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 -
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.
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