The Cost of Knowledge

Every time I hear the word ‘taste’, I cringe a little, less at the idea of taste itself than at the fuzzy way the word is usually employed: this or that person has, or doesn’t have, taste. Of course, it would be good if ‘having taste’ was simply shorthand for ‘having acquired the knowledge, perceptiveness and confidence to make aesthetic choices that are a valuable contribution to one’s respective discourse’, but this is not usually the case. Conversely, ‘not having taste’ is usually a shorthand way of implying that someone doesn’t fit into the social group or cultural niche to which the person who made the statement belongs. All of which brings me to that droll beast laughter.

Laughter is an ambivalent reaction: a sudden, glorious relief, expressing enjoyment over someone’s departure from a social norm (even if it’s just tripping up when you should be walking) and – often in the same instant
– a mocking admonition to return quickly to the norm. A beautiful example of this is a story I heard about an Inuit custom: if a child steps too close to a crack in the Arctic ice, the group, rather than yelling, laughs out loud – laughter, literally, used as a survival skill. A less beautiful example is what happened during the first sports session in my first year of primary school: three kids from a rough neighbourhood showed up in the old gymnasium, not in de rigeur Adidas shorts (it was the summer of 1974, and Germany had just won the World Cup) but in their underpants (their parents being unable or unwilling to afford proper sportswear; this was before the days of Hip-Hop). This, of course, provoked an immediate outbreak of hysterical giggling. Although I must have joined in, I was so shocked by the childish cruelty that I still vividly remember both the scene and the lesson: this is what happens to you if you don’t fit in. The incident literally stripped to its underpants the notion of, well, taste.

Taste, like laughter, can express enjoyment over a breach in convention and just as well mockingly demand a return to it. Taste runs the gamut from a hearty laugh channelled into a (possibly guilty) aesthetic pleasure to shrill giggles sublimated into a discreet exchange of glances. If the cultivation of knowledge, perceptiveness and confidence are what make taste (and the fashions it starts or follows), what transforms it into a human rather than a robotic skill is a pinch of, for better or worse, laughter. That’s where the entrepreneurial nerd’s dream of commodifying taste gets it so wrong. ‘Taste mates’ that tell you on websites and home entertainment systems what you should watch, read or listen to are based on a mix of your own earlier choices plus statistics of other people’s earlier choices and result in nothing but a manual for boredom: the entropy of taste. Laughter is the only thing that can really stop that entropy: it is the spontaneous expression of welcome both for the unexpected kick-in-the-butt and the worn-out (but still going strong) running gag. And that’s where art comes in.

Art relies on taste – ‘a good mix of knowledge, perceptiveness and confidence to make aesthetic choices’. Attempts to distil some sort of commercial manual from these aesthetic choices are, of course, just one step further. Recently, for example, I read an article in the business pages of a Swiss newspaper recommending – surprise, surprise! – fine art as an investment with a good risk-return profile. The first suggestion was that people with a lot of money should buy major works by big names. So far, so obvious. So what for those with a little bit less? The advice was, first, to research the artist whose work you’re thinking of buying. Great. Second, ask a dealer for advice. With all due respect, this is a problem: might some dealers not have vested interests when they advise you on something they want to sell to you? But OK. The third suggestion was not to buy work that needs to be plugged in or that takes up a lot of storage space – which is a bit like telling women not to wear high heels because slippers are more comfortable.

This is a manual for stupidity – art market platitudes transformed into a leopard-skin thong. Although it’s right on a superficial level (it’s less risky to invest in painting), it is wrong on a deeper level (there is a disproportionate amount of crap painting around that won’t be worth a penny in ten years’ time). It was advice that wouldn’t last a second in any other section of the same serious newspaper. Any reader who followed the advice would possibly end up with paintings that spent their life rotting like old meat. Art is not rocket science, but it’s not the pork trade either.

Don’t get me wrong: what makes art live, thrive and pulsate with energy is that people invest in it, whether it’s their love, their critical thinking or simply their wealth. But art solely as an investment is a contradiction in terms. It’s tasteless and laughable. Don’t step too close to that crack.

Jörg Heiser is co-editor of frieze.