Western elites long defined taste as the faculty of identifying beauty

Evidence

What exactly do we mean by “good taste” and “bad taste”? For many centuries, Western elites followed the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s clear and authoritative definition: taste was “the faculty of estimating the beautiful.” Someone with good taste could properly and virtuously identify beautiful things as beautiful things. And in those years, beauty was found in complex pieces of classical music, venerated artworks in museums, and the intricate craftwork of skilled artisans. A person with bad taste, on the other hand, found allure in the vulgar, ersatz, and wretched. Bad taste, thought Voltaire, was a “sickness of the spirit.” — W. David Marx, Status and Culture, 241

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sets up the classical, Kantian definition of taste that the modern ‘different tastes’ view supposedly displaces.
• XREF: connects to: Elite taste favors forms requiring cultivated knowledge to enjoy — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 253; Achieving high-status taste requires deep knowledge, congruence, and bounded originality — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 251; Taste is a social mechanism relative to era and society, not an innate universal — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 244 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Elite taste favors forms requiring cultivated knowledge to enjoy #corroborates (0.82) — W. David Marx, Status and Culture, 253
• The modern aesthetic question shifted from beauty to the definition of art #complicates (0.80) — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 480
• Achieving high-status taste requires deep knowledge, congruence, and bounded originality #expands (0.78) — W. David Marx, Status and Culture, 251
• Standards of taste are relative to an era and society, not universal criteria #contradicts (0.76)
• Taste is a social mechanism relative to era and society, not an innate universal #contradicts (0.75) — W. David Marx, Status and Culture, 244
• Universal appreciation of beauty signals resignation and empties beauty itself #complicates (0.74) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 87
• Aesthetic judgment is the processing of social relations #complicates (0.73) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 369