Taste

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You're listening to the Arts and Ideas podcast with me, Matthew Sweet.

The Gustavus non-S dispute tandem.

I never add the Latin, but people have been saying it since the early modern period.

There's no accounting for taste.

Or tonight's free thinking, however, we're going to have a go.

People like some things are not others,

but there's an architecture which insists that,

aside from what you like,

there's another kind of judgment that can be made,

one that's still subjective,

but it's also, to some extent, right or wrong.

So tonight, let us think of Miranda Priestley

in the Devilware's Prada.

Her very name, arguing that in the matter of style,

there is virtue and sin,

just as there is in the confessional.

Let us think of the golden lube rush,

purported to belong to Vladimir Putin.

Let us consider shaker furniture, leopard skin,

budgie smugglers,

the by-right festival,

butter sommeliers.

Oh, yes, they exist,

and marry Antoinette's shoes,

and all the ideas they stir.

And let us invite her contemporary,

the philosopher Immanuel Kant to the party.

I hope he's going to have a beautiful evening,

and why wouldn't he look who else made it into our VIP area?

John Callanon, he's a Kantian.

I'm sure he's lots of other things, too,

but that's his job on the show tonight.

Who are you wearing tonight, John?

Oh, very stylish.

Where are your listeners?

Can't see it, but I am exquisitely.

It's a nice bit to tweed that.

Well, I'm on-brand as an academic.

Emma Dabbery is here,

the writer and broadcaster,

whose latest book is Disobedient Bodies

Reclaim Your Unruly Beauty.

Welcome, Legato Shokkala, opera singer,

and locus of international glamour is here.

Last year, I think, to discuss Marlena Dietrich.

Indeed.

And I imagine that by Roich is also on the programme.

Yes, it could be.

Peter York is here.

He is to style what David Attenborough is

to the animal kingdom.

And we're all lowering our shades,

because there's somebody new in the roller disco tonight,

the film Academic Sarah Smith,

making a free-thinking debut

as a new generation thinker,

one of radiophores intellectuals in residence.

Welcome, Sarah.

Now, I think we exercised impeccable skill

and judgment in gathering you lot here tonight.

But who here claims to have good taste, Emma?

So, I would say that I have impeccable taste,

but I say that with my tongue firmly in my cheek,

because I don't subscribe to...

I have very like...

I like what I like, irrespective of what is prescribed.

And I'm firmly committed to the value and importance

and innovation and creativity and genius

of many art forms and expressions of culture

that would be considered by those who have good taste

as being low-brow.

I fully reject that.

So, could you give us an example of something

that would prove your first assertion?

I have impeccable taste.

I mean, look at me.

Sarah, what about you?

I like to think I have quite bad taste

as an academic.

I think this is something that you're absolutely not supposed to have.

And this is why I really started to interrogate this.

I really like...

I mean, I'm a film academic

and the films I like are romantic comedies,

their weepies, their melodrama.

I like television, I like women's television,

I like reality television.

These are all supposed to be the kind of

debased things of culture, of film culture.

But this is something that I really enjoy,

but also something that I find quite interesting and intellectual.

So, this is why I sort of want to take this

as something to interrogate.

Gato, have you got it?

I mean, obviously, you've got it.

Have you got it?

I've got exceptional taste

from how I smelled, how I looked,

to not describe what people should think

that I should look like.

Having sung a Biroian opera house is

standing on stages with 132, 131 other white people

as the only black person going to see the opera

as the only black person in a room full

of 2,000 white people.

I've got exceptional taste

and I have no compunction

in expressing where my tastes come from.

Also, I think it's good to note

that I grew up with a cupboard

that always had more than salt and pepper.

So, literally speaking,

my tastes palette is more than

your normal everyday.

John, what about you?

We know that you know where...

You know, we know where you stand on tweed.

But, yeah, I think that's...

As far as it goes, my experience

with taste is veering wildly

between high and low,

trying to go for high culture

and failing,

starting with some European cinema

but always ending just

switching over to Queer Eye

or something like that.

Peter, I feel that having a taste

is sort of your job.

Sort of.

I mean, if you work on a fancy shiny magazine,

you learn to be fluent

in the particular visual language

that they like.

And they're keen on novelty

but only certain kinds of novelty.

And I know how to do a smart taste

and I know how to do art school taste

because it's a very definite thing.

You can see people who've gone to art school

from across the room

and they're very darling.

And I probably, if I were a card

to, could do bad taste,

meaning vulgar taste

because it's easy to define.

Well, can you define it for me?

Too easy. It's...

Well, it means it's the...

How to get the look

in my book called Dictator's Homes

explains how to get the Donald Trump interior look.

So it says, go for gold.

So we can replicate it.

Go for gold.

Have a lot of mirror glass,

have twinkling chandeliers,

have portraits of yourself by bad artists,

all that stuff.

Now, two of you here have talked about having bad taste.

Sarah, can you have good taste in one area

and bad in another?

Do you think?

I mean, you...

Well, I think what I would like to do

is take a step back in fact and interrogate

and think about

how do we even construct good taste

and bad taste in the first place.

We're working on this assumption

that we all know what good taste is

and what bad taste is

and we're enjoying, you know, whether we like...

whether we think we have good taste or bad taste.

But how do we even construct these things in the first place?

I would like to suggest these are

socially and culturally constructed.

And from my perspective,

you know, they're always gendered,

they're always raised,

they're always, you know,

based on certain categories.

