* This is an edited transcript of a conference sponsored by Salmagundi, convened in October 2023 at the Tang Museum on the campus of Skidmore College. There are three sessions, each kicked off with opening remarks by one of the participants

Session One

ROBERT BOYERS: Probably each of us can recall a time when we were turned off by something adored or approved by a friend or a stranger. Remember, if you will, the first time you witnessed someone swallowing a raw oyster and said to yourself, “Never.” Or observed someone making light of or extolling an image that seemed to you appalling. The sight, perhaps, of a mob celebrating a massacre or a terrorist attack, or of a journalist giddy with approval.

How to account for radical disparities of response, especially when they involve people who might otherwise be much like yourself? Are sharp disparities of response, to a political event, or a film, or incendiary statement, the sign of deep and essential differences of outlook and ideology, not merely of disposition or sensibility? Do we want to steer clear of persons whose sensibility seems to us grossly, even alarmingly deficient?

Do we believe, with T.S Eliot and others, in our duty to work towards what he calls the correction of taste? Ought we to hope that everyone will respond in more or less similar ways to extreme representations or occasions of violence or crudity or malignity? The term of choice for many of us when we confront such questions, obviously, is taste, a word often used to insure that disparities of response will be blandly consigned to the domain of the trivial, the merely personal, with the understanding that not much can be done to close the gap between us. We must tolerate, after all, what are merely differences in taste, yes? And yet taste will, some of the time, take on a darker significance, even where small or trivial matters are in play. When a colleague tells me that the films I’ve placed on my core syllabus by Erich Rohmer or Ingmar Bergman seem to him dated or wooden, and wonders how the hell I can possibly expect my undergraduate students to admire them, I can’t help feeling that my colleague has exhibited, sorry, a deficiency. That his taste in films, probably in many other things, is not what it ought to be.

In larger matters of course, the stakes are higher. And there we will be more likely to feel that differences in taste or sensibility may perhaps say everything we need to know about a person’s character or intelligence. And this would be true even when we acknowledge to ourselves, if to no one else, that questions of taste are always problematic. The moment we begin to ask, seriously, what differentiates good taste from bad, or consider that there is danger in associating taste with morality, we know that we’ve entered a domain filled with uncertainty and ambiguity. Is the resort to terms like coarse, ugly, crude, indecent, always a mark of persons who have learned to think well of themselves by expressing disdain for others? In short, in this precinct there are temptations, and we’ll hope to engage them in a series of unrehearsed discussions.

Participants in this symposium came together, in fact, for one single day, with no purpose beyond the pleasure of conversation, the airing of differences, and some mild prospect of enlightenment. Rochelle Gurstein got us started with some preliminary remarks.

 

ROCHELLE GURSTEIN: In the course of writing my new book (on the ephemeral life of the classic in art), I was heartened to find that a standard of taste could be established when a work of art is felt to exemplify primary aspirations and excellences. Joshua Reynolds set out this understanding in his Discourses on Art (1790) when he located the standard of taste in “the authority and practice of those whose work may be said to have been consecrated by having stood the test of ages.” From the sixteenth century until the nineteenth, ancient sculpture such as the Venus de’ Medici and the Apollo Belvedere, which had been unearthed during the great building projects in Rome during the Renaissance, and also those artists who had most perfectly imitated them—Raphael and Michelangelo—met this test. These “true examples of grandeur,” as Reynolds called them, were regarded as models for artists to imitate and as the indisputable standard of taste. Exemplar and standard were synonymous. And as long as the practice was in good working order and artists and viewers felt part of its intellectual and aesthetic continuum, they could confidently judge works of art, both present and past.

Trouble sets in when a practice becomes exhausted, and artists, in their effort to revivify it, produce new forms of painting that stretch beyond the acknowledged boundaries, requiring new standards of taste. This is what happened to the practice of classic art. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, ambitious painters trying to advance aims and aspirations were finding the old subject matter—the bible and ancient myths—inadequate and turned their attention to contemporary events and modern literature, producing intensely expressive, dynamic history paintings like Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa and Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus, which looked little like their revered predecessors.

Simultaneously, the classic paradigm was found wanting by a new generation seeking something deeper, more spiritually resonant, than what they were finding in the Venus de’ Medici or Raphael’s School of Athens. The book that spoke most directly to them was the now-forgotten Poetry of Christian Art by A. F. Rio published in 1836. Even though it was not translated into English until 1854, the French version caused an immediate sensation in England. It made its way into the consciousness of art lovers through the books and articles of John Ruskin and other influential writers who popularized Rio’s ideas. Their combined efforts did nothing less than establish a new paradigm of art and a new standard of taste inspired by the masters of the early Italian Renaissance—Duccio, Giotto, Fra Angelico, Bellini, and Perugino, to name a few of the most famous.

That these favorites needed rediscovery took me by surprise. I had no idea that they had all but disappeared from the imagination of artists and viewers for over three centuries. This shocking development, I came to realize, was an unintended consequence of the first and most influential history of art ever written, Giorgio Vasari’s famed Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1568). Vasari had lavishly praised Giotto and his followers for their technical advances, but because his magisterial history tells the story of the growing perfection of art culminating with Raphael and Michelangelo, these early painters came to be seen as imperfect—and altogether dispensable—predecessors of the High Renaissance. This little-known episode in the history of taste became a kind of template for future disputes about taste, which would become a recurring feature of the history of modern art. For that reason, I want to look at it more carefully, with an eye toward understanding how we have become trapped in the quicksand of relativism today and if there is any way out.

The first thing to notice is that Rio’s new paradigm of Christian art struck at the very foundations of the practice that Vasari had established. In the classic practice, the highest aim was the virtuoso imitation of nature in beautiful renderings of dramatic episodes from the scriptures and ancient history and myth. In the Christian practice, the aim was instead the expression of “profound mystical signification.” And when it came to the function of painting, they were equally at odds. Instead of delighting and edifying viewers—the avowed purpose of painting in the grand style—frescoes on church walls were visible forms of worship, meant to encourage piety and reverence in their Christian viewers.

Given these rival understandings of art, the last thing I expected to find is that Raphael would be held as the standard of taste in both. But I quickly learned that there were two Raphaels—the budding Umbrian painter, known for his renderings of the Madonna and Child; and the mature Roman painter who made his name with the fresco cycles in the papal apartments of the Vatican. Those who believed art had reached perfection during the Renaissance adored the Raphael of the second period. When they viewed such masterpieces as The School of Athens or The Parnassus, they were in raptures over their unsurpassable beauty and elegance. And those qualities were precisely the ones they found lacking in Raphael’s early paintings of the holy family. All they could see was that their “design” was “dry, minute, and defective,” as Vasari put it.

Viewers who saw painting through Rio’s eyes adored the Raphael of the first period—the artist, Rio declared, “for whom was reserved the glory of carrying Christian art to its highest perfection.” Before paintings of Raphael’s holy families, which exemplified what Ruskin called his “earnest, truthful Christian manner,” they were moved by qualities that were invisible to admirers of the Roman Raphael: “celestial purity,” “purity of soul,” “naive simplicity,” “tender emotion,” “poetical imagination.” When Rio praised Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch for its power to make viewers “feel themselves transported into a new world… which long haunts their imagination like the echo of some celestial melody,” he was imbuing art with an intensity of spiritual emotion and depth never before dreamt of. And so when these same viewers turned to Raphael’s paintings of the second period, all they could perceive was meretricious beauty born of technical virtuosity. This would become another defining feature of disputes over taste: rival parties literally see different things when looking at the same painting.

And because they have such radically different understandings of the aim, purpose, and exemplars of their chosen practice, they characteristically offer histories with different trajectories. This is what we find with the explanation each party offered for the dramatic shift in Raphael’s style. Those who judged the Roman Raphael supreme attributed his “perfection” to his ever-increasing artistic virtuosity shaped by his intensive study of newly unearthed classical sculptures and of humanist literature; this, in miniature, was how art reached its perfection during the Renaissance. Where Vasari’s history told the glorious story of progress, Rio’s told the tragic story of decline. These identical developments appear in his history, but not only does he call them by different names—“naturalism” and “paganism”—he treats them as grievous errors of the artists of the age, introducing what Rio deplored as “that great element of decadence,” which would prove “fatal” to “the mysterious and exalted sentiments” of Christian art. Raphael was not immune to these elements of decadence. But ultimately Rio attributed the shift in Raphael’s style to a force entirely outside the realm of art: “The former faith has been abjured and a new creed embraced.” And that creed was humanism.

Ruskin, too, subscribed to this new understanding of art as a material expression of the artist’s soul. But he went further, using the equally novel idea—also outside the practice of art—that a work of art physically embodies “the inner spirit of the age in which it exists” to indict the society in which an artist lives. It was not only the character of Renaissance Italy but modern England that he had in his sights. What the two societies shared was their “denial of religious belief” in “the external and trivial affairs of life, and often in far more serious things.” The less Christian faith pervaded all dimensions of life, according to Ruskin, the art made under these conditions would inevitably become “profane” and “diminished.” Once Ruskin was convinced that art carried such profound spiritual meaning, it became his mission to make readers feel the moral imperative of choosing Christian over Pagan art or “Classic” art.

Much, then, was at stake. It was not just a matter of two different approaches to the making and experiencing of art. Rather, it was a dispute about what kind of society produces such art and what kind of person is capable of appreciating it. And so cultivated art lovers did not take the claims of the new counter-history of Christian art lightly. Anna Jameson, who wrote appreciations of Giotto, Fra Angelico, and their compeers but still admired the old favorites, characterized the taste that could not appreciate great works animated by an aim different from its chosen favorite as “narrow,” “exclusive,” “sectarian.” Other critics went further, denouncing champions of Christian taste for their “intolerance,” “stern fanaticism,” and ultimately “narrow bigotry.” This is how disputes about taste characteristically devolve. Once there is more than a single, agreed-upon standard, the people who care most passionately about art will find themselves in the frustrating and increasingly futile position of talking past one another.

This situation only grew more explosive as art and aesthetic experience acquired additional layers of existential significance over the next hundred years, setting the stage for today’s current impasse. There is much to be said about the disputes that emerged as new forms of art and appreciation clashed with established ones. In these brief, preliminary remarks I can’t describe at length Walter Pater’s intensification of aesthetic experience when he identified “the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake,” as the most fruitful way to spend the brief “interval” we are allotted between birth and death in his famed Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1870). Neither can I examine here Roger Fry’s discovery, in the first decades of the twentieth century, of “the emotion that emanates from the contemplation of forms” in works of art, which he described as “something very deep which corresponds to the need of the human spirit to relate itself to this foreign and inaccessible universe.”

But let me—forgive the leap— turn briefly to an episode that brings us to our own contentious moment: the emergence of a new paradigm of art in the 1960s that had its first expression in happenings, minimalism, pop, and conceptual art. In this case, the established paradigm—modernism—had been abandoned because a new generation found themselves not knowing how to go on after the stunning breakthroughs of painters associated with abstract expressionism—Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, Barnett Newman’s huge fields of color demarcated by vertical zips, Rothko’s floating registers of color—had taken abstract painting to its furthest reaches. The most radical of these movements sought to “get clear,” as Donald Judd announced, “of the circumscribed forms” of painting and sculpture, resulting in varieties of experimentalism such as performances, videos, autonomous objects devoid of anything outside their own materiality, diagrams for wall paintings to be executed by others. And when paintings were produced, artists relied on commercial art-techniques and borrowed images from mass culture.

What the emerging paradigm of postmodern art meant to those committed to modern art was most forcefully expressed by the critic Harold Rosenberg. The Abstract Expressionists’ delvings into the psychic state of creation, what Rosenberg called “their ambition to translate the profoundest feelings into psychological equivalents inherent in art materials,” had struck him as heroic, near miraculous. And so when he was confronted by the proliferation of art movements that disowned the transformative touch of the artist’s hand, he experienced them as an attack on what he valued most in the work of Rothko, Newman, and Pollock—their originality, spontaneity, individuality, seriousness, their ethos of strenuousness. What alarmed him most was the new generation’s commitment to collapsing the distinction between art and life, art and industrial processes, art and ordinary objects, art and mass-produced culture. Rosenberg was convinced that such projects were introducing “the threat of an ultimate dilution that will do away with art entirely,” what he called “the de-definition of art.” As early as 1967 he could make a statement that surpassed the gravest misgivings expressed by our own contemporary critics: “The history of art as a distinct category of artifacts seems to have reached a dead end.”

Here we see that disputes about taste are not just a matter of sensibility; there is a public dimension that pertains to the continued flourishing of the practice of art. A recurring feature of these disputes is the fear on the part of defenders of the old paradigm that the new one is banishing their world to oblivion. In 1856, an anonymous critic worried aloud that Ruskin’s claims for the superiority of Christian painting “threatened an utter revolution in acknowledged Art-authorities.” If the revolution succeeded, he warned, “the decisions of three centuries are overthrown, ancient landmarks removed, and great names disinherited.”

He had good reason to worry. Once a new paradigm takes over, the aims of the old one, along with aesthetic experiences that it made possible, do disappear. In 1975, Rosenberg, in a review of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, “Drawing Now, 1955-1975,” which showcased Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Pop artists, was all too aware of this eventuality. For one who belonged to the clan of alienated moderns, who since the time of Pater have sought in art the depth and expansiveness previously found in religion, the vacuousness of this work was a sign of the time as revelatory and distressing as any that Ruskin had ever interpreted: “The development of art from the fifties to the present consists largely of further counter statements to Abstract Expressionism. Barnett Newman’s call for ‘subject matter that is tragic and timeless’ was answered with a hail of hamburgers, Coca-Cola bottles, and comic strips.”

The alarm and indignation of viewers who find themselves on the losing side of history raises the question with which I’ll close my remarks: what kinds of aesthetic experiences are worth having? This is where something like morality comes in. And it feels anything but relative. In 1864, Ruskin declared, “Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you what you are.” What we like, what moves us in works of art—whatever is the right way of saying this—reveals something deep about us. And that the living artist who gets the highest prices at auction—the only value that everyone seems to agree about today—is Jeff Koons certainly tells us a great deal about the world we inhabit together.

