I agree that taste --or opinion or belief or preferences -- does affect our judgments independently of logic, although even logic can reveal apriori judgments.
But I don't agree with Miller's argument that science and technology disallow beauty. At one point or another, hasn't everyone exclaimed the beauty of nature as revealed by science? The Renaissance artists certainly regarded a scientific view of nature to be the foundation of their art. They were the first modern scientists because they studied the "habits of nature" and were the first after the Greeks to base their aesthetics and theory on nature. What Miller may have in mind when he laments the effect of technology and popular commercialism on art is the cultural preference for "things only as good as they need to be" instead of "being as good as they can be". One of the enduring traditions in all the arts is to make things as good as they can be, to aim for some sensibility of perfection. This notion has been under attack in the arts just as long as it has been championed in the marketing of mass culture and mass production. Witness the current fashion for "abject" and ephemeral art, much in abundance in the hip galleries and "new art" museums. We've come to expect that our $50,000 automobiles will only be good for, at best, a decade, as long as they need to be, so why should we still want a $500 painting to be enduring, aesthetically and physically, as good as it can be? This giving up on the enduringness of art assumes the conflation of high-low taste and acceptance of "only as good as it needs to be" expectations. Further, the new art mandate is to fully separate idea from object, the object being merely a quick-as-can-be transmitter/symbol of idea and having no special aesthetic attributes of its own. Thus, preference for enduring form and hard won skills is a romaticized trap, a dishonest and egoist distraction, from the all important idea, usually ironic, cynical, and abject, telling us once again that man has made a mess of things, as if we didn't know that by third grade. I think the levelling of art to the ever coarser descent of mass culture and its addiction to transient, ever-cheapened only-as-good-as-it-needs-to-be expectations, however much that oils the capitalist or socialist economies, is a bad thing. When art is life without ideals, there is no art. Yes, cultures can and do go bad when a gulf develops between the enduring ideals that humankind always claims for itself and the efforts, the desire, to symbolize them in art. I agree that teachers teach taste. Unfortunately, much of it "sucks" to use the jargon of low culture/art/aesthetics. And I'm not a retro-advocate Luddite. I'm a deeply conflicted, productive modernist-pomo, anti-fashionista, romantic -- a ruthless believer in enduring art and artists who make things as well as they can be made, conceptually and physically, to symbolize the human soul. I mean high art! I'm sick of the cute little cartoon Calvin's out there who make low art (while blowing kisses to Duchamp/Warhol) because, as the cartoon says, there's "no bottom to bad taste". For me, and Duchamp was a mildly entertaining freeloading jokester and Warhol was a fourth rate advertising sketcher who only wanted to be rich. They both became pop world geniuses when they realized that what was happening in the manufacture and marketing of clothing, housewares, and personalities could also be done as real art. Imagine either one of them having a conversation with Velazquez, or any of a thousand others whose art still stuns onlookers day after day, year after year, century after century. In forty years of teaching, if I didn't teach taste, I taught nothing. Some of my students didn't agree with my efforts to teach the taste that rises above mere personalisms. They wanted to be hot and successful, to talk more than do, to hope like hell they'd make the right connections, flatter the right curators/critics/collectors, live in NYC with a spouse/partner who had a high paying day job or trust fund. I've seen 'em come and go, usually fairly fast for the no-idea, deskilled, post studio talkers fumbling with "theory" they can't read. Five years to get noticed by worried peers plus a scatter installation show or two in basement galleries and then the long, desperate journey to total career oblivion. I tried to give them some heavy baggage for the trip. WC --- Chris Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Doesn't anyone here agree with me? > > Art/literature teachers are always teaching taste - > or as A.A. puts it: > "What does the art teacher see? The pupil's > mistakes" > > Even if they deny it - even if it's a taste for > certain certain theories > instead of certain kinds of images - and even if all > they're teaching is a > tolerance or relaxation rather then a refinement of > discrimination. > > When Brady's professor tells the fourth year > student: "The hands you painted > look like flippers" - he teaching a taste for hands > that look like hands. > (apparently an important issue here on A-L -- as > expressed in the recent > dismay over the hands and feet of Gr|newald's Christ > - and thank God Gr|newald > never learned how to do them right!) > > And if Brady's professor is concerned that a viewer > "will not be able to > discern a hierarchy by responding to the shapes in > the picture." - he's > teaching a taste for such a hierarchy - otherwise, > why raise the issue ? > > If Boris is teaching his students to "see all the > colors or shapes > etc. on the surface of the model" -- he's teaching > them that it's > less important to "think apple or flower" than to > think "form, color, value" > Why ? because he's teaching a taste for resemblance > to nature.(or as Goodman > might say - he teaching a preferred set of codes) > > When Tom is writing about how to allow a novel to > get written -- doesn't he > have certain ideas about what would make the > resulting text attractive to a > publisher? (i.e. conform to the taste of a current > market for such things) ? > Wouldn't the jacket of his book remind us of such > expertise by relating his > success as an editor? > > Preferences for images is primarily about taste -- > unless those images are > expected to relate information about a specific > question that needs to be > answered or job that needs to get done -- as in > science or technology. > > And our world privileges science/technology above > everything else. > > Which itself is a judgment of taste -- a taste for > the white coat of the lab > technician - rather than the elegant weeds of the > courtier.
