ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the complex mutual transformation of art and taste during and after the bourgeois revolution, examining the role of judgement, the errors of reductive social readings of art and taste, and the historical origin of the metaphorical use of the word ‘taste’ in art among other things. Taste becomes subjective the more that it is associated with art and the less it is associated with nature, including the human senses. The decline and fall of the ‘objective sense’ of beauty – in which the terms beauty and beautiful were ‘used traditionally to denote objects or the property of objects’ – and the rise of the ‘phenomenal sense of beauty’ – in which beauty became something that was perceived or felt–arelinked to the bourgeois revolution and the transition from feudalism to capitalism, in which fixed standards and inherited traditional values gave way to individualism, liberty and subjectivity. With the advent of bourgeois society, the concept of taste undergoes not one but two related and opposed critiques. One tradition, which finds its most influential expression in Kant, reconceives taste as subjective and free. Another tradition, which has its earliest peak with Benthamite philistinism, rejects taste altogether as an expression of feudal prejudice and privilege.
