Speaker A
Black coffee. Good morning. This is Sarah, and welcome back to the Function of Art vlog. Today, I'm gonna talk a little bit more about aesthetics, particularly having to do with the whole idea of taste. So, aesthetics as they pertain to the concept of taste. But first, I'm going to read the definition of taste to you so that I can establish a little bit more of a baseline. The first entry for taste, of course, has to do with the actual process of tasting something, which is one of your five senses, right? That is not what we're discussing today. We're talking about the second entry, which is a person's liking for particular—it says flavors, but it appends that by saying it's a person's tendency to like or dislike certain things. The definition appends this even further and says that it's the ability to discern what is of good quality or of a high aesthetic standard. This has mainly to do with matters of personal preference, interest, and of course, judgment. Okay, so the important thing to note about taste is that there isn't really any such thing as good or bad preference. A person's taste is based on a lot of different factors: values, cultural context, life experiences, things that you're exposed to versus things that you're not, and your taste kind of develops throughout your life. So, when somebody says they have good or bad taste, it's really a matter of developed taste or mature taste and less experienced taste. So, I will go as far as to say that. So, when art critics critically analyze a work of art, they discuss all aspects of that work of art regarding what it is and how it was made, but they leave out anything that is subjective or based on preference, such as taste. However, when we critically analyze a work of art, we still talk about aesthetics. So, where most people will commingle the concept of aesthetics and taste, there really is a rift between the two, and I want to help define where that separation lies. To do this, I'm going to use the metaphor of food because we're talking about taste, and that just makes sense. During food competitions, particularly on reality TV, all of the chefs are making a plate to present to the judges, and the judges can all pretty much unanimously agree at the point when all the different plates are presented that everything they're looking at is food. So, before they even taste the food and put the first bite into their mouth, there's a lot of things that they can discuss. They can talk about the ingredients that were chosen. They can talk about the method in which it was prepared. They can even talk about the presentation on the plate. All of these things fit into the same category as the discussion of aesthetics. When it comes to visual things like dirt, that moment when you put that first bite into your mouth to assess its flavor, it becomes a matter of taste, and that's when you cross that great divide between taste and aesthetics. From here on out, it becomes more of a negotiation of personal opinion. As people, we do and we don't like certain things. I might hate celery, and you might love celery, and neither one of us is right or wrong. It's just a matter of opinion. You and I could both look at two paintings. One of them could be a Rococo oil painting that was made with classical standards of beauty in mind, and it could be put next to another canvas that has strong hash marks that go in certain directions and are fairly non-objective and abstract. And we can both look at those two canvases, and we can agree that both of them were made with aesthetics in mind, but you might like one versus the other, and I might have a different opinion. This matter of taste is the thing that we don't necessarily bring to the table when we talk about what art is and what it embodies and where its merit lies. When I discuss art, I'm going to try and stay in the category of aesthetics, which is on one side of that great divide between aesthetics and taste. I will probably still give my personal opinion about how I feel about things, but that's less important than what those things are. As a matter of fact, I don't know. You can't really nail anything into the ground solidly enough if the ground is made of soot, and opinions are soot. So, we're kind of nailing that in stone, and those are facts. Facts are stone. I'm gonna get back to work. I'm gonna go watch Insight, hopefully land on Mars, which is very important, and I'm gonna finish my coffee. So, until my next installment of the Function of Art, keep making awesome stuff out there, and thank you for watching.
