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..."]
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Notes -
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.
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