真的存在“好品味”吗？

小时候，我可能会说根本不存在。

When I was a kid, I'd have said there wasn't.

我父亲就是这么告诉我的。

My father told me so.

有些人喜欢某些东西，另一些人喜欢其他东西，谁能说谁是对的呢？

Some people like some things, and other people like other things, and who's to say who's right?

当时觉得'好品味不存在'这个观点如此显而易见，以至于我通过间接证据才意识到父亲错了。

It seemed so obvious that there was no such thing as good taste that it was only through indirect evidence that I realized my father was wrong.

这就是我要展示给你的——一个归谬法的证明。

And that's what I'm gonna give you here, a proof by reductio ad absurdum.

如果我们从'不存在好品味'这个前提出发，就会得出明显错误的结论，因此前提必定是错误的。

If we start from the premise that there's no such thing as good taste, we end up with conclusions that are obviously false, and therefore the premise must be wrong.

我们最好先定义什么是好品味。

We'd better start by saying what good taste is.

狭义上它指审美判断，广义上则指任何类型的偏好。

There's a narrow sense in which it refers to aesthetic judgments and a broader one in which it refers to preferences of any kind.

最有力的证明将是展示品味在最狭义层面上确实存在。

The strongest proof would be to show that taste exists in the narrowest sense.

所以我要谈谈艺术品味。

So I'm gonna talk about taste in art.

如果你喜欢的艺术比我喜欢的更好，那你的品味就比我好。

You have better taste than me if the art you like is better than the art I like.

如果不存在好品味，那么也就不存在好艺术。

If there's no such thing as good taste, then there's no such thing as good art.

因为如果存在所谓的好艺术，就很容易判断两个人谁的品味更好。

Because if there is such a thing as good art, it's easy to tell which of two people has better taste.

给他们看大量从未见过的艺术家作品，让他们选出最好的。

Show them a lot of works by artists they've never seen before and ask them to choose the best.

而选择更好艺术的人，品味也更好。

And whoever chooses the better art has better taste.

所以如果你想摒弃'好品味'的概念，也必须摒弃'好艺术'的概念。

So if you want to discard the concept of good taste, you also have to discard the concept of good art.

这意味着你必须否定人们擅长创作的可能性，即艺术家不可能擅长自己的工作。

And that means you have to discard the possibility of people being good at making it, which means there's no way for artists to be good at their jobs.

不仅是视觉艺术家，任何意义上的艺术家都是如此。

And not just visual artists, but anyone who is in any sense an artist.

你也不能说有优秀的演员、小说家、作曲家或舞蹈家。

You can't have good actors or novelists or composers or dancers either.

你可以有受欢迎的小说家，但不会有优秀的小说家。

You can have popular novelists, but not good ones.

我们没有意识到摒弃'好品味'概念要走多远，因为我们甚至不讨论最明显的案例。

We don't realize how far we'd have to go if we discarded the concept of good taste because we don't even debate the most obvious cases.

但这不仅意味着我们无法比较两位著名画家孰优孰劣。

But it doesn't just mean we can't say which of two famous painters is better.

还意味着我们无法断言任何画家比随机选择的八岁儿童画得更好。

It means we can't say that any painter is better than a randomly chosen eight year old.

这就是我意识到父亲错了的方式。

That was how I realized my father was wrong.

我开始学习绘画，这和我做过的其他工作没什么两样。

I started studying painting, and it was just like other kinds of work I'd done.

你可以画得好或差，但只要努力，就能进步。

You could do it well or badly, and if you tried hard, you could get better at it.

显然，达芬奇和贝利尼在这方面比我强得多。

And it was obvious that Leonardo and Bellini were much better at it than me.

我们之间的差距并非臆想。

That gap between us was not imaginary.

他们如此优秀，既然他们能做到，说明艺术确实可以臻于完美，高雅品味确实存在。

They were so good, and if they could be good, then art could be good, and there was such a thing as good taste after all.

既然我已经解释了如何证明高雅品味的存在，现在也该说明为何人们认为它不存在。

Now that I've explained how to show there is such a thing as good taste, I should also explain why people think there isn't.

原因有二。

There are two reasons.

其一是关于品味的争论总是层出不穷。

One is that there's always so much disagreement about taste.

大多数人对艺术的反应都是未经审视的冲动交织。

Most people's response to art is a tangle of unexamined impulses.

这位艺术家有名吗？

Is the artist famous?

题材吸引人吗？

Is the subject attractive?

这是他们应该喜欢的那种艺术吗？

Is this the sort of art they're supposed to like?

