At its heart, the economic system we call capitalism involves the pursuit of profit through the sale of goods and services in a market in which consumers can make purchases as they choose. Producers only strive to provide whatever their consumers are willing to pay for. In this sense, capitalism is only as good or as bad as the tastes of its consumers. Rather than only blame the wickedness of corporations, we should direct some criticism at ourselves. Many of the problems of capitalism boil down to failures of consumer choice, or taste.
If we lament the vulgarity of a Las Vegas casino complex, or shudder at the thought of the quality of the meat in low-cost burgers, we should refrain from simply condemning the owners and managers of the businesses that provide them (93). It is not their fault that the wrong sort of food sells in vast quantities or that so many people want to stay in mindless resorts. The producers of the most inane television programs are not ideologically committed to making poor-quality entertainment. They are our servants and will provide us with whatever we want, so long as it makes them money. The problem is that too many people arc keen on, and are willing to pay for, the wrong things.
The
Problem of Taste
What is meant by wrong! One answer focuses on externalities, on the hidden costs that certain businesses pass on to society. The casino can inspire depression, family distress and alcoholism, yet the private equity group that owns it does not have to pay for the problems it provokes. The low-grade burgers are linked to obesity and ill-health, but the hospital bills do not appear on the company's balance sheets. The scope of such discussions can be broadened to include the sufferings of the planet.
However important these issues of externalities are, they do not touch on the central question of why the original preference is wrong. There is another kind of 4vrong': a sense that these products are not in line with the highest potential of mankind, that a love of certain kinds of food or leisure resorts or television shows is an insult to what we are properly capable of as human beings. It is this nagging awareness that intensifies the hostility around externalities. We especially mind them because the sacrifice of the planet, health, tax revenues and labour have been in the name of something deeply squalid. If warming the oceans were a byproduct of our noblest endeavours, it would be sad - but fear and panic sets in when we realize that we may be ruining the future for the sake of pitiful and unrealistic distractions.
It can feel mean-spirited to hold up the preferences of decent and possibly disadvantaged people as unworthy. We fear that we will be cast
When taste and money come adrift.
as elitist or snobbish, although in our heart of hearts we don't usually think we are either of these things. Privately, we don't really doubt that the Nevada lobby is grotesque or that the burger is sub-standard. But when it comes to uttering our thoughts in public we often hold back, possibly because of a laudable anxiety about hurting the feelings of others.
We needn't always be quite so polite. In the face of our own hesitancy, we can focus on cases of very obvious failures of taste on the part of those who scarcely deserve our pity. The extremely wealthy entrepreneur and his wife who built the Prix d'Amour mansion in Perth, Western Australia, were the social and economic superiors of pretty much anyone who might criticize their architectural enthusiasms (94). The problem was that they had too little taste relative to the opportunities their wealth
93. The lobby of Caesars Palace, l.as Vegas. 1966
Money alone guarantees nothing.
94. Prix d'Amour (now demolished). Melbourne, Australia. 1990
Spending money well is no less a skill than making it.
95. Michelangelo. Night and Day, Medici Chapel. C.IS34
afforded. From a financial poinr of view, they had exactly the same potential as a Medici prince, but whereas the Medici used their economic resources to create some of the most moving and noble buildings in the world (95), they created an eyesore that few people mourned when it was eventually pulled down.
The spectacular missed opportunities of the vulgar rich speak of an overall problem within capitalism. The failure of Prix d'Amour is really just a magnified version of what occurs in the burger chain and the casino lobby, on crass television shows and in low-brow newspapers. When money is allied with taste - that is, with sensitivity to what is good and beautiful as well as true to our rather inarticulate needs - very good results can follow, in areas from food to housing to media. The
problem is that wise expenditure is extremely rare. The fault does not lie with the money system itself; rather with the tastes of consumers. The contrast between the Medici chapel and the Prix d'Amour brings into view a painful difficulty for capitalism. Our current economic system is primarily geared towards wealth creation. It has gone to immense lengths to maximize the opportunities for some people to accumulate financial resources. It has very little to say, though, about how money should be used once acquired. The qualities that lead to making money are not reliably aligned with the qualities that guide its noble expenditure. This occurs because we are collectively unsure of what the point of private wealth really is. We feel at a loss to make demands and so leave things to the whims of the consumers.
Part of the reason why cars in many areas of the world are now a little better than they were a few decades ago is because some critics have tirelessly tried to educate public sentiment in relation to the virtues and vices of cars (96). These critics have taught us to be more unhappy about problematic aspects of some vehicles on the market, such as sub-standard gears, errors of styling, uncomfortable seats, vulgar fascias, poor brakes. They have taught us how to spend our money more accurately - and they've done so without fear of seeming snobbish or mean. Indeed, they have proceeded from the assumption that they have done us a favour and saved us from error. They have taught us to have taste in a small but crucial aspect of our lives: they have shown us how to be like Medicis on the forecourt.
A process whose merits we readily accept when it comes to cars needs to spread into all areas of life. We should become as demanding about what we consume in terms of food, media, architecture or leisure as we are in relation to the cars we drive. We should accept the legitimacy of the project of raising taste across the board. To this end, we should make ourselves at home with the role of the figure present at key junctures in the history of art: the critic.
In the 1920s, very few people in Britain thought it was a good idea to like, let alone spend money on, contemporary art. By the 1960s, leading opinion almost unanimously believed otherwise. One of the reasons for this dramatic change was the tireless work of the critic Herbert Read, who wrote articles and books, appeared on the radio, mounted exhibitions, founded London's 1CA and travelled around the country giving lectures in defence of the virtues of great contemporary artists such as Ben Nicholson, Pablo Picasso and Barbara Hepworth. Like Jeremy Clarkson in the realm of cars, Herbert Read changed the dominant sense of what it might be good for us to love in art (97).
We like to pride ourselves on having our own taste, but the truth is, given the demands on our time and the flaws in our psychological make-up, it's very likely that we won't know what we like unless we are encouraged to look rather deep inside ourselves and benefit from the input of others to guide our enthusiasms in fruitful ways. Our doubts about our tastes can be the stuff of rich comedy. Consider the fun that Marcel Proust has with a Madame de Cambremer, who has trouble knowing what it is 'right' to like in art. Towards the end of /;/ Search of Lost Time, she declares an enthusiasm for Monet and Degas but a deep suspicion of Poussin, a stance that Proust's narrator, a covert educator of taste, gently interrogates: