April 2006 Archives
Recently the question of a designer doing a piece of work that tested the limits of what was tasteful was posed on graphics.com, sadly it never progressed much past its current state, but for myself it posed the question of what exactly is considered to be good or bad taste.
In an effort to define what taste was I looked at a variety of articles and definitions through my library and of course the internet. Not surprisingly, like most philosophical arguments, it's a circuitous and convoluted path, weaving back and forth, one definition relying on another in order to validate its position. Wikipedia.org offers two possible definitions, the first relating to aesthetics and the other to sociology. The commonality between them however, and other references, is that the matter of taste is a matter of culture. Where culture is constructed geographically, socially, institutionally and chronologically.
