Taste

DS 642

This seminar will explore the idea of taste – both “good” and bad”, in “popular” and “high” culture – drawing on material from the United States, England, France, and South Asia.

Taste has at least two meanings, both of which concern the faculty of perception. The first, an older meaning, is used in a physical sense to convey the sensation caused in the mouth when it comes in contact with a flavor, or a small sample of food. The second meaning is obtained from developments in intellectual culture deriving from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the word became increasingly important and complex. The second meaning of taste went beyond simple liking or preference for something, to include the notion of discrimination. Here, the ability to distinguish between something that was beautiful, ugly, or merely pleasant, was an attribute of someone that exhibited “good taste.” However, both the words tasteful and tasteless emerged during the same period. So who decides what constitutes “good” taste or “bad” taste?

There is no escaping from matters of taste – we judge others and are judged on the basis of our individual tastes. In our everyday actions, each one of us is seen as a consumer exercising our personal taste, our purely subjective preferences, in the choices we make, from the art and movies we view, or the books we read, to the clothes we wear, and the food we eat. But is taste personal or collective? We all know that taste is shared in a particular period and place, such as the “Victorian” taste that dominated late-nineteenth century Britain. And yet, even as we might conform to publicly sanctioned attitudes about certain styles, we still assert our individual preferences. Do we belong to particular taste cultures and taste publics? What is the relationship between taste and shared institutions and spaces that are supposed to represent the public? Whose tastes are considered and whose are not? Who should decide? How should decisions be made?

In this seminar, we will read both historical and theoretical works on the idea of taste, and examine works of architecture, landscape, art, articles of clothing, and public space. Specific topics will include the sexual politics of taste; the birth of consumer societies; fashion; style; museums; and public art and its controversies. The readings will be drawn from a wide range of disciplines including architectural, and art history, anthropology, sociology, and material culture.

Course Texts:

The following books will be read in their entirety, or nearly so. Students may purchase these books at the University Book Store.
• Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste translated by Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
• Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (New York: Basic Books, Revised and updated edition, 1999).
• David Schuyler, Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815-1852 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
• Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Modern Library, 2001).