November 2021(This essay is derived from a talk at the Cambridge Union.)When I was a kid, I'd have said there wasn't. My father told me so.Some people like some things, and other people like other things,and who's to say who's right?It seemed so obvious that there was no such thing as good tastethat it was only through indirect evidence that I realized my fatherwas wrong. And that's what I'm going to give you here: a proof byreductio ad absurdum. If we start from the premise that there's nosuch thing as good taste, we end up with conclusions that areobviously false, and therefore the premise must be wrong.We'd better start by saying what good taste is. There's a narrowsense in which it refers to aesthetic judgements and a broader onein which it refers to preferences of any kind. The strongest proofwould be to show that taste exists in the narrowest sense, so I'mgoing to talk about taste in art. You have better taste than me ifthe art you like is better than the art I like.If there's no such thing as good taste, then there's no such thingas good art. Because if there is such athing as good art, it'seasy to tell which of two people has better taste. Show them a lotof works by artists they've never seen before and ask them tochoose the best, and whoever chooses the better art has bettertaste.So if you want to discard the concept of good taste, you also haveto discard the concept of good art. And that means you have todiscard the possibility of people being good at making it. Whichmeans there's no way for artists to be good at their jobs. And notjust visual artists, but anyone who is in any sense an artist. Youcan't have good actors, or novelists, or composers, or dancerseither. You can have popular novelists, but not good ones.We don't realize how far we'd have to go if we discarded the conceptof good taste, because we don't even debate the most obvious cases.But it doesn't just mean we can't say which of two famous paintersis better. It means we can't say that any painter is better than arandomly chosen eight year old.That was how I realized my father was wrong. I started studyingpainting. And it was just like other kinds of work I'd done: youcould do it well, or badly, and if you tried hard, you could getbetter at it. And it was obvious that Leonardo and Bellini weremuch better at it than me. That gap between us was not imaginary.They were so good. And if they could be good, then art could begood, and there was such a thing as good taste after all.Now that I've explained how to show there is such a thing as goodtaste, I should also explain why people think there isn't. Thereare two reasons. One is that there's always so much disagreementabout taste. Most people's response to art is a tangle of unexaminedimpulses. Is the artist famous? Is the subject attractive? Is thisthe sort of art they're supposed to like? Is it hanging in a famousmuseum, or reproduced in a big, expensive book? In practice mostpeople's response to art is dominated by such extraneous factors.And the people who do claim to have good taste are so often mistaken.The paintings admired by the so-called experts in one generationare often so different from those admired a few generations later.It's easy to conclude there's nothing real there at all. It's onlywhen you isolate this force, for example by trying to paint andcomparing your work to Bellini's, that you can see that it does infact exist.The other reason people doubt that art can be good is that theredoesn't seem to be any room in the art for this goodness. Theargument goes like this. Imagine several people looking at a workof art and judging how good it is. If being good art really is aproperty of objects, it should be in the object somehow. But itdoesn't seem to be; it seems to be something happening in the headsof each of the observers. And if they disagree, how do you choosebetween them?The solution to this puzzle is to realize that the purpose of artis to work on its human audience, and humans have a lot in common.And to the extent the things an object acts upon respond in thesame way, that's arguably what it means for the object to have thecorresponding property. If everything a particle interacts withbehaves as if the particle had a mass of m, then it has a mass ofm. So the distinction between "objective" and "subjective" is notbinary, but a matter of degree, depending on how much the subjectshave in common. Particles interacting with one another are at onepole, but people interacting with art are not all the way at theother; their reactions aren't random.Because people's responses to art aren't random, art can be designedto operate on people, and be good or bad depending on how effectivelyit does so. Much as a vaccine can be. If someone were talking aboutthe ability of a vaccine to confer immunity, it would seem veryfrivolous to object that conferring immunity wasn't really a propertyof vaccines, because acquiring immunity is something that happensin the immune system of each individual person. Sure, people'simmune systems vary, and a vaccine that worked on one might notwork on another, but that doesn't make it meaningless to talk aboutthe effectiveness of a vaccine.The situation with art is messier, of course. You can't measureeffectiveness by simply taking a vote, as you do with vaccines.You have to imagine the responses of subjects with a deep knowledgeof art, and enough clarity of mind to be able to ignore extraneousinfluences like the fame of the artist. And even then you'd stillsee some disagreement. People do vary, and judging art is hard,especially recent art. There is definitely not a total order eitherof works or of people's ability to judge them. But there is equallydefinitely a partial order of both. So while it's not possible tohave perfect taste, it is possible to have good taste.Thanks to the Cambridge Union for inviting me, and to TrevorBlackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading draftsof this.
