On Taste

Comment

Chila Kumari Singh Burman Peacock

Quick Summary: In this Substack, I talk about taste. I discuss what I think it is and why far more things are ‘problems of taste’ than we might initially think. I wonder what lessons in taste would look like, and what case could be made for them. I conclude by saying that there is such a thing as ‘better’ or ‘worse’ taste.

I own the peacock above. She’s called Gloria, and she’s a drag peacock. When I have made my millions (from that lucrative field of Philosophy of Art), she’s going to live in my bathroom, and the only way you will be able to turn on the lights is by saying ‘Slay Gloria.’ She is camply glorious, and I love her. I include the above as a disclaimer. I’m definitely not the arbiter on what is or isn’t good taste. But I’m interested in it, in what it is, where it comes from and how it can be used.

So what actually is taste? Good taste, the sort that allows you to dress well, or put together a room nicely, seems to be the ability to trade off lots of different qualities to form a cohesive whole.

In clothing, it’s knowing how an item of clothing interacts with a body, with other fabrics and with other colours, cuts and accessories. In interior design, it’s knowing how to balance one objects fabric/ colour/ shape with the light and other objects in the room - a way of assessing the fit between a given object and the environment. You can’t decorate a room-by-numbers or find the perfect formula for a given outfit. You need to find what works for you and for the space you’re in.

For example - my aunt has bucketloads of taste. When we were little we used to treat going to their house as a sort of vacation-into-Grown-Up land - glass sculptures! White leather sofas! Coordinated picture frames! I have a mean uncle who purchases ever more outlandish birthday presents to puncture this oasis of sophistication. My aunt is forced to display them as it would be rude not to. Currently, she has a ceramic pig, a garden gnome, a fourteen-hoop-long-Loch Ness monster and various sculptures involving reworked kettles - and she makes them look cool. Now that’s taste.

Exhibiting good taste is a very different to the sort of thinking than, say, a mathematician engages in. A ‘maths’ lens builds up from known axioms or proofs to find an answer. The answer is certain, and there are clear rules governing how you get there. We break it down, logically and linearly, and find the solution. By contrast, a ‘taste’ lens requires an almost intuitive understanding of the complex attributes of various items and the ability to fit them together. Taste is knowing how to collate items into a coherent whole, whatever form that whole may take. And this seems to be a very different way of thinking compared to a maths lens.

Weirdly, on this understanding of taste - as the ability to trade off multiple qualities to create a fit between environment and object - quite a lot of seemingly unrelated things become matters of taste. Like conservation. Deciding to introduce a new plant or animal to a particular environment requires the ability to trade off lots of different qualities, where there’s no obvious way of solving the problem, and assess the fit with the environment.

Or finding a job. You can solve it top-down, with ‘maths’ thinking - optimising work-life balance vs salary vs career prospects to find the ‘best’ offer available. But you could also treat it as a problem of taste, working out how complex, multifaceted entities (organisations and individuals) interact with one another. Or cooking (literal problems of taste) - trading off textures, flavour profiles etc. to form a whole. Or knowing how to put together the right set of people for a dinner party.* Or engineering - seeing how to fit different pieces of the world together.

Often we’re guilty of defaulting to ‘maths’ or linear ways of thinking about problems. Lovelock writes about this, about how our language and classical reasoning encourages us to think in a way that is ‘one dimensional and linear whereas reality is multidimensional and non-linear’. You read words one after another on a page. Ideas are presented sequentially, in time. The world of language is one of ‘stepwise logic’, where B is caused by A and in turn causes C. (I discuss this in more detail in On Writing Awe). But taste is an example of multidimensional, non-linear thinking, and some problems are better solved by ‘taste’ thinking than ‘maths’ thinking.

There’s a real case to be made for Lessons in Taste. In the broad sense, knowing how to trade off a range of complex qualities to form a coherent whole, is an important alternative to classical reasoning and logic. I think we devalue the importance of this form of multi-layered, instinctive thinking, and where it can be used. It should be an alternative approach available to us.

In the narrower sense of knowing how to make items talk to one another - the scale of waste from poor taste is astronomical. It includes the entirety of almost every teenage wardrobe, most ‘ambitious’ interior design choices and anything from Cath Kidston (maybe that’s just my personal preference). Purchases made in poor taste offer very little joy whilst using up more of our ever shrinking carbon budget. It seems like one of the easiest places to make a carbon saving. Teach people to shop well and we will learn how to avoid an enormous swathe of our CO2 emissions. Replace style with taste and we all save money, save the planet and wouldn’t have to look at photos of us in berets and statement moustache jumpers.

Even without the planet argument, it makes sense. Work however many hours for a 2% raise - or take a six week course on interior design, fashion etc., and cut out the 40% of spending that brings you no joy and leaves you less money to spend on other things? It sounds like one of the best ROI’s ever. I’ve had my colours done, and I’ve saved a fortune on not buying things that look a bit crap (quick plug for my lovely friends colour analysis business Insta: @oliviahall_style). Lessons in Taste (however trad-wifey it sounds) seem worthwhile.

---

*** Philosophy Warning ***

My irritating lovely-and-engaging family have spent the morning trying to argue that a crappy smiley face I’ve drawn is just as beautiful as the Mona Lisa. That beauty is simply in the eye of the beholder, and it’s all a matter of taste - entirely subjective. If my sister genuinely thinks that my crappy smiley face is better than the Mona Lisa, she must like me more than she lets on.

Because I don’t think beauty is entirely subjective, and fortunately I have Hume and his ‘On The Standard of Taste’ to back me up. Hume starts with the same observation that my family made. There seems to be a broad range of tastes. Some people are black-eyeliner-emo-punk-rockers, others go for the Kim Kardashian groutifts (grey-outfits), others have sported a Hawaiian shirt, red flamenco trousers and green ratan bag combo (and some have genuinely worn all of these at different points in life).

This variety had been used to argue that beauty, and taste are entirely subjective, that there’s no objective measure of what is or isn’t beautiful.

But, for Hume, this isn’t good enough. Because there are some claims we want to be able to make about art and beauty. I want to be able to say that my crappy smiley face scribble is less beautiful than the Mona Lisa, and have that mean something. It’s not just that it’s less aligned with my tastes, it’s that it really is worse.

And this does matter. For example, in policy, I want the commitment to make ‘beautiful new housing developments’ to mean something. I don’t want to be confronted with Rishi Sunak’s fever-dream of Silicon Valley glass cubes, and told beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Ultimately, we want to be cognitivists in our discussions of art and beauty - we want what we talk about to have meaning.

Hume holds that there has to be some kind of ‘Standard of Taste’ that allows us to talk about these topics. He recognises that we won’t get the same kind of consensus that we can in maths, sciences or logic. Our ability to discern the ‘Standard of Taste’ is clouded by the time and culture we live in. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

---

Few recommendations to finish…

For those who are really, really at a loose end, I’m writing a bunch of ‘chatty-pop-philosophy guides’ because I need to reread books for my masters, and I got bored trying to make notes. The first (the beginning of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason) is available here - I’m not going to publish via email/ the app because I don’t want to clog up your inboxes.

If anyone likes easy-watching TV and hasn’t watched Interior Design Masters, please do, if only for the judge Michelle Ogundehin (Better Home: Better Health with Michelle Ogundehin). I’m obsessed with this woman. She is taste personified, with stellar outfits, classy behaviour and an incredibly nuanced way of reading and judging a room.

Have a lovely week everybody!