Once again Berg tosses a stinky little journalistic aphorism onto our list. It reveals his own bad taste. From any perspective, the comment he cites lacks merit. It implies that there is a causal relationship between bad taste and wealth: If one indulges bad taste, then one is (likely) to become a millionaire. Or, if so and so is a millionaire then so and so indulges or creates bad taste. Or, if one pursues/produces bad taste then one is more likely
to becomes a millionaire than if one pursued/produces good taste. Never mind that there are NO causal connections stated, just wild assumptions that some natural agency exists between bad taste and wealth. Further, no definition of either bad taste or good taste is offered. Further still, no evidence is given that being a millionaire is good or desirable or bad and undesirable. It is simply assumed that wealth equals goodness and the wit of the little turdy aphorism is in its cynical proposition that wealth is a product of bad taste or that bad taste is the key to wealth. My own bad taste is exemplified, unhappily, by my compulsion to respond to Berg's quoting silly"bon-mots" as if they deserved serious thought. What is bad taste? My definition is that bad taste is the aesthetic/virtue/moral standard of the ignorant underclass touted by the elite classes for their own cynical amusement. Thus bad taste becomes a mode by which the elite classes suppress others. However, this model actually reveals the greater bad taste of the elite classes because it ridicules the values of the underclass which however lacking in refinement are at least honest. Nothing exceeds crudity and bad taste more than dishonesty. I regard this substrate of dishonesty as the central flaw of art that flows from the Duchampian tradition, including the pop movement, the metamorphosis of high AS low, the "aesthetics" of mass culture, and the like. Whenever art is consciously dishonest for the sake of mockery and suppression it fails as art and becomes mere propaganda. What needs to be carefully teased out of the "dishonest" art is the neutrality of aesthetic form, I mean the willingness we have to shape sensory experience as aesthetic experience. This understanding of aesthetic form can to some degree at least stand apart from its utility. There IS a beauty we can project onto Duchamp's Urinal even though it is the same beauty one can project onto anything at all. But that is an inherently honest impulse. When that honesty is turned against itself by inciting a different value, such as ridicule, then ugliness is perceived. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> Sent: Sat, October 2, 2010 4:16:35 AM Subject: Does this explain why bad taste has become so prevalent? - Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste. *Charles Bukowski*<http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/c/charlesbuk382578.html> * *
