80 percent prefer ashes of mona lisa to perfect replica, care more about effort and single author attrib. Than intrinsic properties, like bowerbirds
Preferring live theatre, live vocals because of difficulty, want it to reveal artist. Same with metre and realism in art.
Lobster and tans both underwent status reversals w/ scarcity.
We care about how mechanical/intentional the production was.
Art must be useless to signal an abundance of wealth, time, etc. A well stocked pantry doesnt work quite as well.
We care so much about being good critics/consumers in order to signal discernment i.e. the general ability to understand and navigate status hierarchies.
Much of the convergence to aesthetic hierarchies is because of shared incentives to signal status requires a single hierachy for taste to work as a sigbal of norm discernment
- Does this make alleged example of aesthetic learning more dubious?
Some issues, realist painting didmt get easier, like crafts. Maybe it was deprecated by analogy. But what about poetry and metre? What about wabi sabi? What about chinese attitudes to forgery? Maybe mere discernment can be signaled w/ wabi sabi and stuff, like art collectors.