I was listening to an episode of the Radio 4 programme “In Our Time” the other week which discussed taste. Here are some notes.
Early C18th Britain had become the leading commercial power in Europe. This brought new wealth and luxury into British society. The fear was that this would make the British soft and lead to their imperial decline, as it had for the Roman Empire before. Britain was a hard-working, Protestant, parliamentary democracy. France was its Papist, absolutist, decadent other across the channel. There was an anxiety that luxury (excessive self-gratification) will subvert virtue.
The modern concept of taste was born in France and became harnessed to the debates around luxury in Britain. After 1688 the authority of the British court declined so unlike Louis XIV’s dictation of taste in France, there was a much more open debate about what taste might be.
Taste has the economic basis of dignifying expense. It also has an intellectual basis; the exercise of taste is brought to the centre of philosophy by Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury’s deism sees aesthetic as the best proof of God. He also argues that taste explains virtue and moral judgement as the sense of beauty in society. The man of sophistication and taste is therefore a moral man as well.
Addison in The Spectator describes how people can be better than just pursuers of pleasure by pursuing the refined arts; taste is the capacity to be recpetive to these arts. It becomes a distinguishing competence of modern citizens.
British taste is opposed to enthusiasm and excess as a result of being opposed to religious enthusiasm and to the excess of the court of King Charles. A way of appropriate virtue rather than dangerous enthusiasm. The design rules of the time are a reaction to excess. Taste is a vocabulary for an ordered religiosity.
Taste covered deportment as well as visual aesthetics. You could have taste without having high birth. Taste is potentially a very socially subversive idea. Taste was mocked as well as embraced from the start. Bad taste was mocked savagely, for example by Pope.
Taste is based on a set of rules. This opens it to the masses. But it is also meant to involve long exposure to the rules, making them intuitive. Poor taste gets much more coverage than good taste. Critics fall back on the classical idea of decorum, that surroundings should reflect status. So commentaries on the tasteless gaudiness of those who dress above their station proliferate, as does hatred of new money.
Sheet music, novels, galleries etc. make culture more public and more publicly accessible, especially to the rising middle classes. Taste is deployed socially against popular fads and economically against imports, often at the same time. Good taste is the ingredient old money has that new money hasn’t. You can only really have taste if you’re born to it.
Taste as both innate and discriminatory and rule-based and emancipatory.
Wedgewood had to get buy-in from tastemakers when launching new works to ensure their success, a triangle of entrepenuers, critics and lords results.
Taste was very much a feature of the Empire. For settlers one of the aims of Empire was often to recreate yourself, which you did through displaying taste.
In Britain people fall back on the language of decorum when in doubt about taste.
Liberty has a similar trajectory to taste, spreading through society from the aristocracy. And now “tasteful” is the ultimate put-down.
Shaftesbury, Addison, George Coleman
Answering some common criticisms of Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” release.
“A less popular band would not make as much money”
This is trivially true. It is also true of recording-industry-based album releases. So it is not a specific criticism of this business model. Rather it is a fact of life regarding music: you need an audience to sell to in order to make money by selling music to your audience.
What is important is that more of the money from this business model goes to the band. So a less popular band would make more money this way than from receiving royalties for CDs, all other things being equal.
“Radiohead can only do this because they have been promoted heavily by their record label for over a decade”
Again this is trivially true. Radiohead worked very hard to build their success through the channels available. In the first half of the 1990s that was through record labels. Nowadays, it is through online networking.
What is important is that promotion is needed to build an audience. And there is no substitute for hard work and raw talent whether that promotion is through record labels or though MySpace.
“Most Downloaders Paid Nothing”
Most being 60%. So in fact just over half didn’t pay. Or, alternatively, just under half did pay, an average of six dollars each. This is much better than the O% who usually pay for unauthorized downloads.
A 40% success rate for advertising would be extraordinarily good. That is what this amounts to. Many people were buying the album unheard. Do 100% of the people who hear a Radiohead album on the radio go out and buy it? Do 40%?
I have spoken to people who downloaded the album for free then paid what they thought it was worth for a second download. If studies took account of these try-before-you-buy downloads the figures would change. Perhaps not majorly, but enough to notice.
If Radiohead had posted out CDs with invoices, played the album on the radio or on MTV or simply promoted it in the media we would be seeing headlines more like “Only 1% Of Fans Pay For Radiohead Album”.
Doing the maths shows that Radiohead still made more money for the number of albums downloaded than they would if they were receiving royalties from CDs.
So “Most Fans Paid $0 for Radiohead Album” is trivially true for some values of “most” and for some values of “fans” and if we ignore multiple downloads. But it obscures the facts that Radiohead made more money than they would have from CDs, did better than they would have from advertising, and competed successfully against no-cost P2P networks.
furny are a band with a shitty website. No, that’s their own words. What isn’t shitty about furny is their licencing.
Like Negativland and Loca records, furny started with a strong idea of the ethics of music production and distribution born of encounters with the legal realities of sampling before the modern alternative licencing movement emerged at the turn of the century. So like Negativland and Loca they wrote their own licence.
In 1998, which is well before the first Open Content Licence or the FDL.
furny’s first licence was a basic attribution licence (do what you like and attribute the band), but again like Negativland and Loca they have since switched to a Creative Commons’s licence. In furny’s case this is the copyleft BY-SA licence.
The striking thing about furny’s commitment to Free Licencing is that it is simply part of their attitude towards making music. furny take musical and lyrical inspiration from diverse sources, taking aim at everything from their guitarist’s father to Pete Doherty, and they don’t want to get in the way of anyone else doing the same.
Today at 4.15pm French time 100 years ago, Alfred Jarry’s final request was for a toothpick.
Find out more about Jarry at Wikipedia: