  December 2006 2006 年 12 月 I grew up believing that taste is just a matter of personal preference. Each person has things they like, but no one's preferences are any better than anyone else's. There is no such thing as good taste. 我從小就認為品味純粹是個人喜好的問題。每個人都有自己喜歡的東西，但沒有人偏好比別人更好。所謂的好品味根本不存在。 Like a lot of things I grew up believing, this turns out to be false, and I'm going to try to explain why. 就像我從小相信的許多事情一樣，這個觀念其實是錯的，我將試著解釋原因。 One problem with saying there's no such thing as good taste is that it also means there's no such thing as good art. If there were good art, then people who liked it would have better taste than people who didn't. So if you discard taste, you also have to discard the idea of art being good, and artists being good at making it. 否認好品味存在的一個問題是，這也意味著不存在所謂的好藝術。如果存在好藝術，那麼喜歡它的人就比不喜歡的人更有品味。所以如果你拋棄了品味的觀念，就必須同時拋棄藝術有好壞之分、藝術家有優劣之別的觀點。 It was pulling on that thread that unravelled my childhood faith in relativism. When you're trying to make things, taste becomes a practical matter. You have to decide what to do next. Would it make the painting better if I changed that part? If there's no such thing as better, it doesn't matter what you do. In fact, it doesn't matter if you paint at all. You could just go out and buy a ready-made blank canvas. If there's no such thing as good, that would be just as great an achievement as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Less laborious, certainly, but if you can achieve the same level of performance with less effort, surely that's more impressive, not less. 正是這個思考的線索，解開了我童年時期對相對主義的信仰。當你試圖創作時，品味就變成了一個實際問題。你必須決定下一步該怎麼做。如果我修改那個部分，會讓這幅畫更好嗎？如果根本不存在所謂的「更好」，那麼你做什麼都無關緊要。事實上，你甚至根本不需要畫畫。你大可以直接去買現成的空白畫布。如果不存在所謂的「好」，那麼這將與西斯汀教堂的天頂畫一樣偉大。當然更省力，但如果你能用更少的努力達到相同的表現水平，這無疑更令人印象深刻，而非相反。 Yet that doesn't seem quite right, does it? 然而這似乎不太對勁，不是嗎？ Audience 觀眾 I think the key to this puzzle is to remember that art has an audience. Art has a purpose, which is to interest its audience. Good art (like good anything) is art that achieves its purpose particularly well. The meaning of "interest" can vary. Some works of art are meant to shock, and others to please; some are meant to jump out at you, and others to sit quietly in the background. But all art has to work on an audience, and—here's the critical point—members of the audience share things in common. 我認為解開這個謎題的關鍵在於記住：藝術擁有觀眾。藝術有其目的，就是要吸引觀眾。好的藝術（如同任何好的事物）就是能特別出色達成其目的的藝術。「吸引」的含義可以有所不同。有些藝術作品旨在震撼人心，有些則意在取悅；有些試圖跳脫框架引人注目，有些則安靜地融入背景。但所有藝術都必須對觀眾產生作用，而且——這是關鍵所在——觀眾之間存在著共通點。 For example, nearly all humans find human faces engaging. It seems to be wired into us. Babies can recognize faces practically from birth. In fact, faces seem to have co-evolved with our interest in them; the face is the body's billboard. So all other things being equal, a painting with faces in it will interest people more than one without. [1] 舉例來說，幾乎所有人類都對人臉感興趣。這似乎是我們與生俱來的特質。嬰兒幾乎從出生就能辨識臉孔。事實上，臉孔似乎與我們對其的興趣共同演化；臉部就像是身體的廣告看板。因此在其他條件相同的情況下，一幅含有人臉的畫作會比沒有的更能吸引人們。[1] One reason it's easy to believe that taste is merely personal preference is that, if it isn't, how do you pick out the people with better taste? There are billions of people, each with their own opinion; on what grounds can you prefer one to another? [2] 人們容易認為品味純屬個人偏好的原因之一在於：若非如此，你該如何挑選出品味較佳的人？世上有數十億人，每人都有自己的見解；你憑什麼認為某人的品味優於他人？[2] But if audiences have a lot in common, you're not in a position of having to choose one out of a random set of individual biases, because the set isn't random. All humans find faces engaging—practically by definition: face recognition is in our DNA. And so having a notion of good art, in the sense of art that does its job well, doesn't require you to pick out a few individuals and label their opinions as correct. No matter who you pick, they'll find faces engaging. 但如果觀眾有許多共通點，你就不必從一堆隨機的個人偏好中做選擇，因為這些偏好並非隨機。所有人類天生就會被臉孔吸引——這幾乎是定義性的：臉部辨識能力刻在我們的 DNA 裡。因此，要建立「好藝術」的概念（指能有效發揮功能的藝術），並不需要你挑選少數人並將他們的意見標榜為正確。無論你選誰，他們都會被臉孔吸引。 Of course, space aliens probably wouldn't find human faces engaging. But there might be other things they shared in common with us. The most likely source of examples is math. I expect space aliens would agree with us most of the time about which of two proofs was better. Erdos thought so. He called a maximally elegant proof one out of God's book, and presumably God's book is universal. [3] 當然，外星人大概不會對人類臉孔感興趣。但他們可能與我們有其他共通點。最有可能的例子來源是數學。我預期外星人多數時候會認同我們對兩個證明孰優孰劣的判斷。埃爾德什就這麼認為。他將極致優雅的證明稱為「來自上帝的書」，而上帝的書想必是宇宙共通的。[3] 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, like ripples in a pond. There are some things that will appeal to you and your friends, others that will appeal to most people your age, others that will appeal to most humans, and perhaps others that would appeal to most sentient beings (whatever that means). 一旦你開始談論觀眾，就不必單純爭辯品味標準是否存在。相反地，品味就像池塘裡的漣漪，是一圈圈同心圓。有些事物會吸引你和你的朋友，有些會吸引同齡的多數人，有些則能打動大多數人類，甚至可能有些會吸引多數有感知的生命（無論那意味著什麼）。 The picture is slightly more complicated than that, because in the middle of the pond there are overlapping sets of ripples. For example, there might be things that appealed particularly to men, or to people from a certain culture. 實際情況比這稍微複雜些，因為池塘中央存在著相互交疊的漣漪群。舉例來說，可能有些事物特別吸引男性，或是特定文化背景的人們。 If good art is art that interests its audience, then when you talk about art being good, you also have to say for what audience. So is it meaningless to talk about art simply being good or bad? No, because one audience is the set of all possible humans. I think that's the audience people are implicitly talking about when they say a work of art is good: they mean it would engage any human. [4] 如果好的藝術是指能引起觀眾興趣的作品，那麼當你談論藝術的好壞時，也必須說明是對哪些觀眾而言。那麼單純討論藝術的好壞是否毫無意義？並非如此，因為其中一個觀眾群體正是全體人類。我認為當人們說某件藝術作品很好時，他們潛在指涉的觀眾就是這個群體：他們的意思是這作品能打動任何一個人。[4] And that is a meaningful test, because although, like any everyday concept, "human" is fuzzy around the edges, there are a lot of things practically all humans have in common. In addition to our interest in faces, there's something special about primary colors for nearly all of us, because it's an artifact of the way our eyes work. Most humans will also find images of 3D objects engaging, because that also seems to be built into our visual perception. [5] And beneath that there's edge-finding, which makes images with definite shapes more engaging than mere blur. 這確實是一個有意義的測試，因為儘管「人類」這個日常概念在邊界上有些模糊，但實際上所有人類都有許多共同點。除了我們對臉孔的興趣外，原色對幾乎所有人來說都具有特殊意義，因為這是我們眼睛運作方式的產物。大多數人也會覺得 3D 物體的圖像很吸引人，因為這似乎也是我們視覺感知的內建機制。[5] 而在這之下還有邊緣偵測機制，這使得具有明確形狀的圖像比單純的模糊影像更引人入勝。 