Toward a Definition of "Bad Taste"

My parents are moving out of the house in which they've lived for nearly thirty years. They want a place smaller and easier to take care of, one without stairs - or guestrooms. Last week, the children were invited to squabble over the knick-knacks of two well-traveled lifetimes. The living room was turned into a bazaar, heaps of treasure and dross intermingled and overflowing, my sisters haggling, piles collapsing. Some of the furniture is fabulous, some of the plates and bowls and glasses, the rugs and the wall hangings, the paintings and the heirlooms are wonderful. Some, of course, are crap. And looking at all this stuff (how did it fit in the house?), pawing through it for glimmers of gold, I realized that I had never even seen most of it. I had never seen the crap.

My mother is a woman of deeply personal, yet impeccable taste. When she puts a home together (or sets a table or throws a party), it will simply work, everything will be all-of-a-piece, and completely her own. While we picked over and through her life, she regaled us with histories of the items we were taking away. She also waxed almost too eloquent upon the process of remodeling the new apartment (hey, I'm still sad about the old homestead; I don't want to hear about the new one yet). In the course of this interior design overload, a discussion all about decisions and compromises (why some pieces had been prominent and others shut away, why the new home will have back and white checks on the kitchen floor), I had an epiphany about the nature of "taste".

Bennet Reimer, emeritus Professor of Music at Northwestern, characterizes the work of aesthetic anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake thus:

" In her search for an answer to the question 'What is art for?' (another way to ask the same question would be 'Why do humans value art?'), Ellen Dissanayake concludes that an essential characteristic of the arts is that they provide a mechanism for creating objects or events that 'place the activity or artifact in a "realm" different from the everyday.' ... That is, the arts, in unique ways, 'make special.' Other ways of expressing this idea are that the arts exist to make the seemingly ordinary extraordinary, or to make the seemingly insignificant significant. Whatever other values the arts bestow, their distinctiveness as a valuable human endeavor is their powerful capacity to accomplish such transformations. "¹

I find this notion of "making special" compelling as a description of large swaths of human behavior. I find it especially compelling when I think about the ways in which people decorate their personal space (e.g. their houses, cars, bodies, etc.). All humans have within themselves the desire (the imperative, even) to make their surroundings special. We fill our spaces with things that make those spaces special to us. Why then are so many personal spaces so ugly? Why do people have "bad taste"?

We know when we are in the presence of great art. We are struck by the seeming unity of a masterpiece, by how every part fits into a larger whole, by how significant form reveals itself over and over, deeper and deeper. By contrast, when confronting bad art we are stunned by its incoherence, put off by mishmash, distressed by our inability to understand how it fits together.²

Dissanayake would add one crucial element to the above description of what is involved in art: art is communal in purpose.

Because our private spaces are just that, private, we tend to make them special to ourselves and to not think about their impact on our community. We can fill our spaces with items and accents, each of which is special, each of which carries some meaning for us, but none of which fit one with another. That space will be special to us, but will strike many others as confusing - as demonstrating bad taste.

We can, but it is more difficult, try to establish our space as a coherent whole, not relying on individual items or curious colors to demonstrate our uniqueness. We can attempt to create a space which is itself a significant form, holding the elements together, and just not a jumble of pieces, each insisting on its own primacy.

Bad taste is choosing to decorate with items or accents that represent themselves solely as themselves. Good taste considers the impact of individual pieces on the whole. Both are ways of expressing our aesthetic imperative, but they are differently experienced by others. One is directed toward visitors, an outward focused representation, while the other is directed inward and narcissistic.

. . .

¹ This is the best one paragraph representation available on the web of Dissanayake's ideas. There was a lengthy article in the Chronicle of Higher Education some months ago, but it has been archived - and so forever lost to linking. Go read her books: agree or disagree, they will make you think; and that is the name of the game.

² To be fair, this is also a common reaction to new art. Once we learn to see or hear it, the incoherence resolves into harmony. In the case of bad art this resolution never takes place.

Posted by Martial