Professor Fendrich is very busy with all the things that professors are busy with at the end of a semester. Plus it’s Mother’s Day, and she’s a mother (I’m not). So when I told her to take a breather and I’d fill in for her, she was pretty quick to say yes.

Lately, a lot of readers seem especially up in arms about the idea that some people’s taste might be better than others’ and that both studio and art history professors might actually help students improve their taste.

I’ve got some general reactions to all of the angry comments, but first I’d like to say something to someone named Marc Country, about the art critic Clement Greenberg.

Professor Fendrich would be too modest to put this in her blog herself, but I happen to know that she knew Mr. Greenberg and he even came to her studio once. She said he was charming and fascinating (and that he drank two beers while he was there), but that he was absolutely sure that his own taste in painting was the best, that he had a special eye, and that hers wasn’t quite at his level and probably wouldn’t ever quite get there. He was willing, she told me, to guide her by doing something he called “taking the painting around the clock,” which meant rotating it 90 degrees and analyzing it in each of the four positions on the wall. (I’ve tried doing that with some of the pictures I have at home, but all it does is confuse me.)

Before I met Professor Fendrich, I never thought about my taste at all. But I’ve learned a lot from hanging around her, listening in sometimes while she talks to students about art, and now from reading her posts and all the comments people are posting about her ideas.

Professor Fendrich reads a lot of this old French philosopher Tocqueville, and has even directed me to read some pages, from his book about America, that are about what happens to art in America compared to art in France, where there were high-class people we don’t have here in America.

She told me that she thinks that people getting so worked up about taste is something that could only happen in a democracy. She says that Tocqueville’s book is about how people in a democracy love equality more than anything else. Even though they say they love freedom, when push comes to shove, they’ll take equality over freedom any day.

I think this is still true today. The mere thought that some people might have better taste than other people seems to make a lot of people go bonkers. (It’s funny, though, how they accept the fact that some people are just plain better at sports than other people, or that some people have better singing voices than others do. Even if you’re born with sports talent or musical ability, you have to work hard to improve them, and people accept that. But they don’t like the idea that the same things might apply to taste.)

Some of the commentators seem to think that she must beat her students over the head with her opinions. Nope. Never. I’ve seen her in action, and she just talks about what’s beautiful or moving in a painting and asks students to follow along while she talks. Then they go off and pick their own favorite art.

I’ve learned a lot from going on some of Professor Fendrich’s field trips to museums. Sometimes I agree with Professor Fendrich’s opinion, and sometimes I stick to my own opinion. But the discussions, which start with her talking about which works of art she thinks are really great and which she thinks aren’t, are what really help me improve my taste. If I had to rely on just museum labels or wall texts, which tell us a lot about the history of the art but very little or nothing about how the art actually works, visually, I never would have gotten anywhere.

The funny thing is that while I’m trying to improve my taste (not by just following along with Professor Fendrich’s, mind you, but by thinking about what she’s said and arguing with myself about it), I’ve also been reading all these comments from other professors (at least I assume most of them are from professors) about how anybody’s taste is as good as anybody else’s.

A lot of people seem to think that to say anything against the idea that tastes are equal is “elitist” (a new word for me), and that art professors shouldn’t go around “shoving their taste down students’ throats,” as I think one commentator more or less said.

What’s funny is that there’s no one more “elitist” (I think I’m using the word right) than college professors. They think they’re smarter than most other people (and they often are, although professor smartness doesn’t go hand-in-hand with regular smartness, which I think counts for a lot more). They’re also more conscious of rank than anybody I know, even people in the military. An assistant professor is lowly, an instructor lowlier still, an associate professor is pretty good, but only a full professor is a real bull (or bullette, I guess you might say).

It seems that a lot of commentators think that students are too impressionable to handle any professing of taste by the professor. All I can say is that if I were a student and a professor who was supposedly teaching me about art wouldn’t open up about his or her taste, or “aesthetic judgment,” as Professor Fendrich and others call it, I’d ask to get my tuition back.

I have to admit that I’m not necessarily any happier in my life since Professor Fendrich has started me thinking about taste. “Ignorance is bliss,” they say, and that applies as much to taste as it does to anything. But my life is a little … deeper, I think. I don’t know. I think my life has changed because I now notice some things that are beautiful that I absolutely never noticed before. I’ve even started to think about how my home looks, and I’ve made some changes in the things I put on display.

You know, I keep hearing professors say that college is a time when students are confronted with ideas that are very different from the ones they knew about before they came to college, and that this is a good thing. Well, in my book, that should go for taste, too. And the professors who aren’t making students just a little uncomfortable about their tastes aren’t really doing their jobs.