In the next few posts, I’m going to tackle the topic of aesthetic taste — what’s happened to it in the past couple of decades, whether or not we can, or ought, to teach it, and if so, how we can teach it.

Freshmen arrive on campus with their own taste in everything from music to clothes, food, and electronic equipment. Consciously or not, they also have developed certain tastes in art. Taste being what it is, and young people being what they are, freshmen usually arrive with either no taste or very bad taste — not just in art, but in everything — but in either case, they’re very comfortable with their tastes. They don’t expect or want to change them. The paradox is that it just so happens that their taste, which they consider to be something that’s very particular and individual, is, in most important respects, exactly the same as that of most other college freshmen.

If college students have any opinion about art, it’s usually that M.C. Escher and Salvador Dalí are two great artists. Those who have “advanced taste”—i.e., have taken AP art history—love Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Only the rare bird likes Cézanne or De Kooning.

The aesthetic taste of college students derives from what their homes look like and their high school experience. High-school taste fuses together the sights of the mall, TV, the movies, and the Internet. The occasional forced march through an art museum, led by a well-intentioned high school art teacher, makes nary a dent. No matter their socio-economic background, gender, ethnicity, or race, without active intervention on the part of college teachers or enlightened peers, it’s unlikely that students will change their taste during college.

But it’s not just college students who often have narrow or bad taste (these differ, I admit, but they frequently overlap). I’ve known many powerhouse intellectuals, academics, bankers, doctors, and lawyers whose taste was execrable, or just plain ordinary, or who were completely oblivious to taste. How can smart, successful people hang tired, perfunctorily chosen landscapes on their own living room walls, or permit porcelain ducks with little bonnets on their heads to waddle across their coffee tables? Are they lacking some aesthetic gene that we artists have? Or are they just too busy to notice how things look in their own homes?

It’s said that there’s no accounting for taste, although I believe it’s often the case that it’s rather easy to account for it. Yes, taste may be subjective at its core, but that core is surrounded by a lot of reasons that very adequately explain why something is good or bad. There are many who would argue that because of the subjectivity of taste, it follows that no one, including a college teacher, has the right to challenge the taste of another person, including students.

But taking my cue from the wise David Hume (whom I’ll explore further in a future post), I see another side to taste. For all the impossibility of defining good taste, good taste tends to precipitate out over time and then solidify. “Say, that Manet painting sure is beautiful,” is almost as much a fact in its universal application as, “Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius.” In fact, good taste easily ossifies, which explains Martha Stewart. The idea that taste is radically subjective is an utterly inadequate explanation of aesthetic matters.

The higher tastes—hearing and sight—are clearly molded by particular cultures. Just as bonsai trees owe their grownup state to the multiple causes of how they were planted, their particular container, the light, the wiring of their roots, the water and fertilizer and the clipping of their limbs, visual taste varies from culture to culture. Even so, all tastes, everywhere, are contingent on the quality of the “gardener.”

Next time: How a college professor teaches taste.