Featured image: A Lady Playing the Tanpura (detail), India (Rajasthan, Kishangarh) ca. 1735. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Expanding your taste
Once you start to recognize what you already enjoy, experiment with expanding your horizons and trying new kinds of art. Think of this as giving yourself the opportunity to meet new artistic friends. Personally, I never actively try to make myself like any particular art, but I’m always genuinely pleased when I find myself enjoying something I didn’t before. It’s like going to a restaurant, trying an unfamiliar dish, and realizing you love it.
The best way to do this is simply to seek out types of art that you haven’t explored or given much thought before. Familiarity plays an important role in all kinds of taste, so spend some quality time with unfamiliar art and see what happens. Do you find a new appreciation for it, or at least new insights? Can you imagine what might attract some people to this art, even if it’s not your favorite personally? Even if your opinion doesn’t change, you’ll probably still gain something from the experience.
A little knowledge goes a long way
Learning more about art very often changes our perspective on it as we discover all its fascinating meanings, nuances, and connotations. Plus, it just becomes that much more familiar to us. I’ve developed a real appreciation for so many art styles I didn’t used to enjoy because I learned something about them and saw them in a richer and more familiar way. This makes it worth doing a little studying both to befriend unfamiliar art and to gain an even fuller appreciation of art you already love.
You can also see familiar art with fresh eyes through something as simple as going to a museum with a friend who has different taste or visiting an exhibition that puts art you thought you knew in a totally different context.
Food for thought
- How does familiarity impact your artistic taste? Does spending more time with an artwork or type of art change how you feel about it?
- How does knowledge impact your taste?
- Are there artworks or kinds of art you like now that you didn’t in the past?
- Has there ever been a situation where your perspective on some art shifted substantially? If so, why?
Conclusion
I really hope you’ve enjoyed learning about artistic taste and have started to discover your own!
In this series, we’ve thought about art in lots of different ways – noticing patterns within the visual features, subject matter, context, tone, and more, then drawing conclusions about our taste based on these observations. Thus, you may have found yourself wishing you felt more confident and knowledgeable when evaluating these areas and drawing thoughtful and independent conclusions about them. If this is the case, check out The Art Museum Insider. This handbook will teach you to understand and interpret art with confidence.
Learn to think like an art historian.
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