Category Archives: General Aesthetics

Tasteless Philosophy

19 Thursday Apr 2018

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tastelessDespite their preoccupation with the analysis of sensory experience, philosophers have ignored taste, smell, and touch, focusing instead on vision as the most important sense.

German philosopher Hans Jonas’s “The Nobility of Sight” is a prominent example. Only vision, he argued, gives us eternal, universal truths, which have been philosophy’s concern throughout most of its history. Vision puts us in mind of the eternal because time is not essential to it. When we view a landscape we see the visual field displayed all at once, in no time. An object can be visually identified immediately without a sequence of appearances over time, in contrast to sound, touch, or taste that need time to reveal the character of their objects. Visual objects also have stability. We can view an object, look away, and then return to the very same object as if nothing has changed unlike the fleeting, ever-changing objects of taste, smell, and sound.

Furthermore, Jonas argues, with vision we can see objects with accuracy if we maintain our distance from them. With touch, smell, and taste  we must be intimate with the object thus increasing the chances that personal bias might influence our understanding of it.

Despite their illustrious pedigree, these are very bad arguments. We learn nothing of the eternal through vision, or any other sensory mechanism, and vision without the opportunity for subsequent confirmation, in time, would be the source of constant error. Furthermore, our sense of the stability of objects is as dependent on the sense of touch as on vision. The stability of our visual field depends on the body’s orientation is space, which is maintained, in part, by our tactile contact with solid objects.

As to the alleged objectifying distance of vision, science shows that vision involves intimate contact with physical objects–swarms of photons. We are just as capable of misinterpreting those photons as we are the signals from taste buds. Psychological research has demonstrated the unreliability of eye-witness testimony and perceptual judgments are hardly immune to subjective bias. Objects are often seen at a distance or under conditions otherwise unsuitable for reliable identification.

At best, vision’s distance and the illusion of simultaneity allow us to spin metaphors about the eternal and universal. But misleading metaphors are bad metaphors.

However, there is an important contrast between vision and the other senses. Through vision we do gain a sense of an horizon, an area beyond our present space. This is surely important for the development of our imagination in our evolutionary history.

By contrast, touch , taste, and smell root us in the here and now. Objects must be spatially and temporally present for them to effect these sensory modalities. But why should experience rooted in the here and now be uninteresting to philosophy?

If taste is philosophically uninteresting, perhaps it is because philosophers lack taste.

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Are Fine Wine and Creative Cooking Arts or Crafts?

26 Monday Feb 2018

Posted by in 3 Quarks Daily Column, General Aesthetics, Philosophy of Food and Wine

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The explosion of interest in the aesthetics of food and beverages over the past several decades inevitably raises the question whether certain culinary preparations or wines can be considered works of art. I consider how we should distinguish a craft from an art in the context of wine and food in my Three Quarks Daily column this month.

A Sin Against Beauty

20 Wednesday Dec 2017

Posted by in General Aesthetics, Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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no rulesBlake Gray committed a sin against beauty on his blog yesterday.

A winery sent him a press notice about the release of a wine made from a nearly extinct varietal, a form of communication which he usually ignores. However, because it was a rare wine that he might otherwise be interested in tasting he responded as follows:

Interesting but I’m not sure why they would pick it so ripe (16% alcohol!) that you won’t be able to taste the difference between this and Merlot.

Sorry, you probably didn’t want that feedback.

Gray then goes on to explain:

The next step normally would be to taste the wine and talk about it but to be honest, I’m not interested in tasting this wine. I don’t have a hard cutoff for alcohol percentage in a table wine, but 16% is well above what I want to drink and what I want to recommend. If I taste it, and it’s delicious — super smooth, interesting, complex, my Saint-Macaire dream come true — I still would never order a bottle of it, because I couldn’t finish a glass. So should I recommend a wine like that, that I would not drink myself?

The problem is not with his preference for lower alcohol wines, a preference I share. The problem is you can’t know what a wine tastes like without tasting it, just as you can’t know what a painting or piece of music is like with the experience. Aesthetics is a domain without rules because each work is a unique individual, a law unto itself. Each element in an aesthetic object is so sensitive to context that even very similar works affect us in vastly different ways. There are no aesthetic principles that allow one to deduce that a work is of high quality; even a thick description of a work will not tell you if you will enjoy it or not.  You have to have the experience.

