Taste

            It was raining on Monday, September 26th when I left for my Philosophy class, I wore my hoody with my motorcycle jacket zipped up tightly on top of it. I also wore my spring and fall leather gloves. My ass was wet before I even got north to Dundas.

            Since our lecture this time would be on taste, I showed Professor Russell and overlap with his course from my Canadian Poetry course. I’d found a quote on the subject of taste from Irving Layton, who my Philosophy instructor had never heard of: “High culture is that underarm perspiration odour of old men” and “Good taste is something to wipe our unstodgy behinds with.” Devlin commented that it made him curious to find out what Irving Layton’s poetry was like.

            At the beginning of class we had a review question to answer with our iclickers. The question was, “Can Danto’s barbarians appreciate the red squares that are works of art. Most of us said no, but it was a trick question. They can appreciate them, but not as art. We’ll have to watch out for this instructor come quiz time.

            What is taste?

            Sibley says that taste knows how to apply aesthetic concepts.

            Taste is a capacity to have a certain kind of sensory experience in response to sensory cues. It’s not purely contemplative. You feel something that has positive or negative valance, like pleasure and pain, but not pleasure and pain. This capacity is not merely natural receptivity like pleasure and pain, but must be cultivated and developed through practice and training and repetition of experience. Taste is a sensory property to feel positive or negative towards sensible properties.

            He showed us two images. One was a piece of colourful pop art and the other looked like a photograph of a magnified round metal object. He wanted to know if the images evoked nice feelings or disgust. I preferred the coloured one for the colours but the photograph for its shape.

            He told us that what we had just dome was exercise taste.

            He showed a slick photo of the new iphone beside a straight photo of the old Blackberry. Then he showed us two dresses worn by women at the Emmy awards. One was a sexy red dress in a classical style with one shoulder exposed. The other was a green dress with intricate embroidery that I thought made it more interesting but most people voted for the red dress.

            He then showed us an expensive bottle of wine beside a cheap one.

            Good versus bad taste. Given that capacity is a sensitivity, it can be more or less sensitive, depending on practice. Wine tasting requires developing the palate.

            Good taste is high functioning, sophisticated sensitivity.

            Bad taste is low functioning and unsophisticated.

            There are tastemakers, standards of taste and right or wrong aesthetic reactions to have. But there are no rules for taste.

            For Hume, good taste is the consensus among sophisticated critics with high functioning, practiced and developed sensitivity.

            Devlin mentioned Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes as being examples of this regarding taste in films. He opined that they offer a pretty good rough estimate.

            Why is sensitivity equated with good taste? One could be sensitive to colours, for example, and yet be considered to have bad taste by the world’s standards. Hume would not have a good answer to this question because for him, taste is related to culture.

            For Kant, taste is not a consensus. For him, good taste and aesthetic delight is a harmony between form in the world and form in the mind. The sophisticated perceiver contacts with properties of structure and in the mind of rational perceivers there is rational structure.

            After class I headed home, but stopped at Freshco to buy grapes, cinnamon bread and yogourt.

            When I got to my building, the landlord was coming out with the guy he’s hired to renovate the apartment at the top of the stairs. I told him that I’d seen a bedbug. He told me that Orkin had already come about the cockroaches last week, but I wasn’t home. He said he’d call them again.

            Jonquil came in from outside crying, after the rain. I think she’s been spending her time under the deck. When she comes home she acts distressed and goes places where she’s been trained not to go. I caught her lying with her stinky body on top of some clean laundry that was piled on the kitchen table, just as my upstairs neighbour, David knocked on my door. A few days ago I discovered that he’d left a bag with some cans of beer inside my door, and I’d been waiting to see him in the hall in order to thank him. He asked if I’d gotten the bar and I thanked him then. Then he asked to borrow twenty dollars. I didn’t hesitate, even though I only had thirty-three dollars and change. I gave him the twenty. He once gave me twenty dollars to buy a guitar tuner when all I did was ask if he had one I could borrow. Over the two or three years I’ve known him he’s probably given me a hundred dollars worth of beer. He’s also donated quite a lot of stuff that he’s acquired from the warehouse that employs him. He told me after I’d handed him the twenty that he’d give it back to me on Tuesday, plus ten dollars interest. Then he handed me a big bottle of olive oil in a PC bag. I don’t think that had been his intention at first, but rather a spontaneous thing. I found a cigarette in the bottom of the bag that I took out and threw it in the garbage.