Art & Design
Copy What You Like
paulgraham.com
Art & Design
4 min read → 50 sec
Taste improves when you copy only what you truly like, strip away status signals, and imitate the strengths rather than the flaws of admired work. School, philosophy, expert systems, and painting show how authority can distort judgment.
Copy only what you genuinely like, not what others admire
Status can disguise weak work as impressive
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003
Ignore presentation to tell liking from being impressed.
Status can disguise weak work.
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Copy what makes good work good, not its visible flaws.
Flaws are easier to imitate.
04 / 16
005
You have to decide for yourself what is good.
Authorities will mislead you.
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006
High school English classes made short stories seem like the highest form of writing, though that was false.
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007
School rewarded stories where little happened except complicated suffering.
This trained bad imitation.
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Philosophy papers often said nothing definite enough to refute.
Imitating them produced empty writing.
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009
Expert systems looked impressive and sold for high prices, but they were a fad going nowhere.
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The expert system buyers were largely government agencies that also paid thousands for screwdrivers and toilet seats.
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011
A garage sale test can reveal real taste.
Ask what you would pay for art dirty, frameless, and anonymous.
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Guilty pleasures reveal genuine taste better than virtuous choices.
Status seeking distorts what people claim to like.
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99%
of people reading Ulysses are thinking 'I'm reading Ulysses' as they do it
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014
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painters copied brown Renaissance paintings, but they were copying dirt, not the original colors.
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015
The art world made the insider-versus-good-work tradeoff so obvious that it exposed the same problem across fields.
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