Your meandering, discursive writing style fools one into thinking you're embarked on a cruise to nowhere. Then, (if you will excuse the mixing of metaphors), you find that the thin mixture of eggs, butter, vinegar, and herbs that you've been tirelessly whisking with no apparent effect, suddenly coalesces into bernaise.
Your thoughts about pretending to like high art is cleverly explored in the movie “Le gout des Autres,” the taste of others, in which a successful businessman tries to acquire taste and is humiliated by his attempt. Lessons ensue.
I got especially enthusiastic reading the want for "music and theatre and fine art retain an aura of social desirability" section. Her family escaping Russia to America, my grandmother sought out the best stylists for clothes, decor, artworks to the pain-pride of my grandfather [and maybe her children]). But it was an important part of my particular upbringing. It was more than enculturation, learning-acquiring taste meant 'now we can have the best.'
I really enjoyed these observations, Ian, finding myself nodding along as the analysis unfolds.
I remember as a child desperately wanting to acquire the taste for cheese, mainly as a result of the faces and noises made by those who already had.
Laphroaig was quite another journey, in which I managed to preserve my equivocalness on whisky in general, whilst jumping the queue to one of the hardest tastes to acquire. The brand’s advertising exploits this brilliantly.
I have serially failed to ‘get’ Dickens or Shakespeare, with the exact reaction to such monumental failings that you describe - to keep looking for another way in.
On the subtle complexity of tastes worth acquiring, I despair of most car designs within my means (and many of them outside that boundary). But I instantly loved the new Renault 5, with an intensity equal to my distaste for so-called Minis.
Suffice to say I very much like the taste of your writing, and enjoyed the discovery of ‘pervious’ in this piece. 🙏🏻🙏🏻
I am very engaged by your thoughts on Acquired Taste. I take your point about that the term is ‘strictly speaking … a redundancy’, but believe that it already, albeit lazily, implies agency and choice on the part of the acquirer, in order to counter what you identify as the base line and more usual, passive acquisition of taste.
I would argue that we are being assaulted by what you call anti-taste not only to surrender our independent curiosity, but also passively to accept the choices being made for us algorithmically which define what is or is not ‘Taste’.
I am perhaps retreating to Sontag’s more expansive definition of taste, but you made me think of Edith Wharton, who, in The Custom of the County, could be describing to-day’s anti-taste population, in their own Hotel California:
‘The inmates of the hotel were of different nationalities, but their racial differences were levelled by the stamp of a common mediocrity. All differences of tongue, of custom, of physiognomy, disappeared in this deep community of insignificance, which was like some secret band, with the manifold signs and passwords of its ignorances and its imperceptions. It was not the heterogeneous mediocrity of the American summer hotel, where the lack of any standard is the nearest approach to a tie, but an organized codified dullness, in conscious possession of its rights, and strong in the voluntary ignorance of any others.’
If ‘Many of the greatest, most compelling and satisfying cultural objects are complex, occluded, spiky, difficult to like.’ and if this describes ‘the best people’, then they too can succumb to whatever codification has evolved and which risks stifling individual agency and choice. This is demonstrated by Henry James in a brief exchange between a ‘difficult to like’ aunt, herself an example of advanced ‘character planning’ and her niece, Isabel Archer, in The Portrait of a Lady:
‘I shall always tell you,’ her aunt answered, ‘whenever I see you taking what seems to me to be too much liberty.’
‘Pray do; but I don’t say I shall always think your remonstrance just.’
‘Very likely not. You’re too fond of your own ways.’
‘Yes, I think I am very fond of them. But I always want to know the things one shouldn’t do’.
‘So as to do them?’ asked her aunt.
‘So as to choose,’ said Isabel.
Neither the value nor the vulnerability of individual choice in the acquisition of taste should be underestimated.
Cultivation is perhaps the best term/metaphor here.
As to How Taste Can Mean Wisdom (and even ethics), allow me to send you to the most awfully cultivated, patrician - in - despair account in a fairly concise form I've ever encountered. I used to love it and endorse unquestioningly in my snobby 20s, I'm not entirely sure /I'm entirely unsure now. But here goes.
Happy to have my proclivity toward consciously acquiring a taste for things that didn't initially leap out me validated by this essay. I notice that things I have to 'work' at liking often end up especially captivating. The White Album is an example. And, currently, Proust’s big one.
