I have chosen to read and respond to the text exploring ‘Taste, Fashion and the French Fashion Magazine’ by Sanda Miller.

The text explores ideas that focus around fashion magazines and how they can be mirrors of their time as well as the importance of art critiques and taste levels in relation to how we view and perceive artwork. Fashion magazines allow the craft to be elevated by presenting it in a different way – celebrating it for what it is and what people produce. They showcase the most up to date trends including those of different backgrounds and taste whilst also defining what we perceive as tasteful in the fashion world. It moves on to suggest that when we view art we have two main responses – we recognise the artwork itself and then have our own opinions of the work. Instead of looking for known qualities that make the artwork ‘good’ we psychologically created our own taste level for what we liked and therefore question artwork for what it is. Our feelings towards artwork make us question why we like/dislike it and result in taste but if we only have our own thoughts to go on there is not common reasoning (denominator) which needs to be apparent to compare work – critics are therefore introduced to set the denominator.

In the writing it quoted David Hume who stated that ‘the great variety of Taste, as well as of opinion which prevails in the world, is too obvious not to have fallen under every one’s observation’ (Hume 1965:3). I believe by this he meant how every one’s views on art, and more specifically regarding taste, are different resulting in there being cross referencing between thoughts on pieces of work. In contrast to this Edmund Burke later stated that he believed that the concept of taste is ‘no more than that faculty or those faculties of the mind’ (Burke 1990: 13) which in effect meant that there are always key points that every individual will pick up on such as the colours used or the overall distinctive shape resulting in taste not being on the individuals own thoughts. Reacting to ideas similar to this Hume acknowledged critics to have a ‘delicacy of the imagination’ meaning that different individuals will interpret scenarios and artwork inversely.

When reflecting on this time period James Shelly states that ‘the eighteenth-century theory of taste held the judgment of beauty to be immediate; against egoism about virtue, it held the pleasure of beauty to be disinterested’ (Shelly 2009). This contrasts the idea that critics were fair in their judgment of art at this time and how other factors such as technique and context were not taken into account. Instead he belies that ‘beauty’ was the main and only focus of the work meaning that people just liked or disliked the artwork but there as not a vast amount of opinions as to why this was. Personally I believe that whether it was voiced or not everyone had their own opinions on why the work was successful or not in their opinion as psychologically it is natural to do so. This could have been to do with the idea that fashion was fairly new in the enlightenment period so the idea of voicing your opinion could have been see as incorrect especially if individuals didn’t have anything to compare their thoughts to which, like I previously stated, could have led to critics being the denominators. Similar to this idea Nick Zangwill argued that beauty is ‘one amongst many aesthetic properties’ ( Zangwill 2003: 325). From this I get that he believed that something can be seen as beautiful in multiple different ways resulting in different taste levels.

Overall, I enjoyed looking into the concept of taste in the fashion industry and personally believe everyone has their own thoughts in relation to taste and the idea of a critic being a medium creating a neutral basis to base personal ideas off of seems very likely.

Bibliography:

Schellekens, E. and Goldie, P. (n.d.). The aesthetic mind.

Plato.stanford.edu. (2017). The Concept of the Aesthetic (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). [online] Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetic-concept/ [Accessed 22 Nov. 2017].

Barlett, Cole & Rocamora (e.d) 2013, Fashion Media: Past and Present, London: Bloomsbury