The Project on the Nature of Taste...
The concept of taste in aesthetics had its origins in ideas about gustatory taste, and much was made of this analogy in the eighteenth century. Recent research on taste opens up the possibility of a re-examination of the relations between the gustatory and aesthetic concepts. Questions about the nature of taste perception, the role that knowledge plays in our appreciation of tastes, whether we can separate the descriptive and evaluative aspects of taste judgments, the contribution language makes to identification of flavors, the cultural aspects of taste, and the nature of expertise, all raise interesting and important parallels with the exercise of taste in other domains. The time is right to explore a range of connected issues spanning the domains of sensory science, psychology, connoisseurship, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and aesthetics.
http://nyip.as.nyu.edu/object/nyip.taste
Liza - you make an amazing Victorian sitter. I read this today - the taste issue comes up around p. 41, but the whole shebang is worth a read. It's about how it came to be that the social forms and relationships emerging out of the baby-fresh 18th c. commercial market gave us our current conception of who the artist is - "a symbolic abstraction of a whole range of general human experience," who is also supposed to be, guess what...happy! Blissful! The ideal, communal projection of generalized and endangered human values! No pressure...ballet...suicide...you get my point.
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