Habit and difference

Who decides?

If taste is not just private, as Lesson 1 argued, then someone must be better at it than someone else. In 1757 David Hume asked who. His essay “Of the Standard of Taste” answers that the standard is the joint verdict of true judges, and that a true judge has five qualities: “strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice.” In short, good sense, delicacy, practice, comparison, and freedom from prejudice. To show what delicacy means he retells a scene from Don Quixote. Sancho Panza’s two kinsmen are asked to judge a hogshead of wine. One says it tastes faintly of leather and the other of iron, and the company laughs at them, until the cask is emptied and an old key on a leather thong is found at the bottom.

More than two hundred years later the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu turned the question around. In La Distinction (1979; English translation by Richard Nice, 1984) he used a questionnaire given in 1963 and in 1967–68 to about 1,200 people in Paris, Lille, and a small provincial town. He argued that taste follows social position: people with more education and what he called cultural capital learn to like what the dominant group calls good, and then use that liking to mark themselves off from others. In the English version’s best-known sentence, “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.” The book’s subtitle, A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, is aimed at Kant’s picture of a disinterested pure judgment. Later work qualified him. In 1996 Richard Peterson and Roger Kern found in American surveys that high-status people were not snobs about a single genre but liked a wide range of music, so the mark of status had shifted from narrowness to breadth.

The lecture is silent on all of these thinkers, and this course adds them as a frame. The lecture’s own claim is simpler. Above the shared biological layer sits a layer of cultural habit, and above that a layer of personal strategy. This lesson takes each in turn.

Form and spirit

The lecture’s starting contrast is two portraits of an ideal. For the Greeks, it says, beauty was a matter of form, and the highest form on earth was the human body. A book by the sculptor Polykleitos, the Canon, laid down how the parts of a body should relate, and he made a bronze statue, the Doryphoros or spear-bearer (about 440 BC), to show it. The book is lost, and we know it from reports. The physician Galen, in the second century AD, says the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus held that beauty lies in the “commensurability of the parts,” the fit of finger to finger and of everything to everything else, “just as it is written in the Canon of Polykleitos.”

The art historian Kenneth Clark gave a name to the result. In The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956, from lectures given in 1953) he distinguished the naked from the nude. “To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes,” he wrote, and the word carries embarrassment. The nude is something else: “a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed.” The lecture adds a third category, which is its own extension of Clark: the flesh set free from form. Its example is Lucian Freud (born in Berlin in 1922, died in London in 2011, and a grandson of Sigmund Freud), whose Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) sold at Christie’s in New York in May 2008 for $33.6 million, then a record for a living artist. In a 1954 essay, “Some Thoughts on Painting,” Freud is usually quoted as saying that the paint is the person.

Chinese tradition asks for something different. The Shishuo xinyu (世说新语), a collection of anecdotes about the elite of the third and fourth centuries, says that the painter Gu Kaizhi (顾恺之, about 345 to about 406) would sometimes paint a portrait and leave the pupils of the eyes undone for years. Asked why, he said: 四体妍蚩，本无关于妙处；传神写照，正在阿堵中 (sìtǐ yánchī, běn wúguān yú miàochù; chuánshén xiězhào, zhèng zài ādǔ zhōng). Whether the limbs are fair or ugly makes no difference to the marvel; conveying the spirit and capturing the likeness lie in “this thing,” meaning the eyes. In the sixth century the critic Xie He (谢赫) set out six principles of painting, and the first is 气韵生动 (qìyùn shēngdòng): the spirit resonates and life moves. Form comes only third (应物象形, “be true to the shapes of things”). The poet Su Shi (苏轼, 1037–1101) was blunter. In a poem on a painting of flowering branches he wrote 论画以形似，见与儿童邻 (lùn huà yǐ xíngsì, jiàn yǔ értóng lín): to judge a painting by likeness of form is a child’s view.

The lecture ties this to clothing. Greek sculpture shows the body because the body is the highest form; Chinese painting wraps its figures in robes, because spirit is a matter of movement, and a robe can move. A Chinese critic of the eleventh century gives a concrete case. Guo Ruoxu’s Tuhua jianwen zhi (a book that runs to 1074) says that the painter Wu Daozi’s brush made robes swirl, while that of Cao Zhongda made them cling, so later painters spoke of “Wu’s belt in the wind, Cao’s clothes out of the water” (吴带当风，曹衣出水, Wú dài dāng fēng, Cáo yī chū shuǐ). Cao’s clinging drapery shows the body beneath, so the phrase only half supports the lecture’s point, and that robes serve movement is the lecture’s reading, not a documented rule. How far the nude was absent from traditional Chinese art is also a matter of interpretation. What is documented is the fight over nude models in the new art schools of the 1920s: Liu Haisu (刘海粟, 1896–1994), who founded a Shanghai art school in 1912, was attacked for using them.

