Henry Oliver on how to have good taste

Henry Oliver on how to have good taste:

When we prioritise our own reaction to art, we assume that those reactions are about the art. But if you are misreading a piece of writing, without knowing it, your feelings will be more to do with you than with the writing, and thus not a response to the writing at all. When we misunderstand what we read, our feelings make us pay more attention to what is familiar in the writing than to what is unfamiliar. Thus believing that taste is primarily personal encourages us to not react to the writing, but instead repeat what we already think and feel. And so bad taste perpetuates itself.

Once we aspire, like Klein, to appreciate the best work, we begin to pay attention, acquire knowledge, and to see our personal reactions and deep feelings as only one important way of assessing great work. The more we can find in these great works of art, the broader the range of responses we can have. Struggling through works that are beyond us leads to new levels of understanding, new depths of feeling.