Chacun à son gout

First Improvisation

1. It’s only in the final paragraph of Richard Taruskin’s essay on Lizst and Taste that “good taste” is at last defined, here according to Haydn’s description of Mozart’s talent: “a reliable sense of what is fitting, and when.”
2. Taruskin’s soaring essay about Lizst and the “Hungarian Rhapsody #2,” and, by extension, about “taste,” which mostly precedes this revelation performs its lovely cadenzas mainly in the negative, as critique of critique, an intervention against interventions, regarding that most dreaded manifestation of the arts: “bad taste.” Taste as defined in its absence.
3. In particular, he roots out the many of those voices who hold in disrepute Lizst’s early work (in particular “Hungarian Rhapsody #2”), despite its enormous popular audience.
4. Taruskin’s critique, that is, is of certain “elites,” those who appear to have, or believe themselves to have, some right or capacity with which to make judgments of “taste.”
5. In a way, as it turns out then, Taruskin’s critique is a critique of modernists, or seems to be, for which, in truth, he was somewhat well known.
6. Or: his critique tracks close to this critique of modernism.
7. Though his critique of “elites” may well be equally elite.
8. In any event, he can’t help but illustrate “taste” while attempting to define it, or, in some cases, to revile it.
9. There are specific examples.
10. Taruskin, e.g., quotes Liszt himself on the critics, whom he (Liszt) refers to as an “aristocracy of mediocrity.”
11. However: before Taruskin winds up to his dislike of the modernists, he arrays some history. (And we can hardly blame him for this.) For example, he notes that taste is historically mixed up with class.
12. Especially, he, Taruskin seems to mean, by invoking class, the solidification of the middle class in the 19th century, the period in which Lizst’s romanticism first blossomed, and in which the middle class sought to create a cultural or critical orthodoxy by which they were deemed, well, aristocratic. At least if there were just two choices.
13. Like unto the aristocracy, then, the middle class. With the “taste” associated with the aristocracy. The middle class, in this way, was aspirational.
14. And one route through which they, the middle class, in this historical sketch, performed this act of class mobility was by aspiring to such perceptions of culture as constituted “good taste” from their point of view. Which is to say aristocratic taste.
15. Not the working-class taste.
16. In this view, Liszt’s Hungarian rhapsodies would have seemed bad, arguably, because they were over reliant on folk melodies, which is to say the popular music of the day, the working class popular music. Non-aristocratic.
17. Whether this historical sketch is accurate or not, provisional or not, a salient point is concealed within it—that class lurks in any discussion of “good” and “bad” taste.
18. As class lurks in the arts everywhere, and in culture generally.
19. There is always class.
20. And: as any good postmodernist would tell you, where there is a Marxist-Hegelian argument to be had, there will be soon a Freudian, or psychoanalytic, argument gathering force right nearby.
21. Taruskin skirts this, the openly Freudian argument, as it is perhaps too modern, too non-classical, but we may imagine it out loud: that taste may also be “libidinous,” shot through with the desiring-essence of the tastemaker.
22. The pseudo-French apothegm on the subject of taste, which I have used as a title above, hints at this libidinous aspect: chacun a son gout, each to his taste, or each has his taste. Depending on how you mangle the French.
23. The apothegm, celebrated though it is, is a bit of a linguistic perversion, of “A chacon son gout,” the more exact French, to each his taste.
24. Perversion, in a way, is the word that seems here to hover just out of view.
25. The French don’t much use the phrase in question, it is said, and an early citation of the apothegm is the 1835 painting of the same name by James Stephanoff, a British dude, a watercolorist.
26. Chacun a son gout is later immortalized, meanwhile, in Die Fledermaus in 1874, the “popular” opera.
27. That is, “Chacun a son gout” is already performing a slightly artificial dance of “good taste,” by borrowing from the French, a sign of cultural distinction, and as with many such things it has not done such a fine job in the borrowing.
28. “Chacon a son gout,” meaning each guy has his hooker in the Bois de Bologne, or his bondage-and-discipline tendency that he airs out at the dungeon once a week. Each guy has his closet full of hardcore pornography. Each guy has his mistress (an upper level functionary at the ministry of culture).
29. What do we make of the French “a” that migrates around this famous French bon mot, the migratory “a”? The one at the front of “A chacun son gout?”
30. I keep thinking of Lacan’s objet petit a, the not translatable a, the representation of lack. It’s as if the role of desire in taste is always there, in the faux-French, which at once longs for the artistic seriousness of the European continent. And which alludes to French psychoanalysis at the same time.
31. The objet petit a, one might say here, is the part of taste that represents desire.
32. Still, even if the Taruskin essay lists close to the twentieth-century rigors of Marx and Freud, which undergird the question of taste in the contemporary setting, there is still a lingering doubt, that Taruskin comes clean about, like a mid-century house painter admitting that there’s lead in that beautiful coat of white he just slapped up, that taste is always relative.
33. There is, after all, no accounting for it, according to the Latin—de gustibus non est disputandum—a bromide about which there is also much to dispute, and which may mean the opposite of what it is commonly held to mean, as Taruskin concedes.
34. But if taste is valent, labile, culturally charged, politically afflicted, subjective, as we probably would all agree, then why dispute about it, unless you are convinced yours is good and everyone else’s is bad?

