Taste: Media and Interior Design 0367758806, 9780367758806

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TASTE

This book traces and explores the evolution of taste from a design perspective: what it is, how it works, and what it does. Karin Tehve examines taste primarily through its recursive relationship to media. This ongoing process changes the relationship between designers and the public, and our understanding of the relationship of individuals to their social contexts. Through an analysis of taste, design is understood to be an active constituent of social life, not as autonomous from it. This book reclaims a term long dismissed from interior design and unveils taste’s role as a powerful social and political agent within systems of aesthetics, affecting both its producers and consumers. Each chapter discusses a taste concept or definition, analyzes its reciprocal relationship with media, and explores its implications for interior design. Illustrated with 70 images, taste’s relationship to media is viewed through a variety of different lenses, including books, photography, magazines, internet, social media, and algorithms. Written primarily for students and scholars of interior design and related design fields, this book will be a helpful resource for all those interested in the question of taste, and is an invitation to produce and consume all media critically. Karin Tehve has taught at Pratt since 2007 and coordinates the undergraduate thesis curriculum in interior design. Her own research and writing concentrates on taste, media, and identity, and their intersection with the public realm. Karin founded her practice KT3Dllc in 2001 pursuing projects in architecture, interiors, and site-specific art. She has published in the Journal of Design History, The Journal of Interior Design, The International Journal of Interior Architecture + Spatial Design, and Interiors Beyond Architecture. As a member of Interior Provocations, Karin is co-editor of and contributor to Interior Provocations: History, Theory and Practice of Autonomous Interiors and Appropriate(d) Interiors.

TASTE Media and Interior Design

Karin Tehve

Designed cover image: DALL-E 2 and author/generative prompt: a drawing of brightly colored books on shelves First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Karin Tehve The right of Karin Tehve to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tehve, Karin, author. Title: Taste : media and interior design / Karin Tehve. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022060878 | ISBN 9780367758790 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367758806 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003164388 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Aesthetics. | Design—Social aspects. | Interior decoration—Philosophy. Classification: LCC BH39 .T44 2023 | DDC 111/.85—dc23/ eng/20230405 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022060878 ISBN: 978-0-367-75879-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-75880-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-16438-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003164388 Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

CONTENTS

List of Figures vii Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 1 Taste and books

22

Taste and photography

46

Taste and mass media

69

Taste and magazines

91

Taste and zines

113

Taste and the internet

135

Taste and social media

158

Taste and algorithms

181

vi Contents

Conclusion 204 Glossary 215 Reading list

232

Index 241

FIGURES

0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4

1.1

1.2 1.3 1.4

1.5

1.6

1.7

Instagram post, @fineanddandyco | credit line: © Maria Orlova www.orlovamaria.com Instagram post, @lottlott |credit line: © Andre Klotz and Michell Lott Aerial photo of Levittown, Hempstead NY, 1954 | credit line: Levittown Public Library Diagram demonstrating the use of the Golden Triangle by the Apple Logo, based on an image by Malte Koeditz, 2022 | credit line: author Front pages from John Ruskin’s The Crown of Wild Olive & The Cestus of Aglaia (1911). | credit line: public domain Plate I: Ornaments from Rouen, Saint-Lô and Venice | credit line: public domain Plate II: Part of the Cathedral of Saint-Lô, Normandy | credit line: public domain Page with illustration from Charles L. Eastlake’s Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery and Other Details (1869) | credit line: public domain Page with illustration from Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The American Woman’s Home (1869) | credit line: public domain Page with illustration from Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman Jr.’s The Decoration of Houses (1897) | credit line: public domain Page with illustration from Elsie de Wolfe’s The House in Good Taste (1913) | credit line: public domain

3 3 5

7

23 29 29

31

33

35 37

viii Figures

2.1

Photograph: Passage Choiseul, Paris, France, c. 1910. Credit line: Roger-Viollet / The Image Works 2.2 Daguerreotype: The Salon of Baron Gros, JeanBaptiste-Louis Gros, c.1850–57. Credit line: The Metropolitan Museum of Art 2.3 Daguerreotype: Rufus Choate, Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes, c.1850 | Credit Line: Gift of I. N. Phelps Stokes, Edward S. Hawes, Alice Mary Hawes, and Marion Augusta Hawes, 1937 2.4 Photograph (silver print): Eugène Atget, Boulevard de Strasbourg, Corsets, Paris, 1912 | Printed 1930s by Berenice Abbott | credit line: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY 2.5 Photograph: Lyonel Feininger, Hairdresser’s mannequin, Dessau, 1932, Credit line: Harvard Art Museums/ Busch-Reisinger Museum 2.6 Photograph: Eugène Atget, Avenue des Gobelins, 1925 | credit line: © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY 2.7 Photograph: Pedestrians viewing Marshall Field & Company department store window display in the Loop community area of Chicago, Illinois, 1910 | credit line: DN-0008625, Chicago Daily News collection, Chicago History Museum 3.1 Published in “High-Brow, Middle-Brow, Low-Brow,” LIFE Magazine, April 11th, 1949. Illustrations by Tom Funk, text by Russell Lynes | credit line: the estate of Tom Funk, © The Picture Collection LLC 3.2 Still from Modern Times, 1936 (director: Charlie Chaplin) | credit line: © Roy Export S.A.S 3.3 Still from Auntie Mamie, 1958 (director: Morton DaCosta) | credit line: © Everett Collection 3.4 Still from Playtime, 1967 (director: Jacques Tati) | credit line: © Everett Collection 3.5 Still from 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968 (director: Stanley Kubrick) | credit line: © Everett Collection 3.6 and 3.7 Stills from House: After Five Years of Living, 1954. | credit line: © Eames Office LLC (eamesoffice.com). All rights reserved 4.1 Berenice Abbott, Newsstand, East 32nd Street and Third Avenue, Manhattan, 1935. | credit line: The Museum of the City of New York/ Art Resource, NY 4.2 Cover: House & Garden, August 1948 | cover design: Herbert Matter | credit line: © Condé Nast

46

48

48

51

56

59

62

69 71 74 76 77

83

91 93

Figures  ix

4.3 Cover: Art & Architecture, February 1947 | cover design: Herbert Matter | credit line: © Travers Family Trust 93 4.4 Editorial image (focus on plywood vault ceiling/roof assembly). Arts & Architecture, November 1958, 18-19 | Case Study House 20, Buff, Staub and Hensmen Architects (in association with Saul Bass), designers | Julius Shulman, photographer | credit line: © Travers Family Trust & © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10) 95 4.5 Advertisement for plywood vault systems, featuring CSH 20. Arts & Architecture, November 1958, 8 | Case Study House 20, Buff, Staub and Hensmen Architects (in association with Saul Bass), designers. | credit line: © Travers Family Trust 95 4.6 Art & Architecture, February 1947 | Case Study House #16, Rodney Walker, designer | Julius Shulman, photographer | credit line: © Travers Family Trust & © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10) 104 4.7 House & Garden, August 1948/ Case Study House #16, Rodney Walker, designer | Julius Shulman, photographer | credit line: © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10) 105 4.8 and 4.9 Arts & Architecture, November 1958 | Case Study House 20, Buff, Staub and Hensmen Architects (in association with Saul Bass) | credit line: © Travers Family Trust & © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10), Figures 4.8 Editorial image (p20), Figures 4.9 Feature: “New Furniture from Knoll Associates” (p28) 106 5.1 Kurt Schwitters and Theo van Doesburg. Kleine Dada Soiree. 1922 | credit line: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/ Art Resource, NY 114 5.2 ONYX/ Charles Albatross & Patrick Redson (Woodson Rainey & Ron Williams), 1970. The first broadsheet (Woodson Rainey, Ron Willaims, and Esther Choi, “ONYX: Another Interview,” May 11, 2013. | credit line: ©ONYX 19 114 5.3 Jamie Reid, Sophie Richmond, Vivienne Westwood, and Ray Stevenson. Anarchy in the UK no. 1 (Zine cover featuring Soo Catwoman), 1976. | credit line: Digital Image© The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/ Art Resource, NY/ Copyright Sex Pistols Residuals 115 5.4 Untitled, 1970, Linder, Purchased 2007 (Tate) | Credit line: © Linder, Photo: Tate 117

