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Aesthetics is what connects one to matters of fact. It is anti-ideal, it is materialistic. It implies no approval, but respect for things as they are.’
Fairfield Porter
I have always, it seems, done battle with personal taste in art. Either I’m trying to figure out just what I think about art or I am trying to understand someone else’s ideas. What has helped calm my mind is understanding the difference between one’s taste or opinions about art and one’s aesthetics about art. My opinions are simply that- opinions. My aesthetics are how I go about thinking and looking at art.
My first big battle with taste was in undergraduate school where I was a ceramic major. The department was split into two factions. There were those who made functional pots and those who made ‘art’. As a student there was this underlying pressure to pick a camp and commit to its ideology. If you were a ‘clay artists’ making pots was too old school and lacked the room for creative self expression. The potters, on the other hand, saw themselves as part of a valuable tradition and thought it sacrilegious to make something out of clay that wasn’t part of that tradition. Taste it seemed was both a personal judgment and a sociological concept. We were young, impressionable and frankly did not know our heads from holes in the ground. Neither did our instructors who were guilty of fueling the whole stupid debate. We were being taught taste.
Off to graduate school I went where I was exposed to more new things in the world than I could imagine but where I had to start making limiting choices. I had to choose the classes I wished to focus on, the teachers I wished to work with, the material I thought was interesting with the ultimate choice of writing a dissertation and orally defending the choices I made. We bolstered our own opinions about art by rejecting other people’s ideas. We were there to develop our own ideas. The problem was we were still all young and impressionable but were beginning to think we knew it all. We were developing our own taste.
Then it was off into the real world after graduating where I had my first exhibition at Northwestern Michigan Collage of a series of drawings I was doing at the time . I thought I was radical in my desire to hang these drawings unframed in the exhibition area, which was basically the hallway in the art building. The response from some of the art students was to draw on my drawings and write on them how much the thought they were crap. I was even chastised by the administration for leaving myself open to such a reaction by not ‘properly framing my work. They were expressing there personal taste.
Taste is ones opinion. There can be good opinions or bad opinions. The opinions about art I learned as a young student seem subordinate to the ‘aesthetics’ that Porter talks about. Porter’s idea of aesthetics implies a philosophy, a tool by which you sense things. A procedure by which you look. How you look and how you think about what your seeing is going to control what kind of taste you end up having.
It was the philosopher David Hume who believed that aesthetic judgment had to have both the ability to detect things with your sight and a emotional sensitivity to what you detect. You have to look first and be able to feel something about what your looking at. And it was Immanuel Kant who believed that to aesthetically judge something depended on ones ability to be reflective on what you are seeing. If you are automatically going to say you don’t like something then you probably don’t have a very good ability to ‘reflect’ on what you are seeing. All three of those qualities; sensations, emotions and intellect vary between people and are decisive factors how people decide what they like and don’t like in art. If you accept the notion that beauty is in the mind of the beholder then you also have to be willing to agree that not all of those minds may be firing on the same number of cylinders. The ability to see things varies from person to person.
Fortunately there is a quality of being that isn’t solely dependent on how much you know. That quality is openness. Remaining open to the possibilities of art is what I believe Porter is referring to when he says that aesthetics implies no approval, but respect for things as they are. You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to be interested in anything you don’t want to be but you don’t get to automatically judge it as bad either. Aesthetics allows you to look, to inquire, to investigate. If your going to be aesthetic about something it requires you to be respectful. If you are going to make judgments right away based on what you say your taste in art is your going to miss the whole experience. Here is a little test to use next time you are looking at something you may not understand - If It is easier to simply say you don’t like it than it is to explain why you don’t like it, you are probably not being aesthetic.
It is immense pleasure in going to a museum or an art gallery and simply looking aesthetically. Looking with the idea of beauty in your mind. There is a great sense of freedom to look at what is in front of you and not be required to make a judgment. No one is going to give you a test. You don’t need to leave an opinion before you go out the door. You can form that later if you want. But the aesthetic experience can only begin if you are open enough to look. And the joy of the aesthetic experience continues after the fact of having looked when you can later contemplate and think about what you have looked at and compare and contrast that with all the other things you have seen in the past. Soon you have a history of looking and thinking about what you have seen. Possibly you will want to read about the artists and what they were thinking. You’ll want to read art history, buy art books, travel to cities just to see a exhibition. Its addictive. Its pleasurable. And if you you do so aesthetically you won’t have to fight with yourself so much anymore.
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