So I think we could always take a step back

and really think about how are we even

thinking about taste in the first place?

But can we say bluntly

that we believe there are good things

and bad things in culture,

good books and bad books,

good haircuts and bad haircuts, John?

Well, we can because we do.

It's obvious we've already done several times.

We like to...

We need a category of bad taste

but that's a contrast with something else.

We have to have some sense of what

it fails to be bad taste,

what is good taste in order

to revel in bad taste as we might do occasionally.

We need to have a conceptual distinction

just to get going on these terms.

But do we agree that this statement is a correct one?

There are good and bad things.

We agree because we have to.

It's part of this societal contract

that we have constructed.

And so bad taste is what we decide is bad taste.

So anyone who steps outside the prescription

of what we have been socialised to believe

can be considered to have bad taste.

But all of that is basically our decision

which can very, very easily be deconstructed

without much work.

We're talking about we and our immediately

because I'm thinking that when...

If you see something, you say something like

your shoes are really cool.

You're saying more than I and individual

think your shoes are great or good in some way.

You are making some sort of assessment,

aren't you, Sarah, about some sort of wider opinion.

Yes, and I think that we is doing a lot of work

there about who is included and who is excluded.

And you're saying that this is based on a kind of

relationship and an understanding between two people.

So it's always going to have a relationship.

And that's why I think we need to interrogate

who is included and who is excluded from these constructions.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I mean, I always just kind of refer back

to the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu,

who says that taste is a social weapon

used to exclude others.

So I think that has to be...

Very true.

Yeah, that has to be central to our analysis.

So this idea of being right or wrong

in questions of taste?

What does that mean to you, Emma?

Can you be right or wrong?

I think there's an idea that there is a kind of like

objective...

Within Western philosophy, there's an idea

that there's kind of an objective truth

around taste often.

And that just so happens to correspond

to the kind of like enlightenment,

like the enlightenment humanism

that insists that there is this kind of objective truth.

But the subject who constitutes that

happens to be a white European man of a certain class.

Well, I said that Immanuel Kant was at our party.

I think just at the moment his ears would be

prickling right now, wouldn't they?

Kant, 1724 to 1804.

I think he's going to butt into the conversation now

or at least through the medium of John.

He's going to do that.

What would he have to say at this point?

Well, I think he would broadly agree,

or surprisingly perhaps.

Kant is writing at the end of the 18th century

about taste by which time taste is well on the table.

It's an 18th century preoccupation.

You have a rising class of people with money and time

and leisure and they want to spend it on pleasures.

The novel's being created.

And it turns out a lot of these novels are really, really good

like Golliver's Travels.

And a lot of them are 500 pages long and nothing happens.

And they people are recognizing that these are bad.

And there's a difference between them.

And we need to talk about what that difference is.

So what is taste for him?

Well, for him, it turns out it's not so much decided

by, as David Hume thought before, arbiters of good taste.

That there are, he thought there were ideal judges.

And there were the ones who'd spent a long time practicing

on what good taste is and you simply refer to them.

So that's Hume's business.

That's Hume's business.

There's a predecessor of that.

So that has an inherited idea of elicism

or that there are those you need to refer to.

And it also encourages you should just do what they approve of.

And then we get taste as a social status rather

than anything else.

And it's something that can be a commodity and traded

upon in the economy of a steam that's so,

that people are so anxious about,

but Kant wants to revolutionize all that.

And he says taste is a universal capacity.

And he says in his book Critique of Judgment,

1790, could you lay it out for us?

Because he says that judgments about taste are subjective,

but they can claim universal validity.

He's the verb to claim important here.

It absolutely is because he's noticed

several fascinating things about taste

that differentiated from, say, mere sensation.

And we can enjoy the sensation of, say, fruits and the like.

And I can say that I like blueberries.

And you say you don't.

And that's the end of the matter, really.

I can't really get you to appreciate them,

just by saying, but have you tried them?

I have tried them.

I don't like them.

That's the end of the conversation.

But if I say I like this guaya and you say,

I don't, we can talk about it.

We can give reasons for why this is a fantastic expression

of human sensibility through sensation.

And that seems like a whole new dimension.

Sensation is involved, but there is an appeal

to you all to appreciate this.

You ought to think about the form.

It seems ridiculous for me to say,

you ought to appreciate this blueberry.

Just look at it a bit more.

But there is something like the giving

and taking of reasons back and forth that's involved in art.

Nevertheless, it's a universal sensation,

but it's something that does seem to be something

we can debate and actually maybe even

win someone around to appreciating something.

But win them around to a kind of a correct answer.

Winning them around to seeing our reasons

for why we like it.

I can't win you around to the taste of blueberries

just by talking about it.

I can perhaps win you around to seeing something

that you didn't see before just by thinking about it.

So if a cante is the statement,

the composer Bach is good, like saying grass is green.

Not at all.

I think he would say there's this fundamental subjectivity

that's still involved, because it's not just

a matter of knowledge.

It's a matter of subjective responses at the end of the day.

But it doesn't follow that Gustavus non-disputantum.

We can argue about tastes where we can argue about our sensations

and say maybe if we paid a little bit more attention

to them, exercised or thinking about our taste a bit more,

can change our tastes.

And that's a fascinating aspect of aesthetic responses

that changes them from everything else.

And how would this argument work?

If we said to Kant, look, I can hear that Bach is great.

But I actually prefer that ballad I heard in the coffee house.

