 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
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
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg
Brainstorm Alumni
Marty Nemko, guest bloggerBob Zemsky
Recent Posts
Monsters of Achievement | Comment [11]
Where's Czechoslovakia? | Comment [27]
The Bad Cover | Comment [61]
Tickle Me Emo | Comment [16]
Painting 2.0 | Comment [9]
Featured Articles By the Author
Yes, Virginia, There Is Good Taste
My apologies. This post is long. It’s the last in a series of posts on taste.
Students arrive at college assuming, much like everybody else, that taste is simply a natural expression of personality, and that it’s subjective and not worth arguing about. (“De gustibus non est disputandum,” as those who know their Latin like to say.)
It vexes most of my students — who readily concede that there exist varying levels of athletic abilities and drawing or musical talent — to think that an ability to discriminate along the lines of visual taste might not be evenly distributed among us. But even though visual taste rests on a foundation of visual acuity that isn’t the same in everyone, what’s far more important — and I emphasize this when I teach — is how it builds from there.
I discuss with my students what taste, in all its complexities, means. Whenever I project images of works of art in class, or conduct field trips to museums and galleries, I don’t hesitate to talk about art in terms of good, better, and best — to judge, and thereby demonstrate to my students, my taste. And I frequently hand out David Hume’s essay, “Of the Standard of Taste,” for discussion.
Good taste requires that a lot of things come together — a brain that is capable of acute visual discrimination, a broad range of experience in looking at visual things (coupled with a concentration in looking at the best visual things), thinking about what objects look like, abstracted from their utility, having an open mind when encountering new visual stimuli, possessing a willingness to weigh the relative visual merits of the objects we look at, and — it should be unnecessary to add, but it’s important — being in a generally sound mental and physical state when looking, thinking, and weighing. (Some knowledge of historical context is needed, too, but when it outweighs everything else, it leads to sterile responses to art.)
“I don’t know what I like,” or “I won’t talk about what I like,” followed by, “But I know a lot about historical context” is not much more useful, except for people who love taxonomy, than “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.”)
As Hume points out, it’s nearly impossible that all of the desired qualities for good taste will converge at a high level in a single person. Moreover, as I mentioned in a previous post, there is such a thing as no taste, i.e., people for whom the aesthetics of their visual surroundings simply don’t matter much.
When art teachers teach students something about the vocabulary of art — the elements of color, the basics of pictorial composition, the nuances of mark-making, etc, they want them to use that vocabulary. Teachers coax their students into examining, articulating, and judging works of art beyond merely saying, “I like that” or “I don’t like that,” or parroting back data about the work. (If the unexamined life isn’t worth living, then surely unexamined taste isn’t worth having.) As Antonio Damasio argues in his revelatory book Descartes’s Error, reasoning and judging are inextricably linked. Nowhere is this truer than in matters pertaining to art.
Whenever I show images of paintings in class, I include a broad range of artists — those who are considered very good by art historians or art critics (either from hundreds of years ago or from right now in a Chelsea gallery), as well as artists who were considered bad in their own times but are now considered good, or good in their own times but now considered bad. Clearly, taste changes over time. But once again, I draw on Hume for a critical point: Taste, he argues, has undergone far fewer revolutions in history than “the pretended decisions of science,” and indeed, after a long enough time has passed, taste tends to settle down.
It should go without saying that when I teach art I always include references to the artist’s times — Shakespeare’s understanding of the “form and pressure” of one’s times informs all solid interpretations of culture. Just as important, however, I discuss in detail the work’s composition, color structure, and paint handling.
I might say something like, “This isn’t exactly to my taste, but I have to admire the way the artist lays down paint with such a light touch,” or, “I don’t really like to look at pictures of animals being killed, but Delacroix sure can paint a lion so that that I’m in awe of its violent struggle against death, without actually getting nauseated — and all the while the guy keeps control of that yellow, tamping down its intensity, so that it doesn’t suffocate the other colors.”
In offering my own opinions, I’m actually inviting my students to form their own — not denying them their own. I want them to see that there’s room for everyone to make judgments about art without simultaneously caving in to the idea that taste is entirely subjective. The important point for them to reckon with is that some judgments about art are better than others.
The paintings I show aren’t, after all, selected at random. For the jpeg to exist in an art-historical context, it was sifted through the screen of judgments repeated over time. A veritable army of knowledgeable and sophisticated curators, art historians, connoisseurs, art collectors, other artists, and, of course, the teacher (moi) stand in as a collective approximation of Hume’s seldom-found excellent judge. (No, I do not have students take quizzes — expressed or implied — in which they give right-or-wrong answers about which paintings are good, better, or best.)
