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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
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John L. Jackson Jr.
Stan Katz
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg
Brainstorm Alumni
Marty Nemko, guest bloggerBob Zemsky
Recent Posts
Mirror, Mirror, on and off the Wall | Comment [1]
Monsters of Achievement | Comment [11]
Where's Czechoslovakia? | Comment [27]
The Bad Cover | Comment [61]
Tickle Me Emo | Comment [16]
Featured Articles By the Author
The Way Taste Grows
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.
Posted at 05:42:05 PM on May 8, 2008 | All postings by Laurie FendrichComments
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Interesting — I think I fall very heavily into category 2, and am overjoyed that someone else realizes that we visual “no-tasters” exist. I can enjoy art in a museum (and have actually developed a minor amount of “taste” in a very deliberate way,) but have no desire to collect it myself. I rarely remember what other people are wearing, or any of the visual details of their homes. I find the pressure to make things pretty to be a nearly intolerable bore. I despise fashion, and dress in a very functional way. I find watching the grass grow to be an order of magnitude more interesting than attempting visually oriented arts and crafts like photography or interior decorating. When we owned a house, I cooked in my kitchen at least five days a week, but always had to struggle to remember what color the wallpaper was. When we moved out 13 years after buying the house, the guest room still had the choo-choo train theme left behind by the previous owners, who had two small sons — and my husband and I have no children!
And, incidentally: This visual tone-deafness doesn’t extend to other aesthetic aspects of my life. I’m somewhat more interested in, and knowledgeable about, both popular and classical music. I also enjoy cooking, and am one of those people who lives to eat!
— Starbug · May 9, 09:45 AM · #
Ms. Fendrich is a bit too young to know why things happened the way they did. Middle class taste did not die at the hands of some New York theorists. It perished because the truly massive effort that was made in the teens and 20s of the last century to create middle class taste languished after WWII. The ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement were interwoven with the mass production of bungalows via agencies like Sears Roebuck, mass circulation magazines such as the Mercury, and government-sponsored home economics tutoring by the Martha Stewarts of the day. My aunt was one of them in the first three decades of the 20th century, a painter travelling around Southwest Texas showing farmers and their wives new ways of improving their lives. Even the love songs of the day depicted the little cottage as the middle class ideal. You can be sure that the millions who eventuallly turned away from this culture never heard of the MacDonalds and Greenbergs and never met anyone who had.
— David A. McCullough · May 9, 02:44 PM · #
“…Greenberg … apparently and somewhat paradoxically believed that you were either born to “get” higher culture, or you weren’t.”
Nonsense. Greenberg believed in the development of taste, exactly the sort of thing suggested by your “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.”
A little more care next time, please…
— Marc Country · May 10, 07:54 PM · #
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.
— BeenThere · May 11, 09:05 AM · #
De gustibus non disputandum est
— Immanuel · May 11, 09:32 PM · #
It sure as hell is. Just look.
— Globetrotter · May 12, 08:35 AM · #
Middlebrow culture is the way working class kids get into art, exactly as Fendrich says. My father is an electrician who thought Beethoven was the greatest composer. This meant that my 60s childhood home had some Beethoven recordings. I now write symphonies and am professor of composition in an academy. And he can now listen with pleasure to the dissonant modern music I produce, so we all help each other. Music is full of the kind of snobbery that Fendrich rightly excoriates. The truth is these people enjoy the social exclusivity that ‘taste’ gives them.
— kevin o connell · May 12, 10:14 AM · #
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…
— Marc Country · May 12, 12:48 PM · #
Susan Jacoby’s recent book THE AGE OF UNREASON has some pertinent observations on “midcult” that are worth study. Compare the vapidity and homogeneity of today’s free TV offerings with what was available in the 50’s and 60’s. We’re not so much in the dark ages now as we are sitting in the roman coliseum with our loaves of bread as we watch the circuses.
I should also say that it’s really disappointing when people on blogs offer conversation stoppers like # 5 with the latin commonplace about taste.
— George K · May 12, 02:28 PM · #
Sorry, Charlie. They don’t want tuna with good taste, they want tuna that tastes good.
— original marci · May 12, 06:27 PM · #