Should the concept of 'personal taste' be abolished?

What a boring world you must live in.

Without the concept of personal taste and discrimination, what the hell is there to stop the individual from drowning in a fucking sea of overwhelming, often contradictory information? Are we data processing machines? No, we are humans. Vive la Taste, De Gustibus Non Disputandum Est. (sorry, high school Latin a bit rusty)

YES! They are all frivolous IDIOTS who go around "liking" or "not liking" things with no basis in theory or historical knowledge! Some of them even DANCE to music instead of critically evaluating it!!!!

Presumably Tarden was joking. I think that the provocation offered by the question is a useful one, if it means that 'personal taste' is a vague phrase (as said before, I don't like the word 'taste' re pop music) that could do with a rethink. I'm not convinced, though, that we can come up with anything fundamentally better as a replacement.

I have often considered sales to be the only real objective measure of musical success.

Setting aside the part that's in jest (which is about 90-95% of it), there's something very important in what you're getting at. I like Harlan Ellison's dictum:

"...no, everyone does NOT have the right to an opinion. Everyone has the right to an INFORMED opinion."

One can either say that some opinions have more value than others, or that all opinions have the same value. The latter would be considered ludicrous in science or literary criticism; why is it acceptable in the arts? To my way of thinking, it shouldn't be, and yet there are a lot of people who seem to think so.

The notion that "everything is relative" in music or art is part of the ongoing devaluation of the arts, which has been well underway since the Romantic era. One of my old professors recently reminded me of a Hegel quote which I love -- something like "And thus are the constituent parts of the spiritual life of mankind reduced to the categories of mere entertainment and superstition." The arts and religion, respectively. And however you feel about it, there's no denying that the revelatory power of the arts has been marginalized, in favor of their role as entertainment (with an emphasis on novelty), by our growing cultural emphasis on the financial, the utilitarian, and instant gratification. (Yes, I know, we've all heard that phrase or variations on it countless times, and are sick of hearing about it -- but the problem is, it's true.)

In music, a lot of the responsibility for the acceleration of this devaluation may well lie squarely at the doorstep of John Cage. Treated rather cruelly at the hands of Schoenberg, he acquired a lifelong animosity towards the musical establishment, and his work eventually led him to break the contract that had always existed between composers and their audience -- the contract of intent: that the composer is trying to articulate something aesthetically meaningful through his music, and that it would be worthwhile for an audience to expend the effort to understand that something. While many lovely sounds came out of Cage's subsequent explorations and random processes, the significance of that contract-breaking cannot be underestimated. The balance of power had been permanently shifted, from the composer to his/her audience; no longer was it necessary to acknowledge the possibility that one's own ignorance was the culprit in a failure to understand a piece of music. Now, "everything was the same as everything else"; all sounds were considered equally meaningful; there was no good or bad, only how you choose to see it. Innocuous and inclusive as it may sound, this is arguably an unbelievably crushing outlook, since (to condense the relevant arguments tremendously) if you do away with both the ideas of a supernatural absolute (an afterlife, typically one in which people are brought to account for their actions), and any kind of secular absolute (the notion of aesthetic and ethical truth), then the only absolute remaining is death: in the arts, aesthetic death (meaninglessness), and in politics, mass murder (cf. The Reign of Terror, the Russian Revolution, et al.). Hegel and Nietzsche were certainly on to this, and their respective philosophies are, in part, responses to the prospect of this abyss.

For the record, unlike my professor, I like a fair amount of Cage's music. I think his alienation from the musical establishment (at first, anyway) led him to come up with some wild and interesting ideas, and the Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano are beautiful. But I've had the misfortune to sit through other pieces of his which are absolutely dreadful and self-indulgent, and I'm slowly coming around to the viewpoint that quite a few of them are little more than expressions of contempt, as though Cage were laughing in the rafters at the establishment that once humiliated him, saying in essence, "I could shit on a plate and serve it up to you, and you'd still sit there and nod your heads." It's The Emperor's New Clothes all over again. Those pieces don't bring about open minds, they bring about closed minds, insulted and shellshocked at being subjected to "sound and fury, signifying nothing", and less likely to be receptive to challenging ideas in the future.

So no, I don't exactly hate it when people say they "just don't like" something. What I hate, rather, is the failure on a societal level to acknowledge that aesthetic truth and value are not purely relative, nor are they democratically determined (if they are, then Bach is the inferior of Telemann in his own time, and Britney Spears in ours). And I hate the idea that, in the interests of economics, the arts have shown more and more of a tendency to avoid, at all costs, confronting their audience with its own ignorance (since -- to take a rather oversimplified example -- if everything is the same as everything else, why bother to play good-but-challenging music when you can sell out, play crap, and make three times as much money? It's all relative, after all...).

The answer to all of this is not a totalitarian regime, as your pisstake jestingly suggests. Rather, it's in the rediscovery of intelligent and courageous criticism (part of which is the willingness to say, from an informed perspective, that certain things are shit -- John Cage's Water Music, aka "quack-a-duck-call-while-playing-a-radio-and-hitting-random-notes-on-the-piano" -- and certain things are beautiful -- his Sonatas and Interludes), and in the revaluation of the arts and their power to transport, to illuminate, and to enrich. While there's plenty of room for disagreement on what constitutes an informed opinion, it's the only viable basis for worthwhile criticism -- and the critique, or the power of critical thinking, is perhaps the most crucial element in our defense against every form of horror, be it aesthetic or political.

Another candidate for posting on FT properly, I think.

So liking Michael Bolton, say, equals mass murder ? Cool !

