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About the Author
Laurie Fendrich, a painter who lives and works in New York, is a professor of fine arts and the director of the Comparative Arts and Culture Graduate Program at Hofstra University. Her writing has focused on the place of art and artists in society and the education of young artists, but she has also written essays questioning the viability of beauty in a post-Darwin era, the meaning of abstract painting, and the tyranny of outcomes assessment. She will blog about university life, the arts. and culture.
About Brainstorm
Mark Bauerlein
Marc Bousquet
Laurie Fendrich
Dan Greenberg
John L. Jackson Jr.
Stan Katz
Marty Nemko, guest blogger
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg
Brainstorm Alumni
Bob ZemskyRecent Posts
Eyeball Marathon | Comment
More of the Magic Mountain | Comment [2]
The Magic Mountain for Painters | Comment [1]
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly | Comment [1]
Art Attack | Comment [7]
Featured Articles By the Author
A Secretary's Taste
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.
Posted at 12:23:41 PM on May 11, 2008 | All postings by Laurie FendrichComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
“Professor Fendrich reads a lot of this old French philosopher Tocqueville, and has even directed me to read some pages”
Aren’t the working class so stupid?! It’s a wonder they can breathe!
— genuienly loathesome hatred of the unwashed, huh? · May 11, 01:13 PM · #
One day, several years ago, while sitting in a Goodyear repair shop waiting room, watching a C-SPAN special on Tocqueville in America, a young man came in, sat down, watched a few minutes, and then started offering reactions out loud based on other parts of Toqueville’s work.
I asked what he did in life. Was he a professor, a teacher, a college student? No, he said, and mentioned something so “mundane” and un-academic that I can’t even remember it.
That was my best lesson in Toqueville ever – hands down.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 11, 01:55 PM · #
The secretary has a white-collar job, not blue-collar, which is generally what is meant by “working class.” She (or he) is middle-class. And if Professor Fendrich “loathed” the secretary as “unwashed,” she’d hardly direct her (or him) to Tocqueville. The secretary was pointed to the actual text, not the Cliff Notes for it. Jimbo wonders whether “genuienly” [sic] thinks that anybody whoever directed him (or her) to something pretty good to read secretly loathed him (or her). Perhaps some psychologist out there could render a tentative opinion.
— LuckyJim · May 11, 03:09 PM · #
As a secretary, I have to say I didn’t buy this either. It read like the kids’ section of my mom’s church bulletin that’s been “written” by the pastor’s cat.
That said, it seems asthetic taste doesn’t develop in a vacuum, and I’d be grateful to someone who knew how to look at paintings for looking at them with me—just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. What’s so scary about listening to an expert, even if you wind up partly disagreeing with them?
— K.M. · May 12, 07:54 AM · #
@ KM: “As a secretary, I have to say I didn’t buy this either. It read like the kids’ section of my mom’s church bulletin that’s been “written” by the pastor’s cat.” Right on! I’m with you and “genuienly loathesome” — as a secretary, this is the most condescending piece of pseudo-literary thought I have read in a long while. If the great Professor actually has a secretary, I feel sorry for him/her.
— A.G. · May 12, 08:52 AM · #
“And the professors who aren’t making students just a little uncomfortable about their tastes aren’t really doing their jobs. “, quoth the Secretary.
Well, professors who aren’t making students uncomfortable about the belief that “taste” is anything other than social class and preference and has an intrinsic basis are not doing their jobs.
— Joseph F Foster · May 12, 10:05 AM · #
Lucky: Do you really want to swap typos?
— genuienly loathesome hatred of the unwashed, huh? · May 12, 10:33 AM · #
Hmmm. So taste is nothing other than social class and preference. Pity the poor ironworker who learns to like the sound of a cello. The only thing worse than elitism that honestly announces itself as such is elitism that hides behind a patronizing pseudo-egalatarianism.
As for swapping typos: Sure, I’ll trade “genuienly” two Mickey Mantels for a Wiley Mays. And I admit that “[sic]” is always a trivial cheap shot, probably bound to backfire, but I just couldn’t help myself. My excuses are a) that the Starbucks foamer wasn’t working that day, and b) I’m a jerk.
— LuckyJim · May 12, 10:52 AM · #
Read Tocqueville?
Not my goddam job, Prof.
And get your own damned coffee, too.
— halfwit sekkiterry · May 12, 11:01 AM · #
Obviously, I’m not among the commenters who “seem especially up in arms about the idea that some people’s taste might be better than others”. This is clearly the case, of course.
I’m glad to read that Prof. Fendrich has respect for Greenberg (and was charmed and fascinated by him), too. All the more reason for her to take care not to misrepresent the man’s thoughts on the very universal nature of taste and its development.
I can’t help but feel like perhaps my comment was read (by this guest author) to mean the opposite of what I wrote and intended…
Feel free to email me about this, if you like.
— Marc Country · May 12, 12:17 PM · #
Perhaps my humble comment on Prof. Fendrich’s previous post has eluded Mr. Country. In the event that it has, I offer it again, here: “Having had professional and social interaction with Clement Greenberg from the 1980s until his death, I can attest that, in conversation at least, Mr. Greenberg continually asserted that, in essence, one either ‘had an eye,’ or didn’t. This quality, Mr. Greenberg let it be understood, was inborn, and upon it depended the degree to which one could ever develop one’s taste, at least in the visual arts.” I beg other reader’s forgiveness for adding remedial length to this forum.
— BeenThere · May 12, 12:38 PM · #
Oh boy…. Well, I just can’t resist:
Since linguists have found that the perception of color is not just physically but linguistically determined, i.e., languages cut up the perception of the light spectrum, recognizing/perceiving what are “differences” in one language as “the same” in another, for example (cf. the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, right vs. left half of the visual field notwithstanding).
And even native speakers of English may differ in their color perceptions by gender (e.g. words like “mauve” are often statistically in the lexicon of more females than males).
Well, that should just about do it for the “innate” hypothesis, shouldn’t it?
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 12, 01:09 PM · #
Nope, I caught it, BT. Thanks anyway.
— Marc Country · May 12, 01:29 PM · #
Here’s my turn at a repost:
“Obviously, there was a time when even Greenberg didn’t “have an eye”, in his younger years before he developed his taste, as well as many instances when his “eye” would change, and he would take back a previous judgment.
Just as obviously, if one is born into a milieu that never gives an opportunity for the development of higher and broader taste, then you won’t have an “eye” to speak of. But the human capacity for taste is still universal, nonetheless. Of course, nobody disputes the existence of taste in music, cuisine, or anything other than visual art, which is as confused an enterprise as exists in modern society…
For my money, Clement Greenberg understood and explained this all quite clearly, to such an extent that no art theorist, writer, whatever as improved upon that understanding in any important way since.
The best we can do now is look to the sciences to explain taste further. V.S. Ramachandran is a brilliant neuroscientist doing incredible research in the field of Neuroaesthetics, and this cutting-edge lines up pretty well with Greenberg’s though, indeed…”
“Innate” remains intact…
— Marc Country · May 12, 01:32 PM · #
Yo! AHA and MC:
“BeenThere” doesn’t (as far as I know) subscribe to the innate “eye” stuff himself; he only says that Greenberg did. And Greenberg (from what I’ve read by him) didn’t deny that an innate “eye” couldn’t be bettered. Sort of like having good hand-eye coordination and batting .350 in the majors. Or, put in more formal terms, an innate “eye” is a necessary but not sufficient condition for aesthetically judging art. (Greenberg’s own “eye,” remember, famously caused him, in his first published review, to attribute purple and orange—two colors Mondrian never used in his Neoplastic abstract paintings—to the Mondrian Neoplastic paintings under review.)
And, no, that doesn’t “just about do it” for the innate hypothesis. Just because language affects color perception doesn’t mean that it replaces other factors, including whatever’s “innate,” only that it modifies them. How would the kids say it? “Nurture is soooo 20th century.”
— LuckyJim · May 12, 02:13 PM · #
Comment 12 does not state that language replaces other factors — only that if the “eye” does not itself “simply see” even colors without mediation which is somehow “learned” (even if the capacity for learning is “innate” as is generally accepted for human language), then it is not really possible to speak of an “eye” for taste as being “innate” as opposed to “learned”.
That’s all. But that’s a lot….
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 12, 02:39 PM · #
AHA:
You’re so nice (sometimes) over at Trachtenberg’s place, but so cantankerous at Fendrich’s. Look (pun intended), the “eye” of a mature, sophisticated judge of art is a combination of hard wiring and mutable software. But if there’s crappy hard wiring, the software doesn’t have much to work with. As Dorothy Parker said, “You can lead a horticulture…”
— LuckyJim · May 12, 02:54 PM · #
While the “eye” is often privileged in the discussion of the arts, it is nonetheless true that other senses are involved — sometimes to an “equal” or even “superior” degree.