What's his answer?

He would say, you can walk your side to the street

and I can walk mine at the end of the day.

But I can point to some features, for example,

form, repetition, balance, constraint,

or something that he loves, free play,

a sense that you're not quite sure where this art is going,

but you sense it's got something about it,

the thing we see in improvisation that we like so much.

He says, these are features that we have an aesthetic response to.

And we can appeal to certain artworks

that just really exemplify these features sometimes.

And others, where it's just the tune is just repetitive

and boring, and other times the tune is repetitive and fascinating.

But there's a kind of universality about the destination here

is the judgment that you make.

There's an attempt that if I appreciate it,

I believe that there's something about you

that you ought to appreciate it to.

It's what we call a normative force.

You ought to see what I see.

I'm not insisting that you do.

There's always room for disagreement

because at the end of the day, these are subjective features.

But there's something here.

There's a possibility of bringing you

around to my point of view and vice versa.

What kind of conversation are we getting into here?

Yeah, I just have some kind of like,

I have some fundamental kind of issues

like with Kant that I find it difficult to get over.

So first of all, I just cannot separate a manual Kant.

His kind of position on anything from the fact

that he really believed in a racial hierarchy

and he ranked races according to alleged intellectual capabilities.

And he put white Europeans firmly on the top

and everybody else.

And do you think that's reflected in these aesthetic arguments?

Like, absolutely.

And there are flaws in what he...

There are flaws in the claims that he makes about aesthetics.

So I believe that he has this kind...

He has this concept of disinterested aesthetic judgment

that an object can be aesthetically pleasing

but serve no specific function.

But that is entirely at odds with many, many non-western aesthetic traditions.

And if I think about my own paternal...

My own paternal, like cultural heritage,

which is the Eurobar ethnic group of Nigeria,

for in the kind of pre-colonial aesthetic tradition

and kind of metaphysical belief system

that is expressed through their aesthetics,

that is entirely at odds with taste.

Their aesthetic traditions integrate function, spirituality,

ritual and community in an object's beauty

or how it would be assessed in terms of its value.

So the idea that it would be beautiful

but have no function or no purpose,

which is something that Kant kind of claims

is a characteristic of aesthetics, is completely at odds.

And he's this idea of disinterested art

because this is important to think, isn't it, John?

It's not that the idea of Kant's idea of what is best

and what is good taste isn't necessarily

to do with the pleasure that you take in it.

Well, that's not quite right.

It is about the pleasure that you've taken us

but it's a different kind of pleasure.

It's not an interested pleasure,

would be a pleasure that you want to consume the thing in some way.

We could see, say, Sazanne's apples

and we have a pleasure in seeing the image

that is created by that,

but it's a disinterested pleasure

in the simple sense that I don't want to eat Sazanne's apples.

I take a pleasure that I somehow stepping back from.

I can still do lots of things with,

I think there are lots of objects

that I can still use for different purposes

but I'm taking having an aesthetic response

when I'm not thinking about those purposes.

Peter York.

Well, I know nothing of 18th century European philosophers

but this thing about whether I think is innately useful

and you can worship for its usefulness or otherwise

is I suggest would be widely shared

by Kant's contemporaries because they, many of them,

his social class contemporaries.

I don't mean poor people

and they would have thought that something useless

but classical that in the kind that recently

been educated in as a function of their century

was marvellous.

It's all about hierarchy of needs, isn't it?

And when you've got useful things that you consider beautiful,

you want useless things that you consider beautiful

because you think you've climbed another stair.

That's one way of looking at it.

Another way of looking at it is not,

I don't think that's false

but there's another dimension to us

which is that human beings can, if they're lucky enough,

free themselves from their immediate needs.

They can turn their minds to pursuits

that aren't just about shelter of warmth

but that is largely a function of class.

You can't be freed from your needs

if you're absolutely dirt poor for the most part.

Absolutely not, you have to have the opportunity for us

but the idea is that when you do have,

it doesn't mean it means it's just a function of class.

It just means that it's an opportunity

that you have with any leisure time

to turn yourself towards non-purpose of activities.

Gatso, what's your take on this?

So, Biroit, the BAFTA's and the BBC.

I'll start with Biroit and as...

Your experience is Biroit, right?

Can you tell us about it?

In 2019, Tanhoita, I walked on stage

after the six-hour epic and got booed

and I asked Germany in a scribe on Facebook,

what are you booing?

And that was a very difficult question

because they knew precisely why they were booing.

I got an email from MyNazi.com

that was just the N word.

The BBC and the BAFTA's, we need to talk about that

because Tase is all about the fact that

they were able to edit free Palestine

and then argue that they didn't hear

the N word being shouted.

It's all about taste

and I think it keeps in

because that's a deliberate,

a deliberate and injurious act

because here is the thing,

when using and thinking that you might be let off

because the N word was shouted

by someone who has a disability,

turn off and they go, we didn't hear it.

Turn off the TV and see the men react to what they reacted to

or here is my biggest issue with the whole thing.

Why was there no BSL, ASL person represented in that

because that person would definitely have heard

and indeed transcribed what was going on.

So back to Biroit, this act of booing

is most extraordinary to me

because it is only expressed in spaces

that claim to be high art

and they express the bassist form

of Neandertholic behavior by booing.

So what they are saying is,

what I've just watched is a five hour epic.

I've just been at the mess,

washing my friend, Deliver Isolder.

