabor the point by going into too much detail, but writers have added additional components to this list such as the use of certain forms, certain harmonic devices, a vocalized tone, rhythmic elements, focus on an individualized sound, etc. but it's never clear what role all these features are supposed to play, or whether there's some kind of magical combination which is distinct, if difficult to describe. The focus of more contemporary critics, Neely included, tends to be more on participation in a "jazz tradition", defined by the scene and by the audience. As far as Laufey is concerned, the argument is that she isn't jazz because she isn't part of the community of jazz musicians (she didn't get her start in jazz clubs, she doesn't collaborate with established musicians, etc.) and that she doesn't attempt to appeal to a jazz audience. Her press comes from mainstream publications, not jazz critics. This is all, of course, independent of what her music actually sounds like.
For all of their faults, any of these approaches allows us to come up with a reasonable, or at least workable, definition of jazz. And then someone insists that Kenny G is a jazz musician and the arguments start flying. Mr. G is in fact an acoustic musician who plays the soprano saxophone, a traditional jazz instrument that is most closely associated with Sidney Bechet and John Coltrane, two undisputed jazz legends. His has a distinct sound, at least occasionally plays with a swing feel, has at least some blues "feeling", came up on the edge of the jazz tradition (he got his start as a teenager in Barry White's band), etc. These definitional exercises are useful, but they have their limits.
For the record, I'm not going to argue that Kenny G is a jazz musician; his style is more adequately described as instrumental pop. But his connection to jazz is more direct than one would think. If we trace the lineage back, we find two converging streams. Before going solo, Kenny G played with the Jeff Lorber Fusion, who were peers of the later-period fusion acts like Bob James, Earl Klugh, and Fourplay, who trace their lineage back to people like Joe Sample and Donald Byrd, who played a more smoothed out version of the soul jazz of Shirley Scott and Richard "Groove" Holmes from the late 1960s, who in turn are successors to organ grinders like Jimmy Smith from the early '60s, who came out of the more blues-oriented wing of hard-bop, which is jazz qua jazz. On the other hand, his solo work is the direct successor to the instrumental pop of the 70s, which was popularized by people like George Benson, Maynard Ferguson, and Chuck Mangione. But these people started their careers as straightahead jazz musicians before chasing pop hits. They did this, at least in part, in response to Wes Montgomery's recordings of contemporary pop songs for Creed Taylor's CTI label in the late 1960s. Montgomery is a jazz legend in his own right, though his CTI recordings aren't of any particular interest to most jazz fans. And then there's John Klemmer, whose 1975 album Touch is probably the most direct progenitor of the Kenny G sound (song titles like "Waterwheels" and "Glass Dolphins" say it all), but I don't know where he fits into all of this.
To say that the situation is complicated is an understatement, but when trying to define and discuss genres and influences everything is bound to be complicated, because influences come from all directions. The remarkable thing about the whole Kenny G controversy, though, is that his audience didn't seem to care whether he was considered a jazz musician or not. I grew up during the height of his popularity, and while he was far more mainstream than Laufey will ever be, no one really seemed to love his music. His audience, to the extent that he had one, was the kind of person who didn't pay to much attention to the music they listened to. He was background music for people who only listen to music as background. He was played on radio stations that marketed themselves as "the station everyone at work can agree on", which eventually evolved into a "smooth jazz" format that revolved around Mr. G himself. He was at his most ubiquitous at catered events; anyone who attended a wedding, football banquet, or charity fundraiser in the 90s would be forced to suffer through his mindless wailing during dinner, and on at least two occasions I heard the DJ announce to the room that "this is Kenny G and gosh, doesn't this make great dinner music" in a patently self-congratulatory manner.
The problem with Kenny G, from a jazz fan's perspective, wasn't that his fans were impostors who were misidentifying themselves, but that the music industry was incorrectly marketing him as a jazz musician. It wasn't so much that he was being proclaimed the Savior of Jazz the way Laufey is (he wasn't), or any other active attempts, but the more subtle, lazy stuff. His recordings were sold in the jazz section of record stores. He won Grammys in jazz categories. He appeared on the Billboard jazz charts. Stuff like that. This might not be so much of a problem, but for all of his popularity, there was a significant backlash among jazz fans and non-fans alike. As my friend's dad so eloquently put it when I suggested that if his son could be as famous as Kenny G if he practiced his instrument enough, "Kenny G doesn't play the saxophone; he play the kazoo". Or as my own father put it when I asked the context of his breaking the record for the longest-held note (Did he make a recording of it? Did he bore a concert audience for 45 minutes?): "He was in a music store and got his horn out and started playing it. A crowd started to gather around him, and after 30 seconds they started throwing stuff at him".