Museums have taught us to only “look” at paintings and sculpture rather than to ever feel them by touching, for example. (And good heavens, at Lescaux, even human breath is “dangerous”.) The visual perception of the layers of paint on a canvas is not the whole story of “depth perception”, either.
If one were to say that an individual must have some sensory as well as intellectual capacities in order to develop taste (as opposed to a simple body or, on the other hand, a disembodied mind or spirit – dare I say, computer program), then, yes, it seems there are innate human capacities for acquiring tastes.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 12, 03:09 PM · #
And the consensus that develops among humans, across vastly different geographic locations and historical times and societal cultures… the general trend of art where we broadly agree on the worthwhile and the worthless, this comes from where, in your view, AHA?
— Marc Country · May 12, 05:12 PM · #
The “general trend” of art when? Who preserved art from early human history on? How well informed are we from archeology concerning the artistic tastes of the non-elites (i.e. non-Pharaohs, non-kings, non-robber-baron-elites, etc.)?
What does “consensus” on “universals” mean? Who determines “consensus”? The “salon des refuses” or the refusers? Is it a question of voting — with voice, with money, or with the feet?
Add to that the modern era of facilitated travel and mass communications on a more egalitarian basis. And the continued economic and status valorizations of artistic taste, etc. The question answers itself.
This is like trying to agree on an innate “universal grammar” for all human language. Just when researchers think they’ve got it all outlined, up pops a newly-discovered old language that doesn’t seem to necessarily work that way. (Imagine a conversation between Whorfians and Chomskyites on these issues.)
I keep thinking about how the “sweet” and the “sour” are literal, sensorially distinguishable tastes that many cultures have had historical difficulty “mixing”, including our own not that many decades ago. Yet, therein consists much of the “art” of cuisine.
Does having a human capacity for taste mean that there must be “universals” in taste? Let’s give that a definite maybe.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 12, 05:49 PM · #
The trend over time. Of course, in ancient times, “non-elites” had no time nor concern for “art”, but you better believe they could pretty much agree on what was a beautiful sunset, and what was less so.
Consensus is identified in the general, not the specific. We can all agree generally to what tastes good, bad, otherwise, despite our more individual subjective preferences.
With increase amenities of modernity, come increased opportunities for people to educate their taste to the level of the elites of old (and new).
Dealing with art is more like trying to agree on a universal morality for humans. Of course, these things have differed across geography, time, and custom as well… yet, nevertheless, morality has its origins in an innate human sensibility that is broadly shared. Also, like in aesthetics, we all make moral decisions intuitively and individually, but some people are more “morally informed” than others.
A historical difficulty with mixing flavors, only to be discredited one day with a new recipe, just proves all along that the new flavor was good, and it took us until now to recognize what was true all along.
V.S. Ramachandran uses an excellent example from the study of birds. A certain baby bird will peck at its mother’s beak for food, because it has a red spot. Scientists discovered that they act the same way to a disembodied beak from a dead bird: they go nuts for, not the moter, or the food, but simply the sight of the red spot on the beak. Scientists further discovered that the birds are just as happy with a stick with a red mark, as a beak. But even further, scientists discovered they could come up with a form that the birds loved EVEN MORE than the one they had come to know from nature: a stick with three red stripes. The birds actually preferred this new “Post-Beakism” abstract work to the ‘realism’ of the previous objects. His point being, of course, that if birds had art galleries, there’d be a red striped stick hanging on the walls, and none of the birds would have any explaination for why the stick was so attractive, so valuable… they’d just experience it, aesthetically, and value the experience in itself…
— Marc Country · May 12, 07:28 PM · #
About a year ago, I picked up “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, by Steven Pinker. Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Until 2003, he taught in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. Here’s Pinker weighing in on the question of the human response to art:
“Regardless of what lies behind our instincts for art, those instincts bestow it with a transcendence of time, place, and culture. Hume noted that “the general principles of taste are uniform in human nature… the same Homer who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, is still admired at Paris and London.” Though people can argue about whether the glass is half full or half empty, a universal human aesthetic can be discerned beneath the variation across cultures.”Pinker’s viewpoint, from the cognitive psychologist’s perspective, seems to back-up precisely what Greenberg was on about. As Canadian art critic/landscape painter Terry Fenton puts it,
“The objectivity of taste is central to Greenberg’s criticism — one of the cornerstones, as it were, of his “critical theory.” It’s also a central bone of contention for his many critics and detractors, who in some cases misunderstand the concept, in others disagree with (or strongly disapprove of) Kant. In the 20th Century the concept of taste was often conflated with the notion of personal preference and rather elaborate and unconvincing arguments were brought forth to deny the objectivity of taste and to elevate something like personal preference to a kind of pseudo-universality. As this lecture makes clear, Greenberg held fast to Kant and objectivity.”— Marc Country · May 12, 08:22 PM · #
Personally, I find scientist Ramachandran’s work on, say, vision or synesthesia more relevant for these issues than cognitive psychologist Pinker’s “instinct for art” which, in context, might be an instinct to produce art rather than to universalize the qualities of art.
