Taste

Definition

Taste is the socially influenced but subjectively grounded judgement governing what counts as tasteful and appropriate room design. In Taylor & Preston's account, working definitions of tasteful room design "expose the extent to which such attributes may be subjectively grounded but socially influenced; issues of order and composition vacillate between unifying space via harmony and repose and charging the space with an array of eclectic objects" (p. 12). Taste has an "ever-changing and elusive nature" and a "likely alliance to consumption and the acquisition of possessions as a symbol of social status" (p. 12) — making it the domestic-scale counterpart to the culture-ideology of consumerism, and the practical register in which style, décor and status operate through conformity or individuality. Its reach runs "through historical advice literature to popular interior magazines and journals of today" (p. 12).

Key Thinkers

• Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston — taste as ever-changing, elusive, allied to consumption and status; the harmony/eclecticism vacillation (p. 12).
• Pierre Bourdieu — the sociological machinery this implies: taste as classificatory judgement, symbolic capital, distinction.
• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — the counterpoint: even "tacky" objects carry identity; visual/aesthetic values are socially constructed rather than perceptually given.
• Billy Baldwin — the practitioner's account of taste's operative categories: "chic" in repetition and in non-repetition; taste against fashion ("One of the greatest sterilizers of the would-be perfectionist is fashion… If I find that something I am doing is becoming a trend, I run from it like the plague," p. 27); "There is nothing quite so boring as false refinement, or so vulgar as misplaced elegance" (p. 27).
• Elsie de Wolfe — taste's moral, gendered register: taste as "a compass that never errs" — "what surer guarantee can there be of a woman's character, natural and cultivated, inherent and inherited, than taste?… she may be as human and feminine as she pleases, but she will never cause a scandal!" (p. 83) — developable through "suitability, simplicity and proportion"; vulgarity attributed to those "content to live in ugly surroundings" (p. 83).
• William W. Braham — taste as what the natural/applied opposition defends against: "The selection of colors and finishes is always an exercise of taste"; the profession's "deepest fear" of the arts of convention; the "aristocratic rather than puritanical" standard of decoration.
• Christopher Dresser — the Victorian prescription-regime the editors diagnose around the concept: his Studies in Design chapter shows "effect and experience… regulated by prescriptions of taste and decorum" (editors' headnote) — taste as the rule-giving discourse that decides which effects (repose) are proper to a room (1876).
• Charles L. Eastlake — taste's earliest polemical witness (1868): the diagnosis that furnishing convention is enforced as taste — "there is an absurd conventionality about such points as these, to which most of us submit, under a vague impression that if we differ from our neighbours we shall be violating good taste" (p. 102); the multi-style mansion as "the practical evidence that a healthy and genuine taste was altogether wanting" (p. 102); and the editors' historical verdict that his attack "paves the way for the professional decorator as the arbiter of taste" — taste as the jurisdiction the new profession claims.
• Rhoda and Agnes Garrett — the cultivated-taste prescription and the rights claim (1876, via Ferry): against "know[ing] what they like," people must "take care that their tastes 'are so far cultivated as to make it desirable to display them'" (quoted p. 113) — taste as cultivable faculty whose test is display-worthiness; and the ladies who "demand the right of having their particular tastes consulted" (quoted p. 113) — taste claimed in the language of rights, the earliest rights-formulation of taste in the wiki's sources.
• Ruth Madigan & Moira Munro — taste's class-limit finding (1996/2006): "there was not generally a strong involvement with design as a way of expressing and demonstrating 'good taste'" among working-class and lower middle-class households, who "did not appear to share the vocabulary of design and style promoted so strongly in the design-conscious 1980s" (p. 223); 'good design' is not a condition of 'good taste' (editors); and the rival judgment — respectability, not taste, is what these households believe they are judged by (see respectability).
• Edith Wharton & Ogden Codman Jr — taste's epistemic rank-order and its anti-credential claim (1898/2006): the editors' headnote reads the book as attending "to issues of taste in the context of cultural specificity, social status and functional purpose" (p. 387); in the excerpt taste appears as the judgment the professional half-knowledge fails — "the cultivated layman, whether or not he has any special familiarity with the different schools of architecture, is often a better judge than the half-educated architect" (p. 388) — and as the disconcerted witness to category confusion ("It is no wonder that people of taste are disconcerted by the so-called 'colonial' houses where stair-rails are used as roof-balustrades," p. 388). Taste here is ranked below proportion in the order of judgment: the layperson's objections to ornament ("garlands, bow-knots, quivers, and a great deal of gilding") condemn the style on the wrong grounds, while taste itself is what "the science of proportion" exceeds.

