The Groove 226 - When Bad Taste Becomes High Art
Welcome to the 226th issue of The Groove.
I am Maria Brito, an art advisor, curator, and author based in New York City.
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WHEN BAD TASTE BECOMES HIGH ART
History is full of moments when the in crowd sneered, “That’s not art! That's bad taste!” only to eat their words a few decades later.
“Good taste” often isn’t about quality at all, it’s about power and conformity. Who decides what’s in good or bad taste? Spoiler: usually the cultural gatekeepers, the critics who once had power (but not anymore), galleries of a certain caliber, some curators (less and less these days), elites, and moneyed collectors of the era. Their preferences harden into orthodoxies.
Every era has its unofficial taste police, and they’re often enforcing the values of a particular class or ideology. As the legendary art critic (and professional iconoclast) Dave Hickey wrote, “Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else's privilege.”
Here are a few examples of how taste in art changes and evolves:
Exhibit A: Impressionism
Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1872, oil on canvas, Collection Musée Marmottan, Paris.
In 1874, Claude Monet and friends debuted their loose, light-splashed paintings to gasps and guffaws. Louis Leroy, a critic for the satirical French newspaper Le Charivari, derided Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise” as looking “sloppy, unfinished, wild, and certainly not art”. In fact, Leroy meant the term “Impressionist” as an insult, implying these painters could only churn out vague impressions of scenes, not real art.
The Parisian art establishment clutched its pearls at the visible brushstrokes and bizarre colors. Bad taste! Yet those rebel painters stuck to their vision. Fast forward a century and Monet’s once-mocked canvases are the crown jewels of museums around the world (especially the French!) and of collectors willing to shell many millions for them privately or at auction.
Taste flip: complete. Today it’s hard to imagine a world where Impressionist paintings were edgy and “ugly,” but that was the hot take in 1874. Now they’re the gold standard of “good taste,” proving that avant-garde art often starts life as an object of ridicule before becoming an object of reverence.
Exhibit B: Pop Art
Life Magazine issue from January 31, 1964 spotlights Roy Lichtenstein as “the worst artist in America” by several critics while others found his work “fascinating” and “forceful”.
By the 1960s, painting pretty water lilies was safely in “good taste,” so artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein set out to scandalize anew. They painted soup cans, comic strips, and cartoons; visual junk food that made high-brow critics choke. Lichtenstein’s early shows so rattled the establishment that Life Magazine ran a 1964 headline asking, “Is He the Worst Artist in the U.S.?”
At the time, many thought Pop Art was trash: How dare these artists paint Mickey Mouse or a Ben-Day dotted comic panel and call it fine art? The lowbrow sources: ads, tabloids, and product packaging “wreaked havoc with the hierarchy that separated entertainment from art,” one historian noted. Yet what was deemed garish bad taste in ’64 became the blockbuster museum shows of later decades.
Warhol’s once-kitschy Campbell’s soup cans are now icons of 20th-century art (one of those canvases sold for $27.5 million in 2017), and Lichtenstein’s comic-style paintings that provoked howls of disapproval now reside in the posh halls of MoMA and the Tate. The joke’s on the haters: Pop Art’s “vulgar” celebration of consumer culture ended up redefining good taste, making room on the pedestal for celebrities and superheroes.
Exhibit C: Zombie Formalism
Lucien Smith, Feet in the Water, 2012, acrylic on unprimed canvas.
By the 2010s, a wave of supposedly intellectual abstract paintings made by artists that were too cool for the whole thing flooded art fairs, each one a safe, design-friendly riff on earlier Minimalist or Color Field art. This trend became so formulaic that critic Walter Robinson dubbed it “Zombie Formalism”.
Young artists were churning out interchangeable, blandly decorative abstractions purely to please dealers and speculators, who flipped them at auction for profit. For a brief hot minute, this was “good taste” in the market; every chic collector wanted a Lucien Smith “rain painting” or a Christian Rosa scribble-and-swirls canvas on their wall.
But the backlash came fast. By 2015, the bubble burst; prices for these once-sought-after canvases tanked, and “no artist wants to be a market darling” of that empty sort. The art world collectively groaned at the monotony. In hindsight, Zombie Formalism is now a punchline, a case of good taste gone stale. It showed how even an edgy idea (pure abstraction) can devolve into mannered convention when everyone hops on the bandwagon.
Finding Your Own in a World of Taste Wars
Collectors (and artists and galleries too) would do well to remember how fickle trends are.
Buy art because it moves you, puzzles you, makes you feel alive, not because Artforum said it’s hot this year. The collectors who end up happiest, and incidentally often ahead of the curve, are those who follow their passion over convention.
Conformity is the death of creativity. When art starts obeying the rules of good taste too eagerly, it risks becoming boring.
In other words, the so-called “good taste” usually just means adopting the preferences of those who came before you: the aristocrats, the untouchable intellectuals, the billionaires, rather than trusting your own eyes.
But keep this in mind: great art often offends taste before it refines it.
Pablo Picasso (no stranger to blowing up conventions) put it even more bluntly: “Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.”
If the Impressionists had wanted to please the taste police, they’d have stayed inside the lines (literally). If Warhol cared about good taste, he never would have silk-screened Marilyn Monroe.
So here’s to the misfits and the trend-breakers, who teach us that today’s tastelessness can become tomorrow’s classic. Tastes will continue to flip and fight, but the groove of art keeps on spinning, and we’re all better off dancing to our own beat.