(Pardon the pun, but Pinker might just leave a bad taste in the mouth for some on this thread from his countervailing denigration of the evolutionary significance of music, for example.)
Also, I would feel more comfortable with Hume/Kant’s “objectivity” in art perception if/when at least East-West correspondences were cited, rather than examples which are strictly Western.
Lastly, while I am unfamiliar with Ramachandran’s bird study, it seems from the summary provided that the art theory of the birds in question rests not on a principle of the pure aesthetic but on memory, transfer, projection and the like — a far cry from an innate instinct for art.
A chacun son gout, as the French would say.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 12, 10:35 PM · #
For a transcript of a Ramachandran lecture on art universals (which contains the red spot story — and which begins with a Victorian East-West dispute about art!) called “The Artful Brain”, go to: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2003/lecture3.shtml
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 12, 10:48 PM · #
Yes, that Ramachandran Reith lecture is precisely where I’m coming from… his own “east-west” bit, concerning Hindu sculpture, is paralleled by Greenberg’s own observations on taste:
“True taste, genuine taste, develops, expands, grows. It changes only insofar as it corrects itself, true taste. And it doesn’t do that temperamentally, but as part of the process of its growth. Growth means increasing openness, catholicity, inclusion more than exclusion. As you go along, get older and look at more and more art you find yourself liking more and more art, without having to lower your standards. Taste refines itself; it’s true. It discriminates more as it develops, and yet at the same time, paradoxically, it becomes opener. Open in this way: that you look at Hindu sculpture, say, in the same way, by and large, as you look at contemporary art or the art of the old masters or any other kind of art. And you look, it’s hoped, with the same honesty.”
The full audio of this talk by Greenberg is available here: http://newcrit.org/cg/ClemSpeaks.html
— Marc Country · May 13, 12:46 AM · #
Yes, but notice that the Victorians’ taste, in the Ramachandran lecture, did not “correct itself” at all; Ramachandran altered the definition of art to exclude realism as a “quality” of art in order to fit his theories. (By this definition, the invention of perspective in two-dimensional art would be merely a “distraction”.)
But to go back to the “non-natural” manipulation of those birds, well, in the human context a violent persistent reaction to visual stimulation is often a sign of pathology, not art. In fact, some of the most interesting discussions of art and/vs. pathology precisely concern the art of schizophrenics.
Greenberg, in the quotation cited, appears to be speaking about an individual’s taste, at least. However, when we start defining the “correction” of taste in cross-national and cross-generational terms (as Ramachandran does), there is too much of a whiff of “culture” influence in this to suit my taste test for “innateness”, as it were. So far, at least.
There probably are “universals” in art but they may indeed be more in the instinct to do art than in the content/nature of the art itself. “Man (sic) the tool-maker”, etc. The brain science jury is definitely still out….
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 13, 07:11 AM · #
This piece is insufferable.
— Bunny Sloan · May 13, 08:25 AM · #
“Yes, but notice that the Victorians’ taste, in the Ramachandran lecture, did not “correct itself” at all…”
You’re right. Most Victorians ad, well, Victorian taste. It wasn’t broad enough to include the unfamiliar, and their experience with it, for the most part, wasn’t enough to educate their taste in their lifetimes. That fell to their succeeding generations, who, being less hidebound than their parents and grandparents, were able to broaden their taste beyond narrow Victorian fashion, to a fuller human aesthetic. This is what is meant by the consensus over time… Victorian society didn’t accept the work, but eventually it does become accepted despite the superficial cultural differences, if the work is of lasting quality.