This backlash created a concern that jazz would only be marginalized further, as potential fans would be turned off by association. As guitarist Pat Metheny famously put it when describing why jazz wasn't popular in the United States:
Metheny (who is, in my opinion, the greatest guitarist of all time, period) made these comments in 1987 as part of an interview for an Iron-Curtain era Polish children's program, so this was well before the mainstream backlash in the US started, and it is unlikely that anyone here would have heard them contemporaneously. But when the video clip was posted to the internet in 2000, Pat was asked about it on his website, and his reponse stands as one of the greatest takedowns in internet history, so brutal that it deserves to be read in its entirety. But when it comes to the question of whether Kenny G is a jazz musician, Metheny writes:
Laufey, however, faces the opposite problem. Jazz fans, critics, and musicians don't have a problem with her music. No one is making fun of her music, and it would be hugely surprising if she ever faced the same kind of backlash that Kenny G has faced. Neely isn't concerned that Laufey being categorized as jazz will tarnish the reputation of the genre; he's concerned with definitional integrity. There's a tendency among some groups to view definitional labels as an indicator of quality, or lack thereof. The whole "popitmism" debate of the 2010s was an attempt to rectify what was seen as decades of denigration of pop music. By the 1970s, rock had established itself as serious music for serious people, and anything that didn't meet certain criteria could be casually dismissed as "pop" music and ignored entirely. We don't need to consider the artistic merits of Paper Lace or Bo Donaldson & the Haywoods because it's accepted as axiomatic that they don't have any. When a pop artist does come along that we feel has value, like Madonna, we can retroactively define her as rock and lobby the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for her induction to legitimize our opinion.
What the poptimism movement sought to do was to remove the idea of genres as value indicators. It may be pop music, but there's nothing inherently wrong with that, and it doesn't excuse the critic from evaluating it on its own terms. In later iterations, the concept was taken as a license by some to assume that popularity was synonymous with quality, and a backlash set in. The ultimate problem was a misinterpretation of the logic; if a critic gives a pop album a bad review, is it because the took it seriously and rejected it, or because they're simply refusing to take it seriously? And how do you show that you're taking pop music seriously unless you're heaping praise on pop albums? It didn't help matters that some "rockist" critics (the term is either proud or perjorative, depending on who is making the argument) stubbornly clung to the old paradigm that pop artists simply weren't deserving of serious treatment. As more serious people like Ted Gioia got involved—he said poptimism had caused music criticism to devolve into lifestyle reporting—poptimism's influence waned. By this time, Zoomers were starting to come of age, wholly influenced by the idea of gatekeeping.
So Neely, or I, or anyone from our generation doesn't understand why Laufey has to be jazz. People born between 1981 and 1995 aren't supposed to view genres as quality indicators. Laufey being jazz does not mean that Laufey is good. Kenny G might not be jazz, but if he is, he still sucks. But there's also a bit of bullshit to this argument. Jazz is difficult. For most people, Dixieland conjures up images of old cartoons, and the big band era brings to mind senior citizens. Prewar jazz has been reified to a degree that makes appreciation among the youth difficult if only due to its cultural connotations. Postwar jazz is too esoteric. It was created at a time when it was moving further away from mainstream musical sensibilities and toward the avant garde. Even at its most accessible, it involves harmonic structures that are quite different from most contemporary pop music, and the centerpiece is long improvisations that require close listening to fully appreciate. The upshot is that if someone who mostly listens to Thelonious Monk and Anthony Braxton tells you that the new Taylor Swift album is good, it carries different weight than someone who listens to Ed Sheeran and Lady Gaga telling you the same thing.
