a social critique of the judgement of taste

The work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was an important trigger for this shift. Nothing is worse than saying one art work is definitively better than another, and that everyone else should think so too. Today, if you were to speak of having good taste you would be laughed at, seen as old fashioned and out of touch, told to ‘check your privilege’. The US critic Clement Greenberg, writing in the late 1950s, was probably the last critic to advocate good taste. Since then, much has changed. The idea has come to be negatively associated with an outlook and a period in history when, it is argued, a group of old, white men imposed their views on the rest of the population, who they looked down on. Carl Wilson, author of Let’s Talk about Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste, notes that Hume’s theory “could be described as a prejudice – a bias in favour of tradition, which may publish deviation from the ‘highest’ standards and obstruct the creation of new ones.’ Taste is a word that is off limits when it comes to art. Today, however, we rarely speak of someone having good taste. And he suggested that certain people were in a position to judge what was in good taste: those who had “delicate sentiment, improved by practice” could decide, “the true standard of taste and beauty”. There is a basis for good taste, Hume concluded, which is our feelings, our response to the art work.

One: that people disagree about what is good and bad art, and two: that we can agree that some art works are understood to be the greatest achievements of humankind. Hume was trying to resolve two apparently contradictory observations. “It is natural for us to seek a Standard of Taste,” wrote the Scottish philosopher David Hume in 1757, “a rule by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled at least, a decision, afforded, confirming one sentiment, and condemning another.”

A social critique of the judgement of taste