Developing Aesthetic Taste

Abstract This paper explores how facts that lie beyond the formal properties of works of art are necessary for the development of aesthetic taste. The paper argues that taste may be educated, that an educated taste is better than a noneducated one, and that this education proceeds largely along the lines of learning contextual facts relevant to the appreciation of individual objects (and events), as well as ones relevant to genres and artforms. The paper offers arguments against the proposal that different tastes are incommensurable one with another. The paper begins with a comparison between considering a work of literature as literature or as simply calligraphy and in exploring what makes those two events different finds that the learning of the sorts of facts mentioned above are generally necessary for the development of taste.