Can the contrast be measured? One psychology program says partly. In 2008 Takahiko Masuda and his colleagues ran three studies: museum paintings, landscapes and portraits drawn or photographed by East Asian and Western participants, and preferences for portraits. East Asian art and viewers tended to include more of the surrounding context, and Western art and viewers tended to center the main object. An earlier experiment by Masuda and Richard Nisbett (2001) found that Japanese participants noticed more of the background in underwater scenes than Americans did. These are group averages with plenty of overlap, so “a tendency” is the right word.

Marble and bamboo

The Parthenon, begun in 447 BC and finished in 438, with its sculptures completed by 432, was designed by Ictinus and Callicrates, with the sculptor Pheidias overseeing its sculpture. Its base measures about 69.5 by 30.9 meters, close to a 9:4 ratio, and the lecture’s claim is that the Greeks built it to musical proportions and that no two column gaps are the same. What can be measured is the base and the refinements. We did not check the claim about unequal column gaps. The platform on which the columns stand rises in the middle, by about six centimeters across the short fronts and about ten across the long flanks, the columns swell slightly in the middle (the swelling is called entasis, and reaches about eighteen millimeters), the corner columns are about two percent thicker, and the columns lean inward. The musical-proportions idea, though, is a modern hypothesis, and “optical corrections” as the reason for the curves is disputed: a 2025 preprint by the mathematician Alain Goriely says there is strictly no scientific evidence for it. As for the saying “architecture is frozen music,” Goethe told his secretary Johann Peter Eckermann on 23 March 1829 that he had found a paper of his own in which he called architecture “petrified music,” and he added, “Really there is something in this.” He did not claim it as new.

The Chinese palace is built on another principle, a line instead of a block. The Forbidden City, built in 1406–1420, is 961 meters from north to south and 753 from east to west, about 72 hectares. Visitors pass the Meridian Gate, then the Gate of Supreme Harmony, and arrive at the Hall of Supreme Harmony, about thirty meters tall on a three-tiered marble base, where the Qing emperors were enthroned. The palace sits on a north-south axis of the whole city, 7.8 kilometers from the Drum and Bell Towers to Yongdingmen, an axis that UNESCO listed as a World Heritage Site in 2024. In the Summer Palace, a covered walk called the Long Corridor runs 728 meters in 273 bays. The lecture says the single long approach to the emperor was designed to unnerve visitors, so that foreign envoys fell to their knees. We found no support for that. The one documented encounter in the story, Lord Macartney’s audience with the Qianlong Emperor on 14 September 1793, took place in a tent at Chengde, and Macartney, after negotiation, knelt on one knee instead of performing the nine kowtows.

In painting, the lecture contrasts the English painter J. M. W. Turner’s Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842, Tate Britain), in which a small ship struggles in light against a violent sea, with the quiet of a Chinese ink landscape. Turner is reported to have said that he had had himself lashed to the mast for four hours to observe the storm; modern scholars doubt it. The Chinese counterpart is a way of reading space. The Song painter Guo Xi (about 1020 to about 1090) distinguished three kinds of distance in a landscape: 高远 (gāoyuǎn), high distance, looking up from the foot of a mountain to its peak; 深远 (shēnyuǎn), deep distance, looking from the front of a mountain to what lies behind it; and 平远 (píngyuǎn), level distance, looking from a near mountain to a far one. The lecture calls this last one “plain,” which belongs to a different Song ideal.

The subject the lecture likes best is bamboo. Wen Tong (文同, 1018 or 1019 to 1079; style name Yuke) was a painter and a cousin and close friend of Su Shi, and a master of ink bamboo. A hanging scroll in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Ink Bamboo, ink on silk, about 131.6 by 105.4 centimeters, shows a branch that droops from the upper left and then curves upward; the branch is read as a metaphor for a scholar’s integrity. When Wen Tong died, Su Shi wrote an essay that gave the language its phrase for planning before you start. To paint bamboo, he wrote, you must first have the whole bamboo in your chest (胸有成竹, xiōng yǒu chéng zhú), then jump up and chase what you saw, “like a hare rising and a falcon swooping,” before it is gone. He tells how he found the painting in the seventh month of 1079 and wept. The lecture’s point is that such a painting is a portrait of the painter’s character. The woman painter Guan Daosheng (管道昇, 1262–1319), the wife of the artist and official Zhao Mengfu (赵孟頫, 1254–1322), painted bamboo too, and the lecture takes her swaying stalks as a feminine character.

A last counterexample to the neat East-West split lives at the Qing court. Giuseppe Castiglione (郎世宁, Lang Shining, 1688–1766), a Jesuit lay brother born in Milan, reached Beijing in 1715 and served three emperors for about fifty years. His One Hundred Horses in a Landscape (1728, made for the Yongzheng Emperor, now in Taipei) uses European shading on Chinese silk.