So anyway, who gets to decide what is musically worthy and what is mass murder ? I kind of see what you're trying to get at, and I don't entirely disagree with it, but there's something about it that makes me uncomfortable. Informed opinions are better, sure, but I don't think I'd go much beyond that - appreciation of music is kind of intangible.

I think the question (like most questions) comes down to willful confusion of two completely different concepts: let's call them "taste" (whatever strikes your fancy, for reasons you're not necessarily obligated to investigate or explain) and "aesthetic opinion" (informed, reasoned, striving-for-objectivity decisions about artistic value). Anyone who's ever assembled a desert-island disc knows the difference between the two, as it explains that embarassing pick you try to slip by around number seven (the Primitives, for me) and then redeem by listing a Terry Riley record after it. I'm not sure it's worth simply attacking the "taste" portion of the equation---what's worth attacking is the odd belief some people have that their "tastes," no matter how ill-informed or subjective they may be, somehow translate into absolute artistic value, and any more analytical approach to answering such questions is somehow "pretentious" or "elitist" or involved "listening to the music but not really *hearing* it" or some such tripe.

The difference, as I see it, lies mainly in communication. One can have one's gut reactions and cherish them and never back down from them, and that's wonderful. But as soon as a person wants to talk to another person about music---as soon as two people with different subjective reactions want to discuss a piece of music and work out what value it has---that "taste"-based analysis becomes largely useless. It provides five seconds of conversation: "I like it." "I don't." Beyond that, it's analytical: "*Why* do you like it?"

Anyway. This issue seems to pop up quite often among "informed" music listeners, and I think it's key to maintain that the two elements of music appreciation are completely separate, and value judgements should not be attached to either. Value judgements should be attached to people who cannot distinguish between the two.

-- nta

(Conclusion abt Cage = wrong, btw, re his "contempt" for the audience)

Oh boy do I have a lot of problems with Phil's answer, although I am glad he posted it. I don't know if I have the time or am "well-informed" to get into it, but a few things popped out at me - one being an exaggeration of the role of relativism in our culture. I don't think that Britney Spears fans think they're listening to Bach. I think we'd all like to see a greater value placed on intelligence and critical thought, but I think that can co-exist with the crap. I'm *really* wary of these "it's all gone downhill" since the 18th century (or whenever) types of arguments.

I also think that an artist who "confronts the audience with its own ignorance" is making an awful lot of assumptions about his or her audience, assumptions that even those wearing the Emperor's Old Clothes weren't making. In fact, historically speaking, appreciation of the arts required a great deal of recognition of myths, symbols, motifs.

As far as Cage, I remember Brian Eno saying that Cage had the biggest influence on him even though he never listened to his records. For me, he's very similar to Duchamp.

To put things straight - I didn't mean I agreed with the post, just that it was a very interesting piece.

The Primitives? '*Embarrassing*'???

Isn't this what post-modernism is about? The process of understanding as opposed to judgment? The devaluation of the power of the author and the elevation of the importance of the audience's interpretation? ( Those essay quotes on Josh Blog today seem quite relevant ). I think the Cage-Duchamp comparison is quite apt. Also: If we reject notions of personal taste, then who shall we trust to produce a universal set of aesthetics for all to abide by?

Post-Modernests can be judgemental. Most obviously when they are devaluing modernism.

In another life, Ellison's quote was something I used to browbeat my students with without realizing who I was quoting. Truer now than ever, where every opinion on the Internet (including mine) seems to potentially carry equal weight or no weight at all.

God, I wish I had the time to really keep up with these thought- provoking threads! I feel I'm growing a new prefrontal lobe just to keep track of them.

I like Cage, both the silences and the outbursts. As for Duchamp, I once even wrote a thesis on "The Bride Stripped Bare," for which Duchamp might even be said to have written a soundtrack. (I have it on record, but it's not exactly Mantovani.)

Oh, Lord, I have written too much today...

Mitch said: "Also: If we reject notions of personal taste, then who shall we trust to produce a universal set of aesthetics for all to abide by?"

This reminds me a parallel I meant to draw earlier, between music and two other endeavors in which subjective taste and objective value create some friction. The first, and more interesting, is the realm of the political, in which the same complaints can be made: that either (a) ill-informed, subjectively biased know-nothings exert too much of a voting influence over public policy, or (b) elitist bean- counters exert too much of an intellectual influence over public policy. While pretty much everyone can see the ways in which (a) is an unfortunate aspect of democracy, it has been generally decided by most of the world that some form of representative democracy is the only semi-fair way of making public policy decisions, even if it means that certain citizens will make irrational, ill-informed voting decisions that are the political equivalent of, say, listening to Phil Collins records.

The difference, of course, is that the state must make decisions, and those decisions must affect each of us. We should, perhaps, be really happy that democratic declarations of value in music---say, Phil Collins massive record sales in comparison to the Boredoms'---do not mean that Phil Collins gets to decide what sorts of records we will get to listen to for the next few years. The taste/value debate becomes something of a moot point---we can visit ILM and engaging in analytical/spectulative contemplation of pop music, and someone else can sit at home listening to "No Jacket Required," and while those decisions may strike one or the other as *annoying,* they're in no way *harmful* to anyone else involved.

The other comparison to be made, the more vexed and fraught one, is to the "canon wars" in literary criticism---a field in which approaches like "Reader Response Theory" that seem to favor intuitive "reaction" over objective "meaning" are rapidly chipping away at the traditional route through the canon. I won't even go into that, but I'd be interested to hear what others think. . .

Other people's aesthetic value judgments do affect us, Nitsuh, because of the economic aspect of music listening. (Maybe you could say, it's the market that decides, not the state.) One could have a similar worry about the populace's control over cultural capital.