Is there a way to move beyond relativism? That is, is it possible to arrive at a standard independent of a person’s own feelings and attitudes, beyond one’s own partial and limited standpoint, a standard, in other words, that is true—true without scare quotes around it? This way of formulating these questions I learned from Alasdair MacIntyre. In fact, I had hoped that I might be able to do for aesthetics what he had done for morals in After Virtue: establish a legitimate standard of judgment by situating it within the practice of art. The history of taste that I recovered showed that it is possible to judge which works are excellent in terms of exemplifying the aims, principles, and methods of a practice. Everyone who has been properly introduced to and is involved in the practice acknowledges that there is an authoritative view. They can say as a matter of fact that the Venus de’ Medici is the standard of ancient art, that the young Umbrian Raphael holds this distinction in the early Renaissance, the Roman Raphael in the High Renaissance, Cezanne in post-impressionism, Picasso in cubism, Pollock in abstract art, Warhol in pop art. They do not say, “it appears to me” or “in my judgment,” and this is because these judgments are rooted in the authority of their particular practices.

Because I must specify that they are rooted in their particular practices, however, I find myself running into trouble. And that is because the history I have recovered has repeatedly shown that if artists are unable to advance the practice of art that they have inherited, they innovate, often inadvertently, which introduces a new and rival standard of taste. Though viewers committed to rival paradigms might very well be able to recognize and acknowledge the exemplar of the competing paradigm, they conclude that their judgements are in this instance a matter of taste, and that taste is relative since it is founded in nothing more substantial than the viewer’s personal feelings, attitudes, and preferences. This is not where I had wanted to land.

But I need to qualify this. The history of taste also revealed that, in disputes about conflicting paradigms of art, where one stands temporally is all important. The vitriolic controversy over Christian versus Classic art was no longer a compelling dispute once the passions of the moment had passed. Then it was surely possible to enter and inhabit the standpoints of Raphael’s impassioned admirers and his equally impassioned detractors. But when one is confronted with works of art of one’s own time that are at once acclaimed and disparaged, it is an entirely different matter. Here I become confessional: I am unable to appreciate Jeff Koons. The piece of his that even less than enthusiastic viewers can always muster a good word for is his Rabbit (1986). I saw it at Sonnabend gallery when it was first exhibited and more recently at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles. People who know a great deal about art have instructed me to notice the way the form appears to be filled with air pushing from the inside out, like a floating mylar balloon, when it is in fact made of stainless steel—what an artistic marvel that is. Standing before the piece, I can see it through their eyes and marvel at the industrial technology that produced it. But it never becomes transformed into a work of art. My perception and experience are not altered, as they have been by compelling writers I have treated in my book, who have given me the eyes to appreciate artists whom I previously walked right by, like Raphael, Reynolds, Canova, even Renoir and Rubens.

I have repeatedly questioned why this is, only to find that the more I run through the possibilities, the more unresolved issues emerge. I am willing to grant that my dislike of Koons’s work could be a failure of imagination on my part, but I cannot suppress the suspicion that it is just as likely that his admirers are too easily taken in by the object’s technical wizardry. Other times, I feel that claims made for his art are specious. When I read Koons saying that his “artistic intention is to communicate with the masses,” it only confirms my distaste: his Rabbit, Balloon Dogs, and all the rest demand nothing of his viewers; I find them trivial, shallow, meretricious. They do not provide—in truth, they militate against—the kinds of aesthetic experience that art in its long history has made possible. Perhaps it is unfair—in fact, a category mistake—to judge a work of art by standards that belong to a rival paradigm of art, standards alien to it.

If I were to take that lesson to heart, I would admit that I cannot get enough distance from our moment. I should conclude that I am not the right viewer for Koons and let the matter rest there. But I cannot. I want to dispute; I want to say that art that addresses existential questions is of a higher order than art that makes luxury items out of the detritus of mass culture—that there is a hierarchy of values, a hierarchy of which kinds of aesthetic experiences are worth having—even though I know that I have no rational grounds on which to stand, only my personal experience and responses. Again, this is not where I had wanted to land.

Which returns me to Alasdair MacIntyre and my original—and now vain—hope that I would be able to do in the realm of art what he had done with incompatible traditions in the realm of morality: Make a persuasive case for “the rational superiority” of one tradition over a rival one by demonstrating that the superior tradition can explain the persistent, intractable problems encountered by adherents to the rival one better than they themselves can and furnish remedies for these in a way that their opponents would find “rationally compelling.” When it came to the characteristic modern moral stance—emotivism—MacIntyre offered a stark choice between Nietzsche and Aristotle and convincingly demonstrated that only the Aristotelian tradition “could be restated in way that restores intelligibility and rationality to our moral and social attitudes and commitments.” What is now clear to me is that I cannot make an analogous case for the rational superiority of one paradigm of art over a rival one. What would that look like? Koons or Raphael? David Smith or Phidias? It becomes absurd the moment it is posed. And that is because these painters and sculptors think of the aims, functions, and forms of art—the very idea of art—in such radically different ways that it raises the question of whether earlier figures like Raphael or Phidias would be able to recognize the work of Koons and Smith as art. For this reason, it is virtually impossible to imagine adherents of these incompatible traditions in conversation, let alone that any of them could explain the seemingly irresolvable problems encountered by their rivals better than they themselves could.

 

MICHAEL GORRA: Right. I’m quite interested in what you said about Ruskin, in his saying “Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you what you are. Go out into the street and ask the first man or woman you meet what their taste is. If they answer candidly, you know them body and soul. You, my friend, in the rags with the unsteady gait, what do you like? A pipe and a quart of gin? I know you, you good woman with quick step and tidy bonnet. What do you like? A swept hearth and a clean tea table. My husband opposite me, and a baby at my breast. Good, I know you also. You little girl, with the golden hair and the soft eyes, what do you like? My canary and a run among the wood hyacinths. You little boy with dirty hands and low forehead. What do you like? A shy at the sparrows. Good. We know them all now. What more need we ask?” But then at the beginning of that passage he says, “Taste is not the only part and index of morality. It is morality.” I guess all of this leads to a question. Where does conscience come in?

 

ROCHELLE GURSTEIN: An important question, no doubt and yet I don’t think that taste as Ruskin speaks of it in that passage can get us there. Taste as a strictly personal habit of preference is distinct from taste as an expression of a larger world and the standards that people at a given moment can agree upon.

 

JAMES MILLER: I’m struck, Rochelle, that you began by saying that you have an approach that might help us deal with a rampant relativism, but I’m not sure how what you’ve presented does that. You’ve given us a story about art that revolves around practices and standards, arguing that the practices vary from time to time, and that new criteria appear from time to time. This isn’t especially controversial or hard to accept. And yet Arthur Danto has a story to tell about art which is rooted in the exhaustion of the attempt to produce a naturalistic art, and emphasizes the challenge to our way of thinking that begins essentially with Andy Warhol. Danto—so it seems to me—can take pleasure in the conceptual challenges that are raised by Warhol, in a way you seem to have no appreciation for. So that I ask: when you speak of relativism, are you in effect lamenting the end of modernism and the end of history as we once understood it?

 

ROCHELLE GURSTEIN: For me, Danto offers us the best way to understand our postmodern moment. He speaks of it as post-historical. Anything is possible. Everything is possible. And no, not a lament, or not exactly. Really it’s an old conflict. The Christian classic argument sees degeneration, but the Renaissance argument sees progress.

 

JAMES MILLER: And I suppose that vision corresponds, in the way you propose and understand it, to the division between Harold Rosenberg’s idea of “the new” and Danto’s.

 

ROCHELLE GURSTEIN: Yes, that’s the point. Rosenberg sees decline. And Danto sees, if not progress, then at least liberation. That’s how he speaks about it. Everything is possible. When he speaks of post-historical art, he acknowledges that you might also look at it and think this is a moment of chaos and disorder. But he’s so sophisticated, so capable of standing outside of what he’s describing. Sophisticated in a way that a moralist like myself can never be. And when I say sophisticated, I don’t mean that in a negative way. If I try to do that, I feel like it’s a pose. Even when I say I can appreciate what Warhol’s doing, I am doing that to be sophisticated. In some ways this is a question of taste. When I read Danto on Warhol my view of what matters in art doesn’t substantially change. I continue to regard Warhol as I do. I can take Danto’s position in my mind and say, oh, I can see why Danto would say that. But it never becomes my own judgment. It never becomes my own perception. When I read a more powerful writer, from my perspective, like Ruskin or Rosenberg, my way of thinking changes. Rosenberg helped me to see abstract expressionism as I could not have done without him.

But I know that in a way I’ve been dodging the question about relativism. In truth, I ended up being a relativist in writing my new book, which is the last thing I wanted to be. I was hoping to be able to really establish a way out, to say that we can root taste and judgements of taste in practices. But all I found was a terrible realization that it’s just the paradigm that keeps changing. And I’m not able, so far, to figure out how to get beyond that. I’ve said that I was very influenced by MacIntyre, and I hoped that in writing my new book I could do for the arts something like what he did. But I’m not a philosopher, so perhaps it’s my intellectual equipment that failed me. Or perhaps it’s just that morals and aesthetics are so utterly different that you can’t hope to accomplish in the one domain what can be accomplished in the other. I do, at any rate, have to accept, again, that I am a relativist.

 

CELESTE MARCUS: I’m not a relativist. I’m a value pluralist. And I am writing a biography of Chaim Soutine, in which I try very hard to wrap my mind around what he’s doing. And I find it unpersuasive when people talk about the art project as if all artists are trying to do the same thing. I’m also a painter. We can’t all be trying to solve the same problem. We move on to different problems. Every painter is always doing something personal. Some of them conceive of themselves as a stage in the history of art, and usually they’re the ones who make it into the museums. There are painters that are the greatest painters of their generation that we’ve never heard of, because they weren’t trying to be part of this or that discourse or symposium. They weren’t trying to further the art project. This thought drives me crazy. There are great young painters right now that no one talks about because all they know is the art that’s in the big galleries. And if the art that’s in the galleries is not figurative, people will say figurative art is over. But it’s not true. It just happens to be the art you read about. Or you hear that all art is political. But that’s not true. It’s just that the critics who write for, I don’t know, art publications you’re supposed to read want to talk about politics.

So I guess what I want to distinguish between is, art as a personal project and art as a political project. All of the great artists become obsessed with some kind of challenge. They’re seized by something, and that’s what we are attracted to in their work. This project that they’ve set for themselves. And the standards that you have to judge them by, I think, are twofold. One is, how interesting is the project they’ve set for themselves? They can set for themselves a very simple project. This is my problem with Warhol. I think that he succeeds by his own standards, but his own standards are not interesting to me. This is not a relativism problem. I can tell a good Warhol from a bad Warhol, I just think that most Warhol is not that good. I can tell a good Rothko from a bad Rothko, or I think that I can. And I think that the project generally is so impressive and so important that the question of whether or not this Rothko or that Rothko is succeeding by his own standard, matters much more to me than what Warhol does. But I think the impulse to try and describe all of art as if it’s all happening as part of a single project, and not as an expression of an individual soul, is the issue here. How interesting is this soul, how excellent is this soul: These are the important questions. You’re not trying to grapple with something utterly beyond you. When you’re standing in front of a Manet, you are asking yourself, can you understand him, as much as you’re asking yourself what was the historic impact he had? And I think one of those is a question of taste and the other is a question of politics, which is not a bad question. But they’re not the same.

BARBARA BLACK: Well, thank you, Rochelle, for getting us started. And to Celeste for your response. I also wanted to change the term of choice from relativism to pluralism. And I like very much your emphasis, Celeste, on what is interesting. Not an easy question. Rochelle, your story of taste was a story of ebbs and flows. In thinking about taste, are we inevitably thinking about dominant tendencies or trends that shape our sense of what is good, or interesting? If Sontag is right—and I think she is—that taste is context, then we are probably uncomfortable proposing that art can be “universal” or “timeless.” When you read about taste, you often see affiliated terms like grace, beauty, elegance. Rochelle, you use some of them yourself. Powerful terms, in their way, and yet, in the end, I don’t know that they help me to understand what we mean when we speak of “taste.”

My own inclination for a long time was to think of taste as having much to do with a tradition, a cultural inheritance, with decorum and rules, and what is right and what is fitting, what is correct. And this set of concerns can take us to things that are trivial. I’m very interested in the relationship of taste to the body and to embodiment. Think, just for a moment, about the recent argument in congress over Senator John Fetterman’s hoodie—you know what I’m talking about. So is that appropriate, is that tasteful dress? Does that at all matter? It does take us somewhat away from an exclusive emphasis on art as the domain in which taste mainly matters.

But I’ve also noticed in my own professional life and academic circles a rebuke of taste. And Bob, you’ve touched upon this phenomenon, this instinct, in some of your opening remarks, a critique of civility as an ideal, as something to be desired. We think of how the concept of respectability politics has been repudiated by so many academics, who believe that calls for the appropriate, for the tasteful, for the collegial, are only mechanisms of social control.

 

ROBERT BOYERS: Important, Barbara, and of course that critique, turning on a term like “mechanisms of social control,” has itself become a cliché, and is trotted out with an indiscriminate, usually undiscriminating vehemence, so that it seems to refer to an actual process while also operating mainly as a noise of disdain. There isn’t much that can’t be described as a mechanism of social control.

