This seems like a good time to plug in Pablo Picasso's famous assertion that good taste is the enemy of creativity.

To a person of relaxed sensibilities, life in a world governed by good taste is tantamount to residency in a hell without pain. This empire of blandness would, I imagine, be a good bit easier to take than the traditional model but hell none-the-less.

Taste is an offshoot of education, and education is, of course, a good thing. We are in bad shape without it. But, as in the case of other strong medicines, there are side effects. One is that the brain of the recipient is in danger of becoming overly purified - bleached, in a sense - so that the recipient is unable to comfortably coexist with the livelier expressions of human creativity (often identified by words or phrases such as "histrionic" and "over the top") and attacks them on grounds of aesthetic and/or moral contamination. “Bleach over there, please. I see germs over there.”

My grousing about good taste is not rooted in the belief that it promotes false values. All our values are faked, supported by axioms that will sooner or later be out of fashion. Universal values, near as I can tell, are things along the lines of electromagnetic force. The universe doesn't appear to do aesthetics or morals. It's up to us cognitive types to come up with whatever we can. And these values are largely guided by our sense of what kind of a world we actually want to live in. Editorials often posit that we all want to get to the same place - we just have different ideas on how to get there. I don't think so. I don't think we all want to get to the same place. But I digress.

Taste is a test. "We need to know if you're one of us." The blatant chiaroscuro and skewed angles of 40s noir or the gnashing of method acting are, well... immature, histrionic, offensive to persons of well-tuned sensibilities. And they distract from The Truth.

Truth... and what might that be? Like any good fundamentalist preacher, the commentator is there to tell you. The director, the actor, the cinematographer, the composer,* etc., they are just there to set things up, and the commentator would appreciate it if they didn't clutter the joint with a lot of distracting razzle-dazzle.

But good taste changes. Rococo was tasteful at one time. There are some who are pleased to think they're hipper than Watteau and Boucher and Fragonard. But based on what? It's not that I think good taste shouldn't be an option. If that takes you where you need to go, stick with it. But I and certain slovenly cohorts need to be somewhere else. You see, we're not among those who have shut themselves off from the pleasures of rococo and mannerism.

Good taste in its present incarnation wants art to not draw attention to itself. What does that mean for Michelangelo or Shakespeare or Beethoven?* Exegeses and commentaries are fine, but it's the thing itself that matters to me. Artistic creativity is a messy affair. We're a messy species. Art is a way we have of fumbling for light, but there's a touch of madness in much of art, sometimes more than a touch.

A word that gets a lot of play in contemporary commentary is "restraint". This, we are told, is a good thing. Directors, actors, cinematographers, set designers, in fact artists of every sort, should aspire to the condition of restraint. RESTRAINT!!! Is the aim here to drain every vestige of exuberance from the creative palette of the human race? Restraint. Is that what artists should strive for? What an ambition. Soon enough you’ll be dead, and you’ll have all the restraint you could ever have wanted.

Here try this: Buy a gun. Load it. Put the muzzle to the right temple (left for southpaws). Point slightly upwards and pull the trigger. Now, I realize this act is a bit over the top for a true aficionado of good taste (sleeping pills?), but the aftermath... all the restraint you ever dreamed of... without the loose-cannon aspects of actual dreaming.

A director (actor, cinematographer, set designer, etc.) should not draw attention to him/herself. You read this from time to time. There is a foolproof way to accomplish this: Don't make the damned movie. True, we would then be deprived of the commentators' wise, mature, subtle, insightful expositions (and I'd have to take up stamp collecting or some such to fill in the time); but somehow we'd muddle through. Or not.

I think that this striving for blandness is, in effect, an attempt to minimalize the role of the artist and maximalize the role of the commentator. After the artist has done the heavy lifting, people like me get to come in and blather till we drop. But who's overrated, John Huston or Andrew Sarris? Commentators are just ants who clean up after the picnic. Ants do have an important place in a healthy ecosystem, but they are not a substitute for chocolate cake.

For some, art should be a means of clarifying the mess in which we live. It should be tidy or at least amenable to tidy analysis. Art, for me, is a place where instinct and superstition can come out to play. And the skewed angles, the high contrast, I need all that. The stylized acting of the silent movies, I need that too. I don't expect or want art to tidy anything. It can try. Maybe something good will come of it, and for a short while a certain number of people will feel that maybe life has some sense to it after all.

And then the chaos and the random will creep back in, and the movie will be relevant or not depending on its strengths as a series of moving images. Its perceived wisdom may help it or hinder it depending on how future generations of movie-goers feel about things.

It's not that film-makers should not be tasteful and subtle. They should be anything they want. They should be at the top of their game, whatever that is.

What I enjoy but don't need is someone's dissertation, including the one I'm writing now, on what all that means. I'm O.K. with the commentary, mine and others, but I don't need it. What I need is this.