Phil: don't you think it's possible that I could believe that value is neither "purely relative," nor purely democratically determined, yet hold that the same piece of music you find to be worthless is not (say we both gave careful, well-defended reasons why)?

I meant to say also "nor totally objective (in the sense of absolute truth, etc.)".

Josh said: "Other people's aesthetic value judgments do affect us, Nitsuh, because of the economic aspect of music listening."

I did consider this, Josh, but I feel it's a bit of a moot point in terms of the comparison I was trying to make. My point was that in the political realm, *one* decision must be made in any given public policy quarrel. Either we reduce the top tax rate, or we don't. We're free to go on believing that that reduction is a bad idea, but those taxes will stay be paid at the lower rate.

This is only sort of the case with music. True, if J-Lo holds the number one Billboard spot (the presidency) and the Microphones only sell a couple hundred records (mayor of Olympia), the economics of the market are going to pull the entire music business in J-Lo's direction at the Microphones' expense. But that only corresponds to the fact that a political figure---president, prime minister---can pull a nation's agenda or public debate in his/her own direction. It doesn't quite correspond to the actual legislative power a political leader has; for that to be the case, J-Lo's #1 Billboard spot would have to entitle her to, say, decide what songs the Microphones could use on their album.

So I'd agree with what you're saying as far as it applies to the analogy of political *opinion*---that is, purely what people think or believe---but not in terms of my analogy to political *action*, in which one thing has to be decided on and all must abide by it.

But all of this is just a side-track from a whole other issue . . .

I personally don't believe in 'taste' as a neutral force in a person's mind; it's so clearly a product of their environment + history + related interests. Which is why relativism is fundamental to our approach to listening - if you wish to abolish personal taste then you also need to abolish personal experience... an experience that not only includes listening to the record, but also what you did the day you bought it, and the day before that, where you live, who your friends are, and of course which albums you bought prior and plan to buy next (it's possible that 'taste' is merely an expression of one's past and potential value as a consumer of commodities).

Arguably the "it's all gone downhill since the 18th century" sentiments are basically elegies for feudalism - as Adorno suggested (and it was one of his more sympathetic points re: music I'd say) the idea that music could gain autonomy post-feudalism through the ability to be bought and sold and yet not become dependent on market forces is a paradox that could exist in reality for only the briefiest period of time. True, Bach was not driven by market forces, but that's the luxury you have with a rigid, tightly-structured and pre-determined audience.

Phil's suggestion (and I'm paraphrasing obviously) seems to be that Cage brought about the death of the composer and thus the audience aquired a tyrannic role in the production of their own taste. Similar revelations in literature for example didn't provoke orgiastic responses of "I like it 'cos I like it, so there" in critical works, true, but that's because responses (Barthesian, deconstructionist etc.) still tended to rely on intelligent explication to get across the writer's often personal non-author-derived conclusions. It would be unfair to compare these to the inarticulate expression of appreciation of the average music listener who is obviously far closer to the average book reader - and if you went up to a Joan Collins reader on the beach, grabbed his or her book and started preaching about its worthlessness I would still applaud her right to punch you in the face and keep reading.

And anyway it's a myth that the 'people' ever had a keen appreciation of complex or avante garde artforms (and when I say 'myth' I do mean a cultural/ideological tool in the ongoing process of white male bourgeoisie ex-nomination). The prominence of popular culture has always existed, only in the form of unwritten songs, unrecorded events, unwritten opinions, because the producers and audiences were considered beneath critical evaluation.

The 'tyranny' of relativism is in my mind a direct result of the (perhaps still superficial) acceptance that no person's life is worth more than another's. J Lo's rich and the Microphones are poor, yes, but we don't need musical analogies to know that economic disadvantage is one of the more glaring discrepancies in our nominally equal society.

Having a bit of a brawl over aesthetics is a pleasure! Diving right in:

One thing I failed to articulate in my argument...was nicely said by Nitsuh. His distinction between "taste" and "aesthetic opinion" is something that I meant to include, or at least hint at -- but looking back at my initial post, I didn't, which could easily leave one with the impression, I think, that I was advocating a rather repressive outlook. I didn't mean to imply for one moment that there was no subjective element to music, quite the contrary -- when I said that they were "not purely relative" I meant precisely that -- in other words, that an objective component does exist (Tangentially, there seems to be some conflation happening of the relative and the subjective, which are two different things). Obviously music appreciation, and criticism, is a mixture of the subjective and the objective, as it is with any art; I'm certainly not so byzantine (nor foolish) as to suggest that it's purely objective. So Josh, yes, I certainly think that two informed individuals can form wholly different -- even diametrically opposed -- evaluations of a piece of music, and neither one is necessarily "incorrect" by any means. De Gustibus Non Disputandum Est, indeed -- and for that matter, intuitive reactions are part of the bread and butter of listening to, and loving, music, or any other art form. (We just have to be mindful of the premises upon which those intuitive reactions are based.)

Regarding Cage's "contempt" for the audience, I stand by my initial comment. I know that his writings, statements and even demeanor contradict it -- yet I still believe it's there in some of the music. I'm willing to concede that it's a highly subjective response, though.

