“That is beautiful which gives us pleasure without interest.”
-Immanuel Kant

In a post modern world where traditional aesthetics and conventional artistic practices have been challenged and destroyed many times over I can’t help but notice that there are somehow remnants of particular romantic ideals and morally based judgments, a sort of seemingly inadequate value system known as “taste.” This was a concept which was more than at home in the late eighteenth century towards the end of the enlightenment spearheaded by a very intelligent and important German philosopher named Immanuel Kant. Before I get into Kant, though, let’s back up into the seventeenth century and take a look at Jean de La Bruyère, who wrote:

“There is in art a point of perfection, as there is in Nature one of goodness and
completeness. Anyone who feels this and loves it possesses a perfect taste; but
he who is not sensible of it, and loves what is short of that point or beyond it, is
wanting in taste. Thus there exists a good and a bad taste, and we are right in
discussing the difference between them.”

It is around this time that suddenly, as if out of thin air, the idea of, point de perfection is introduced and along with it man’s sixth sense in detecting such a point. It’s hard for us to imagine because “taste” has for years been engraved in our collective conscious but there was a time, before the advent of refined taste, when the distinction between high art to low or arts to crafts did not exist. A time when the products of man’s creative drive weren’t defined, the way they are today, by external variables such as critics and reviews or less obvious variables like it’s location (consider the way a work’s location, whether it be a museum, a gallery, a church, in the media, or on the street, influences our views and classification of any given work). Somehow, in the mid seventeenth century the point de perfection is born and we all grow a “mysterious organ,” as Giorgio Agamben puts it, which aids us in detecting it.

And so we enter the eighteenth century, the “age of enlightenment,” and our “taste” is given a whole new context: modern aesthetics are introduced, the clear distinction between beauty and the sublime is spotted, and universal principles for the classification and judgment of works of art are put into place. Here’s were Immanuel Kant comes in explaining that as rational beings we experience beauty, and without the experience of beauty the “exercise of reason” is incomplete. He introduces aesthetic judgments of taste. This “judgment” is different, however, from the judgments of morality and science, it is not a cognitive judgment and therefore not logical but aesthetic. Kant believed that beauty was not a property of the artwork but rather the pleasure one has when entertaining the “free play” of the imagination, and thus a judgment that must be experienced; in there lies my first issue on taste, Kant places the aesthetic problem and the experience of beauty on the spectator instead of the artist. He says “pleasure without interest” but I would argue (in another much longer paper) that the artist has much vested interest in his work and it’s this inverse perspective that dismisses such authorial interest. The second problem, and a more obvious one, is that an aesthetic judgment of “taste” is still “judgment.” When one says about a work of art, “it is beautiful” he is speaking about the work and is often asked to explain his attraction. One often tries to rationalize his judgment and with that comes a universality, one which Kant felt was more than present in the aesthetic judgment of art.

Kant, and his contemporaries, stressed the idea of beauty being an experience and not a concept. He said that the aesthetic judgment was, “free from concepts.” Regardless of the weight this might have had in the eighteenth century, today art has been attacked by the Cubist, the Dadaist, the Surrealist, the Fluxist, and many other “ists” which have more than challenged conventional beauty in addition to blurring this line between experiences and concepts. They’ve addressed traditional beauty and art and in all their own ways torn it down and built it back up again. Our understanding of art, or lack there of, today is very different from that of the eighteenth century and yet we still look to “taste” to justify our attraction to it and give it a sort of tactile meaning. We advocate the divide between good and bad “taste” regardless of its original moral context. We put faith in our “experts” of “refined taste” and allow them to govern our opinions with their subjective criticism. We place large dollar amounts on the most agreeably beautiful works of art and have good faith that they will be constantly appraised as such.

“To say that something is beautiful is not to say that everyone else will find it so,
but rather that they ought to find it so… There is thus a degree of logical parity
between moral and aesthetic judgments, since the former, too, entail
universalization as a condition of validity.” –Immanuel Kant

The speed at which new ideas are introduced, assimilated, institutionalized, and historicized is faster today than ever before and perhaps we hold on to “taste” as our last hope for understanding or rationalizing it all despite everything. Kant himself understood that the aesthetic experience of beauty could not be quantified, he believed that the “free play of the imagination” enabled us to bring concepts to bear on experience that is, in itself, “free from concepts.” Perhaps through its sort of paradoxical nature it all got misconstrued over time and so we have “taste.”

