Aesthetic taste

In aesthetics, the concept of taste has been the interest of philosophers such as Plato, Hume and Kant.

"Good taste" redirects here. For the short story by Isaac Asimov, see Good Taste.

For Kant, beauty is not a property of any object, but an aesthetic judgement based on a subjective feeling.

In his aesthetic philosophy, Kant denies any standard of a good taste, which would be the taste of the majority or any social group. For Kant, as discussed in his book titled the Critique of Judgment, beauty is not a property of any object, but an aesthetic judgement based on a subjective feeling. He claims that a genuine good taste does exist, though it could not be empirically identified. Good taste cannot be found in any standards or generalizations, and the validity of a judgement is not the general view of the majority or some specific social group. Taste is both personal and beyond reasoning, and therefore disputing over matters of taste never reaches any universality. Kant stresses that our preferences, even on generally liked things, do not justify our judgements.[1] Bourdieu argued against the Kantian view of pure aesthetics, stating that the legitimate taste of the society is the taste of the ruling class. This position also rejects the idea of genuine good taste, as the legitimate taste is merely a class taste. This idea was also proposed by Simmel, who noted that the upper classes abandon fashions as they are adopted by lower ones.

Bad taste

Bad taste (also poor taste or even vulgar) is generally a title given to any object or idea that does not fall within the moralizing person's idea of the normal social standards of the time or area. Varying from society to society, and from time to time, bad taste is generally thought of as a negative thing, but that also changes with each individual.[2]

A contemporary view—a retrospective review of literature—is that "a good deal of dramatic verse written during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods is in poor taste because it is bombast [high-sounding language with little meaning]".[3]

See also

Notes
  1. Gronow 1997, pp. 11, 87
  2. Theodore A. Gracyk, "Having Bad Taste", The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 30, Issue 2, 1 April 1990, pp. 117–131, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/30.2.117 Published: 1 April 1990.
  3. M. H. Abrams, "Vulgarity. Dictionary of Literary Terms< and Literary Theory (1977),Penguin, 1998, p.976.

References
  • Arsel, Zeynep; Jonathan Bean (2013). "Taste Regimes and Market-Mediated Practice". Journal of Consumer Research. 39 (5): 899–917. doi:10.1086/666595.
  • Bourdieu, Pierre (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-04546-0.
  • Bourdieu, Pierre (1986). "The Forms of Capital". In Richardson, John G (ed.). Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. New York: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-23529-5.
  • Bragg, Melvyn (25 October 2007), Taste, In Our Time, BBC Radio 4, retrieved 18 September 2010
  • Ekelund, Jr., Robert B.; Hébert, Robert F. (1990). A History of Economic Theory and Method. 3rd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company. ISBN 0-07-019416-5.
  • Gronow, Jukka (1997). Sociology of Taste. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-13294-0.
  • Friedman, Sam; Giselinde Kuipers (2013). "The divisive power of humour: Comedy, taste and symbolic boundaries" (PDF). Cultural Sociology. 7 (2): 179–195. doi:10.1177/1749975513477405. S2CID 53362319.
  • Hennion, Antoine (2007). "Those Things That Hold Us Together: Taste and Sociology." Cultural Sociology, Vol. 1, No. 1, 97-114. London: Sage.
  • Holt, Douglas B. (1998). "Does Cultural Capital Structure American Consumption?" The Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Jun., 1998), pp. 1-25.
  • Horkheimer, Max; Adorno, Theodor W (1982). Dialectic of the Enlightenment. New York: The Continuum publishing Corporation. ISBN 0-8264-0093-0.
  • Koehrsen, Jens (2018). "Religious Tastes and Styles as Markers of Class Belonging" (PDF). Sociology. doi:10.1177/0038038517722288. S2CID 149369482.
  • Outwaite, William; Bottonmore, Tom (1996). The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Social Thought. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
  • Simmel, Georg (1957). "Fashion". The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 62, No. 6 (May, 1957), pp. 541-558.
  • Slater, Don (1997). Consumer Culture and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. ISBN 978-0-7456-0304-9.
  • Stern, Jane; Michael Stern (1990). The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste. New York: Harper Collins. ISBN 0-06-016470-0.
  • Vercelloni, Luca (2016). The Invention of Taste. A Cultural Account of Desire, Delight and Disgust in Fashion, Food and Art. London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-4742-7360-2.
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