Mitch said: "Isn't this what post-modernism is about?...The devaluation of the power of the author and the elevation of the importance of the audience's interpretation?" Hmmmmm. Frankly, I don't like the sound of that -- my first reaction is that it's anathema to my own aesthetic principles. If so, I guess I'm not a postmodernist, which hardly comes as a surprise. ;-) He also said, "If we reject notions of personal taste, then who shall we trust to produce a universal set of aesthetics for all to abide by?" Well, I haven't rejected the notion of personal taste, only the notion that it should reign supreme and function as the barometer of value. I certainly don't see having some sort of aesthetic Code of Hammurabi as valuable, nor was it something I intended to advocate. Off the top of my head, the only aesthetic absolute I'm willing to postulate is the same one for which I initially attacked Cage: I feel comfortable requiring intent. That doesn't mean microscopic control; algorithmic music can be perfectly viable, if you choose the right algorithms, and in general, any process can create something wonderful. As a composer at least, though, I see processes like those as a way of generating material, rather than as an end in and of itself. If the process happens to generate something worthwhile, that's great -- but I tend to think there's a correlation between the probability of worthwhile output, and the amount of control that one can trace back to the original algorithm (or premises of the process) -- in other words that one can tend to foresee at least part of the outcome of an algorithm or process that produces attractive results. I don't think the output of a fully random process tends to be interesting, no more than the other twenty billion books besides Hamlet produced by the monkeys chained to typewriters would tend to be interesting.

Kerry said: "I also think that an artist who 'confronts the audience with its own ignorance' is making an awful lot of assumptions about his or her audience, assumptions that even those wearing the Emperor's Old Clothes weren't making. In fact, historically speaking, appreciation of the arts required a great deal of recognition of myths, symbols, motifs." Well, music is not, and will never be, truly ahistorical, and there will always be a correlation between one's understanding of the signs and signifiers of a particular art form and one's ability to appreciate its subtleties. For instance, a Western musician, listening to certain types of Indian classical music and hearing a drone of C-F (with the F on top), would tend to assume that the F is the tonic and that the chord is inverted, since in Western music the fifth tends to be the normative sonority. However, as both observation and theory indicate, the C is often the tonic, and the fourth is treated as a viable normative interval. That's perhaps an overly theoretical example, but the point is that there will always be a differential in a listener's ability to appreciate any art, based on that person's understanding of innumerable factors, including its theory, its history, its social context, and so forth. I wrote more about this on my page a few weeks ago.

As for "confronting an audience with its own ignorance", I didn't intend to conjure the image of (for instance) some serialist composer, sternly lecturing the audience for being "ever so stupid". Rather, my point was simply that the commercialization of the arts consistently discourages artists from using a language that isn't instantly comprehensible and gratifying to the most uneducated, or inattentive, audience. When art is evaluated first and foremost by its ability to turn a profit, anything that would alienate any portion of the audience, even if it's something necessary to the aesthetic achievement of the work, is deprecated. Hence, the business-model of art avoids confronting people with, among other things, what they aren't equipped to understand, or aren't interested in putting any effort into appreciating. American orchestras don't play Schoenberg and Morton Feldman, because they believe that people don't understand those composers, or don't want to be challenged, even though their music is generally acknowledged to be of the highest order. So my intent wasn't to characterize audiences as ignorant, but rather to characterize the business-model as inherently catering to, and encouraging, ignorance, by deprecating the challenging in favor of the easily digested. And, yes, Britney Spears and Bach can co-exist, but if it were left to the mercy of the market, Bach would be dispensed with the moment he was no longer profitable. (Not that I pine for the system of patronage, either -- that had its own problems, to say the least.)

I certainly don't believe that "it's all gone downhill" since the 18th century, 19th century, or any particular point in time. It's true that, though there are areas in which history could be said to be at least partly teleological -- for instance, Western medicine and human rights -- I don't believe that, in the arts at least, subsequent developments have necessarily constituted "improvements" over what came before (so, for instance, Chopin isn't "better" than Mozart by dint of having access to a wider scope of accepted harmonic possibilities). That being said, though I do perceive a shift from the perception of art as revelatory and meaningful towards art as commercial entertainment, that in no way can be generalized to a belief on my part that the past 150 years (or whatever) have been a decline. That would, among many other things, neatly snip out 95% or more of my favorite music, including the entire genres of jazz, pop/rock, and electronic music, and most of the classical music I really love. The identification of a trend on my part does not sum up my beliefs about recent history as a whole, by any means!

Finally, I was roundly criticized off-list by a friend for conflating the political and the musical, and my muddled argumentation therein; the point is well taken, and I didn't intend to postulate aesthetic and ethical relativism as equivalencies.

So again, my purpose was not to deny the subjective and the personal -- only the notion that it should reign supreme. I mean, come on, I like Wesley Willis -- and while it's not inconceivable that I could defend him on aesthetic grounds, it'd be a largely silly idea. There's plenty of room in the world for taste (even bad taste!), and it need not always be grounded in argumentation or even rationality. I am almost wholly ignorant of the visual arts, and the fact that I like Mondrian and Kandinsky (for instance) is largely a function of intuitive affinity. I defend my right to have that affinity, but I don't claim that it's the product of any depth of understanding on my part, nor that it's equivalent to a deep critical examination. I do "just like it", but I acknowledge the fact that I lack the tools to articulate that liking, and that, knowing my ignorance, I should maintain an open mind as much as possible. (I don't need to feel guilty or inferior, just reasonably humble and receptive.) Thus, as a near-Philistine, when I am confronted with a painting which challenges me, or seems beyond my comprehension -- particularly a work that is said to be of value by people whose opinions I trust -- I know that I should strive to understand it, so long as I'm given grounds to believe that there was intelligent intent behind its creation.