Now you don't know this,

but Isolder doesn't have a child in any other production.

She has a child in this production

and she sings it as a ghost.

It's public knowledge as Perlisa Davidson's profile

that she has just had twins.

What's the singer?

The singer.

What she delivers is most extraordinary

because our mutual friend is rocking this baby

as she's now a ghost.

And at the end of this production

that started at 6.30, that finished at 11.15,

two people down from me, booed.

And I'm like, you have the effingery and the audacity

to completely ignore 100 people playing in the orchestra

and everything that you've seen

to say that.

What I'm booing is that what I left my house to watch

does not align with my taste,

is absolutely ludicrous to me

and supports Emma's idea of how taste

can be extraordinarily classist,

especially when it is in high art spaces

because they go, this is not for me,

so I'm going to do it.

Opera audiences do boo, don't they?

I mean, they do boo as much as football crowds,

but they're certainly much more inclined

to boo than theatre audiences, aren't they?

It's very specific, isn't it?

I mean, you've kind of started to explain it to us,

but what does it mean when an opera audience booes?

Because it's always, it's always sort of for an individual,

you can cheer the singers, can't you both boo the director

or boo some of the process of it?

Which is precisely what they did on Monday

when the designers came on.

But I'm really embarrassed for anyone that booes,

we're not at secondary primary school,

we're not on the playground,

because what you're seeing is what I'm seeing

does not suit my taste.

Get over yourself, watch TV at home

and do not express your values

around live art, Timothy Chalamet,

who's the son of a ballerina.

Like the future is live art.

Very soon, what you're offering on a screen

will be covered by AI.

So shut your mouth for a second

and let the adults in the room talk about it.

So, let's just say that for those of you

who missed the story that Timothy Chalamet

made some kind of disabliger remarks about opera and ballet.

So, and here I am, defending an art form

that would not defend me,

because I got booed at byroids.

But what's the reason why audiences

shouldn't boo what they don't like?

Well, it's not just about that.

I think the higher the art form

and the more money you pay,

you feel you have carte blanche to respond to it

however you like, which means I'm here,

you are here for my ownership and my entertainment.

And if you don't align with my views or my entertainment,

then I don't accept anything you've presented.

And I think that that's what it's got to do with class.

I've rarely followed this at all.

Are you saying you went to byroids and performed?

Indeed.

The audience responded on mass

like a British 80s football crowd.

1 million per cent, that's what I'm saying, Peter.

It was all on you for being you.

Absolutely.

And you had Angela Merkel in the audience.

I had that Angela Merkel.

And it was, it was,

the whole thing became a really difficult period

because not only did it draw IR,

so Vagna fans, it also incited Nazis.

I ended up getting docks

and people who don't know,

which is sharing your personal information on Twitter

that I had somehow,

by sheer virtue of what I look like,

desecrated the attempt to Vagna.

So, taste is a very interesting thing.

When you pour in that level of wealth

that comes with an understanding or an expectation

that your precise needs will be met.

It's not at least speaking one moment,

I just want to say I'm so sorry that happened to you

and that is just like deeply,

deeply horrific and traumatic.

And I'm just sorry that you had to experience that.

Thank you.

It's a most extraordinary thing

because I knew that I had to go back on stage.

I mean, someone literally sent that email

in word and I had to walk back on stage.

But here is the thing about people

and their expectations as it regards class

or expectation and what I look like.

I will defy them till I have no breath in my body.

So, I will go back to singing by Roight next year

as I have been doing since 2019.

It might be costly,

but I do it to say your tastes will not stop

how this production is delivered.

And just to quickly pick up on that as well,

I am going to be the grand marshal

of the St. Patrick's Day Parade in London on Sunday.

The announcement that I was going to be doing that

has been met widely with so much support

and it's been wonderful,

but also with a very vocal minority

of extreme and explicit racism.

Is that an expression of taste in any way?

What I'm saying, the point that I'm making

is because it's a similar experience for me to have

is that the world,

the racial, the world kind of constructed

by a figure like a manual can't

is has given us the architecture

of these ideas about race

and about black people specifically

that somebody like you or I are still,

we both have very current contemporary examples

of the way we are still being abused

because of the racial hierarchy

that has been deeply entrenched by a figure like Kant.

So, it's very difficult for me to think about his opinions

or positions on taste

and think about them in this detached

with this in this detached way

that is being is kind of happening here.

Matthew, just very quickly to add,

there's something extraordinary,

I've just come back from America literally on Monday,

there's something extraordinary that happens

when I speak to Americans

or indeed in an environment that doesn't have me in it

with an accent that sounds like this

and you can see them go,

what sort of judgment is being made do you think?

Well, the judgment by association

is anyone who has a posh or an English accent,

especially in America is someone who is instinctively,

naturally, predominantly better

and demonstrates better education

and it's something that I play and pray on

because I know the aposities of that

is literally the danger of my life.

So, I am in spaces that don't expect it

and they're like, oh my God, you're accent.

And I'm like, I know.

I mean, in the show that I just did,

they go, why can't we read subtitles about this show?

I mean, is it an American?

I mean, the opera is in Italian

and she goes, can't we just do certain titles

sort of the audience don't what's going on?

I mean, they barely speak Italian

and I go, they barely speak English

and through the Americans, it was such an affront

because they don't expect me to hold that space

and it's all about taste in terms of

what we've been socialised to believe

and that's why I started this on the basis level

in terms of food, salt and pepper.