The argument over Laufey is even further complicated by the fact that singers have always had an uncertain status within jazz itself. More recent singers like Diane Reeves have managed to stay firmly within the jazz camp, and older ones like Sarah Vaughan and Blossom Dearie mostly have, but even stalwarts like Ella Fitzgerald have trouble staking a solid claim. Neely places Laufey in the traditional pop category, but pretty much everyone in that category shares the same uneasy relationship. The problem is that most of these singers came to prominence in an era where American musical theater provided most of the repertory, whether it be in jazz or pop music, and the boundaries between the two were much more blurred prior to the mid-60s. The other problem is that improvisation is an important part of jazz and singers are expected to sing composed melodies with composed lyrics. There isn't a ton of room to maneuver. Scat singing was developed as a sort of workaround, but it's still hard to see the voice as an instrument on par with, say, the trombone unless you're willing to make certain allowances.
A singer like Frank Sinatra is a case in point. Is he jazz or traditional pop? He first came to prominence with the big bands of Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, so he has a jazz background. But that was at a time when jazz was America's Popular Music, and the material done with singers was often "sweeter" than the purely instrumental stuff. When he went solo in the 1940s the Axel Stordahl arrangements didn't try to be jazz, and by the early 50s he was largely a novelty act. When he resurrected his career with Capitol beginning in 1953, he was most often paired with either Nelson Riddle or Gordon Jenkins. Riddle favored more jazz oriented arrangements, while Jenkins had a lush, Hollywood style. He'd use a variety of arrangers throughout the rest of his career, some more jazz-oriented than others. But in the 1960s he made a famous string of recordings with the Count Basie Orchestra that are unquestionably jazz, and he'd record an album with Duke Ellington in 1968. He was never a great scat singer. Was Sinatra a jazz musician? Sometimes.
So I've now reached the part of the essay where it's customary to offer my own opinion on whether Laufey is jazz, but I'm not going to do so because I don't know. I will say this: I'm not going to cynically toss her into the deep end of the jazz pool the way Metheney does with Kenny G in order to force comparisons with Diane Reeves or Sarah Vaughan. I don't know what this would accomplish. I'm not going to say she's not jazz as opposed to traditional pop because those lines have always been blurred more than Neely leads his viewers to believe. I'm not going to say she isn't jazz because she isn't part of the jazz community, for the same reason I wouldn't say that Charles Mingus wasn't jazz if I found out that he was similarly disengaged.
I'm not going to say she definitively is jazz, either, because I haven't heard enough of her music to make that determination. From what I have heard, it sounds like she's on the periphery, akin to someone like Norah Jones or Eva Cassidy. But I'm glad that a popular performer is at least taking an interest in jazz that suggests they actually listen to it regularly and not just say they're influenced by it to gain cultural cachet. I'm glad that at least some teenage girls are excited to hear Misty, not as an academic exercise but as a genuine emotional experience. I'm glad that a popular musician is viewing the voice as an instrument to be explored and not as a vehicle for sub-Mariah Carey histrionics. Whatever Laufey is, I think her emergence is a good thing.
Thanks for posting this so I didn't have to. You've done a better job than I would have I think. It seems rather obvious to me, as a fomally trained jazz and classical musician, that Laufey isn't concidered jazz by most of the 'snobs' because she isn't embedded in the culture, world, and history of jazz. Downthread there is a discussion of Jaco's best album, this is a good example. Even part time jazz folks will know who the single name "Jaco" refers to, what instrument he plays, and what his best album is. (I like his self titled debut solo album personally.) Being a part of jazz seems to me to require knowing all the Names, their instruments, albums, and history etc. If you love it, it comes naturally over a lifetime of listening and playing. I'm not sure Laufey would know who Jaco is, but I hope she does.
Much is this discussion is counfounded by the fact, which you mention, that pre-bop/pre-war jazz was the popular music of its time. It was also dance music. People left their homes, went to music halls, and listened to this music live. The recording technology of the time just can't do justice to the experience of actually hearing a group live, in a good hall, when it was the most popular music in the country. Laufey's music, if it is adjacent to jazz, is adjecent to this stuff. Not the post-bop stuff meant to be listened to on the (then much better sounding) record players of the 50s and on. I love Minugs, Coltrane, Parker et al, but I can't imagine trying to introduce this music to someone that isn't themselves a musician at some level.
Which brings me to my final point. There just aren't that many musicians anymore, and post-bop jazz is "art for artists". Someone mentions people hearing it for the first time not liking the parts with "all the solos", probably trading 8s. Its impossible to communicate that this is the best part to people who can't judge how difficult it is to play. And to be fair some of it really is just chops for the sake of chops.