BARBARA BLACK: That’s one big aspect of the challenge we face, isn’t it? Even the resistance to the tasteful, or appropriate, or accredited, is also in its way an expression of a situated orthodoxy. In our anthology of readings for this conference, a Victorian scholar quotes another, who wrote that, “Good taste is a barrier to an understanding and appreciation of the 19th Century.” To me that felt preposterous. As a Victorianist, I’m used to my century getting canceled for all kinds of reasons. And it’s usually about what it lacks. So it lacks progressive ideas, it lacks sophistication, it lacks sex. But here’s someone telling me the Victorians have no taste, no doubt inspired by Victorian excess, Victorian eclecticism, the dawning of an era of mass culture. So we’ve got gimcracks and baubles and tchotchkes. Reading that line made me realize—not for the first time—how often taste excludes, and often poses as definitive, though it is utterly situated. Funny, the notion that taste will get in the way of understanding the Victorians, because the Victorian period is the grand era of taste-making. There’s a paradox to the 19th Century, which was after all the era when socioeconomic class became permeable and efforts became ever more strenuous to classify people, ways of living, behaviors, by means of taste markers.

 

MICHAEL GORRA: I agree with Celeste that value pluralism is a more useful concept than relativism. Values can coexist. You can have a taste for this and a taste for that, and they don’t cancel each other out, much as you think they should.

If you go back to these Victorians, and Ruskin, the debate over Raphael, you find that the debaters were seeing different Raphaels, were valuing different things in him depending on the stages in his life they preferred. But he was still the person they used to distinguish one taste from another. And I guess this would make me think of Matthew Arnold, and his idea of touchstones. Touchstones are things that you can point to that are some sort of, I don’t want to say definitive standard, but some sort of permanent point of valid reference. Raphael may not now be as interesting as he once seemed, but for centuries he certainly was a standard point of reference, quite in the way that Manet or Woolf or Picasso operates in current debates. The controversy over their work is what’s interesting, I think. The controversy, the fact that people keep on being talked about even as tastes or standards or the terms of argument change. The value in them is that we go on saying things about them.

That’s one thing I’ve been thinking and that would fit even into T.S Eliot’s idea of what is a classic. A classic is something you go on arguing about. Modernism presented itself as an absolute standard, abstraction as an absolute standard, the thing painting is always reaching for, just as the representation of consciousness is the thing the novel’s always reaching for. How do we go on from that, from a form that I think most of us feel is now outmoded, but that nevertheless presents itself as an absolute standard? Modernism gave us that dilemma, and it’s something we’ve been fighting with and arguing about for a long time. And I’m thinking here of an article probably many of us read recently, Jason Farago’s piece in The Times Magazine arguing that art now is not being revolutionary, not trying to change things, that we’re now in a period of consolidation. Does that present another way to think about taste and value?

 

IAN BURUMA: In the debates referred to here and in our readings on taste, there are two sides, one stressing elegance, beauty, grace, and virtuosity, the other emphasizing spiritual qualities. A simplification to be sure. But what emerges in discussions about taste is often the specter of a superior class. Why so? If you want to be able to judge artworks based on their virtuosity or other purely aesthetic or formal values, you need knowledge, training. That means connoisseurship, which entails an elite, or the exclusion of those who don’t know as much. This way of thinking about taste and judgment is now very much frowned upon. Authority has collapsed.

In fact, the whole idea of connoisseurship plays very little part in discussions of modern art, and I wonder whether we’re not seeing at the same time a revival of the interest in a secular vision of the redemptive and religious sides of art, in the sense that a lot of art is now judged on its inclusivity and its representation of marginalized groups. A lot of emphasis here on what is and is not politically acceptable, with a corresponding creation of a new elite, not connoisseurs, but certainly a new elite who exclude in the name of inclusivity. So that you have a new school that seeks redemption in art at the expense of judging in terms of virtuosity or other formal concerns.

What surprises me and disappoints me a little bit about some of the painting that is now being touted on the grounds that it is supposedly inclusive and gives a voice to foreign and marginalized groups—some of whom were not actually neglected in their own time—is how conventional a lot of it is, in formal terms. It’s very representational, very unexperimental. Painting of that kind is far from dead, but it’s judged, I think, in a religious manner, though the language used to promote it is clearly secular. Do you think there’s anything in this way of describing the present situation, Rochelle?

 

ROCHELLE GURSTEIN: I’m glad you brought that up. Actually there’s a great deal of figurative paitning to be seen in the galleries and biennales. Figurative painting, if it’s done primarily by African-American artists today, is the thing, and it’s the most retrograde in terms of modernist style. For figurative painting to return at this point would seem improbable, even absurd, if you subscribed to Clement Greenberg’s idea of history. But then, once you make “interesting” a standard for thinking about artworks, you don’t really know where that’s apt to lead you. Harold Rosenberg invoked spontaneity and freshness, another way of talking about creativity, which is pretty bland as a standard, but “interesting” doesn’t emerge until the 1960’s and at least the roots of postmodernism. Is “interesting” a viable standard? Maybe not a bad one, though you can apply it to many other things, whereas with art, well, I think here of Roger Fry, who says that with art, you don’t want to have stories. You don’t want to have things outside of art. You want an interior reality that belongs to the visual alone, what nothing else can bring. Fry’s idea of aesthetic emotion doesn’t get at everything you might want to say about it, but it was, in the best sense, interesting. Does Fry answer our most insoluble questions about art? Look, my sense is that if you have one paradigm that seems to you to suffice, then that’s the only one there is. Before the 20th Century, no one was describing art as self-expression. You don’t find that. Really you don’t, not, certainly, in the visual arts. Our problems derive from our acceptance that there can legitimately be more than one paradigm. When someone says, “Well, I can’t stand that. I only like pop,” how do you persuade them to open their eyes to look at something else?

So we live in the post-historical moment that Arthur Danto talked about, and the position of value pluralism is only possible in that moment, that world. Before our time, it just wasn’t possible. Artists think they can do anything and call it neoexpressionism, neoromanticism, neominimalism, neogeo. These were all the movements of the eighties that Danto was writing about. They have nothing in common. They’re essentially revivals of past styles. The modernist idea was that if you wanted to make something new, you had to create a new form, because the new things you hoped to express couldn’t be expressed with the old forms. The thing that Ian was saying about the newest work seems to me true. Aesthetically, it’s quite dull. I don’t have any objection to it. I’d rather look at it than at many other things. But I don’t think there’s anything aesthetically interesting in it.

 

MICHAEL GORRA: Can I just add something to that? You can say, fair enough, conventional and representational, but the root, in the case of many black artists, is socialist realism. That’s where it came from.

 

ROCHELLE GURSTEIN: For the modernists, of course, socialist realism was not to be taken seriously as art.

 

ROBERT BOYERS: The taste for modernist artworks necessarily denied any attractiveness for works that were– what to call it…

 

CELESTE MARCUS: Ideologically useful. Art, after all, can have different purposes, obviously. When you turn away from paintings to other artforms, the conversation will inevitably alter. But the idea that we may judge art by asking whether it serves an ideological purpose belongs to a category of judgment removed from other standards.

 

ROCHELLE GURSTEIN: Oh, I agree. Absolutely. Different categories of judgment, as you say. And yet, even while acknowledging that, we may want to say that there are, for most of us, hierarchies of value, even in a world that seems not to approve or accredit such hierarchies. If you’re going to think of all the experiences that have been available to us, I find it very disappointing that Pop Art has the status it has in our world today. I’m not surprised, given the world we live in, that people are attracted to that kind of work. I’m saying if you’re looking at the long view, and take the idea of the touchstone, of Matthew Arnold’s touchstone, you think about the idea of the classic. The things that people come back to over and over and over through the generations. That is what the history of taste makes possible.

 

TOM HEALY: I’m not sure about any of this, which is not surprising really. About the classic as a foundation for taste or about the “interesting” as an adequate foundation. And so I resort to mere anecdote. I was having a discussion last night with a friend about the merits of different translations of a Cavafy poem. My friend very much favored a florid, rather antique version, while I argued for a more muscular and angry translation. Neither of us speaks Greek, but it mattered that we’ve read lots of translations of Cavafy and discussions about them, so that our preferences are informed, are not arbitrary, even if we disagree with one another.

 

TERENCE DIGGORY: Here I can’t help thinking about the word “like.” Of course in discussions about the concept of taste, there’s often been a hard distinction between mere liking and making a judgment of taste. When we’re looking at judgments, are we talking about taste? And when we’re looking at liking, are we talking about something very different from taste? Rochelle spoke of the public dimension of taste. And in some of the instances she cited, it was clear that “the market” played a considerable role. It was certainly present in the transition from abstract expressionism to the various arts of the 1960s, including pop art. Maybe too obvious, but not negligible.

 

TOM LEWIS: Definitely not negligible. And not far either from what we mean when we speak of fashion and its relation to commerce. In the 18th Century, fashion was a pejorative term and never to be confused with judgements of taste. Though of course you might say that it’s fashionable to have good taste. And yet we know that there are ebbs and flows in fashion, in what’s regarded as good taste, and that this ebb and flow, especially in the last century, has much to do with commerce and marketing.

But that’s something very much a part of the history of art in America, almost from the beginning. So that the Hudson River School, which was in great favor in the mid 19th Century, had been abandoned for the Barbizon school at the end of the 19th Century. In the 20th Century, in the twenties and thirties and forties, you could pick up a Cole painting for a few dollars, and then all of a sudden he was rediscovered and the Hudson River School paintings now go for millions. You can say that taste changed, but that’s hardly a description of the forces that affected these changes.

 

ROBERT BOYERS: I’m always amazed at the confident enunciation of aesthetic standards or criteria, as if they were a reliable measuring apparatus—that’s Harold Rosenberg’s term for what’s gone completely to hell. The Arnoldian idea of touchstones has seemed to me in this regard both useful and suggestive, but also somehow mysterious. After all, touchstones ostensibly refer to artworks that can and do reliably serve as a measuring apparatus—reliably in the sense that you can see an artwork radically different from your chosen touchstone work and expect to be able to say, see, this really does or doesn’t measure up. Of course if you select an inappropriate touchstone by which to assess another dissimilar work, then your judgment is absurd and worthless. But Arnold could assess Chaucer, or Robert Burns, by putting them next to Shakespeare. Arnold was interested in qualities or values that transcended not only fashion, but transcended the dominant features of the ostensibly relevant paradigm. Put a certain kind of robustly muscular passage in Chaucer or Burns next to another kind of robustly muscular passage in Shakespeare and you can see what is excellent or distinctive in each while also seeing what makes Shakespeare superior. If you operated with some degree of taste this understanding would be available to you. So Arnold contended. And that is a conviction that we no longer share as a real possibility—I say we, much though in certain precincts that conviction remains credible.

 

IAN BURUMA: When, for example, would it remain credible?

 

ROBERT BOYERS: In a room of museum curators who believe they can differentiate between a first rate Pissaro or Balthus and a lesser work by either artist merely by putting the one superb Balthus next to the inferior one, or by juxtaposing these artists with works by other artists doing comparable things, however disparate the styles.

 

MICHAEL GORRA: But with Arnold, you know, there’s not one touchstone. There are several different touchstones, and many intersecting standards. The 18th Century certainly may have thought it could erect a single standard of taste, a neoclassical standard, but the project foundered. None of those efforts worked. And in a way, it was Shakespeare who signaled the failure, the Shakespeare who doesn’t conform, who doesn’t match what that Francophile Neoclassical standard wants it to do. And no matter how much Dryden or Milton or whoever wants to erect an adequate standard, they just can’t bring it off. So I think we need a sense of multiple touchstones and competing standards of taste.

 

CELESTE MARCUS: I like the word “interest,” which allows us to say, yes, there are many standards, but also that there is a hierarchy of some sense, which can be measured in terms of interest. Another word that I like to use is excellence, though I concede that it’s hard to say what we mean by excellence all the time. One way to identify those things is to say that they are the things that the great artists of every generation will continue to look to. The great artists. I don’t mean the artists who are briefly fashionable in galleries. Let’s look for a moment at the example of Chaim Soutine. Though De Kooning was an abstractionist he saw that Soutine got very close to abstraction within figuration. Also it was clear that painters Soutine looked to included Rembrandt, who he was obsessed with, and Fouquet, and even Ingres, not because he was trying to imitate them but because he knew he needed them. He would spend hours and hours looking at Chardin though Chardin didn’t paint anything you’d think Soutine could use, but he would marinate in front of Chardin.

Of course he had no interest in copying Chardin, but he would look at Chardin’s ray fish, for example, and then go and buy a ray fish and paint it in his own style. And what he was trying to do was to achieve the level of authenticity that Chardin achieved within his own style. Can you say the standard was excellence? You can say that Chardin and Soutine operated in the same level of excellence, but not the same version of excellence. Hard to explain this, but not hopeless to try to explain or teach the standards which are worth learning. That’s one way of helping people to have taste. Never an easy thing.

 

IAN BURUMA: I can’t help thinking that the marketing questions raised here are central to anything we want to say about taste. And maybe Rochelle can tell us: when did marketing become branding? Because I think one way in which Warhol was very influential, some would say interesting, is that he did very consciously turn himself into a brand as Jeff Koons and other contemporary artists have done or tried to do. I once read an anecdote of Picasso sitting in a restaurant in Paris, signing the napkin and saying “this is now worth a million.” That’s a proto-Warhol gesture. So, when did that begin? When did branding become a conscious artistic strategy?

 

ROCHELLE GURSTEIN: In the 19th Century. And then it grew and developed. Harold Rosenberg liked the idea of the art package. In 1967 he’s already saying something that surprised me. That the art catalog was a marketing technique. He was dismissing it as part of the larger commercialization of art, which makes a certain kind of sense, even if it’s untrue. Of course the market affects people in drastically different ways. It moves some artists to turn against whatever is the thing everyone is currently talking about. But then it moves other artists to try to figure out how to do the next thing without capitulating too completely to the dictates of the current market. Often it creates new desires for something else, for a kind of innovation that will seem really new and thrilling. Are artists controlled by the market? I say not necessarily, though we all know of instances where the market really has dictated not only what is shown in the major galleries and museums but what the artists think they want to make.