My cupboard was, didn't just have that, ever.

So, it is the equivalent of asking someone

who's never had a five star Michelin meal

but has always had boiled rice without rice

and without salt.

Going, yes, so what do you think about this?

My darling, you don't have the palette for this.

You like, you couldn't break that down.

I mean, I don't mean to dismiss you

but you don't have the range in terms of

and just use that metaphor

in terms of critiquing something that's live art

or indeed critiquing food.

You simply do not have the range

to understand the taste of what are being presented

and that is precisely why you boo.

So, let me tell you, Tia, face unequivocally,

you don't have the range.

I'd like to pick up on this idea

between high art and low art that's being raised here

and to come back to the question of Kant

because something that I think is

with circling around is this idea of how do we form a canon

and the, you know, John, you made this point

and I'm really interested in what Kant would make of this

of how does a canon become constructed?

I'm talking about an artistic canon here.

How do we, you know, I'm a film lecture,

I come from a film background,

there is such a strong film canon

and I find it extremely suspicious

that all the films that are always praised

and always consider the best of are, you know,

about and directed by white men.

So, if we are, if Kant is going to persuade us

that there's something, you know,

that brings us together and we should, you know,

come to an agreement about this,

how is that that canon's always seemed to center around,

whether it's literature, music, film,

around these kinds of figures?

John, a quick thought from you on that

and then we'll go, we want to hear Sarah's postcard.

Well, I don't know, I play a game with my students

called Thanks Kant, where they send me in reports

from around the world of all the things

that Kant created that have gone wrong,

neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism, racism.

It's like no one hated anyone

because of the color of their skin before Kant, apparently.

But he was a racist and he was a theorist about race

and we have to talk about that.

But there are, we don't get to study only the nice guys,

philosophers would be out of a job very quickly.

So John, I think it's very important

that you have just named that indeed Kant was racist

because I think those values are widely just accepted

without naming professors.

Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

But you know, it's important that Newton was a great guy

but I'm not giving up on grab a theory of gravity

and there might be something in his aesthetic theory

that we could actually put to good use.

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It's 2009 and we're in the German mountains.

A man straps himself into a car

on the world's most dangerous racetrack.

He whispers to himself.

It's time to put my balls on the dashboard.

As he starts the engine.

In 15 minutes, he's in an ambulance unconscious.

In 15 years, he's a billionaire.

This is Total Wolf, Formula One's most powerful team boss

and the breakout star of Drive to Survive.

This week on Good Bad Billionaire,

how Total Wolf made his billions.

Listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

This is free thinking on BBC Radio 4

and BBC Sounds with me, Matthew Sweeter.

Around me, it gathered a group

who were exercising their taste and judgment.

John Callanon, Emma DeBerry, Lugato Chocolat, Peter York

and Sarah Smith, who is one of our new generation thinkers.

Now we ask all of the new generation thinkers

to write what were pleased to call a postcard

and read it out on the radio.

And so far, none of them has had the bad taste

to point out that that's not what a postcard is.

But Sarah is a film academic.

As you've heard, we all now dim the lights for her

and for the director, Sophia Coppola.

In 2006, Sophia Coppola released her latest film,

Marie Antoinette, which was about the last queen of France.

With its pop sensibility and bold irreverent style,

which included shopping montages and makeover scenes,

the film appears to have more in common

with a girly teen flick rather than a period drama.

Marie Antoinette appalled the critics.

The New Yorker actually questioned whether the film

was made by Paris Hilton.

They accused it of lacking morality, emotional depth,

political sense.

Sophia Coppola says that she sought

to capture Marie Antoinette's inner experience.

But the New Yorker's response, this

is like a manicurist claiming to capture

the inner experience of your pinky.

These complaints have followed Sophia Coppola

throughout her career.

Her films are accused of being superficial, vapid, shallow.

As the daughter of Hollywood legend,

Frances Ford Coppola, Sophia, is

called the ultimate nepot baby, a pamper tollywood princess

and a spoiled daddy's girl.

But let's compare these two coppolas.

Frances Ford Coppola's most celebrated films,

The Godfather series, are hailed as an epic tale

about the American dream.

The mafia represent the universal conflicts

between the old world versus the new world, tradition,

versus progress, and family versus capitalism.

Sophia Coppola's films on the other hand,

which are largely about young women feeling trapped

or bored or unfulfilled, they had achieved no grand reading.

These are superficial films about women's trivial lives.

Why might the films be read this way?

French sociologist Pierre Bourdoux argued

that the distinction between good taste and bad taste

is socially constructed, especially through class.

Upper and middle-class culture like opera, the ballet,

high literature, classical music, and fine art

are good taste compared to mass-produced art,

which is associated with working class people,

such as reality TV, superhero films,

Panto or popular fiction.

I propose that our nations of taste are also gendered.

According to Bourdoux, good taste privileges

the mind over the body, the intellectual

over the sensual, subtlety over excess,

restraint over pleasure, and non-popular over commercial.

The body, the sensual, the excessive,

the pleasurable, the commercial.

These are all things typically associated with women's culture.

Sophia Coppola's Mariantoinette is about the gendered experience

of navigating the highly restrictive court

of King Louis XVI on the cusp of the French Revolution.

It is told in a highly stylized manner

and packaged as a pleasurable and commercial teen film.

It apparently lacks the components

so prized in her father's filmmaking,

explicit politics, grand theme, and epic storytelling.