它是悬挂在著名博物馆里，还是被复制在一本昂贵的大书里？

Is it hanging in a famous museum or reproduced in a big expensive book?

实际上，大多数人对艺术的反应都受这些外在因素主导，而那些自称品味良好的人也常常判断错误。

In practice, most people's response to art is dominated by such extraneous factors, and the people who do claim to have good taste are so often mistaken.

所谓专家在一代人中所推崇的画作，往往与几代人后所欣赏的截然不同。

The paintings admired by the so called experts in one generation are often so different from those admired a few generations later.

很容易得出结论说这其中根本没有什么真实的东西。

It's easy to conclude there's nothing real there at all.

只有当你孤立这种力量时——比如尝试绘画并将你的作品与贝利尼的比较——你才能看到它确实存在。

It's only when you isolate this force, for example, by trying to paint and comparing your work to Bellini's, that you can see that it does in fact exist.

人们怀疑艺术可以优秀的另一个原因是，艺术中似乎没有容纳这种优秀的空间。

The other reason people doubt that art can be good is that there doesn't seem to be any room in the art for this goodness.

论证过程是这样的。

The argument goes like this.

想象几个人正在观看一件艺术品并评判它的优劣。

Imagine several people looking at a work of art and judging how good it is.

如果优秀的艺术确实是物体的属性，它应该以某种方式存在于物体中，但似乎并非如此。

If being good art really is a property of objects, it should be in the object somehow, but it doesn't seem to be.

它似乎发生在每位观察者的头脑中。

It seems to be something happening in the heads of each of the observers.

如果他们意见不一，你该如何在他们之间做出选择？

And if they disagree, how do you choose between them?

这个谜题的解决之道在于认识到艺术的目的是作用于人类观众，而人类有很多共同点。

The solution to this puzzle is to realize that the purpose of art is to work on its human audience, and humans have a lot in common.

就物体作用对象产生相同反应的程度而言，这可以说是物体具有相应属性的含义。

And to the extent the things an object acts upon respond in the same way, that's arguably what it means for the object to have the corresponding property.

如果一个粒子与所有相互作用对象的表现都如同其质量为m，那么它的质量就是m。

If everything a particle interacts with behaves as if the particle had a mass of m, then it has a mass of m.

因此客观与主观的区别并非二元对立，而是取决于主体间共性多少的程度问题。

So the distinction between objective and subjective is not binary, but a matter of degree depending on how much the subjects have in common.

相互作用的粒子处于一个极端，而人与艺术的互动并非完全处在另一个极端。

Particles interacting with one another are at one pole, but people interacting with art are not all the way at the other.

他们的反应并非随机。

Their reactions aren't random.

由于人们对艺术的反应并非随机，艺术可以被设计来影响人，并根据其效果分为优劣——就像疫苗一样。

Because people's responses to art aren't random, art can be designed to operate on people and be good or bad depending on how effectively it does so, much as a vaccine can be.

如果有人讨论疫苗赋予免疫力的能力，却反驳说『赋予免疫力并非疫苗的真正属性，因为获得免疫是每个人免疫系统的个体行为』，这种说法会显得非常轻率。

If someone were talking about the ability of a vaccine to confer immunity, it would seem very frivolous to object that conferring immunity wasn't really a property of vaccines because acquiring immunity is something that happens in the immune system of each individual person.

确实。

Sure.

人们的免疫系统存在差异，对某人有效的疫苗可能对他人无效，但这并不影响讨论疫苗有效性的意义。

People's immune systems vary, and a vaccine that worked on one might not work on another, but that doesn't make it meaningless to talk about the effectiveness of a vaccine.

当然，艺术的情况更为复杂。

The situation with art is messier, of course.

你不能像评估疫苗那样简单地通过投票来衡量艺术效果。

You can't measure effectiveness by simply taking a vote as you do with vaccines.

你必须设想那些具有深厚艺术修养、且心智澄明到能忽略艺术家名气等外在因素的鉴赏者的反应。

You have to imagine the responses of subjects with a deep knowledge of art and enough clarity of mind to be able to ignore extraneous influences like the fame of the artist.

即便如此，你仍会看到一些分歧。

And even then, you'd still see some disagreement.

人们的观点确实各异，评价艺术很难，尤其是当代艺术。

People do vary, and judging art is hard, especially recent art.

无论是作品本身还是人们的评判能力，都绝对不存在一个完整的排序，但两者都确实存在部分排序。

There is definitely not a total order either of works or of people's ability to judge them, but there is equally definitely a partial order of both.

因此，虽然无法拥有完美的品味，但拥有良好的品味是可能的。

So while it's not possible to have perfect taste, it is possible to have good taste.