The Standard of Taste Debate

On the one hand people like to say that “there is no accounting for taste.” On the other hand, people constantly make judgments about their own and other people’s taste (gustatory and aesthetic). Charles Ludington examines the taste for wine in eighteenth-century England and Scotland, and the taste for beer in twenty-first century America, to argue that taste can in fact be accounted for because it is a reflection of custom, “tribal” identity, gender, political beliefs, and conceptions of authenticity, which are mostly but not entirely conditioned by class status and aspirations. And rightly or wrongly, we judge other people’s taste because taste positions us in society.

Quaint, Exquisite

From the opening of trade with Britain in the 1850s, Japan occupied a unique and contradictory place in the Victorian imagination, regarded as both a rival empire and a cradle of exquisite beauty. This book explores the enduring impact of this dramatic encounter, showing how the rise of Japan led to a major transformation of Western aesthetics at the dawn of globalization. The book provides a radical new genealogy of aesthetic experience in modernity. It argues that the global popularity of Japanese art in the late nineteenth century reflected an imagined universal standard of taste that Kant described as the “subjective universal” condition of aesthetic judgment. It features illuminating cultural histories of Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado, English derivations of the haiku, and retellings of the Madame Butterfly story, and sheds critical light on lesser-known figures such as Winnifred Eaton, an Anglo-Chinese novelist who wrote under the Japanese pseudonym Onoto Watanna, and Mikimoto Ryuzo, a Japanese enthusiast of the Victorian art critic John Ruskin. It also explains the importance and symbolic power of such material objects as W. B. Yeats's prized katana sword and the “Japanese vellum” luxury editions of Oscar Wilde. The book provides essential insights into the modern understanding of beauty as a vehicle for both intimacy and violence, and the lasting influence of Japanese forms today on writers and artists such as Quentin Tarantino.

The Standard of Taste in David Hume’s Philosophy

Hume is perhaps the most skeptical of all the great philosophers; and so it might reasonably have been assumed that he would have doubted the existence of a standard of taste in an area of human activity, the arts, where very many people, not ordinarily considered of a skeptical turn of mind, have doubted the existence of any standard according to his 1757 essay Of the Standard of Taste.