I think Laufey absolutely could be jazz though. Its possible she already has the background; I don't know enough about her personally. She does have a good amount of classical training, and many, many jazz greats started as conservatory kids. Maybe she'll find a drummer and bassist and cut a jazz trio album. Maybe her current fans will even buy it. We'll see.
site note, my current favorite jazz kids are Domi and JD Beck: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ANPbOxaRIO0
More options
Context Copy link
Having skimmed the Neely video again, he references criteria from Ken Burns' documentary that was purposefully narrow, so as to exclude fusion: swung rhythms, blues influence, and improvisation. Neely gives examples that would generally be regarded as jazz, but fail the improvisation criteria (a through-composed Ellington performance), or meet the criteria, but wouldn't generally be regarded as jazz (a hip-hop performance), but accepts it as an approximation for what distinguishes "mid-century pop" and Laufey's reinvention thereof from jazz as musical forms. I think this is reasonable.
(In)Accessibility takes multiple forms - almost all jazz is tonal music played with relatively soft timbres on instruments selected for consonance with each other, so a random jazz song is more likely to be inoffensive to the ear than a random song from a genre that achieves its "edginess" by way of harsh timbres and unsubtle dissonance. Anyone who can work with background music can let "Bright Size Life" be that music (and, if a reader has never heard that album, it's voir doir for Rov_Scam calling Metheny as an expert witness, as well as the best recording of the short-lived, "tortured artist" virtuoso bassist Jaco Pastorius, playing a bass guitar modified to be fretless, prior to this being commonly accepted as a valid substitute for acoustic upright bass*) - identifying the ways in which "Bright Size Life" was innovative requires prior knowledge of its context, but does "accessibility" mean "low barrier to enjoyment" or "low barrier to intellectually appreciating at the same level as an aficionado?"
*A handful of esteemed bassists had toured and occasionally recorded with bass guitars, primarily for convenience, but Pastorius was a pioneer in using bass guitars as a primarily creative choice.
When I said that jazz was difficult, I didn't mean to imply that it wasn't easy on the ears. It's difficult in the sense that it's hard for someone accustomed to pop music to appreciate, especially if they don't have any musical training. One common complaint I've heard from friends who listen to rock and try to get into jazz is that they like the part at the beginning where everyone plays together, but they get bored throughout the endless soloing. When I tell them that the solos are more or less the whole point (not entirely true, but you get my drift), they give me an odd look. If you're used to structured music with to-the-point melodies and solos that don't go on for more than 8 bars (giving you a taste of possible variation but not getting off track), it's understandable why someone blowing out 5 choruses followed by another guy doing the same thing may seem tiresome. I don't think it's a coincidence that people who already like jam bands tend to also like jazz.
As for Bright Size Life, I bought that album on vinyl at a used record shop back in the 2000s and when I took it home to play I noticed that someone had stashed ripped out pages from a porn magazine in the sleeve. I decided to hang on to them as an investment and they're still there to this day. And how can you say that this is Jaco's best work and not his solo album? It's obviously very good, but he's clearly a sideman here and doesn't get to show his full potential. Pretty much every track on that Jaco Pastorius exhibits a new possibility for what the bass guitar can be, particularly "Portrait of Tracy". And "Opus Pocus" is probably the only example in recorded music of menacing-sounding steel drums.
If it's easy on the ears, you can expose yourself to it until you passively begin to appreciate it on an unconscious level or find something that gives you a musical foothold. (I disliked violin-centric music until I heard this Julia Fischer performance of the Third Movement of the Brahms Concerto in D - it turns out that the things I disliked about a lot of violin performances weren't universal.)
His showcase album is the best recording of him showcasing his superior potential to innovate; "Bright Size Life" is the best example of him playing superior jazz bass.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
So I'd imagine if you quizzed ordinary folk on the topic in any American town or city, they'd classify the major musical genres as something like:
Jazz is primarily horns (Saxophone and Trumpet)
Rock is primarily guitar music
Pop is synthetic backing tracks with a focus on vocals
Classical music is primarily violins (by which the average person means violins, violas, cellos, etc)
Hip Hop has rapping in it
Country is anything with a southern accent
These classifications are obviously wrong, but also obviously more useful on a quick and dirty basis than a more accurate definition by genetic descent or multi-factor testing. For the most part, if one listens to music in the context of TV/Radio/Store Muzak, you'll correctly classify the vast majority of music you hear using this simple testing criteria, and you'll use very little of your brain's processing power on the task.