When I make a critical comment about a compositional or color problem in a painting-in-progress by a beginning student, it’s not uncommon for that student to say, “But I wanted it that way.” A student’s defending a work by retreating into radical subjectivity (i.e., intention is all that counts, and all intentions are immune from judgment) is an understandable emotional reaction. It takes time for a student to learn to separate his or personality from its accompanying taste. If students keep up that kind of defensive attitude (a few do — but most have at least an inkling that it obviates the whole point of taking a painting class), they’ll never progress much.
But there is a paradox to good taste, one that postmodern artists have seized upon, albeit a little too much, in my opinion. Once good taste is “perfected” (the classicist view; romantics think it’s vaguely knowable, but unreachable), fixed, labeled, and locked into place, it atrophies and becomes boring. That paradox of good taste haunts all of us who think hard about what makes something beautiful.
Bringing this point up with that defensive beginning painting student isn’t very helpful — not because it will make classroom life more difficult for me, but because it will confuse the student just when he or she should be trying to get a grasp of the basics. A little later — say, in intermediate or advanced painting — it’s fine, even essential.
I’ll say it right out loud: Teaching taste to students has been seriously undermined by postmodernism, which privileges a kind of cultural revenge (which in turn boils down to “there shall be no greatness”) over aesthetics. Postmodernism doesn’t merely eschew good taste — it considers it the enemy of art.
But we live in a postmodern age that can’t simply be wished away or retreated from in the way that the beginning student, mentioned above, retreats into it. A crudely silk-screened Marilyn by Andy Warhol now easily crosses over from the mall (where it hangs in reproduction-of-a-reproduction poster form next to posters of Kevin Federline and Beyoncé) to the wall of a tasteful Manhattan apartment, where — as an “original” reproduction — it hovers over a Mies Barcelona chair. Warhol, and Pop Art in general, have beaten into us the idea that taste resides not in the work of art, but in its context.
Which is why Jeff Koons is rich. (Isn’t it a sweet irony that the same wealthy collector who buys an intentionally wretchedly tasteless Jeff Koons “Easy Fun” painting wouldn’t dream of having a whole apartment that exuded the same taste as that expressed inside that picture?)
I’ve been in semi-heated discussions with people who offer the Foucaultian argument that taste derives predominantly from class, privilege, and elitism. Some of my artist friends argue that good taste has never been more than a fancy cover for who’s got the power and money in art. I can’t but smile when I hear this argument, because one of the worst manifestations of taste on the planet is ostentatiousness — precisely the taste brought on when only power and money are the driving forces.
Most art students, who are struggling to understand art’s inherent power — that is, to figure out why some paintings and sculptures move them, and some don’t — aren’t very interested in any of this. And the good news is that taste — particularly students’ taste — is able to change and improve as we grow more experienced and critical with aesthetic matters.
Posted at 01:37:38 PM on May 16, 2008 | All postings by Laurie FendrichComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
Previous: Robert Rauschenberg
Next: The Real History of Blogging
Professor Fendrich writes: “‘This isn’t exactly to my taste, but I have to admire the way the artist lays down paint with such a light touch,’ or, ‘I don’t really like to look at pictures of animals being killed, but Delacroix sure can paint a lion so that that I’m in awe of its violent struggle against death, without actually getting nauseated — and all the while the guy keeps control of that yellow, tamping down its intensity, so that it doesn’t suffocate the other colors.’”
To repeat a point I addressed in a previous post: what does the “I have to admire” and “I’m in awe” add to the description of the work of art? Isn’t it enough to say, “This painting exhibits X, Y, and Z traits?” Does adding “I like that” to that sentence really add anything to it beyond the biographical fact?
And when it comes to arguing, arguing taste means leaving out the “I like that” anyway. No one will debate that you “really” like something. The issue in a taste debate is whether or not the object under evaluation actually has the traits being ascribed to it and whether or not those traits bring anything of value to the world.
For example, consider the issue of formal complexity in literature. We can discuss whether or not a work of literature is formally complex without ever caring whether or not complexity brings anything of value into the world. And we can debate that issue without ever saying, “I personally like the things that complexity in literature adds to the world.”
The minimalist position on issues of beauty, like issues of truth, seems more convincing. The statement, “I like that X has traits 1 and 2,” only adds the biographical assertion (“I like that”) to the description of X having traits 1 and 2.
— Luther Blissett · May 16, 04:22 PM · #
The purpose of most, if not all, works of visual art (and certainly just about every serious painting in Western culture from the 17c. on) is precisely to be liked by an audience. So someone with expertise and, yea, taste, saying he or she “likes it [or not] because…” to begin a discussion with students is not only an appropriate but a valuable pedagogical tool. Sure, the issue of a taste debate is whether or not the object under evaluation has the traits being ascribed to it, but if the traits are something whether it’s mostly blue, or has a rough texture, the debate is uninteresting. Only if the traits imply an element of “I like it” (e.g., it’s graceful) or “I don’t like it” (it’s clumsy) is the debate of any interest. And yes, we can certainly discuss whether or not a work of literature is formally complex without ever caring whether or not complexity brings anything of value into the world. We can also discuss whether the stitches on that heart surgery are simple or complex without caring whether or not the patient died.
