Dear Editors:

I really appreciated Katy Carl’s essay in the Winter 2023 issue, “A Taste for Delight,” because it draws out an aspect of taste that’s easy to forget: that it isn’t static, and that indeed we might even have a moral responsibility to cultivate good taste—or at least to strive to make our own taste better. Carl is walking toward the border between the aesthetic and the ethical, a border where the art we make and the art we love is a matter of grave consequence.

But Carl hedges her bets as she approaches a sliver of territory that artists have mostly conceded, where there’s a direct route from the realm of art into the realm of morals. It’s a sliver of territory that’s been so heavily bombarded that there are hardly any human inhabitants there anymore, and the ground has become so toxic, and the way leaves the wanderer so vulnerable, that no one is willing to venture there.

In the middle of her essay, where she’s tracing in Jason Guriel’s book, On Browsing, some of the features of off-screen living that create the conditions for growth in taste, she’s headed straight for this disputed territory. It seems like she’s dying to say: good taste matters! And better taste makes better people!

Instead, she hedges. She’s careful, and she doesn’t want to overstate the value of art, to make it seem more important than the politicians and moralists have bullied us into thinking that it is. So before picking an alternate route through an argument about how the cultivation of taste achieves a kind of moral utility by creating experiences of higher pleasures that in turn reinforce our better instincts, she makes a pretty standard disclaimer about the limitations of what art can do. “Good taste doesn’t guarantee good character,” she says. The editors were good enough to reprint the thought in big letters on the page.

For my part, I’ve been stealing into this territory in the nights, sifting through artifacts left over from the peoples who once lived here amidst the fragments of mortar shells from militant moralists who drove them away. Remnants of barricades from generations of avant-gardes, remains of campfires from itinerant Bohemians, private musings of artists who desperately hope that their work could really matter, errant thoughts of philosophers who wonder if there might not be some treasure buried in the sands, and functional objects that flowed so directly out of and back into life that they shame our academic creations with their vitality.

One of my favorite artifacts is a quote from the historian Peter Brown, writing in The World of Late Antiquity. He’s talking about the concept of paideia, “the true education,” which is of course less an education in facts than a formation in taste: “The man who chiseled and polished himself like a statue through the devotion to the classics was the highest ideal.”

What struck me about the idea is the concept of using art as a chisel to cut away the excess of myself, to reduce me to the essential, to take up the challenge of finding in this lump of stone sitting here the form of a true man, of a good man.

That’s the only reason that makes any sense to me for caring about art at all. Which is why I’m here in this no man’s land. I want to say to Carl: don’t walk away from this place. Don’t plot a course from art into the moral universe through some other territory, winding your way through philosophical or theological or psychological backroads, so that the mountains remain between art and the rest of life.

Come here, where the path is direct! For there is power here. We’ve forgotten that this territory exists, and hardly know how to defend it. But it’s a territory worth fighting for: the straight road from art into life and life into art is right here. And here, taste really matters. It has to matter, and it has to matter more than people safely on either side of this territory are willing to admit.

And because it matters, we must demand that it be true, and that it lead us to the good. So I scrawled on my copy of Fare Forward an emendation to Carl’s quote: “If good taste doesn’t guarantee good character, then it isn’t good taste.”

Sincerely,

Tom Break
Co-founder and Editor of In the Wind Projects