Humans have a lot more in common than this, of course. My goal is not to compile a complete list, just to show that there's some solid ground here. People's preferences aren't random. So an artist working on a painting and trying to decide whether to change some part of it doesn't have to think "Why bother? I might as well flip a coin." Instead he can ask "What would make the painting more interesting to people?" And the reason you can't equal Michelangelo by going out and buying a blank canvas is that the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is more interesting to people. 當然，人類的共同點遠不止這些。我的目標並非列出完整清單，只是想說明這裡確實存在某些堅實基礎。人們的偏好並非隨機產生。因此，當一位藝術家在創作繪畫並考慮是否要修改某部分時，不必想著「何必費心？乾脆擲硬幣決定算了」，而是可以思考「怎樣能讓這幅畫對人們更有吸引力？」而之所以你無法靠買張空白畫布就達到米開朗基羅的水準，正是因為西斯汀教堂的天頂畫對人們來說更具吸引力。 A lot of philosophers have had a hard time believing it was possible for there to be objective standards for art. It seemed obvious that beauty, for example, was something that happened in the head of the observer, not something that was a property of objects. It was thus "subjective" rather than "objective." But in fact if you narrow the definition of beauty to something that works a certain way on humans, and you observe how much humans have in common, it turns out to be a property of objects after all. You don't have to choose between something being a property of the subject or the object if subjects all react similarly. Being good art is thus a property of objects as much as, say, being toxic to humans is: it's good art if it consistently affects humans in a certain way. 許多哲學家一直難以相信藝術可能存在客觀標準。舉例來說，美顯然是存在於觀賞者腦海中的感受，而非物體本身的屬性。因此美是「主觀」而非「客觀」的。但事實上，若將美的定義限縮為對人類產生特定影響的事物，並觀察人類之間的共通性，就會發現美終究還是物體的屬性。當所有主體都產生相似反應時，你無需糾結某事物究竟是主體屬性還是客體屬性。正如對人類具有毒性是物體的屬性一樣，優秀藝術同樣是物體的屬性——只要它能持續以特定方式影響人類。 Error 錯誤 So could we figure out what the best art is by taking a vote? After all, if appealing to humans is the test, we should be able to just ask them, right? 那麼我們能否透過投票來找出最棒的藝術？畢竟，如果吸引人類是評判標準，我們應該可以直接詢問他們對吧？ Well, not quite. For products of nature that might work. I'd be willing to eat the apple the world's population had voted most delicious, and I'd probably be willing to visit the beach they voted most beautiful, but having to look at the painting they voted the best would be a crapshoot. 嗯，不完全是這樣。對於自然產物來說或許可行。我願意品嚐全世界票選最美味的蘋果，也可能願意造訪他們票選最美的海灘，但被迫欣賞他們票選最佳的畫作，那可就全憑運氣了。 Man-made stuff is different. For one thing, artists, unlike apple trees, often deliberately try to trick us. Some tricks are quite subtle. For example, any work of art sets expectations by its level of finish. You don't expect photographic accuracy in something that looks like a quick sketch. So one widely used trick, especially among illustrators, is to intentionally make a painting or drawing look like it was done faster than it was. The average person looks at it and thinks: how amazingly skillful. It's like saying something clever in a conversation as if you'd thought of it on the spur of the moment, when in fact you'd worked it out the day before. 人造物則截然不同。首先，藝術家不像蘋果樹，他們經常刻意試圖欺騙我們。有些手法相當微妙。舉例來說，任何藝術作品都會以其完成度來設定觀者的期待值。你不會期待一幅看似速寫的作品具有照片般的精確度。因此一種廣泛使用的技巧（尤其在插畫家中），就是刻意讓畫作看起來比實際創作過程更快速完成。一般人看了會想：這技巧多麼驚人啊。這就像在對話中機智地說出某句話，彷彿是當下靈光一閃，實際上卻是前一天就精心構思好的。 