x Figures

5.5 Flier: 1839 Geary St., 1979 July 28. 1979 | credit line: Place: Box: 9, Folder: 17, Johan Kugelberg punk collection, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library 121 5.6 page from Tuesday Night 1977 (a zine about CBGB), editor: Richard Frey, 09.20.1977 | credit line: Richard Frey 126 5.7 detail of an interior wall, CBGB | credit line: Mary Altaffer/AP/Shutterstock 126 5.8 and 5.9 Pages from Skeezer (a zine), Spring 1988. Ian Birlem and Adam Ayer, editors. | credit line: Ian Birlem | Images found on skateandannoy.com (Randy Kilwag, editor) 127 6.1 Kawai-Vacances Summer Vacation in the Kingdom of the Golden by artist Takashi Murakami, displayed as part of a major retrospective of the artist’s work. Versailles, France, September 09, 2010 | credit line: ©2010 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved. | Photo: Patrick Aventurier/Getty Images 135 6.2 The © MURAKAMI show. Brooklyn, New York, April 3, 2008. | credit line: ©️ 2008 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved. | Photo: Patrick McMullan/ Getty Images 141 6.3 Outside the © MURAKAMI show opening party, Brooklyn, New York, April 3, 2008. | credit line: © 2008 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. | Photo: Patrick McMullan/Getty Images 144

6.4 Takashi Murakami X ComplexCon. | credit line: © 2019 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved 146 6.5 PUNK: Chaos to Couture | DIY: Graffiti & Agitprop, New York, Spring 2013. | Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Image source: Art Resource, NY 150 6.6 Saint Michael x Takashi Murakami Saint Graffiti Tee | credit line: ©️ 2021 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved 152 7.1 Social Media post: @anniecoggan (designer & educator) | credit line: Annie Coggan 159 7.2 Social Media post: @daquinomonaco (design firm) | credit line: D’Aquino Monaco 159 7.3 Social Media post: @vasfsf (designer and educator) | credit line: Virginia San Fratello 162 7.4 Social Media post: @interior_provocations (scholarly organization) | credit line: images from top left:

Figures  xi

7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8 7.9 7.10 8.1 8.2

8.3 8.4

8.5 8.6

8.7

9.1

9.2

Liz Teston, Igor Siddiqui, Selma Catovic Hughes, Loukia Tsafoulia & Severino Alfonso, Annie Coggan, Alexandra Goldberg, Nataly Rojas & Gabriela Rosas, Interior Provocations (Anca Lasc, Karyn Zieve, Erica Morawski, Deborah Schneiderman, Keena Suh, Karin Tehve) 162 Social Media post: @rusty_7s | credit line: Jessica Stegbauer (design entrepreneur) 168 Social Media post: @mo_morshuis | credit line: Mo Morshuis (design entrepreneur) 168 Social Media post: @lauramoreta | credit line: Laura Moreta 172 Social Media post: @alenavarron | credit line: Alejandra Navarro 172 Social Media post: @_kadrii | credit line: @_kadrii 172 Social Media post: @nikkimcwilliams | credit line: Nikki McWilliams 174 DALL-E (AI) generated image: prompt “A museum gallery” | credit line: DALL-E and author 181 DALL-E (AI) generated image: prompt “A museum gallery filled with art created by AIs” | credit line: DALL-E and author 181 Tate Britain | Photo: Tony Hisgett, Birmingham, UK 184 Recreation of screenshot of Tate website search results, term: “jenny” (accessed 07.20.20) | credit line: © 2022 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York | Courtesy Tate 190 Data posted for Jenny Holzer’s BLUE PURPLE TILT (GitHub) 191 Recognition (details): Pope Francis and George Frederic Watts, Daphne (c1879-82) | credit line @Dinuka Liyanamatte/ Reuters News & Media Inc. | Courtesy Tate 193 Recognition (details) | Ban Ki-moon and Harold Cohen, Before the Event (1963) | credit line: @POOL/ Reuters News & Media Inc. | Courtesy Tate 195 Eugène Atget. Pendant l’éclipse. Albumen silver print, 6 7/16 x 8 5/8" (16.3 x 21.9 cm). Abbott-Levy Collection. Partial gift of Shirley C. Burden.1912 | credit line: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY 204 Every page ... from Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida. | credit line: Photograph: © Idris Khan 209

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the result of a class that I have taught since 2009, simply titled Taste. Housed within the Interior Design Department in the School of Design at Pratt Institute, that class was the result of a conversation I had over dinner with Anita Cooney (now the Dean of the School of Design) and Melissa Cicetti (architect and professor) in New York City in 2008. The three of us were discussing the potential role of theory in Pratt’s Interior Design graduate program: its relationship to creative practice, whether it could be used to reinforce still-emergent disciplinary boundaries, and the like. The conversation turned to taste as a term sorely in need of recuperation and reclaiming. We realized, as the conversation stretched past dinner and the waitstaff began to glare, that none of us had an adequate definition for the term. How could the concept of taste be made taboo in design studios while three academics were at a loss to define it clearly and definitively? And so the class was inspired. I taught the class for several years with my friend and colleague Antonio Furgiuele. Pratt Institute has the reputation of being a maker school—that we emphasize problem-solving and the development of a design process through experiments in drawing and fabrication. In keeping with that ethos, even the theory classes in the Interior Design department involve acts of design, as well as acts of reading, writing, and analysis. Taste became a way to connect making and thinking, in considering where one’s choices originate—not just for consumers and users, but for designers and makers as well. The relationship of media to aesthetic choice grew from our reading lists and our students’ analysis, particularly considering the ways that mediation always involves choice, no matter how automatic its processes might present themselves. The students that I have had the privilege to teach in Taste have all contributed to the

xiv Acknowledgments

development of the scholarship foundational to this book. I would also like to thank Antonio for everything I learned throughout our collaboration, and for the joy of working with such a fierce intellect. I am enormously indebted to the support and mentorship available to me as an administrator and faculty member in Pratt’s Interior Design department. First and foremost, thanks go to Anita Cooney, the chair of Interior Design when she hired me first to teach a graduate studio, and soon thereafter to the position of Assistant Chair. Anita never wavered in her support of the initial idea or its translation into a class and then again into a book. The Department of Interior Design was instrumental in all efforts as well; huge thanks to Chair David Foley and Assistant Chair Tania Branquinho for their patience, understanding, and flexibility. Sincere thanks to the Pratt Library staff (in particular to Maggie Portis and Holly Wilson, ‘zines expert), without whom the research would not have been possible. I would like to thank Deborah Schneiderman and Amy Campos, editors of Interiors Beyond Architecture, for my first opportunity to translate ideas developed in teaching into chapter form. From that experience, I learned that editing is an act of care, both technical and personal. I owe innumerable debts to the editors and organizers of Interior Provocations, now an umbrella term for symposia and publications dedicated to raising disciplinary consciousness. This cohort is made up of faculty from the departments of Interior Design and History of Art and Design at Pratt; past and present members include Deborah Schneiderman, Keena Suh, Anca Lasc, Alexa Winton, Karyn Zieve, Erica Morawski, and myself. This book would not have been possible without their feedback, advice, support, and faith. Interior Provocations has developed into a significant international forum across physical and digital domains to debate the issues that define interior design, a forum that has expanded and informed my own thinking. The process of crafting the book itself took a village—a highly skilled and knowledgeable village. Colleagues Timo Lindman and Brendan Moran read initial drafts. A colleague introduced me to Rachel Smucker, the editor that gave this book critical structure and legibility. Madeline Crawford was at various stages an editor of content, copy, spelling, and readability; she was also an ideal model reader, standing in for the highly-intelligent-but-new-to-­designtheory student body that I hope this book will reach. Collyn Hinchey, a former student and current polymath, gave incisive feedback at a critical stage. INT MFA candidate Natalie Elzayn worked tirelessly to secure image rights, as did Bhumi Gupta and Stefanie Alpert. In particular, I would like to thank Xinchun Hu, a former student and current friend. Xinchun read shaggy drafts, edited my proposed images, filled in missing research and contributed incisive original scholarship (in the chapter “Taste and social media”). Above all, no one

Acknowledgments  xv

was more eager to talk about this work. Students like Xinchun are a rare and precious gift, and this book is dedicated to them. I would like to thank the team at Routledge for their faith and feedback, particularly Krystal LaDuc Racaniello for her initial support. Finally, I’d like to thank my family, both inherited and chosen. Dan, Kyra, Keena and Constance: your support for and faith in me has been constant and humbling. When I was very young, my mother used to say she wanted to be the queen of taste. I’m still unsure what that reign would have entailed, but clearly it inspired me to serve that particular court.

