I'm with the two Mikes in feeling your usages of 'taste' devalue the
currency. You say, "I don't intend to stretch the word taste so far as to drain
it of
utility," but I feel you do exactly that when you celebrate the taste involved
in sharpening pencils.
In my original comment I thought briefly of using the cleaning of brushes as
an example of a useful instruction in art school that doesn't involve "taste",
but you convey you think that it is -- as with the pencils -- part of the
"aesthetic" of artmaking, and so it involves taste. So presumably teaching the
use of one solvent instead of another is teaching "taste" by you. Teaching
which
fastener in attaching canvas to a frame is the least likely to tear the
canvas is teaching taste because it "involves visual doing". Same would also
seem
to apply to teaching how to set up the best storage system for finished
paintings -- it too involves visual doing.
You say, "any instruction in art, where teaching and learning involve visual
doing, is blended with taste -- a sense of the beautiful." The use of the two
commas there suggests "where teaching and learning involve visual doing" is a
non-restrictive relative clause, which means we can drop it without affecting
the rest of the sentence. So you say "any instruction in art is blended with
taste -- a sense of the beautiful." So teaching about those paint-solvents is
"blended with a sense of the beautiful."
Also: "Any use of any visual system involves taste." Surely a great deal of
the activity of the non-blind among us entails a use of a visual system? The
use of graphs to plot stock market movements involves a visual system. Indeed,
I
guess "taste -- a sense of the beautiful" is "involved" in making out your
tax returns, entailing as it does filling out those visual forms.
You also inscrutably assert, "any use of any visual system involves
feelings/emotions, evocations." So when the tv techies were here last week
assembling
our new set while consulting a wiring chart, gosh knows what emotions and
feelings were surging through their heads. I also should have complimented them
for
their taste, since you assert, "Because any use of any visual system involves
feelings/emotions, evocations, it also involves taste."
But maybe not, it's not sure, maybe you want to claim the use of a visual
system involves "taste" only in teaching, or maybe only in teaching art,
because
you say, " You can't teach perspective without implementing it visually. The
manner in which it is implemented engages taste. I will maintain that any
instruction in art, where teaching and learning involve visual doing, is
blended
with taste -- a sense of the beautiful." I myself have seen one-point
perspective taught with only three straight lines; I have a hard time seeing
how a
"sense of the beautiful" came into it. I'm moved to observe that by this
standard -- that is, if teaching and learning a course involves visual doing it
must
be "blended with taste -- a sense of beauty" -- then all courses in trade
school and all science courses in high school and college are "blended with
taste
-- a sense of beauty". I do hear a terrible stretching sound.
Trouble is, 'engages', 'involves', 'is blended with' are such vague and
non-restrictive words they call to mind a club that absolutely anyone can join.
You
suggest that teaching "exactitude, a touch, a feel for materials" is teaching
an "aesthetic", which of course you can say 'engages', 'involves', 'is
blended with' taste. It's truly hard to think of any course in any school that
by
your standards you could not claim is entirely the teaching of "taste -- a
sense
of the beautiful" as you do of art school.
You say, " the rest of you don't go far enough in your notions of taste.
You use the word in its most banal and limited sense, as reflecting mere
persoanlisms, unjustified, unphilosophical and common."
To my taste, you do indeed "stretch the word taste so far as to drain it of
utility". I can't say your usage is common, but I do feel it's unjustified,
unphilosophical.
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