4
Taste, Criticism and Journalism
Identifying Beauty and Good Taste
The concept of taste acquired great significance in the eighteenth century and was the subject of much
debate. As the idea of a public for art took hold, so did a concern that this public, more inclined to offer
opinions on art, should do so in an informed and appropriate manner. This public expected sound, reliable
criteria in the judgments of critics and amateurs. To be a “man of taste” (the distinction was rarely
applied to women) became a sign of social cachet as well as the height of fashion:
...for some years a reputation as a man of taste has been as sought after among those who would
distinguish themselves as was, in Molière’s time, that of a man of wit ... there are teachers of this skill
as well as proselytes; the accomplished wit has been replaced by the virtuoso, each house wishing to
have its own.
(Mercure de France, 1754, cited in Wrigley, 1993, 192; my translation)Particular themes run through eighteenthcentury debates on taste and criticism. First, there were varying
opinions on whether it was possible to identify an objective standard of beauty and taste, or whether this
was difficult due to the fact that individual assessments of artworks were bound to be subjective or
relative. Second, there was the issue of whether beauty became evident to the man of taste through a
process of abstract reasoning, or whether the identification of beauty central to the operations of taste was
essentially empirical – a matter of practical experience – of comparing, contrasting and forming an
opinion on works of art in order to cultivate sound judgments on their merits. Finally, there was the matter
of whether judgments of the beauty or aesthetic value of works of art could be separated from an
evaluation of their moral qualities – a subject to which we shall turn in Chapter 5. A wide variety of
issues has been raised in more recent academic debates on the methods used by eighteenthcentury
critics and commentators on taste. These include questions of the degree to which art criticism should
share the concerns of literary criticism (e.g. by focusing on narrative details, character and expression),
the matter of an appropriate register for the writing of criticism (from the formal and academic to the
literary and irreverent) and the degree of erudition (in the case of history painting) or technical knowledge
(in respect of all art) that a good critic should be expected to possess. There is also the matter of the
extent to which eighteenthcentury critics and commentators perpetuated the previous century’s emphasis
on the “perfect forms” and inspiring narratives of history painting.
The first person identified as using the term “aesthetics” in the modern sense (i.e. the philosophy of the
beautiful or the principles underlying good taste) was Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762),
Professor of Poetry at the University of Frankfurt an der Oder. In his Aesthetica, of which the first two
volumes were published in 1750 and 1758, respectively, he defined aesthetics as the “science of sensible
knowledge,” the term “sensible” meaning, at this time, “pertaining to the senses.” According to his
empirical view of taste, good judgment was the result of wide sensory experience. Because artistic works
affect their audiences through their impact on the senses; for example, sight and hearing, which move the
imagination in vivid ways, taste may not be reduced to the clarity of logic (Gaiger, 2002, 7–8). He and
others in the eighteenth century stressed that a kind of accumulated “knowledge,” derived from the senses
but ultimately more sophisticated in form, was involved, and that taste could not be a simple matter of