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What Is Good Taste, Anyway?

Photo credit: Barry Blitt
Photo credit: Barry Blitt


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Toward the beginning of the last century—that is, when this magazine was a mere 75 or 80 years old—a handful of cutting-edge culturati would lose their famous cool when a certain topic came up in conversation. “The worst vice ever invented,” Edith Sitwell huffed. “The first handicap to any creative functioning,” Salvador Dalí sniffed. “The enemy of art!” Marcel Duchamp thundered.

What, you may well wonder, could they have been talking about? Opium? Alcohol? Marriage? Non, non, et non. What had whipped these imperious creative artists into a frenzy of dismissive vituperation was, in fact, something that most people have strong ideas about, nobody can define, and virtually everyone (besides that trio) seems to want: good taste. Strong ideas because our tastes, as evidenced in our clothes, homes, and manners, are powerful projections of our identities—whether real or aspirational. (“My tastes are simple,” Winston Churchill, a great aristocrat as well as a great prime minister, once breezed. “I am easily satisfied by the best.”) Nobody can define taste, because, after 25 centuries of trying to do just that—Plato fretted about it long before the Duchess of Windsor did—the only thing that anyone can agree on with respect to good taste is that, at the end of the day, it’s…subjective.

And everyone wants it, because good taste is a form of cultural capital that, unlike so many others—couture, jewels, decor, education, accent, the location of your weekend home—cannot be bought. Like blue blood, you’re either born with it or you’re not; it’s the ultimate club. Yes, you can hire decorators, you can court designers, you can read the right magazines (like this one!), you can follow influencers. But at the end of the day, all those are to good taste what an editor is to a writer: They can only help you express and shape what’s already there.

But what is the “what” that’s there? From the start, nobody has been able to agree. If you’ve ever found yourself muttering “Well, De gustibus…” while backing out of a heated argument about the relative merits of Harry Winston vs. Buccellati, Wagner vs. Puccini, or Tuscany vs. Capri, it’s because the Romans were already throwing up their hands two millennia ago. (The full phrase is De gustibus non est disputandum: “There’s no arguing about taste,” a concept for which, significantly, many languages have some equivalent—for instance, Chacun à son gout or, as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said apropos of pornography, “I know it when I see it.”)

Before the Romans, there were the Greeks. Plato started the ball rolling with his theory of Forms: the notion that there are ideal essences of things both material and abstract (chairs, say, or virtue), essences to which we can only hope to aspire. Since then some notion of “elegance” or “refinement” has been at the core of our Western ideas about what’s “good” in good taste. The point is to get as close to the essence as possible. A T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings klismos chair is probably as close as anyone has come to the Platonic form of a chair—aside from the ancient Greeks, from whom the midcentury British-born decorator purloined his design.

Taste, of course, extends far beyond furniture and tchotchkes. A first-century AD Greek treatise called On the Sublime sought to identify key elements in what makes beautiful literature beautiful, and some of its author’s conclusions about writing go for Robsjohn-Gibbings’s klismos chair—and pretty much everything else. (Longinus, the Greek author, talks about the importance of “simplicity,” for instance, and “elevation”—the sense of exaltation that a great piece of style provokes.) This almost intuitive sense that taste, the outward expression of an inner quality, is somehow entwined with a kind of purity has never really gone away. It’s hard to get away from the feeling that the “good” in good taste has moral as well as aesthetic overtones—that the soul that’s being expressed in the furniture or clothes is elegant and refined too.

Hence one of the great paradoxes of “good taste”: Having it means expending a tremendous amount of energy and attention on fashioning an exterior meant to draw attention to something we can’t ultimately see—that we may not even want to be seen. Bill Blass summed it up in a comment he once made about the socialite and fashion icon Babe Paley. On the one hand, he observed that “I never saw her not grab anyone’s attention, the hair, the makeup, the crispness.” On the other hand, “You were never conscious of what she was wearing. You noticed Babe and nothing else.”

After Plato the debate raged on. In the 18th century, at the height of the Enlightenment, philosophers and writers continued to argue. (It’s worth noting that during this period three different French kings named Louis lent their names to three totally different styles of furniture, each of which was thought to be in the most exquisitely good taste in its day, only to be dumped unceremoniously when the next Louis appeared.) In the subversive spirit of the times, some thinkers were already dismissing the notion that good taste meant “the canon.”

“Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable,” Voltaire remarked. “For my part, I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.” Others tried to resolve another central paradox of the Taste Question, which is that, as the German philosopher Immanuel Kant observed in his Critique of Judgment, taste is an ostensibly rational, objective judgment that’s ultimately based on subjective feeling. We know this from everyday experience—especially, I might add, we professional critics. I didn’t think much of Mad Men; the rest of the world did. How can someone be “wrong” about how they feel about a work of art or drama or whatever? Kant tried to provide an answer with his concept of the “sensus communis,” the “common feeling” among members of a given community that allows a critic to make a subjective judgment with a quasi-objective purpose: the expectation that everyone else ought to agree. It’s an expectation that I and every other working critic have based our livelihoods on. Still, as philosophers picked apart the issue of good taste, there was no getting away from the sense that taste is, at the end of the day, wholly arbitrary and our rules about it mere constructions to justify a wholly subjective notion. In 1757 the Scottish philosopher David Hume wryly observed that “we are apt to call barbarous whatever departs widely from our own taste and apprehension.”

Just why we do so was a subject taken up a century later, when intellectuals started looking at the concept of taste not as the expression of some Platonic ideal but as a blunt weapon in the class struggle. Every reader of shelter and fashion glossies is only too aware of the swiftness with which fashions change. One year they’re touting “The New Opulence,” and the next you learn that it’s time for “The New Simplicity.” Why? At the turn of the last century the German sociologist Georg Simmel started thinking about fashion, and he concluded that the upper classes use a given fashion in clothes or decoration to establish what “good taste” is—thereby drawing the line between themselves and everyone else. But once the middle classes start to ape that taste (knockoffs are hardly a new concept, it turns out), the upper class has to redefine good taste so as to maintain the distinction between them and the bourgeoisie. Plus ça change: Today the upper class may not be the aristocratic one Simmel was talking about, but the goalposts continue to move on a regular basis.

This more modern understanding of good taste as being completely arbitrary, meant merely to suppress whole classes of people in the service of a tiny elite, brings us back to Sitwell, Duchamp, and Dalí and their dismissals of good taste as being “the enemy of art”—something stifling rather than liberating. But then, as Simmel went on to observe, even the rebels who break away from the confinement of good taste end up creating their own good taste, and so the cycle begins again. (Sitwell’s “outrageously” huge jewels in the early 20th century were just good taste, as far as Fulco di Verdura was concerned a decade later.) So what’s the relationship between the good and the rebel, the tastemaker and the outlier, the outré individualistic gesture and our sense that there are, somewhere, somehow, consistent standards of taste? “Elegance is good taste plus a dash of daring,” Carmel Snow, the legendary Harper’s Bazaar editor, once observed. But…what’s a dash?

By now it should be obvious that nobody really knows. After three millennia of intellectual wrestling matches, when faced with questions about taste, all we can do is throw our hands in the air, just as Babe Paley did one day when, in order to free up her hands, she tied her silk scarf to her handbag. After a photograph of the liberated fashion queen appeared in the papers a few weeks later, an enduring fashion was born. A mere practical convenience or a stroke of style genius? There’s simply no accounting.

Illustration by Barry Blitt

This story originally appeared in the October 2021 issue of Town & Country. Subscribe Now

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