 

JAMES MILLER: I want to go back to what Celeste said earlier about excellence. Sorry, but this is a term that pushes all my buttons. And frankly, so does interesting. As an editor, if a critic comes to me and calls something interesting, I say, “Tell me something specific.” I would never let a critic use that word. I consider it weak and a weasel word. Excellence, I think, doesn’t get us anywhere. Not in the arts context and not in academia, where “excellence” is a term all administrators resort to as a standard. Though when you try to apply it, you realize it is meaningless. Because if you go to a cultural studies department and ask what’s excellence, the answer will be unrecognizable to half of the English department and completely legible to the other half. English departments have been blown up by debates over this. What it means to somebody in the chemistry department is completely different from what it would mean in a history department. It is the most question-begging, empty term of approbation that is used by modern bureaucrats to say nothing at all. In my view.

 

CELESTE MARCUS: First of all, I think that one of the most fun things to do in writing is to take a word that has been degraded so that it doesn’t mean anything anymore and attach meaning to it and significance to it. So the fact that the word excellent is used by vapid people to mean something vapid does not mean the word itself is vapid. If you took every word that people use, and degrade through constant usage, so much that you can’t even hear it anymore, and then stop using it altogether, you’d be sacrificing too much excellent language. Like the word problematic, which somebody used earlier. I think that it is, okay, problematic but important. I love it when a writer tries to refresh a familiar, apparently empty term. It’s one of the hardest things to do. It’s harder than using esoteric words. Sure, if somebody was going to write an essay about a specific work of art and all they could say was that it was excellent, and they couldn’t say anything more than that, that would be a weakness in the essay. But if somebody is describing many different competing systems and so can’t definitionally be specific because you have to allow room for multiplicity, then it’s fine and good that they use that word to set up something we somewhat understand.

 

ROBERT BOYERS: When you think of all the alternative terms you might use in the domain of aesthetics, you’re apt to find the same problem. If you say authenticity, you’ll say authenticity meaning precisely what? In the domain of aesthetics, it seems to me, unless you get down to the nitty-gritty, you are always going to be revolving in an ether that allows for just about any kind of interpretation. Excellence obviously leads us in some contexts to think about accomplishment, right? A term that in the arts, for the most part, most people will no longer resort to. Who wants to be merely an accomplished painter? All sorts of people are accomplished. You can make a good drawing in the studio, and not be regarded by your peers as an artist. When you look at a Soutine painting, as Celeste suggests, you’d never think of its excellence as having principally to do with its being highly accomplished. That wouldn’t be what would come to mind. It is of course highly accomplished, but that word itself would seem at once inadequate and misleading.

 

TOM HEALY: I think there’s a lot more to be said about the marketing and branding. There’s a wonderful scene in David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress, where he has Rembrandt and Pascal meet in the street and Pascal says to Rembrandt, “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear of your bankruptcy.” And Rembrandt bows and says, “I’m so sorry to hear about your excommunication.” Markson was writing about them as brands, Rembrandt in connection with commerce and Pascal as a brand of resistance.

 

TERENCE DIGGORY: And does that define in some way the taste for their work? I’m not sure about that. We’re talking about something that has a public dimension. And I don’t think that individual artists are necessarily making the taste by which their art is received. And I think that’s where the market comes increasingly into play, though of course the term branding wasn’t used in the past. I think the concept of celebrity is relevant. They didn’t use the term branding, but the concept of “celebrity” is pretty much the same thing. And I would nominate Byron as a brand as well as others we’ve named.

 

TOM LEWIS: A hundred directions we might take here. But let me focus things first a bit. I’m thinking about the history of selling art in the United States. And it really begins in the late 1830s when a man named James Herring, who was a minor portrait painter, opened a gallery in New York City for the promotion of fine arts in the United States. And it was an interesting gallery, because you paid $5 a year to join the gallery and you could then enter a lottery for that $5 that got you a painting. And you would also get an engraving for your money. $5 is probably about $175 or so today. By the 1840s, Wall Street got involved and bankers started bankrolling this operation. And so at that point, it really became big time. And the lottery became big time. And they were grabbing paintings from all the biggies, Cole, Church, Bingham, Duran, and selling them. And if you look into their catalogs, you’ll find that a lot of the paintings have passed through these galleries. These bankers had no aesthetic training, but they started something called the AAU, the American Art Union. They put William Cullen Bryant in charge of it. He’s the first president. And its purpose was to create a venue to display and sell art, but most importantly, to develop the taste of the populace for the best kind of American art. So here are the bankers telling us exactly what the best taste in American art is. And this really was quite something. In 1848, they distributed catalogs, images in the form of engravings. They had their own bulletin of the American Art Union, and they created “correct taste.” And of course it was immediately related to the accumulation of wealth.

After a while the whole thing collapsed. The state supreme court or state appellate court in New York said that the lottery was illegal. And it all came to a crash with a painting called “The Voyage of Life,” which was actually a lottery winner and is now in the National Gallery. BARBARA BLACK: What year did it collapse?

 

TOM LEWIS: About 1848. But it’s an interesting thing to consider how art became commodified and people grabbed it. The bankers grabbed it to make a dollar. They didn’t do so well because the finances got very murky. But nevertheless, it became a way to popularize the artists that I’ve mentioned and several others, and also to bring them to the fore in America and establish a standard for taste.

 

MICHAEL GORRA: The 19th Century was critical in the way the arts marketplace, as we now understand it, developed. Branding? Think of Dickens. There are all kinds of Dickens ephemera and mugs and broadsides, not to mention touring companies of his plays. Clearly art as commodity or as debased by its position in the market is nothing new. Patronage in earlier periods operated as a kind of a marketplace. The idea that the writer ought not to work in a marketplace is an aberration of modernism. Of course Joyce had private patrons, and Virginia Woolf had an inherited income, and her press. But the idea of the artist as separate from the market: it’s just a historical aberration.

Session Two

JAMES MILLER: In reading the various texts that we were all assigned in preparation for this public conversation, and in listening to most of our comments during the opening session, I was struck by how many of us essentially take for granted that taste or bad taste are obviously a matter more or less purely of convention, and that standards of good taste and bad taste vary greatly depending on the time, the place, the culture, or what I shall call practices within the domains of art and art criticism. This was the view of the French sociologist and theorist, Pierre Bourdieu, who argued that in any society, a small group of people, most consequentially an elite, distinguished by education and intellect, style of speech, style of dress, and so on, will determine what constitutes good or bad taste within their group or class.

It’s worth remembering, however, what this common modern view ignores. At no point in our readings, and I don’t think at any point in our conversation earlier, did we encounter an example of a mathematical or platonic defense of the enormously fecund proposition, as Galileo would later put it, that “Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe,” and that from a mathematical point of view, some sonic, musical, and spatial relationships are demonstrably more harmonic or more beautiful than others. This was a position held in antiquity by Vitruvius and revived in the Renaissance by the painter Piero della Francesca, who defended the idea of divine proportions in his mathematical writings, a proposition also upheld in the Renaissance by Leonardo DaVinci and Palladio.

It’s also striking how often modern critics forget the essential roots of taste in two of our essential animal organs of sensation, our tongue and our nose. Bordieu doesn’t make this mistake, writing, “one cannot fully understand cultural practices unless culture, in the restricted, normative sense of ordinary usage, is brought back into culture in the anthropological sense and the elaborate taste for the most refined objects is reconnected with the elementary taste for the flavors of food.” You’ll notice how he hierarchizes the two. This connection between brute sensation and sensibility is especially clear in Latin. French and Spanish. What we call taste in English is gustibus in Latin, goût in French, gusto in Spanish. In French, the opposite of gout is degout, their word for the primitive human sensation of disgust. A taste for something, I think, implies an attraction that sometimes feels almost as powerfully instinctive as disgust. A very, very powerful attraction.

A series of questions now naturally arise. When I express my taste for food or an artwork, am I in some way responding at least in part to something intrinsic to the external object that I experience? For example, is there a mathematically specifiable sense of proportion, like the golden mean, that is analogous to the verifiable chemical compounds in food that almost everyone will taste as bitter, enabling almost everyone to easily distinguish grapes that are sour from those that are sweet? Or, on the contrary, is my taste merely an inward sensation of sentiment, as David Hume calls these feelings? If so, is my taste entirely idiosyncratic, with no demonstrable correlation to the external world and things-in-themselves?

“De gustibus non disputandum est.” The origin of this old Roman adage is unknown. Its meaning is a subject of debate in itself. A standard English translation is “there is no disputing about taste,” whereas the French render the Latin adage as “á chacun son goût,” to each his own taste. One implication of this adage commonly drawn by contemporary students in my classrooms is that everyone’s taste is purely and obviously subjective. What’s true for me won’t necessarily be true for you. It’s just the way it is. But if that’s the case, why would I be participating in a public conversation about taste? Seems a waste of time. Why should I care if Ian Buruma or Rochelle Gurstein or Bob or Peg Boyers share my taste for sweet breads or for the films of Pedro Almodovar? To each his own taste. Let’s break early for some food and drink.

It is true that some human beings have demonstrably defective sense perceptions. After all, the sensory disabilities we know as color blindness or tongue deafness exist. As it happens, it’s also true that supertasters exist, as do super smellers, both employed by food companies and perfume manufacturers to become ultra-sensitive judges of a dish or a new cologne. In his famous essay on the standard of taste, Hume admits as much, saying that in individuals where the sentiments and sense organs “are so fine as to allow nothing to escape them, and at the same time so exact as to perceive every ingredient in the composition, this we call delicacy of taste.”

Super tasters seems to be as rare as athletes with the gifts of LeBron James. Those with a refined delicacy of taste in the arts are perhaps even rarer. Hence one of Hume’s observations in his famous essay that in a situation where there is such an empirical diversity in the organs of inner sense perception, and also in the standards used by people of refined taste to judge a piece of food or a work or art, we must conclude that, “A certain diversity in judgment is unavoidable and we seek conveying for a standard by which we can reconcile the contrary sentiments.” Kant was famously as puzzled by the Latin adage as Hume. In his third critique on the power of judgment Kant entirely agrees with Hume’s empirical observation that there is no empirical criterion nor standard by which disputes over one’s taste for food or an artwork can be resolved with a proof. And Kant uses the very strong term “proof.”

But Kant in the same section of the third critique also points out that disputes over taste as a matter of empirical effect occur constantly and regularly in civil society. So that even if we can never prove by reasoned argument that what appeals to my empirical taste must appeal to yours, we nevertheless, as Kant goes on to say, “As sociable animals exhibiting a natural propensity to interact with others belonging to humanity, take keen pleasure in communicating our inward sentiments and feelings to others in an effort to compare and contrast.” If not to secure agreement, precisely because disagreements over taste are, speaking empirically, a means for promoting what is demanded by an inclination natural to everyone. I think one of the mistakes that Kant makes is that he thinks because obviously we disagree about taste, we need to have a concept to cover this. So the antinomy is that there is no concept, there can be no proof, but we have to suppose there’s a concept.

But that’s not actually, I think, how disagreements go. The reference to a standard or an exemplar actually circumvents the demand that you provide the proof, for then you need only point to the exemplar. So this is the real limit to what Kant had to say, I think. Let’s pretend that I’m a contract theorist, as Kant sometimes did and as I usually avoid trying to do. Imagine now a primal scene at the origin of all societies and civilization. Imagine the individual members of previously isolated groups sit down to eat a meal in common, to share some wine and conversation, and that this is the origin of their social contract: a primal moment of intersubjective pleasure where part of the pleasure is constituted precisely by comparing notes on what everyone has just tasted. Perhaps the best way to launch a public conversation about taste is simply to anticipate what’s to come by saying, bon appetit.

 

ROBERT BOYERS: I’m probably an outlier here, but it seems to me that what’s problematic about taste goes well beyond what we think about when we compare our like or dislike of particular foods. Of course it’s inevitable that, when we think of food, and appetite, we find ourselves in the domain of taste. But I can very easily resolve problems or differences when we’re talking about food by saying, well, you like this and I like that, and so what? We don’t have an argument about it. You’ll order what you want and I’ll order what I want. And I’ll be satisfied and maybe you won’t. But in thinking about differences of taste that take shape in our encounters with artworks, or ideas, it’s not so easy, I think, to resolve the issues that emerge.

We actually believe, for example, some of us, that what’s showing in the galleries in Chelsea ought not to be featured there. We want to have an argument about that. We want to have an argument about what the Museum of Modern Art decides to highlight in its spring schedule. We don’t just say, well, the person who made the choice this year happens to have a view of contemporary art that’s very different from mine. We want to have an argument about that and we do want to wonder what underwrites our differences. And this is what makes it hard. Just as it’s hard to convince someone who’s moved by a speech containing platitudes and banalities that he ought not to be moved—unless to disgust.

 

JAMES MILLER: Well, I bring up the example of food because first of all, I disagree with you. For those of us who are gourmets or even gourmands, part of the pleasure is to go to a restaurant and argue over whether the duck is as good as it was the last time. The skin is crispy? Was this vintage of the Bordeaux as good as the previous vintage? Not everybody cares about food in that way. But the main thing I wanted to bring up essentially, going back to food, is I think the primordial scene of sharing of taste and comparing about taste is to bring to the fore appetite and the appetitive and the organic aspects of taste. In Bourdieu you can have a hierarchy in matters of pure sensation, where pleasure that is nothing but sensate is looked down on.

This becomes particularly notable in high modernism, in which the pleasure associated with mere entertainment is not worth arguing over. If you like to be entertained, you have bad taste. Entertainment is a form of appetitive pleasure that’s easy to share with people. Many are the occasions in which I’ve heard really lively conversations and friendly disagreements about taste when people are walking out of a film or after they’ve all been listening to the same album. There’s a freedom and a tangible pleasure in the sharing of views that is very foreign to the seminar room. One of the problems for education is in coping with the fact that our taste for things is at core appetitive and not only rational and aesthetic.