Fascinating and thought-provoking as usual, many thanks, Ian! There's such deep joy that comes from a hard-acquired taste - you feel like you've unlocked a treasure that enriches the rest of your life. I discovered this recently with Vermeer's paintings: after years of frustrated not getting their appeal, what finally unlocked them was Andrew Graham Dixon's wonderful biography. Now I walk through grubby North London past grubbier people and see them as magically as Vermeer saw Delft and his girl with a pearl earring. No AI can do that.
Three points where I know I’ve definitely cultivated things - Sonic Youth‘s Daydream Nation, where the single was the accessible way in, but it took 7 listens before the magic eye‘ picture resolved and mess became prismatic, and impossible to unsee. There was also the critical consensus, so even if at 17, I lacked the background to immediately understand where it was coming from, there was a sense there is something here for you to unlock.
Joanna Newsom - whose voice is as divisive as Dylan - where it took many repetitions of ‘This Side of the Blue’ on that Orange mobile cinema advert (the switch off your phones one) to persuade me there was something worth investigating. I bounced off or she bounced off me the first few times. But that one track was enough to make me persevere, and unlock one of my favourite artists
The other is the general category of single malt whisky - which is more perhaps about refinement, of starting with American bourbon and seeking something less sweet as, like the barrels, you age.
I remember sitting in the cinema watching 2001 A Space Odyssey. It was in the early 80s, a retrospective, it is my (now ex) husband's favourite film. I had a passing acquaintance with classical music and it wasn't the pretty Blue Danube that captured me. It was the Ligeti Requiem (perhaps better described as a concerto for 747) that stayed with me and sent me on an exploration of contemporary classical music.
A question, if I may. In talking about "anti-taste" you say that "Meta is the great corporate champion of anti-taste..." Why Meta and not, say, Amazon, or anyone else in the mega-tech class?
Happy to have my proclivity toward consciously acquiring a taste for things that didn't initially leap out me validated by this essay. I notice that things I have to 'work' at liking often end up especially captivating. The White Album is an example. And, currently, Proust’s big one.
“Once you find the key to its heavy oak door a vast and fabulous kingdom awaits.” Love that, thanks.
Ruffian . . .
Your meandering, discursive writing style fools one into thinking you're embarked on a cruise to nowhere. Then, (if you will excuse the mixing of metaphors), you find that the thin mixture of eggs, butter, vinegar, and herbs that you've been tirelessly whisking with no apparent effect, suddenly coalesces into bernaise.
Ta-da! Modern car design, indeed!
What a wonderful comment - thank you!
Your thoughts about pretending to like high art is cleverly explored in the movie “Le gout des Autres,” the taste of others, in which a successful businessman tries to acquire taste and is humiliated by his attempt. Lessons ensue.
I got especially enthusiastic reading the want for "music and theatre and fine art retain an aura of social desirability" section. Her family escaping Russia to America, my grandmother sought out the best stylists for clothes, decor, artworks to the pain-pride of my grandfather [and maybe her children]). But it was an important part of my particular upbringing. It was more than enculturation, learning-acquiring taste meant 'now we can have the best.'
I really enjoyed these observations, Ian, finding myself nodding along as the analysis unfolds.
I remember as a child desperately wanting to acquire the taste for cheese, mainly as a result of the faces and noises made by those who already had.
Laphroaig was quite another journey, in which I managed to preserve my equivocalness on whisky in general, whilst jumping the queue to one of the hardest tastes to acquire. The brand’s advertising exploits this brilliantly.
I have serially failed to ‘get’ Dickens or Shakespeare, with the exact reaction to such monumental failings that you describe - to keep looking for another way in.
On the subtle complexity of tastes worth acquiring, I despair of most car designs within my means (and many of them outside that boundary). But I instantly loved the new Renault 5, with an intensity equal to my distaste for so-called Minis.
Suffice to say I very much like the taste of your writing, and enjoyed the discovery of ‘pervious’ in this piece. 🙏🏻🙏🏻
Lovely, thank you
I am very engaged by your thoughts on Acquired Taste. I take your point about that the term is ‘strictly speaking … a redundancy’, but believe that it already, albeit lazily, implies agency and choice on the part of the acquirer, in order to counter what you identify as the base line and more usual, passive acquisition of taste.
I would argue that we are being assaulted by what you call anti-taste not only to surrender our independent curiosity, but also passively to accept the choices being made for us algorithmically which define what is or is not ‘Taste’.