 

Second Improvisation

35. In the quotation from the Taruskin essay above, the quotation that defines the notion of “good taste,” “a reliable sense of what is fitting, and when,” the operative word is the word “fitting.”
36. What does it mean for a work of art to be fitting? Suitable or appropriate under the circumstances, as my cheap-ass, non-elite online dictionary suggests.
37. “Fitting” goes back to early modern English, the mid-1500s, and maybe back to Old Norse, fitja, which would arguably make it a word loaned to the English tongue during conquest. And thus a word associated with power.
38. Maybe when a thing is “fitting,” it is fitted to power.
39. Maybe that’s exactly what we’re talking about when we talk about “taste,” that power lurks nearby.
40. Maybe associating itself with “taste,” or even dictating taste, as in the Stalinist period, is a thing that power does.
41. My bias is: as a human being, even more so than as an essayist, I don’t want to be told what taste is, by anyone, I want, rather, to discover it through my own tortuous route.
42. And my resistance is not only to being told what “good” and “bad” taste are, but also my resistance is to the idea that are dialectical obverses, and there is no other thing but the two.
43. Reliably, all the dialectics are, after postmodernism, bad dialectics, flimsy dialectics, provisional dialectics. And the tendency of the postmodern critics to collapse dialectical formulations is perhaps the most warranted of their recent efforts, so helpful when it comes to signifier and signified, or speech and writing, or, arguably, capitalist and communist.
44. And thus perhaps I can be freed of this idea that the Taruskins of the world are going to tell me what “good taste” is and to legislate for it in the public sphere. For example, that the Hungarian rhapsodies of Liszt are definitely “good,” especially if I happen to feel they are overly demonstrative.
45. (A clear recent example of the “good” that might ensue from the collapsing of culturally imposed dialectical formulations is the absolute bomb crater that has appeared in American civilization, and on American campuses, over the idea that there are more than two genders.)
46. One way that a work of art is “fitting” according to the tastemakers is when it “fits” into genre, or into conventional definitions of taxonomy.
47. But I feel like genre exists ex post facto with respect to art, as a way to speak interpretively about art, but might even be antithetical to the initial need to express.
48. For example, when I think about writing an essay about repelling some of what Richard Taruskin gets up to, one thing I want to do is to avoid all the hallmarks of a conventional essay.
49. How to avoid such a thing? Can I not create some hybrid between essay and fiction as Borges did occasionally (for example in his celebrated anti-genre essay, “The Analytic Language of John Wilkins”), or which Nietzsche seems to do in Thus Spake Zarathustra? Can I make my essay into a sort of a prose poem, or a series of musical improvisations?
50. I enter into any debate on “taste” not as an essayist trying to sell a line of tasteful artworks, but as a creative artist who is both certain and uncertain about taste, who thinks taste is both subjective and objective, and who believes there is no clear boundary between these two things.
51. Or: my taste is phenomenological.
52. I love the fact that Rothko’s chapel in Houston is not symmetrical. I love the fact that there is no definitive table of contents for The Canterbury Tales. I love that Cage’s late “numbers” pieces have no set note values for the performers, only durations. I can find a sentence in almost every page of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life that makes me want to cry. I love every note that Sun Ra played in the 1960s. I teach Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit every year, and I helped my wife get a bunch of strollers into the SMFA grad program office so that our students can perform the Yoko Ono piece from Grapefruit that involves pushing an empty perambulator around a cityscape. I love the taste of a pear when it’s in season. I deeply admire the Japanese obsession with cherry blossoms, and that song about it: “さくら さくら.” I like the striations of glacial activity still evident on the coast of Maine and I think they are as good, or better, than paintings by Winslow Homer. And yet I stumbled on that painting by Andrew Wyeth recently, you know, the one everyone likes, and it seemed pretty good to me.