Cage has intent: he intends that you listen, and don't spend your whole time in total panic-attac mode that you're not listening as the Great Dead Masters Require Us. His foray into TRUST of the audience — which is nothing to do with PoMo, which anyway doesn't exist as a coherent thing — seems to be what's frightening Phil, who doesn't like that ANY of these experiences are a two-way thing. An argument, a dialogue.

Not to say Cage was always coherent or uncontradictory in his position: on one hand, he was a total control freak on the manner of performance. On the other, late in life (in the 80s), with the various mesostic operas, I think he got into a shtick-groove and wrote-performed as a habit of himself (ran out of devices to banish the seduction of pre-formed structure, summink like that).

Re Duchamp: well, Cage's works operate as mind-gags, so yes. But above all HE WANTED YOU TO HEAR THEM.

Phil, I can't tell from your description of Water Music if you just encountered a lousy performance, or you feel the composition is intrinsically dud. (Incidentally, to complain about self- indulgence AND lack of intent strikes me as bizarre...)

Phil: 'intent' as a prequisite of 'value', hmmm... surely the ability of the history of the listener ( the viewer etc.) to bring unique worth to an artwork cannot be ignored, even when said worth was unintended by the author/artist? Using a Duchamp example again, when "A Bride Stripped Bare.." was accidentally broken, he declared it "finished". If the universe outside the artist interprets and evaluate his/her works, attributes worth where none is intended to exist, is this a 'lesser' form of quality, of value? There exist intelligent, informed listeners that enjoy Metal Machine Music, even if the intent of that record was to create unpalatable noise.

But might there be a connection between aesthetic and ethical relativism? And if so, how significant is it?

Phil, what's all this about Cage undermining intent? Everyone knows that he was fascinated by systems, by processes. Some of them were 'aleatory', but Cage is always totally present in the end result, if only because we've read the program notes, read his books, heard he used the I Ching, hunted for mushrooms, was into Buddhism. Or perhaps we've seen him, the charming, prissy old queen, on film. Whatever, nobody comes to Cage cold. We listen even to his silences with 'Cagean ears'. He is, to my mind, a more authoritative and intentional composer than just about any other in the 20th Century. Yes, there may have been a desire to get revenge on Schoenberg and the musical establishment, but that was done by a charm offensive resulting in a 'Cult of Cage' rather than by putting the listener in control.

You could say that every aleatory composer 'relinquishes creative control' in his own very distinctive -- and highly creative -- way. Eno's experiments with the Koan computer program still sound pretty Eno-like. Artistic intention is not so easily banished. Kick it out the front door and it comes in through the bathroom window.

As a practising musician, I'd also say that the choice of selling out and making three times as much money is not a realistic one. Personality is destiny. Again, the problem is escaping from Intent. People see through your shoddy motives. They see your discomfort, the fact that you're torn between integrity and the desire to be popular. The masses tend to buy records by artists without such conflicts: showbiz troopers like Robbie Williams, Elton John and Phil Collins. People whose personality profile matches 'actor' better than 'artist'. Who'd do and be anything to be popular.

I also resist the idea that where there are no objective standards, chaos, anarchy and 'horrors' inevitably ensue. It's like saying that only belief in God stops us all being murderers. You're forgetting empathy -- the same quality which makes us listen to the works of Cage, even when they're just the sound of a radio being tuned, and feel like he must have had something very profound to communicate. Empathy makes us construct artistic intent even where there is none. It makes the world go 'Bong! Pling! Parp!' It transforms the sound of paint pots and a transistor radio into 'The Fontana Mix'.

I think the Bach/Britney axis is mistaken. this 18th/21st century axis is an impossible one to pull off because of a shift in the pool of influences. Britney would be folk songs, perhaps, though the best of these folk songs are shot through with eccentricity and surprise, saomething only very occasional in Britney (the slower "baby baby, how was is uposed to know" bridge in 'baby...' fr'instance). Bust still, from apopulist view, one must remember that most history until perhaps the 60's was lofty at best, written by and for the posterity of a terribly narrow set. (there's a word that isn't 'elite' that slips my mind. distant, difficult to understand, but not especially british as it lacks the connotation of.. hoity toity. and i'v been sat here a good 15 minutes trying to think of it.) Bach might be Radiohead, there's certainly the same near-universal critical acknowledgement of Importance there.

Phil says: "American orchestras don't play Schoenberg and Morton Feldman, because they believe that people don't understand those composers, or don't want to be challenged, even though their music is generally acknowledged to be of the highest order."

I think someone's subjectivity is getting the better of him. Schoenberg and Feldman are not "generally acknowledged to be of the highest order"---Schoenberg and Feldman are not even generally known to exist, relative to global culture's widespread recognition of Bach or Presley. The general acknowledgement you speak of exists only among the miniscule cadre who happen to (a) know a whole lot about music and (b) approach that music in an particularly analytical way--- or, I suppose, (c): people who take more pleasure from listening to Vivaldi, but are willing to stipulate that if people such as (a) and (b) say Feldman's brilliant, they probably have a point.

So I'm not sure I follow any of the carping about how economics affects aesthetic consumption. Music is enjoyed and consumed by a higher proportion of the world public than ever before, and most of them seem to really, really like what they're hearing. Perhaps many of them would enjoy being exposed to the types of music that music- lover cognoscenti would argue are "better"---but that's a bit like saying that everyone should be made to go skydiving, as they might end up liking it a whole lot. As it stands, most people don't really care about music, and as such we have a music industry that churns out *product* for people who don't really care about music.

