Bad Art and Good Taste

Abstract

Aesthetic value and good taste usually go hand in hand. A person with good taste is, typically, someone who appreciates things which exhibit some aesthetic quality or excellence. However, in ordinary life it is commonplace that we indulge in things which are lacking in aesthetic value. For example, we might prefer to watch Days of Our Lives rather than The Wire, or to read a bad crime novel rather than good poetry.It is tempting to draw the conclusion that we are making a mistake, and lacking good taste, when our aesthetic attitudes do not match up against the aesthetic value of the things we prefer. However, this conclusion may be too quick. It has recently been argued by John Dyck and Matt Johnson 1 that appreciating bad art-art which lack aesthetically good making features or whose bad making features clearly outweigh its good making ones-isn't always inappropriate. In this paper I will argue that while there might be a case to be made for this claim, the problem which Dyck and Johnson identify is much more general and that their proposed solution can at best be a partial one.

The comparative achievement explanation of artistic value

“…And yet they can still be goodbad. Moreover, I share Algander's (2019) worry that Dyck and Johnson are equivocating between the causal occasion for an experience of bizarreness and the intentional state constitutive of that aesthetic experience; after all, if bizarreness must be caused by a dissonance between intended and realized effect (rather than simply seeming so upon watching), then the deliberate bizarreness they attribute to Lynch is a contradiction in terms. For these reasons, I do not consider it a flaw of my account that it may be incompatible with Dyck and Johnson's explanation of good-bad art.…”

“…For these reasons, I do not consider it a flaw of my account that it may be incompatible with Dyck and Johnson's explanation of good-bad art. 16 See Algander (2019) for a critical and insightful discussion of this notion of bizarreness. See Strohl (2022, esp.…”