Want to start an argument with someone?
Tell them they have “bad taste.”
It’s almost guaranteed to set off some heat.
Taste. Such a simple word. How did it come to be so emotionally loaded?
When we say that someone has “bad taste,” we’re not talking about their ability to accurately judge flavors. That’s the taste that we experience through our mouths. No, “bad taste” in this sense is very different.
The Oxford English Dictionary gives several definitions of the word “taste.” The first few are what you’d expect. When you get down to the third category of usage, you find this one:
Mental perception of quality; judgement, discriminative faculty.
And,
The fact or condition of liking or preferring something; inclination; appreciation.
Those uses go back to the 14th and 15th centuries, with a 1552 example quoted from a prayer by Queen Elizabeth I:
That we may have some taste and feeling for it in our hearts.
By the 18th century, using taste in this way became even clearer,
The sense of what is appropriate, harmonious, or beautiful; esp. discernment and appreciation of the beautiful in nature or art; the faculty of perceiving and enjoying what is excellent in art, literature, and the like.
Style or manner exhibiting aesthetic discernment; good or bad aesthetic quality; the style or manner favoured in any age or country.
Today, taste refers to judgments and preferences about quality.
How did the word go from describing the physical sensations of consuming food or beverages to a “mental perception of liking of preferring something”? It’s really not that far of a leap if you think about it. The bodily experiences of foods tasting good, bad, or disgusting are easily transferred to the bodily experiences of a seeing a painting, hearing a song, or looking at a car.
As in: “Ugh, the color of that car makes me sick.”
From there, it’s an easy leap from making judgments about object’s “taste” to making one about the person who chose it. “Anybody who’d buy that car has hideous taste.” We’ve been making that connection for hundreds of years.
And, that brings us to the subject of favorites. Asking someone to tell you their favorite things gives an instant snapshot of their taste. Current movies? Singers?
“Oh, your favorite new movie is Jackass Forever?” Gotcha.
We use favorites as a proxy for taste, especially as examples pile up.
“Ah, and Shania Twain is your favorite singer?” OK. Now I really get it.
Here’s where the comparisons and judgments come in. No matter how charitable and open-minded you may imagine yourself to be, we all attribute characteristics to others depending on comparisons between their preferences and our own. You don’t have to think about it. It just happens.
What would you say about the taste of the person whose favorites are “Jackass” and Shania?
C’mon…no fudging allowed! I’d be willing to bet that the more your own favorites differ from those two examples (“oh, mine are ‘House of Gucci’ and L’il Nas X”) the greater the likelihood that you’d say that the other person has “bad taste.”
The key to that judgment is embedded in the definitions quoted above. Read them again, carefully. “The sense of what is appropriate…or beautiful”; “good or bad aesthetic quality.”
Those definitions make taste sound like the ability to discover a property (appropriateness; beauty) of an object in itself. Taste as a talent.
But there’s another element in one of the definitions that adds an interesting twist: “the style or manner favoured in any age or country.” That qualifier turns taste into a contextual judgment, a function of a time and a place.
What if I asked you this:
“Where does the person whose favorites are Jackass and Shania Twain come from? South Carolina or South Bronx?”
I know, I know. Stereotypes suck. But if taste is (at least somewhat) a judgment about the style of what is appropriate or beautiful in an age or location, then the answer is simple. Like all stereotypes, it may be wrong, but guessing it is easy.
Because taste is both personal and contextual we intuitively appreciate that someone saying we have “bad taste” is a double whammy. Not only are they saying that we lack the talent to appreciate the intrinsic beauty of something, but also that we are part of a sub-group that can’t either.
It doesn’t take much to demonstrate the era/location dynamics (“spacetime”) of our judgments about taste.
Here are some examples of things that were the epitome of good taste in women’s fashion (a particularly dynamic taste domain) in several decades. (All images are from Shilpaahuja.com).
At the time, each of the women in these pictures would most likely have been judged as having very good taste. Wearing clothes from earlier eras today, they’d be seen as out-of-style or maybe purposefully ironic.
Taste-as-an-enduring-ability might be more accurately depicted as taste-as-correct-determination-of-appeal-within-my-spacetime. Good taste today in South Carolina is different from good taste in South Bronx. Just as it was in 1960.
These are not new ideas. Here’s an interesting Guardian article about a 2019 London Design Museum exhibit of “vulgar objects” from the mid-19th century. Here’s one example, a gaslight fixture from what the exhibit calls its “chamber of horrors”.
We (some of us!) may think this is hideous now, but what did people think of it at the time? A clue from the Guardian article:
A classical faith in the essential truth of beautiful objects, as set out in Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, is powerfully countered now, (Design Museum Director Deyan) Sudjic suggests, by Laver’s Law. This is the chart set out by fashion theorist James Laver that describes any new object’s inevitable journey from being seen at first as outlandish, then chic, then dowdy, then hideous, then quaint, before being finally hailed as the epitome of bygone style.
Here’s Laver’s chart from Wikipedia:
Depending on your spacetime context, “good taste” probably ranges from the Outré (Daring) to Smart periods. Early adopters in particularly avant-garde zones (certain Brooklyn zip codes, for example) might get “good taste” marks in the Shameless or even Indecent eras.
Does this mean there is no overarching beauty in things? Perhaps not. Many of us will point to natural beauty and the near-universal experiences of awe and wonder they elicit as proof that beauty-as-transcendent-quality exists. Human-made objects may aspire to that level of universal appeal, but those that even come close to succeeding are few and far between.
Laver suggests that some objects become charming, romantic, or beautiful as their spacetime qualities gain depth. Museums exist to curate the vast inventory of candidates to select those they believe meet the mark.
Objects live in spacetime, as do we, and this makes their appeal vulnerable to the path Laver described. Some age gracefully; others do not. (The parallels with our own lives are all too obvious.)
That means that we look at some of the things we would have called favorites a decade (a month?) ago and think: “what the heck possessed me to buy that?” What “possesses” us is the spirit of the spacetime in which we chose them. Viewing them from our current “coordinates” of context and personal identity, they can feel as if they were chosen by a stranger. And, in some sense they were. Who we were and the world in which we lived at the time we chose them can be so different from our here-and-now spacetime that the object itself is unrecognizable as an extension of “me.”
Others, however, remain cherished throughout the lives we share with them.
Our favorite things are like breadcrumbs we leave behind on our journey through the material world. The path they mark is sometimes puzzling, but examining them provides important clues about our lives and our desires in the past, the present, and the future.
If we look at our favorites closely, we see signs of our evolving tastes, and our meandering selves.
Oh, and never underestimate the power of Coca-Cola’s cultural acumen! In Coca-Cola-spacetime, some things are always a sign of good taste!