Taste

Both in philosophy and in ordinary conversation, the idea of taste is embedded in discourse about art and aesthetic appreciation. People are praised if they display good taste in their choice of art, entertainment, clothes or behavior; they are criticized for dubious preferences and inappropriate demeanor. Popular and public art is sometimes actually suppressed if it is deemed to violate norms of taste. These activities suggest that “taste” labels a set of preferences and dispositions that admit shared social standards and public criticism. At the same time, as the saying goes, “there is no accounting for taste.” Aesthetic responses are also understood as immediate and powerful reactions that are not wholly the result of deliberation or choice. Just as a love of chocolate seems immune to persuasion, taste for decoration, music, movies or other art seems in part to emerge from an individual’s psychological makeup and personality, not to mention cultural background. How can both these ways of thinking be sound? This question generates what philosophers of earlier times called the “problem of taste,” for aesthetics has always harbored a tension between the normativity of critical standards and the fact that those standards rely upon the notoriously variable responses of individuals. A study of taste, therefore, requires consideration of perception, the development

of appreciation and the determinants of culture that frame both. Is the recognition of aesthetic qualities so grounded in personal responses that beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder? Or do standards of taste indicate, however indirectly, some degree of realism for the qualities we appreciate in art and other objects? If we maintain that there are standards for aesthetic enjoyment, how do we distinguish good from bad taste? Moreover, why do we sometimes find ourselves actually preferring things we suspect are in bad taste? Probably many of us genuinely like certain movies, songs and dances that we acknowledge are not of the highest merit. While aesthetic taste is linked to both quality and enjoyment, clearly there can be a split between acknowledged high quality and the degree of pleasure taken in art. Some of these issues emerge from the very language philosophers have formulated to

consider aesthetic response: the metaphor of taste itself. This term invokes the immediate enjoyment of eating and drinking to elucidate the nature of aesthetic sensibility. Just how apt the metaphor is to account for aesthetic discernment and appreciation has been a matter of philosophical controversy for centuries. To see this, we need to look at the genesis of the term in the formative years of aesthetic theory.