Related Concepts

• Consumerism — taste's "likely alliance to consumption and the acquisition of possessions as a symbol of social status" (p. 12).
• The Decorative — taste is the operative judgement of decorating practice.
• Symbolic Capital — taste as the cultural-classificatory capital Bourdieu theorises.
• Domestic Interior — the site where taste is exercised and displayed.
• Symbolic Ecology — household objects as the concrete symbols taste arranges (and what social status discourses ride upon).
• Natural Finishes — taste's architectural disavowal: the natural/applied opposition as "resistance to the artificiality of 'taste'" (Braham).
• Wall of Books — taste's discriminations made visible: books as the decorative variety the palette admits ("red ones!").

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — taste's supersession by the system: the "inconsistent and subjective system of tastes and colours, of de gustibus non est disputandum" gives way to "the constraints of abstraction and association" (p. 41); "the 'chic' invariably implies the elimination of appearances in favour of being"; and the model/series "nuance" that "may be said to come close to the work of art." The extract "Structures of Atmosphere" carries the core passage.

• The Historical Tradition (Wharton & Codman 1898/2006) — taste's rank-order relative to proportion, the concept's earliest architectural formulation in the wiki's record: the headnote's frame ("issues of taste in the context of cultural specificity, social status and functional purpose," p. 387); the cultivated layman's superior judgment over "the half-educated architect" (p. 388); "people of taste are disconcerted" by category-confused houses (p. 388); and the diagnosis that ornament-objections ("garlands, bow-knots, quivers, and a great deal of gilding," p. 388) are taste judging on the wrong currency — style is judged by proportion, and taste must learn the difference. Where this page's other sources give taste's judgement (Bourdieu, Baldwin, de Wolfe), prescription (Dresser), class-limit (Madigan & Munro) and genealogy (Soulillou), Wharton & Codman give its epistemic subordination: taste is the cultivated layman's judgment, real and necessary, but outranked by "the science of proportion" that "is not to be acquired in a day" (p. 388). See proportion, style.

• Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006) — the elusive nature of taste, its alliance to consumption and status, subjective-yet-social character, harmony vs. eclecticism (p. 12).

• The Logic of Practice (Bourdieu 1990) and Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu 1977) — taste as classificatory, embodied judgement (the sociological ground).

• Design and Order in Everyday Life (Csikszentmihalyi 1991) — against purely status-driven accounts: personal meaning over aesthetic value.

• The Sterility of Perfection + The Rule Breaker's Success (Baldwin 1972/2006) — the decorator's judgement in action: chic as the category of successful transgression (rule-breaking); the anti-trend stance as taste's defence against fashion's sterilization; "costume decoration" vs. "the Real Thing" (p. 30); the client without "gumption or self-assurance" whose taste collapses into fear of her own room (p. 27).

• Structures of Atmosphere (Baudrillard 1968/2006) — taste's supersession thesis: the old regime was "the inconsistent and subjective system of tastes and colours, of de gustibus non est disputandum," but "under the present system the success of the whole occurs in the context of the constraints of abstraction and association" (p. 41) — taste displaced by system; and taste's own moral grammar exposed: "the 'chic' invariably implies the elimination of appearances in favour of being: black, white, grey – whatever registers zero on the colour scale – is correspondingly paradigmatic of dignity, repression, and moral standing" (p. 38).

• A Christian House (Beecher & Stowe 1869/2006) — taste's economical register: modes "at once healthful, economical, and tasteful" (p. 43); "tasteful" defined as compatible with thrift — flowers, pictures and statuettes admitted as the ornaments of use, never of display ("the interior is not for display," editors, p. 43). The historical baseline of the taste-consumption alliance the editors diagnose (p. 12): taste claimed precisely against the acquisition-display cycle. See the-decorative, domestic-economy.

• A Wall of Books (Braham 1999/2006) — taste's architectural career: "The selection of colors and finishes is always an exercise of taste, and any such acknowledgment makes evident the deep affiliation of architecture with the other arts of convention – dressing, dining, dancing, or other activities. That perhaps is the deepest fear expressed by the privileging of natural over applied color: that acknowledgment of the arts of convention and the necessity of timeliness would undermine a profession dedicated defensively to timelessness" (p. 61); "The opposition of natural finishes to applied colors derives its energy from resistance to the artificiality of 'taste,' which is affiliated with intuition, irrationality, and the feminine" (p. 61); the class politics of canon-formation — Hitchcock and Johnson: "[T]he current style sets a high, but not impossible standard for decoration: better none at all unless it be good. The principle is aristocratic rather than puritanical" (p. 59), with the 'aristocratic' standard "both an emblem or badge and a shifting collection of principles and artifacts" (p. 60); and the closing demystification — "It is through the discriminations of taste, shaped according to class and gender, as well as to form, material, and workmanship, that we discriminate among the qualities of materials and their finishes" (pp. 61–62). See natural-finishes, gender-and-the-interior.