— LuckyJim · May 16, 10:49 PM · #
The problem, LJ, is that no one can really argue with someone who says, “I like this painting.” It is true if the speaker is sincere: does he really like the painting? You cannot have a debate where the positions are, “I like this painting” and “I don’t like this painting.” Both speakers are speaking the truth as long as they are sincere.
To locate the debate, we must move to the descriptive and analytical. What did you like or dislike about the painting? The two speakers above might be looking at the painting so differently that the debate is impossible from the start (that is, one sees a secret message about a Martian attack and another sees a delightful formal arrangement of cubes).
So we ask what our peer likes or dislikes. S/he points out several traits. We can then either debate the presence or absence of these traits. Or, we can agree that the work possesses certain traits (a light touch with the brush, finely observed details) but disagree on the ultimate value of those traits.
The former debate is not so much about taste but about epistemology: do you see what I see?
The latter debate is about values, and it will begin to cross from aesthetics to politics, ethics, pedagogy, and so on.
That is to say, we both might agree that the music of Daniel Johnston is clumsy. But to me, that clumsiness might be a sign of his authenticity, of his emotional sincerity; while to you, that clumsiness is a sign of technical laziness, of emotional confusion and instability. Now we’re at the level of values: is authenticity worth valuing? But we’re also still at a very descriptive level: raw emotional expression or symptom of emotional illness?
The descriptive debate returns us to the work of art, but the value debate takes us away from it. Both debates are necessary, but the latter is no longer so much about the work of art but about wider social concerns. The value debate doesn’t even need the work of art.
So the simple addition of taste judgments adds little to the discussion of the work of art. At their most complex and most interesting, I think they shift our attention away from art and into other, broader discussions of our lives. That’s fine — I don’t think discussions of art should simply be formal analyses — but we should be clear that when we talk about taste, the “taste” portion of our utterance is largely about something besides art.
— Luther Blissett · May 17, 09:04 AM · #
LB’s position in a nutshell: “The value debate doesn’t even need the work of art.” I agree completely.
— LuckyJim · May 17, 09:57 AM · #
“I don’t know what I like,” or “I won’t talk about what I like,” followed by, “But I know a lot about historical context” is not much more useful… than “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.”
Not “much more” useful? I’d say not more useful at all, if it’s a matter of experiencing art.
“… his revelatory book Descarte’s Error…”
Should that be “Descartes’ Error”?
“But we live in a postmodern age that can’t simply be wished away or retreated from in the way that the beginning student, mentioned above, retreats into it.”
Huh? Postmodernism is yesterday’s news. It’s all been so thoroughly debunked Sokal and Bricmont’s “Impotures Intellectualles” leaps to mind as a classic in this regard), it’s hardly a question of “wishing or retreating”, rather it’s a matter of pointedly refuting, and then heaping scorn and ridicule on those out there who are so stupid as to think idiots like Foucault, et al have anything useful to offer art.
Thomas Nagel:” The writers arraigned by Sokal and Bricmont use technical terms without knowing what they mean, refer to theories and formulas that they do not understand in the slightest, and invoke modern physics and mathematics in support of psychological, sociological, political, and philosophical claims to which they have no relevance. It is not always easy to tell how much is due to invincible stupidity and how much to the desire to cow the audience with fraudulent displays of theoretical sophistication. Lacan and Baudrillard come across as complete charlatans, Irigaray as an idiot, Kristeva and Deleuze as a mixture of the two. But these are delicate judgments. “
Or, here’s D.G Myers, weighing in:
“Academic writing in our own time, however, exhibits a disregard, not merely for style, but for truth. Once upon a time, no matter how badly they wrote, scholars imagined that they were contributing to knowledge. But no longer. Much of the scholarship now published in the humanities—primarily in English and comparative literature, but increasingly in history, musicology, art history, and religious studies—has no other purpose than to confirm the scholar’s own status and authority. It is not a contribution to knowledge, but to political power.
Consider, for example, Judith Butler. Every year since 1994 the journal Philosophy and Literature has held a Bad Writing Contest, asking its readers to submit “the ugliest, most stylistically awful” sentences they’ve found. And this year’s winning entry comes from Judith Butler, a full professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of five books including her widely quoted Gender Trouble (1990).
