1988-05-19 COUSINS, Mark

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http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/VIDEO/lecture.php?ID=770 COUSINS, Mark Taste as an Ethical and Political Idea in the 18th Century Legitimation and Credibility conference organized and moderated by Roy Landau. Mark Cousins - Taste as an Ethical and Political Idea in the 18th Century. From the Legitimation and Credibility conference organized and moderated by Roy Landau. Lecture transcription: MARK COUSINS: I once had a problem, an interest, which led on to thinking about something else: to try an account for the developing taste for early Italian art, trecento and quattrocento art in England, at the end of the 18th century, and then to the 19th century. It wasn’t difficult to map, the growth of this taste in terms of the usual, scholarly indexes. One could look at the growth of historical scholarship on the 15th century at the end of the 18th century, things like (William) Roscoe’s biography of Lorenzo di Medici, or one could look at collections like the Walker gallery in Liverpool, where Roscoe’s collection is now housed. One could say the way in which engravings were increasingly disseminated, and one could mark the change in the earlier critical remark made by the Italian masters in art history books, painters and a whole range of topographical literature. So, one could chart this as a history, from 1780 to 1820, one could trace a transformation of interest, and one could chart the way in which this class of paintings certainly became valued. However, having simply traced that history didn’t seem to me to give an account of the mechanism whereby this transformation occurred, and it seems pointless to me to try to explain this mechanisms by things like “a change insensibility” yes, it’s totally tautological, yes, that’s what you are seeking to analyze. So, I’ve always found terms like “Romanticism” or whatever, entirely pointless. What kind of mechanisms might be at stake in such limited, but real change. I don’t think one gets an awful lot of help from simply the standards specialists of text, because in a sense, this simply mark the rise and fall of masters, and schools, etc., quite often in an ironical mode, a mode which simply talks about taste, as a kind of worldly fashion, nor did I get much help from sociology texts, again, in a sense, what interests sociology of taste is not what’s valued, or how it’s valued, but the way in which, as it were, the ruling class perpetually falled off on everyone else a set of prefered objects. What I began to find myself asking, was who or what is the legitimate subject of taste. What is the subject, such that it has taste. Here I began to look at two different issues: one was discussions about taste itself, in the 18th century, and certain transformations in those discussions. In particular, at ideas of certain social practices which, for lack of a better word, are called practices of sincerity. To put my argument on the table, what I want to suggest on this paper is that there is a gradual transformation in discussions of the art object in the 18th century towards what we might call a sensationalism of aesthetic response. Here, perhaps in England, it was slightly different from the continent. On the one hand, you get the rise of the sensationalist count of art appreciation, but this creates a profound difficulty, because it’s clear that this discourse in no way wants to license any response: it’s important to this argument that it finds ways of saying that not everyone’s taste is (to be considered), only some are legitimate. What legitimates the subject of taste is that the subject of taste is capable and actually makes statements in a mode of sincerity. It’s an unhelpful word, and I don’t mean to value sincerity in any sense, it’s not that I think people suddenly became sincere. Various ways of trying to characterize certain mentalities in Modern Europe, tend to write in various ways that at a certain point, the history of the self, added to itself a new attribute which might be called sincerity, in 17th century, perhaps. Clearly, in the idea of sincerity, there is a relation to classical ideas of truthfulness. It may well have certain other origins in 16th century obsessions with falsification, forgery, and pretense, the areas of life in which impersonation might be used by the individual to escape from the actuality, or his responsibilities of his private or social identity. In this sense, the Victorian villain, who violates his social identity by forging a will, is merely the last actor in a long tradition. Nonetheless, the concept has undergone profound transformation. Some historians, tend to locate this transformation in the emergence of the concept of society. Some people have given to Calvinist leaders a kind of early undeveloped sense of society, in which sincerity is tested by the willingness to speak plainly. You can find it vividly expressed by Edward Thompson. The a