• Suitability, Simplicity and Proportion (de Wolfe 1913/2006) — taste's moral register, stated from the advice literature's founding professional voice: "We are sure to judge a woman in whose house we find ourselves for the first time, by her surroundings… We may talk of the weather, but we are looking at the furniture. We attribute vulgar qualities to those who are content to live in ugly surroundings" (p. 83); "what surer guarantee can there be of a woman's character, natural and cultivated, inherent and inherited, than taste? It is a compass that never errs… she will never cause a scandal!" (p. 83); taste developable through the triad — "We must learn to recognize suitability, simplicity and proportion, and apply our knowledge to our needs" (p. 83); the interior-as-biography reading of taste's function (see interior-as-biography).

• On the Means by which Repose is Attainable in Decoration (Dresser 1876/2006) — taste's Victorian prescriptive form, the earliest source in this wiki for the harmony/repose pole of the editors' vacillation: the chapter demands repose "in all our decorations" as "an indispensable art quality" and prescribes its conditions (knowledge, harmony, small-mass colours, dark grounds, cream ceilings) — taste not as the judgement of a consumer choosing among styles (Baldwin, de Wolfe) but as a regulative discourse that decides what effects experience may have: the editors' gloss is that in such writing "effect and experience were regulated by prescriptions of taste and decorum." The repose pole of the vacillation is codified here before the eclectic pole exists to oppose it; see repose, neutral-colour-effect.

• Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (Hope 1807/2006) — taste's earliest polemical witness in the wiki's sources (1807, sixty-one years before Eastlake): taste as the jurisdiction the trade has captured — furniture "abandoned, till very lately, in this country, to the taste of the sole upholder, entirely ignorant of the most familiar principles of visible beauty, wholly uninstructed in the simplest rudiments of drawing" (p. 153) — the upholsterer as taste's possessor before reform reclaims the word; and the trade's product as taste's failure — "attributes of true elegance and beauty, which, though secondary, are yet of such importance to the extension of our rational pleasures" (p. 153) left wholly absent. Hope's remedy (the cultivated collector-designer, armed with "sufficient intimacy with the stores of literature… and… sufficient practice in the art of drawing," p. 154) already implies the lineage's later claim: taste restored is taste cultivated, not taste traded. See upholsterer, fashion.

• The Dining Room (Eastlake 1868/2006) — taste's earliest sociological witness (1868, now the second-earliest voice in the advice-literature lineage after Hope's 1807 excerpt): the conformity mechanism stated a century before Bourdieu — "an absurd conventionality about such points as these, to which most of us submit, under a vague impression that if we differ from our neighbours we shall be violating good taste" (p. 102); taste's want diagnosed structurally ("the practical evidence that a healthy and genuine taste was altogether wanting," p. 102); the trade's usurpation of taste's name ("wholesome doctrine to a credulous public," p. 101); and the arbiter-jurisdiction the attack opens for the decorator profession (editors' headnote). Taste here is what convention borrows and reform claims to restore — before it becomes the consumer's judgement among styles. See fashion, upholsterer, symbolic-capital.

• 'Decorators May be Compared to Doctors' (Ferry 2003/2006) — taste cultivated, judged by art's standards, and claimed as a right (1876): the Garretts, like Eastlake, hold "that decorative art should be judged by the same standards applied to other forms of art" (p. 113) — but where Eastlake admonishes the young ladies who "know what they like," the Garretts prescribe cultivation ("so far cultivated as to make it desirable to display them," quoted p. 113); the ladies of 'Houses As They Might Be' "demand the right of having their particular tastes consulted" (quoted p. 113) — the rights-vocabulary that Teston's right-to-design makes explicit a century and a half later; and the ladies' actual taste is derivative (Mrs A's "dado style," Mrs B's "real flowers" on door panels, p. 113) — taste's social mediation caught in the text's own satire. See suitability, advice-literature, gender-and-the-interior.

