The Artist. Do you call it “teaching” to talk solemnly to children in language they cannot understand? If they are making pictures themselves, and being assisted in their enthusiastic experiments by a real artist instead of a teacher, they will naturally wonder why their friend should have the photograph of the Last Supper in the portfolio from which he is always taking out some picture in order to illustrate his answers to their questions. And having wondered, they will ask why, and their friend will tell them; and perhaps they will get some of their friends enthusiasm, and perhaps not. But they will know that the real human being who is like themselves does like that picture.
The Questioner. But it makes no difference whether they like it or not?
The Artist. You can’t compel them to like it, can you? You can only compel them to pretend that they do.
The Questioner. Can’t you teach them what is called “good taste”?
The Artist. Only too easily. And their “good taste” will lead them infallibly to prefer the imitations of what they have been taught to praise, and quite as infallibly to reject the great new art of their generation. They will think some new Whistler a pot of paint flung in the public’s face, and the next Cezanne a dauber.
The Questioner. Then you don’t approve of good taste!
The Artist. Every artist despises it, and the people who have it. We know quite well that the people who pretend to like Titian and Turner, because they have been carefully taught that it is the thing to do, would have turned up their noses at Titian and Turner in their own day—because they were not on the list of dead artists whom it was the fashion to call great; they know moreover that these same people of good taste are generally incapable of distinguishing between a beautiful and an ugly wall-paper, between a beautiful and an ugly plate, or even between a beautiful and an ugly necktie! Outside the bounds of their memorized list, they have no taste whatever.
The Questioner. Cannot good taste be taught so as to include the whole of life?
The Artist. It would take too much time. And thank God for that! For good taste is simply a polite pretense by which we cover up our lack of that real sense of beauty which comes only from intimate acquaintance with creative processes. The most cultivated people in the world cannot produce beauty by merely having notions about it. But the most uncultivated people in the world cannot help producing beauty if only they have time to dream as they work—if only they have freedom to let their work become something besides utilitarian.
The Questioner. You think, then, that education should not concern itself with good taste, but rather with creative effort?