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MrHen comments on Bizarre Illusions - Less Wrong
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Is it fair to say that you are looking for a way to predict "good" art before it enters the cultural status stream?
Not in the sense that I want to predict the next big thing.
What I'm looking for is, what portion is due to actual merit of the artwork, that people would appreciate even in the absence of others pressuring them to like it, or the signaling effects of displaying it to others?
I have often focused on scenarios where you can get a judgment before cultural effects interfere, but these aren't strictly necessary. Like with the placebo example I keep giving, there are ways to see what is due to some effect that will make anything look good, and what effect is due to the actual merit. The hoaxes that others have referenced are good examples of this.
Does that answer your question?
Yes, this does answer my question.
The followup question: How useful is being able to identify "bad" art? Is it a step toward the same direction of identifying merit?
(Good and bad as I am using it means value from actual merit and ignores all peer pressure or signaling effects.)
Very useful: in the future, we want to have machines that can make the same (peer-pressure-free) art classifications that humans would, so they can pop out art themselves. Bad art is nearly as useful as good art in helping to train such a machine and identify the algorithms humans use to make these judgments.
But when the field of art has been corrupted to the point where it's just a pure status game, there is no such classifier that can be learned. The only machine you're going to be making is one that looks human, and hobnobs its way up the social ladder so that it can learn what the elites think, and render judgments in that way.
(I made the same critique about some Japanese researchers' quixotic attempt to build a machine that determines how much humans will like a given wine, based on chemical analysis. Hey guys -- it ain't the chemical composition of a wine that makes people like it!)
Cool. Yeah, I pretty much agree with everything here and don't have anything to add. I think this comment nails the subject on the head.