Aesthetic taste

While Hume is generally seen as an empiricist, in matters of taste, he can be classified as an ideal observer theorist, allowing for individual and cultural preferences.

He introduces the concept of a true judge, an individual with "strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice.

For Immanuel Kant, as discussed in his Critique of Judgment, beauty is not a property of any object, but an aesthetic judgement based on a subjective feeling.

[7] Bad taste can become a respected and cultivated (if perhaps defiant and belligerent) aesthetic, for example in the works of filmmaker John Waters, sculptor Jeff Koons, or the popular McMansion style of architecture.

A contemporary view—a retrospective review of literature—is that "a good deal of dramatic verse written during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods is in poor taste because it is bombast [high-sounding language with little meaning]".