Best known for this book’s idea that gender is a performance rather than the expression of a prior reality, Butler is on practically everybody’s short list of the most influential “theorists” now writing. She is routinely placed in the company of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Here is her award-winning sentence:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”
Postmodernism is the last refuge of an intellectual scoundrel…
— Marc Country · May 17, 01:19 PM · #
Here’s a thread on a related topic:
http://artblog.net/?name=2008-05-13-15-04-new
— Marc Country · May 17, 01:27 PM · #
Now that my final divorce papers from Luther have come through, I must point out to Marc that, by consensus of many, many comments in this forum that it is considered very tacky to try to nail people for typos. This is after all, as the consensus says, a blog.
— A Work of Art · May 18, 07:17 AM · #
Saying that Postmodern has been “debunked” by various still-Modernist scholars is like saying that capitalism has been debunked by the Socialist Workers Party. The SWP could be correct in its analysis, but last time I looked, Wall Street was open for business. And using Judith Butler and the Sokal hoax—extremes of the relativist and peformative/social-construct aspects of Postmodernism—is Roger Kimballism. (What is Roger Kimballism? It’s “debunking” an artist who visual work you don’t like by quoting something extreme and/or stupid the artist [who’s usually not a pro in the word business] said, once upon a time, and then using the quote to “prove” the artist’s alleged faults.) On the ground, in artists’ studios and in galleries in big art centers south of the Arctic Circle, Postmodern still rules. I, personally, don’t like that state of affairs, but it is the case.
— LuckyJim · May 18, 07:28 AM · #
“Nail people”, AWA? Good grief, have I wandered into a Junior High School? It’s called offering a friendly heads-up… Please, if I make a typo that I can correct, NAIL ME, by all means, and I’ll actually thank you for it!
Lucky Jim, that’s really a desperate analogy, the point of which is simply inaccurate. A scientist CAN debunk a writer who uses scientific terms WRONG. A reader who bases their own beliefs on the errors of fools and charlatans is simply compounding the error. This isn’t even about “liking someone’s art”. This is an intellectual, not aesthetic, matter, and as such, is not dependent on subjective “Roger Kimballist” opinion, but rather, on easily-answerable questions of fact.
Oh, yes, “Postmodernism” certainly is still the brand name in fashion, but that doesn’t taker away from the fact that such fashionable emperors of the art world and academia have got their nasty junk hanging out for all the “common (sense) ers” to see…
— Marc Country · May 18, 04:57 PM · #
A friendly heads-up: I think you meant “but that doesn’t take away…” (Lordy, talk about tedious, but, hey, we’ll do it Marc’s way.)
Neither desperate (lots of analogies come to mind) nor inaccurate. (And the rhetorical device of “simply” is, well, a rhetorical device.) This Postmodernism business isn’t science—unless there’s a predictive lab experiment involving Venturi’s architecture I don’t know about. Nobody’s “debunked” Postmodernism so that all the serious artists and scholars are now saying, “Guess the Pomo hypothesis was wrong; back to the bunsen burners.” And Postmodernism, like it or not (and for the most part, I wish it’d blow over) is a lot, lot more than “the brand name in fashion.” Underestimate the enemy at your own risk. Which means that those who don’t favor Postmodernism ought not to (here’s another analogy) turn the wagons in a circle or (still another) play King Canute and shout at the PoMo waves to go away.
As for junior high: best six years of my life.
Finally, being a bit of a jerk, I think Marc has to get out of the library more. Just a hunch, but I don’t think he gets to see enough really good art in the flesh.
— LuckyJim · May 18, 07:32 PM · #
Who said that the most profound response to visual art is language? Or that the “learning” of “taste” is somehow “transmitted”/“communicated” by language?
What happened to “the medium is the message”?
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 18, 10:35 PM · #
Not the most profound response, but the lingua franca for purveyors of all those diverse disciplines—from physics to poetry, from music to metalsmithing—use when they get together in faculty meetings, at symposia, and on blogsites. Personally, I’d love it if, in response to somebody else’s comment, I could just throw down a j-peg, or an mp3 clip, and get same in return. But what if we were having an argument over food, or perfume? (I sure hope there are no typos in here; I don’t want Marc doing the elementary school number of saying, “Teacher, teacher! LuckyJim misspelled something!”)
— LuckyJim · May 19, 07:38 AM · #
Very interesting question. Food and perfume sometimes provoke physical allergic responses when experienced as opposed to discussed or viewed. In other words, there’s a specific objectivity to the literal “taste” test that can be toxic “subjectively”.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 19, 08:45 AM · #
Oh, jeez, lucky Jim, you ARE being a jerk! Seriously, I assumed Fendrich is/was in a position to fix a typo in her post (and, looky looky, she DID fix it, although not quite the way I would, but, no matter…), so I actually thought it would be NICE of me to point it out. There was no “Nyah-nyah-nyah, you screwed up!” implied by me in the slightest.
Peace,
MC
— Marc Country · May 26, 11:49 PM · #