That was the source of my political analogy. The U.S. public-policy debate, for instance, tends to cater to people who don't really follow or care about the details of politics---everything is painted in broad, vague phrases about "opportunity" or "dignity" that leave many with no clue about what public policy issues exist and how political candidates plan to approach them. This, I'd assert, is a case in which *it matters* that most people don't care (see my response to Josh above). But in terms of the music market, how do we justify arguments that it matters? To extend on the art analogy in previous posts: does the fact that I drink cheap wine, or know very little about modern sculpture, constitute an intellectually unjustifiable lowering of standards in those particular fields?

Thus I'm in complete agreement with the art analogy, and have tried to formulate the same argument in similar debates in the past. The key is being able to mentally differentiate between the two sorts of "liking"---and to be able to admit, for instance, that if the only poem you've ever read in your life is by Robert Frost, perhaps your negative reaction to Hart Crane shouldn't carry much weight.

That said, I *do* think we'd be better off with an intellectual / aesthetic culture in which people sort of desired to or took pleasure in experiencing those things that are considered refined tastes. We seem to reject a whole lot of activities since they're seen as remnants of cultural elitism, class stratification, "snootiness," etc.---but my take has always been that wealthy, educated elites, who have access to just about any experience culture can offer, tend largely to choose those experiences that are, in the end, pretty good. Which is to say: to reject a cultural experience because it's the province of the elite is sort of like rejecting a million dollars because it's the province of the wealthy.

The above post, like many above posts, seems to me very intelligent and thoughtful and full of dedication. This is merely a footnote:

>>> Music is enjoyed and consumed by a higher proportion of the world public than ever before, and most of them seem to really, really like what they're hearing.

Well - many people like a lot of what they hear. But most of us also dislike - even hate - a lot of what we hear. Maybe that wasn't meant to be included in your account. I just think that a full account of 'the experience of music today' (let alone at some other time) would have to include a lot of negativity as well as all that positivity you mention.

Oops. Forgot to counter a possible objection to my opening argument, which would run, "If no one's heard of Schoenberg and Feldman, how can we know they don't actually like them better than Vivaldi?"

Answer: They don't. I mean, honestly. I will give you everything I own if you can get more than two members of Celine Dion's fan club to buy more than one Morton Feldman recording.

Hmmm... I'm going to a Gunther Schuller (Mr. "Third Stream") talk on Sunday; maybe I should ask him his opinion of both Celine and Feldman.

To go back to the original topic for a moment, I think when the average non-music-geek listener says "I just don't like it" they usually mean "I don't like it and I don't think analyzing why would be any fun for me", not "I don't like it and I don't believe any further analysis is possible." I hear the latter far more often from people who claim expertise in the subject.

It seems to me that there are two different bits of processing going on, and they can happen in either order, or at once. One is deciding whether you like something. This is almost entirely subjective, and primarily a visceral decision for most people, although it can be encumbered with as much other stuff as you can convince your synapses to tolerate, and of course you can change your mind over time. The other is deciding what artistic virtues and flaws you think it has, which is also often subjective, but sometimes by being really painstaking about defining terms and calibrating mutual reference points you can get to agreements that are close enough to objective for practical purposes.

The bulk of popular-music listeners, who only ask for music to be entertainment, not art, have no reason to care about the second point, and while it's arguably a significant loss in their lives, and the root cause of the overwhelming awfulness of most commercial music, even by superficial standards, you're probably not going to get anywhere trying to badger them into subjecting the music they think they like to criteria that don't matter to them. If you want to communicate with people who only care whether they like something or not, you have to somehow shift at least part of your argument into their defined sphere. The most promising opening, I think, is that even people who don't analyze or understand music at all are bound to resent the inevitable effects of their ignorance. They'll buy the album for the song they think they like, and hate the rest of it. Or they'll like it now, but they'll get sick of it in two weeks. This is the only operable definition of "bad taste" I've been able to come up with, in fact, the inability to extrapolate in any direction from your own responses. If you can convince them examining the music and their reactions to it a little more closely will tangibly reduce the frustration and disappointment in their lives, they might give you a chance.

But most music-geeks learn very quickly not to try to talk theory with commoners, especially not if you have to explain Duchamp and Cage before you can discuss them, thus these forums. I agree that Cage's efforts to eliminate intent from music (his own description, whether you think he succeeded or not) were profoundly wrongheaded and destructive, in much the same way that moral relativism makes trouble for ethics education. But we must confront these things. "4:33" should be in any serious art curriculum, even if it's our fondest hope that not a single person who sits through a performance of it rushes home to become a conceptual artist themselves. It isolates some crucial bits of truth about how we make and label "art", plus it's a lot shorter and easier to stage than the Ring Cycle.

The problem with trying to only judge art on artistic merit, removing all subjectivity from the process, is that without some personal value judgments, even the semi-objective things are virtually impossible to weigh against each other. We might be able to agree that a certain song's lyrics are poetically inventive, and that the music to which they are set is banal, but then what? Do good lyrics beat out ordinary music, or vice versa? It seems to me that the most valuable discussions have to account for both dimensions of analysis. What are we doing if not trying to help each other find more rewarding ways to relate to music? Conducting dissing contests, most likely, which is juvenile. This is why all those polarizing classic/dud/search/destroy formula threads are a waste of time, whether the voters back up "i like it" with "just because" or elaborate theories. Tallying up the yeses and nos doesn't improve anybody's life. Turning somebody's no into a yes, however, might. Even turning a yes into a no, if it establishes a context for turning some other nos into yeses, might be valuable. Reducing music to the quantifiability of structural engineering would only leave us in exactly the quandary engineering faces: building the bridge is easy; the hard parts are deciding which rivers to cross, and keeping the people on either side from beating the crap out of each other the moment they no longer have to risk drowning to do so.

