Nabeel on what makes art great: 1) Great art is not predictable or obvious, it is surprising. 2) Great art contains multiple overlapping layers of echoes. 3) Great art contains more meaning than can be paraphrased.
Here’s a Jackson Dahl podcast with Tyler and Nabeel.
Excerpts:
In good human works, every detail feels carefully chosen.
Great artworks are hard to compress (i.e. have high information content); slop is easy to compress.
We barely see everyday objects because we are so used to them (low novel information again), but great art can make you see these objects afresh, the way a child might.
This strangeness is essential for the effect of great art, because we like to make sense of things, and if we make sense of things too easily they are not interesting to us; great works of art are therefore necessarily somewhat difficult to grasp the meaning of, their meanings are multiple and constantly shifting, and they require a pleasant kind of effort to make sense of.
Great literary works are full of these hidden patterns, which silently create a kind of electric charge of coherence across the text as you are reading, and which contribute to the feeling that we are reading something intentionally knit together as an aesthetic whole.
…not only do you have to surprise readers in interesting and precise ways, but you also have to make sure that multiple patterns cohere across the entire work and are not simply local and uncorrelated.
There’s a feeling of limitless depth that is unique to the really great works: it feels like you can always find more patterns, more coherence, more beauty on rereading. Or that more readings will give you a deeper understanding, but never a perfect or complete one.
Another facet of depth is mystery. Good art is always a bit under-explained. It allows you to speculate. Characters may have multiple motives.
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