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Yes, Virginia, There Is Good Taste
By Laurie Fendrich
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My apologies. This post is long. It’s the last in a series of posts on taste.
Students arrive at college assuming, much like everybody else, that taste is simply a natural expression of personality, and that it’s subjective and not worth arguing about. (“De gustibus non est disputandum,” as those who know their Latin like to say.)
It vexes most of my students — who readily concede that there exist varying levels of athletic abilities and drawing or musical talent — to think that an ability to discriminate along the lines of visual taste might not be evenly distributed among us. But even though visual taste rests on a foundation of visual acuity that isn’t the same in everyone, what’s far more important — and I emphasize this when I teach — is how it builds from there.
I discuss with my students what taste, in all its complexities, means. Whenever I project images of works of art in class, or conduct field trips to museums and galleries, I don’t hesitate to talk about art in terms of good, better, and best — to judge, and thereby demonstrate to my students, my taste. And I frequently hand out David Hume’s essay, “Of the Standard of Taste,” for discussion.
Good taste requires that a lot of things come together — a brain that is capable of acute visual discrimination, a broad range of experience in looking at visual things (coupled with a concentration in looking at the best visual things), thinking about what objects look like, abstracted from their utility, having an open mind when encountering new visual stimuli, possessing a willingness to weigh the relative visual merits of the objects we look at, and — it should be unnecessary to add, but it’s important — being in a generally sound mental and physical state when looking, thinking, and weighing. (Some knowledge of historical context is needed, too, but when it outweighs everything else, it leads to sterile responses to art.)
“I don’t know what I like,” or “I won’t talk about what I like,” followed by, “But I know a lot about historical context” is not much more useful, except for people who love taxonomy, than “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.”)
As Hume points out, it’s nearly impossible that all of the desired qualities for good taste will converge at a high level in a single person. Moreover, as I mentioned in a previous post, there is such a thing as no taste, i.e., people for whom the aesthetics of their visual surroundings simply don’t matter much.
When art teachers teach students something about the vocabulary of art — the elements of color, the basics of pictorial composition, the nuances of mark-making, etc, they want them to use that vocabulary. Teachers coax their students into examining, articulating, and judging works of art beyond merely saying, “I like that” or “I don’t like that,” or parroting back data about the work. (If the unexamined life isn’t worth living, then surely unexamined taste isn’t worth having.) As Antonio Damasio argues in his revelatory book Descartes’s Error, reasoning and judging are inextricably linked. Nowhere is this truer than in matters pertaining to art.
Whenever I show images of paintings in class, I include a broad range of artists — those who are considered very good by art historians or art critics (either from hundreds of years ago or from right now in a Chelsea gallery), as well as artists who were considered bad in their own times but are now considered good, or good in their own times but now considered bad. Clearly, taste changes over time. But once again, I draw on Hume for a critical point: Taste, he argues, has undergone far fewer revolutions in history than “the pretended decisions of science,” and indeed, after a long enough time has passed, taste tends to settle down.
It should go without saying that when I teach art I always include references to the artist’s times — Shakespeare’s understanding of the “form and pressure” of one’s times informs all solid interpretations of culture. Just as important, however, I discuss in detail the work’s composition, color structure, and paint handling.
I might say something like, “This isn’t exactly to my taste, but I have to admire the way the artist lays down paint with such a light touch,” or, “I don’t really like to look at pictures of animals being killed, but Delacroix sure can paint a lion so that that I’m in awe of its violent struggle against death, without actually getting nauseated — and all the while the guy keeps control of that yellow, tamping down its intensity, so that it doesn’t suffocate the other colors.”
In offering my own opinions, I’m actually inviting my students to form their own — not denying them their own. I want them to see that there’s room for everyone to make judgments about art without simultaneously caving in to the idea that taste is entirely subjective. The important point for them to reckon with is that some judgments about art are better than others.
The paintings I show aren’t, after all, selected at random. For the jpeg to exist in an art-historical context, it was sifted through the screen of judgments repeated over time. A veritable army of knowledgeable and sophisticated curators, art historians, connoisseurs, art collectors, other artists, and, of course, the teacher (moi) stand in as a collective approximation of Hume’s seldom-found excellent judge. (No, I do not have students take quizzes — expressed or implied — in which they give right-or-wrong answers about which paintings are good, better, or best.)
When I make a critical comment about a compositional or color problem in a painting-in-progress by a beginning student, it’s not uncommon for that student to say, “But I wanted it that way.” A student’s defending a work by retreating into radical subjectivity (i.e., intention is all that counts, and all intentions are immune from judgment) is an understandable emotional reaction. It takes time for a student to learn to separate his or personality from its accompanying taste. If students keep up that kind of defensive attitude (a few do — but most have at least an inkling that it obviates the whole point of taking a painting class), they’ll never progress much.
But there is a paradox to good taste, one that postmodern artists have seized upon, albeit a little too much, in my opinion. Once good taste is “perfected” (the classicist view; romantics think it’s vaguely knowable, but unreachable), fixed, labeled, and locked into place, it atrophies and becomes boring. That paradox of good taste haunts all of us who think hard about what makes something beautiful.
Bringing this point up with that defensive beginning painting student isn’t very helpful — not because it will make classroom life more difficult for me, but because it will confuse the student just when he or she should be trying to get a grasp of the basics. A little later — say, in intermediate or advanced painting — it’s fine, even essential.
I’ll say it right out loud: Teaching taste to students has been seriously undermined by postmodernism, which privileges a kind of cultural revenge (which in turn boils down to “there shall be no greatness”) over aesthetics. Postmodernism doesn’t merely eschew good taste — it considers it the enemy of art.
But we live in a postmodern age that can’t simply be wished away or retreated from in the way that the beginning student, mentioned above, retreats into it. A crudely silk-screened Marilyn by Andy Warhol now easily crosses over from the mall (where it hangs in reproduction-of-a-reproduction poster form next to posters of Kevin Federline and Beyoncé) to the wall of a tasteful Manhattan apartment, where — as an “original” reproduction — it hovers over a Mies Barcelona chair. Warhol, and Pop Art in general, have beaten into us the idea that taste resides not in the work of art, but in its context.
Which is why Jeff Koons is rich. (Isn’t it a sweet irony that the same wealthy collector who buys an intentionally wretchedly tasteless Jeff Koons “Easy Fun” painting wouldn’t dream of having a whole apartment that exuded the same taste as that expressed inside that picture?)
I’ve been in semi-heated discussions with people who offer the Foucaultian argument that taste derives predominantly from class, privilege, and elitism. Some of my artist friends argue that good taste has never been more than a fancy cover for who’s got the power and money in art. I can’t but smile when I hear this argument, because one of the worst manifestations of taste on the planet is ostentatiousness — precisely the taste brought on when only power and money are the driving forces.
Most art students, who are struggling to understand art’s inherent power — that is, to figure out why some paintings and sculptures move them, and some don’t — aren’t very interested in any of this. And the good news is that taste — particularly students’ taste — is able to change and improve as we grow more experienced and critical with aesthetic matters.
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