Another much less subtle influence is brand. If you go to see the Mona Lisa, you'll probably be disappointed, because it's hidden behind a thick glass wall and surrounded by a frenzied crowd taking pictures of themselves in front of it. At best you can see it the way you see a friend across the room at a crowded party. The Louvre might as well replace it with copy; no one would be able to tell. And yet the Mona Lisa is a small, dark painting. If you found people who'd never seen an image of it and sent them to a museum in which it was hanging among other paintings with a tag labelling it as a portrait by an unknown fifteenth century artist, most would walk by without giving it a second look. 另一個影響力較不明顯但更為強烈的因素是品牌效應。如果你去看《蒙娜麗莎》，很可能會感到失望，因為它被厚重的玻璃牆隔開，周圍擠滿瘋狂拍照的人群。你最多只能像在擁擠派對中遙望房間另一端的朋友那樣觀看它。羅浮宮就算用複製品替代真跡，恐怕也沒人能分辨出來。然而《蒙娜麗莎》實際上是幅陰暗的小畫作。若找來從未見過此畫像的人，讓他們參觀將這幅畫混在其他畫作中、僅標註為「十五世紀無名藝術家肖像」的展廳，多數人會直接走過而不會多看一眼。 For the average person, brand dominates all other factors in the judgement of art. Seeing a painting they recognize from reproductions is so overwhelming that their response to it as a painting is drowned out. 對一般人而言，品牌效壓倒性地主導了藝術品鑑賞的所有其他因素。當人們看到從複製品中認出的畫作時，那種熟悉感會強烈到完全淹沒他們對畫作本身的真實感受。 And then of course there are the tricks people play on themselves. Most adults looking at art worry that if they don't like what they're supposed to, they'll be thought uncultured. This doesn't just affect what they claim to like; they actually make themselves like things they're supposed to. 當然，人們也會自欺欺人。大多數成年人在欣賞藝術時，總擔心如果不喜歡那些所謂「應該」喜歡的作品，就會被認為沒文化。這不僅影響他們聲稱喜歡什麼；實際上他們還會強迫自己去喜歡那些「應該」喜歡的東西。 That's why you can't just take a vote. Though appeal to people is a meaningful test, in practice you can't measure it, just as you can't find north using a compass with a magnet sitting next to it. There are sources of error so powerful that if you take a vote, all you're measuring is the error. 這就是為什麼不能單純靠投票來決定。雖然大眾的喜好是個有意義的標準，但實際上你無法準確測量，就像旁邊放著磁鐵時無法用指南針找到北方一樣。誤差來源如此強大，以至於如果進行投票，你測量的其實全是誤差。 We can, however, approach our goal from another direction, by using ourselves as guinea pigs. You're human. If you want to know what the basic human reaction to a piece of art would be, you can at least approach that by getting rid of the sources of error in your own judgements. 不過，我們可以換個方向來接近目標——把自己當成實驗品。你也是人類。如果你想知道人類對某件藝術品的基本反應是什麼，至少可以透過消除自身判斷中的誤差來源來接近真相。 For example, 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. Another is to stand close. A painting familiar from reproductions looks more familiar from ten feet away; close in you see details that get lost in reproductions, and which you're therefore seeing for the first time. 舉例來說，雖然任何人對一幅名畫的第一反應都會因其名氣而有所扭曲，但仍有方法可以減輕這種影響。其中一個方法是反覆觀賞這幅畫作。幾天後，名氣的光環會逐漸消退，你就能開始純粹地欣賞畫作本身。另一個方法是近距離觀看。從複製品中熟悉的畫作，在十英尺外看起來會更眼熟；但當你靠近時，就能看到複製品中遺失的細節，這些細節對你而言都是初次見面。 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. Tricks are straightforward to correct for. Merely being aware of them usually prevents them from working. For example, when I was ten I used to be very impressed by airbrushed lettering that looked like shiny metal. But once you study how it's done, you see that it's a pretty cheesy trick—one of the sort that relies on pushing a few visual buttons really hard to temporarily overwhelm the viewer. It's like trying to convince someone by shouting at them. 有兩種主要錯誤會阻礙我們真正欣賞藝術作品：一種是你自身環境帶來的偏見，另一種則是藝術家施展的技巧手法。技巧手法相對容易修正，只要意識到它們的存在，通常就能避免被誤導。例如，我十歲時曾對那些看起來像閃亮金屬的噴槍字體深感震撼。