But' I said to her, feeling that the only way to rehabilitate Poussin in the opinion of Madame de Cambremer would be to tell her that he was once again fashionable. 'Monsieur Degas insists that the Poussins at Chantilly arc the most beautiful things he knows.'
'Really? I don't know the ones at Chantilly,' said Madame de Cambremer who did not wish to disagree with Degas, 'but I can speak for those in the Louvre, they're horrible.* 'He also admires them enormously.'
The Role of the Critic in the Education of Taste
'I must go and look at them again. My memory of them is rather vague,' she replied after a moment of silence, as if the favourable judgment she would soon have of Poussin would depend not on what 1 had just told her but on the additional and this time definitive examination to which she intended to submit the Louvre pictures.
Marcel Proust, In Search of lost Time, vol. 4: 'Sodom and Gomorrah', 1921-2
We shouldn't let the relish with which Proust skewers Madame de Cambremer distract us from the more patient task of trying to understand what precisely her error is, and, since we're more like her than we might like to admit, our own. Madame de Cambremer doesn't know her own mind. This is a forgivable eventuality: how are we supposed to know from the outset which painter has talent? The problem here isn't really uncertainty, though. It is rather the refusal
We don't always know what we like until someone is there to guide our tastes.
97. Herbert Read at the opening of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. London, 1947
to humbly acknowledge an inability to know one's own concerns; a frailty masked by arrogance. Madame de Cambremer- like many other people - pretends she knows what is important in art and that she is making judgements on the basis of authentic experience, while in fact she hasn't taken the trouble to think and feel, and with a degree of panic simply tries to mimic what she imagines the current fashion to be.
If you were trying to turn the situation around for Madame de Cambremer, mockery wouldn't be the best starting point. After all, part of this woman's problem is that she thinks she should already have sound taste in art without ever having benefitted from a process of education. She thinks she should know the answer, and is therefore less inclined to work through her ignorance. Herbert Read knew this problem well. He began from a position of great sympathy for doubt and ignorance, and, in response, kindness was a key part of his educational strategy. He took it for granted that decent, intelligent, well-intentioned people might not know very much about art. Why should they? In particular, he knew that they might be very sceptical of abstract art, but he didn't chastise them
for being idiots or nostalgic fools. He didn't have fun at their expense, as Proust would have done. All true education has this structure. The kindergarten teacher doesn't think children are contemptible because they cannot write or are confused about what number comes after fourteen. You are allowed to start, with honour, wherever you are. Read's tactic was to begin with things that people already acknowledged and approved of. In lectures, he liked to point out that a Madonna and Child by Raphael - one of the most respectable and widely admired artists in the 1930s - was in fact deeply devoted to abstract composition, just like Barbara Hepworth, a contemporary artist he was fond of (98). Read was a master at getting you to admit new works into your private pantheon by directing you towards subtle similarities with ones that had already won your trust.
The greatest critics help us find personally resonant reasons why we might like or dislike certain objects. They take seriously a very strange fact about experience: that we don't automatically know why we love or hate things. We often cannot explain accurately to ourselves or others what it is, really, that is at stake. For example, when we say that something is 'awesome', 4cooF or 'amazing', we are registering our positive reactions, but not explaining them (these words can be grating because we feel bullied rather than seduced into admiration). Criticism is the process of going behind the scenes in the hunt for true reasons.
Even when contemplating extremely celebrated and much-loved images, we are liable to feel painfully silenced by the basic question of why we like them. A good critic can track what is really going on when we are moved by a work, and can put the enthusiasm into words. For example, many people have felt there is something special about Mona Lisa's smile (99). In 1869, however, the Fortnightly Review published an essay by the art critic and philosopher Walter Pater that gave an articulate, if slightly flowery, insight into what the power of this smile might actually be based upon:
She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and. as Lcda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mar)': and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.
Learning to love Hepworih, with Raphael and Read's help.
98. Barbara Hcpworth. Pelagoi. 1946
In other, less ornate words, what we may like in Mona Lisa's face is an impression of a combination of vast experience and serenity; a sense that here is a human being who is aware of all sorts of eventualities and dynamics in other people, and is still able to be fond of them. It is really the kind of attitude we long to find in an ideal lover or a friend, someone who might know us for who we truly are, with all our secrets and our darkness, yet still regard us with tenderness and generosity.
There is a crucial continuity between the rather arcane task of teaching us what to look out for in Renaissance paintings and the more popular role of the educator of taste in relation to cars, houses or hamburgers. At root, the work of the critic involves getting people to grasp what is genuinely satisfying and pleasing about something, or what might be disappointing and half-baked about it. Criticism is the effort of being as clear as possible about the basis for our loves and hates. Sometimes it can seem as if it is only concerned with the hating part, with pointing out with derision what is sub-standard, but this negative stance should only ever be an incidental part of the far more important project of identifying what is worthy of admiration.
Even if we like it. it's a challenge to say what is nice about this picture.
99. Leonardo da Vinci. Mono Lisa. 1503-6
Nevertheless, improving taste should mean that people regularly get a little more unhappy about certain aspects of their lives. For example, rather than putting up with bad architecture, there should be a collective gasp of horror at the new poor-quality housing development or brutal shopping mall, a gasp which, to return to capitalism, should then translate itself into severe financial punishment for those responsible for desecrating the earth.
The largest and most commercially successful shopping centre in the southern hemisphere, Gladstone, in the suburbs of Melbourne, was built by a family business called Myer Emporium, which also happens to have a fine record of philanthropy (100). The leading members of this family are conspicuous for their gracious homes and sophisticated outlook on life. In other words, they did not build a vast, mean-looking, architecturally disastrous complex because as individuals they thought it was a delight. It's just that they wanted to make a lot of money, and they believed that such a shopping centre would be the most reliable way to do so.