53. Oh wait, I like some things that other people can’t stand. I have played the album Dub Housing by Pere Ubu for friends on multiple occasions and have been told that it is awful and is not music, and that I can’t possibly like it. Same with Trout Mask Replica. Same with The Flowers of Romance, by Public Image Limited. I really love those videos by Vito Acconci, no matter how icky they are, and I’m glad they are in the world. I think As I Lay Dying is a masterpiece, even though it has been cancelled by both the left and the right. I was recently reading Miss Lonelyhearts, which fails every test of the contemporary, seems to dislike many, many categories of human beings, including some categories of humans to which the author belongs, and I really think it’s dazzling and wonderful.
54. There is probably no accounting for my tastes.
55. I am, in the context of these lines, neither thing, neither a person with good taste nor a person with bad taste. And if you will permit me a rashness I will say that the same is true of you, dear indulgent reader. If we talked long enough I could demonstrate this.
56. The “fittingness” of taste, also, is contextual, and changes over time.
57. E.g., Manhattan, the film by Woody Allen.
58. History requires certain texts, for historical reasons, and that is why they have urgency at a particular time. History requires certain films, certain works of music, and their necessity is beyond the limits of an auteurist theory of art and literature. History doesn’t require good taste, but history attempts to manipulate good taste. And when history requires this work, it immediately becomes an evidentiary example of “good taste.”
59. Again: the Stalinist view of taste would be: that “fitting” means that a work of art has to represent the worker and uplift the worker. And we know what the ultimate result of that view of taste is, viz., that a lot of artists get suppressed, or jailed, or assassinated. Isaac Babel is a chilling example. Here the “fittingness” of good taste and its relationship to power is abundantly clear.
60. “Fitting” also alludes to, or invokes, or whispers of Darwin’s “survival of the fittest,” and in this view the arts are simply a thing of struggle and disputation (Taruskin uses the word “cognition”), in which whatever is most “fitting” wins the prize: by aligning itself with critical power and the historical forces that invest this critical power.
61. Meanwhile: Taruskin quotes the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy as opposed to certain music on “theatrical grounds.”
62. This is a major feature of the Taruskin essay, in fact.
63. “One reason for the antitheatrical prejudice is that theatrical acting, being by definition an act of dissembling, transgresses against ideas of sincerity.”
64. As Taruskin, in his way, is here defending Liszt against the charge of “bad taste,” by virtue of his large-scale employment of popular idioms in, e.g., the second Hungarian rhapsody, likewise the big fancy pianisms, his arpeggios, he would appear, on this basis, to be defending excess in so-called classical music.
65. (And he appears to be doing so, at various points in the piece, by throwing “elites” under the bus, Stravinsky, e.g., and, elsewhere, Adorno.)
66. The Nietzsche being quoted (“The theater should not lord it over the arts”) is fitted well into the Taruskin argument, but one wonders if the Nietzsche who later thought ill, to some degree, of his own Birth of Tragedy, might have had a different view in due course, a not-dialectical point of view, a view in which taste, allegedly objective in certain cases, nonetheless migrated toward the ambiguous.
67. The “anti-theatrical” argument, which might just be a pro-genre argument (the thing called music should not be a thing called theater) which Taruskin resists, might be lodged against a great number of contemporary popular performers—Liberace, Yngwie Malmsteen, Rick Wakeman, Joe Bonamassa, any number of contemporary players who are simply “fast” rather than “expressive.” In fact, Nietzsche’s argument, which he would perhaps have rejected later, does have a certain currency, if “theatrical” performance is merely “theatrical,” as opposed to expressive.
68. But all the genre-based arguments, like all the gender-based arguments, seem, from the postmodern vantage point, kind of weak.
69. A friend of mine put it this way, about Taruskin: “Taruskin opposes the subtractive nature of modernism.”
70. And here, in these lines, I am trying to subtract until there is almost nothing but the most primitive need to express.

