Children neither see nor think about the taste in their homes, which are simply backdrops to their lives, not aesthetic zones. Whatever taste is expressed in the home is simply the way things are — like the forces of nature — and it’s almost impossible for children to step back and think about their parents’ taste. During high school, in particular, kids begin to modify the taste they learned from their parents by what they encounter on their own — at school, in the mall, on television and, these days, on the Web.

I, for instance, grew up in a home where my parents’ taste in interior design tended toward excess, checked only by their frugality and limited resources. Just about every available surface was covered with knickknacks. My mother invested a lot of those possessions with much more sentimental than aesthetic value; the knickknack came from a wonderful vacation, a friend gave it to her for Christmas, it was made by one of her children, etc. When she cleaned house, she dusted them lovingly. My parents were very decent people, with good values accompanied by charitable actions. But, as an artist with a gimlet eye, I know that their taste was pretty bad.

A painter like me can see that the objects in my parents’ home, considered as a whole, made no aesthetic sense whatsoever, even if a few of their possessions, considered individually, were fairly nice-looking. So why wasn’t their taste any better?

Good taste requires, for starters, that the whole prevail over the parts. Few of us have either the money or the aesthetic focus to construct our interiors following this principle (one followed, within their paintings, by almost all great painters). Instead, most of us acquire our aesthetic objects — i.e., those things in plain view in our homes that we like to look at — rather serendipitously, over time, the same way my parents did. Good taste necessitates a certain mercilessness — a cool determination to cull sentimentally valued individual objects out of the herd of one’s visible possessions for the sake of the aesthetic whole.

A world-class contemporary art dealer, now retired, once told my husband how to decorate a room. Take everything out of it, he said, and bring the objects back in, in order of size, one at a time. With each object, ask yourself if it’s absolutely necessary. If it’s not, he said, leave it out. How many of us are willing do to that? (He also said to move furniture away from the walls, so as to make room for large paintings. He sold large paintings, of course.)

Yet my parents genuinely aspired to good taste. They actively wanted their home to look nice, to exude better taste and, more important, they wanted to better themselves through art. They went so far as to hang a framed (but otherwise utterly worthless) reproduction of a Cézanne landscape painting over their mantle, even though my mother knew nothing about the artist and didn’t particularly like her reproduced picture. They read Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Philosophy, they belonged to local reading groups, and they made sure their children got to see Shakespeare plays and experience the occasional museum visit.

Their taste was the despised “middlebrow” taste ridiculed by Dwight Macdonald in his 1960 essay, “Masscult and Midcult.” Macdonald and other intellectuals (including the great American art critic, Clement Greenberg) saw “middlebrow” culture as the pathetically pretentious and ultimately comic efforts of the despised bourgeoisie to put on airs.

Macdonald and Greenberg were parlor Marxists who apparently and somewhat paradoxically believed that you were either born to “get” higher culture, or you weren’t. Their attacks, together with larger forces such as the coming of television, blew a hole in the ship of middlebrow culture and taste and — as Joan Shelley Rubin lucidly documents in her excellent book, The Making of Middlebrow Culture — it’s been slowly sinking ever since. Sure, there’s a bunch of reading groups in various cities, and Oprah’s Book Club, but these things are a far cry from the Book of the Month Club or Dr. Frank Baxter on TV on Shakespeare.

For all its faults — awkward abridgements of the classics, bowdlerization, the heavy editorial hand of anthologizers and packagers — the bourgeois, middlebrow culture of my parents that has now almost disappeared managed to spread art far and wide in its day. It permitted thousands of people outside the plutocracy and the ivory tower to understand and appreciate higher culture at some palpable level. Even amid forests of knickknacks, it permitted children like me to grow up with a sense that there was something beyond department-store shopping and television sitcoms that mattered.

We lost something when we permitted the intellectual elite to knock bourgeois culture down so that masscult could then trample it to death.

NOTES

1. Once again, “good taste” and “bad taste” aren’t hard and fast, scientifically provable, immutable exacts. But they do exist.

2. There’s also such a thing as “no taste,” where certain people just don’t care much what things look like. They subscribe to the visual equivalent of people totally not into food who say, “I eat to live, not live to eat.”

3. My parents’ taste wasn’t on account of economic deprivation. They were marginally “comfortable.”

4. My own taste isn’t perfect, not even connoisseur-level, but it is better than most. I am, however, somebody who has spent an awful lot of time looking at art, at interior design, and thinking about them, so it stands to reason I have a little heightened visual acuity at my service. In the area of wardrobe, I’ve got serious work to do.

5. Many masscult things rise to the level of, well, something better than low masscult — e.g., such sitcoms as “The Honeymooners,” “I Love Lucy,” “Mary Tyler Moore,” “Cheers,” and “The Office.”

Next time: Teaching taste in the classroom.