“It is not true that there is no such thing as good taste. Art can be good, and some artists are better than others at making it.

Art has a purpose: to interest its audience. Once you start talking about audiences, you don’t have to argue simply that there are or aren’t standards of taste. Instead tastes are a series of concentric rings..

If art isn’t all subjective, how do you pick out the people with better taste?

Though appeal to people is a meaningful test, in practice you can’t measure it. You can’t just take a vote.

There are two main kinds of error that get in the way of seeing a work of art: biases you bring from your own circumstances, and tricks played by the artist. The way not to be vulnerable to tricks is to explicitly seek out and catalog them.

It’s harder to escape the influence of your own circumstances, but you can at least move in that direction. The way to do it is to travel widely, in both time and space.

..while anyone’s reaction to a famous painting will be warped at first by its fame, there are ways to decrease its effects. One is to come back to the painting over and over. After a few days the fame wears off, and you can start to see it as a painting.

The most important consequence of realizing there can be good art is that it frees artists to try to make it.

“..to properly appreciate beauty, the viewing conditions must be optimal.

“A huge reason for the US’s dependence on oil: our preference for living space. The housing market follows consumer demand. If consumers really loved living above shops and having public parks as their green space, and living stacked, then everything would be townhomes and alleys. But we prefer the big box store that we have to drive to.

If you’re spending all your time on the road, my friends, then you have definitely not arrived.

“After adjusting for inflation, American men in their 30s in 2004 had a median income of about $35,000 per year, for a 12 percent drop compared with $40,000 per year for men in their fathers’ generation in the same age group in 1974.

“The musculature of the Library of Congress categorization scheme looks like it’s about concepts. It is organized into non-overlapping categories that get more detailed at lower and lower levels — any concept is supposed to fit in one category and in no other categories. But every now and again, the skeleton pokes through, and that skeleton, the supporting structure around which the system is really built, is designed to minimize seek time on shelves. The essence of a book isn’t the ideas it contains. The essence of a book is “book.” Thinking that library catalogs exist to organize concepts confuses the container for the thing contained.

“[Metadata utopia] presumes that there is a “correct” way of categorizing ideas, and that reasonable people, given enough time and incentive, can agree on the proper means for building a hierarchy. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Any hierarchy of ideas necessarily implies the importance of some axes over others.

“The laziness of info-civilians is bottomless. No amount of ease-of-use will end it.

“Never do an interview with the femme fatale..

“While China is zooming, the Indian broadband market seems to be stuck in neutral..

“Though most tower defense games are fantasy-oriented, Preece gave his version a quirkier, more cartoonish feel. He added a number of elements that made it more viral — particularly a group-based ranking system which encourages competition between friends and co-workers.