INTRODUCTION

What do we mean when we refer to taste? It is a term that we are quite confident in using, and it is easy to assume we are making its meaning and ourselves understood. And yet, upon even cursory investigation, taste means different things depending on who uses the term and in what context. Because of its inherent subjectivity, taste has been long dismissed as arbitrary or frivolous.1 Taste is associated with the irrational, the feminine, and a lack of rigor. This misunderstanding veils taste’s role as a powerful cultural, social, and political agent, affecting producers and consumers. The most active influences on one’s taste may go largely unnoticed, paradoxically through the ubiquity of their presence. The first influence to consider is media: systems of representation and communication, the tools we use daily to store, deliver, and access information or content. The second influence is design; design shapes the environments in which we live and work. Taste, in turn, influences design as a part of a designer’s process and through the influence of consumer or user preference. The focus of this book will be on the relationship between taste, media, and interior design. Taste is central to interior design’s public identity, for better or worse, in many ways misunderstood through that association.

Defining taste A contemporary, academic working definition: taste is a set of preferences to which we have been conditioned, judgments made intuitively. Depending on the context in which it is used, taste may refer to the moment a choice is made, or to the accumulation of choices—the things, spaces, and experiences chosen. DOI: 10.4324/9781003164388-1

2 Introduction

Before defining the term as it pertains to interior design, let us embrace the messy vitality of the term as a whole (bodily sensations and all) to make an important point. No matter its form, taste is the judgment of something we experience, whether the phenomenon in question is visual or edible. Mediation, however, can obscure what is being judged. If we read a detailed description of a delicious meal, we do not mistake that representation (the description) for its referent (the meal). It is utterly apparent that tasting food or drink requires direct experience. It is also evident that our own experience of the same meal might be quite different from that of the author of that ­description—whoever had that meal and took the trouble to describe it to us. If we look, however, at a photograph of an interior or a work of art, the indirect nature of that encounter is significantly less apparent. Taking in something by looking at it still involves bodily sensation—information that can be taken in through our senses—but perhaps because seeing represents (for most of us) a continuum of experience, it seems so obvious as to elude scrutiny. To that point, the ubiquity of media helps veil its power to shape our understanding of its content. Over time, it is possible to develop perceptual habits fraught with false equivalents—that the fully sensorial and embodied experiences of objects and spaces are roughly equivalent (or at least adequate) to seeing them as the content of an image. Just one example: a photograph of an interior records a room at a single moment, under particular conditions of light. The room may be tidy in the image, messy moments later. The photographer may have moved furniture or objects. The photographer selected a particular view, highlighting some elements or characteristics; that particular view might eliminate others. These edits, these choices, may have been made consciously or unconsciously, but they remain choices that affect the viewer’s perception, understanding, and judgment regarding that room. Mediation edits, and in so doing, leaves us with few reminders to consider what might be missing.2 Given that this is a book and not a delicious meal or piece of music, the aesthetic assessment of visual phenomena will be in sharpest focus, emphasizing the judgment of the design of objects and spaces. This book, a form of media, will edit: the following chapters representing its author’s judgments and choices.

Taste: some foundational definitions Definitions of taste—regarding what it is, how it is formed, and its purpose— evolve. Since the eighteenth century, the formation of one’s taste has been theorized as inborn or natural, or as learned or unconsciously absorbed from one’s environment or context. This book presents a number of these definitions. Each selected definition is analyzed in the following chapters regarding its proposed metrics: how aesthetic choices might be valued or measured. The analysis considers each definition’s position regarding factors like an individual’s agency and the role of social contexts and constructs in establishing personal preference. Each analysis traces debts to earlier definitions. For example, French

Introduction  3

sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s treatise on taste, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), draws from and critiques philosophies from centuries past, particularly the aesthetic philosophies of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. This accumulative effect creates a rich complexity of ideas and no small measure of ambiguity. While this text examines both scholarly and popular sources for definitions of taste over time, perhaps the best response to this complexity is to begin with some historical analysis of the most common meanings of taste: It’s what I like. It’s what we like. It’s good.

It’s what I like With this definition, one’s judgments appear to be entirely one’s own: subjective, acknowledging no values outside the individual. This is not a new idea, according to the Latin proverb de gustibus, non est disputandum, or “there is no accounting for taste.” This is taste at its most familiar—a domain of arbitrariness and subjectivity. It’s what I like creates a temporary equivalence between effects produced by delicious food and fine art, as long as the experience of pleasure is the only metric. With this definition, we could be a set of unrelated sensation-seeking individuals, free to enjoy (or not) whatever phenomena might come our way.

FIGURE 0.1 Instagram post, @fineanddandyco | credit line: © Maria Orlova www.

orlovamaria.com FIGURE 0.2 

Instagram post, @lottlott | credit line: © Andre Klotz and Michell Lott

4 Introduction

This version of taste can be inferred from British philosopher Edmund Burke’s A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful, originally published in 1757. Taste, in the eighteenth century, was understood as the discernment of beauty. Burke’s definition appears straightforward: “By beauty I mean, that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it.”3 Beauty is taken in by the senses and results in pleasure. If you love it, it is beautiful. Burke describes an emotional response prior to that impression’s qualification by judgment or classification. It is personal, immediate—the very definition of individual and subjective. There appear to be no stakes here beyond the potential for personal enjoyment. Burke, however, is able to make such a simple statement because “…it is probable that the standard both of reason and Taste is the same in all human creatures.”4 This statement, while predicated on the assumption that all human creatures have the same preferences, does begin to point toward social stakes: that taste may have some role in binding us together (or, quite possibly, in dividing us) through our pleasures. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (also writing in the eighteenth century) narrows taste’s purview, establishing strict parameters around what might be considered beautiful. Both Burke and Kant declared that taste should be understood (at least in part) as a personal and subjective response to an experience taken in through one’s senses. However, for Kant, not all experiences were equal. Kant puts “beautiful” in a different, more exalted category than “agreeable”; those things that we may simply “like” are in pursuit of the agreeable, not the beautiful.5 Agreeable things are a source of undisciplined, physical pleasure—that which pleases the senses in sensation—a category well beneath Kant’s criteria for proper discernment of beauty.6 There may be no accounting for those tastes. The agreeable was a form of interest in the real existence of an object—the physical sensations it might create or whether or not one owned it.7 According to Kant, the discernment of beauty required a higher order of perception, free from any personal interest in the outcome of an assessment. Despite embracing love as a proof of beauty, Burke also constructs arguments distinguishing beauty’s characteristics as distinct from physical pleasures or everyday concerns. Burke warns his readers that “desire… is an energy of the mind that hurries us on to the possession of certain objects” and that “…love, is different than desire… it is to this latter that we must attribute… violent and tempestuous passions…”.8 For Kant, the experience of beauty was immediate and free of a priori ideas. This experience was profoundly present; the immediacy of its recognition— that judgment in taste—could remind us of the primacy of direct, unmitigated experience. Taste required autonomy, a particular kind of independence or freedom, meaning beauty could only be genuinely recognized when one was disinterested—free from needs, wants, or preconceptions.9 When applied to individual choice or judgment, disinterest guaranteed that a decision or choice

Introduction  5

was made as an exercise of free will, a characteristic that tied Kant’s work on aesthetics to his writing on ethics and morality.

