Whither Tartaria?

Uses the 'Tartaria' conspiracy theory (we're savages living amid a lost civilization's beautiful buildings, told they merely 'went out of style') to frame a real puzzle: people prefer traditional/classical architecture ~70/30, yet 92% of new federal buildings are modern — and the shift is consistent across art forms (dress, buildings, sculpture, poetry, music). Scott offers a structured menu of explanations: flaunting->hiding wealth (Depression/French Revolution); elites signaling elite-class allegiance / getting out of touch; Catholic->Protestant plainness; genuine new aesthetic truths; rising labor cost (rejected — doesn't explain clothing/poetry); the art/mass-culture split (pop music and superhero movies absorbed the easy-to-enjoy audience); and the standout — signaling wealth -> signaling taste (once industrial production made beauty cheap, elites switched to hard-to-discern 'taste' codes that only insiders can read). Closes on why it matters: art is an unusually clean laboratory for studying how a field's status incentives (impress-the-public vs. impress-the-guild) shape its output.

Quality 76 · Excellent. Low-Excellent. An iconic framing and a genuinely generative essay; the 'signaling wealth -> signaling taste' hypothesis (taste-signaling requires quality that's hard to discern, so beauty had to become illegible) is sharp and exportable, and the closing tie to fields-talking-to-themselves connects to his expertise/legibility work. Held just into Excellent because it is an explicitly hedged menu of hypotheses rather than a committed original thesis. 76.

Claude’s paradigm shift 50 · Moderate. Moderate. Draws on existing signaling/distinction theory (Veblen, Bourdieu); the fresh synthesis is applying it to the cross-art-form modernist turn and the taste-code argument. 50.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. An iconic, generative essay using the 'Tartaria' conspiracy to frame why beauty left public architecture, with the sharp, exportable 'signaling wealth → signaling taste' (beauty became illegible) hypothesis. Conceptual influence within intellectual/aesthetics discourse, no material change — low RWI.