但一旦你研究過它的製作手法，就會發現這其實是相當俗氣的技巧——屬於那種靠強烈刺激視覺按鈕來暫時震懾觀眾的把戲。這就像試圖用大吼大叫來說服別人。 The way not to be vulnerable to tricks is to explicitly seek out and catalog them. When you notice a whiff of dishonesty coming from some kind of art, stop and figure out what's going on. When someone is obviously pandering to an audience that's easily fooled, whether it's someone making shiny stuff to impress ten year olds, or someone making conspicuously avant-garde stuff to impress would-be intellectuals, learn how they do it. Once you've seen enough examples of specific types of tricks, you start to become a connoisseur of trickery in general, just as professional magicians are. 要避免被伎倆所惑，就得主動找出並歸納這些手法。當你察覺某種藝術散發出一絲不誠實的氣息時，停下來釐清狀況。無論是有人用閃亮玩意兒吸引十歲孩童，或是刻意打造前衛作品來打動偽知識分子——只要發現明顯在迎合易受騙的群眾，就去剖析他們的手法。當你見識過足夠多的特定伎倆後，就會逐漸成為辨識花招的行家，就像職業魔術師那樣。 What counts as a trick? Roughly, it's something done with contempt for the audience. For example, the guys designing Ferraris in the 1950s were probably designing cars that they themselves admired. Whereas I suspect over at General Motors the marketing people are telling the designers, "Most people who buy SUVs do it to seem manly, not to drive off-road. So don't worry about the suspension; just make that sucker as big and tough-looking as you can." [6] 什麼算是伎倆？大致來說，就是帶著對觀眾的輕蔑所施展的手段。舉例而言，1950 年代設計法拉利的人們，很可能是在打造自己也會欣賞的車款。而我猜想在通用汽車那邊，行銷人員會對設計師說：「買休旅車的人多半是為了展現男子氣概，不是真要越野。所以別管懸吊系統了，直接把那傢伙做得又大又威猛就對了。」[6] I think with some effort you can make yourself nearly immune to tricks. 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. If you go and see all the different kinds of things people like in other cultures, and learn about all the different things people have liked in the past, you'll probably find it changes what you like. I doubt you could ever make yourself into a completely universal person, if only because you can only travel in one direction in time. But if you find a work of art that would appeal equally to your friends, to people in Nepal, and to the ancient Greeks, you're probably onto something. 我認為只要付出一些努力，你幾乎可以讓自己對各種花招免疫。雖然更難擺脫自身環境的影響，但至少你能朝那個方向前進。方法就是在時間和空間上廣泛遊歷。如果你去見識其他文化中人們喜愛的各類事物，並了解過去人們曾經喜愛過的不同東西，很可能會發現這改變了你的喜好。我懷疑你永遠無法成為一個完全普世的人，畢竟你只能在時間中單向前行。但如果你發現某件藝術作品能同時吸引你的朋友、尼泊爾人和古希臘人，那你很可能發現了真正的傑作。 My main point here is not how to have good taste, but that there can even be such a thing. And I think I've shown that. There is such a thing as good art. It's art that interests its human audience, and since humans have a lot in common, what interests them is not random. Since there's such a thing as good art, there's also such a thing as good taste, which is the ability to recognize it. 我在此主要想說明的並非如何培養好品味，而是「好品味」這件事確實存在。我想我已經證明了這點。確實存在所謂的好藝術——就是能引起人類觀眾興趣的藝術。既然人類有許多共通之處，能引起他們興趣的事物就不是隨機的。既然有好藝術存在，自然也有好品味這回事，也就是辨識好藝術的能力。 If we were talking about the taste of apples, I'd agree that taste is just personal preference. Some people like certain kinds of apples and others like other kinds, but how can you say that one is right and the other wrong? [7] 如果我們談論的是蘋果的滋味，我會同意口味純屬個人偏好。有些人喜歡某些品種的蘋果，有些人則偏好其他種類，但怎能斷言哪種是對、哪種是錯呢？