 

IAN BURUMA: Yeah, I think obviously when it comes to liking one kind of food or another, it is entirely subjective, but I do have a restaurant story. Years ago, I was in the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong with the food critic of The Atlantic who had a conversation with the chef, and the conversation he had with the chef was just like conversations people have with opera singers or opera critics, which wasn’t so much, do you like the chanterelle souffle or do you prefer lobster ravioli? It was about, wasn’t Jose’s chanterelle souffle marvelous? And he said, yes, I had it in Geneva. Oh, I had it in Copenhagen. And what it came down to is that it was about food, obviously, it was about pleasure and appetite, but it was also about comparison. And to make a comparison, you need knowledge. And that applies to things that have sheerly to do with entertainment and pleasure too. There are people who have a sort of Talmudic knowledge of particular cuts of rock songs and can tell you why the basement tape made in 1967 in San Francisco is really superior to the one done in Woodstock in 1971.

 

JAMES MILLER: Just to be clear, I don’t believe that taste is all subjective, or that it’s naive to think there’s an objective difference that informs our taste preferences, not when it comes to food or wine or rock music.

 

BARBARA BLACK: Ian’s story just now brings me back to connoisseurship, to the fact that there really are people who have discerning taste when it comes to food. Often those people belong to a class, a class of those who take a certain pride in their taste and their ability to differentiate one sort of thing from another. One of my favorite books is Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process. In that book he tells us that many of the original rules and laws and codes center around the taking of meals with other people, and that the manuals people used, going all the way back to the years between the 14th and 17th centuries, were focused on bodily behavior, on the effort to teach people how to behave like the beautiful people, the people who knew how to behave when they are at court. The class element is apparent in the sorting of individuals into better and lesser, higher and lower, and also in the aversion to those who don’t exhibit the appropriate aversion to things disreputable or ugly or distasteful. So I think that taste is or can be a cudgel, and it can be about contempt, and disgust, and shame.

Interesting that Elias was a German Jew, studying the way that groups of people use stigmatizing language and concepts to banish, shame, or ostracize other groups of people. Though he was able to escape Germany and go to Great Britain, both of his parents died in the Holocaust. And so he dedicates his book, which is about that phenomenon of shame, “to the memory of my parents, Herman Elias, dead Breslau, 1940 and Sophie Elias, dead Auschwitz, 1941.” So it’s kind of the unwritten chapter of this book, but it’s buried there in the dedication. Odd, perhaps, to think of these facts as having something to do with our subject, but it does. Taste, after all, an aspect of the project to cast an entire people as vermin, beneath contempt or concern.

 

ROCHELLE GURSTEIN: It seems to me that we’re talking about several very different versions of taste and not yet getting at what would answer the assertion that in the end it’s subjective. We all agree that within a practice you can have an exemplar, a touchstone, and that people who participate in it will use it as some sort of standard until it no longer fits their desires or expectations. But this doesn’t settle questions about the validity of the exemplar or the superiority of one species of taste. I can accept that class and convention have a lot to do with taste, and that the taste of the tongue is related to, though also distinct from, aesthetic judgements. But I don’t think it’s clear how these appetites and judgments are connected.

 

TERENCE DIGGORY: One way I would sort out the question that Rochelle has just raised of these different ways of defining taste is in a kind of cultural history paradigm. I think of the issue of taste as a matter of aesthetics and particularly of judgment as having descended from enlightenment discourse. The emphasis on taste as something based in the body is descended from romanticism. The fact that we are inheritors of both of those traditions makes for some of the confusion that we continually find ourselves in.

 

MICHAEL GORRA: I had two points and one goes back to something Jim said, the other to Rochelle’s remarks. Jim, you noted that when people go to the movies they come out and talk and compare notes, and people often have a very good time, and what they say is based on their appetite for a kind of pleasure. To you, at least as I hear you, that seems alien to what we do in the seminar room, where we’re often embarrassed to talk about the pleasure we take in works assigned for study. I mean, I still remember being in graduate school and thinking it was sort of declassé to admit to liking certain things, though I always remembered what Henry James said in The Art of Fiction, that “Nothing will ever take the place of liking a book.” But I’m moved too by what Rochelle said, about the confusion or tension in thinking of the different kinds of taste, and whether there can be an objective, measurable basis for taste, as when we speak of harmonic proportions and so on. And I guess for me, in the end it does all depend to some small degree on connoisseurship, doesn’t it? I mean, both the food critic and the chef are talking about things that might be measurable, in terms of the precise temperature to which the souffle is cooked and the quality of the mushrooms, and so on. Though all of that does belong to social life, to playing for advantage, and snobbery, and trying to score points by saying, well, I wouldn’t dine at such a place, and I can tell the difference between these mushrooms and those. There’s something in what others have said about the social advantage one may seek to obtain by displaying taste and advantage.

 

ROBERT BOYERS: But the advantage does often come—doesn’t it?—when what you display is the capacity, and the instinct, to go against the grain of that which is accredited, harmonic, perfected, even well-made. The connoisseurship which exists among large numbers of highly trained and sophisticated people gives them permission to disdain what passes for good taste, whether in the arts or in the kitchens of the rich and famous. I’m no foodie, as Jim has pointed out, but I’ve often been taken to out of the way, less-than-ordinary-looking places to dine on delicious dishes—taken by people who pride themselves on their contempt for the expensive restaurants whose typical fare they regard as mediocre and blandly “perfect.” One of the best meals I’ve ever eaten I shared with several writers at a burned-out strip-mall in a deserted neighborhood of Miami, where a middle-aged Chinese man and his wife welcomed us and asked us what kinds of Chinese food we wanted them to prepare for us. Our host, and driver, was Tom Healy, and his pleasure had clearly much to do with bringing us to the scary and improbable place and treating us to dinner at a restaurant with no stars and no prospect of being discovered. The social advantage there, needless to say, was distinct from anything those words suggest.

 

JAMES MILLER: That story confirms my comments about sociability and about the sense of sharing a powerful attraction to an experience that you’re checking in with each other to talk about. How does it feel to you? How does it feel to me? We interact because we’re both at the same restaurant. What’s interesting is the scene itself. A profound attraction, a kind of naive realism, and nobody gets worried about relativism after you’ve walked out of that place. You’ve just shared an experience.

 

ROCHELLE GURSTEIN: Though you might then wonder what you really shared with Tom and the others in your party, Bob. Were you enjoying the same things? Was the surprise, the novelty, as innovative to Tom as it was to you? And was the food, maybe, not so appealingly presented, as good as you pretended you thought it was?

 

JAMES MILLER: Well, of course it’s a deal breaker if you decide that the experience is felt in such a way that you can no longer regard it as a shared experience. I mean, if your companions don’t at all agree with you about anything it’s hard to bond together over the food and the shared passion for something new and unexpected and not at all elegant in an accredited way.

 

IAN BURUMA: To begin with, I think of an item we all read in our assigned readings for this conference, that is, Rochelle’s fascinating analysis of pornography and Susan Sontag’s idea of the shock of pornography being the last “chasm” of the avant-garde. It seems to me that perversion plays a big part in the snobbery of a certain kind of connoisseurship. People can think of themselves as sophisticates for liking something precisely because it fills most people with disgust.

So the connoisseur of food likes andouillette or some very smelly French cheese or durian, precisely because it smells like a public toilet, and also because the average Philistine hates it. And I think what’s true of the appetite for food can figure in the appetite for sex, in that there is a snobbery amongst sexual sophisticates, who believe that anything to do with procreative straight sex is basically Philistine. The further you get away from that, the more refined. You end up in a sort of gay S&M cellar. And there you find the true sophisticates. Isn’t that the case? But I think that applies to a great many assessments of art and taste, where a driving force is an aversion to the bland.

 

CELESTE MARCUS: I wanted to talk about a different connoisseurship, which I’ve learned about through my girlfriend, who can do this thing that I can’t do, which is very sophisticated girl talk, which involves, for example, intense conversations about the details of Taylor Swift’s relationship history. My girlfriend and her companions talk not even about the music as music, but about who knows the most about the songs and the boyfriends. If I were to say, do you think that her music is very good, they’d probably make fun of me for bringing that up. I mean, by what standard do you consider it “good”? It’s good at least in the sense that it inspires the kind of interaction they enjoy and confirms their status within a certain community confident about the good taste that comes with being a fan of Taylor Swift. It’s about—I think—knowing something deeply and being unusually connected to something. Maybe not so different from what we’re doing at our conference table, making value judgments, correcting one another and confirming our membership in an intellectual community.

 

BARBARA BLACK: So it’s clear that taste is a vector, it keeps shifting and changing what seems attractive or acceptable to the mainstream or majority. That doesn’t help me to decide whether taste is based on anything universal, whether there is a universal standard for the elegant, beautiful, or graceful. I still believe that it’s very contingent and contextual. Does power tell us why this or that standard of taste predominates at any given moment? It’s fashionable to think so, but I’m not sure about that at all.

Adam Phillips defines taste as a club where those who share in valuing these things rather than those get to be members. And so taste is about affiliating with others, and it can be consensus building and also the basis of community. But here I agree with Pierre Bourdieu that a club is affiliation with like-minded people, so that you can’t really understand the club or the clubbiness or the club-ability of taste if you don’t have people who are outsiders, who do not belong. So taste is a social identity. It has a very strong public dimension, and I think taste is all about the self in the eyes of others, and that’s what unites all our various versions of taste.

 

TERENCE DIGGORY: I just have a question, for Jim, or for Barbara: Does the pleasure of sharing need to be based on agreement about what we’ve just shared, or can it rely primarily on the fact that we’re willing to get together and talk about it?

 

JAMES MILLER: I think we’re talking about an occasion for sociability and the fact that these shared experiences often become the basis of long-term friendships. And the friendships don’t require that you agree about everything, it’s the pleasure that’s taken in disagreeing without being disagreeable and that you’ve had a shared experience. Sometimes if I watch a movie with Bob Boyers, which I’ve often done, he might say something I’d never thought of before, and that’s cool, or upsetting. But the stakes in this are not a knock-down, drag-out philosophical bloodsport where you prove that you have the definitive standard and use it as a cudgel. You want a flexibility here that is based on how this kind of shared sociable experience of taste is rooted. It’s an embodied situation that involves friendship, sociability, and disagreement in which all of the questions that bedeviled Immanuel Kant are simply bracketed. It’s almost like– I’m tempted to say this–Kant couldn’t see it this way because he had a sociability problem.

 

TOM LEWIS: Here’s—what to call it?—a little piece of something else, from a speech that James Russell Lowell made to Harvard at the 250th anniversary of the university. And he said, “This is the goal of a college education. Let it be our hope to make a gentleman of every youth who is put under our charge; not a conventional gentleman, but a man of culture, a man of intellectual resource, a man of public spirit, a man of refinement, and with that good taste, which is the conscience of the mind, and that conscience which is the good taste of the soul.” Should I admit that I’ve been pondering this for a good long while?

 

JAMES MILLER: I find that disgusting.

 

TOM LEWIS: I expected that. That’s why we don’t go to the movies together.

 

BARBARA BLACK: Lucky that you two are not members of the same club—though you are both friends of Bob Boyers.

 

TOM LEWIS: But that’s actually my point. That’s what he was doing. Lowell was saying, “We at Harvard, we have to increase the membership in this club so that we have those aesthetic and intellectual experiences.” And the club can just be two people eating a sumptuous dinner in a ridiculously expensive restaurant, or it can be a group. And this, of course, I think endorses what you were saying, Barbara. That taste is about the self in the eyes of others.

 

ROCHELLE GURSTEIN: Absolutely. That passage does capture, in its way, the public dimension that really not all of us are comfortable with. And this brings me to a thinker who matters to me, and I think to many of us, to Hannah Arendt’s idea that taste decides what appears in the world and the quality or character of the world we’re living in. And that we have a common world that only exists when things persist over time. It’s not a trivial matter, I’m sorry to say. I don’t agree that gossip about Taylor Swift’s boyfriends is anything like what we’re trying to do here. After all, we’re trying to talk about which things ought to matter to our culture. What kind of world is going to exist after us. What came before us. When we’re discussing matters of taste we’re trying to understand why certain things that once mattered a great deal to civilized people no longer command our loyalty or attention, why things people wanted to extol or imitate or write poetry about no longer inspire those ambitions. I don’t think we do justice to our interest in taste by reducing it to a question of what people gossip about when they want to have something in common to talk about. Of course there’s that dimension of taste, and of course power relations will sometimes determine the dominant tastes or preferences in a culture. But I’m committed to asking what things are we keeping alive? What things matter in the world?

 

CELESTE MARCUS: Yeah, I think the point I was making was not that these two kinds of discourses are qualitatively the same. I was saying that they’re structurally the same. I do think that Taylor Swift’s music is bad. Now, if I were to say that in that conversation, not only would it be rude, it would have nothing to do with what my friends were talking about because they’re not interested in qualitative judgements. They’re interested in participating in a community. And I do think there is an element of what we’re doing here that is, as you say, more important, though structurally it may be similar. But really, Rochelle, I completely agree with everything you said about what we’re hoping to do in discussing taste. And I want to up the ante a bit by saying that when aesthetics get confused and it becomes popular to fetishize obscenity or cruelty or violence, then our aesthetic choices may well come to influence our political choices. Of course I’m not alone in noticing this, though I’m not sure we can agree on what to do about it.

 

ROBERT BOYERS: In my book on Susan Sontag and George Steiner, I speak a bit about a really interesting change in Sontag’s thinking that occurred in the period between the early 1960s and the middle of the 1970s. In an early evaluation of the films of Leni Riefenstahl, Sontag argued that the content of Riefenstahl’s films ought not to count in our assessment of them, in our feelings about them. They were, after all, great works of art, and they could be valued simply in those terms. Ten or twelve years later, she argued that the context had changed and that an assessment, once perhaps compelling and valid for a sophisticated minority of intellectuals who read her original essay in The Partisan Review, could no longer be trusted. Such an argument, transferred into the larger public domain, pitched to a much larger audience, could become dangerous. Sontag had come to believe that the films of Leni Riefenstahl were not simply to be regarded as aesthetic artifacts. They were not intended to be.

Now I’m not fully persuaded that the context had changed in the way Sontag felt it had, but she makes of course a striking case, and she did know that a decade after she wrote the original essay for a little magazine enormous numbers of people were following the writings of Susan Sontag, and in effect could not be trusted to take in what she said quite in the way she’d once intended.

