Gotham Diary:
Taste Itself
26 September 2014
Taste: the mental faculty that enables aesthetic experience.
We will not be talking about good or bad taste. To do so would suggest some sort of frontier, or no-man’s-land, between the two, and I don’t believe that any such thing exists, except in the minds of people who want to puff themselves up and bring others down — surely not a matter of aesthetic experience at all.
Instead, we will talk about some of the factors that develop taste over time, not by signalling better choices of experience — that would be discrimination, as we saw yesterday — but by making taste more personal and comprehensive. Taste becomes more comprehensive when it has been seasoned by a wider variety of experiences, and when it accommodates this range of experience, not necessarily all at one moment, but with a ready agility to summon past experiences of the same kind. When I look at a painting at the Museum, for example, I try to see it in isolation, as a kind of resistance to the natural flood of other paintings that it calls to mind. Sometimes, what is called to mind is not another painting but a film or a piece of music. The more associations that bubble up in response to any given direct aesthetic experience, the more articulate (in a non-verbal way) the taste that does the filtering.
Taste also becomes more personal over time. The proverb that tells us that there is no arguing with taste applies very fittingly to developed, long-seasoned taste. Applying it to people whose aesthetic experiences are neither numerous nor comprehensive, however, is poplulist nonsense. Any such ignorant person who waves the flag of non disputandum is announcing no more than the desire to preserve such taste as is possessed in a state of stuntedness. No possessor of developed taste will be heard to sigh contentedly, “I know what I like.” While it is certainly pleasant to know what you like, it is not particularly interesting. What’s interesting is to know that there is a lot more out there to get to know. (And then we’ll see whether we like it or not.)
Again, unlike the shrill populist, the possessor of a developed taste will only rarely be heard making unflattering remarks about the things that he or she doesn’t like. These are ignored, as potential failures of the aesthetic imagination.
— Although, I’m reminded that I really must get round to airing my stupefied but intensely unfavorable response to the productions with which Jeff Koons has been allowed to fill the Whitney Museum, and the horror of the strangely genial American enthusiasm that has drawn crowds to the museum, not to mention the wildly dystopian cast of the art critics’ support. —
The developed taste does not take account of dislikes. What would be the purpose? If the function of taste is to open the window of aesthetic experience, then anything that might close this window, even by a little bit, ought to be dealt with by another part of the mind. Besides, nothing keeps the faculty of taste busier than the things that we don’t really like about the things that we love.
Developed taste is experienced — it has seen much — and attentive — it has paid attention to what it has seen. If I were mathematically confident, I should say that both experience and attentiveness grow exponentially, not just because, the more you see, the easier it is to see still more, but because the web of aesthetic associations thickens by an ever more extremely multiplied number of strands. It is not necessary to add to the gross number of aesthetic experiences to make the web even more dense. A great deal of aesthetic life doesn’t involve fresh aesthetic experiences at all, but takes place entirely in the mind, from which it eventually forces discrimination to make experiences available. When I listen attentively to one of Mozart’s piano quartets, for example, a new experience is laid atop an old one.
***
The other day, I wrote that it is taste that enables the artist to balance the disparate factors that any serious artwork embodies. For example, a piece of music may be sublime, pointed achingly at something beyond human experience, but it cannot be called serious if untutored listeners can grasp no part of it. Great artists are aware of human limitations, and they work hard to ask for as much as they can, without asking too much. (Art that appeals to cognoscenti only is unworthy of discussion.) Some artists — Verdi, to my mind, is the supreme example of this — so successfully cloak their demands that sophisticated listeners (yes, even possessors of highly developed taste) mistakenly assume that none are being made.
In the end, however, I can’t say much about the taste of the artist — I’m not an artist myself. I can only say that the artists’ taste is an important element in my aesthetic experience. If I find Keith Jarrett’s performances of Handel’s keyboard suites — works of which Sir Isaac Newton complained that he could hear nothing but the flashy execution — a triumph of taste in art, I am really talking about my taste, and about the jolt that the performances sent through my taste when I first heard them. It was my taste that allowed me to relish the obvious exhilaration with which Jarrett negotiated the suites’ profoundly opposed pulls, toward bravura exhibition on the one hand and primly ostentatious classicism on the other. Handel also had an uncommon ability to position snatches of demotic melody in stately settings, as if doing the hornpipe in front of Greenwich Hospital.
For all his Italian operas and purely instrumental compositions, Handel managed, with a handful of religious or ceremonial settings of English texts, to become not just English but the pillar of English music. His importance in Britain appears never to have dimmed. At a fine performance of Messiah, it is still with choked-up exaltation that I stand for the Hallelujah Chorus. My only consolation for being singed by a burnish bush is that my tears don’t have far to fall before they disappear into my beard.
Most of all, the faculty of taste is a faculty of pleasure. Pleasure is the sunlight that feeds it. Your pleasure. Your evolving, ever-widening pleasure in the world. Please begin with that.