[7] The thing is, art isn't apples. Art is man-made. It comes with a lot of cultural baggage, and in addition the people who make it often try to trick us. Most people's judgement of art is dominated by these extraneous factors; they're like someone trying to judge the taste of apples in a dish made of equal parts apples and jalapeno peppers. All they're tasting is the peppers. So it turns out you can pick out some people and say that they have better taste than others: they're the ones who actually taste art like apples. 問題在於，藝術並非蘋果。藝術是人為創造的產物，承載著大量文化包袱，此外創作者經常試圖誤導我們。多數人對藝術的判斷都受這些外在因素主導；他們就像在品嚐一道由等量蘋果與墨西哥辣椒組成的料理時，試圖評斷蘋果滋味的人。他們嚐到的全是辣椒。因此事實證明，你可以挑選出某些人並斷言他們的品味比他人更優越：這些人才能真正品嚐出藝術的蘋果本色。 Or to put it more prosaically, they're the people who (a) are hard to trick, and (b) don't just like whatever they grew up with. If you could find people who'd eliminated all such influences on their judgement, you'd probably still see variation in what they liked. But because humans have so much in common, you'd also find they agreed on a lot. They'd nearly all prefer the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to a blank canvas. 或者說得更直白些，這些人具備兩種特質：(a)不易被愚弄，(b)不會僅因習慣而喜愛某物。若能找到那些完全排除這類影響因素的人，你可能仍會發現他們喜好的差異。但由於人類存在諸多共通點，你也會發現他們在許多方面意見一致。幾乎所有人都會選擇西斯汀教堂的天頂畫，而非一塊空白畫布。 Making It 創作之道 I wrote this essay because I was tired of hearing "taste is subjective" and wanted to kill it once and for all. Anyone who makes things knows intuitively that's not true. When you're trying to make art, the temptation to be lazy is as great as in any other kind of work. Of course it matters to do a good job. And yet you can see how great a hold "taste is subjective" has even in the art world by how nervous it makes people to talk about art being good or bad. Those whose jobs require them to judge art, like curators, mostly resort to euphemisms like "significant" or "important" or (getting dangerously close) "realized." [8] 我寫這篇文章，是因為厭倦了聽到「品味是主觀的」這種說法，想徹底終結這個論調。任何從事創作的人都能直覺地明白這並非事實。當你試圖創作藝術時，偷懶的誘惑和其他類型的工作一樣強烈。當然，把事情做好很重要。然而，從人們談論藝術好壞時表現出的不安，就能看出「品味是主觀的」這個觀念在藝術界有多根深蒂固。那些工作需要評判藝術的人，比如策展人，大多會使用「具意義」、「重要」或（近乎危險地接近真相）「完成度高」等委婉說法。[8] I don't have any illusions that being able to talk about art being good or bad will cause the people who talk about it to have anything more useful to say. Indeed, one of the reasons "taste is subjective" found such a receptive audience is that, historically, the things people have said about good taste have generally been such nonsense. 我並不幻想能夠談論藝術的好壞會讓談論者說出更有用的見解。事實上，「品味是主觀的」這種說法之所以廣受接納，其中一個原因正是歷來人們對好品味的論述往往都是些無稽之談。 It's not for the people who talk about art that I want to free the idea of good art, but for those who make it. Right now, ambitious kids going to art school run smack into a brick wall. They arrive hoping one day to be as good as the famous artists they've seen in books, and the first thing they learn is that the concept of good has been retired. Instead everyone is just supposed to explore their own personal vision. [9] 我想解放「好藝術」這個概念，不是為了那些談論藝術的人，而是為了那些創作藝術的人。如今，懷抱雄心壯志進入藝術學院的年輕人，迎面撞上的是一堵高牆。他們滿心期待有朝一日能達到書中那些著名藝術家的水準，卻首先學到「好壞」這個概念已被淘汰。取而代之的是，每個人都只該探索自己的個人視野。[9] When I was in art school, we were looking one day at a slide of some great fifteenth century painting, and one of the students asked "Why don't artists paint like that now?" The room suddenly got quiet. Though rarely asked out loud, this question lurks uncomfortably in the back of every art student's mind. It was as if someone had brought up the topic of lung cancer in a meeting within Philip Morris. 