I feel nothing when I look at the Mona Lisa, and even accounting for subjectivity, I would honestly be surprised if very many do. You can get an art snob to wax poetic with fifteen paragraphs about what emotions it's meant to convey in you, or alternatively, you could just look at good art produced today which evokes emotions on its own merit, without needing somebody to tell you why and what emotions it's supposed to evoke in you.

> People liking something you don’t does not make them brainwashed

It very much does when you get to the points of comical absurdity like this bullshit[1] and that bullshit[2]. Once people are committed to the social status game of art snobbery, they have to take it further and further, justifying the artistic merit of increasingly meritless 'art', lest they reveal their snobbery was fake all along, and then you have a blank fucking canvas selling for millions. It's not even that people like something I don't, but rather that the idea they actually like it at all is a charade.

[1]https://nypost.com/2024/12/03/lifestyle/blank-pure-white-art... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No._5,_1948

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Skimming the article you linked, I don't think it's in contention with what I'm saying? It essentially points out that "taste" is not about actually liking something, but responding to social incentives, which is exactly what I mean by a social status game.