When I talk about teaching taste, I’m not talking about teaching multiplication tables. Obviously, there’s no right or wrong “answer” to questions of taste. Nor is taste something that any teacher should try to impose on students. It would be an injustice to reward or punish students according to whether or not they agree with someone else’s taste.
But students are deeply shortchanged by their art teachers’ refusing to make judgments and explain them, since they’re given no help in entering what the great art historian E.H. Gombrich called, “The Story of Art.” They also are misled, since they don’t explicitly learn that artists always think and behave in terms of judging what they do and see as bad, good, better, and best. (Eavesdrop on almost any conversation in a bar frequented by artists to confirm this.)
The current situation—where people seem downright afraid to pass judgment, to argue their opinions, to wrestle with where things rank according to their quality—leads to teaching art as if it’s no more than just another unremarkable byproduct of larger historical, political, economic or sociological forces. In the process, of course, the unique voice of the art is almost totally discounted.
If we ban judgment from matters of taste, we reduce art to art-historical data. Fear of judgment spurred the rise of “visual studies” and “visual culture” departments to replace “art” and “art history” departments. These like their art dished up as social science, which flattens art into something that’s more or less the same as making up a train schedule.
Aesthetic taste, in reflecting the sensitivities peculiar to the organ of sight—the eye (working in conjunction with the brain, obviously, since the eye is passive)—derives from a number of things, beginning (although by no means ending) with the biology of the viewer possessing the taste. Some people, for example, can distinguish a significantly larger range of colors than others, or make out a greater range of tonal variations. On the other hand, some people have red/green color blindness (about 8 percent of the population) and a few have the condition of achromatopsia (where no colors can be distinguished at all).
We can all agree (I hope) that someone with achromatopsia should not be in the business of teaching painting (unless it’s monochrome painting), and that we wouldn’t give much credence to the aesthetic taste for color of such a teacher. Music has its Beethoven, composing music even when deaf, but the nature of painting makes such a marvel impossible.
It should be obvious (although somehow it isn’t) that having good or bad taste—in anything—has utterly no connection to whether one is morally good or bad, and startlingly less correspondence with intelligence or level of education than one might think. Life mixes morals, intelligence, education and taste in individuals into various stews. When talking about art, it’s always worth noting that, as often as not, brilliant art collections have been built by people who were despotic, wicked or downright evil—Leo X, the Medici, Hermann Goering come immediately to mind.
Aesthetic taste changes drastically from culture to culture (some cultures, for instance, like lots of clutter, while other cultures like things visually sparse), which makes cross-cultural comparisons risky. And within individuals, it changes as they mature. In their twenties, thirties and forties, people’s tastes often change rapidly and frequently. By fifty, however, most people’s tastes are usually pretty much set in stone. Or perhaps I’d better say, “people’s ranges of taste.” The same person who loves John Prine in the morning can easily turn around and love Beethoven in the afternoon.
In his absolutely essential essay, “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757), David Hume acknowledges that the several qualities someone with good taste must have—“a strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison and cleared of all prejudice” —are impossible to identify in any given person. He goes on to argue that this doesn’t mean such a person couldn’t possibly exist—Hume’s standards were human, not Olympian. Hume meant that although it will always be subject to dispute whether any particular person has good taste, taken as a whole, the activity of judging remains valid.
Gombrich was asked at a lecture I attended if he had an opinion as to who was the greatest artist in the history of art. He didn’t say, “That question can’t be answered,” or “That depends.” Instead, he said, “One is tempted to mention the name of Michelangelo.” The judgment was delicate and tentative, and I daresay not one person in the audience felt that Gombrich was imposing his taste on the audience.
Yes, Gombrich’s taste, in judging Michelangelo to be the best artist, is subject to dispute. A man of his brilliance clearly knew that, but in integrating his judgment, taste and understanding of art into a whole, he was capable of seeing greatness—and, of course, seeing non-greatness. If you can’t even acknowledge that artistic greatness exists and stands out against a field of non-greatness, you’ll never, ever see it.
Next time: How some thinkers, in putatively trying to rescue regular folks from the taste hierarchy of hidebound elitists, actually stifled natural and commendable desires on the part of those regular folks to make their taste a little better.
