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On the 500th anniversary of John Calvin's birth, John Piper writes about the Reformer's impact on America. 
Beauty is in the eye of the (teacher of the) beholder
Laurie Fendrich, a blogger for The Chronicle Review and a painter and a fine arts professor, shocks higher education by suggesting that not everyone has good taste.
It’s said that there’s no accounting for taste, although I believe it’s often the case that it’s rather easy to account for it. Yes, taste may be subjective at its core, but that core is surrounded by a lot of reasons that very adequately explain why something is good or bad. There are many who would argue that because of the subjectivity of taste, it follows that no one, including a college teacher, has the right to challenge the taste of another person, including students.
I’m sure her students love to hear this, and her colleagues. But why teach art or literature – which is just another way of saying one teaches “taste” – if there’s no such thing? Fendrich is going to be writing more columns about taste and how to teach it, and I’ll be commenting here.
back to top10 Comments to “Beauty is in the eye of the (teacher of the) beholder”
Why teach art or literature if there’s no such thing?
Might as well say there’s no such thing as love…
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Too many profs (esp in literatre) teach TO taste instead of TEACHING taste.
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Excuse me. “literature.”
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This is not an uncommon opinion. I think you people have never been in an art department.
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I have been in an English department, Luke, so I’m very aware of how subjective opinions can be and how much influence bad taste really does have on academica today.
Sure, the study of art/literature has a degree of subjectivity in it, but art/english students should learn what makes good art and not allowed to elevate their own preferences to the level of good art.
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I am an interior designer, and trust me, there is such thing as having bad taste! There is good design and there is bad design. That said, someone with different tastes may be using the foundation of good design, and I still may not like it. Some people have no care about their homes and couldn’t care less about the fundamentals of design. To each their own.
It’s like art – not everyone will like every piece, but there is art that follows basic fundamentals, and art that is simply trying too hard to be different.
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#4 Luke,
Well, shopping at WalMart, Target, World Market or Pier 1 doesn’t count as being in an art department for you lefties either
#6 TL, I couldn’t agree more. My sister in law was an interior designer. She came to Phoenix to help my wife decorate the house several times – all of them expensive disasters. One time she took down all of my paintings, put them in my closet and then drank a whole bottle of Remy Martin I had been saving – that ws it
She was upset that I never hired her to do any of my interior design work over the years. The reason I didn’t hire her was because she was a lousy interior designer, had no taste, couldn’t design her way out of brown paper bag and I had clients that I didn’t want mad at me – even though she was supposedly well trained. My dumb Doxie Dog could do a better job.
How she made a living at it all those years is beyond me but I saw a lot of her work and it is a miracle someone didn’t kill her for the worst of it.
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Developing taste is first a matter of exposure to what is excellent in a particular category. It is mostly a matter of discernment. The person who is exposed to many things that are excellent, things that are mediocre, and things that are bad, will develop a sense of which is which.
I was a music major for three years and ended my undergraduate career as an English major. Most of my professors in both departments reminded us often that one of the things they were helping us acquire was good taste. You can’t really teach it, but you can teach principles of art that can guide you, and as I said you can expose yourself to so much creative work that it becomes clear how a particular work ranks in comparison to other work.
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Llama,
Being in the cabinet design business I know exactly what you mean. I’ve seen so many “designers” that put together such a hodgepodge of junk, that I’ll never hire one. And too, the customers that are the most trouble, are the ones that hire some whacko that thinks she is some hot interior designer. Next thing ya know you’re trying to make something for them that you know durn good and well it’s going to look stupid.
I’ll design my own kitchen and let my wife pick the colors/patterns and accessories thank you very much.
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One of the tasks I do is occasional critiques of unpublished writers. Now, one would think a “critique” would mean “Tell me whether it’s any good. Tell me which elements work and which ones don’t.”
And, trust me, some of the works I critique are horrid; they look like rough drafts from someone who flunked English and has never read a book. I always try to start with something positive. One time I thought for a long, long time, and the only positive thing I could think of was “Your work is creative.” Now, that wasn’t a true compliment, because it was creatively awful (bad story line, bad grammar, boring, bad theology, bad dialogue, evidence the writer knew nothing about the setting or about children, bad everything). And then the person came back to me, complaining because I didn’t suggest a place that might consider publishing it!!!!
But yeah, when people send me works to critique, what many of them are really saying is, “I want a professional editor to like it as well as my doting grandmother does, and to tell me which publisher to send it to and make a quick million dollars.” They don’t want a “critique” at all; they want an awards ceremony. But as far as I’m concerned, if someone pays me for a critique and I don’t tell them the parts that need improvement, I haven’t done my job. So, with the bad ones, I struggle to come up with some positive things, but I don’t hide the bad stuff. And I don’t pretend like it’s ready for publishing when it isn’t even close. I think 50 years ago that would have been considered a really valuable service; today it’s sometimes considered inappropriate. (Now, I love it when I receive really good work and can tell the writer that!)
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