No wonder it was critically panned.

So where does this leave women's filmmaking?

If we don't interrogate how our taste,

how our ideas of taste are formed,

women's films will always be on the critical backfurt.

They will always be considered in bad taste.

Thank you, Sarah.

I saw one of the first screenings of Coppola's Mariantoinette.

I read it as a satire on people

who are too busy not finishing lovely cakes

to notice the large numbers of people wanted to kill them.

That's an interesting greeting of the film.

I think something that is interesting is that, you know,

Mariantoinette is, it's never read as a historical film

or a political film, but it is about history

and it is about politics.

She's making a link between, you know, in the film,

Sophia Coppola is making a link between Mariantoinette

and celebrity culture today,

the young women of today, teenagers.

But this is telling us something about politics and history

because Mariantoinette in the film

is never given access to, you know, the world of politics,

to the war room, to these kind of decisions

that are being made.

But this film is never taken on those kinds of terms.

And I think it's because people see the film

as this highly stylized, you know, kind of commercial film,

you know, starring in American actress,

a person dance, and they fail to take it kind of seriously

on those terms.

But this, you know, this is the gendered experience.

This was the woman's experience, according to Sophia Coppola.

So why can't we take that as a kind of,

as a comment on politics and history?

I think that some of you are saying it was widely panned.

It was pretty panned when it came out.

And I think this is followed.

This is followed Sophia Coppola's career

and she's always compared to her father

and they're always these comparisons

and they make an interesting comparison

because her films are so feminine, you know,

they kind of revel in the girlishness,

especially in terms of their style,

as well as the narrative and themes, compared to him.

And because he's, he looms, you know, Francis for Coppola,

he looms so large over film history.

She, she always kind of pales in comparison.

And his films are so masculine, you know,

they're gangster films, they're brutal, they're epic.

I think this really shows the way

that gender tastes to really divert.

Negative reviews of that.

And also of Emerald Finale's films,

quite this idea of style over substance.

I'd like to kind of nag away at that a bit.

As though that is some kind of reversal of the moral order.

Yes, I mean, Emerald Finale's films,

I have to say I cannot defend.

Why? Because I, I mean, I'm saying

that Sophia Coppola is accused of being shallow and vapid

but I really see Emerald Finale's films

as being shallow and vapid.

What's wrong with shallowness?

Well, I don't, I think what's interesting

about Sophia Coppola is that she is interrogating shallowness.

She's interrogated, what does that mean?

I was talking to Matthew before we began about the bling ring

and that is about these celebrities who are,

sorry, about these teenagers

who are obsessed with celebrity culture.

But I think, and people have accused them of being shallow

and accused the film of being shallow,

but I think the film is about shallowness.

It's about teenagers and, you know,

being accused of being shallow

or as I do think Emerald Finale's films.

I'd like to feel I want to speak up for shallowness

but I'd also like to kind of bite it

the idea of style over substance.

It strikes me that there are a couple of ways

to attack this idea that style is

or can be substantial, Peter,

and therefore important and unwise to dismiss.

Or we could embrace those things

but we should get to reject that over substance.

When style overpowering.

Okay, style over substance was what I got

for a certain kind of guardian writer

when I started doing stuff.

And the idea was that my ideas were essentially

ephemeral and unimportant

because I was nicely dressed.

And Dave's people were not nicely dressed.

It's astonishing, isn't it?

It's a thought.

But Peter is also about your accent.

When people hear your accent, the...

They're going to rush a blood to the head.

Absolutely, but when you're downstairs,

you turn to John, and you said,

oh, you know, I haven't had an education.

It would be really interesting to pull the people

who've heard your accent tonight

and understand what strata you exist in

because the accent as well as your rate...

It doesn't be as clearly.

Well, no, it does.

In terms of interrogating precisely what we're talking about.

Which is taste.

You do not actually have to have good taste,

but you can present it.

So it's all performative.

It's a construct that we have socially brought into.

So is taste a performance then, Emma?

I think to a degree, I'd like to just return to

just very quickly the style over substance piece.

And I really, I think style can be...

I'm not dismissive of style at all,

but I feel style can be a very powerful expression

of substance, and then you can also have style

that is kind of inauthentic.

You know, it's people take the symbolism

of a certain kind of stylistic expression

and they reproduce that.

But it's not actually like expressing anything substantial.

I think a lot about the...

I'm a student of the black panthers.

They were a highly stylized radical group,

but they used fashion.

They used the way they were dressing.

They used the way they style themselves.

Actually to express a very kind of like a very radical politics

and in order to capture media attention

so that they could kind of further promote their vision

of the world.

But they did it through style.

stylistic.

What is the relationship between good taste and good ideas?

Does having bad taste make you a bad person, Peter?

No, what do you mean is the wrong shoes?

You know, that can be dealt with.

People can be shown the light.

But bad taste and ideas, vulgarity of mind.

Yeah, it's a very bad sign.

Dictators, aesthetic taste is one of your...

Dictators.

Are there dictators with good taste,

authoritarian with good taste?

Well, they've come from different...

In my book, Dictators' Homes,

which show a lot of places with a lot of gold in them

and a lot of mirrors and a lot of marble.

It's astonishingly similar to taste right across the world.

But occasionally you get...

And that dictators often come from rebel soldier backgrounds.

They haven't had time to learn the fancy stuff.

So naturally, and they want to impress the point about

a dictator's home.

