The Tyranny of Taste

I was at a gallery crawl recently with my girlfriend, and aside from the paintings, she was checking out the people themselves - an eclectic mix to say the least. I noticed something that seemingly always comes with an arts event - snobbery. I'm sick of elite art being put on a pedestal. Taste is, if anything, a construct we develop socially. I find that it expresses itself in a very tribalistic fashion: hipsters and country-folk will most likely have very different tastes - due in large part from their social surroundings. 

I don't think there is anyway to say that one sense of taste is somehow better than another, but that's almost always how it's viewed. It's not just the "hip" making fun of the supposedly "vulgar" either. I'd say that I've heard far more "even I could paint that" comments about a Jackson Pollock than I've heard "that's so bland / mainstream" about a Thomas Kinkade. 

I've always been taken aback when one of my friends make fun of someone's taste. So what if your friend listens to mainstream pop - it's what they like. It doesn't even necessarily code for their "tribe" - though it's often well correlated. I've heard countless people draw false conclusions on someone due to what music they were playing. I know someone quite well who can both enjoy gangster rap and also discuss at length the finer points of Nietzsche - to name one of very many.

One of the most visible forms of taste is in the fashion of clothing. I see it as analogous to all forms of taste: that of a cultural signal. This is not to say that I'm divorced from the concept of fashion all together - I play the game as well. I see fashion as both for others and myself. 

I see this as a pragmatic decision - as it may be for the rest. I'd like to portray a few things:

• That I mean business, but that I'm casual/not-uptight.
• That I care about my appearance, but not to the point of vanity.
• That I'm not beholden to brands (I won't wear logos), but to quality.
• And to convince myself that I really am all of the above.

I was asked a question the other day: whether the pursuit of fashion as a career and passion is somehow antithetic to living a meaningful life. I'm still rather torn on this issue. I find that on the one hand "losing" a talented designer to fashion - as opposed to say designing products that change our lives in a more substantive manner (such as what Designer's Accord is doing), and on the other hand the pragmatist in me says that fashion could lead, in a very real way, to the furthering of these very same causes.

If I project the look of success and accomplishment, I have a better chance of influencing others to get more things done. It's a sad fact of life, but as a rationalist I must accept it. Perhaps a true injustice in the world of fashion is accessibility to even the basics of signaling fashion.

Look no further than to the success of campaigns like TOMS Shoes who give shoes to the Third World, and you'll see that it's in fact a real dilemma. In developing countries, if you don't have shoes you're not only uncomfortable and less healthy, but you're considered to be of a lower class. If we were to level the fashion playing field, we'd be able to bring true merits to the forefront of the conversation. This isn't to mention the fashion problems that plague even the wealthiest of countries in that ancient game of romance. 

This somewhat convinces me that there are still areas where fashion innovation (even in the non-functional aspects) is more than mere vanity and could actually have real humanitarian impact. This leads me to think that practitioners in this medium could have a nobel impact and hence one can be both a lover of fashion and a "good" person.

Comments

[James]

Good taste (like a good opinion) isn't a fundamentally relative thing. It's easy and non-confrontational to see it as such, but when it really comes down to it there's no difference between 'good' art and 'good' industrial design, engineering, or even math; disciplines in which quality of taste is much more easily measured.

The problem is that 'taste' is this hard-to-conceptualize thing that most people don't seriously think about. Your average gallery crawler (just like your average artisté) ends up mostly posturing.

[twitter.com/NickPinkston]

I'd say that one can definitely make the distinction between art and fields like design. The difference is in their utility. Art's only utility is derived from the feelings it impresses upon the viewer - not its functionality.

Design on the other hand serves a purpose: to sell, to increase capabilities, etc. These elements have objective measures: to sell more, to increase an attribute (click-through conversions), etc. The same is true for engineering, math, etc. - all have objective utility functions (not that the outcomes are purely measured in that way).

The only equivalence in art would be public art. This is really a pragmatic application of art that is used to make a space more inviting for the community, etc. This means that the art's utility function could be measured by its draw for the community, etc. The issue is that this still derivative of the collective personal tastes of the public at large - which are completely subjective.

I think you'd agree that public art, by using a measure of mass appeal derived from personal views, is generally not praised for pushing the envelope of arts but instead for its agreeableness to the public at large (certainly not the avant garde elements therein).

I think that taste in the arts, divorced from all practical functionality, is in fact completely subjective and doesn't offer any objective reason to justify itself. Therefore, I conclude that taste in the arts is in fact completely subjective and generally align itself with social groups and other subjective aspects of personal identity.

Are you arguing that this position is non-confrontational?