A question of taste.
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.
There are a number of examples that can be drawn upon that illustrate this point. For example the Manga comics of Japan feature depictions of people and situations that have come under attack in North America for their sometimes misogynistic and violent art. The pornography industry caters to various cultural groups selling material that ranges from the erotic to the portrayal of intercourse to hard core masochism, within that spectrum there are various cultural groups that would argue that the material being sold has various merits of taste.
Taste is also shaped chronologically and institutionally. The Vanitas paintings by the Dutch masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth century are considered to be tasteful and aesthetic works not only by the art institute but also by the larger social group that has come to accept the institutionalization of this work. Yet the depiction of decaying food in order to portray the opulence afforded to rich Dutch bankers was rejected by the larger social group in Jana Sterbak's work "Vanitas" for her portrayal of women as objects of commodification.
The issue of aesthetics is also related to the question of taste, yet seems to have elevated itself above the base level of the physicality of taste, perhaps if you will high taste. Aesthetics is more concerned with construction, technique, composition and color and derives its sense of taste from the dominant cultural group that defines it.
So what is good taste? The answer lies in who your audience is and what cultural, political and institutional beliefs that they ascribe too. Where beauty lies in the eye of the beholder taste is in the mouth of the maker and what your audience is willing to swallow.
A larger version of the opening imaged is posted here, I'll leave it up to you to decide if it is tastefully and aesthetically pleasing.
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