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.