August 29, 2007
On the loss of taste
Brian Phillips, writing in the September issue of Poetry, has this to say:
What happens when the relationship between an audience and an art form begins to fail? A kind of obscurity, something felt but not quite formulated, overwhelms aesthetic judgment. It becomes difficult to say what is good or bad, and worse, what one likes or dislikes. Somehow these questions appear unconnected to what is actually happening. The atmosphere fills with the bad air of theories. Conservative outcries are feebly raised, in response to no evident controversy. Discussion shies from the work of artists, withdraws to the question of survival, the ominous question of the future. What will the way forward be? Irving Howe wrote that all literary revolutions begin in an assault on a standard of taste. Where will the next one begin, if the standard of taste is a vapor?[ ... ]
When I say, then, that the current audience for poetry in America lacks taste, I do not mean to suggest that we have bad taste—that we like bad poems. I mean, instead, that we have fallen into a kind of insensibility, a sort of intelligent numbness, which is both a cause and a consequence of the poetry culture's lingering anxiety. The presence of this numbness, demonstrated by the widespread concern for what other people ought to read, is what leads me to conclude that in poetry the uncertainty of our aesthetic experience has overwhelmed our relationship to the art; that, in other words, the capabilities that I have described as belonging to taste have dissolved until we find ourselves unable to form intuitive aesthetic judgments, unable to know the ground on which such judgments could legitimately be formed, and thus adrift in the indifference that we ritualistically pretend is something else.
The essay, titled "Poetry and the Problem of Taste," is not online, but is well worth reading. I'm confident that considering its assertions from the vantage point of other disciplines is worthwhile.