On the standard of taste
A critique of critique
Ben Poggemiller Staff
Apparently, there has been a war raging in the world for hundreds of years, and I was completely unaware of it. Vicious writings have been fired back and forth vehemently arguing over . . . what “beautiful” is. That’s right. Taste is something that has been discussed almost endlessly. Many philosophers strive for a set of rules claiming that there is a system for declaring something beautiful, while others claim that that there are no rules at all.
Immanuel Kant argues in his Critique of Judgment that an object is either beautiful or it is not. Beauty is universal and occurs only out of a feeling of pleasure that humans get from form. This must happen in the split second between when we sense something and when we recognize what it is, though. For example, if there is a painting of an office building, I can only perceive beauty before I realize that it is an office building, and there are other factors afterwards that cause us to disagree.
Many thinkers seem to reject this idea, since Kant sacrifices our individuality for an aesthetic system. However, a Kantian viewpoint means that since beauty is universally perceived, nobody’s judgment is better than anybody else’s. This is an important notion in a documentary entitled Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock? The movie is about a truck-driving woman who finds a painting at a thrift store and she believes it was created by an artist named Jackson Pollock. She then attempts to confirm its authenticity by confronting elite art experts whose judgment is “better” than hers. Maybe it’s not so important after all, considering Kant would argue that whether the painting is a Pollock or not is irrelevant in determining whether it is beautiful or not. But if it is a Pollock, it could mean millions of dollars to this woman.
The point is that arguing over taste is about as futile as an argument can get. I keep thinking to myself: “Who cares if people agree or not? The only thing that’s important is if I like it.” That got me thinking even more. If there is no standard for taste, why don’t we make one? We should arbitrarily pick someone to sit on a throne in a recreated version of ancient Rome and have people approach him or her with works of art, and that person will declare whether the works are “good” or not. I figure as long as we’re picking someone arbitrarily, we might as well arbitrarily pick me. After all, it was my idea.
The procedure will go like this:
Person: Is this painting beautiful, O Kaiser Ben?
Kaiser Ben: Yes. Yes, it is.
Person: Great, now I can tell that jerk at work that he was wrong.
Kaiser Ben: Don’t forget to tip me and visit the gift shop on the way out.
I will create the canon from which students read and I will decide what good art is. This way, there will be no more disagreements, and ideas like subjectivity and objectivity will be irrelevant. I am also guaranteed to dislike everything that comes out of the next generation. If people disagree with me, then there is something wrong with them. On second thought, never mind. Most people think this way anyway.
