Not long ago, I enjoyed a spirited conversation with a highly perceptive and well-informed observer of our contemporary cultural landscape—a conversation mostly concerned with the quality of art criticism as practiced today in the principal forums of informed opinion: university lecture halls and scholarly journals. My friend and I readily agreed that the cultural terrain we surveyed was disappointing, to say the least: a barren and monochrome landscape. We thus echoed a familiar lament, repeated often over the years, he, in far more articulate terms than I.
As I later reconsidered some of the points we discussed, it occurred to me that a contributing factor to the ills that we were so strenuously deploring was the absence, in contemporary criticism, of one important ingredient. Simply put, it seemed that the role of taste—yes, taste—had so dramatically diminished in the dialogue on art that it had virtually disappeared. Taste no longer an ingredient of art criticism? … Impossible. Surely my memory was again playing tricks on me. How could taste not be accounted for in any serious discourse dealing with artistic expression? And yet, try as I might, only irrelevant recent references came to mind: the oddly titled exhibition A Taste of Angels, Gerald Reitlinger’s rather too venal Economics of Taste, and the impossibly snobbish display of Princely Taste. No doubt about it; taste was no longer common currency in today’s cultural bazaar. Undeterred, I continued my search.
It was like trying to locate an