It’s what we like If it’s what I like denotes a set of individual preferences, then it’s what we like asks more explicitly who might share these preferences. Although Immanuel Kant’s definition of taste declared taste to be subjective, it is also beholden to a principle he called sensus communis.10 Sensus communis is a kind of aesthetic common sense; without this shared sense, to call something beautiful would have no stakes beyond the experience of personal pleasure.11 Design scholar Kent Kleinman identifies these as high stakes indeed, positioning preferences-in-common as foundational to civil society, a vehicle for social cohesion.12 As a concept, sensus communis speaks to harmony within the human condition, a recognition of beauty that all might have in common. It enables Kant’s definition of taste to be applied universally. Like the beauty it discerned, taste had an eternal transcendent quality—a judgment of taste could be true for all and for all time.

FIGURE 0.3 Aerial

photo of Levittown, Hempstead NY, 1954 | credit line: Levittown Public Library

6 Introduction

Moving into the nineteenth century, however, these definitions were recontextualized in environments experiencing unprecedented change. A significant aspect of this was the speed and scope of this change, driven in no small part by the Industrial Revolution.13 From a technological perspective, this era saw significant development in manufacturing, transportation, commerce, and communication, with corresponding effects on the built environment at every scale. Historian Penny Sparke identifies the economic impacts of mass production and trade as inextricable from its social consequences, including the rise of the middle class and its subsequent preoccupation with all things taste-related.14 In the United States, an expanded middle class became identifiable around mercantile, shipping, and manufacturing functions.15 The emergent industrial economy translated into greater individual wealth for individuals participating in this new economy, in some cases exceeding that of the traditional European aristocracy. With the ability to accrue wealth in this manner came the possibility of social mobility, or the concept that one’s social identity might be defined to a greater degree with what one does and has, as opposed to who one might be. With this dynamic re-definition of the foundations of social position came the need to make aesthetic choices to identify oneself in a new social setting. The criteria for making these choices were far from fixed, eternal, or universal. The literary theorist Terry Eagleton suggests that the appeal of ­self-determination and individual freedom were integral to these changes to the meaning of taste.16 To the members of an emergent middle-class, the meaning of autonomy would shift as well, suggesting the license to apply the term taste to decisions made on practical, everyday matters, in profound contrast to Kant’s exacting criteria. In the nineteenth century, many definitions of taste acknowledged the influence of experience, education, and upbringing on aesthetic assessment. If taste is influenced by experience, it follows that taste could change over time. If taste is part of one’s identity, a change in taste may affect one’s social position: one’s ability to belong to (or be excluded from) a social group. Over time, definitions evolved to position taste as a critical part of one’s identity, whether the things preferred were worthy of Kant’s discernment or could be understood as merely agreeable. These preferences make individuals recognizable to others. Today, this seems like second nature; as individuals, our choices construct our image: the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the spaces we inhabit, and even the food we eat. These choices create a set of impressions that are seen or sensed and judged by others.17 By the middle of the twentieth century, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu defined taste as “an acquired disposition to differentiate.”18 Distinguishing oneself from (and to) others through one’s choices was to be understood as a substantial component of all social life.

Introduction  7

It’s good More obviously than its alternatives, it’s good suggests the making of categories, of classifying phenomena on some form of meritocratic scale. Good implies suitability, usefulness, and practical value. Its most common antonyms, however, are bad and evil, pointing to its use as an indication of virtue or morality. I like it requires only self-examination; it’s good requires external measures, ostensibly to ensure results with relevance beyond one’s personal preconceptions and opinions. Much Enlightenment thought on aesthetics attempts to establish classifications: to determine the standards, rules, or universal truths to be applied to beauty and taste. After considering love as its basis, Edmund Burke moves on to an inquiry as to whether all beautiful things might have something in common, using proportion: an established relationship between numbers, applied as a kind of formula for beautiful form since antiquity.19 Burke uses a systematic process of elimination, but ultimately concludes that proportion is not the cause of beauty in plants, animals, or human beings. Kant eliminates the good and its associated utility from consideration, defining them as forms of interest. For something to be good, it must function as a means to an end, without possessing the “purposiveness without purpose” that a pure experience of beauty must have.20 Kant was among the most influential Enlightenment philosophers, and his aesthetic philosophy remains foundational within the design disciplines.21

FIGURE 0.4 Diagram

demonstrating the use of the Golden Triangle by the Apple Logo, based on an image by Malte Koeditz, 2022 | credit line: author

8 Introduction

However, his philosophy was written to assess aesthetics that could be understood as pure or autonomous, such as fine art: objects of contemplation devoid of the burden of utility. Despite this, Kant’s concept of autonomy is frequently evoked as a means of establishing value in design.22 In design theory, autonomy refers to the independence of a work of design from matters extrinsic to its essential nature, helping determine how that design is assessed. This would privilege metrics specific to the work or discipline itself—free from exterior needs, wants, or preconceptions. As an example, the autonomy of architecture might be predicated on questions regarding what forms of knowledge and experience architecture produces. This could theoretically exclude vast categories of concern that are present and accounted for in practice. These might include the degree to which a work of architecture’s social or political impacts should play a part in how it is judged; for example, what good might it enable? Furthermore, because utility (in any form) is a form of interest according to Kant, he offers little specific guidance as to how empirical matters (including issues of structure, economy, and sustainability) should be considered regarding a work’s value. The principle of autonomy would exclude considerations of the preferences of a work’s audience or users—is it what they like? For Kant, the experience of beauty was an end to itself, a kind of finality present in direct, immediate experience. One might argue that the ability to sense finality in both objects and spaces was disturbed by the development of mass production and the changes to the consumer economy that ensued. Manufacturing developments meant that products were less expensive and more available. Industrial goods were no longer necessarily tied to a particular place; manufacturing centralized production (driving increased urbanization), but advances in transportation made it possible to disperse those goods. Goods previously considered luxury items were now accessible to a broad market, a diverse set of income levels. Significantly, manufactured goods were designed to exist for a limited time. This temporal quality is identified by historians and theorists like Ellen Lupton and Penny Sparke as culturally pivotal. Mass production irrevocably disturbs the sense of objects being permanent, surrounded as they might be by copies and potential replacements. This impermanence is a central tenant of a consumer economy and one of modernity’s defining features.23 These are just some of the conditions requiring a reconsideration of taste, for a definition acknowledging fundamental cultural change.

Media No matter how cerebral their arguments, Kant and Burke acknowledge that aesthetic experience depends on sensible experience: information about the world taken in through one’s senses. This is embodied sensation, requiring direct contact or the actual presence of the phenomenon to be assessed. Direct

Introduction  9

experience, however, is now just one of the ways by which we commonly experience the world around us. The universal aesthetic values theorized by Enlightenment philosophy are challenged by mediation; any form of representation translates and edits its content.24 If we understand and experience our environments differently through different forms of media, each of us has an expanded potential to perceive that environment differently. If our perceptions are different, our assessments could be, as well. No single set of means to recognize the beautiful, the agreeable, or the good would be unexceptionally or universally applicable to this heterodox condition.

“The medium is the message” In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964, Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan issues the evergreen proclamation that “the medium is the message.” Media is not merely the storage and transporting of content, but a new lens through which to see the world, translating its content into new forms. That translation has the power to illuminate the underlying logics of its content, changing and revealing how information is organized.25 McLuhan asserts that media changes sense perception itself, albeit with its attendant effects usually going unnoticed. This is a crucial power: the relative and paradoxical invisibility of its impact. This invisibility can be produced by a sense of immediacy. An example of this is the development of linear perspective, a drawing technique dating to the Renaissance. Perspective creates an illusion of occupying space, and a sense of objectivity and accuracy regarding the perspectival image. If the illusion is successful, then that image is experienced as transparent, offering little resistance to the perception of the representation and its referent being the same.26 In other words, media mitigates experience, often without notice. McLuhan points out that what we think of as content is often another form of media. A book is a container for text, text is a container for speech, speech is a container for thought, and thought is a container for ideas. Each layer, each mediating step, has different inherent characteristics of visibility and mobility. Each step changes access to that content. A book, filled with an author’s ideas, becomes portable and independent of that author.27 Books communicate those ideas wherever the book can be taken and whomever might possess it. Books are durable, preserving ideas for future generations. If the translations inherent to books change one’s access to the world of content, then one’s perception of the world may also change. In line with this is McLuhan’s suggestion that our concern should be with “effect rather than meaning… for effect involves the total situation and not a single level of information movement.”28 In his essay “Media Hot and Cold,” McLuhan proposes a system of classification for these effects. “Hot media” is

10 Introduction

information-dense, often relying on a single sense; for instance, photographs and films are “hot.” “Cool media,” on the other hand, requires some degree of audience participation and thus attention and focus; a text, for example, is “cool.”29 A lecture is hot; a class discussion is cool. Any hot media requires less participation, requiring less focused attention than a cool one. Whether a medium is hot or cool determines the effect of its reception. According to McLuhan, hot media is consumed passively and uncritically. Because cool media requires participation, it invites greater criticality from its audience, reader, or consumer. The more uncritical or passive the reception, the greater the potential for that media to imprint an understanding constructed by its authors and its form upon its consumers.

