On Taste

there are always absolutes. There are pirates and there are farmers. We are all one or the other, but even these genetic empires are scattered with protean archipelagos of taste. We want what we want, but like obsessive serial killers, we want it exactly the way we want it. We want the corpse wearing Mama’s lipstick, so, along with aroma, taste is the oldest most precedent sense. Our lizard brains were tasting and smelling things long before we started worshipping them. So I should start with Andy Warhol, because his first masterpieces articulate the distinction between taste and desire.

In Warhol’s radical democracy, the vitrine of high culture is a prison. There are desires endemic to the species that hold us together; there are shi ing local tastes and traditions that keep us apart, and there are artists like Warhol whose ecumenical, global fame, sans vitrine, can unite the two. Warhol began with his soup-can paintings and his “Flavored Marilyns”—trademark desires produced in individual flavors to suit your taste. Everyone desires Campbell’s Soup. It’s the best stuff. Everybody desires Marilyn Monroe. She’s the most desirable woman. But we all have our personal kinks, so Andy painted fi y-two Campbell soupcan paintings, each slightly different in its configuration and one painting for every flavor of soup: Cheese, Mushroom, Tomato, Clam Chowder, Bean and Bacon, etc. He painted about a dozen Flavored Marilyns—or Lifesaver Marilyns, as they were called at the Factory, since the candy provided the colors. All the Marilyns are identical in these paintings, but the backgrounds come in lime, orange, lemon, strawberry, pineapple, and licorice, to suit your taste while fulfilling your desires.

John Baldessari and I saw Andy’s theory confirmed at a Warhol survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art. We were standing in a room hung with five large Electric Chair paintings in a variety of monochromes. A group of Park Avenue matrons strolled in, and without hesitation one of them said: “I like the blue one,” and I could see her living room and imagine her childhood, the blue haze in her heart, and the grim pleasure she took in social executions. Standing there, I wondered, like Peggy Lee, “Is That All There Is?” because, as likely as not, that is all there is—not that there’s anything wrong with that. My position is that ideology is fashion anyway, and for the last two centuries most of our bloody global comedies have begun with our inability to distinguish our desires from our tastes. It’s hard to sort them out, but we know when they are not in tune.

When a virtue we recognize and believe in is too outré, we shamefully walk on by. On other occasions, we insist that our taste for cabbage and borscht and our preference for Nordic love goddesses constitute canonical cultural desires. This can have dire consequences. Tastes are fiercely held, protean, and invariably local. (Imagine Freud practicing in Rio.) Over the years, I have seen fistfights erupt in casino lounges over the relative quality of the whores at Soi Cowboy in Bangkok and the De Wallen whores in Amsterdam. I have seen skirmishes over the relative virtues of pickled herring and Japanese breakfast and over the relative manliness of fox hunting and baccarat. Duels have been fought over the silliness or sublimity of kilts, lederhosen, Mormon prairie dresses, and the teased silver hairdos of Southern dowagers. James Madison actually argued for this distinction between taste and desire in the Tenth Federalist Paper. Since small republics are vulnerable to virulent faction, Madison suggested that this tendency would be mitigated in a large republic composed of multiple public proclivities, products, needs, climates, populations, and languages—multiple tastes but one desire: the maintenance of the republic. In Madison’s view, the violence of local faction would be decontaminated by a commitment to the larger discourse of the liberal republic. In this way, an eighteenth-century savant, sitting at a polished desk in Montpelier, Virginia, formulated what physicists and climate scientists today call “hierarchical discontinuity”—the idea that a republic at ground level could be chaotic, complex, and rife with wind shear, yet still remain more checked and balanced at a national level, up above the clouds. As Peter Vierick argued in Conservatism Revisited, even conservatives are trying to conserve a liberal democracy. Otherwise they’re treacherous radicals.1 This distinction is a consummation much to be desired in a commercial republic. The lesson for art mavens today is that the art business continues but, up in the stratosphere, its vitrine of exclusivity has evanesced. Art is irrelevant. The newsworthy transformations wrought by Picasso, Pollock, Warhol, and Robert Mapplethorpe have been replaced by shiny ghosts. They are not news, and they are not new. Some work is just more recent. The last “new” thing I saw was break dancing. Our museum exhibitions—like the art in collectors’ summer homes—are “group shows” held together by the most banal feature of the works on display and by the majesty of undifferentiated diversity. It’s hard to mount a one-person exhibition and still be fair and maintain that multifaceted mediocrity that keeps one’s enemies at bay.

Art, in live culture, however, out in the scumbled street is the wild card in the hand that culture deals us—the talisman that gives