Is "good taste" just the taste of whoever happens to be in charge? The question sharpened in the twentieth century as Europeans and Americans looked back on how confidently their critics had ranked the world's art, and on how often those rankings matched the critics' own class, nation and race. This level weighs the case for relativism against the case for standards that cross cultures.
The challenge of relativism
History and travel both show that standards of beauty vary. Ideals of the human body have shifted from age to age, and music that one culture finds harmonious can sound harsh to another. Aesthetic relativism holds that aesthetic judgments are true only relative to a culture or an individual, so no standard stands above all the others. Relativists note that when Europeans first collected African sculpture, they labeled it "primitive," and that standards announced as universal have often been local prejudice in disguise.
Taste and social class
Sociologists add a sharper charge. Pierre Bourdieu's research on French taste argued that preferences mark social position. A philosophical version of the worry runs like this: critics of the taste tradition argue that its universal standards may simply reflect the preferences of privileged groups. Hume's ideal critic, with the leisure to practice and compare, looks suspiciously like an eighteenth century gentleman.
Defenders of standards reply that the origin of a standard does not settle whether it is valid. Mathematics, too, was developed mostly by the leisured, yet its proofs hold for everyone. They add that standards can be corrected: jazz and the blues, created largely by Black Americans shut out of elite institutions, came to be recognized as major art forms because listeners learned to hear what was there.
Other traditions of aesthetics
Western philosophy has no monopoly on theory. Ancient Indian thought developed rasa theory, first set out in the Natyashastra, a treatise on drama credited to the sage Bharata and usually dated to around the turn of the common era, though estimates vary by centuries. Rasa theory holds that art aims to evoke a distilled emotional flavor that the audience can savor and share. Rasa means juice or flavor: the audience tastes love, heroism, sorrow or wonder in a refined form, freed from personal worries. The Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta, around the year 1000, argued that savoring rasa is impersonal and close to spiritual joy, a striking parallel to Kant's idea of disinterested pleasure.
Japanese aesthetics prizes qualities that Western proportion theory overlooked. Wabi-sabi values the beauty of things that are simple, imperfect and impermanent: a rough tea bowl, moss on a stone, a wooden step worn by years of feet. A related idea, mono no aware, the gentle sadness at the passing of things, runs through classical works such as The Tale of Genji. These traditions show both difference and overlap: very different cultures arrived at ideas of savoring, detachment and shared feeling.
Are some preferences universal?
Some researchers argue that certain likings are rooted in human evolution. The philosopher Denis Dutton, in The Art Instinct (2009), suggested that a widespread taste for landscapes with open grass, scattered trees and water reflects the savanna where early humans evolved. Evolutionary aesthetics proposes that some aesthetic preferences evolved because they helped our ancestors survive or find mates. Critics call many of these explanations just-so stories: easy to invent after the fact and hard to test.
Popular claims about universal beauty need care. The golden ratio, about 1.618, is often said to define the most pleasing proportions, and it is sometimes claimed to be hidden in famous buildings and paintings. Experiments have found little consistent preference for the golden ratio, and many of the claimed examples depend on measuring selectively.
A middle position
Many philosophers now combine these insights. Taste is shaped by culture and class, and humility about our own standards is wise. But judgments can still be better or worse informed, more or less attentive, open or closed to comparison, which was Hume's real point. Respecting other traditions means taking their standards seriously as standards, open to reasons, rather than dismissing them as mere preferences.
Worked example: the people's choice
In the mid 1990s two Russian-born artists, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, commissioned opinion polls in more than a dozen countries asking what people wanted in a painting, then painted each country's "Most Wanted" and "Least Wanted" pictures. The results were strikingly alike. In country after country, the most wanted painting was a realistic landscape dominated by blue, with water, trees, a few figures and some animals. The least wanted was usually a small, jagged abstraction.
What follows? An evolutionary aesthetician sees support for the savanna idea. A relativist points out that the countries were linked by global advertising and calendar art, which may have spread one picture of beauty everywhere. A defender of critical standards notes that the most wanted paintings were rather dull, which suggests that averaging preferences no more produces great art than averaging recipes produces a great meal. The artists meant the project partly as a joke on market research. Yet it raised a serious question: when we disagree about beauty, are we disagreeing about the world or about ourselves?