“Taste is a habit, the repetition of something already accepted. If you start
something over several times it becomes taste.” –Marcel Duchamp

I would like to reiterate that my beef is not with the nature of criticism or the value and/or purpose of art but rather with the specific role that “taste” plays in our relationship to art and our experience of such. The issue, I feel, is that even though we're aware of “taste” we may not realize how much it directly affects our experience. It would seem then that we’re stuck unknowingly holding on to this archaic practice. My aim with all this is to directly address the issue of “taste” and to discover as much as possible its workings in my environment in order to become as aware as possible of my own sensibilities and the role “taste” plays in my life. And I hope to maybe inspire the same thoughts in others.

“To explain why not everyone is prepared to encounter a thing’s aesthetic
properties can recognize them, even when their ordinary perceptual faculties are
in order, eighteenth century theorists positioned the existence of a special
faculty of aesthetic perception, that of taste.” –Stephen Davies

1. LITTLE GIRL (Critic)
In just a few moments we will bear witness to one of the most important events in the history of the cinema.

2. WILLI (title sequence)
Art for its own sake, “That is beautiful which gives us pleasure without interest”

Allow me to propose the following argument:

An artwork, lets call it X, and some other thing, lets call it Y, which might be another artwork or might not, are as far as we can tell pretty damn similar and, as a result, display no aesthetically significant perceptual differences. Nevertheless, X has features relevant to its recognition and appreciation as art that distinguish it from Y. Therefore, some of X’s artistically significant features must depend on some of its non-perceptible properties.
Still X is pretty damn similar to Y, lets say that X and Y are exactly the same, they are as some might say, equally beautiful and therefore valid. Now lets say that X was created in 1750 and Y was created yesterday… or that Y is a forgery of X… or that Y was created by a woman, or by a computer, or by accident…

…still I like the idea of art for its own sake, but how do I reconcile?

3. WILLI (intro)
When we are born we are told what to think. As we get older we learn what other people think. Eventually we may learn to think for ourselves. The trick is trying to make sense of it all.

4. EMILY & WILLI (end of conversation)
EMILY So what is this?
WILLI Something somebody wrote.
EMILY So what is this?
WILLI Something somebody wrote.
EMILY So what is this?

5. WILLY RUNNING part 1 (A camera)
WILLI Something somebody wrote.

6. WILLI Soundstage 1
I will soon be visiting Paris France were I plan to visit the Louvre. In order to ensure myself the proper aesthetic experience the target of my appreciation must remain clear, which is of course the aesthetic properties an artwork might posses. To be fully prepared to receive a work’s aesthetic properties, I will adopt a particular mental attitude, the aesthetic attitude; which is one of distanced or disinterested contemplation. To achieve this frame of mind I must bracket out all natural or typical concerns with respect to the object’s usefulness, value, history, and classification in order to prevent these from distracting or inhibiting the proper experience of the object of attention. I therefore plan to run through the entire museum in less than nine minutes and forty-three seconds.

7. WILLI (Emily at the park)
She would force herself to contradict herself so as to avoid conforming to her own taste. She would say, “Taste is a habit, the repetition of something already accepted.” She said, “If you start something over several times it becomes taste.” I asked her if she had good taste or bad taste, she said she had indifferent taste.

8. (Willi climes the tree)
This segment was edited by rolling dice.

9. (dolly scene – B camera)

10. WILLI Soundstage 2
The aesthetic properties as according to British philosopher Frank Sibley: unified, balanced, integrated, lifeless, serene, somber, dynamic, powerful vivid, delicate, moving, trite, sentimental, tragic, graceful, delicate, dainty, handsome, comely, elegant, garish and beautiful.

11. GROUP OF PEOPLE(dolly scene – A camera)
WILLI Consider:

PERSON 1 to say that something is beautiful is not to say that everyone else will find it so, but rather, that they ought to find it so. That is beautiful which gives us pleasure without interest.

PERSON 2 There exists a degree of logical parity between moral and aesthetic judgments, sense the former, too, entail universalization as a condition of validity.

PERSON 3 Realize though that in this case instead of envisaging the aesthetic problem from the point of view of the artist, we consider art and the beautiful purely from the view of the spectator and unconsciously introduce the spectator in to the concept of the beautiful.

PERSON 4 Lets say also that art, for artists and spectators alike, brings man’s concepts to the perceptual level of his consciousness and allows him to grasp them directly, as if they were percepts.

PERSON 5 While man is a conceptual thinker, one might argue, it brings us special pleasure and insight to turn concepts into more readily grasped precepts. In this art is, or should be, a selective reaction of reality according to its creator’s metaphysical value judgments.

PERSON 6 An artist isolates those aspects of reality he deems fundamental and integrates them into something concrete allowing others the pleasure of contemplating them. Does this then imply again that man ought to like a certain kind of art?

PERSON 1 Is this Art for the sake of? Would are judgment of such still be fundamentally based on a sort of moral or ethical basis? Do I just feel this thing or can I think about it? Should I think about it?

PERSON 2 Does art have the right to deconstruct and free man’s consciousness directing it towards natural sensations and the enjoyment of seemingly meaningless colors, noises, and moods?

PERSON 3 Would that be aesthetic, is this aesthetic? Do I need good taste before I can dance?

12. EMILY & WILLI (entire conversation)
(the following exchange is taken from an interview with Marcel Duchamp)

WILLI Do you go to museums?

EMILY Almost never. I haven’t been to the Louvre for twenty years. It doesn’t interest me, because I have these doubts about the value of the judgments which decided that all these pictures should be presented to the Louvre, instead of others which weren’t even considered, and which might have been there. So fundamentally we content ourselves with the opinion which says that there exists a fleeting infatuation, a style based on a momentary taste; this momentary taste disappears, and, despite everything, certain things still remain. This is not a very good explanation, nor does it necessarily hold up.

WILLI Still, you accepted the idea that your entire work would be in a museum?

EMILY I accepted because there are practical things in life that one can’t stop. I wasn’t going to refuse. I could have torn them up or broken them; that would have been an idiotic gesture.

WILLI you could have asked that they be in a nonpublic place.

EMILY No. that would have been insanely pretentious.

WILLI Being protected yourself, you could have wanted to protect your work…

EMILY Certainly. I’m slightly embarrassed by the publicity aspect which things take on, because of that society of onlookers who force them to re-enter a normal current, or, at least, what is called normal. The group of onlookers is a lot stronger that the group of painters. They oblige you to do specific things. To refuse would be ridiculous. To refuse the Nobel Prize is ridiculous.

WILLI Would you accept going into the Institute of Art?

EMILY No, my God, no! I couldn’t! Besides, for a painter that doesn’t mean much! Aren’t they all literary peple, I think, the members of the Institute?

WILLI No. There are painters too. Rather worldy ones.

EMILY The academic sort?

WILLI Yes.

EMILY No. I wouldn’t sign a request to belong to the Institute. Anyway, it surely wont’ be proposed to me.
So what is this?

13. WILLY RUNNING part 2 (B camera)

14. WILLI & EMILY (soundstage)
WILLI So what is this?
EMILY It’s something somebody painted.
WILLI So what is this?
EMILY It’s something somebody painted.
WILLI So what is this?
EMILY It’s something somebody painted.

15. EMILY at the gas station.

16. LITTLE GIRL (Critic Reprise)
In just a few moments we will bare witness to one of the most important events in the history of the cinema. For the first time in history Fluxus artist Takehisa Kosugi’s masterful film, as mentioned in Hollis Frampton’s 1968 lecture, will be accompanied by John Cage’s seminal musical masterpiece 4:33. A reappropriated triumph this critic deems worthy of all the praise in the world.

17. John Cage & Takehisa Kosugi appropriation