C ontested Q ualities
Standards and aesthetic experience are long-time companions of the arts. Standards express tradition, its measures and idiom. Aesthetic experience originates in the work’s aesthetic and emotional powers. The shared aesthetic values of the collective and the individual’s receptivity and power of reflection converge in the faculty of taste – a concept referring both to individual propensities and to collectively shared ideals, and a concept ridden with many of the same ambiguities as that of ‘quality’. To mediaeval philo sophy we owe the old Roman adage, de gustibus non est disputandum, that is, it is pointless to discuss matters of taste, because personal preferences are merely subjective opinions and hence cannot be right or wrong. However, the insight that there always will be different and competing understandings of the nature of quality does not permit one to conclude that anything goes and that aesthetic issues evaporate into individual taste judgements – quite the contrary. An important lesson from the sociology of art – often associated with Pierre Bourdieu – is that tastes are anything but idiosyncratic. They are instead eminently social. Aesthetic preferences express standards, standards express values, and these values provide and shape communal identities (and vice versa) – an idea dating at least to Friedrich Schiller’s concept of the education (‘Bildung’) of popular taste. What in a given context is referred to as quality is thus always debatable, whether ‘quality’ refers to how successfully a standard is met, whether the standard itself is appropriate in the given context, or finally, whether the values that inform the standard are acceptable or shared. Such discussions reveal a fundamental democratic element in aesthetic controversies. Evaluating a work of art can never be absolute. The evaluation is an appeal to share a specific perception of the world, to commit to a sensus communis – understood in the double meaning of a common sense and a common sensibility. A judgement of taste is thus not merely the expression of individual preferences – it inevitably expresses the social dynamics and diversity that are inherently part of art.
Protocols of quality The entry ‘quality’ in the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Aesthetics highlights the difficulties in claiming that aesthetic quality is an ontological given, that it is part of the material fabric of the world. In addition, the entry stresses that quality is the effect of certain standards applied in and relevant to a specific setting. Quality thus depends on context. The force of ‘homonymy’ – that the same word has different meanings – and the positive values associated with the term obfuscate the fact that quality concepts are synecdoches of standards that might very well be incompatible.
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