Taste Grows Both Ways

Cultural hierarchy likes to divide art into the complex, which develops you, and the simple, which only entertains. In fact complexity widens perception, but by itself it produces no value.

And simple music is not a lower form of art.

A short melody can be precise, expressive and memorable. Complexity by itself creates no value. A work can be complex because the author had nothing to say more simply.

Taste develops through exposure.

At first unfamiliar music sounds like noise. Then distinctions appear. A person learns to hear the instrument, the form, the period, the performance. The same happens with painting, architecture, cooking and literature.

It helps now and then to pick a work slightly beyond the familiar:

• a different genre;
• a different culture;
• a longer form;
• historical context;
• several performances of the same piece.

But art is not an exam on your cultural level. You can understand how a symphony is built and still love a three-chord song.

Developed taste widens the number of available pleasures. If it is used only to despise other people’s, the range somehow becomes rather narrow again.

Widened perception has a side effect people are rarely warned about. Someone who spent six months getting into coffee stops drinking the coffee that used to suit him perfectly well: he now hears the over-roasting where there used to be just a morning drink. An ability to distinguish has been acquired, a share of the available pleasures lost. The same happens with editing in film, with tiling and with the sound on a recording: once you learn a craft, you start seeing the seams.

The trade is usually favourable — more distinctions than losses. But it is a trade, not a pure gain, and “developed taste only adds” is said by people who have not yet tried to go back.