On Nov 6, 2008, at 9:27 AM, William Conger wrote:
But another distinction remains to be queried: What is the
difference between like and appreciate? Is it one of kind or one of
degree? Does appreciate require taste (guided by "True Docents")? Is
liking simply a preference that may or may not involve good taste.
Can liking be a matter of bad taste (False Docents)? I think these
questions are pertinent but I'm not sure how to answer them. I said
earlier that I tend to agree with Gombrich's view that "there are no
wrong reasons for liking an artwork" (possible paraphrase). For
him, some liking, even bad taste or tasteless liking was at least a
first access to art. Perhaps he would've agreed that it was a
prejudice that disabled prejudice. He did think that any liking may
or may not be really salient to an artwork's central or fullest
content -- I mean with all the implications of historical, formal,
cultural, and personal content.
My own view is that "appreciation" is very low on the scale from
liking to aesthetic engagement because it does not evoke inherently
aesthetic content even if it can be assigned such content by True
Docents.
Greenberg made the distinction between liking a given work of art and
appreciating it, that is, between having some kind of affective
feeling for a work (liking it) and evaluating its quality
(appreciating it). Indeed, he made the point that a person of taste
and discernment (himself) can like a small piece of kitschy sculpture
on a side table, directly across the room from a work of high quality
(a Newman, as I recall).
Liking is an impulse of our emotional connection to something and
someone; appreciation (as its etymological root suggests) is an
evaluation of the quality of a thing. We may like a thing for many
reasons not closely related to its artistic quality, from nostalgia to
something in the representation you like or its size or its materials.
Good taste is part of the practice of appreciation, of evaluating of
quality. The term "good taste," btw, suffers some drive-by
condescension from critics who claim that it is merely a habit of the
socially self-conscious, i.e., those who know and care about whether
the shoes are Prada or not; or worse, a systematic codification of
approved objects that culls out the less worthy (people of bad or
pedestrian or vulgar taste) from the more worthy. You know, like art
museums that exhibit big, ugly modern works of art and claim that the
works are good, i.e., tasty, so that the exhibit shows how good the
museum's tastes are to other, more prestigious museums, while
simultaneously demonstrating to the general public that they (the
public) lack taste if they do not like the show.
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Michael Brady
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