I am perhaps retreating to Sontag’s more expansive definition of taste, but you made me think of Edith Wharton, who, in The Custom of the County, could be describing to-day’s anti-taste population, in their own Hotel California:
‘The inmates of the hotel were of different nationalities, but their racial differences were levelled by the stamp of a common mediocrity. All differences of tongue, of custom, of physiognomy, disappeared in this deep community of insignificance, which was like some secret band, with the manifold signs and passwords of its ignorances and its imperceptions. It was not the heterogeneous mediocrity of the American summer hotel, where the lack of any standard is the nearest approach to a tie, but an organized codified dullness, in conscious possession of its rights, and strong in the voluntary ignorance of any others.’
If ‘Many of the greatest, most compelling and satisfying cultural objects are complex, occluded, spiky, difficult to like.’ and if this describes ‘the best people’, then they too can succumb to whatever codification has evolved and which risks stifling individual agency and choice. This is demonstrated by Henry James in a brief exchange between a ‘difficult to like’ aunt, herself an example of advanced ‘character planning’ and her niece, Isabel Archer, in The Portrait of a Lady:
‘I shall always tell you,’ her aunt answered, ‘whenever I see you taking what seems to me to be too much liberty.’
‘Pray do; but I don’t say I shall always think your remonstrance just.’
‘Very likely not. You’re too fond of your own ways.’
‘Yes, I think I am very fond of them. But I always want to know the things one shouldn’t do’.
‘So as to do them?’ asked her aunt.
‘So as to choose,’ said Isabel.
Neither the value nor the vulnerability of individual choice in the acquisition of taste should be underestimated.
Perfect Portrait of a Lady quote, thank you!
Cultivation is perhaps the best term/metaphor here.
As to How Taste Can Mean Wisdom (and even ethics), allow me to send you to the most awfully cultivated, patrician - in - despair account in a fairly concise form I've ever encountered. I used to love it and endorse unquestioningly in my snobby 20s, I'm not entirely sure /I'm entirely unsure now. But here goes.
https://iphils.uj.edu.pl/~t.kowalski/power-of-taste.html
Happy to have my proclivity toward consciously acquiring a taste for things that didn't initially leap out me validated by this essay. I notice that things I have to 'work' at liking often end up especially captivating. The White Album is an example. And, currently, Proust’s big one.
Fascinating and thought-provoking as usual, many thanks, Ian! There's such deep joy that comes from a hard-acquired taste - you feel like you've unlocked a treasure that enriches the rest of your life. I discovered this recently with Vermeer's paintings: after years of frustrated not getting their appeal, what finally unlocked them was Andrew Graham Dixon's wonderful biography. Now I walk through grubby North London past grubbier people and see them as magically as Vermeer saw Delft and his girl with a pearl earring. No AI can do that.
Ooh I must read that
Three points where I know I’ve definitely cultivated things - Sonic Youth‘s Daydream Nation, where the single was the accessible way in, but it took 7 listens before the magic eye‘ picture resolved and mess became prismatic, and impossible to unsee. There was also the critical consensus, so even if at 17, I lacked the background to immediately understand where it was coming from, there was a sense there is something here for you to unlock.
Joanna Newsom - whose voice is as divisive as Dylan - where it took many repetitions of ‘This Side of the Blue’ on that Orange mobile cinema advert (the switch off your phones one) to persuade me there was something worth investigating. I bounced off or she bounced off me the first few times. But that one track was enough to make me persevere, and unlock one of my favourite artists
The other is the general category of single malt whisky - which is more perhaps about refinement, of starting with American bourbon and seeking something less sweet as, like the barrels, you age.
Great examples - I was the same with Joanna Newsom and Ys
I remember sitting in the cinema watching 2001 A Space Odyssey. It was in the early 80s, a retrospective, it is my (now ex) husband's favourite film. I had a passing acquaintance with classical music and it wasn't the pretty Blue Danube that captured me. It was the Ligeti Requiem (perhaps better described as a concerto for 747) that stayed with me and sent me on an exploration of contemporary classical music.
A question, if I may. In talking about "anti-taste" you say that "Meta is the great corporate champion of anti-taste..." Why Meta and not, say, Amazon, or anyone else in the mega-tech class?
Happy to have my proclivity toward consciously acquiring a taste for things that didn't initially leap out me validated by this essay. I notice that things I have to 'work' at liking often end up especially captivating. The White Album is an example. And, currently, Proust’s big one.