As Michael frames it, the question on the table is whether arts workers (my term for artists, presenters, producers, educators, funder and commentators) should lead “taste” rather than follow it. But there’s a fundamental problem here, one that needs to be explored before I can take a side. What exactly do we mean when we use the word “taste?” The elite has always told the public what to value when it comes to the arts, of course, and gatekeepers have always been concerned with identifying appropriate taste-makers. Plato famously complains in his Laws (700a-701b) that the “once silent audiences have found a voice, in the persuasion that they understand what is good and bad in art.” In analyzing this passage, most historians point to the source of Plato’s real concern: he didn’t trust the demos (general public) to discern the truth and thus to collectively weigh judgment on the arts (or anything much else). As Pierre Bourdieu notes in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, the relationship between class and taste-making is so embedded in our socio-cultural constructions that judgments of taste are themselves acts of social positioning: we are what we like; we like what we are. For Plato, the people of 4th century B.C.E. Athens had somehow been reduced to a low-brow, crowd-pleasing state in which making “judgment by uproar” had replaced the interpretive authority previously granted to (for Plato) more appropriate gatekeepers.
So, then, is Michael arguing that only “appropriate” gatekeepers (arts workers, for instance) can set the standards of taste? He cautions that if we “give them what they want” we are betraying our missions. Again, Bourdieu might be useful: “The most intolerable thing for those who regard themselves as the possessors of legitimate culture is the sacrilegious reuniting of tastes which taste dictates shall be separated. This means that the games of artists and aesthetes and their struggles for the monopoly of artistic legitimacy are less innocent than they seem.”
That said, I don’t actually think the issue on the table is taste. I think it’s interpretation, or rather, whether we believe in the audience’s cultural right to interpret the art works they consume. And in that context I think we do have to lead—in order to follow, in order to move toward the democratization of the arts we all claim to be seeking. But I want to keep my posts short and, I hope, conversational, so I’ll return to that idea in a later entry.
‘Life would be so much simpler if more people agreed with me.’
The arts have experienced a “taste” problem for a very long time. Seems as though there has always been a distinction of “good” music versus many other forms, and even among the art formsm there is sone kind of distinction from “high” to “low” – “popular” to “elite”. Even grant applications make reference to this thing called artistic “excellence,” yet the only consistent definition provided is “I know it when I see it.” Hence: Life would be so much simpler is more people agreed with me.
Even arts education advocates rely on the line “there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in art.” Still, apparent or not, there is a difference between “good” and “better”.
The great challenge to this work of managing or administering in the arts remains giving people, i.e. your audience, what they want while you also provide what you as an artist feel that they need. In the perfect world: you give them what you think they need, and the audience thinks it is what they wanted all along.
The wrench in all this audience development lead or follow discussion is that the modes of creating are expanding faster than our capacity to present them. Thus providing some kind of space for quality, or taste if you will, makes note that the need for skill development and being better is always there.