“But to go back to the “non-natural” manipulation of those birds, well, in the human context a violent persistent reaction to visual stimulation is often a sign of pathology, not art.”
We’re talking about baby chicks v. humans. Squawking and pecking is about all you’d expect in an excited reaction amongst birds. People are frequently more elegant and reserved in their appreciation of art.
“there is too much of a whiff of “culture” influence in this to suit my taste”
What is culture but the extended phenotype of the species? It is precisely the result of innate natural instincts within individuals that makes up the whole.
“There probably are “universals” in art but they may indeed be more in the instinct to do art”
You’ll admit there’s could be an instinct to “do art”, but fail to see that such an instinct requires one to know what “art” is in order to “do” it. And, of course, broadly, as a species, we do agree on what “art” is. It is the stuff that we enjoy looking at (or listening to , or eating) just for its own sake. And, again, broadly, as a species, we agree on what things fill this purpose, in the main.
— Marc Country · May 13, 10:08 AM · #
All of Fendrich’s pieces are insufferable.
But they are bringing a lot of clicks to the Chronicle site. Hurray for ad revenue!
— M.A. in Interactive Journalism · May 13, 10:12 AM · #
Post-scriptum:
I don’t really know that the birds in the experiment are pecking from “pleasure” – it could be from “desire” and “desire” is not always born of “pleasure” as opposed to “pain” (or the memory of either). Where are the two distinguishable in the birds’ brains? (Do they not border each other in humans?) And were the birds actually wired for that? (All puns intended.)
Well, as lawyers say, I state and restate my original comments. And, of course, A chacun son gout — toujours!
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 13, 11:25 AM · #
Thanks for the discussion, AHA. I’ll take your P.S as my cue for same.
The birds show a hard-wiring for liking a visual pattern. The whole question of visual aesthetics is how to account for a similar reaction in humans. We know from Melamid and Komar some very broad strokes along similar lines to the birds: we like the blue sky landscape, yadda yadda… There’s the golden mean,some general visual fundaments, all of these things have a common aesthetic resonance. Some recent neuroaesthetic research suggests that we may be hardwired visually for, not just images of these evolutionarily-ideal blue-sky-landscapes, but more deeply, more abstractly, for the subtle ratios of scale within the landscapes. To me, this provides a pretty persuasive parallel to the bird analogy.
Harry Frankfurt (of “On Bullshit” fame) is quite good on the importance of what we care about in a book of that name, as well as “The Reasons of Love”, which I highly recommend.
A chacun son gout — toujours? Mais oui! I couldn’t agree more!
“He who truly thinks for himself is like a monarch, in that he recognizes no one above him. His judgments, like the decisions of a monarch, arise directly from his own absolute power. He no more accepts authorities than a monarch does orders, and he acknowledges the validity of nothing he has not himself confirmed.”
- Arthur Schopenhauer
— Marc Country · May 13, 12:39 PM · #
Like charm, taste is a herd instinct, inherited from an English upper class sentimentality. And to quote the great Anthony Blanche, “Charm is the great English blight. It doesn’t exist outside these damp islands. It kills art. It kills love. And I’m afraid my dear Charles, it is killing you.”
— original marci · May 13, 01:19 PM · #
So, does that mean that the ancient Greeks had no taste?
Or, maybe that they inherited their taste for art, like the Elgin Marbles, from the English?
— Marc Country · May 13, 01:33 PM · #
Does “responding to” constitute the same thing as “liking” a visual pattern?
Maybe that’s the stumbling block. How does one distinguish the “reflex” mechanisms of response from those that are “cultivatable”?
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 13, 02:44 PM · #
Mr. Country said to e-mail him, so I had to look him up. Man, I never realized how much of a permanent swath Clem cut through Canada when he went up there to star at those Lake Louise and Banff things, and did those $150-per-half-hour studio visits.
— Jack Bush · May 14, 09:24 AM · #
Sorry, Jack, that comment to “email me” was in regards to my first comment and the mention of my name in this article, and was directed at the blog author, who has my email address…
I don’t know about Lake Louise or Banff “things”, or $150 studio visits, but yes, Greenberg is one of history’s greatest art critics (duh), known throughout the art-making world… not really a surprise, is it?
— Marc Country · May 14, 10:52 AM · #