Andrushka

Before you read my post, you may want to visit Angie's blog. Always insightful, her most recent post incited this post. It started as a comment, but it soon became evident that it's a post of its own. We often say that "there's no accounting for taste," and yet experts on a given subject, people who immerse themselves in it and study it, usually agree on what constitutes the pinnacle of an art form. Only people without a grounding in the fundamentals and history of painting would say Da Vinci or Rothko or Rafael suck. Often, "it sucks" is synonymous with "I don't understand it." Perhaps we should recognize a difference between an educated opinion and an uneducated one. In the realm of TV, we can relate these to critical acclaim and ratings, respectively. And when we discover ourselves in disagreement with the educated opinion, we should view it as an opportunity to learn why people in the know appreciate what we do not. That doesn't mean we have to like it, but we should try to understand it. We might even be surprised; once we understand it, we may love it. "Taste" may be a dangerous cognitive linguistic metaphor, conflating our bodily reaction to food with our emotional and mental reactions to art. (Lackoff and Johnson list it as a subset of the Mind as Body metaphor. Here are a few interesting reads relating to cognitive linguistic metaphors.) On the other hand, it's the metaphor we've been working with, so let's run with it. With food, I don't have to like it, but I can understand what appeals to people about the edibles in question. For instance, I have an aversion to chocolate. However, reading about the chemical properties and effects of chocolate as well as listening to chocoholics describe their passion for it makes me able to appreciate the stuff even if I don't want to eat it myself. Likewise, I've never personally found Rothko terribly inspiring, but when I listen to people who do "get it," I appreciate his importance and beauty all the more. More to the point, when a knowledgeable person gives a well-founded reason for why they don't like something, it colors my opinion and begins the process of my own rejection of it. Acolytes to a field often have a sophomoric disdain for what others find beautiful. We try to position ourselves in opposition to those who have gone before us in order to carve out a niche and establish ourselves as having higher sensibilities than our peers and teachers. After all, it's much easier to rip something apart than build it up. I have not been using the first person plural we in vain. I catch myself doing this all the time, and I'm not proud of it. The underlying assumption of these attacks on educated taste is that we are playing a zero-sum game in which accolades for one person or support of their taste detracts from my/our standing in the field. Hogwash. As we have seen, experts sometimes disagree for various reasons, but more often than not, they share commonalities of taste because they know the history and craft of the field. If we can accept that the only real difference between them and us is their grounding in a discipline, then there is accounting for taste and the lack thereof.

Posted by Scott on 05 March 2006 at 3/05/2006 12:09:00 PM | Permalink