• Touch, Taste, Smell (Brown 2018) — the gustatory root of the concept, distinct from this page's aesthetic-judgement register: taste as the bodily sense carrying "layers of social, cultural, and even political meaning" — the museum register (see taste-full-museum) where taste is exercised, educated, and deployed as interpretive medium: restaurants "educate and encourage visitors to think reflectively about what they eat and how their taste constructs stereotypes and ideas about other communities and cultures"; "taste … can be educated by the self and by the larger social, political, and cultural contexts" (Mihalache, quoted); and taste "bridges the gap between personal experiences – each of us tastes food differently and intimately at a biological level – and collective meanings and values." Where this page's sources track taste as the judgement governing décor (Bourdieu, Baldwin, de Wolfe, Eastlake), Brown's register returns the word to its sensor: taste as cultivated palate — the concept's etymological ground, now given an institutional programme.

• Social, Spatial and Temporal Factors (Lawrence 1987/2006) — taste's sociological substrate: the status function the editors' "alliance to consumption" names, given its research frame — the house as "a credential for esteem and the respect of others" (p. 185); possessions whose latent functions are status claims ("there is still no comprehensive understanding of the functions of status claims," p. 185; see manifest-and-latent-functions); and affluence as "a relatively greater degree of control and choice that can reflect and reinforce personal preferences and identity" (p. 185) — taste's latitude as a function of wealth. Where Bourdieu theorizes taste as distinction and the editors name its consumption-alliance, Lawrence supplies the mechanism and the open empirical question: what the status claims do, and what penalties attach to "household objects that are attributed contradictory social values" (p. 185) — the taste-judgment's sanction, posed as an unmeasured variable. See symbolic-capital, consumerism, interior-as-biography.

• 'House Beautiful': Style and Consumption in the Home (Madigan & Munro 1996/2006) — taste's class-limit finding, the page's first interview-based source: "It was immediately striking in our interviews that there was not generally a strong involvement with design as a way of expressing and demonstrating 'good taste.' Our sample of working-class and lower middle-class households did not appear to share the vocabulary of design and style promoted so strongly in the design-conscious 1980s" (p. 223); the editors' headnote verdict that "'good design' is not a condition of 'good taste'"; taste displaced by a rival judgment — "the social standing of the household appears to be more strongly reflected in criteria of respectability, expressed as keeping up standards of cleanliness and tidiness, rather than overt striking for 'good taste' or a 'sense of distinction'" (p. 224; see respectability); and the system's reach confirmed at the anxiety level — respondents felt it "important to achieve the right sort of look," accepting "a message that it is skill rather than money which achieves the effect" (p. 225). Where the editors diagnose taste's "alliance to consumption and the acquisition of possessions as a symbol of social status" (p. 12) and Lawrence theorizes its status-function, Madigan & Munro find the alliance not taken up: taste's vocabulary stops at the modest-income door, and its social judgment is performed by a different currency (see respectability, use-value, homeliness).

• Ornament and Order (Soulillou 2002/2006) — taste's political genealogy and its bad-taste geography: the "reformers of taste in the applied arts of the nineteenth century" whose artifacts are "no less weighted with ornament than those that they put on trial" (pp. 321–322) — taste as the tribunal of one ornamental order prosecuting another; "bad taste" as the territorial stigma — "the orientalism characterized by ornamental abundance, excess of show – in short, bad taste" (p. 319) — the taste-judgment displacing the status oppositions it inherits (atticism/Western vs oriental abundance); the class-history of the verdict — workers' ornamentation condemned "not… because it was of an inferior class, but because it was not 'rational'" (p. 319) — taste's class warrant re-founded as rationality; and "too decorative" as taste's discursive operation: "an internal organization of the discourse, consigning to the decorative whatever opposes it in its hegemonic strategy" (p. 322). The source that converts the page's Bourdieu frame into a genealogy: taste judgments as the visible surface of legitimacy hierarchies in ornamental expense. See ornamental-excess, free-and-not-free, the-decorative.

• Decorating Culture (Tang 1998/2006) — taste's place in the sign hierarchy: sign value establishing, "through display and conspicuous consumption, a distinctive hierarchy of taste, status, and identity" (p. 331) — taste, status and identity as one differential order the sign economy administers; the decoration craze as taste's market engine ("at the cutting edge of the latest fashion," p. 331); and interior design "cashing in on personal preferences… and profit[ing] from the notion of multiple identities" (p. 332) — taste as the sign system's most personal denomination (see sign-value, fashion, interiorisation).

