On Good Taste

“Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.” Thus spoke Pablo Picasso with the pithy acumen of a coffeehouse poet—and yet he forgot to mention that good taste is the conscience of art. It’s the Jiminy Cricket that whispers in an artist’s ear when he begins to go astray. For good taste is not the enemy of art. God forbid! It is the dyke that keeps our creative energies flowing in a direction rather than spilling amorphously into the field, flooding the crops meant to feed future generations. Verily, a closer look at this seemingly benign statement reveals not wisdom, but pessimism, because the logical conclusion is chaos (which, when it becomes a creed, is another way of saying nihilism).

Milan Kundera has written that the baroque architecture of Prague is kitsch, and that, in fact, the entire city has been stamped by bad taste. If this is so, we are left with a conundrum: Why do so may people want to see Prague? The Charles Bridge, Old Town Square and Wenceslas Square on an average summer day are teeming with visitors from near and afar. Are visitors kitsch? Indeed, are people kitsch? They are if you are a cynic.

  

One of the more insidious projects of Modernism has been its assault on good taste, which expresses itself in the minds of artists as a kind of “sapophobia,” if you will—a neurotic fear of good taste which collects within the soul of the artist, festering in his chest, growing, spreading and ultimately blocking the vital connection between mind and heart. For the key to understanding good taste is to know that it lives in the heart. That is why it is so easily recognized—the reason it is universally understood—and why art is an uplifting experience. Indeed, to devote one’s life to it is to undertake a great ascent.

The danger in Mr. Picasso’s statement may not be evident at first glance. By putting undue emphasis on creativity, Picasso is obscuring the value of art. For all art is creative, but not all creative things are art. The creative process is more akin to pregnancy than birth, and, at a certain level, Pablo is promoting the act of conception while shirking the responsibility of bringing up baby.