It's not really a cozy place to live in Wimbledon.

It's to express your power and Godhead

often to a semi-listeric population.

That's how that works.

So you don't have to have good taste.

In fact, it would be a disadvantage.

Taste and ethics, John, what is the connection here?

They do come together a little bit for Kant,

but also for his successors,

where maybe just relating us a little bit

to what Sarah was talking about.

There is a sense that taste is not just a...

a differentiating phenomenon, but a unifying phenomenon.

As we move beyond the Enlightenment period

into their romantic period, Marantist period,

we have Schiller,

who thinks that it's perhaps in universal responses

to beauty and nature, and this finds its way into Wagner a lot,

that we find something like a common humanity,

and that we can take away from the more ideologically

loaded conceptions of taste.

And by moving ironically, we think to the more formal,

to the more stylistic, the more abstract,

somehow then captures and tunes in

for a common humanity that we can then lead ourselves to.

So in that way, the more stylistic,

it becomes the more substantial of the character.

Can we follow that up, just like maybe make some suggestions

about how some kind of new language of taste might be articulate?

Do we want to get rid of it,

or do we want to just find new ways of...

Language, as you just mentioned, is the most extraordinary...

I'm so glad you said that,

in terms of the synonyms or the rhymes that I'm going to offer.

So Emma was on a panel at the British Museum

for an exhibition called What Do We Have Here?

And Hugh Edwards, in his research,

had found that that was the first time

that the British Museum would use the word looting.

Now the exhibition was called What Do We Have Here?

And the choice of that phrase, or that naming,

was linked to not ostracising or pushing away people

who might not attend otherwise.

Within five minutes of that talk,

I came up with a better name.

Carry on, which is funny,

and also part of the British DNA, carry on dot, dot, dot,

looting is very important, I think, taste wise

that both good and bad taste be expressed

because they give us what to turn away from,

or indeed dive towards.

However, those are still a societal construct.

So someone going, yes, that's what you should convert towards,

or diverse towards, is someone's opinion

or society's contract.

So I think that the entire thing is muddied, is muddied

because we have to move forward,

we have to accept that the idea of good taste

is our contract.

And we can change that at any time.

I think as well to go back to your point Matthew,

or your question about whether good taste is a performance.

I think this is true.

And thinking about film criticism and the role of film critics,

I think a lot of this role is about film critics,

signaling to other film critics that they have good taste.

I'm writing a book about Nora Efron at the minute

who's best known as a romantic comedy filmmaker,

but she made this huge critical call on commercial failure

bewitched.

It was the reboot of the television program

starring Nicole Kidman.

And there was a film reviewer who gave it a terrible review

when it came out in 2005.

And then during lockdown, he re-evaluated this film.

He'd left his publication where he was previously working.

He was now working on his own blog.

He looked at this film again and he said,

oh gosh, I can't imagine ever panning this film that badly.

It's kind of fun, it's kind of cute.

It's got a few things going.

I realized now that what I must have been doing

is posturing and demonstrating that I have good taste

and that I understand what a good film is.

Oh my god.

So these are the people who make decisions about

what films, what art is good and bad.

But it is an act and it's a signalling to other people

that you have good taste.

Listen, as if you could see, my eye roll is really loud

because let me tell you something for free.

White men who review things or try to shift

or indeed shepherd our opinions need to be quiet.

We need the volume and what they're doing

needs to be just piped down because...

I just think a lot of them are sadly unaware

of their cultural blind spots

and they think they're a bit...

But just their cultural blind spots where they just assume

that there is a universality,

but it's actually just expressive of their subjectivity

and they become the kind of like default norm

from which everybody else deviates.

And it's by virtue of that lesser or tasteless.

What then happens to taste in the age of AI

where the fact that you're describing is amplified,

isn't it, by the algorithm?

Because it is kind of finding all of those things,

isn't it, expecting those things, finding those kind of...

But I feel like we're also in a really interesting cultural moment

and that if you think about the kind of ruling class now,

like this tech oligarchy that we have,

they are people that do not conform

to the traditional ruling class norms of taste.

So it's being troubled but not in ways

that I find particularly exciting or liberatory.

For also, I think AI, if you're using an AI platform,

it's just further entrenching

or already received ideas of good taste.

Because AI is there to perpetuate.

Exactly, it just generates what's already existing on the internet.

If you ask it, what are the top 10 films?

What is the best music?

Whatever, it will tell you received wisdom

and no new ideas are going to come out.

AI doesn't... Does AI have taste, Peter?

No, it's grapes taste.

And then, eventually, we'll put the scrapings

into their own workings, inevitably,

so things will get mad or a madder.

John?

AI becomes like Hume's ideal judges.

They just gather the information through long tests

and tell you what to obey.

And we need some kind of sense of a critical response

to what we're being taught about.

And we might find that we have too many judges

going about claiming authority,

too many arbiters of taste,

and no one offering reasons for why we should go one way rather than the other.

Simply, we declare now, based on the source that we see on Instagram

or wherever else, that something is tasteful.

Why? Because I like it.

And now, taste becomes like blueberries.

So, that's such an extraordinary point,

because if you think about X-Factor

or indeed Burns Got Talent,

the nation learns to understand

or appreciate what is good based on what gets through.

But we completely forget all the elements,

like the human stories, the film they show before,

what got them to this point.

And what the audience celebrate

isn't essentially good value or a display of great talent.

It's an expression of like,

oh, we should like this, because...

