“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.