Media and taste Examining media’s relationship to taste means examining how media edits and translates the objects and spaces that make up our environment. As argued above, any analysis should acknowledge that these edits and translations may occur without incurring notice.30 McLuhan’s description of hot media, in particular, suggests that the experience of a film so overwhelms the senses as not to leave room for considering what could be missing. The intensity of hot media may exceed its viewer’s conscious perception; aspects or details that may be present (or absent) are not noticed. Media gives us what seems like unmitigated access to the world, but even its experience can obscure what is not represented. To focus on media and taste is to examine the filters and translations that exist between subjects and objects, allowing their effects to be seen.31 McLuhan’s theory has been critiqued as a form of technological determinism. His language often suggests a straightforward causal relationship between the effects of media and cultural change.32 A richer understanding of media (and its relationship to taste) emerges by considering its effects as reciprocal and variable. It might be argued that any form of media is only as hot or cool as the attention paid to it. A lecture could cool down if listened to with an engaged and critical ear; a seminar could warm up with every lapse of focus. A holistic understanding of media requires consideration beyond techniques or technologies to applications, receptions, and effects. Both media and taste are agents of culture, but neither is external to culture.33 According to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s definitions, taste is c­ontextspecific. In terms of a physical context, differences in our environments eventually translate to differences in our values and preferences. In terms of a cultural or social context, our preferences influence (and in turn, are influenced by) the preferences of those around us. Media can shift how a context is perceived and afford access to the preferences of others beyond our immediate surroundings. In either case, this could trigger new ways that taste is formed, influencing judgments made. A photograph of a room across the globe may inspire and

Introduction  11

edify its viewer, with the potential to inspire new ways of considering that viewer’s own environment. Applied in this way, Bourdieu’s concept suggests a recursivity between the effects of taste and media. Both fundamentally involve choice, whether the choices in question are conscious or even recognizable as choices. This book, will consider the effects of choice, and the reciprocal relationships between container (media), contained (subject matter), users, and contexts.

Design An understanding of taste benefits anyone interested in the impacts of aesthetic decisions, but for designers, the stakes are exceptionally high. A consumer might make dozens of aesthetic decisions daily, relying on their conditioned preferences without necessarily being conscious of doing so.34 These decisions are often intuitive: an exchange involving direct and immediate engagement with an object, taking it in, saying yes or no. On the other hand, designers must be more conscious of the number and quality of aesthetic decisions to be made over the course of a day, as those decisions have more significant impacts than simply personal satisfaction. Taste is part of any design process and, in the case of interior design, its public image. When one asks what is the most important qualification for an interior designer, the average person’s answer is they must have great taste.35 Perhaps that is a criterion, but if we rely on our average everyday definition of it’s what I like, it is clear that great taste alone is a rather meager place to start.

Taste and the design process Taste has proven to be a problematic term for designers of all disciplines. Certainly, its use is considered taboo in many academic environments and design studios, except when referring to the caprice of a client or a patron’s desires. An understanding of what taste is and how it forms, however, is critical for the practice of design; yet,conditioned intuitive choice is only one part of design praxis. For designers, a robust design process leads us to test our intuited choices, offering opportunities to actively question conditioned traditions, values, and norms. In her essay “Taste and the Interior Designer,” Penny Sparke analyzes early modern design praxis, and points out that taste was often deprecated as a hallmark of the amateur.36 Sparke describes taste as set in opposition to design (a professional domain) and used to distinguish the efforts of interior designers from architects. Used in this way, taste can be a tool to exclude the efforts of a host of individuals that participate in realizing interiors, ranging from laborers and mediators to consumers and users.37 It is not a distinction that is difficult to make: interior design, as a profession, includes praxis challenging to

12 Introduction

differentiate from amateur efforts—the selection of furniture, finishes, color, and lighting are all possible for the layperson. While the contemporary discipline of interior design is inclusive enough to embrace both professional and amateur praxis, taste can be evoked to suggest that the profession of interior design is less than rigorous and process-oriented and diminishes its perceived potential to partake in a global discourse about design.38 Design of all kinds requires the ability to navigate and satisfy a multitude of criteria in addition to one’s preferences. Designers make design choices through an iterative process, including research, analysis, and the testing of options, making decisions about aesthetic and non-aesthetic aspects of a space or object. The design of the built environment requires an understanding of construction techniques and the salient criteria to apply to materials specification. It also requires making appropriate judgments in the face of things in which a person may have little or no choice at all, such as the laws of physics. The complexities of a rigorous design process do not preclude personal preference or intuition; rather, personal or subjective choice would be one part of a larger process. While the average layperson may misplace “great taste” as standing in for the design process as a whole, taste is merely one part of a complex process for designers of all disciplines.

Notes on method The intention of this book is to analyze different definitions of taste, examining each through the lens of mediation. Taste, as a set of definitions, has a history, and historically its study has spanned several disciplines. This book refers to definitions from philosophy, sociology, art and design criticism, and critical theory, with guest appearances from economics, anthropology, and marketing. Immanuel Kant and Pierre Bourdieu loom large in the study of taste. Analyses of taste from the academic to the popular are likely to refer to the ideas of one or both.39 The concepts of Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan remain critical to the study of media, having introduced terms like the information age, global village, and even media into our vocabularies. Their work and its analysis by others comprise a substantial share of scholarship on their respective subjects: examined, critiqued, and referenced by scholars across disciplines. It is important to note that new definitions of taste do not simply accumulate. In this, one can see similarities with McLuhan’s assertion that each new form of media transforms perception holistically. Extant forms or definitions of taste persist in their effects, not overwritten so much as edited and recontextualized. A useful metaphor: an image, being more portable than its subject matter and capable of almost unlimited copies, also changes who might see it, shifting and expanding its possible judgments or assessments. The structure of this book is based on continuing developments in technology, an essential basis for changes to media. While its organization is (roughly)

Introduction  13

chronological, this text is not meant to be a comprehensive history. The authors and texts selected are generally well-known, oft-quoted, and understood to have been influential over time. Each chapter discusses a taste concept or definition, analyzes its reciprocal relationship with media, and explores its implications for interior design. The design case studies selected include built projects and illustrations demonstrating applications of design advice, work by professionals and work by amateurs (and in one particular case, work by artificial intelligence). These case studies seek to ground theory in practice, connecting speculations about the response of design to larger cultural changes. This is not a book that attempts to explain definitively how specific preferences develop, especially at the scale of an individual’s taste. It is not a history of likes and dislikes.40 This book aims to understand the impact of each definition of taste at a social or cultural scale and to speculate on its implications to design thinking or praxis. This book privileges a Western perspective, one centered on the United States. Most references are European and American, following that rather conventional lineage of ideas. This is, however, a deliberate choice. If taste and the context in which it is formed are intertwined (as Bourdieu would have it), then concentrating on a particular context clarifies those relations. Taste is local and subject to the influence of cultural and material conditions; to speculate on its nature in one place does not necessarily produce knowledge applicable elsewhere without further analysis and translation. Moreover, the concepts of taste analyzed in this book help illuminate some of the aesthetic values thoroughly embedded in the Western design canon—the texts, projects, and principles held as academic and disciplinary ideals. This book can serve as part of the larger process of examining that canon critically. To that end, this book will take pains to point out not only what (and who) is the purview of particular definitions but also to point out what (and who) has been excluded. Each chapter concludes with a list of references for further reading. The book concludes with a glossary of key critical terms accompanied by references.

