Character Assassination #2: Real! Live! Tastelessness!

"The ontological structure of our emotional lives is totally Buddhist inspired."

Theory #7: Pauline Garvey on Practicality

We can understand practicality, that ubiquitous justification for consumption and decoration choices, as "an idiom through which an acceptable image of individual priorities is projected." 

How to Have a 'Good Home': The Practical Aesthetic and Normativity in Norway. 2003.  Journal of Design History, 16(3).

Declaration

We wish to announce that February is the most tasteful month.  It successfully avoids the pitfalls of the pessimistic Fall months.  (November's depression is unpleasantly reminiscent of Centralia or Shelton in the 1990's.)  It manages not to reflect the unbridled enthusiasm of the Spring months.  And, while Summer's sultry and painfully hot sensuality is highly popular, popularity is certainly no good measure of tastefulness.  

February may not be popular.  February may not be sexy (unless you are into sweaters and tights).  February may not be an up-and-coming band with dirty bass.

But February is sufficiently distinctive (frigid!) and not too riotous. 

Theory #5: Max Weber

"The powerful personality does not manifest itself by trying to give everything a 'personal touch' at every possible opportunity.  The generation which is now growing up should, above all, again become used to the thought that 'being a personality' is something that cannot be deliberately striven for and that there is only one way by which it can (perhaps!) be achieved: namely, the whole-hearted devotion to a "task" whatever it (and its derivative 'demands of the hour') may be.  It is poor taste to mix personal questions with specialized factual analyses."

Theory #4: Aguste Comte

From The Positive Method and Its Application to Social Phenomena: "... respect for our ancestors is the basis of a sound social order."  He also pretty much thinks that revolution is the result of increasing specialization in the absence of religious communion.

Your grandmother wanted you to have good manners.  So unless you want to destroy the social order, you'd better demonstrate your respect for her by figuring out which forks to use when and how to write a thank you card.  This blog can help.

If you are one of those kids who wants to set the social order asunder and you're not content with using the fish fork for your salad or skipping church to get really good at algebraic topology, please contact the editorial staff of this blog immediately.  We've got advice.

Theory #3: Archibald Alison

From "Associationism and Taste Theory in Archibald Alison's Essays" by Steven A. Jauss:

Some earlier taste theorists had appealed to associationist psychology, but they did so primarily to help explain away the obvious diversity of responses to almost any object of taste: private emotional associations with an object, they suggested, often corrupt the process by which individuals arrive at judgements of beauty, thereby giving rise to the apparent diversity of tastes [. . . .] Alison, however, dramatically expands the role of that psychology in taste theory by arguing that genuine aesthetic experience (the "emotion of taste") just is the experience of a special sort of "train" of emotional associations with an object.

Theory #2: The Problem of Taste

The Problem of Taste

From the "Problem of Taste" at the Pinocchio Theory blog:

When we are free only as consumers, the market replaces all other forms of contestation and valuation. Conflicts that might have been resolved at other times through violence and coercion, or consensus and negotiation, or voting, or other political processes, are now adjudicated entirely through cost-benefit analysis and the mechanism of prices. This also means that the only form of judgment is aesthetic judgment.

Theory #1: Bourdieu

"Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed." (from 'Distinction' by Pierre Bourdieu)