 

IAN BURUMA: Well, I’m not sure that the audience is all that different because that second essay, “Fascinating Fascism,” was after all in The New York Review of Books, which is basically the same audience—though, you’re right, a much larger one. Let me read out the relevant sentence: “The hard truth is what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocuous ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established.” And there is something that reminded me a little bit of the custom, which persisted until perhaps well into the 1960s, the custom requiring that even in serious books, quoted passages from erotic writings be published in Latin. The idea was that if you’re properly educated, this can’t possibly corrupt you. But if uneducated people get their hands on this, that could have very serious consequences. And what Susan was saying is not so very different from that.

 

ROBERT BOYERS: I quite agree.

 

JAMES MILLER: This seems to me to approach the question of forbidden knowledge, which is one of the themes included in our anthology of readings. And I’m reminded of an interaction I had with our mutual friend, Roger Shattuck, long a regular columnist for Salmagundi, who wrote a whole book on the topic of forbidden knowledge. The longest chapter in Roger’s book is on the Marquis de Sade. Roger was interested in knowing what I thought about it because he had read my book on Michel Foucault, and he knew I was willing to go places—including to talking about the Marquis de Sade—that not everybody wanted to go. And when I first met him and I read the chapter, I said to him: “It seems to me, Roger, that we have here a performative contradiction. You wrote 180 pages saying that the writings of the Marquis de Sade are proto-fascistic. Anybody who takes them seriously is going to become a serial killer, at least a sociopath of the first degree. Yet you have described in great detail some of the worst passages of de Sade, and given him those 180 pages.”

And I said, “But Roger, when you went to Paris in the late ‘40s, probably you had to go to La Faire in the Bibliotheque Nationale where the banned books were. And you know they didn’t put those books in Latin. They put them behind lock and key,” and of course Roger was fuming, because de Sade had just been put out in a Pléiade edition. And I said, “So Roger, what are you actually proposing here?” The problem, I’m suggesting, is that, if you attack heresies, as Augustine discovered with Pelagianism, you keep them alive. And so I wanted to ask Roger, are you going to advocate censorship? I mean why don’t you just come out and say it? And he said, “No, no, no. I would never do that.”

Obviously we’re in a world in which that ship sailed about 50 years ago. I have made only a feeble effort to look at the Hamas tapes of the October 7th Massacre, because I’ve been told I shouldn’t watch them. But they’re out there somewhere and once they go into circulation, they’re available to be used in any which way. So the question for somebody like Roger, it seems to me, is: was it a mistake? Writers like J.M.Coetzee basically say it’s over. We can’t bring ourselves to forbid such writings. The modern, enlightenment wish to be curious about everything has left us with no limits and no taboos. And once you’ve broken the taboos, it’s like the genie’s out of the bottle.

 

ROBERT BOYERS: The passage from Coetzee in our conference Reader is taken from his novel, Elizabeth Costello, and those sentiments come from the character rather than from Coetzee himself. You might read such a passage as an attempt to, shall we say, put up a test balloon. Elizabeth does suggest, after all, that a word like “obscene” might still resonate for us, might actually reach us or shake us, as for example in describing the Hamas tapes you alluded to as an obscenity. Though of course I would also use the word “obscenity” to describe Israeli treatment of Palestinians both in Gaza and the West Bank. You do have to consider what “obscenity” means when you use it in connection not just with the tapes, but with the actions that inspired—not justified but inspired– the October massacre of Israeli civilians. I do think that in Coetzee, there’s an attempt at least to suggest that maybe there’s some life left in the concept of the obscene, though at various points in that book the speaker, Elizabeth Costello, says, in one way or another, “Actually I’m not sure what I’m saying. Obviously I’m not in favor of censorship. I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m a writer. I can say what I want. And yet….”

 

ROCHELLE GURSTEIN: In a 19th Century obscenity trial, the judge would not permit the obscene passage to go into the record for the very reason that the language would pollute and contaminate the public record forever. So they refused to use the language, though they would say, “Well, we might be charged if we don’t put the words in. They have to know the charge against them.” Clearly, they had a strong awareness of what repeating those words might evoke. Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon, in writing against pornography, ended up reproducing it on the page. The very thing they didn’t want to exist.

 

SUSAN KRESS (audience): I’ve been thinking a lot during this session about how we know what we like, and recalling my own education in British schools and universities where we were pretty much told what to like. It wasn’t a question of whether I related to this character or this author. It was a question of what was good for me, as in good to eat, or take in. I was a second generation immigrant. The culture was white, it was Christian, and it was middle or upper class. I came from a house largely without books. There was one bookcase that had the New Left Book Club books in it and some novels by Dickens. That was it.

And so my education was a project of forming my taste so that I could be assimilated, integrated, and become part of whatever this club I needed to join was about. So I’m in awe and admiration of all you up here who seem to know what you like, but I worry about whether we’re prepared here or elsewhere to do for our students what was done for me. I love that passage from James Russell Lowell that Tom Lewis read earlier, where he says we’re educating people to be gentlemen, right? Of course, no mention of women. There weren’t any women at Harvard. But still, there was that enviable conviction that we were educating them to have this spirit and conscience that would make them admirable white Christian gentlemen.

But now, there are not many connoisseurs, and where there is no project of consensus, no agreement as to what is necessary and not necessary, what is it we should be talking about in our classes? That’s my question. And doesn’t this have quite a lot to do with questions of taste, broadly considered?

 

TOM LEWIS: I agree entirely, Susan, that if we allow for and acknowledge the 19th Century rhetoric and the sexism informing the passage from Lowell, we might still take seriously the essential project he was recommending. He assumed that there were works of art and literature which contain verities, if you will, or truths about the human condition. And that these truths were universal. Acquaint people with these—I know how idealistic this sounds—and you will create people who are resistant to the pressures put upon us today to be easy about what is demeaning and dehumanizing in the culture.

 

BARBARA BLACK: I hear you both, and yet I must say that for me, in education and in how you move through the world and choose to educate yourself, it is a dereliction of duty to shield yourself from any expression or representation of evil. It’s not responsible to allow yourself to move through the world ignorant of the fact that there is real evil in it, and that it’s incumbent on us to try and combat it, whether on a personal level, through kindness, or in political activism and agitation. But I think that you have to know about it. That you need to feel a responsibility to learn about it if you’ve been fortunate enough not to encounter it directly. Art has the capacity to acquaint people who are innocent of it and who are untainted by it with the reality of evil in a way that can really change us.

Like others on our panel, I’m thinking about this because of the inclusion in our anthology of the pages from Coetzee’s novel, Elizabeth Costello, where the protagonist’s brutal brush with evil has stayed with her and colored her thinking about representations of evil. Costello never talked about it to anybody because she thought it was her responsibility to keep it inside her and suppress it and not let other people know about it and basically try to forget. And I think that that’s exactly wrong, that if you encounter evil, you have to be an emissary of it. You have to let people know about it.

So I do think art can teach us good taste, in part at least by not shielding us from what is horrifying and by refusing to fetishize brutality. But it does have the responsibility to acquaint us with it. No wonder Elizabeth Costello feels confused when she considers the options.

 

ROCHELLE GURSTEIN: I’d like to hear more from Susan Kress about her education.

 

SUSAN KRESS: I will say one sentence, which is that my education was wondrous.

 

ROCHELLE GURSTEIN: Oh, that says a lot, actually.

 

SUSAN KRESS: Because I read all of these amazing things, and I became acquainted with a great tradition.

 

BARBARA BLACK: Good for you.

 

SUSAN KRESS: Though it was also horrific in some ways, which we don’t need to go into here.

 

IAN BURUMA: Important, what Susan has said, and yes, I’m all for higher education, and refinement, and high culture, and art, and so on, but I’m much more pessimistic than some of the speakers have been. I think of the 19th century German idea of Bildung, that if you educate the bourgeoisie and teach everybody to play music and appreciate fine literature and demanding ideas, you will create a more moral human being. But then, though he could be a bit of a bore on the subject, George Steiner kept on reminding us of all those SS officers who would pull people’s fingernails out but also quote Goethe and play Schumann sonatas beautifully. And so I think the claims for Bildung are too high. I mean, it’s a good thing to have, but it doesn’t necessarily make us into better human beings.

No reason not to mention too that there is a kind of liberal consensus, amongst the liberal elites, who are the cultural elites in this country, and who are committed to an ideology of diversity and inclusivity and giving marginalized people a voice and taking care to be anti-racist and so on. We can argue endlessly about how good or bad the effects of that ideological commitment are. But that is certainly a powerful faction in our elite institutions. Does it tell us much about taste and the shaping of taste in the present culture? We haven’t quite tackled that one yet.

 

MICHAEL GORRA: We’re all sort of circling around Susan’s question and the pedagogical situation, within which many of us work. So again, there’s the T.S Eliot line about the function of criticism and the correction of taste. And I myself don’t much believe that. I don’t think of myself as in the business of correcting taste. I am happier temperamentally when I like things than when I don’t. Though a lot of my education gave me exactly the opposite in that I was taught what to disapprove of. Nothing very new in this, that in graduate school we encountered what’s called the hermeneutics of suspicion. And yet in spite of that I never thought that my job was to correct taste. My job is to expand taste. My job is to show students that they may like and enjoy and find stimulating and enlivening things they have not encountered, things that they would not have liked or enjoyed if they had encountered them on their own. The job is to give them the vocabulary, the equipment by which they might find those things rewarding. Most of my students do find Jane Austen rewarding on their own, but they may not find Middlemarch rewarding, or Faulkner. And so I want to help them with that.

And the other thing I would say about this expansion of their taste is my part in introducing them to the bleakest books possible, and showing them, trying to persuade them, or showing through my own enthusiasm or taste for these things, why someone like Coetzee might be somebody they would want to read or find necessary to read, or Pat Barker’s books. So an expansion of taste rather than a correction of taste.

 

ROBERT BOYERS: I agree completely with Michael. Temperamentally, there’s no way I could possibly think of myself in the classroom as correcting anybody’s taste. But in effect, when I think about it, it’s hard not to suppose that that’s what I’m doing. When we introduce students, in an enthusiastic way, to extremely demanding works of literature or art or philosophy, we are in effect attempting to correct taste, by saying there’s validity in giving yourself over to this work. It’s real work. It’s difficult. And that’s a good thing. And no, we’re not assigning to you only what’s easy, not giving you what you’re accustomed to. An enlargement of taste, to be sure, but also in its way a correction.

In modeling for students your enthusiasm about conflict in a work, a work which doesn’t adopt an easy point of view and hammer it home, in effect, you’re correcting taste. You’re saying, “Isn’t this thrilling to see the way this works in this particular kind of book?” And “yes, you may want a clear resolution of the conflicts opened up in books like this, but really this isn’t what the best books or films or poems do for us, and really these are the kinds of artworks and ideas you ought to love as much as I do.” So that no, I’m not telling anyone that it’s forbidden to watch this or like that, but in modeling a certain kind of patience and attention I think I am—like it or not—correcting the taste of my students.

 

MICHAEL GORRA: Maybe better to call it a transformation of taste. We hope the students are not the same people at the end as they were when they came to us.

Session Three

ROBERT BOYERS: I want to turn to something we’ve cited in passing, which is discussed in a number of the essays included in our conference readings. Often we read that disgust has a firmer hold on us than any other sentiment, that it is basic to our definition of self. Some contend that it is a natural instinctual endowment, that there are many things that are sure to provoke disgust in just about any of us, foul odors, vile habits that entail cruelty to animals or children, flagrant displays of mendacity or abuse.

Others argue that, though disgust may occasionally seem to be a primitive sentiment, the disgust that makes us fully human is developed as part of the civilizing process, what Barbara Black was speaking of earlier, and thus entails a capacity, a willingness to make discriminations as between what ought or ought not to seem disgusting. In this sense, I learn to think of this or that as, in fact, disgusting, and learn as well to react accordingly.

To be sure, the recoil or aversion we associate with disgust is bound to be visceral, to have what may be called a chemical or physical component, and yet the idea that disgust also belongs to the civilizing process and is not entirely divorced from the capacity to make distinctions is compelling, so long as we accept that what is learned may also issue in or become a powerful sensory recoil.

Thus, I not only understand why the speech and behavior of Donald J. Trump fully deserves to be regarded as disgusting, but feel that disgust the moment he opens his mouth to speak. We learn, we think, we assess, and we are revolted.

The connection between taste and disgust is perhaps captured in Kant’s idea that our aesthetic capacity is purely “negative in its essence”—that’s a quote—and is chiefly marked by our conviction that certain things are to be rejected or despised. These things we would avoid include not only the coarse or the ugly, but the morally reprehensible. Disgust would then be not only a sensation or reaction formation, but a central component of the faculty we call taste. Some of us would naturally be more inclined than others to exercise that faculty and, some of the time, to feel disgust.

We ask whether anything is, in fact, objectively disgusting, acknowledging that the word “objectively” is often completely dubious or misleading. After all, the mixing of dairy and meat seemed truly and indisputably disgusting to my Orthodox Jewish grandparents, though it does not seem so to me or my children.

I remember a moment at another Salmagundi conference years ago when the philosopher Peter Singer, author of many books, including one called Animal Liberation, stood on a food line behind another writer and asked him how he could bear to ladle onto his plate and then eat the beef stew served to us for lunch, a sense there for Singer that there was something objectively disgusting about the devouring of a meat dish. The words, “To each his own,” spoken by the writer with the beef stew on his plate, were by no means persuasive to Peter Singer.

Neither, I suppose, would those words have seemed persuasive to the novelist J.M. Coetzee, about whom Singer co-edited a book that paid special attention to Coetzee’s writings on the lives of animals and their susceptibility to human cruelty and abuse. But it is not about animals that I want to speak right now, nor even about Coetzee’s writings on obscenity or the depiction of torture.

I want instead to look at something else in Coetzee’s great book, Elizabeth Costello, to which we’ve already referred. I was inspired to head, briefly, I assure you, in this direction by a student enrolled in one of my courses who studied Coetzee’s novel with me, saw the announcement about our taste conference, and knocked on my office door.