As much as I'd like to consider myself an elitist, the idea that the majority of pop fans don't desire the presence of art in any of their music, even in some reduced way, doesn't sit all that well. Kudos for the engineering metaphor though, Glenn.

4'33" is NOT "CONCEPTUAL ART"! Nor is it "about what we label music", or "questioning notions of blah blah blah": it's about FUCKING LISTENING! He wanted you to listen ERGO he didn't want to destroy "intention" in music. He HATED the idea of "anything goes" as a corollary of what he was doing; he was always incredibly strict and bullying when it came to people altering aspects of his scores, instructions, instrumentation, and so on.

The story about his wanting revenge on Schoenberg is garbage, as well. As is the idea that Schoenberg was "the establishment" when Cage was his pupil: hard offhand to think of someone LESS the establishment at that particular time.

Glenn said: "They'll buy the album for the song they think they like, and hate the rest of it. Or they'll like it now, but they'll get sick of it in two weeks. This is the only operable definition of "bad taste" I've been able to come up with, in fact, the inability to extrapolate in any direction from your own responses."

And that is why I think Glenn is the most brilliant person alive.

Seriously: this is the neatest little intellectual turn-around I have ever seen. The argument usually runs that the concept of "bad taste" is defined by aesthetic elites, and as such is forced upon common people who have absolutely no need of it. That argument is sometimes true and sometimes not, which makes it very hard to justify the "bad taste" concept in those instances where it really does *not* seem to be rooted in elitism. Glenn's argument completely bats that problem aside by providing what I'd never thought possible: a utiliarian advantage to what's normatively known as "good taste."

Of course, those with bad taste have a loophole: they can just ask friends with slightly better taste to recommend records. The aesthetic elite, in a sense, does all of the classification legwork for everyone else, which is as close to the root purpose of a traditional music critic as I can think of: they tell the public what the public would probably like best.

Not that it always turns out that way, but. . .

Though we're talking about 'defining' 'bad taste', i.e. pinning down what 'bad taste' means, and in such cases often words are given new meanings, like the one Glenn gives, I think he's missed an important aspect of most everyone's usage of the word 'taste'. Namely, 'taste' is an inclination toward certain things over certain other things, a propensity to make judgments of things in certain ways, to like or dislike. Glenn's definition turns taste into the capacity to change one's inclinations. But he would say, I think that taste (in his sense) is only good when it's the capacity to change one's inclinations in favor of something 'good', leaving intact the notion that someone with good taste, in the usual sense, would already like the thing being judged (which may be why the thing is supposed to be 'good' - I'm not sure at the moment if one is prior to the other).

I definitely think this capacity is laudable and desirable, but it's not 'good taste', nor is the lack of it bad taste. It's something else.

As for the 'dissing contests,' I think Glenn's right that a lot of the C/D / S/D etc. threads here get a little numbing. But that's because they're overdone, and done not all that well, often. Knowing whether a lot of the people here like something (or don't!), and a bit on why, is helpful within the context of our knowing things about one another. I'm not really partial to glammy-type music, so if for example Ned speaks kindly of someone and talks about the apparent Bowie influence in their music, it helps me know that I might want to put that band on the back burner on my mental check-this-out list. Or similarly, if it sounds like something I might like, for other reasons, but Ned also says it's glammy, I might see that as my opportunity to find ways to explore glammy music in general. Likewise for shedding additional light on music that I already like, or don't when I've heard it. Those 'waste of time' threads have the potential to change nos into yeses, etc.

I have more to say I guess but I'm trying to take it bit by bit.

Of course Cage had intent. Randomized noise is when the ceiling falls in in the middle of the performance. It was random, ie entirely unplanned. If Cage turns on the radio / sits down at the piano bench and plays nothing, he's already put some intent into the results. Just because the results are less rigidly controlled in some ways than notes on a page doesn't mean it lacks intent. Say a pianist is playing a Bach piece and the piano is out of tune. Does it cease to be a Bach piece? The pianist isn't playing A440, he's playing A338 and that isn't the A that Bach intended. If it doesn't cease to be a performance of a Bach piece because Bach didn't instruct the pianist to play A338, then all music must necessarily have some degree of chance involved. And if chance is involved in all music, then to reject Cage's pieces as lacking intent, we must draw a line in the sand as to how much is 'enough'. I wouldn't dare, frankly.

I also dislike when people try to dismiss theories like cultural relativism out of hand because it 'doesn't work'. If the argument holds logically, then we must deal with the consequences. Otherwise, we look like the crazy farmer, pouring the milk into the bucket with the hole in it and saying "what are you staring at?"

The thing about Cage trying to purge his work of intent wasn't a deduction I made from observing or analyzing his music, it's something I remember from studying his own comments about his work in college, in preparation for participating in a recital of some of them. I agree that depending on how you define "intent", you could argue that Cage's music has just as much of it as "Sister Christian". But Cage himself thought, or at least said, that he was trying to get rid of it. Unless I'm misremembering, which is possible. It was a while ago.

As for "4:33" being or not being "conceptual art", I didn't mean that to be a controversial idea either. It's the most prominent work of conceptual art most people know of. If we can't agree on a definition that simple, then little wonder we have such a hard time agreeing on anything subtler. And yes, in part it's about listening, but it is also a work of art that applies the label "art" to something that is not normally considered such (as do Duchamp's readymades), which means it's also very much about how we define art. This too seems like a very simple and uncontroversial assertion.

