On Apr 3, 2008, at 5:54 PM, William Conger wrote:
You can't exclude taste from art instruction, even if you teach one taste today and another tomorrow. There are other perspective systems that don't rely on the vanishing point. It depends on your taste.
Yes, but teaching how perception works is largely devoid of making tasteful pronouncements. There's a difference between "In standard, Western perspective, horizontal lines appear to converge on the horizon" and "If you want to paint a good picture, use Western perspective." Or consider figural painting: you can put as many branches or as few as you want on tree, as in a Gainsborough or Fragonard, and most viewers won't mind, if the painting is otherwise "tasteful." But add a sixth finger or third breast, or move both eyes onto one side of the nose and many people will (might) react initially with alarm, perplexity, or disdain--more so, than those who will enthusiastically embrace the new anatomy! Perhaps the viewer's reaction of surprise or disgust is driven by an innate "taste" to prefer a normal human shape, and not a disfigured or misshapen one. But even so, such disgust is driven by a reaction that is not specifically a "visual art" matter of taste, but rather is a fundamental, survival-level reaction.
Miller, as Cheerskep points out, typically plays games by stretching the word "taste" to embrace any cultural assertion by the teacher or student, or even by BurningInterlocutor. What's the point of speaking of the "taste" for a hierarchy of shapes? How pointless and ambiguous is it to assert that merely to observe that uniform objects contain no hierarchy of shape and size is to express a "taste" for such a hierarchy? Miller makes "taste" as useless a word as he claims "art" has become (by now referring to anything one does and claims to be "art").
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