She wanted to speak with me not about Costello’s objections to representations of torture, but about a chapter in which Elizabeth visits an old and dying man named Mr. Philips, confined now to a hospital bed, clearly in bad shape. It occurred to my student that we had not really engaged sufficiently with questions of taste in our classroom discussions, and she wondered why not. Neither, she said, had we entertained the thought that perhaps Elizabeth Costello’s behavior in that chapter was itself—she used the word—obscene, and therefore not only distasteful, but objectionable. My student was referring to an encounter in which Mr. Philips, barely able to speak, but remembering that Elizabeth had once allowed him to paint her portrait, scribbles on a writing pad, “Wish I could paint you in the nude,” which leads her to think, “What the hell?”

“I loosened the wrap and shrugged it off my shoulders, took off my brassiere, hung it on the back of the chair, and said, ‘How’s that, Aiden?’” She also thinks, “I could feel the full weight of his gaze on me, on my breasts, and frankly it was good. They were not the breasts of a young woman, but it was good, nevertheless, in the place of withering away and dying, a blessing.”

Not surprising that Mr. Philips should then, as she reports, have written thank you on his notepad, and that further along in the encounter Elizabeth wonders, again in her language as invented by Coetzee, about the element of boasting. The potent woman teasing the waning man, cock teasing, she calls it. Could be, my students had agreed when we looked at the passage in class, that the boasting was distasteful, if not quite obscene, the cock teasing not quite objectionable, given Elizabeth Costello’s willingness to entertain that disturbing thought herself.

Or were we perhaps persuaded by Elizabeth when she realized that she learned the pose she struck, she says, “from the Greeks?” Reflecting that, really, “As I sat there, I was not myself, that through me a goddess was manifesting herself, Aphrodite or Hera, or perhaps even Artemis.” Or were we perhaps moved to feel that the whole episode, though not an instance of conventionally accredited good taste, was at least “tasteful” in the sense of being authentically challenging, serious?

In my office, the student who had come to work through her misgivings gently suggested that the two of us move on to the final turn in this encounter between Mr. Philips and Elizabeth, who had concluded that, in uncovering her breasts, she was performing an act of humanity such as we sometimes perform from the overflow of our human hearts. Lovely, it seems to me, and lovely it seemed to my students, that formulation, though the overflow then takes Elizabeth to visit Mr. Philips again more than once after he has had radiation treatments, and is very despondent, so she observes, just an old bag of bones, waiting to be carted away. That’s not my language. That’s from the novel. You can tell.

About all of this Elizabeth had written to her sister Blanche, a nun, while resisting the temptation to reveal or confess the final phase of the transaction, including the moment when she decides to “drop a hand,” I’m quoting, “casually on to the bedcover and begins to stroke ever so gently at the place where the penis, if the penis were alive and awake, ought to be, and then loosens the cord of Mr. Philips’s pajamas, opens up the front, and plants a kiss on the entirely flaccid little thing, takes it in her mouth, and mumbles it until it stirs faintly with life.” “Nor,” she goes on, “is the smell pleasant either.”

And then, “What, she wonders, would the Greeks have made of this spectacle? Not Eros, certainly. Too grotesque for that. Would one have to wait,” she asks, “for the Christians to come along with the right word, caritas? For that, she concludes in the end, is what she is convinced it is. From the swelling of her heart, she knows it.” Good, I suppose, for her, and perhaps maybe convincing as well to me so far as it goes. “Though it is not easy to know,” as Elizabeth herself reflects, “what to make of episodes like this. Are they just,” she asks, “holes in the heart into which one steps and falls and then goes on falling?” I end with this quotation because, in its way, it bears, so it seems to me, on the quandaries we entertain about taste, and judgement, and disposition. My student nicely put to me in our office conversation the proposition that maybe caritas, or charity, was too easy a way to dispense with our misgivings when confronted with what she called Elizabeth’s assault on defenseless Mr. Philips. That’s my student’s language. And wasn’t it, she asks, legitimate to say that, in going rather too far with this episode, Coetzee had himself—to resort to a term the novelist Coetzee employed in his criticism of the writer Paul West in another passage of that same novel—exceeded his commission? Was that not a violation, not simply of a conventional idea of good taste, but of taste? I would like to dwell for a while, though I won’t, on those words, “exceeded his commission.” But I think that, for the moment, I’ll leave it at that, and I hope that you’ll find something here to engage with in the domain of taste: exceeding one’s commission, the degree to which the playing out of a certain kind of episode which may, in fact, evoke disgust, may nevertheless also be anything but objectionable.

 

IAN BURUMA: You’ve come a long way since Brooklyn.

 

ROBERT BOYERS: Not too far, I hope.

 

JAMES MILLER: I want to pivot back to the scene of the instruction. How did you feel having this conversation in a classroom, with that material? Because we were talking right before the break about what we should teach, how we should teach it.

 

ROBERT BOYERS: How do I feel about it? First, of all, I’ve taught this book for about 15 years now, so I’ve had considerable experience doing it. I can honestly say that, to use a much overused term nowadays, I’ve always been comfortable assigning this very great book to students and talking about it with them. Much as I do in other courses teaching Coetzee’s Disgrace, or Waiting for the Barbarians, books much more certain to evoke disgust. Of course, one of the things that you hope to model for your students is your willingness to go to places that they may regard as forbidden, and discovering that it is possible, actually, to have a serious discussion as adults in the classroom about this kind of material. I felt the same kind of challenge, and excitement, decades ago when I first taught Crime and Punishment. Mrs. Costello can speak legitimately of caritas when she tries to come to terms with her approach to old Mr. Phillips. But no such term is available to us in thinking about the depravity of Svidrigailov in Dostoevsky’s novel. From which students have much to learn. Would I assign Elizabeth Costello to a high school class? I taught two years of high school in the early 1960s. No, I would not assign it to a high school class. No, I’ve never had any difficulty with that passage, or any passage or book like it at the college level. The students, I’ve always found, are willing to rise to the challenge of talking about this material.

My student who came to the office was right that we hadn’t talked about taste. She saw the announcement of the taste conference, and so she wanted to talk about it. Fair enough. Did I convince her that “objectively” there was nothing gratuitously objectionable in Coetzee? I think I did.

 

TERENCE DIGGORY: Obviously the question of the relationship of taste to morality has been hovering on the perimeter of our conversation from the start. My own sense is that they are distinct. Obviously they involve making judgements, but I think that the judgment of something as “disgusting” in the aesthetic realm (the opposite is “distasteful”) is one thing. Another is the polarity, which would be, “Is this evil or good” or, “is this bad or wrong?” I think those are different kinds of judgments, and ought not to be conflated. Obviously, with Coetzee’s book, this is complicated because we’re asked to judge Elizabeth Costello’s actions, but we’re also asked to judge Coetzee’s book, which is the problem that she has with the novel about the Holocaust. You can’t easily separate the aesthetic from the moral, and yet I think somehow we should try.

 

IAN BURUMA: I’m slightly shocked that this rather sweet passage about Mrs. Costello and old Mr. Phillips would provoke a discussion about how scandalous, and difficult, and outrageous it might be. Because, when we were students, we were worried that older people would frown upon the fact that we were reading Last Exit to Brooklyn, or something like that, compared to which this is absolutely innocent.

The other weird paradox, because of the nature of social media and so on is that you say you would hesitate to read this with high school children, but we’re talking about a generation of high school children, many of whom at the age of eight or nine would already have seen hard porn, as we hadn’t in our time. There is something strangely out of kilter here.

 

ROBERT BOYERS: When I taught high school I knew that my students, even in Honors classes, would not have understood what you call the sweetness in the transaction with old Mr. Philips, and I don’t think I’d have wanted to explain it to them. An instinct more than a judgment.

 

JAMES MILLER: Going back to the civilizing process, it seems to me that the formation of taste, in many elite institutions of education, such as Lowell’s Harvard, is intricately connected to the formation of character, and in fact is profoundly organized around rituals involving food. I’m thinking of the eating clubs of the elite Ivy League and the kind of manners that were enforced there. I thought about this when I was a visiting professor at Harvard. I’d gone to a regular liberal arts college not that different from Skidmore. But, at Harvard, this whole totalizing apparatus, with all the clubs and extracurriculars, had the capacity to take somebody from a rural background, who had no exposure to what it would mean to be a gentleman on Wall Street, and allow them to obtain, within four years, not only the confidence that they could behave like a gentleman, but that they were entitled to the rewards of such a generation.

The mores and such may seem like trivial things, all the way down to the food, but it’s a total training of dispositions, designed to create a habitus that is shared, and at such a level that you know you’re joining the ruling class of America, and you have the right stuff.

 

ROCHELLE GURSTEIN: I haven’t read Elizabeth Costello recently, but I remember that much of it, including that chapter with Mr. Phillips, disturbed me. I doubt that the sweetness came through to me any more than you think it would with high school students, Bob. Of course Elizabeth Costello, throughout the novel, is always getting herself into very difficult situations, committing to things that offend others and leave her wondering about herself. I don’t know that you can teach “taste” by inviting even college students to grapple with the thoughts of such a character.

 

ROBERT BOYERS: One of the ways in which Coetzee shows her to us is by representing her misgivings about everything she does, says, and thinks. That’s an aspect of the novelistic presentation of the material, and it’s not as if we’re invited to approve unequivocally of her, though I like and admire her, for all sorts of reasons.

 

JAMES MILLER: To me, the very fact that we’re questioning this and talking about it, and that your student came to you about it, is exactly the reason for showing why it should be taught. How else to get them thinking about the conventions of taste, how it’s formed, the community that’s shaped around it. The presumption here is that art should always be rooted in questionable taste, right? …There is so much human experience that’s shockingly difficult to contemplate. What’s fascinating is that there is no easy answer. A mercy fuck? Caritas? We want to ask all of those questions.

 

ROCHELLE GURSTEIN: This reminds me of Michael’s earlier distinction between not correcting taste but widening taste. I feel that such exchanges as the one you had with that student are indispensable.

 

JAMES MILLER: Another example, or story. I brought to one of my classes at The New School a woman from Uganda who had been a 13 year-old girl kidnapped by Amin’s army, used as a sex slave with 14 or so other girls. She got these girls to escape, and they went back to her village. After shocking experiences, some of these girls could barely walk.

The village would not accept the girls back because they were damaged and no longer human to them. She had the girls build their own huts across the bank of the river, a place I’ve gone to, and shamed the village into taking these girls back. She went on to become the head of anti-human-trafficking efforts for three East African countries.

She came to my classroom, and the conversation unfolded, and one student said, “There are no trigger warnings here on any of the books on the syllabus.” The Ugandan girl asked me, “What’s a trigger warning?” I said, “Students will explain this to you.”

She said to them, “I’m working on a book, a memoir, from my experience. There are unspeakable things that happened to me and the other girls. Are you saying that you wouldn’t read my book?” Here was a person who has lived experience, and somehow the student trotting out her demand for a trigger warning and a safe space came to understand that she had to listen and be grateful.

 

CELESTE MARCUS: I think it’s true that even young people who are poised to demand safe spaces where they don’t have to hear certain things can be brought around to engage and even be grateful.

So much sex is actually scripted. You’re saying things that you’ve heard in movies, and you’re doing it because you want to be part of a certain kind of class. Or you want to be able to perform love, and care, and sexiness, and it’s much easier to do that by imitation than to try and figure out what it is that you like.

 

ROBERT BOYERS: Would you like to say a bit more about the word “scripted,” Celeste?

 

CELESTE MARCUS: But then we’re all accustomed to scripted interactions, especially where sex is involved, and deviations are likely to challenge our sense of what is decent and tasteful. In some way the encounter between Elizabeth Costello and Mr. Phillips belongs to a scripted scenario, doesn’t it? The fact that you can even consider using a word like caritas to describe what’s going on there is very reassuring. It all falls within the framework of normal sexual behavior, even if it initially can seem shocking.

In the Coetzee story, the participants know their roles, in spite of the unusual stresses of the situation. But if you’re experimenting with gender and with sexuality, you’re putting so much pressure on yourself not to incorporate other models of what it is to be a person, what it is to be in love, and what is is to be attracted and attractive because you’re forcing yourself to come up with that on your own. And there the challenges, not only for the participants but for those who want to understand and represent them, are greater. For young people who identify as nonbinary, they’re not able to partake in the tradition of gender in the way that most people can. Susan Sontag in one of our assigned readings says that being feminine is being attractive in a conventional way, but if you’re trying to come up with your own interpretation of what your gender is… I don’t know. It is a really formative experience having a conversation with a person who has concluded that they don’t identify as the sex they were born into. I’ve been jealous that they were free enough in their own minds to come to that conclusion, and able to have such a specific and powerful understanding of who they are that they could make those decisions on their own and reject the rest of the tradition that all of us are dependent on. It may be that someone who can’t engage with the Elizabeth Costello material is probably representative of a kind of intolerance in the younger generation. But I think that shock and intolerance may also come with a greater freedom in other realms.

 

TOM HEALY: I’m not sure about the greater freedom, and I’m not sure that the freedom has much to do with an enlargement of taste. But let’s see where we’ll go next with this conversation.

