Reflection 3 - The Standard of Taste

What does it mean to have good taste, and is this a meaningful ability?
To determine what it means to have good taste, I think one has to agree that there is such a thing as universal “good taste” and “bad taste,” and after working through the readings in this unit I argue that there is no such idea or standard of taste. Because no such standard exists, the ability to determine whether someone has good taste or to claim that art is either tasteful or not is inconsequential. 
I want to begin with Mothersill because her argument, that there are no laws of taste and never can be, really resonated with me. While she does admit that principles of taste exist and that there is something normative about our ideas of taste, she stresses the fact that there is no aesthetic rule to back them up, thus they become weakened and not useful to us. She argues that because there is no blanket statement to judgements of taste that can always be personally predicted, the standard of taste fails because it has no predictive qualities. She writes :“that is to say that my powers fail at the crucial point, namely the ability to predict the accrual or non-accrual of value-quality in my own experience.” I think this passage is particularly interesting because she’s essentially saying that if we can’t predict our own taste with one hundred percent certainty then how can we say that there is a standard of taste that we can apply across the board and to other people? I really love how Mothersill uses herself as a personal example with the detective novel example. In this entire course, we’ve been questioning beauty and representation and whether objective rules exist. Many times in these discussions, we’ve felt very personal convictions about the beautiful and have used that feeling as a way to understand the possibility of objective standards when it comes to beauty and art. With the idea of taste, Mothersill employs the same comparison to self but turns it on its’ head, saying that when my own personal statements of taste can’t follow 3 simple rules (not law-like, not interesting, unbelievable), how can I expect there to be universal standards of taste? 
I think what Mothersill and other authors in this unit are trying to touch on is individual preference and how because we, as human beings, can never be completely detached from ourselves and the society, history and culture that surrounds us, we are left with no objective standard or definition of what “good taste” actually is. Hume argues that a removal of prejudice refines taste. He writes that for a critic to fully “execute” his job, he or she must preserve his mind free of all prejudice. I find this impossible. One cannot fully remove himself or herself from what they have been socialized in to thinking whether that’s in regards to a particular piece of artwork or not. For instance, Dickie reiterates this point by arguing that you can never view an artwork wholly “disinterestedly.” Whether you are an art critic or fan, you can’t separate yourself from what is around you and how that could be affecting your judgements of taste. In addition to Dickie, Hume and Mothersill, Kant reiterates the idea that there cannot be a standard of taste through his four moments of: the disinterested pleasure, subjective universality, purposiveness without purpose, and necessity arguing that a standard of taste would have to adhere to all of these rules and that it ultimately fails. It fails because there is a positive lack of explanation in an aesthetic judgement and an absence of an objective principle but rather only an explanation in the subject. I ultimately agree with Kant and all of the other authors we’ve read in this unit and find that no standard of taste can exist because what really matters in these aesthetic judgements is the subject more so than the object, and that there can be no standard of taste that can be applied to everyone’s thinking all the time. However, I will say that while I do not believe a standard of taste exists, I thoroughly enjoyed Mason’s point when mentioning Hume’s discussion of the critic. I thought his point that someone can appreciate something and affirm that it has good taste while not necessarily liking it was a point well made, and while I would like to believe that such judgements are possible, I’m not entirely convinced.