 

Third Improvisation

71. The “anti-theatrical” argument of Nietzsche does, in fact, leave out a discussion of Camp. Which Taruskin overlooks too. I want to bear down on Camp.
72. Here we might, in any attempt to render complex, again, the question of taste, refer back to Susan Sontag’s celebrated essay on the subject, “Notes on Camp,” where the question of when bad taste is good taste is very carefully thought through.
73. Implicit in the idea of Camp (Sontag speaks at length about certain aspects of theater emerging from the gay community of NYC in the sixties), which is maybe a plenty good sub-generic name, and thus worthy of capitalization, is the idea of irony legitimizing bad taste and rendering it rhetorical, expressive, nuanced, even revolutionary. Bad taste in a Camp context is counter-narrative, is about creating enlightenment by ironizing certain hackneyed redoubts of the conventional.
74. John Waters, let’s say.
75. Liberace.
76. The Barbie movie.
77. Anything Godzilla.
78. Thor: Love and Thunder
79. Certain works of Brecht.
80. If Camp is “theatrical,” it is over-the-top-theatrical, and Camp music can have a profound political value by opposing or contextualizing normative culture, through irony.
81. Camp can do this without being anti-theatrical, by, in fact, being precisely, even excessively theatrical.
82. So: bad taste is occasionally good taste.
83. Charles Ives was not above ironizing, and Frank Zappa (the composer of “Peaches En Regalia” and “Naval Aviation in Art?”) was not above ironizing, Charles Mingus was not above ironizing, and certain jazz compositions by Carla Bley are sharply ironic, like “Spangled Banner Minor and Other Patriotic Songs,” extraordinary in their irony, actually, always with one eye on musical excess.
84. “Bohemian Rhapsody,” too, is clearly “theatrical,” “Camp,” in bad taste, and very funny, at least the first 1,000 times you hear it.
85. (“Bohemian Rhapsody” was one of the only rock songs my father, a classical deejay during his college years, and quite a music snob, admitted to liking.)
86. Orville Peck, the contemporary “Country and Western” singer, is substantially campy, with his frilled western wear and his studied baritone, but also very moving, especially in his combination of LGBTQIA+ narratives with an idiom known for its cowboys and blond bombshells.
87. Maybe Camp is best when it is both Camp and not-camp.
88. Camp prevents the organic. And I think taste should be organic. But “organic” is a contested word, always stuffed up with elitism, and thus a preference for the organic is a preference for the ambiguous, as “organic” is non-continuous like all other certainties. And thus I still love Camp. Especially when it contains non-Camp.
89. Maybe “organic” is a terminology exactly like “bad taste,” closely related to Potter Stewart’s definition of the obscene: “I know it when I see it.”
90. Will I know “organic” when I see it? Can I trust that “taste” is self-evident, meaning that it displays obvious outward signs? Signs that we can all agree on? Is it an ineluctable notion that “fitting” is self-evident to all who wish to find the traces of it?
91. Either taste is a thing that is hitherto existing, fixed, or it is a thing that is labile, or else it is both in some fashion, between fixed and subject to change.
92. Or it is both. Both fixed and labile. Post-dialectical.
93. And so: leaving a discussion of taste to a classical music critic is very much like leaving the henhouse under the jurisdiction of the fox.
94. Classical music almost always believes in its taste; indeed, the very notion of taste is founded in part on ideas about classical music, the symphonic, the orchestral, the operatic, all such things as might be displayed on PBS on a Saturday evening, and the institutions arrayed to “preserve” these things.
95. Classical music is the gateway to “taste.”
96. One could say the same, perhaps, about the ballet. Maybe you could say it about poetry, or a certain subgenre of contemporary poetry fixed on prosody and classical allusions, especially as practiced by, you know, hard-drinking Russians.
97. In the main, these things are the evidence on which we mount arguments about the “fitting.” “Fitting” is power, traditional ideas of taste, and a firm belief in the dialectical opposition between “good taste” and “bad taste.”
98. When in reality one cannot mount a defense of “taste” in which the terminologies are fixed.
99. Incredibly, it is Kant, he of the categorical imperatives, who, in Taruskin’s essay, is the voice of reason: “It is absolutely impossible to give a definitive objective principle of taste…for then the judgment would not be one of taste at all.”
100. Still, for the record, I think “taste,” if it means anything, means to signal the presence of the Sublime.

