Taste

The thing at stake in the "crisis of criticism"

I took it personally when my Hunter students would engage in negative self-talk. They didn’t mean much by it, usually it was a way they could endear themselves to their classmates by way of self-deprecation. Maybe I’m just dumb, it took me several times reading this to understand, someone might say, and others would affirm that a reading was difficult. This is such a bad draft, I’m almost embarrassed for you to read it, and everyone would chime in with their experience of having a rough time writing a rough draft. (Quotes are not verbatim, only meant to capture the spirit of their comments.) It also served the purpose of preempting anything they said or wrote as not not necessarily worthy of critical interrogation, to lower expectations, soften the reaction. I didn’t like it.

Not just because I wanted them to believe in themselves and their perspective (to be a writer, I’ve always believed, is to possess some level of arrogance—if you are asking someone to spend their leisure time with you, you must think you and your work are superlative), but because it was an insult to me. The process of applying to Hunter works similarly to most MFA programs, in that there is a written portion, but differently in that after the number of applicants is whittled down from initial mass, we we could conduct interviews. We (only two of us in nonfiction) selected people not only on the basis of talent on the page, but from a sense that they were professional, mature, responsible, smart, engaging, interesting people. Which is all to say, the choices of students were a reflection of my personal taste (negotiated alongside my colleague, but that doesn’t negate that they were my choices, since I did need to agree), and for those students to then turn around and talk down about themselves, for me, suggested they didn’t think I had good taste.

You can argue this is a stretch, or that I was taking too personally a common human behavior, but I’m sensitive. I take a lot of things personally when I perhaps shouldn’t.

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When I started this newsletter, part of the reason was to establish myself as someone with great taste. I had a number of interests I wanted to explore, and do some deep dive exploration of their cultural meaning, but ultimately the idea was: I know better than you. That is the not-so secret weapon of the critic, a sense that their taste is better than the average person. Without that, a critic is another person opining, and in an era where anyone, anywhere, is able to put forth an opinion and have people see and engage with it, something must separate the critic from chronic poster, if the idea of criticism is to mean anything. A critic needs to be an arbiter of good taste.

This is where we get to the axiom: taste is subjective. Sure. People like different things. Which leads us to the millennial dictum: let people like things. OK. If people want to like things that are not good, we should let them. So what is the critic, whose purpose is apply their sense of taste to discerning what is and is not good, to do in the face such ambivalence toward what they do? Every serious working critic seems to be scrambling to figure it out.

Over the past few years, I’ve read the thoughts of Merve Emre, Becca Rothfeld, Lauren Oyler, Andrea Long Chu, Christian Lorentzen, and others on the subject, and they all differ. They’re all worth reading—if you care. Which is the thing the critic is really up against. Finding a solution to the “crisis in criticism” is important if you are a critic, existentially and professionally. It’s important if you enjoy reading good criticism, if you see criticism and good taste as something worth preserving, whether it’s for political or aesthetic reasons.

But what we all have to reckon with this: the world of people who care is small and insular. Our reasons for reading criticism are at odds with the way the reading and viewing public wants to engage with cultural work. I think of it in these terms: when I was starting this newsletter, I was watching a lot of YouTube creators whose hook was reviewing spirits (a lot of what had become dubbed “WhiskeyTube”). As someone who was interested in refining my tastes around which poison I was consuming, it was valuable to have people who spent time tasting many different expressions of scotch, bourbon, rye, who honed their palettes to distinguish flavor differences between something that spent three years in the barrel versus ten, who knew the impact of increased wheat or barley in the mashbill, or why the climate impacted the aging process. It led me to my own exploration, my own palette refinement, a discernment of what I would enjoy but also what is and is not quality. Taste.

That means something to me. But if you’re drinking only to get drunk, does it matter? In that case, alcohol is alcohol; any version will do the trick. I got into coffee (I have a tendency to get really into things and want to know all about them) and suddenly felt I needed to know the difference between a single origin Ethiopian light roast and a Peruvian dark roast. But what if all you want is a caffeine boost? The developed taste of the critic is null and void because your goals are not aligned. Taste being subjective isn’t the issue, it’s that for some people taste doesn’t matter.

Should it? For the critic, the answer is obvious. Taste is their (our) lifeblood. It’s not always apparent to the larger public why it does. The critic must convince them. But it’s easy to dismiss the critic and their insistence that taste is not something strictly inherit to the individual but can be learned and cultivated. Critics are, perhaps to the chagrin of most of them, still people like the rest. And the pretentiousness that is endemic to the profession can be a turn off.

So, the critic must either reconcile themselves to the fact they will only ever speak to others who are like them, who take cultural work seriously and believe good taste is imperative to a good life, or find a way to change the minds of those who drink only to get drunk—to persuade them that a richer experience lies on the other side. It’s no easy task. The stakes of bad taste must be clear and important enough to warrant reorientation.

What are the stakes of bad taste? With the respect to art, it’s not as clear as if we apply the idea of bad taste to the world of politics—bad taste in politics destroys lives. What are the stakes of bad taste in art? I’m not always sure. What some critics would like to do is link the ideas: bad taste in art leads, in some way, to the degradation of politics, to populace disengaged from the act of critical thinking, and therefore receptive to the most vicious ideas and policies. Some would like to untangle the two: we do not need good taste in art because it has some political significance, but because it is good unto itself (I’m wildly oversimplifying here).

Perhaps there is no answer, it’s more philosophy than science, and all we have is endless debate. Taste either matters to you or it doesn’t; just don’t insult mine.