I’ve had wines with 16% alcohol that were crisp and refreshing and wines at 13% alcohol that were flabby and dull. The alcohol percentage is just a number and an often inaccurate, unreliable number as well. (The law allows a 1% variance in wines over 14%.)

Just as there is no recipe for producing quality wine, there is no rule book for what one will like or whether varietal character will be evident. At best, we can make educated guesses about such matters, and it’s that element of surprise that makes wine (and paintings and music) thrilling.

Of course ,if Blake doesn’t like a wine he ought not to recommend it. But he can’t know if he likes it until he tastes it, not because he doesn’t know his own preferences but because its in the very nature of aesthetic experience that cases cannot be generalized.

Resonance: A Measure of Wine Quality

01 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by in General Aesthetics, Philosophy of Food and Wine, The Art of Wine

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pollackI’ve been thinking a lot about Martin Seel’s concept of resonance as one of the keys to wine quality.

Think of the rustling of leaves, the shimmer of light on water, or the background hum of the city. What is common about these phenomena is that they cannot be perceptually traced back to a source.  We know the hum of  city is caused by engines, voices, all sorts of devices that make noise but those individual sound sources cannot be picked out. In resonance, events shine, vanish, and reappear without order or form.

Think also of the inchoate, half-formed shapes in the background of abstract art (such as the Pollack painting above) or the sounds that are not quite melodies or harmonies that provide interest and complexity in a piece of music.

The use of tonal effects operating in the background of contemporary rock music provides a sense of movement independently of the melody or rhythm. The precise character of a band’s sound can’t be fully analyzed into component parts, especially if it’s new and different. The sound depends in a general way on which instruments are used, their tone quality and the way the various tone qualities interact but these components cannot be picked out and given a precise specification.

This lack of perceptible form is the key characteristic of resonance. It’s experienced as a kind of attractive chaos, a loosening of expectations and assumptions, drawing us in to the painting or piece of music by creating a sense of mystery about it.

Although Seel doesn’t mention it, wine too has resonance, flavors and aromas that give only hints and nuance as the flavors and textures insinuate and lapse remaining just below the threshold of full discernment. Quality wines often have a clarity and focus to them. But great wines provide a different kind of experience, provoking a feeling of something just beyond the horizon that cannot quite be identified. They present barely discernable aromas that don’t fit our standard categories, that violate expectations and seem starkly original but resist attempts to explain or describe precisely what we’re tasting.

Seel thinks of resonance as a borderline aesthetic phenomenon, present only occasionally in works of art although striking when experienced. In wine, by contrast, resonance is the main characteristic of superior quality. Only the best wines combine clarity with these inchoate nuances that indicate great complexity but resist a full analysis into component parts.What is a borderline phenomenon in the visual and musical arts is central to wine appreciation.

Walter Becker RIP

04 Monday Sep 2017

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Walter Becker, lead guitarist and co-songwriter for Steely Dan died over the weekend at the age of 67. I fondly remember back in the day spending hour after hour meticulously copying Becker’s guitar solos to see how they worked, pondering the enigmatic lyrics he wrote with Donald Fagen to find hidden meanings, marveling at the studied perfection of their studio work.  In other words, from their first major album Can’t Buy a Thrill until I left the music business, Becker and Fagan were my constant companions.

Black Friday contained one of his better known guitar solos.

Is What’s in the Glass All That Matters?

19 Thursday Jan 2017

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glass of wineI often hear it said that despite all the stories about family and cultural traditions, drinking ideologies, and paeans to terroir, what matters is what’s in the glass. If the wine has flavor it’s good. Nothing else matters. And of course the whole idea of wine scores reflects the idea that there is single scale of deliciousness that defines wine quality.

For many people who drink wine as a commodity beverage, I suppose the platitude that “only what’s in the glass matters”  is true. But many of the people who talk this way are wine lovers and connoisseurs. For many of them, I think there is something self-deceptive about this full focus on what’s in the glass. Although flavor surely matters, it’s not all that matters and these stories, traditions, and ideologies are central to genuine wine appreciation.