Selling the bamboo

The lecture says no Chinese painter sold his work until the eighteenth century. That is false: Tang Yin (唐寅, 1470–1524) made his living selling paintings. Zheng Banqiao (郑板桥, 1693–1766), a painter of bamboo and orchids in Yangzhou, is famous for posting a price list. In 1759 he published a notice of his rates: 大幅六两，中幅四两，小幅二两，条幅对联一两，扇子斗方五钱 (dàfú liù liǎng, zhōngfú sì liǎng, xiǎofú èr liǎng, tiáofú duìlián yī liǎng, shànzi dòufāng wǔ qián): six taels of silver for a large hanging, four for a medium one, two for a small one, one for a scroll or couplet, and half a tael for a fan or album leaf. Then he said what he preferred to gifts. 凡送礼物食物，总不如白银为妙: presents and food are never as good as silver. Cash, he wrote, makes him glad, and then the painting and calligraphy both come out well.

That is a clue to the next layer. Even the most spiritual-looking art is made by people with rent to pay and reputations to build, and they choose what to do in relation to what others are doing.

Be different

The lecture’s second half is about that choice. If this year’s street fashion is a red dress, an ordinary person wants the red dress, and a celebrity wants a green one, not because green is lovelier but because green sets her apart. The German sociologist Georg Simmel described the pattern in 1904. Fashion, he wrote, is the imitation of a model and so satisfies the need for social adaptation, but it satisfies “in no less degree the need of differentiation,” and the fashions of the upper class are abandoned “as soon as” the lower prepares to appropriate them. In 2007 Jonah Berger and Chip Heath tested a version of this in four studies and found that consumers diverge from the majority in the product areas that signal identity, such as music and hairstyles, and not in areas like backpacks and stereos. Try a toy model of what happens when many people play this strategy at once.

The lecture applies the idea to art, and the timeline matters. It says that Impressionism, which painted the fleeting look of things, was undone by the camera, which did it faster, and that painters such as Cézanne, Picasso, and Braque were pushed by the camera into thinking about structure. The order is wrong. The daguerreotype was announced by François Arago in Paris on 7 January 1839, and its method was released to the world on 19 August of that year. The first Impressionist exhibition opened on 15 April 1874, in the photographer Nadar’s studio on the boulevard des Capucines, with thirty artists. The critic Louis Leroy, in Le Charivari on 25 April, wrote that wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape, mocking Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872, now in the Musée Marmottan), which gave the group its name. A remark that Paul Delaroche is reported to have made in 1839, “from today painting is dead,” is the usual proof of a shock, though it is known only as “often quoted,” with no firm source. Art historians such as Aaron Scharf have shown that some painters, Degas among them, used photographs, and others reacted against them. A simple chain from camera to Cubism is too neat.

The rebellions did follow, each reacting to the last. Cézanne wrote to the painter Émile Bernard on 15 April 1904 that nature should be treated “by means of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone, all placed in perspective,” a line whose words “all placed in perspective” are often dropped when it is quoted. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was painted in 1907, and the critic Louis Vauxcelles’s remark about “cubes” in a review of Braque in 1908 gave Cubism its name. In 1913 Marcel Duchamp mounted a bicycle wheel on a stool; the original is lost and later replicas exist, and he used the word “readymade” from 1915. In April 1917 he sent a urinal signed “R. Mutt” to the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York. It was not shown at the exhibition, was photographed by Alfred Stieglitz, and was lost; the eight replicas date from 1964, and whether Duchamp or someone close to him conceived the original is now debated. The French artist Daniel Buren (born 1938), who has used 8.7-centimeter stripes since about 1965, is a counterpart in another direction. The lecture says he refused museums; in fact the Guggenheim removed his banner from its 1971 international exhibition on the night before the opening, and he has since shown at the Pompidou Center (2002), the Guggenheim (2005), and the Grand Palais (2012). In 2004 he lined the marble path at the Temple of Heaven in Beijing with blue and white flags (De l’azur au Temple du Ciel), a work for the French cultural year in China.

A last point: is rebellion what drives the history of art? It is one theory. Heinrich Wölfflin argued in Principles of Art History (1915) that styles develop through internal pairs of opposites and that “not everything is possible at every time.” George Kubler’s The Shape of Time (1962) pictured art as sequences of solutions to problems. The lecture’s version, in which each artist rebels against the last, is the sharpest, and it fits this lesson’s point about difference. It adds that this works only where there is room: nobody can make 1 + 1 equal 3 as a personal strategy, but one can dislike the Mona Lisa and not be called mad. Taste is elastic, and elasticity is what personal strategy needs.

Finally, a caution about the first layer. Culture can override even the most body-centered of preferences. Foot binding in China began around the tenth century and was well established by the Song. By the nineteenth century it affected perhaps 40 to 50 percent of Chinese women, and nearly all upper-class Han women. The first anti-binding society was founded in Xiamen in 1874, the Republic banned it in 1912, and the last new cases were recorded in the 1950s. A standard of beauty that hurt those who followed it, and that nobody now defends, was held for a thousand years.