Chapter summaries Taste and books Technological advances in the production of books were essential in their becoming widely accessible to the American and British public in the nineteenth century. Books about design became available to a broader and more diverse set of readers as economic and social change made taste an issue for an emergent middle-class. Moreover, these changes challenged values established by aesthetic philosophy. In the absence of a single applicable set of standards, authors of books on design had the task of constructing an authoritative voice,

14 Introduction

of crafting metrics by which design might be judged. The pursuit of credible standards of taste created strange bedfellows, including the conflation of aesthetic values with moral or ethical issues. Over time, expressed ideals became scaffolded by their authors’ popularity, notoriety its own form of authority. Taste moved from cleaving to absolute principles to negotiating heterogeneous sources for validation. As its definitions multiplied and evolved, taste became understood as multivalent, as vital for one’s identity as for the recognition of beauty, suitability, or excellence.

Taste and photography Photography enabled its subjects to be experienced in new contexts and by new audiences. This subsequently changed how those subjects might be understood or valued by others. The extent of these impacts is veiled, as photographs are commonly understood to be equivalent to their subject matter. This ambiguity, too, supports a trade in meanings and values.41 This is commensurate with definitions of taste as a form of display: to choose what can be seen, rather than what is truly loved. This form of taste suggests that objects, spaces, or pursuits are not necessarily preferred for inherent or embodied values (including beauty) but as evidence of their possessor’s wealth. Not coincidentally, the emergence of photography coincides with the use of the term image to describe one’s reputation.42 This articulates a further shift in taste away from aesthetic judgment and toward a marker of social standing.

Taste and mass media One common taste taxonomy categorizes taste as either universal (a single set of assessment standards) or relative (several sets adapted to particular circumstances). These two models help distinguish writing about mass media and popular (pop) culture and the struggle to distinguish them from more rarefied forms of production, such as the fine arts and architecture. “Mass” refers to the ambitious scale of the intended audience, and to the overwhelming scale of media’s presence in the cultural landscape. Each form of mass media—film, radio, television, print periodicals—is a vehicle for cultural content, each a tangible cultural artifact itself. How these different forms should be valued, and their potential impacts on the taste of their audience, was to be the subject of vigorous debate for the better part of the twentieth century. From the esoteric arts to entertainment to everyday praxis, the products of culture and the tastes of those who consumed each type of media were sorted and labeled as high, middle, or low. Whether espousing universal or relative standards, however, definitions of taste were largely stratified in these debates. Even as taste appears to become tastes, each taste remains defined in relation to one another on a single scale from low to high.

Introduction  15

Taste and magazines According to Kant, assessments of taste should consider no motive or use outside the contemplation of beauty or excellence. However, for Pierre Bourdieu, taste is a set of intuited preferences, habits and values to which one is conditioned by environment, experience, and education. Bourdieu’s investigations predicted preferences based on socio-economic class, positioning taste itself as useful: as a social boundary marker. Everything one consumes, makes, or displays contributes to one’s social status. This boundary-forming process has parallels in magazine publishing. Organized by genre, each magazine creates a particular domain of subject matter and sensibilities, reinforcing a coherent identity for its readers. Magazines develop specific readerships; their content, over time, both reflects those readers’ interests and can help reinforce their distinct preferences. Similarly, Bourdieu theorized individual taste as forming a dynamic, recursive relationship with the values and sensibilities embraced by one’s social domain or milieu. Reading a magazine may influence the taste of its consumer; as understood through this definition, that consumer’s social identity is qualified by the magazines they choose to read.

Taste and zines A subculture is made identifiable by its rejection of mainstream values. Taste here denotes a deliberate tactic, a set of choices designed or chosen deliberately to create distinctions from a status quo. Examining taste via subcultures and other marginalized groups reveals an ideological nature encoded in objects and spaces. Their aesthetics often involve appropriation, a claiming and recasting of the cultural products of the mainstream. These new contexts produce new values and trigger the need for alternative strategies of assessment. This is a form of taste-making: a shared embrace of what is devalued, and assigning them new shared values.43 Decentralized forms of media, like the zine, operate in parallel to these phenomena.44 Their subject matter is largely niche topics, targeted to a small audience with interests not represented by mainstream forms of media. This is taste as anti-taste, aesthetic choices made as a form of protest, a bid to construct a coherent identity outside codified norms.

Taste and the internet As a system of distribution of user-generated content, the internet challenges the hegemony of mass media with interpersonal media. This shift fundamentally blurs distinctions between authors, audiences, and critics. It also may contribute to a collapse of distinctions between the domains of art and the economy. Some contemporary definitions of taste reverse-engineer consumer activity, focusing on individual choice. Taste is made radically distinct from any aesthetic

16 Introduction

communis, rooted in the search for pleasure and self-definition—it’s what I like. As a global marketplace, the internet supports the production and consumption of an ever more heterogeneous nature. This increased access to products supports the theorization of omnivorous taste, aesthetic choices made well outside the domains previously defined by geography and social position. Definitions of taste that begin with the user appear to challenge top-down models of influence, but user-influence is less purely user-generated than it initially appears. The multi-modal digital communication channels afforded by the internet become a platform on which influence and authority are traded between newly empowered users and more traditional producers of art, design, and status.

Taste and social media When theorizing taste as an integral aspect of identity, most definitions refer to social domains where face-to-face interactions are the norm. Naturally, definitions of taste adapt when faced with social life conducted on digital platforms. These new definitions foreground curation, a necessary response to the scale of the internet. Internet engines and platforms manage and edit, each form of mediation producing patterns of selection and arrangement. “Curation” is also the term used to describe the process by which online identities develop via social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram). One’s “curated” online presence is a mediated and dispersed presentation of self. The opportunity to curate one’s (apparent) taste changes the nature of identity itself as constructed in part by the perception of others. If taste can be understood to be specific to its context, the context of social media demonstrates that a single individual may possess or perform more than one taste.

Taste and algorithms Taste has historically been understood to be a characteristic informing human choice. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) challenges that sovereignty. AI technologies circumvent human limitations, able to process data at unprecedented speeds. While its use and scope are limited to its encoding and operational parameters, AIs operate with a complexity that frequently renders the precise steps to their results unfathomable. That complexity creates homologous relations to human taste, choices made by what appears to be less-than-fully conscious means. AIs are now deployed in museum settings as curators and as artists, often integral to institutional efforts to challenge exclusivity by eliminating bias. As containers and arrangers of content, both museums and AIs also function as media. The project of universality becomes one of neutrality, translated through technology seemingly unencumbered by tradition or subjectivity. However, an AI can only operate through rules and on content constructed by humans, and the results can reveal the subjectivity inherent in both.

Introduction  17

Conclusion All the forms of media analyzed above will continue to evolve. Media will continue to allow its subject matter to be translated into new forms and to appear in new places and to new audiences. Existing forms will continue to combine, recombine, and remediate. If one were to predict the future of media, one might look to the evolution of the physical, social, aesthetic, and economic contexts in which each form has emerged. Advances in technology and their cultural contexts will likely continue to obfuscate the difference between means and ends.45 One theme likely to endure: chasing the dragon of immediacy, of the mediated experience that faithfully mirrors reality. So long as we maintain this desire, we undermine the pursuit of a holistic understanding of how media edits and frames, how it shapes everything: from environments to desire. Taste is a term with significant cultural stakes, with implications ranging from the personal to the political. Its continued study is critical, as taste remains challenging to understand across its many (and evolving) meanings. Its complexity and ambiguity may veil the importance of taste as a concept. It’s what I like suggests preferences as part of individual subjectivity. Taste is part of our identities, categorizing us in the process. It’s what we like asks who or what might wield the influence to change our mind and hints at the power of taste to influence how groups form. Taste locates us closer in relation to others who might share our preferences and farther from those who do not. It’s good starts to acknowledge a measure of value that operates at a larger scale: outside ourselves and those we know, even up to the scale of an entire culture. This hints at social factors and social impacts in how we attribute value and how we construct aesthetic categories and metrics, even if these factors and impacts are not explicitly mentioned. This book examines definitions of taste over time and how taste and media reflect and affect one another; that taste is dependent on exposure to aesthetic phenomena is recurrent in these definitions. Our environments, past and present, contain and form those aesthetics, influencing what we assess to be suitable, appropriate, or beautiful. This ongoing evolution changes the relationship between designers and the public, and our understanding of the relationship of individuals to their social contexts.

