ON TASTE : YOU’LL KNOW IT WHEN YOU SEE IT

Some notes, queries, speculations and musings on taste and taste makers designed to jiggle the Sunday morning faculties:

Though the link is unlikely in the extreme, taste shares one property with pornography: You can’t define it, but you know it when you see it.

Formal definitions will include adjectives such as sensitive, discriminating, critically discerning and appreciative. But taste is, in essence, an indispensable component of the aesthetic impulse.

Popularly, we link it with fashion. Or the haute monde or in being chic. But in tracing backwards from convention to metier to style to coterie to formal experiment to inspiration, somebody was there at the beginning to put an idea into sensory motion.

That’s where Calendar’s annual lineup of taste makers comes in.

Picasso once said, “You do something and somebody comes along and does it pretty.” The Calendar list is an attempt to find out what shapes some of the people who shape our perceptions, with the expectation that they know what precedes the pretty (assuming too that they intuitively understand the equation between taste and singularity, before taste falls into art’s outhouse, the commercial).

Thackeray once defined genius as the art of selection. Assuming that every committed practitioner in a given form has access to the same information, what distinguishes the expression that “takes” from that which doesn’t? Does taste reside in the choice of how to go about communicating the illusion of newness most effectively? Maybe taste is a synonyn for selection too, and what happens after that is a matter of dumb luck. Van Gogh is probably the most popular painter in the world today. He sold exactly one painting in his lifetime.

Is it given to the artist to know when he (or she) scratches, as Beckett put it, “the itch to make,” if it will sound the chord his culture didn’t know it was lonely to hear?

Which leads to the question, is popular taste an oxymoron? For example, do Madonna’s glad-rags and Marilyn Monroe posturing represent taste? One definition of the generation gap may lie in the distinction between the kids who have taken up her improvisational lacy look (kids are always looking for an emblematic expression of their sense of apartness--remember the granny glasses, pioneer skirts and ironed hair of the ‘60s?) and the adults who find the look a hysterically funny sight of culture and camp collapsing into each other’s arms.

Actually, culture and camp merged long before Madonna and her classmates arrived on the scene. We’re living in an era in which culture has cannibalized itself to such an extent that it keeps on regurgitating increasingly watery replicas of earlier icons. Talk shows don’t offer conversation; they offer the sales spiels of recycled celebs. Marilyn Monroe created a profoundly sexual disturbance in American society that reached so deep that it took on a mythic proportion. There is nothing sexual about Madonna. Madonna is play-sex. Kid-stuff. She touches on our nostalgia for sexual innocence. Sex was never less innocent than it is now. Sex never meant AIDS.

Madonna is on the December cover of Vanity Fair. Tina Brown is Vanity Fair’s editor. She’s also one of the taste makers on our list. She’s on to something.

A philosopher named Vauvenargues in a 1746 work called “Reflections” wrote, “To have taste it is necessary to have soul.” Changing the social context slightly, is the white manifestation of taste comparable to the manifestation of what blacks call “soul”?

The general historical-philosophical view of taste has generally been summed up in the phrase, “De gustibus non est disputandum.” You can’t dispute it, and you can’t account for it either. After Epicurus, most philosophers didn’t try.

But not all.

Samuel Johnson said, “Men may be convinced, but they may not be pleased against their will.”

Henry Adams said, “Everyone carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it triumphantly wherever he travels.”

John La Farge said, “The full use of taste is an act of genius.”

Joseph Ruskin went so far as to say, “Taste is the only morality.”

In “Notes on a Money Unit,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Tastes cannot be controlled by law.”

And La Rouchefoucauld observed, “Good taste is a product of judgment rather than of intellect.”

That may be one of the reasons we have a problem with it and are so hell-bent on trying to legislate what once belonged in the realm of sensibility--our technology of mass communications have become so prodigious that we confuse viewing with experience, and hence lack judgment.

Lily Tomlin, echoing Ambrose Bierce, said, “A lot of what passes for corruption these days is simply a matter of bad taste.”

Your correspondent offers this modest view: “Taste is what you express when you’re being true to yourself and sensible to your surroundings. Bad taste is what you think you can get away with.”

In any case, let’s see what this year’s taste makers have to offer about what shaped them.