Burnham and Skilleås in their book The Aesthetics of Wine engage in a thought experiment that shows the questionable nature of “it’s only what’s in the glass that matters”. They ask us to imagine a scenario in 2030 in which wine science has advanced to such a point that any wine can be thoroughly analyzed not only into its constituent chemical components (which we can already do up to a point) but with regard to a wine’s full development as well.

Imagine 3D animations of a wine’s development over time tracing in precise detail all the chemical reactions a wine undergoes from fermentation through aging to popping the cork that can generate a recipe for all those stages. Thus, in this imagined scenario,  wine factories can synthetically  produce an exact duplicate of any wine you want. All wines at all stages in their development can be manufactured and sold at a modest price. That 2005 Lafite that sells for thousands of dollars per bottle, you can order it as it tasted in 2025 for about $30. The special bottle of La Tâche purchased at your daughter’s birth and opened for her graduation—no problem, just order another. The vagaries of farming, vintage variation, wine faults and supply limitations now all a part of the misty, dimly remembered past.

And let’s imagine these synthetic wines have been put through rigorous taste tests and it is demonstrated conclusively that there is no discernable difference between the synthetic wines and the originals.

Is that a wine world you want to live in?

I suspect that some people would say sure. If what matters is only what is in the glass then nothing would be lost in the 2030 scenario and much would be gained. There are benefits to a world in which even people with modest incomes can drink great wine.

But I suspect that many of us would demur. I know I would. We know that people value originals and that art works discovered to be forgeries lose all value. We are inherently fascinated by origins as psychologist Paul Bloom has shown. Isn’t part of what we enjoy about wine its connection to a place, the unique conditions of  its production, and the creativity, initiative, and risk-taking of the people who made it?

The fact that wine is a collaboration between humanity and nature is part of its appeal. So is the uncertainty of not knowing exactly what you will get when you open the bottle. As Burnham and Skilleås write:

Having to expect the unexpected may not only be a fact of life in the wine world of today but also something that creates a welcome frisson in the wine lover.

So too does the sense of regret knowing that for special bottles you will never have that experience again. The maturing and decline of a bottle and the fact that all the bottles of a cuvée will eventually disappear symbolizes much about the human condition. These symbolic connections are all severed in the 2030 scenario.

Would these losses be worth the opportunity to drink a 2005 Lafite whenever we want? Would we even appreciate such a wine when perfection becomes the norm?

More deeply it’s worth asking whether human ingenuity could create the remarkable yet subtle differences that the collaboration between culture, geography and nature create?

If these considerations carry any weight for you, then your appreciation of wine goes far beyond “what’s in the glass’’.

A Vision for Our Times

15 Thursday Dec 2016

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Was the Nobel committee prescient, their choice as apt as Patti Smith’s wordlessness?

Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’
I saw a white ladder all covered with water
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

The World as a Painting

31 Wednesday Aug 2016

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rauschenbergI’ve been poking around New York taking a break from wine tasting. At the Museum of Modern Art I came across this quote from Robert Rauschenberg next to his 1961 work “First Landing Jump”:

There is no reason not to consider the world as one gigantic painting

When teaching aesthetics I always struggle to capture in a few words the essence of modern art. Rauschenberg’s quote I think does it.

For helpful oversimplifications, if Renaissance painting is about religious narratives and their intersection with ordinary life, classical and neo-classical art about the grandeur of the human form expressed via harmony and rational proportion, and romantic art about emotion and the glorification of nature, modern art takes all of reality, its colors, textures, lines, even at its most mundane, as its subject matter. From the impressionist’s interest in light, to the cubist play of surfaces, Kandinsky’s geometrical forms, the use of found objects, to the environmental art of today, visual artists treat the world as one big painting of which each individual artist abstracts only a small portion.

Students often express frustration with modern art wondering what it’s about, what meaning is has. Obviously some modern works have meaning in the conventional sense of a narrative or set of characters that do something intelligible. But the larger project of modern art is to simply take some dimension of reality and highlight it, put it on a pedestal so we see it anew.

It’s about the visual play of matter in motion which cannot be constrained by anything as limited as a narrative. It takes perception seriously, not merely as a precursor to conceptual understanding, but as something in itself worth exploring.

I doubt that Rauschenberg’s “First Landing Jump” has an articulable meaning other than to portray a collection of familiar textures and shapes in a juxtaposition never before seen.