The Right to have Bad Taste

¿Have you ever thought that a bad, sour wine from somewhere around the corner is better than a good Spanish rioja or a French cabernet or an Italian sangiovese? For someone who likes wine the difference is sublime and obvious. Now imagine that someone would tell you that they prefer the bad, sour wine from around the corner, and also adds that in the end is only about taste; i.e. that there is no qualitative difference from a random experiment with grapes and a traditionally exceptional rioja or cabernet or sangiovese.

Imagine someone telling you that because he prefers a street hotdog than an Argentinian cut or a top-rate salmon, it is also a matter of taste, and there is not qualitative difference from eating in a food cart than in a good prestigious restaurant. It is all about individual choices and there is no objective quality that ranks some things above others. Now imagine this same person telling you that because more people drinks Smirnoff Ice, or some popular mezcal, massively produced and with extensive marketing for the poor Average Joe, than they drink an eighteen year Scotch, the popular Smirnoff or the burdensome bad quality mezcal are actually better than the Scotch. Or that the random experiment with grapes be better if people drink it and like it more than the rioja and so forth. Sounds ridiculous, isn't it?

Food and drinks are aesthetical experiences, just as music is for hearing, writing is for reading, films are for watching, and so forth. ¿Have you ever heard someone arguing that Independence Day is a better movie than The Godfather? ¿Or that there is no better or worse, because in the end it's a matter of taste, so that it cannot be argued that The Godfather is better in quality than Independence Day? ¿How about comparing Twilight with Hamlet? ¿Or Lady Gaga and Pitbull with Beethoven and Mozart? ¿Or the average street painter with Rembrandt and Picasso? These comparisons, as coarse and brute as they sound, are the logical conclusion of the utilitarian belief that aesthetical experiences are always a matter of taste, and there is no inherent beauty behind artistic expressions; i.e. a metaphysical aesthetical reality that cannot be gauged by the scientific method that only studies physical phenomena.

However some believers in science-as-religion (i.e. not in science-as-science), think that because the scientific method for studying nature has been so successful, only through that method any kind of reality can be grasped and known. Following this premise the only way of knowing what is better and what is worse in artistic expressions is by studying the statistical aggregate of all individual preferences. This leaves Beethoven and Mozart as objects of a minority cult of intellectuals and Pitbull and Lady Gaga as the peak of our civilization. The same can be said of the author of Twilight viz. Shakespeare, or the author of A Game of Thrones viz. Virgil or Dante or Cervantes or Goethe and so forth. Hence, they mistake virtue with popularity, two very distinct things. Of course this is the product of a confusion in some scientists that mistake their method with objective reality. This is translated ideologically as liberal thinking: the idea that individual preferences and choices cannot be morally or aesthetically judged. But they can be judged. To explain this we must understand a couple of things about ignorance.

I think there are three types of ignorance. (1) when someone simply don't know something because it hasn't been taught to him. (2) when someone physically can't know something, as when they are blind and ignore what colors are. (3) When someone is ideologically handicapped to understand something that is within his intellectual reach.

The supreme nature of a masterwork of art, like the 9th symphony or The Aeneid or Gone with the Wind or Macbeth and so forth, can be known. It can be taught to anyone, but it the teaching of it doesn't guarantee that they are going to like it. The masterwork has an inherent aesthetical value independent of our individual preferences. We can acknowledge this, or we can suffer the second and third types of ignorance, so that we cannot understand what is it that makes Beethoven far superior than Pitbull, and we might deduce that Pitbull is better that the German composer because it happens that we extract from it more utility. Hence we suffer from blindness. Our ignorance blocks our understanding and our ability to see the sublime nature of a real and true work of art viz. a popular combination of rhythms. The third type of ignorance can recognize the beauty of Beethoven, but thanks to scientific ideology that disregards anything metaphysical, i.e. the human condition itself, we would conclude that there is no qualitative difference between our taste and that of the common people.

This is inevitable in thinking that only extension is subject to knowledge and not intention. Science can understand everything except the human condition, because everything human is filled with intention and lacks extension. That is, it's filled with metaphysical meaning and devoid of physical relevance (I'm vaguely using Collingwood against Russell in this argument). Masterworks of art have an aesthetical intention of beauty, virtue and are ultimately the peaks of civilization's achievements. The only extension that they have is how many people like them, and how much utility they extract from it.

The problem with liberals and those of economic intellectual orientation is that they do not understand that there is a taste for garbage and bad things. People can consciously enjoy and like something qualitatively bad. People can have bad tastes. And there is nothing wrong with it. But not because it is not wrong it follows that there are no qualitative differences between high culture and popular culture. I myself like Pitbull's music very much. I think it's perfect for parties, perfect for a joyful time, I extract a lot of utility from him. But I also acknowledge that it's a bunch of garbage, and I have the right to like and enjoy garbage, just as some times I enjoy the food carts better than a delicious restaurant, or watching a terrible movie like Schwarzenegger's Commando (a movie I like a lot) than The Godfather. Another example: I don't like Shakespeare as much as I think I should. I don't extract from it the sublime experience I get from Tolstoy, Virgil or Dostoyevsky. But not because I don't feel so much attracted to his plays, he is less of a genius. I'm the one with the problem. It is me the one that cannot connect with his art. I'm the one suffering from ignorance. But the masterwork remains the same.

Now, the difference between liking Mozart more than Beethoven, or Tolstoy more than Dostoyevsky, or Milton more than Shakespeare, or Homer more than Virgil, is a matter of taste, because we are talking about geniuses and their masterworks. You can prefer one over the other without degrading the any of them. We acknowledge the geniality of all of them and we pick our preferences among them. But what we cannot do is following this same reasoning with other artistic expressions that are intuitively of a lower level.

In few words, the perception of a work of art does not depend exclusively in the affection created in the subject in the form of utility. The reality of a trully artistic work lies in its capacity to imitate beauty in itself, as a virtue and as a sign of excellence viz. mediocrity. Just because someone might enjoy more the visage of a public housing project architecture over Florence Cathedral or Istambul's Hagia Sofia doesn't mean that all qualitative, metaphysical, aesthetical differences are levelled. Anyone unable to comprehend this suffers from a dreaful lot of ignorance.