August 17, 2007

• taste

  First let me say that in the below I am concerned primarily with “taste” as it refers to opinions about artistic works. I am not talking about “taste” as it refers to actual physical sensations such as the taste of “food” or something which is probably much easier to objectify.

  The other day I noted that on this site where one can rate the movies one has seen that I had rated an inordinate number of movies highly. You’d think that you’d end up with some sort of even distribution of ratings, but for me at least I found very few movies that I rated at the 1 or 2 star level whereas there were an enormous number rated at the 4 and 5 star level.  More precisely when I did the count it was:

  72 5 stars
  81 4 stars
  28 3 stars
  6 2 stars
  5 1 star

  The site just pops up random movies to me and I rate the ones I’ve seen so it isn’t like I was looking for my favorite films so I could rate them. The site defines 3 stars as “I liked it” and 2 stars as “I didn’t like it” and so on from there. So basically what this means is that I like pretty much everything. Really. There is virtually no story at all that I don’t like, and most I really like  or even love. Even some of the ones I rated low I don’t think I really disliked but since the site has a recommendation feature I rated some with 2 stars just because I didn’t want the site to recommend anything like that to me in the future. Really looking over the list, only 4 can I honestly say I actively disliked and feel passionately about it.

  My experience with similar systems for rating books or anime or video games is pretty much the same. I find myself largely positive about all of the works of art I have experienced from the most minor to the most extreme. Very little that I have seen or experienced really bothers me.

  Perhaps this is somewhat predictable since most people I think will tend toward experiencing the things that they know they will enjoy and will stay away from things that they are likely to dislike. But is that really the reason?  Or am I inordinately inclined to like things others would not. Perhaps the truth is that the things I choose to experience or stay away from are arbitrary decisions and that had I experienced the things I thought I would dislike I would find myself liking them after all. And indeed there is evidence for this as virtually every time I go outside of my comfort zone and experience a work of art that is unusual for me that someone recommended I find myself liking it a great deal. Basically I often declare that pretty much anything with a story, I suspect I will like.

  So then where does the concept of taste come from? Is it simply that I have been born a person inherently lacking in it?  Or is it rather that the concept of taste is a kind of mass delusion, much like fandom is a mass delusion. There’s no reason for you to root for the Sports teams of the cities near where you live or for any other sports team unless you happen to know someone on the team or directly connected to the team and are acting in support of that person. The rest is just a delusional attitude that people adopt because it passes the time and because it makes social interactions easier and more pleasant. So too with other fandoms and most of the others are even less practical since fandom for a certain movie star or whatever doesn’t really provide any benefit whereas getting a city behind a sports team may provide financial benefits to the city and the region or even foster greater levels of cooperation amongst its citizens. It’s still delusional though.

  Taste is likewise I think. By being “discerning” you distinguish yourself from others which creates a point of conversation a thing that can be discussed. You can even make a living out of it, if you con enough people into thinking your taste is somehow more “refined” than others. Hence the critics fill their writings with flower language and pointless references to other works in order to make it seem as if they are smarter and more cultured than the rest of us poor slobs.

  More naturally though I think the few real distinctions in taste arise from our life experiences. If you had a negative experience and some movie happens to show the same experience and place the blame entirely upon the character representative of you well then you aren’t likely to like that movie very much are you? Similarly if you are a fan of a comic book series and a movie professes to be a realization of that comic book series but turns out to be radically different, and ruins the characters you like and likewise changes things then you aren’t likely to like that movie either. 

  It can go the other way too. Some experience you may have had may well be so perfectly captured by a film that it resonates with you. Some movie might express a message that you need to hear right now and it might change your life. As a result of such an experience you may find yourself loving those movies and thinking they are masterpieces regardless of what other people say.

  I think this is a large part of why we even bother to discuss works of art with one another besides just the need to fill the empty silences. We are often looking for clues into each other’s nature. We talk about things just in the hopes of finding out what kinds of experiences we each have had that make us who we are. A movie or a book can be a window into discussing deeper matters that people care about a lot more but don’t know how to bring up.

  But for a vast majority of artistic works you experience, you probably won’t have any substantive connections with the work. Mostly they’re just stories and you can choose to hate or love them or not care about them at all on a whim. And I think that under ordinary circumstances most of us will just look for the good in the experience and say that we “liked” it. This is natural since it makes us feel better about having spent the time to experience the thing. If we think about the bad aspects of an experience we’d have to say we “disliked” it and then we’d have to wonder about why we bothered to experience it in the first place.  Then again, you might be a person who naturally just loves the act of criticizing things. In that case then you can dislike anything and everything if you want because you’ll feel the experience is worth while since you get to take pleasure in finding the flaws and weak points. I think that in some ways I have that tendency too. Indeed I think it is an attitude cultivated in academia. There are strong incentives in academia for being a skilled and brutal critic.

  Then again, there’s also the social factor.  People tend to like things that the people they interact with like. And they tend to dislike things that the people they interact with dislike. So generally it almost seems like a game of race to an opinion. Whoever comes up with a solid opinion about a work of art first becomes the trend setter and all of the rest in the group follow suit adopting the same opinion. Sometimes you hit an individual dissenting voice but that doesn’t disrupt the interaction because that dissent can be incorporated easily into the overarching narrative. Every group has a crazy person who disagrees with the norm. Making fun of that person’s opinion on this particular work of art or trying to understand it becomes a valuable point of conversation for the group. Still by and large on most works of art the group will agree.

  Of course if none of these things were true, and people were simply perfect evaluators and perfectly honest evaluators based on some inexplicable internal capacity called “taste”, I wonder if the end results would look pretty much the same?

  • 5:32 pm
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