Easy-Challenging
Generally, I’ve found that:
- the pictures I’ve taken that I’m happiest with are not the same as the ones other people like the most, and
- other people often like the same group of pictures.
This relates to something Samuel Hughes wrote about not too long ago about art being “easy” and “challenging”.
I want to step back for a moment and introduce a different distinction, namely between what we might call easy styles and challenging, or difficult, ones. A style is ‘easy’, as I use the term, if works in it can be enjoyed or appreciated, at least on a basic level, without much work; a style is thus ‘challenging’ if works in it require a lot of work to enjoy.
It’s a really interesting piece, arguing that the general trend towards increasingly difficult art is at odds with architecture’s position as public and background art. In our case, photography is a private and foreground art, so the issue of whether or not more challenging is better comes down to taste. Further on Hughes talks about difficulty being orthogonal to, but correlated with, quality: good doesn’t always mean challenging, but the best works are often more difficult.
Some art forms extend further into the easy-challenging domain than others.
Highbrow cinema is way more accessible than highbrow lit. The most difficult movies (e.g., Satantango, Shoah, Histoire(s) du Cinema) are ultimately very easy to get through compared to, say, James Joyce.
Kitsch is good art made easy. Many people prefer this, because they lean towards the easy end of the spectrum. Max Read has argued that AI art, for example, is almost always kitsch, avoiding challenging content by virtue of LLM’s structure, but also by design.
After all, what they produce is a kind of weighted average of the images they’re trained on; and what is kitsch but a kind of aesthetic average? As Hito Steyerl writes, “Visuals created by [machine learning] tools are statistical renderings… They converge around the average, the median; hallucinated mediocrity.” This effect is exacerbated further by the guardrails the developers build--almost the last thing any A.I. company wants is for its app to produce “challenging” output.
I’d guess that you can adjust your taste towards challenging by investing in context.
Other Quotes
When people talk about taste and how to acquire it, I often feel like they’re groping for a shortcut to access their own interiority. Most people think about desirability in terms of what other people are doing ... Of course, it’s natural and perhaps even healthy to discover what we like through mimicry. But perhaps it’s unhealthy to never grow out of it—to never develop your own sense of goodness.
The first rule of smart writing is you must recognise what smart writing is. Sounds simple enough but most people fail at this. Lots of smart writers get their good quotes ignored and their tepid quotes celebrated. This lowers everybody’s standards. Orwell warmed about this