BLINDSPOTS: I'm sorry, I haven't a clue

Ezra Pound, a man who often gave the impression that he knew absolutely everything (or, to echo the old rhyme about the master of Balliol College, that if he didn't know it, it wasn't knowledge), was walking around Paris with Ernest Hemingway. Th e youngnovelist turned their rambling conversation towards the likes of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and Pound fell uncharacteristically silent. "To tell you the truth, Hem," he admitted after a while, "I've never read the Rooshians."

Pound's friend and sometime protege, T S Eliot (another writer of quite prodigious erudition) once responded to the prospect of viewing Greek sculpture with a fastidious shudder: "Snake worship". Dr Johnson claimed he could see nothing special about Gulliver's Travels, and believed that Tristram Shandy was too odd to last. Shaw thought Shakespeare wasn't a patch on George Bernard Shaw. Stravinsky hated Richard Strauss, Tchaikovsky hated Brahms and couldn't understand all the fuss about Wagner. William Blake was infuriated by Sir Joshua Reynolds. And Federico Fellini once admitted his almost total ignorance, not only of 20th-century literature, art and music, but also of the films of his illustrious contemporaries, such as Ingmar Bergman.

In short, the most unexpected people seem to have their blind spots. Though they could scarcely be described as philistine, they find certain artists, art works and art forms meretricious, corrupt, jejune, silly . . . or, simply, too boring to investigate. And on a slightly less heated level of debate, there is the most common example of a blind spot - that involving an artist who clearly has canonical standing, but whose gifts can seem distant and unaffecting. (The next time you see an advertisment fora bargain set of the world's 100 great books, lovingly bound in hand-tooled kidron, ask yourself how many of them have really had a profound effect on you. Twenty? Five? One?)

Over the next few weeks, a handful of Independent arts writers will lay bare their own blind spots within their specialist fields, and write about artists whom they acknowledge as important to others, but who have meant little or nothing to them over theyears.

The main point of this exercise is - it should swiftly be emphasised - not to offer comfort to art-loathers and other wilfully ignorant citizens : its mood is less "I accuse" than "I confess". It is intended as an inquiry intowhat distaste says about taste. After all, what would we think of a person who claimed to like everything they had read, looked at or heard? At best, they would seem like a Pollyanna. At worst, they would seem like a sponge or dupe, undiscriminating to the point of lunacy. Strong sympathies imply strong antipathies.

And just as one can construct a map (useful to sailors) in which the land masses are blank but the waters detailed, one might sketch an illuminating history of artistic taste in terms of individual and general blind spots. The late 17th century couldn't "see" Shakespeare's tragedies, Blake went largely unrecognised in his own lifetime, the 19th century couldn't find much more in Mozart than a witty charmer and Vermeer was nearly invisible until 1870 or so. The air of our own century has been filled withthe cries of artists and critics striving to build up not just their personal enthusiasms but also their dislikes into general laws.

The influential critic F R Leavis, for example, is often sneered at as a kind of academic hero-worshipper, bringing to the admiration of Jane Austen, George Eliot and, later, Dickens the kind of fervour that might in a more faithful age have been exercised within the walls of an evangelical church. Yet it is just as instructive (and less of a libel) to recall the ferocity with which Leavis would identify and then expel the second-raters of English literature. No wonder, as Donald Davie has recalled in amemoir, harassed young university teachers turned to the pages of Scrutiny with such a sense of anticipation: issue by issue, the journal would lay bare yet another vast shelf-full of books that would no longer have to be crammed, annotated and drummed into the heads of the undergraduates. What a relief! In the visual arts, too, every self-respecting band of young turks sets out to assassinate a few choice idols, preferably those of their parents' generation. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, as their name hinted, would have no truck with the painting that came after Raphael; predictably enough, a later generation of art critics would dismiss the PRB itself as utterly insignificant to European art. Wyndham Lewis and his fellow Vorticists excoriated the whole cultural baggage of Victorian and Edwardian England within the vivid covers of BLAST, while, in Italy, F T Marinetti and the Futurists fired explosive salvos at their own heritage, including Italian cooking. Another somewhat more recent and considerably more noisy cultural movement can be dated to the moment when a young chap by the name of John Lydon, aka Rotten, was spotted wearing a Pink Floyd T-shirt with the words "I HATE" scrawled above the logo.

Nor is the aggressive flaunting of blind spots a trick reserved for stroppy young insurgents. Perhaps the most celebrated of all such exercises was conducted by a man well advanced in years, Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy's essay "What Is Art?" was written when hehad embraced an austere brand of Christian anarchism and had come to regard many of the traditional pleasures of art as a whorish confection of moneyed perversion and mass self-deceit. His solemn accounts of the idiocies of King Lear and Wagner are so stubbornly literal-minded that they verge on the hilarious. Moreover, while there's at least the occasional hint of the tease or the put-on about Shaw's summary dismissals of Shakespeare, Tolstoy's bardophobia seems to have been genuine.

And so was the disgusted appraisal of the three Ps - Picasso, Pound and Charlie Parker - by Philip Larkin. True, the notion that Larkin was a bit of a yobbo - "books are a load of crap" and so on - was a po-faced gag he worked up over the years, partly to irritate the trendy, partly as a comic exaggeration of his real dispositions, so it is wise to tread carefully on the subject of Larkin the culture-basher. (Incidentally, aggrieved theatre folk who imagine that lofty dismissals of the stage are a recen t metropolitan fad should look first to Tolstoy, then at Larkin's memoir of his last-ever visit to a play, in an interview reprinted in Required Writing, and then wince.)

But there's a great distance between, say, T S Eliot maintaining that he had given up reading anything except detective stories and Larkin enthusing over Dick Francis. The former is simply frank; the latter smacks, if not of affectation, then of mischief. To talk loudly about one's low tastes, or advertise an ignorance, can be a kind of boasting every bit as nasty as more mainstream swanking, and in some cases much nastier. There's a funny passage in one of David Lodge's campus novels in which a madly competitive academic, caught up in a round of "Humiliation" (an elitist party game in which the winner is the one who admits ignorance of most great books), brags of never having read Hamlet. Larkin never went quite that far, but he was certainly proud ofneither knowing about nor caring a tuppenny damn for modernist painting, poetry and jazz.

And though the terms of Larkin's argument are, to put it charitably, a bit slack, there's little doubt that his remarks gave voice to a dislike of all things modern (or modernist) that was felt by a good many of his readers. Despite the likelihood that more people have seen the paintings of Picasso than those of almost any other modern painter, there is still no guarantee that the average dinner table of averagely cultivated Britons will have much time for or knowledge of synthetic Cubism.

If you were to ask the same gathering for their views on the later Cantos you had better have your coat and scarf ready, since some blind spots are so large that they are more like blind savannahs.

One of the problems with the Larkin line, however, is not so much that it is wrong as that it is lazy and self-congratulatory: it can soothe you into thinking that your ignorance is a badge of integrity and that the cultivation of your grudges makes you into a bit of a character.

Adorno once remarked that, nowadays, thinking was essentially a matter of checking from time to time that one could indeed still think. Similarly, the real value of examining your blind spots from time to time is not so that you can then change your mind, but to check that you still have a mind capable of change, and tastes worth the effort of changing.