GUERNICA
Stephen Pearson, Wings of Love, 1972. © Stephen Pearson IMAGE/Felix Rosenstiel’s Widow & Son Ltd., London
In our moment of instant assessment and “if you like this, you’ll like that” algorithms, it would seem that we’re approaching the end of taste. As our muscle for cultivating taste weakens, and globalization thrives, the lines demarcating good and bad appear increasingly fluid, and therefore changeable, even irrelevant. It’s a democratizing notion, and a seductive one. But as you’ll read in the Boundaries of Taste, the second of this year’s four special inquiries into borderlines factual and figurative, it’s also fallible. Taste boundaries, whether enforced or imagined, inform how the world behaves. And like much of today’s flavor of racism or classism, taste derives power from its implicitness.
So where does taste live? Guernica’s contributors find it emerges in the in-between—along the spectrum of emotion and intellect, that nebulous space between love and what we think we love, primal pleasure and learned appreciation, gut revulsion and reasoned dismissal. Consciously or not (and now more than ever) taste is a performance, a projection of our selves into the world—or a set of actions, symbols, and vocabularies by which we assess others. Whether on Pinterest or at a farmers’ market, through celebrity-endorsed sneakers or lit-mag tote bags, taste is reified by the image it makes.
But more urgently, taste is a potent organizing principal, our insidious means to decide who we’re with and who we’re against, who belongs and who doesn’t—and further, to cloak political and structural boundaries under the softening light of subjectivity. Taste, as many of the pieces in this issue insist, does not live autonomously, superficially, within each of us. Instead, it emanates outward—a tool of the powerful, wielded to regulate our differences.
Writing about New Orleans funeral customs, in which the deceased are embalmed in lifelike poses and mourners dance passionately in jazz processions, C. Morgan Babst probes the privilege inherent in deeming something distasteful. “Necessity sometimes overrides propriety” in a community that’s seen “slavery and yellow fever, a murder rate north of Medellin’s, a hundred-year flood.” Invoking the bodies lost or left to rot after Hurricane Katrina, she argues: “If…we have brought an unmoving corpse into the middle of our dancing, it is not out of morbidity or numbness, but because the onrushing fact of our disappearance only brings our living into focus.”
Sonia Faleiro also examines how social customs collide with conceptions of correctness. She profiles Indian rationalist Sanal Edamaruku, who enraged worshipers after tracing a Christ statue dripping so-called “tears of God” to a sewage leak. Facing death threats and a blasphemy charge, he fled to Finland, where he remains to this day, left to contemplate from afar the power of offense in his homeland.
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