 

Fourth Improvisation

101. The way it is often told, the codification of the Sublime begins with the discovery, during the Enlightenment, of the Alps. As a tourist destination.
102. Of course, nowadays, this very journey would be suspect, in certain circles, an “eco-tourist” journey, but had it never taken place, we would not have had an early definition of the Sublime.
103. There was a Sublime before the discovery of tourism in the Alps, sure, but it was there, in trying to find a language to describe the Alps, the experience of the Alps, that people began to codify the Sublime and to cause it to adhere to certain emotional experiences.
104. The Sublime is what you discover upon beholding the Alps.
105. Or the Grand Canyon.
106. Or a solar eclipse. (In fact, while I was writing this piece, I was also planning a three-hour drive, so as to see the solar eclipse of 2024, and in so doing was willing to remove my son from school, believing that beholding the eclipse is more important than conventional schooling.)
107. Or a meteor shower.
108. Or the Northern Lights.
109. Or the first photograph (a photo-composite, in truth, and thus a simulation) of a black hole.
110. I imagine that the criteria through which I believe in “taste,” if at all, find their origin in this Sublime. Of course, it doesn’t have to be a thing in nature, by the way, “nature” being a contestable word.
111. The Sublime is a perception of scale. Or it begins in a perception of scale.
112. The Sublime, because it precedes taste, does not require taste for its evocation. It is an emotional event.
113. It is not necessarily the case, at least for the purposes of this essay, that human emotions be understood to be phenomenological. Or: all humans are capable of having a human emotional reaction that has to do with scale.
114. Freud had a name for this, borrowed from Romain Rolland, le sentiment oceanique, “the oceanic feeling.”
115. Sublime as a perception of insignificance, as a recognition of being, or a recognition, if you’ll forgive some Heidegger, that Being exists and then it begins beyond the scale of the human and its ego-space.
116. In art, the feeling of appreciation may involve a perception similar to the perception of the Sublime, or perhaps it cohabits with the experience of the Sublime, using the Sublime as a point of origin or reference. (The Rothko Chapel, e.g., for me.)
117. The very first time I knew I was experiencing it, the Sublime, qua Sublime, in the world of the visual arts (though alleging to know is a presumption and begs the question of what is knowledge), I was beholding a James Terrell “skyspace” installation in, I think, a parking lot in Santa Fe.
118. The piece has since been moved, so my memory of the Sublime is no longer coincident with place, or it is free of a real world analogue; it is a memory of a perception.
119. And yet it is certainly a feeling of the Sublime.
120. For me, the first time I knew I was experiencing it in music, though alleging to know beyond doubt is folly, was at a live performance of La Monte Young’s “The Second Dream…” at a concert at Lincoln Center, sometime in the nineties.
121. On the one hand, the Sublime is (arguably) the light that empowers the Enlightenment, but one has to recognize that the Sublime was not waiting around for the Enlightenment to exist, and it will exist after there are classical music critics, or art critics, or novelists, to attempt to invoke it.
122. Which would suggest that the Sublime, as a criterion for perception, precedes the recognition of the Sublime. Or that is my theory.
123. The line from Hölderlin suggests the deeper inquiry:
124. “Nature’s gleaming is higher revealing.”
125. The Sublime, in this sense, is a perception of a revelation in the being of things, that is in turn recognized in works of art—not according to their performative excellence, their shredding capacity, not according to their fitness or their fittingness, not according to their adherence to tradition, not according to preexisting standards that are learned through “knowledge,” not according to class, not according to mere desire, not according to tastemakers, not according to traditions of excellence or merit, not according to dialectical notions about forms and rules of genre, but according to their transparent expressiveness of the not entirely expressible, the feeling of some kind that exceeds language.  