There are still genres that are gate-kept as quality indicators by people, which retain some degree of cache to their names. It's simply that Jazz is no longer one of them. Jazz has no cultural cache, no aura of Cool, to grant or not-grant, for people born after 1990 or so, except in some LARPy or RenFair kind of way. Inasmuch as there is a continuing Jazz tradition, it is just that, a tradition, a music that can be defined by genetic descent from some prior pure Jazz.
My wife is once again stressed by a big project at work, and once again rewatching Sex and the City, and she recently got to this episode, in which Big [b. 1955] takes Carrie [b.1966] to a jazz club, where she takes up with the club owner. By this point in history, a jazz club is already retro, but Big is also nearing fifty and a bit of a throwback himself. This seems, in my mind, to be the last time that I can think of that jazz was presented in popular media as genuinely Cool, rather than as pure LARP. (Coincidentally, this was also Jim Gaffigan's sole episode of SATC, in which he dated Miranda and had no lines, simply pissing, shitting, and farting in front her as his entire character arc)
So for someone born after the year 2000, whose parents might have watched that episode, they'll view Jazz less as a genre than as a mood. Popular American music genres are all, in my view, better classified as moods. There's pop with a jazzy mood, there's rock with a jazzy mood, there's hip hop with a jazzy mood. Any other classification runs into too many problems of edge cases, because genre isn't exclusive. Show tunes are clearly a cohesive genre, but show tunes contains all genres.
Jazz doesn't have any cachet among the general public, I'll grant you that. But it does have cachet among critics and musicians, and I think that's where the problem lies.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I can't unsee the incoherence of that image, but I also didn't learn the skills that Ilzo used to call it slop.
I can mentally rotate the objects that are shown in pictures, and therefore I can notice perspective and lighting errors. AI is getting pretty good at that. I can not mentally repair, repaint, and restore a gate, nor can I place it in a geographical/social/historical context, therefore I didn't notice that the paint and carvings are incoherent or that it never could've blocked the canyon. This is one aspect of "AI slop".
I think that is a failure on my part, and I would enjoy good art more if I had the level of discernment that Ilzo demonstrated. I can't use an image as a portal to another world in that way.
I probably won't do anything about it, though.
What about the McMansions? Those (somewhat by definition, or at least by nature) frequently highlight their incoherent design features.
That's somewhat of a middle ground. I can detect that something is off in the pictures linked above, but I can't necessarily describe it in any particular way.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I know there must be some examples where I have no taste, but I can't come up with an example right now and it's so annoying, because I sound like a dick.
I think we need more shit tests like the Ern Malley affair, but for us strivers instead of experts:
I think test of judgement should generally say the base rate. Both to avoid having to guess the meta, and because otherwise you have really bad chances if you trained on a different one.
PS: I can read your flair without a custom theme, I saw the space where it should be and selected the text.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm planning a longer post responding to Scott's comments about taste, so I'll have more to say there, but I just wanted to remark on this briefly:
I think this is a variation on a story that many people repeat uncritically. The story goes something like: "for thousands of years, being an artist was just like, a job, like any other. People knew there was nothing particularly special about art as such - they would have laughed at our modern snobs. The artist was just some dude who went to his 9-to-5 and made stuff because people thought it was pretty or funny, or because a rich king asked him to, or whatever. And then one day in the 1800s, for absolutely no reason whatsoever, ~10 German guys decided that artists were actually Geniuses and they should be revered as such, and this was called Romanticism, and lots of people fell for it and we've been dealing with the fallout ever since".
I think the cracks in this story start to show when you look at the historical record. The idea that there's something distinct about art as an activity that sets it apart from more "mundane" types of work is an ancient one. Greek and Roman poets and sculptors certainly did try to create works that would live on and be passed down to posterity; they were aiming at a certain kind of "immortality". Plato said that there was a quarrel between philosophers and poets over the correct approach to wisdom and virtue; there was no analogous quarrel between philosophers and saddle makers. Aristotle saw fit to dedicate an entire book to poetry and drama, but not an entire book to woodworking.
