On good taste
I still have no answers but I do have thoughts
I went to a French high school, which means that in my final year I got to take an intensive philosophy class that was weighted far more than all my other classes. Misty mornings, 2-hour daily sessions, Camus-wannabe teacher (in a good way). One day we had to write an essay on the topic: Peut-on nous reprocher une faute de goût? That basically means, can we be accused of a lack of taste? It boils down to, is beauty in the eye of the beholder? It was the first time I was called to examine the subjectivity or objectivity of taste, and I ended up with 10 pages of explorations, and a conclusion that looked something like this:
Not really. We cannot make objective judgements of taste. It is fully subjective, good taste is a matter of preference, etc etc. You can think someone has bad taste but you can’t reasonably argue for it.
I was adamantly sure of it. I debated with my dad on the beach that following summer; he was decisively for the opposing view, that good taste is objective, that some things are purely reflections of bad taste.
Fast forward, six years later: today! I have been thinking of taste ever since. Have I made any progress? Well, I’m still somewhere in between, but now I see the other side a lot more clearly. One art history degree later, I’ve spent countless hours thinking about art, quality, and beauty. I’m surprised I hadn’t related taste to quality as actively in 2017, when I submitted my high school essay with the conviction of a philosophical mic-drop.
What I kept reverting back to was this: the idea that if someone enjoys a piece of art I find bad, a photograph that fails in skill, framing, and any other common elements shared by good photos, who am I to tell them that it’s wrong to enjoy it? If it somehow struck an aesthetic chord with them, and it didn’t with me, how is one superior to the other? I could try to argue with them, but at the end of the day, to each point of mine about why I find it bad, they could say “but I like it.” So to them, that’s good taste.
Now I have come to think of taste from a different angle. Someone with good taste is someone with an eye for good quality. In art, quality includes things like skill, emotional resonance, depth, and even market value. Emotional resonance means that if an artwork, a movie, or a song, causes an emotional reaction in most people, then doesn’t that grant it a certain quality of impact? Depth is an interesting one: we tend to consider a piece with a certain depth and complexity better than a superficial one. Universality is another one: historically, some works of art have been universally admired, hinting at a shared inherent quality. In that way, good taste can be trained. Expertise in music makes you more likely to discern between a great piece of music and an average one- it makes you more likely to notice qualities that most would miss. Where there’s expert consensus, that means there’s some kind of inherent quality they can discern. Therefore, someone who is able to distinguish a piece of art that has these features from one that doesn’t, can reasonably be considered someone with “better taste”.
Interestingly, when we say a friend of ours has great taste in music, we mean they have similar taste to ours. To us, our taste is good taste. We mean “oh, this person really knows how to spot a great-quality song.” But we’re not thinking about quality objectively at all, we merely mean they know how to spot what we consider to be good quality. It’s a mess of a cycle.
Despite my shift to seeing quality and taste more objectively than before, I definitely still hold beliefs that point in the other direction. For example:
Cultural nuances: Different cultures have different standards about what is beautiful and what is high quality. Universalising taste and quality attempts to place one thing above another in a way that can’t really coexist with the sheer amount of different backgrounds and perspectives our world is made of.
Temporality: Art history teaches us that what is condemned at one point in time is often praised later on. It’s simple as that. Aesthetic standards evolve and change over time, making good taste and quality too ambiguous to define. It suggests that standards for good taste are tied to a moment in time in a way that makes it harder to tie them to inherent qualities alone.
I have realized that no matter how much we think about it, the nature of taste will always slightly evade us. We will keep coming up with valid arguments for objectivity, valid arguments for subjectivity, and at the end of the day, still usually remain in the middle. I think that although I have grown and spent so much time immersed in art history, philosophy, and aesthetics, my view will always lean closer to the subjective. It’s true I want to believe that beauty is more subjective than not, because that’s how I have always seen life. I like finding things I consider beautiful and sharing them with people who find them beautiful too; there’s always going to be someone who shares your good taste with you. And if your taste in things is compatible with what is considered high quality by your contemporary consensus, even better: you will be considered a person with good taste, your friends will ask you for music and film recommendations, and you will get to brag about having discovered that artist before they were popular.
For me taste boils down to how comfortable someone is in their own skin, vs how much it’s obvious they clamor for external validation
Example: if something is gaudy, ostentatious, or tacky, we’d say it’s in poor taste.
A peacock suit or bright shiny gold shoes. End to end gold walls. Wearing Gucci or name brand everything in huge letters
These things scream “I need validation” and it makes us look at such a person with pity
Taste is about what and how you are presenting.
It matters less about what you wear, what art you put up in your home, and what you say.
What matters is why you are doing those things. If you are doing it to beg for attention and affirmation, it’s in poor taste, and such a person has bad taste
For me, It isn’t purely objective or subjective. It is both somehow, not at the same time. I know it can’t be both cause they are the opposite of each other. But hear me out. I agree with you about quality, people who appreciate good quality, probably have better taste in general. That’s what I am talking about, so let’s say there are three levels of quality, poor, medium and high quality. These are objective. Within each category, whatever the person likes is subjective. Of course all the factors you mentioned affect a person’s taste. For example, If I know nothing about art, which I don’t Lol, I can’t really judge whether this is a good one or not. Another point, from my own experience, the higher the quality, the more expensive the thing is. So whatever you can afford, will determine your taste somehow. If we are talking about shopping, the less money the person have, the more limited options they have. It limits their exposure to better quality products. If the person isn’t exposed to better things, how would they know about it.