Republic of Taste. Catherine E. Kelly

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СКАЧАТЬ middle class.⁹ Lack of money and standing did not necessarily signal a lack of taste. Indeed, the laboring men and women who created refinement’s props often insisted that the quality of the goods they produced reflected their taste as well as their skill. That said, one was far more likely to discover a capacity for taste in a young woman whose once-respectable family had been rendered destitute by hard times than in a young man bent on clawing his way out of hardscrabble poverty.

      Broad as taste’s compass might have been, when Anglo-Americans attempted to define or to account for it, they turned time and again to metaphors and examples that hinged on sight and seeing. For Americans as for their British counterparts, taste and its cognate words—imagination, fancy, discretion, and, to a lesser extent, connoisseurship—were grounded in the eye.¹⁰ The countless Americans schooled in taste by the rhetorician Hugh Blair, for example, learned that taste was “ultimately founded on a certain natural and instinctive sensibility to beauty” and that beauty was first encountered visually. Those who read the Spectator knew that Joseph Addison had singled out sight, “the most perfect and most delightful of the senses,” as the critical component of his “Pleasures of the Imagination”; they understood that discretion was like a “well-formed Eye” capable of commanding “large and extended Views.”¹¹ The logic connecting taste to vision was reiterated in the pages of the American periodical press. Writers and editors regularly reminded readers that the “finer organs” of a tasteful person could see beauty that was “hidden from a vulgar eye”; that taste turned a “nicer eye” on the works of nature; and that tasteful objects were those that “please[d] the eye.”¹² The same set of associations appeared in the formal speeches made by college students like John Wales, who promised listeners that they could improve their taste while taking their daily strolls simply by noting which things appeared “pleasing and beautiful” and which did not. In no time, he assured them, they would establish a standard by which “everything was easily and readily ajudged.”¹³ Whether imagined as a badge of genteel discernment, an avenue to personal pleasure, or both, taste was imbricated in visuality. It depended equally on the perception of the subject and on the appearance of the objects and images within the field of vision.¹⁴

      Opportunities to exercise one’s taste—to scan the surroundings with a knowing and receptive eye—increased in variety and quantity during the early republic. As the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, bourgeois Americans acquired access to more books and magazines, more paintings and prints, more museums and galleries. They encountered a visual field that was increasingly crowded, courtesy of an expanding consumer market. The language that women and men used to describe their aesthetic experiences offers one register of the growing influence of commerce, commodities, and consumer capitalism. Consider the word “taste” itself. A key word in the eighteenth-century British aesthetic lexicon, “taste” appeared in political treatises, oratory, and children’s books. It also made regular appearances in letters written by and to the nation’s founders: Jefferson urged the design of a capitol that would “form the taste of our young men,” and he fretted over how John Adams’s “want of taste” would be received in Europe. For his part, Adams took pains to distinguish between the artificial “Amuzements” and the “higher Taste” displayed in England’s romantic country gardens. Even George Washington hailed Julius Caesar as a “man of highly cultivated understanding and taste.”¹⁵ These men, like their counterparts on both sides of the Atlantic, invoked “taste” in reference to physical sensations as well as to individual preferences and predilections; they used it to describe the appreciation of beauty in nature, art, and literature. “Taste” was an elastic word, conjuring an individual’s reactions to endless external stimuli. But for all its value as an index of the external world, taste was also deeply and intrinsically internalized. This, in fact, was precisely what made taste so potent for men like Jefferson, Madison, and Washington: it simultaneously summoned gentility and moral character.

      Not so the word “connoisseurship.” If taste depended upon fundamentally internalized qualities and abilities, connoisseurship derived solely from a familiarity with objects outside the self. Connoisseurs were distinguished by their knowledge of category and quality, by their expertise in a world of goods. Defined by his or her relationship to particular things, the connoisseur was a creature of the market. It is telling that the same founders who never hesitated to appeal to taste rarely invoked connoisseurship; when they did, it was usually to declare that they lacked it. Thus Washington confessed that he was “not much of a connoisseur” of dinner plates and “profess[ed] not to be a connoisseur” of poetry. Jefferson was “so little of a connoisseur” that he found the paintings of Adriaen van der Werff and Carlo Dolci superior to those of Peter Paul Rubens.¹⁶ To be sure, there was always the whiff of gamesmanship in disavowals like these. A preference for Dolci over Rubens might have ruffled the feathers of connoisseurs, but it also trumpeted a far deeper knowledge of art history than most Americans or Britons could claim. But by pointedly distancing themselves from connoisseurs, Jefferson and Washington implicitly juxtaposed connoisseurship’s studied pretense against taste’s authentic simplicity in order to announce themselves as republicans and to lay claim to an aesthetic and moral high ground.

      Suspect in the eighteenth century, “connoisseur” and its variations triumphed in the nineteenth. Americans seized on the word to describe their connection to the material world. The early national periodical press provides a rough index of the ascent of the connoisseur. Initially, the word was associated solely with high culture and the fine arts. Connoisseurs judged painting, sculpture, and (much less frequently) literature; their approbation was invoked in announcements for gallery exhibitions and essays on Benjamin West’s oeuvre and Henry Fuseli’s lectures on painting.¹⁷ But the range of objects that commanded the connoisseur’s attention quickly expanded beyond the exquisite and the rare to include the everyday and the accessible. Newspaper and magazine advertisements invited connoisseurs to peruse engraved prints, perfumes, and wines or to enjoy mechanical panoramas, philosophical experiments, and turtle soup.¹⁸ Arkansas land, merino sheep, cream cheese, and a special shade of red that could be produced only with a dye made from sheep’s dung—all provided fodder for connoisseurs.¹⁹ “Connoisseurship” never eclipsed “taste.” Indeed, the two words were often linked. Eventually, they became all but synonymous. Nor was the exercise of taste ever entirely divorced from the material world. Nevertheless, the nineteenth-century ascendance of “connoisseur,” a word that appeared only rarely in eighteenth-century Anglo-America, should alert us to the increasingly active and volatile presence of the market in the republic of taste.

      The market ensured that the very visual and material cultures that helped materialize the United States’ republic of taste also served to undermine it. The republic of taste had always been an abstraction, an idea. Like all theories, it proved vulnerable to praxis. Yet as it was imagined and constituted in the United States, this particular abstraction proved to be especially vulnerable to the material forms that were meant to embody and to shape it. For one thing, most of the texts and objects that structured the world of taste, even in its most allegedly American iterations, were European or, more likely, British in origin. An exclusively “American taste” was an oxymoron. Sovereignty produced neither cultural nor economic autonomy. Most Anglo-Americans did a very good job of overlooking the extent to which their tasteful texts and things derived from English originals. That said, Englishness (and the recent history of political rupture and economic dependency it implied) popped up more than anyone might have liked. Put simply, U.S. citizens’ continued reliance on British texts, objects, images, and styles complicated their narratives about national distinctiveness and disrupted their claims about a singularly American republic of taste.²⁰

      More to the point, regardless of provenance, most of the objects and images constituting the American republic of taste were commodities. Circulating across the Atlantic and within the United States, taste’s props were part of a protean consumer market that was both a source and a symbol of political, economic, and social change. Commodification undermined the lofty promises held out by the abstraction of taste not because it produced tawdry, tacky goods (although it assuredly did) or because it extended taste’s compass across all sectors СКАЧАТЬ