This is of course not to say that conceptions of art and The Artist haven't changed over time, or that there's nothing historically distinct about the Romantic conception of art. Only that the purely deflationary narrative, the claim that any distinguished status for art is a historically recent invention, is at best incomplete and lacking in nuance.
Yeah, it sounds historically imprecise, both ways. There was artistic programs with manifestos before the left-ward turn of the cultural elites. The Renaissance was one broad program; one could argue that every western "art movement" ever since (including the post-WW1 self-declared auteurs defying the bourgeois society in trendy cafes) has tried to be the next Renaissance.
One more individual scale - architects were artists, before, too. Palladio had an individual vision and program in the 16th century. He was famous, he wrote treatises. St Peter's Basilica was a group effort that took a century to complete. Some its chief architects are known for their other artsy contributions, like Raphael and Michelangelo.
More options
Context Copy link
That's just poor phrasing by Scott; it's clear from context that what this should be saying is "a new vision of the Architect as Artist"
More options
Context Copy link
This argument becomes very interesting if you extend it to Xenophon's books on animal husbandry and training...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Let's start with a deliberately silly example: Imagine somebody shows you two images. Both look broadly similar in style & quality to you, but there is a single off-coloured pixel in one off them. As the other person tells you, the images are indeed broadly similar, but this kind of pixel is in every image made in a certain way, that making images this way is considered tacky and tasteless, and that trained professionals can spot the pixel in the blink of an eye, which you can't because it follows complicated rules of position. Would you defer to their judgement of taste?
At least for me, a lot of artistic ideas, even after hearing their reasoning, make me go "sounds nice for you, but no thanks". No matter the complexity of rules, it's ultimately arbitrary and interchangeable. Discernment is intrinsically something that can be completely made up, on any topic, and in any way. So it's value as a skill is quite questionable.
That doesn't mean I don't have my own tastes, and for some things I even have some strong opinions as well. For worldbuilding in stories, for example, I'm a strong proponent of strict internal consistency, or in art I'm a big fan of geometric principles (unsurprisingly, as a mathematician). But I don't really have much trouble just simply ignoring allegedly important discernable differences unless somebody can give me a very good reason why I should care.
More options
Context Copy link
I like this post because it is legitimately "off-topic" from a lot of what the Motte usually focuses on. I'll offer some points, random and unorganized.
"My speculation is that Laufey's fans want her music to be considered jazz"
I think this is at the core of most issues with what is called "taste" in the aesthetic and fashion(able) sense. One's tastes are closely linked to one's personal affinities, but within the context of what social proof collectively deems "good". If I have a beer on my own with no one around me, it's almost nonsensical for me to tell myself that "I have good taste." Ordering the "right" beer (or other drink) around others is a matter of taste. If I'm at a fancy steakhouse and order a shot and a beer to the table, this is a faux pas because it signals a failure to recognize context and circumstance. In that way, taste is very much like humor - I can tell dick jokes with my buddies when we're out camping, but, at that same steakhouse, I need to recognize the social context.
The problem your quote about Jazz points to - as well as the larger McMansion discussion - is that, sometimes, people will correctly identify something that is seen as high value taste signalling, but utterly fuck up their own interpretation of it. We can forgive their lack of ability to correctly imitate / execute the attainment of that high value taste, but we tend not to forgive their obvious desire to attain it. In this way, taste is like coolness; if you have to loudly announce how cool you are, you aren't cool (social proof cannot be coerced by sheer force of will ... at best, it can be purchased). Laufey's fans want her to be considered Jazz because Jazz is cool and they want to be cool. What they've failed to recognize is that there are other ways of being cool (you brought up Sinatra, for example), so the better signalling strategy is to signal towards what you are naturally inclined to.
Returning to my steak dinner example, there can be times when a crass dick joke is not only appropriate but uproariously funny - when it is an authentic gesture. If Matthew McConaughey is at the table with me and makes the dick joke, it's an authentic reflection of his cool-guy-down-to-earth-texas-man-of-the-people attitude (leave aside for a moment if this is a carefully crafted hollywood persona, that's a whole different discussion).
Which leads me to point 2
Taste is about knowledge and expertise.