 

JAMES MILLER: I’m still thinking about the state of higher education and what we’re supposed to teach people, and can’t yet drop Coetzee. As a novelist he is a really great example of a Socratic kind of writer, in that he lays out dilemmas without solving them for you. In philosophy, the dialogues of Plato that have no conclusion or are inconclusive are called aporetic. There’s a style of teaching which I very much embrace which is to disquiet and puncture complacency. In that sense it’s purely negative, but the character of Socrates embodies this, as a virtue. But how different that is from the notion of a tradition of practices that takes shape in terms of a fixed standard or criterion. James Russell Lowell clearly knows what his criterion is and how it’s going to be transmitted. He wants to form a gentleman, and he knows what he wants that to look like. If we look at the university today, I’m wondering whether there is a similar kind of standard that, in fact, has insinuated itself. At my own institution, the New School, the mission statement says we want to train good democratic citizens who are committed to diversity, inclusiveness, and pluralism. That’s actually a standard. It’s a paradigm, and it actually has officers, bureaucrats, who enforce it in various ways in the dorms. Again, it’s a totalizing paradigm. So it seems to me. At Harvard they went from having one standard to creating the elective system, created value pluralism, and junked the core curriculum. And so it seems that, with the dissipation of the 19th century sense of bildung and the creation of gentlemen, we’ve gradually, almost willy-nilly, substituted another kind of standard that, in practice, is actually hostile to uncertainty and discomfort, and raising doubts. What it wants is edification. It wants comfort. It wants reinforcement. I’m now wildly overgeneralizing, but it seems to me that the aspect of classical education that had this purely negative aspect of puncturing complacency and leaving you hanging, it seems to me, is at risk in the current moment.

 

IAN BURUMA: There’s a lot to what you say, Jim, and of course we’re all trying still to make our way back to questions of taste. And yet I want to turn to Celeste, and say I agree that the gender question is putting enormous pressure on a lot of young people. This has a lot to do with language, and demands from the new bureaucratic power structures insisting that we adopt ways of speaking that can seem anything but natural—to some of us, at least.

Let me put it this way: Speaking a foreign language is partly a form of theater. You’re acting out a different person in some ways. I think the same thing could be true when you’re performing class, and in some cases shaping taste. In the 1960s, it was very common for people who were from the upper middle class to adopt a working class language. Mick Jagger, a nice middle class boy from the suburbs, started talking something like Cockney, which was a complete act, a theatrical act. Boys from the upper middle class, who went to state schools would get bullied if they didn’t adopt the working class accents of their schoolmates. It can go both ways. The other way it works in a theatrical manner is that the middle class, the aspiring class, usually felt that they had to be very rigid and talk proper English, and otherwise they could slide down again. The upper class often adopted working class linguistic habits because they could afford to do so, and be playful about it.

My problem with the gender politics of today is related to all this. I don’t dismiss it at all that some people really feel deeply, deeply uncomfortable about the gender they were born into, or the sex they were born into and feel they want to be a different sex. You cannot dismiss that in any way. But what I do miss a little bit is the theatrical aspect. Cross-dressing is not the same thing as transgender. The theatrical aspect of cross gender, or indeed the fluidity of sexual identity, of feminine men and masculine women, and so on, was something you could adopt. There was a spectrum within which you could adopt many identities without being absolute about it. I think the pressure on young people right now is partly that because they feel uncomfortable with a masculine role, they feel they have to be female, some do, at any rate. The interesting thing is, then, how often they adopt the most old-fashioned notions of what it is to be female. Men who have become women—sorry if this seems a little harsh and a little provocative—often seem to me to be playing a kind of Doris Day role, and suddenly adopt huge amounts of jewelry and flick their hair back, and so on, in a way that women no longer feel the need to do. Of course that too is theatrical and performative in a way, but it’s not playful anymore. As with so many things today, it becomes a question of absolute identity. I think that’s harmful to human beings, whether we’re talking about class, or speaking different languages, or adopting sexual personae.

 

CELESTE MARCUS: I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community, and so the roles that were set for men and women were absolute. Women had to dress in a particular way and men had to dress in a particular way. Women had to sit in a certain place and men had to sit in a certain place. The roles were fixed. Whether you were a full member of that society was dependent on whether or not you knew how to perform that role properly. I can understand that if gender fluidity is just part of the way your social milieu expresses itself, if your only interaction with it is reading articles about it in the New York Times, it might seem like it’s the same thing as the world I came from, insofar as there are rules about how you ought to behave, and what you’re supposed to say. But if you’re interacting with the people who are making those choices for themselves, it really is quite different. While there certainly are people who choose to be, I don’t know, Doris Day-y about it, the fact is that they’re the ones making that choice. Whereas, in the community that I come from, if you want to be a member in that world, you don’t get to make that choice. I do think there still are women who feel Step-ford-y, and that’s how they think a woman ought to be. I do think that gender, no matter how free you are in your own mind about it, comes with so much baggage for everybody, and how you choose to negotiate it can be challenging. I do think that if femininity is being expressed by somebody who was born into a male body, there’s just more freedom in it than if it’s somebody who was born into an Orthodox Jewish community who’s wearing a long skirt because, if she doesn’t, she’s not going to find a husband by 19.

 

IAN BURUMA: But that’s an odd comparison, don’t you think?

 

CELESTE MARCUS: Why? If you’re talking about prescribed gender roles…

 

BARBARA BLACK: I was interested in the word “should” just now, and thinking about taste as often prescribing what ought to be the dos and don’ts, and taste as fitting in and being suitable. Think about the category of the cool, which I think is a flavor of taste, and entails a kind of knowing-ness. I think the tasteful person often has a secret or gnostic knowledge that others do not have. To some degree, this figures in our conversation about performativity and the pressure to create a persona that expresses a chosen or an imposed life. I think taste is about what separates people. Cool is a mode of detachment, and insofar as it is an expression of taste, it’s all about the image of the self in the eyes of others. An effort to embody a sensibility that can mark a person’s membership in a select group.

 

TOM HEALY: I don’t know. I’m a little confused by that. Look, taste is about rules and conventions. Artists, real artists, defy the rules and make their own. To be cool, it seems to me, is to live detached from ordinary conventions, because you can no longer become what everyone else is performing.

 

JAMES MILLER: I’ve been mulling over something Celeste said, and trying to think about how, in the current generation, gender experimentation, that very strong sense of choosing the experimental life, coexists in the same synchronous zone as an emergent new standard of what you can and can’t say, in terms of diversity, equity, and inclusiveness.

 

ROBERT BOYERS: It’s a troubling contradiction, noted earlier by Ian and by others, and it bears on questions we all seem to have about taste as an imposed discipline and taste as an endowment we adopt at least in part for ourselves.

 

JAMES MILLER: I have one other thought, though: I think there’s a paradox, in that even as a solitary thinker, if you have a sense of anchoring and conviction, that frees you to go places and to raise doubts you might not otherwise be able to raise. The paradigm case for me is Augustine’s confessions, which explores the mysteries and the multiplicity of the human self and the cabinets of memory. He’s able to go deep, deep, deep down because ultimately he’s anchored in God, and he can always come back to God. And this in effect is true as well of Socrates, who can raise the doubts he does because he belongs, actually, to a community with a very strong set of common norms. When he disquiets them, he may piss off the famous person he’s talking to, but he’s not going to create a civil war and the end of civilization as we know it. Experimentation versus standards, paradigms, and rules… That tension in education, and also in a generational sense, I’m drawn to.

 

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Always hard to know who is safe to share forbidden knowledge with, knowing that it won’t corrupt your audience or your companions. There is safety in having good taste and knowing it, knowing you won’t transgress.

With that said, I think that for people who are serious about art and culture, much of having good taste is engaging with things that challenge your sense of safety, whether that’s a challenging work of art, or a dish that’s made of something you’ve never eaten before, or wearing something that’s not easily understood by other people, or maybe only by those in your community. So what’s the deal with safety and taste?

 

TOM HEALY: Having grown up really poor, I think part of the answer is it’s a privilege to skirt that border. If you are poor or if you’re a woman in an orthodox family you may not have the privilege of finding or seeking new kinds of risk.

 

ROBERT BOYERS: I’ve been stunned by the way the notion of safety has affected the academy and the discourse on the culture, simply because it seemed to me, on the way to adulthood, that safety was the last thing I wanted. Not because I came from anything remotely like a privileged background, but because I wanted to be shaken, and excited, and exposed to things that were unfamiliar. Of course there were things along the way that, like everyone else at the table, I confronted which were unpleasant, but I wouldn’t have wanted to trade that experience for a regime in which safety was the governing principle or ethos. In the classroom, one of the things you do, I think, is to suggest that safety is not what we’re about.

If that means the students have to discover that they are really much stronger and more powerful than they thought they were, that some other people have been telling them that they were, that’s going to be a very important aspect of their development as young people. They’re going to discover that they can actually read Elizabeth Costello, and Waiting for the Barbarians, and Disgrace. I know that safety has become, as you suggest, very much a governing notion in much of the culture. Many students that I talk to at our dinner table, and so on, want to talk about it. They’re interested in it for themselves and for the culture of the student body that they’re in. It’s an important subject.

 

AUDIENCE MEMBER #2: Just going back a little bit, Tom Healy said we want art to be in questionable taste, right? I think if we’re correlating taste to gender as well, or if we’re correlating the world of art to gender, gender is a sort of performance in and of itself. It’s a kind of art.

I think it’s interesting that, when gender performance starts to become challenging, people become concerned. People feel a pressure. Not sure what that amounts to, but the application of pressure does seem to me often to be felt like a violation of taste.

 

TOM HEALY: The pressure on young people I hear about, of course. But for myself, I don’t feel under pressure at all, nor do I mind at all if people want to change their gender. And as to performance, well, I’m entirely in favor of that. I just think there are many ways of performing masculinity and femininity whether you’re a man or a woman, without having to take the absolute step, including operations and so on. Again, I don’t dismiss the fact that some people feel an absolute need to do that, but there are many ways to perform these roles without having to be absolute about declaring, “I’m either a man or a woman.”

 

CELESTE MARCUS: The world of gender fluidity is definitionally not telling you that you have to pick. It is allied with trans people not because they’re part of the same movement or calling for the same kind of acceptance, but because they’re subject to the same marginalization. I think there are misconceptions informing talk of gender fluidity and gender freedom. The young are saying that both of these kinds of people deserve respect, and freedom, and safety.

Nobody is telling anybody that they have to have gender reassignment surgery. The only thing that people are saying of that community is, if they want to, then they should be able to. It’s the same community that says, “If I want to be gender fluid, then I should be able to.” The reason they’re allied is because they make a lot of the same people uncomfortable, not because they’re asking for the same thing.

 

IAN BURUMA: But this has nothing to do with taste. If somebody wants to change their gender, and you say to them, “That’s because that’s your taste to become a woman,” or “a man,” they’d be very offended. That’s the whole point of it, that it’s not just a matter of taste. Whereas cross-dressing is a matter of taste. I’m for more fluidity, but I’m slightly… I don’t feel pressured, but I feel that some people are pressured because of the current climate to make an absolute choice, which is the opposite of fluidity.

 

AUDIENCE MEMBER #3: Mr. Healy, you were talking about reading what happened with young boys in the Catholic Church, and how disgusted you felt in learning about their experience. Would you say that disgust is essential as a response to such things?

 

TOM HEALY: People have to make their own choices about the art they want to experience and even the history they want to know. There are so many degrees of human experience that I just don’t want anyone to tell us what art can be made of or what emotions we’re supposed to feel.

 

ROCHELLE GURSTEIN: I’m glad that we’re turning again to taste. And you know, the whole history of the avant-garde has to do with subversions of taste. This has been going on since the 19th century, with people rejecting the status quo and making new art. In the 1960’s many artists complained that “You can’t shock the bourgeoisie anymore.” They wanted to be shocked. It had become a taste, and the taste has not exactly disappeared. Not even now. The imperative is therefore to keep pushing. What’s the boundary? People get used to things. Good taste won’t help when the desire is to push beyond a boundary.

 

TOM HEALY: The answer is, if it can be commodified, it gets absorbed. We live in the consumer culture, so yes, it’ll all be absorbed.

 

IAN BURUMA: The photographs for Calvin Klein jeans or underwear are a perfect example of how gay culture has been absorbed by the capitalist mainstream. And yet, we haven’t really made a case for vulgarity and tastelessness. Because I don’t think any high art worth its name has been without some tastelessness and vulgarity. We’ve already mentioned the carnivalesque spirit, everything from Shakespeare plays to Mozart’s operas, and so on. They all royally borrowed from the more vulgar cultures in their time. Without that, the work would be extremely boring and academic. It’s absolutely essential to be at least a little bit vulgar.

 

ROBERT BOYERS: Can you conceivably incorporate an appetite for vulgarity into your pedagogic practice?

 

IAN BURUMA: I try.

 

BARBARA BLACK: Me too.

 

ROBERT BOYERS: I think here of my psychoanalyst-friend Adam Phillips, who writes that he’d like the vulgar “to be a useful term of art as opposed to a straightforward, simple-minded insult.”

 

TOM HEALY: I think we can all get behind that.

 

ROBERT BOYERS: Adam also writes that “the vulgar is a scapegoat of good taste.”

 

IAN BURUMA: That’s even better, isn’t it?

 

ROBERT BOYERS: And let’s end with one more provocative quote from Phillips, and leave by thinking, till at least our next Salmagundi conference, of what it has to do with taste: “The vulgar refuse to miss out.”

 

TASTE: A LIST

Selections for a Salmagundi Symposium

For the October 2023 Salmagundi Conference on TASTE the editors put together for participants a home-made anthology of readings, which contained the following:

 

1—Richard Taruskin, “Taste, Bad Taste, & Franz Liszt”

2—Zadie Smith, “Speaking in Tongues”

3—Dwight MacDonald, “Masscult & Midcult”

4—William Ian Miller, “Orwell’s Sense of Smell”

5—Adam Phillips, “The Vulgar”

6—Susan Sontag, “A Photograph is not an Opinion”

7—Arthur Koestler, “The Anatomy of Snobbery”

8—J.M. Coetzee, “Elizabeth Costello & The Problem of Evil”

9—Wayne Koestenbaum, “The Callas Cult”

10—Rochelle Gurstein, “Mass Culture, Mass Society”

11—John Murray Cuddihy, excerpts from The Ordeal of Civility

12—Margo Jefferson & Darryl Pinckney, “A Conversation On The

Black Bourgeoisie”

13—Lynn Freed, “Doing No Harm”

14—Edgar Wind, “Critique of Connoisseurship”

15—Marianne Moore, “Critics & Connoisseurs” (a poem)

16—Randall Jarrell, “A Girl in a Library” (a poem)