GUIDE 7

ART CRITICISM

ACTIVITY 2.   REVIEW IN ENGLISH.

“TASTETICS”

Review about "Of the Standard of Taste" by David Hume.

David Hume, thinker, born in Scotland in 1711, one of the most important figures of the European Enlightenment, had his culminating moment through the English empiricism. Focusing on issues of taste and aesthetics, as we can observe in "Of the Standard of Taste" included in the book "Essays and treatises on several subjects" published in 1947, he wondered about the possibility of establishing rules and concepts that determine taste, as foreseen in this title, and also wonders if there are principles to define universal taste.

Since before his time, philosophers and intellectuals have much discussed about the validity of that notion established on these topics that contains many ethereal and subjective facts in its conception. There are lots of issues around it and this was a work undertaken by Hume in a detailed high quality analysis that led him to present factors that show whether taste is a subjective feeling for each person or indeed may have a series of benchmarks to establish reasonable and meaningful definitions.

Hume begins his writing acknowledging the existence of a variety of thinking and factors likely to please different people and in different ways, even when they have shared their social and cultural environment. Then, he refers to particulars available in those environments and the way some men can learn from them as the basis to understand and respect them with common sense and accept the possibility of a variety of points of view and understanding aesthetic beauty as a feeling. It is discussed elsewhere in a dilemma that makes it range from a few thinkers power to establish rules on taste or pursuing this within the universal laws of nature. Thinkers to assume this responsibility, or who have credentials to be called critical, as this author says, may be those who meet qualities as "good sense" to discern a "delicate taste" to capture nuances and an "aesthetic acuity" that allows them to make judgments. This leads him to venture into the field of aesthetic rationality as a fundamental matter in the rules of art widespread approval that men give to many enduring works which, for this reason become aesthetically beautiful. After that, the next task was to find the questioning undertaken in the field of discussion that might be related to the issue of taste. About the correct rating of critics and their qualities, says Hume, knowledge of art as delicate imagination and good sense in addition to the distance regarding the critical personal biases are considered valuable to deserve this title. In his last pages, he touts the fact that an agreement between the different parties may be given to search for specific items that can generate any sense of excitement or admiration, within the same work, sometimes found in different chronological times or in many other ways and may also be never agreed.

Through some procedures and behaviors used as conviction strategies and that use these matching elements are a breakthrough of Hume as a philosopher because it established a demonstration of the "art of reasoning from generally accepted opinions" as a teaching tool of certain parameters as irrefutable aesthetic factors can be defined as taste after a process of understanding, a process as the one that was analyzed by Sontag, S. (1966) in “Against Interpretation” who explained the importance of aesthetics when she wrote in favor of signifier, shape and form over signified, interpretation and contents as she explained.