The McMansion Hell write-ups are great because they describe in specific terms what a lot of people feel intuitively but cannot label. A house that is too big for its lot size with a bunch of mixed architectural styles (each trying to separately ape something that is already recognize as cool and high value taste) represents both a) an inauthentic imitation of style that is incongruent within the context and b) poorly executed. A good architect would do a better job of combining those styles, or choosing a single style for the whole home. It would be proportional to the lot size and probably fit better with the surrounding homes in the neighborhood.
Bad taste is as much about bad reasoning and familiarity with a subject as it is about poor social understanding. Johnny Depp can get away with dressing like a homeless pirate because he actually knows (or his stylist actually knows) how to drape scarves just the right way, and how many bracelets are too much. That is a specific knowledge and it can't be faked. A lot of it is in the details. Three piece suits have made a bit of a comeback in the past few years. Aside from a lot of guys not knowing how the vest should fit, they wear it with the bottom-most button fastened. This is not how a vest is buttoned up (you leave the last button undone). Why? There's probably some historical reason but today it is a subtle signal that you've taken the time to become knowledgeable about the fashion and you aren't being an inauthentic and clumsy imitator.
As a bit of an aside, the taste-knowledge feedback loop is, indeed, a reinforcing loop. A few years ago, I decided I wanted to upgrade by cooking skills. I studied some of the classic French schools and would drill myself repeatedly (Chicken Fricasse...four nights in a row). Eventually, my taste (in the literal sense) did actually become more sensitive and precise. I could actually taste different fruits in cognac. I could tell if a sauce was the right consistency based on mouth feel. I used to think sommeliers were full of shit for saying a wine was "light and airy" but now I .... kind of get it. (p.s. I will still go HAM on a Big Mac at 2 am because I'm "a real one" as the kids say).
The point, again, is that taste is cultivated with knowledge, and destroyed with cheap imitations of it. I'd say this even applies to domains that aren't at all associated with normal notions of "taste." Sales, for instance. A bad salesman apes the appearance of a good salesman - the suit, plastic smile, haircut, expensive watch. They throw out a couple of salesman lines they read online somewhere meant to "reframe" the conversation, but they're done clumsily and without much effect other than to make the bad salesman feel like he's a good one. The best salesman ... talk very little and mostly let the customer sell themselves. How do they do this? I don't know for sure and, if I did, I doubt it could be condensed into a few sentences other than to say; they have some form of real knowledge and expertise that let's them do this.
So, to answer you final question:
Exercise epistemic humility first, then make a value judgement.
Defer to the person who can demonstrate knowledge about the taste subject. The architect who can point out that the gables are too gable-y. The sommelier who can tell you that the Chateau Pop-D-Noof was founded in 1769 by 420 gay monks because the vineyards were the least heretical in all the land. The steak guy who can tell you about the hind quarter fatty tissue rendering temperature. These people know more than you, and you need to have the humility to know that. If your taste differs from them, understand you know less and that your taste could change if you knew more.
Then, make a value judgement for your life about if you care enough to go get that knowledge. If you don't, that's perfectly fine and you can then say "Well, I like Franzia." You are allowed to take comfort in that because of your control over your own values and time in life. The value of that opinion is no less than the value of the expert - but the expert, in the right context, will collect more social esteem than you. And that's also fine because then you can demonstrate a higher level virtue - humility - and learn a little.
I'd always heard that this was attributed to King Edward VII (late 19th / early 20th century). While Prince of Wales he apparently became too rotund to fasten the bottom button, and his courtiers imitated this style. (A quick Google suggests this as the reason, but doesn't seem to be definitive and some other possibilities are given, so it may be apocryphal).
Apparently a lot of etiquette boils down to something the court copied from a king or queen. Not surprising, as how quickly you adopt a new trend would be a reliable signal of how close you are to high status people (exemplified in the monarch). This also predicts that the fashion will change by the time that it's diffused out to the general public, as it has ceased to be a good indicator.
In the case of the undone waistcoat button, a corollary of this is that the trend probably only exists because waistcoats themselves went out of fashion. If we'd been wearing waistcoats all this time, a trend from the early 20th century wouldn't have survived that long! (Or it would have cycled out and back in to fashion at least once).
At the highest meta-level I thus generally think of taste as being a hard to fake status signal (which isn't quite the same as knowledge and expertise, though does require it).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link