In the winter of 1852 a man called Mr Crumpet returned to his modest home in Brixton, south London, after visiting a Marlborough House exhibition on the principles of good taste and found he had been shaken to his core.
“I was ashamed of the pattern of my own trowsers for I saw a piece of them hung up there as a horror,” he exclaimed. Having then made a pot of tea to steady himself, Mr Crumpet noticed with pain the butterfly painted on the teacup he held to his lips. For he now knew that such embellishments, copied from the natural world, were also the height of bad taste.
Mr Crumpet, of course, never actually existed. He was created by the writer Henry Morley in a piece commissioned by Charles Dickens to run in the December edition of the magazine Household Words. Dickens, the editor, was full of scorn for an exhibition which he felt sneered at the tastes of the common man.
But for the cultural historian Sir Christopher Frayling, this provocative show about domestic tastes was a landmark in changing national attitudes – and especially the section of it the newspapers dubbed the “chamber of horrors”.
Frayling is givinga talk about the show’s curator, Henry Cole, and what he called his “gallery of false principles”. Whether or not this ever displayed a sample of Mr Crumpet’s trouser material, or of his decorated crockery, it certainly did display 87 items judged in poor taste, including a gas fitting shaped like a convolvulus flower and some very ornate wallpaper. Frayling has now tracked down several of these original exhibits and is presenting his findings on Saturday at the current Great Exhibition Road Festival in Kensington, London. He argues that Cole was brave to be so candid about his set of aesthetic guidelines.
“He was being honest really, since there always are rules at work in an exhibition and they are rarely set out and explained,” said Frayling. “In this case they were to do with proportion, colour and geometry, as well as not taking things directly from nature. This was a genuine attempt to show the way.”
Curators at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which Cole later went on to found and run, helped Frayling uncover more of the items once described on placards as “indefensible in principle”. There was a bread tray bearing a biblical image of the feeding of the five thousand, a wallpaper featuring horses, a selection of virtuoso cut- glass engraving and that original convolvulus gas jet.
“I would love to show it all together again one day,” Frayling said. “We know that Dickens went to the exhibition and thought it cruel because there is a classroom scene in his novel Hard Times in which a government inspector tells pupils they cannot design a wallpaper with ‘orses on it’.”
Cole’s gallery of bad taste did not stay open for long because, not surprisingly, the manufacturers of the offending objects were upset. All the same, it marked a moment in which the idea of improving public taste was made explicit.
“When Cole set up his show in 1852 there was no Karl Marx and no Sigmund Freud, so there was no psychology nor class analysis. The idea was simply to raise the tone,” said Frayling. “Of course, now we think taste is all a question of where we are coming from. But for Cole there was a manifesto. He believed it was a branch of human science the public could study.”
Until then the French notion of “taste” had been the preserve of scholars and aesthetes. Edmund Burke had tackled it in his 1756 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, and then, a century later, the art theorist John Ruskin hoped to inspire the masses with the articles he wrote for The Artist and Amateur’s Magazine, subtitled A Work Devoted to the Interests of the Arts of Design and the Cultivation of Taste.
And discussions of taste continued to have the power to rattle people. When design critic Stephen Bayley staged a show on the theme at The Boilerhouse, a precursor of the Design Museum, in the 1980s, he placed the items he judged “good taste” on pedestals and those in poor taste, such as the model of a postmodern house by architect Terry Farrell, on a dustbin.
“Farrell was cross,” said Deyan Sudjic, director of London’s Design Museum. “He ran in and took the model out. He felt traduced just as those in Cole’s chamber of horrors had.”
Bayley’s show and his book, Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things, were, however, deliberate attempts to shake up assumptions. “Taste is a moveable feast,” he said this weekend. “I put on that show because people were not distinguishing taste from design. Design is largely a technical subject to do with whether something works well. But whether you actually like something is then a matter of your own taste.”
Bayley dates the modern appetite for clean lines and purity to the birth of mass production: “Modernist aesthetic principles came along in reaction to that moment when suddenly everyone became consumers. It was required as a kind of rationalisation. And people do crave order. So in that way modernism is like classicism.
Personal taste remains a tricky issue. “It is a taboo. People are open about sexuality and money, but they are squeamish about their taste because the everyday choices we make are so revealing.”
The truth, Bayley holds, is that people with the same background usually share their tastes. Among his own chamber of horrors would be lava lamps, (“nostalgic meretricious crap”), and Philippe Starck’s attention-seeking lemon squeezer, although he thinks Ikea’s ubiquitous Billy bookcase is a “classic”.
Such domestic choices, often informed by nostalgia and aspiration, were the subject of artist Grayson Perry’s huge 2012 tapestries The Vanity of Small Differences, and of his Bafta-winning television show All In the Best Possible Taste. This September the Turner Prize winner’s new solo show at the Victoria Miro gallery in Mayfair, London, will include new work looking at the way consumer choices express our identity. Perry’s ceramic pot Shopping for Meaning is covered with images of the artist in a wig and headscarf, standing in front of London’s designer stores: all places that claim to sell good taste.
“The great thing about Grayson is he has been able to talk about these differences without being condescending,” said Sudjic. “It would be a terrible thing if a museum now was trying to teach good taste. We have stopped having that sense of moral certainty about it and are aware of how transient any rules are.”
A classical faith in the essential truth of beautiful objects, as set out in Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, is powerfully countered now, Sudjic suggests, by Laver’s Law. This is the chart set out by fashion theorist James Laver that describes any new object’s inevitable journey from being seen at first as outlandish, then chic, then dowdy, then hideous, then quaint, before being finally hailed as the epitome of bygone style.
“Humans are programmed to look for change and difference, and I hope we are exploring that at the Design Museum. People are really sophisticated now and so we want to look forward and make sense of what is going on,” he said.