Notes 1 Drew Plunkett, former Head of Interior Design at the Glasgow School of Art, quotes the American architect Louis Sullivan on this point: “Taste is one of the weaker words in our language. It means a little less than something, a little more than nothing …”. Drew Plunkett, Taste: A Cultural History of the Home Interior 1800 to the Present Day (London: RIBA Publishing, 2020). 2 A photograph would quite obviously eliminate the sounds, tactility, and olfactory aspects of the experience as well. What is less obvious is the degree to which those missing characteristics might qualify one’s judgment of a photograph’s content.

18 Introduction

3 Edmund Burke and Adam Phillips, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 83. 4 John Bartlett and Justin Kaplan, Familiar Quotations: A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992), 118. 5 Immanuel Kant and Paul Guyer, Critique of the Power of Judgment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 91. 6 Kant and Guyer, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 91. 7 Ice cream, the warmth from a fire, a hug: all agreeable. Ice cream must be possessed to be enjoyed, a fire must be near one’s skin to be perceived, a hug requires the touch of an actual body. Contrast this to the contemplation of a painting in a museum—it need not be possessed to be experienced, nor need there be any stakes in its judgment. That painting could produce a positive or negative response in the viewer with no effects beyond the aesthetic experience itself. 8 Burke and Phillips, “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.” 9 See the entry for autonomy in this book’s glossary. 10 Kant and Guyer, Critique, 122. 11 Kant and Guyer, 175. 12 Kent Kleinman, “Taste, after All,” in After Taste: Expanded Practice in Interior Design., eds. Kent Kleinman, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, and Lois Weinthal, 1st ed. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012), 17. 13 This assertion is a simplification of arguments presented in Penny Sparke’s book As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2010). 14 Penny Sparke, The Modern Interior (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 17. 15 Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 17. 16 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 9. 17 Personal taste might be an oxymoron, given that it is only discernible under the scrutiny of others and understandable in comparison with others’ choices. 18 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinctions: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 466. 19 In the first century BCE, Vitruvius used proportion to analyze and explain the principles of architecture, a translation of esoteric theoretical reasoning to a set of numbers recognizable (or at least theoretically verifiable) by anyone ( John Onians, “Vitruvius,” in Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance (Princeton University Press, 1988), 33). 20 In this translation, the phrase is “purposiveness without an end.” Kant and Guyer, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 111. 21 Architecture Theory Since 1968 (1998, edited by K. Michael Hays) contains 23 separate references to Kant across 57 essays, generally to establish how design can be understood to be an autonomous domain of knowledge or practice. Taste is only mentioned in these contexts to evoke the irrational. In After Taste: Expanded Practice in Interior Design (2012, edited by Kent Kleinman, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury and Lois Weinthal), two of the four introductory essays focus on taste specifically as defined by Kant’s Critique of Judgment. 22 This is the subject of an essay I wrote as the introduction to an edited volume on the subject, in Interior Provocations: History, Theory, and Practice of Autonomous Interiors, eds. Anca I. Lasc,Deborah Schneiderman, Keena Suh, Karin Tehve, Alexa Griffith Winton, and Karyn Zieve (New York: Routledge 2020). 23 Lupton and Sparke are excellent sources for further reading.

Introduction  19

24 One of the finest essays on this subject, specific to design, is Robin Evan’s’ “Translations from Drawing to Building,” on the effect of a designer’s means of communication on the design process (in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997]). 25 McLuhan uses cubism as an example. A cubist painting makes an instant sensory awareness of a whole phenomenon possible; perspectival vision is no longer the only possible means to understand space. 26 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 26. 27 Writing itself has been argued to structure the creative process, a position taken up by thinkers from Plato to Jacques Derrida. These effects, however, are beyond the scope of this book. 28 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2003), 26. 29 McLuhan uses jazz to illustrate cool—musicians improvise performances based on and coordinated with a musical structure, a device giving order to individual performances but not mandating their specifics. Improvisation is co-creation, in contrast to memorization and repetition. 30 A book does not give us access to text edited out, to things deemed inappropriate to say, to thoughts unexpressed or ideas unformed. A book in our hands does not necessarily evoke awareness of the process by which a book comes into being. Any reader might turn to a title page and identify a book’s publisher, but this gives no insight into that publisher’s process. A book in our hands does not necessarily evoke those without access to that book. 31 This is the rephrasing of a statement made regarding media by Antoine Hennion (in The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation (London: Routledge, 2015), 2, trans. Margaret Rigaud and Peter Collier.) 32 Media professor John Potts has written an abbreviated literature review of these critiques in “FCJ-084 Who’s Afraid of Technological Determinism? Another Look at Medium Theory,” The Fibreculture Journal: 12 (2008), accessed 08.31.22, https://twelve.f ibreculturejournal.org/fcj-084-who%E2%80%99s-afraid-of-­ technological-determinism-another-look-at-medium-theory/. 33 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, 24. Bolter and Grusin describe technological determinism regarding media; here it is applied to the operations of taste as well. 34 From what to eat for breakfast to what to listen to before going to bed. 35 It is here that too much generalization may be in play. When the average person is asked about interior designers, their taste figures large in their imagined competency. When asked about the qualifications for architects, my very non-scientific poll suggests they must be good at math. More on that distinction in subsequent chapters. 36 Penny Sparke, “Taste and the Interior Designer,” in After-Taste: Expanded Practice in Interior Design, eds. Kent Kleinman, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, and Lois Weinthal, 1st ed. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012), 5–12. 37 Sparke goes on to describe the professional designer of early modernity as almost exclusively male; one can also assume they are white. A number of contemporary texts have explored the exclusionary praxis emerging from historically positioning these designers as sole, all-powerful actors. These include Mabel O. Wilson’s keynote talk at the SAH conference in 2020: “Home of the Oppressed: Slavery and American Civic Architecture” as well as Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (eds. Irene Cheng, Charles Davis II, and Mabel O. Wilson (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020).

20 Introduction

38 It may be more accurate to say that some quarters of the profession are less open to defining amateur efforts as legitimate design. As just one example—not every professional interior design association admits members without a college degree from an accredited institution. 39 Bourdieu himself takes on Kant’s positions, notably in a chapter entitled “Towards a ‘Vulgar’ Critique of ‘Pure Critiques,’” declaring that Kant’s vision of the autonomy of aesthetic requires the separation of art from culture itself (in Distinction, 485–500). 40 An enjoyable example of a text that does speculate on likes and dislikes: Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016). 41 This presents a homology to the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s description of taste as excessive signification, separating our perception of objects from their power of signs: Giorgio Agamben, TASTE, trans. Cooper Francis. (London; Calcutta; New York: Seagull Books, 2017), 38–39. 42 “image, n.”, OED Online, accessed 06.20, https://www-oed.com.ezproxy.pratt. edu/view/Entry/91618?rskey=VJj48K&result=1. 43 Susan Sontag, “On Camp,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Penguin, 2009), 275–292. 4 4 Decentralized forms of media are ostensibly as old as writing. The copy machine, used illicitly and secretly for the production of zines, is the technology that positions decentralized media here. 45 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, 20–31.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio.Taste. Translated by Cooper Francis. The Italian List. London: Seagull Books, 2017. Bartlett, John, and Justin Kaplan. Familiar Quotations : A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature. Boston: Little, Brown, 1992. Blumin, Stuart M. The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in The American City, 1760–1900. Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Burke, Edmund. Edmund Burke: On Taste, On the Sublime and Beautiful, Reflections on the French Revolution, A Letter to a Noble Lord: With Introduction and Notes. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1969. Burke, Edmund, and Adam Phillips. “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.” Oxford [England]; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Cheng, Irene (Irene Chun-I), Charles L. II Davis, and Mabel O. Wilson. Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020. Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990. Evans, Robin. “Translations from Drawing to Building.” In Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, 153–193. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.