126. For example, though I find myself in general appalled by Richard Wagner, and not only because of Nietzsche’s opinions on the subject, I am very interested in the tales of Sir Tristram de Lyones and his doomed love for Isolde, the result of a love potion visited upon them by Isolde’s mom, who wants to ensure that she, Isolde, marries King Mark.
127. Some critics think Tristan und Isolde is the “first” love story. Others think it is a retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice, which means that it is a performance of continuity with respect to the “first” love story.
128. (Maybe all the love stories are one story.)
129. Shakespeare says that the key ingredient of a perfect love potion is the “love-in-idleness” flower, e.g., viola tricolor, also known as a pansy.
130. Thus, Wagner’s “Liebestod” from Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, wherein Isolde weeps over Tristan’s body, calls forth a whole history of doomed lovers and the potions that afflict them, and “love-in-idleness,” and I love it, the “Liebestod,” because it does in fact shimmer forth with the eternal thing that operas in general attempt, but often fail to capture, despite all the “theatrical” elements that are so central to the opera.
131. The thing about Sublime is: it is there and it is hidden, it is and it is not, and therefore it is both sacred and profane, high and low, and taste is all these things, too, because taste is the thing that calls for the Sublime, which precedes taste, which represents a human struggle with all the things that exceed the human.
132. Taruskin’s very fine, exceedingly well written and well-argued essay about Liszt, and Liszt’s second Hungarian rhapsody, which in no way convinces me about Liszt, which I both like and do not like, wishes for continuity of the institution of taste-making.
133. It wishes for the old days of a taste-maker thundering from above about how it is.
134. And yet, in truth, taste-making is exactly like two bald guys fighting over a comb. That’s exactly what Taruskin sounds like, like a bald guy fighting with some other bald guy. Over a comb.
135. Taste, that is, keeps a thousand periodicals busy, while ignoring the eternal role that the Sublime plays in the apperception of art.
136. Oh, and one last thing.
137. Surely, Taruskin’s veiled charge against Boulez in his essay, viz., that Boulez’s protestation about the “gypsy spirit” in Liszt has a racialist aspect, this is assuredly accurate.
138. And, to reiterate, Taruskin’s remark about Boulez reminds us of certain kinds of taste-related judgments that are obviously meant to keep out certain kinds of artists. They are political. They are about political forces.
139. Indeed, some taste-making is about constituting an audience so that it can keep other people out, for example, during the “Disco Sucks” period of rock and roll criticism that was both homophobic and an effacement of the central role that African-American music played in the origins of rock and roll. Or the hatred of jazz that was really a hatred of Black New Orleans, or the hatred of photography in high art circles that was, in part, a hatred of a medium that had a lot of excellent women artists excelling therein, women artists who practiced photography in part because they were methodically kept out of the “true” visual arts of painting and sculpture.
140. That Liszt loved a melody borrowed from the Romany, I mean, is one of the truly great things about him. That doesn’t mean that his arpeggios were not too much. The same folk origin, the love of the music of the people, is present in Copland’s Appalachian Spring, or Vaughan Williams’s Folk Song Suite, John Adams’s Shaker Loops, Michael Torke’s setting of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” and so on. These pieces are each great, and they are all high and low.
141. The collapsing of the opposites into what precedes them, that is, allows us to be restored to the wish to express what is so hard to express. Or: when we are fixed on the horizon line we find the urgencies that are most urgent. Taste has nothing to do with it.

*Editor’s Note: Richard Taruskin’s essay, “Taste, Bad Taste, and Franz Liszt,” appeared originally in the journal Liberties, Autumn 2022, VOL 3, No. 1, and is available on JSTOR.