Is Nothing Really Objectively Excellent?
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De gustibus non est disputandum—is there a more famous maxim in all of history? It’s one of the few bits of Latin that non-classicists know. There’s no disputing taste. You like your thing and I like mine, and who’s to say which is better? I like the Beatles and you like the Rolling Stones—or, these days, I like Taylor Swift and you prefer Beyoncé, or Kanye West rather than Jay-Z, and, as poor Kanye himself found out during the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, disputing a taste preference can make you a public disgrace.
And yet in truth, all we do dispute is taste. Poor Kanye became Poor Kanye because, like all of us, he couldn’t help himself. At that now notorious Video Music Awards ceremony, he so passionately preferred Beyoncé’s video to Taylor’s that he threw judgment (and, briefly, his career) to the winds, cutting Taylor’s acceptance speech short and making his words into one of the most reproduced memes of our moment. But who has not, at some point or other, done the same? “I’m gonna let you finish, Tom,” we imagine W.H. Auden saying to T.S. Eliot, interrupting the latter as Eliot insists that Kipling is superior to all other modern poets, “but Thomas Hardy’s poems are some of the best ever made.” We watch Iron Chef not merely to savor foods we cannot smell or taste (a thing that in itself would have amazed our aesthetic ancestors) but to watch the cooks compete, one against the other, Chinese chef against American, and if anyone on the judge’s panel ever whispered weakly, “Well, it’s a question of taste,” she would not be on the program the following week.
We love disputing taste, and we do it passionately. You’re crazy to think the Stones are in the same league as the Beatles—or that Trollope can hold a candle to Dickens or whatever the flavor is that inspires you. Disputes on taste darken homes. My wife and I have a long- standing dispute about the coffee table in the living room. I love the one we used to have, a slab of lacy metal salvaged from an Art Nouveau Paris balcony grille onto which a sheet of horizontal glass can be placed. She prefers a base of daringly bent wood that she somehow noodled Bergdorf’s into selling to her (er, us), onto which a sheet of round glass can be cantilevered. (She did this with such polite but unimpeded persistence that Bergdorf’s later put up a sign saying, “No Display Tables or Furniture on This Floor Is Ever for Sale”—in other words, as the kids pointed out, Mom-proofing Bergdorf’s.) I lost this dispute; my grille is banished to the basement.
And yet, surely, there must be, on this murmuring sea of dispute and banishment, some constants—firm poles of quality or beauty or excellence that transcend even the squabbles of my preference against yours. The great American sociologist Howard Becker once wrote a fine book called What About Mozart? What About Murder?, the title of which was meant to refer, of course, to the usual rejoinders against the “relativism” of sociological thinking. Isn’t murder, at least, an absolute evil? And isn’t Mozart indisputably great? Surely some figures and masterpieces and masters or mistresses have a place that hovers above all the disputes of taste. There are polestars we follow, touchstones we all revere, and we make an unchanging idea of taste in their image, or by following their lead.
Given that we think that, or try to, I was all the more shocked to discover, during a recent late night grazing of YouTube, a video in which the great Canadian pianist Glenn Gould goes after Mozart as a mediocrity. Mozart! Truly. There is Gould, in 1968, indisputably a great musician, the author of two of the best renditions of Bach ever recorded, lashing into Mozart and those of us who love him. He plays a heartbreaking passage from the C Minor Concerto and then rips it apart: “Listless scale runs,” “predictable chord changes.” He compares Mozart’s composition—really!—to “interoffice memos,” the email of that time. He concedes it no more credit than “a few wistful themes.”
Now, I think of Mozart abstractly as not just a Great Composer but intimately, as a fellow traveler through life. I really love Mozart. If I had to take 10 records with me to a desert island—not for showing-off purposes, but for real feeling—they would include the last seven Mozart piano concertos. (Along with the Beatles’ last seven albums, which I realize makes 14 discs, but still.) Yet Gould’s words, however shocking, did not feel exactly wrong. Invariably, any attack on anyone usually has some element of truth in it. Shakespeare is wordy; Molière can be dated; Milton is often dull. Even the nastiest attacks on our own work—authors are reluctant to admit this, but it’s so— usually have some (small) ring of truth to them, if only because the hostile critic spotted something we’re covering up.
So I did what any panicked man of my generation does at difficult moments. I turned to my children. My son Luke is a philosophy student who as an undergraduate was a music major; he therefore sits astride both of these stools. “What can we reply to Gould?” I demanded. Couldn’t we argue the greatness of Mozart from his longevity—from how long he has been admired?
“So,” my son said (having adopted the exasperating Ivy League preamble indicating patient readiness to instruct you, even though the instruction is unlikely to penetrate the concrete). “So… I don’t think you could make an argument from longevity, since many things that have lasted a long time have been bad things. But I think you could instance longevity as a sign or cue pointing to the possibility of an argument.”
I slunk away, put in my place by a philosopher—and yet, clinging to the wreckage as I sank, I saw a spar of hope. The possibility of an argument. This seemed to me the right way forward. The precision of Gould’s critique might force us to make our defense of Mozart more precise, his contempt might make us arm our love with better weapons. What we would answer to Gould is not that Mozart is great, but that your critique, however intelligent, is limited in its horizon. It is apparent, listening to Gould, that he was indifferent to, even made uncomfortable by (in what we would now call a “spectrumy” way), the extraordinary emotional immediacy of Mozart’s music, its replication of a human being wandering in and out of melancholic and affirmative moods—by, in short, the implicit romanticism of the sound. Great melodic music, after all, is made from repetition as much as variation. Mozart makes music by rote and repetition? Well, Rococo art delights us in general not because of the profundity of its architecture but the shimmering variety of its surface.
An argument might thus be made. And moving toward “the possibility of an argument” is what truly sharpens our wits and brightens our tastes, moves them from the realm of prejudice to something closer to the world of principle, not inviolable and fixed, but hypothetical and alterable. The man or woman of real taste is to us known not by the firmness of her insistences but by the subtlety of her affirmations. (Well, anyway, so they ought to be known to us. We live in a fallen world, where usually someone with strong taste intimidates us more than someone with good taste. The critic Clement Greenberg dominated the American art world for a generation by the firmness of his tastes, and though he got quite a lot of good work accomplished—Jackson Pollock was as great as he thought—by the end his rule was cramped and confining, like being compelled to dine on the same platter of sashimi for the rest of our lives.)
Between authority and anarchy lies…the possibility of an argument. The real aesthetes are known by the liveliness of their minds and the possibility, at least, that they can be made to alter them. I spend my 3 a.m.s now arguing with Glenn Gould. (In my imagination I win the arguments; that is why we call them dreams.) I should add that not long afterward, my philosophical son brought his new puppy to town (a rescue dog, of course—he is of ethical principles as well), and it promptly jumped on the Bergdorf-bought table, causing the dangerously cantilevered sheet of glass to fall to the floor, shattering into a thousand pieces and making a noise like an asteroid hitting a city. Amid the ruins of the monument, I had a faint glimmer of hope that the French balcony grille coffee table base might rise from the ashes of its condemnation in the basement. No such luck. There’s only so far argument can take you. Taste may be disputable. Tables are not.
Illustration by Barry Blitt
This story originally appeared in the October 2021 issue of Town & Country. Subscribe Now.
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