As for Josh's good point about "good taste", I think it's possible that "taste" is such a muddled concept that "good taste" and "bad taste" are not opposites. I don't have a working definition of "good taste". Pretty much the only usage of it that I feel like I understand is when it's said of interior decorators, in which case it almost always means the ability to look at objects or materials in one context (a store, a catalog) and predict how they're going to look in another context (the target room). When it's used about music, it invariably means that the person who has the taste mostly likes the same bands as the person praising it.

Read in the Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music tonight that Cage's aim was to write a `musical composition the continuity of which is free of individual taste and memory (psychology) and also of the literature and tradition of the art,' which I think means we might say that he was working to do away with intent in the traditional western sense - but of course writing and performing compositions to do so is still intentful, maybe just not as "much" (if that makes any sense). There's probably a tension here between getting rid of intent leading to intentionlessness, and getting rid of intent leading to meaninglessness (within a certain tradition) - by which dichotomy I mean intentionlessness to be farther-removed, somehow, from human activity. (I can't go into what I mean at the moment, though - and this is jut a thought, one I don't want to derail this other discussion about taste - the main point is that I think Cage both did and didn't purge his work of intent. Ooh, how zen.)

Apologies for possible muddle above, tired and entering this with a browser such that I only get to see 30 characters of a line at a time which is murder for someone with long sentences like me.

APOLOGIES TO ALL FOR EXTREME DEFENSIVE RATTINESS ABOVE, RE CAGE :

I just felt he was being treated as the pathological extreme case, this irresponsible pomo clown who destroyed everything which Good and Decent. Based on an academic "version~ of his aesthetic which had little or no sanction in his actual work.

Not that he isn't an intensely complex, contradictory figure: but of course THAT'S what that should be studied, not what bogue academic art "historians" think is his "contribution".

Re: Conceptual Art. Isn't the "problem" (or indeed the glory) with CA that it's ALL intent and no content?

Tried to say this earlier but it got complicated: I think 'good taste' is equivocal. For instance someone who, parallel to Glenn's interior designer, is good at deciding whether a record will be appropriate to a given context has 'good taste' in music. May be arguably different from but interrelated with 'good taste' as an assessment of the list of a person's yeas or nays, independent of the context the music actually appears in. (Ex: a good wine connoisseur knows what wines to recommend for when. Hence has 'good taste'. But someone who always had a 77 Merlot, or whatever, with every meal - pasta, peanut butter sandwiches, etc. - would not have 'good taste' (would they have 'bad taste'?).) I'm sure you can think of many more usages, different senses of the term.

Exercise to mull over: make a list of who you think has 'good taste' and 'bad taste' (in general - say, "teenyboppers" or "classical bores" or whatever - and specific, say "my uncle Fred"). Try to do it without thinking too hard - just think of a person, say "does it sound right to say 'X has good taste in music'?" - also then analyze your list and see if you agree with your choices, and try to explain to yourself why you made them. I've been playing this game at home tonight and it's very, very revealing.

Wait: I think some of us (Glenn included, for some reason) are backing off a little from the implications of both Glenn's original argument (about the negative effects of one's own bad taste) and his extension of it (re: interior decorators). The implication of both is that while it's difficult to defend the idea of absolute taste (i.e., liking X is "good," liking Y is "bad"), we can define taste as something else entirely: the ability to make accurate, useful, *utilitarian* distinctions between different pieces of art. One's "good taste" is established not by what one likes and does not like, but by one's ability to discern between the elements of the two. Example:

Two people stand in front of two canvases, both of which are painted entirely back. Person A says, "These are identical black canvases, and I don't them." Person B says, "I don't like them either, but they're not identical: you can see that the patina on this one is completely different."

It mainly seems like an ability to compartmentalize and distinguish between *elements* of a particular work. Most gut-reaction listeners form opinions in a very Gestalt fashion---either it works or it doesn't. This new Glenn-derived definition of "taste" explains how some listeners can listen to a Phil Collins track and say, "Well of course, this sucks, but I must admit the production on that left- channel percussion track is just spectacular."

I think we all know I meant *black* and *like* in the second paragraph, above.

As I've been told the locus classicus of the problems with 'taste' is David Hume's account. Shamefully I have not read it myself, but maybe I will do so in the near future. Maybe the dude's got something that will help us out.

I hadn't read that Hume piece before, and it certainly echoes this conversation. Two things in it I found really interesting:

1. He doesn't do a very good job, I think, differentiating between the analytical process of recognizing the individual virtues and flaws of a work and the judgmental process of weighing them against each other. He declares that failings of the organs may affect a person's ability to recognize the characteristics of a work, which seems reasonable enough, but then, after going through a long list of reasons why one person's opinion about those characteristics could differ radically from another's, he states as a basic criterion of rational discourse that the participants "must acknowledge a true and decisive standard to exist somewhere". He does not, as far as I can tell, demonstrate the existence of such a thing in matters of taste, although he hints at a sort of circular "learned men generally agree, therefore there must be a standard to which they are commonly referring" assumption.

2. Even more intriguing, and perhaps telling, is that in making this semi-circular argument he touches on the very difference between art and science that tarden began this conversation with. Reversing our usual formulation, he claims that since scientific work falls out of favor quickly, while artistic work endures, aesthetic judgments must not be so elusive after all. But this seems fairly idiotic to me. Scientific matters do not "fall out of favor", they are refuted. An argument about whether the earth's orbit is circular is very different than an argument about whether the ending of Romeo & Juliet is a cop-out. Individual scientific works spend short lives as the state of the art, but as syllogisms they are immortal. "If x then y" remains valid even after we've discovered that not x. Nothing of this certainty can be said about art. The long lives of old artworks, in fact, seems like one of the most glaring indications that art isn't much amenable to reason.