> Within the group, the extent of your knowledge will help you distinguish from others.
> the way this taste (but also the artist's skill) is acquired is highly correlated with social belonging: your appreciation of a specific piece of work is informed by your past experience within your social environment.
The setting you describe is a perfect example of this: a group with agreed upon acquired taste, which uses knowledge of that taste as criteria to rank art pieces. In that setting, the judgement is bidirectional: not only do people judge art pieces' worth, but they are judged for their good taste by their ability to separate the pieces according to the group's criteria.
> Our daughter likes to draw a lot in her own style. Now she is revisiting her old drawings and redrawing them few years later. While her earlier work has some naive charm, she tends to prefer her later pieces, and indeed I do find her current work "better" in the sense that the characters are "more" there - they are more skilfully renderered and have "more character".
I don't want to judge your daughter's art, but it is perhaps unsurprising that she uses her latest opinion to judge her own work. As she acquires a sense of aesthetics, her new artwork will tend to confirm to that new taste.
"... but they are judged for their good taste by their ability to separate the pieces according to the group's criteria."
On this we disagree. I think the students can do the sorting without peer pressure, driven only by their innate perception and love of the specific genre.
If we enforce this by making the selection process completely anonymous? Do you still feel the students will still feel judged for their taste?
There is no specific peer pressure mechanism in what I discussed. The system is internalized by the people doing the rating; it is learned as a part of being in the group, discussing whith others about what you like and how you create, and by following the courses in your example.
It is also not only values, but also knowledge. If you know classical music theory, you will be able to appreciate and distinguish baroque music, while people with other educations may seek different things in the music they listen to.
> Do you still feel the students will still feel judged for their taste?
The main point here isn't about judgement. It's a personal gratification for the viewer to be able to see subtleties in the author's art. It's very similar to people personally enjoying learning about technology, while also being able to acknowledge peers in a technical discussion and also seeing social benefits from being able to program.
> Within the group, the extent of your knowledge will help you distinguish from others.
> the way this taste (but also the artist's skill) is acquired is highly correlated with social belonging: your appreciation of a specific piece of work is informed by your past experience within your social environment.
The setting you describe is a perfect example of this: a group with agreed upon acquired taste, which uses knowledge of that taste as criteria to rank art pieces. In that setting, the judgement is bidirectional: not only do people judge art pieces' worth, but they are judged for their good taste by their ability to separate the pieces according to the group's criteria.
> Our daughter likes to draw a lot in her own style. Now she is revisiting her old drawings and redrawing them few years later. While her earlier work has some naive charm, she tends to prefer her later pieces, and indeed I do find her current work "better" in the sense that the characters are "more" there - they are more skilfully renderered and have "more character".
I don't want to judge your daughter's art, but it is perhaps unsurprising that she uses her latest opinion to judge her own work. As she acquires a sense of aesthetics, her new artwork will tend to confirm to that new taste.