Taste and Hume

After reading Hume and his theory about human taste I am starting to see what would make art, art.  I know that I was the first one to talk in the class this year saying that the blue heart on stadium way was not art.  I was being slightly facetious but I really did not see the artistic appeal to it either.  However, after reading Hume, I really agree with his notion of taste.  This notion is that each person has their own set tastes for all types of art.  He writes that it is not necessarily composed of what you have studied or how one was brought up but rather, it is something that is uniquely inherent in each of us.  He argues that when something strays far from our own taste, we look at it as “barbarous,” or crude and savage.  Applying this even to everyday speech, there are jokes that while some find funny and tasteful, if they drift too far away from another’s taste, they will find the joke crude.  This can also easily bee seen in movies and art.  I know that when I went to go see an art exhibit in Seattle where there were huge paintings of people being killed in China and the exhibit was very controversial.  This is because it was too far away from peoples “taste scale.”  The reason that Hume uses the word taste is because it carries with it the connotation of physically tasting food and drink.  He uses wine as an example of this.  After telling a story of two people drinking wine Hume says that, “The great resemblance between mental and bodily taste will each teach us to apply this story.  Though it be certain that beauty and deformity, more than sweet and bitter, are not qualities in objects, but belong entirely to the sentiment, internal or external; it must be allowed, that there are certain qualities in objects, which are fitted by nature to produce those particular feelings.”  This quote describes exactly the point that Hume is trying to get across.  It is saying that there are certain things that just cause reactions causing in each of us.  This reaction is what Hume associates with taste.