• Domestic Doyennes: Purveyors of Atmospheres Spoken and Visual (Turpin 2003/2006) — taste's naturalization as women's faculty, the concept's seventeenth-century form: "Due to their 'natural' taste, women soon became proprietors of good manners and civility. As a result, the best social education emanated from cultivated women, the gatekeepers of elite society" (p. 369) — taste attributed by nature ('natural' in scare quotes, Turpin's own signal), then used as the qualification by which women were made etiquette's proprietors and society's gatekeepers. The page's other sources show taste as judgement (Bourdieu, Baldwin, de Wolfe), prescription (Dresser), class-limit (Madigan & Munro) and genealogy (Soulillou); Turpin supplies its earliest gendered function in the wiki's record: taste as the warrant for a delegated power — women admitted to social authority precisely because their taste was declared natural rather than trained, the same move de Wolfe's "inherent and inherited" compass will repeat two centuries later (p. 83 of her text). See gender-and-the-interior, etiquette, salon.

• Why Architecture Matters (Goldberger 2009) — Ruskin's 'Taste is the only morality' (p. 36); the cycles of taste that decide a building's or career's reputation (Rudolph, Wright, Soane, Graves — pp. 137–38); and the demand that preservation decisions not be made 'in response to the short cycles of taste and fashion' (p. 158).

• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

• source-notes/lupton-miller-2006-streamlining

Open Questions

• Is taste primarily a status instrument (Bourdieu, the editors' "alliance to consumption") or a genuine mode of self-expression ("an inherent impulse of self-expression," p. 11) — can both hold at once?
• How does taste migrate from domestic advice literature to social-media interiors culture — does the Instagram interior collapse taste's private/social distinction?
• Can "good taste" be detached from class distinction, or is every aesthetics of room design already a social position?
• Baldwin's anti-trend taste ("I run from it like the plague") reads as distinction through refused distinction — is fleeing the trend the most positional move of all in Bourdieu's terms, or a genuine escape from taste's status function?
• Baudrillard claims taste has been superseded by "the constraints of abstraction and association" (p. 41) — is Baldwin's connoisseurship (equal-value pairs, no "upstarts") the old regime's last stand, or does even anti-trend taste operate as atmospheric value within the system?
• The Beechers claim taste without display — "healthful, economical, and tasteful" (p. 43) — making thrift itself the tasteful position. Is economy-taste (the anti-display interior) genuinely outside taste's status function, or is frugality one of taste's most reliably positional performances (the Bourdieu question in its nineteenth-century form)? See domestic-economy.
• De Wolfe holds taste to be "inherent and inherited" and yet offers to teach it — "How can we develop taste?" (p. 83). Is her double claim (birthright and cultivation) the advice genre's contradiction, or its sales pitch — and is "It is a compass that never errs" taste's classificatory function (Bourdieu) at its most explicit gendered form, policing women through their rooms? See interior-as-biography.
• Dresser's chapter shows taste in its prescriptive, rule-giving form ("effect and experience were regulated by prescriptions of taste and decorum") — decades before taste becomes the consumer's judgement among styles. Did taste's function shift from prescribing effects (which room-effects are proper) to classifying choosers (who has taste) — and if so, when, and what turned a decorum into a distinction? See repose.
• Eastlake's public submits to furnishing convention "under a vague impression that if we differ from our neighbours we shall be violating good taste" (1868, p. 102) — taste-panic as the enforcement mechanism of trade fashion, a century before Bourdieu's distinction. Is the fear of neighbours' judgment taste's social origin or its pathological form — and does the professional decorator (whose arbiter-status Eastlake's attack "paves the way for," editors' headnote) rescue taste from conformity or institutionalize the policing it performed? See fashion, symbolic-capital.
• Madigan & Munro find that working- and lower middle-class households expect to be judged by respectability (cleanliness, tidiness), not by "good taste" or a "sense of distinction" (p. 224) — yet their respondents still felt "important to achieve the right sort of look" and accepted the "skill rather than money" ideology of the coordinated display (p. 225). Is respectability taste's class-other (a genuinely different judgment-economy) or taste's moral shadow (the same classificatory system, its aesthetic currency priced out)? And does the "skill rather than money" message — taste as competence, not capital — show the design culture recruiting the very households its vocabulary excludes? See respectability.
• Soulillou dates the taste-verdict's re-founding precisely: workers' ornamentation condemned for being "not 'rational'" rather than "of an inferior class" (p. 319) — taste's class warrant replaced by a rational one, with the class geography surviving as "bad taste"'s territorial residue (orientalism, abundance, show, p. 319). Is the wiki's taste material therefore operating an inherited geography (the "foreign body" of Batchelor's colour prejudice, p. 32) beneath its classificatory function — and would a non-class taste be possible, or only a new territorial stigma? See ornamental-excess, chromophobia.