Taste may be "out of fashion," but that doesn't make it any less indispensable for Cao Yiqiang, Full Professor founder of the School of Art History and Theory at the China Academy of Art. Influenced by his mentors, Ernest Gombirch, with whom he studied in the 1990s, and Joaquín Lorda, Professor researcher the School, Yiqiang explains in this interview what taste means to him, its value to society today, and the importance of teaching it in the classroom.

How do you define taste?
It is a coordination of energies: between the eye and the hand, report perception, discipline emotion. Taste, at its highest point, is the refinement of attention. It is about sensitivity and creativity, and without sensitivity, there is no creation.

Does it evolve over time?
We live in an era of cultural relativism in which, in the name of ideological correctness, for many academics and artists, taste becomes a problematic issue and is avoided. However, taste is a cultivated form of sympathetic attention, not a weapon of exclusion. It is a foundation of human creativity.

Taste is refined through discernment of imperfection. Cultivating taste involves cultivating empathy: the ability to recognize the resonance and nuances of human creativity across cultures and centuries—to feel, in a stroke of ink or a flash of oil, the coordinated energy that unites the creator, the material, and the viewer.

Xie He in the 5th century and Gombrich, Haskell, and Lorda converged on the same idea: judging art ethically requires careful viewing, historical reflection, and resistance to the presumption that our own taste is decisive. Judging art is an ethical act that demands humility, precision, and openness to the life that breathes through a work.

As early as the fourth century BC, thinkers from different civilizations grappled with the question of taste. In Greece, Plato and Aristotle conceived of harmony, proportion, and propriety as measures of beauty and artistic judgment. In China, thinkers articulated similar notions through ritual propriety and cosmic harmony. In India, the concept of rasa linked artistic creation to what could be savored by a sensitive mind.

Do you think that taste has lost its value today?
We are often told that it is pointless to discuss taste, and that it belongs to the realm of pure subjectivity. It is perceived as something elitist and superior. However, my finding Velázquez's Las Hilanderas convinced me that great art can refine our powers of perception and judgment.

Perhaps this refinement is the only way in which artists and viewers can come to share what we call "good taste."

Can you point out the core topic Xie He's document "On the Quality of Ancient Paintings" (5th century AD)?
The importance of this treatise lies in Six Principles that articulate a vision of art as coordinated energy, a harmony of perception, execution, and vital force.

Xie He presented the treatise as a description of the work process. This becomes clearer if we reverse its order, from the last principle to the first: One begins by copying the masters of the past and observing nature; in doing so, one pays attention to spatial composition; respects the natural forms and colors of the subjects; maintains the structural integrity of the brushstroke; and finally, strives to convey liveliness, where the artist's energy and the life of nature merge.

Why do you consider it essential to educate new generations in taste, standards, and art?
From the moment we are born, we are educated in art, and people forget this fact. As human beings, we only have two tools: creating images and writing words. Images and words enable us to express ourselves and allow us to understand the world; they play a vital role in our development.

In China, art has played a vital role in the country's history and culture, where a cultured man must know how to paint, write, have good calligraphy, be able to play an instrument (...). All these requirements are what we now call art, and the future belongs to those who master art and language, the only areas that control, create, and feed Artificial Intelligence. Artistic intelligence is the mother of Artificial Intelligence.

*project PID2023-153253NA-I00, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by FEDER, EU.

*This session has been organized in partnership ART T&H (Architectural Research Team: Theory and History).