我在藝術學院時，有次課堂上放映著十五世紀某幅偉大畫作的幻燈片，一位同學問道：「為什麼現在的藝術家不這樣畫了？」教室突然安靜下來。這個問題雖然鮮少被大聲提出，卻如影隨形地縈繞在每個藝術系學生的腦海。那情景就像有人在菲利普莫里斯公司的會議上提起肺癌話題般尷尬。 "Well," the professor replied, "we're interested in different questions now." He was a pretty nice guy, but at the time I couldn't help wishing I could send him back to fifteenth century Florence to explain in person to Leonardo & Co. how we had moved beyond their early, limited concept of art. Just imagine that conversation. 「這個嘛，」教授回答，「我們現在關注的是不同的問題。」他是個相當和善的人，但當時我忍不住幻想能把他送回十五世紀的佛羅倫斯，讓他親自向達文西那幫人解釋，我們是如何超越他們早期那種狹隘的藝術概念。想像一下那場對話吧。 In fact, one of the reasons artists in fifteenth century Florence made such great things was that they believed you could make great things. [10] They were intensely competitive and were always trying to outdo one another, like mathematicians or physicists today—maybe like anyone who has ever done anything really well. 事實上，十五世紀佛羅倫斯的藝術家們之所以能創作出如此偉大的作品，其中一個原因正是他們深信自己能夠成就偉大。[10] 他們充滿競爭意識，總想超越彼此，就像當今的數學家或物理學家——或許就像任何真正擅長某件事的人那樣。 The idea that you could make great things was not just a useful illusion. They were actually right. So the most important consequence of realizing there can be good art is that it frees artists to try to make it. To the ambitious kids arriving at art school this year hoping one day to make great things, I say: don't believe it when they tell you this is a naive and outdated ambition. There is such a thing as good art, and if you try to make it, there are people who will notice. 「你能創造偉大作品」這個信念並非只是有用的幻覺。他們確實是對的。因此，意識到「優秀藝術確實存在」最重要的意義，在於它解放了藝術家，讓他們敢於嘗試創作。對於今年懷抱雄心進入藝術學院、渴望有朝一日創作出偉大作品的年輕學子，我要說：當有人告訴你這只是天真過時的抱負時，別相信他們。優秀藝術確實存在，而如果你努力創作，總會有人注意到。 Notes 筆記 [1] This is not to say, of course, that good paintings must have faces in them, just that everyone's visual piano has that key on it. There are situations in which you want to avoid faces, precisely because they attract so much attention. But you can see how universally faces work by their prevalence in advertising. [1] 當然，這並非指優秀畫作必須包含人臉，只是每個人的視覺「鋼琴」上都擁有這個琴鍵。在某些情境下，你反而會刻意避開人臉，正因為它們太容易吸引注意力。但從廣告中人臉的普遍運用，你就能明白人臉的視覺效力有多麼強大。 [2] The other reason it's easy to believe is that it makes people feel good. To a kid, this idea is crack. In every other respect they're constantly being told that they have a lot to learn. But in this they're perfect. Their opinion carries the same weight as any adult's. You should probably question anything you believed as a kid that you'd want to believe this much. [2] 另一個容易讓人相信的原因是，這會讓人感覺良好。對孩子來說，這種想法就像毒品一樣令人上癮。在其他所有方面，他們不斷被告知還有許多需要學習。但在這件事上，他們卻是完美的。他們的意見與任何成年人的意見具有同等份量。你或許應該質疑任何你在童年時期深信不疑、且如此渴望相信的事物。 [3] It's conceivable that the elegance of proofs is quantifiable, in the sense that there may be some formal measure that turns out to coincide with mathematicians' judgements. Perhaps it would be worth trying to make a formal language for proofs in which those considered more elegant consistently came out shorter (perhaps after being macroexpanded or compiled). [3] 可以想見，證明的優雅程度或許是可量化的，這意味著可能存在某種形式化的衡量標準，最終會與數學家們的判斷相吻合。也許值得嘗試為證明創造一種形式化語言，在其中那些被認為更優雅的證明總是能以更簡短的形式呈現（或許在經過宏展開或編譯之後）。 [4] Maybe it would be possible to make art that would appeal to space aliens, but I'm not going to get into that because (a) it's too hard to answer, and (b) I'm satisfied if I can establish that good art is a meaningful idea for human audiences. [4] 或許有可能創作出能吸引外星人的藝術，但我不打算深入探討這個問題，因為（a）這太難回答了，而且（b）只要能確立「好的藝術對人類觀眾而言是個有意義的概念」，我就心滿意足了。 [5] If early abstract paintings seem more interesting than later ones, it may be because the first abstract painters were trained to paint from life, and their hands thus tended to make the kind of gestures you use in representing physical things. In effect they were saying "scaramara" instead of "uebfgbsb." [5] 如果早期的抽象畫作看起來比後期的更有趣，可能是因為第一批抽象畫家受過寫生訓練，他們的手自然會做出描繪實物時的那種動作。實際上，他們是在說「斯卡拉馬拉」而非「烏埃布夫格布斯布」。 [6] It's a bit more complicated, because sometimes artists unconsciously use tricks by imitating art that does. [6] 情況其實更複雜些，因為有時藝術家會不自覺地模仿那些確實使用技巧的藝術品。 [7] I phrased this in terms of the taste of apples because if people can see the apples, they can be fooled. When I was a kid most apples were a variety called Red Delicious that had been bred to look appealing in stores, but which didn't taste very good. [7] 我用蘋果的口味來比喻這個概念，因為如果人們能看到蘋果，就可能被欺騙。小時候市面上大多數蘋果都是「紅地厘蛇果」這個品種，專門培育來在商店裡看起來誘人，但實際上味道不怎麼樣。 [8] To be fair, curators are in a difficult position. If they're dealing with recent art, they have to include things in shows that they think are bad. That's because the test for what gets included in shows is basically the market price, and for recent art that is largely determined by successful businessmen and their wives. So it's not always intellectual dishonesty that makes curators and dealers use neutral-sounding language. [8] 公平地說，策展人處境艱難。如果他們處理的是當代藝術，就必須在展覽中納入一些他們認為糟糕的作品。這是因為展覽作品的篩選標準基本上是市場價格，而當代藝術的價格很大程度上取決於成功商人及其夫人的喜好。所以策展人和畫商使用中性措辭，並不總是出於知識上的不誠實。 [9] What happens in practice is that everyone gets really good at talking about art. As the art itself gets more random, the effort that would have gone into the work goes instead into the intellectual sounding theory behind it. "My work represents an exploration of gender and sexuality in an urban context," etc. Different people win at that game. [9] 實際情況是，每個人都變得非常擅長談論藝術。隨著藝術本身變得越來越隨機，原本應該投入作品的心力，反而轉向了聽起來很有學問的理論背後。「我的作品探索了都市情境中的性別與性取向議題」等等。不同的人在這個遊戲中勝出。 [10] There were several other reasons, including that Florence was then the richest and most sophisticated city in the world, and that they lived in a time before photography had (a) killed portraiture as a source of income and (b) made brand the dominant factor in the sale of art. [10] 還有其他幾個原因，包括佛羅倫斯當時是世界上最富裕且最精緻的城市，而且他們生活在攝影尚未（a）扼殺肖像畫作為收入來源，以及（b）使品牌成為藝術銷售主導因素的時代。 Incidentally, I'm not saying that good art = fifteenth century European art. I'm not saying we should make what they made, but that we should work like they worked. There are fields now in which many people work with the same energy and honesty that fifteenth century artists did, but art is not one of them. 順帶一提，我並不是說好的藝術等同於十五世紀的歐洲藝術。我不是說我們應該複製他們的作品，而是應該像他們那樣工作。現在有些領域確實有許多人以十五世紀藝術家般的能量與誠實態度工作，但藝術領域並非如此。 Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this, and to Paul Watson for permission to use the image at the top. 感謝 Trevor Blackwell、Jessica Livingston 和 Robert Morris 閱讀本文草稿，並感謝 Paul Watson 允許使用頂部的圖片。 |
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 | | Japanese Translation 《藝術何以能臻於善境》 | | | | Simplified Chinese Translation 《藝術何以能臻於善境》 |
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