So, that is the thing.

If the metric is created for AI for judgment,

the accumulation of wisdom,

then what's included in there is also mediocrity,

and that's not good enough.

So, what lies on the other side of taste, then?

You know, we've heard it critiqued tonight, Sarah.

What is it that...

What is kind of the idea that...

That happens once you've abolished it or reformed it?

Well, I don't know whether we need to abolish or reform it.

I don't know. We will always have our sense of taste, our judgment.

But I think these things need to be interrogated further,

and they need to be questioned more,

because these do have material differences to people's lives.

Like, coming up this weekend, we have the Oscars.

Again, I'm going to bring this back to women filmmakers.

Only three women filmmakers in its 96-year history

have won the Best Director Oscar.

This makes a difference to these women's lives

about what kinds of films they make,

the careers that they're going to have.

So, you know, the Oscars is an arbiter of taste.

We should think about how this is being measured,

who is being rewarded,

and what kind of impact this has on these people's careers.

The film director, John Waters, once told me about a person

in his home city of Baltimore, who he really admired.

And this was a woman who sat on her porch all day,

drinking and shouting abuse,

as buying, giving them the finger.

And here, he said, was somebody who was truly liberated

from the tyranny of good taste,

which is something that he sees as his own work.

You know, the job of his own work,

films like Pink Flamingos, in which, you know,

many may know that the heroin consumes dog feces.

The woman in his neighbour, then,

bodied this idea.

But can you be liberated from the tyranny of good taste?

Is tyranny the right word?

Is tyranny the right word?

Sarah was talking, then,

I wrote down the phrase from Envog,

for your mind and the rest will follow.

And that's precisely what that film,

playing from Envogos, that's precisely what he was saying.

It's like, anything as, in relation to the person,

could be high art or low art.

There's a sense, though, in which we can have

perpetual revolutions, rejecting taste,

challenging taste, interrogating taste,

where we become cynical about the very concept of taste,

and the very idea of being able to differentiate

between something that's better or worse in our own terms.

And so we have to, in sense, move,

ask once we've deconstructed everything,

once we've torn everything down, what next?

I hate to use the word real people,

and I especially hate the word authenticity, I have to say.

But if you're a real person, living at a real place

with a real job, that people can understand

from a one-word description, GP, cup, inter, et cetera,

you're mostly not developing your taste

as an intellectual structure.

You may be making choices, but you haven't got,

if somebody asked you for your taste thinking,

you wouldn't have much to say, and nor should you.

I think people like GP's and Carpenters

do have a rich cultural life, and they...

That's not what I'm saying.

I'm saying they don't have the kind of rich cultural life

that academics do.

They aren't producing a pantheon of taste.

They're not thinking about this sort of stuff

in a way that they're following developments,

and stuff like that, and they're putting politics into it,

and they're saying, I like this ice cream more than they want.

Peace, peace, enter what Error M. Sarah said

at the start of the program, reality TV,

brunzgot talent, and that is where their learning of taste

comes from.

So we can...

That's why the idea of taste needs to be democratised,

because even though you don't go to the opera,

this is a version of the opera.

So what does that look like?

What does that taste?

An ideological construct that is about power and about exclusivity

and who...

Yeah, about power, essentially.

And it's quite different to what one likes or doesn't.

Very different, yeah.

So I don't think we can conflate those two.

We're not saying that there's nothing left to like

or to not like.

But you want to dispense with the idea of taste completely then.

I wouldn't say to dispense with it,

but I would say to be aware of the fact

that it's not something that just naturally exists,

but that it is an ideological construct

that is about power.

And to include a wider demographic

in who gets a defined taste.

And also different philosophical traditions,

philosophical traditions that are like non-Western

philosophical traditions and how they would inform aesthetics,

how they do inform aesthetics and morality.

John, you're the philosopher.

Once we've done all of this, we'll just have to sit down

and say, OK, right now, what's good taste?

LAUGHTER

Are we anywhere nearer to answering that question, do you think?

I think one thing that we could think about is whether it's

so bad to be inside an ideological construct

and whether that means we, thereby, give up on criteria

within that construct that we might make you solve.

I think it's when people don't realize

it's an ideological construct and they just think it's

something that happens to exist naturally.

But there's a sense in which taste can be weaponized.

But anything can be weaponized for the purposes of social oppression.

The idea that taste in itself is a tool of social oppression.

It seems overboard.

We're right at the end here, but can we imagine culture

without the idea of taste?

Those who determine what is good taste and bad taste,

though, that's different to saying taste just exists.

That's what's the thing that's weaponized.

Can we imagine culture without the idea of taste?

No.

No.

Oh, I think we're going to get a chorus at the end here.

We could make, yeah, I think we could have what we like,

but we don't like we could have aesthetics,

but that's separate to say.

That would not be taste.

So this is a kind of a post-taste world that you're imagining.

Potentially, potentially.

I'm just amusing thinking of that.

What happens in it?

Is it an easier place to be?

It's just as hard.

We just call it something else, but it's still taste.

Yes, I think the utopia is expanding the demographic

of who decides what taste is.

OK, well, I think it's bad taste to use

that terrible broadcasting cliché.

That's all we've got time.

So it's carriages at 10 p.m. for John Callan and Emma Debery,

Le Ducato, Chocolat, Sarah Smith, and Peter York.

And I hope you won't find it vulgar if I also

thank the producer, Luke Mulhall, or you for listening.