What Makes Something Tasteful?

Taste is a concept that has been and remains even to this day, an elusive term. No one has ever really been able to define what is considered tasteful and what is not. Taste is something that is incredibly subjective and constantly changing. For an example, just think about when you were a little kid and the foods you ate. You probably ate things then that you would not touch with a ten foot pole today. I know I did. I use to eat green tomatoes off the vine when I was four years old. Today, I do not even eat ripe tomatoes. While most of us would probably cringe at the idea of eating green tomatoes, who is to say it is not tasteful? At the time, I sure liked them. To me, they tasted great. Is that all that matters? Does it only take one person to make something tasteful? David Hume would certainly agree.

To Hume, taste is all about sentiment. “It is natural for us to seek a Standard of Taste; a rule, by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at least, a decision, afforded, confirming one sentiment, and condemning another” (80). However, a single, universal “Standard of Taste”, may not exist at all. Hume goes on to say, “All sentiment is right; because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real, wherever a man is conscious of it” (80). As long as one person finds sentiment or taste in something, it becomes tasteful to that person; tastefulness is not something that can have a strict definition. With this notion in mind, I can definitively say that both the paintings of the monkey and of the man are tasteful.

When I look at the two paintings, I can easily see why someone might say that either of those two works are distasteful. The picture of the man is quite ugly. The man has very distinct, primate facial features. He also has a fairly creepy grin on his face. The monkey is pictured as civilized, almost too much so. Someone might take offense at the fact that a monkey is pictured smelling a flower; as if that particular human activity should be above primates. I however, believe that both paintings are very tasteful. While some people may like to think people are very different from primates, we really aren’t. There is a lot of evidence to support that humans descended from apes. Not only that, some human behavior can be quite savage at times and very primate-like. I like the two paintings because they both point out these similarities. So you might say those paintings are tasteful, because those paintings are tasteful to me.