Reader responses to my previous post compel me to digress from my planned post—on how I go about teaching taste—in order to address the question of why I presume to teach taste to my students.

My initial post on taste reveals the extreme, even raw sensitivity many people—even university professors—have when it comes to the mere suggestion that taste might be a hierarchical matter. That a college professor like me dares to teach good taste—instead of simply “explaining” it, as if it’s a neutral matter, like a fact—elicits the charge of elitism (not so bad), snobbism (pretty bad) and even worse, words that don’t belong in print on a blog site dedicated to issues of higher education (very bad).

Ah, that nasty word elitism. But like Jon Stewart said, in mocking the flurry of commentators who charged Barack Obama with “elitism” after his comments about small-town Pennsylvanians, don’t we want leaders in democracies who are “better than us”? When it comes to art, the questions really are, Why are college art professors so afraid to convey to their students that they have superior taste?, and, Why are they afraid to teach that taste to their students?

Teaching good taste is a thoroughly democratic invitation to young art students to join the club of art-lovers by teaching them to become passionate about—rather than merely “knowledgeable” about—art.

The subjectivity of taste that always applies when things being compared are very close (e.g., judging vanilla ice cream to be superior to chocolate ice cream) does not negate the underlying truth that when things being compared are very far apart (e.g., judging Velázquez’s Las Meninas to be superior to a toddler’s scribble), no one with the least bit of visual acuity would say judgment is merely a matter of subjectivity. From this we derive the principle that matters of taste imply a hierarchy of taste, even if we can never be certain about its internal ordering.

Matters of taste and matters of morals are, in a deeply complicated way (richly explored by both Rousseau and Hume) analogous. Both have a ranking from good to bad that’s never going to be provable. A curious fact of human experience, however, is that even thinking people can’t shake the sense that these rankings are, roughly speaking, true and incontrovertible hierarchies—and not mere matters of subjectivity.

At the heart of the culture wars is a fight between many decent people with deep moral values fighting relativists, many of them in universities (most of whom are as equally decent as the first group), insisting that moral values are mere social constructs.

This same relativism clearly shows up in people who insist that matters of aesthetics boil down to preferences. It shows up in university professors when they say they are there simply to “make it clear to…students that the job of an art historian is not to judge whether art is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (i.e., notions of our own taste are not what matters), but to try to understand art within the context in which it was produced.”

To those professors, I ask this: “Why teach Velázquez at all, if you don’t love him and don’t think he’s truly great? Just because he made the history books?”

No wonder so many students fall asleep in art history classes! If a professor doesn’t love the art, if a professor doesn’t reveal to the students that he or she thinks the art is great, or conversely, think it’s grotesque, the presentation is no more than dessicated information that places art “within the context in which it was produced.” Professors like this live in the land of Nietzsche’s living dead, and their students will surely sense it. Yes, yes, I’m sure these students will do well on the outcomes assessment examinations that will eventually come their way, testing their true “knowledge” of art.

But guess what? They’ll never learn what it is to love a great work of art.