Introduction  21

Hays, K. Michael. Architecture Theory Since 1968. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. Hennion, Antoine, Peter Collier, and Margaret Rigaud. The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation. London: Routledge, 2015. Kant, Immanuel, and Paul Guyer. Critique of the Power of Judgment. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kleinman, Kent. “Taste, after All.” In After Taste: Expanded Practice in Interior Design, edited by Kent Kleinman, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, and Lois Weinthal, 1st ed., 28–41. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012. Kleinman, Kent, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, and Lois Weinthal. After Taste: Expanded Practice in Interior Design, 1st ed. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012. Lasc, Anca I., Deborah Schneiderman, Keena Suh, Karin Tehve, Alexa Griffith Winton, and Karyn Zieve, eds. Interior Provocations: History, Theory, And Practice of Autonomous Interiors. New York: Routledge, 2021. Lupton, Ellen, and J. Abbott Miller. The Bathroom, the Kitchen and the Aesthetics of Waste: A Process of Elimination. Cambridge, MA; New York, NY: MIT List Visual Arts Center ; Distributed by Princeton Architectural Press, 1992. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 1st ed. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994. Onians, John. “Vitruvius.” In Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, 33–40. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Plunkett, Drew. Taste: A Cultural History of the Home Interior 1800 to the Present Day. London: RIBA Publishing, 2020. Potts, John. “FCJ-084 Who’s Afraid of Technological Determinism? Another Look at Medium Theory.” The Fibreculture Journal: 12 (blog), December 2008. https://twelve. f ibreculturejournal.org/fcj-084-who%E2%80%99s-afraid-of-­t echnologicaldeterminism-another-look-at-medium-theory/. Sontag, Susan. “On Camp.” Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. A Delta Book, 0038, 275–292. New York: Dell Publishing Co, 1966. Sparke, Penny. The Modern Interior. Illustrated edition. London: Reaktion Books, 2008. Sparke, Penny. As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2010. Sparke, Penny. “Taste and the Interior Designer.” In After Taste: Expanded Practice in Interior Design., edited by Kent Kleinman, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, and Lois Weinthal, 1st ed., 14–27. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012. Vanderbilt, Tom. You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.

TASTE AND BOOKS

Introduction Eighteenth-century aesthetic philosophy contains within it many of the concepts and principles of a contemporary understanding of taste. Taste, in these texts, is the recognition of beauty. The theories of philosophers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant distill concepts about emotion and sensation into precisely constructed definitions, striving to describe what beauty might be and those objects or phenomena that could therefore be considered beautiful. Each definition considers standards, rules, and universal truths that might be developed for taste, consistent with much contemporary Western philosophy in the age of reason and rationality. For Kant, judgments of taste require autonomy, separation from all extrinsic concerns to be considered valid. These concepts endure, many of them remaining foundational to contemporary scholarship about value regarding art and design. The contexts—­ intellectual, social, material—in which they were conceived, however, are substantially different from the contexts in which they continue to be applied. According to historian Penny Sparke, industrialization, urbanization, and social mobility were all foundational to a nascent modernity in interior design.1 An expanded marketplace of goods, furnishings, and fittings for the home grew in response to a growing newly prosperous middle class and an unprecedented availability of manufactured products. Choices regarding the design or disposition of one’s environment became a more commonplace concern, no longer the purview of the aristocracy.2 This expanded field where taste might be deployed could be understood to have driven changes to its nineteenth-century definitions. These necessarily expanded taste’s domain from pure aesthetics to circumstances beyond immediate experience, acknowledging contingent or contextual conditions. DOI: 10.4324/9781003164388-2

Taste and books  23

FIGURE 1.1 Front

pages from John Ruskin’s The Crown of Wild Olive & The Cestus of Aglaia (1911). | credit line: public domain The book was part of a series called Everyman’s Library; its founder, Joseph Dent, sought to produce books “to appeal to every kind of reader: the worker, the student, the cultured man, the child, the man and the woman.” (“The Founding of the Everyman’s Library,” Everyman’s Library, http://www.everymanslibrary.co.uk/history.aspx. The design of the pages is attributed to Reginald Knowles (1879-1950), said to have been influenced by William Morris.)

This chapter presents moments in the evolution of taste, each definition distinct in point of view. What the definitions presented in this chapter have in common is their method of dissemination. Books, as the primary vehicle by which new ideas about taste were represented and shared, played a pivotal role in shaping those ideas. Advances in print technology enabled the distribution of texts now rich with images, providing guidance in design matters; those advances also helped make this guidance available to an ever more extensive and diverse readership. Whether addressing a design professional or amateur, these titles take particular advantage of the interplay of word and image, creating and constructing codes to assess excellence in an environment of unprecedented change.

24  Taste and books

The democratization of books Books, in some form, have existed for millennia. In its most basic form, a book is simply a written or printed form of communication, a text of usually considerable length meant to be read by people unknown personally to the author.3 Books are generally designed to be portable and durable. It is not surprising, then, that in every literate society, books have been used to record, preserve, and transmit knowledge.4 What changed in the nineteenth century (particularly in the US and the UK) was the availability of books. In the context of the Industrial Revolution, the advancement in print technology was a revolution unto itself. The development of steam power to fuel mechanical typecasting and typesetting raised output dramatically, and new methods were developed to improve the quality of illustrations.5 Books, magazines, and newspapers were produced more quickly and cheaply, reaching ever-increasing numbers of readers. Transitions from human to machine labor made books, in particular, newly affordable as well, no longer necessarily only within the purview of the wealthy. Literacy rates also expanded throughout the nineteenth century (and into the twentieth) across socioeconomic groups, a reciprocal effect with book production.6 Historian Lord John Dalberg Acton, writing in the nineteenth century, identifies these developments as making knowledge available to a wider audience, a spatial effect he described as lateral. In contrast, the vertical effect of print concerned time: that print should preserve knowledge, making it possible for later generations to build on the ideas of earlier ones.7 The lateral effect of print meant that knowledge was expanding to more people within the current generation. Historian Arnold Toynbee suggested the Industrial Revolution was also a revolution in ideas, in turn linked to the material processes and effects of technological advances.8 As books reached an expanding literate audience, the interplay of recorded knowledge and a diversifying readership contributed to an expanding discourse. This readership faced an expanding landscape of choice, positioning questions about aesthetic judgment as part of these new debates. While the eighteenth-century texts of Enlightenment philosophers like Kant remained foundational, new definitions of taste would emerge to accommodate these unprecedented changes.

Books on design The concept of taste was to expand across genres.9 A very particular concept can be traced through nineteenth-century books on the design of interiors and architecture. In contrast to the “pure” definition of taste offered by aesthetic philosophy, new definitions of taste acknowledged the messy contingencies and constraints of physical existence. Kant’s models of taste and beauty were

Taste and books  25

hypothetically universal and eternal; judgments of taste were meant to be made independently, free of practical concerns. Definitions of taste had to transform and adapt when applied to the useful arts—design and craft, rather than paintings or sculpture—where concerns regarding economy and utility are generally intrinsic. Historians like Sparke and Grace Lees-Maffei suggest the emergence of contemporary design publishing as an early-nineteenth-century phenomenon. Even in its earliest iterations, design publishing included a variety of distinct genres for a variety of readerships, including consumers looking for guidance. What were the legitimate standards of taste, in an era of unprecedented abundance of choice and constant change? How was one to make aesthetic decisions that accommodated the messy contingencies of use and economy? Nineteenth-century authors writing on taste and aesthetics used a variety of means to determine the legitimacy of their ideas for the reader seeking guidance, a task made more complex by the myriad measures by which the design of the environment might be evaluated. Each author’s task was to construct an authoritative voice, their writing designed to persuade.10

Design manifestos: John Ruskin John Ruskin (1819–1900) was an English critic of art and architecture, as well as a painter and poet of substantial and lasting influence.11 A vocal critic of mass production and industrialization, Ruskin’s writing on aesthetics is largely polemical, constructing arguments based on both principles and precedents. Ruskin’s definition of taste also substantially relies on religion as its source of authority. While philosophers like Kant used rational argument to construct a theoretical set of universal conditions concerning aesthetic judgment, Ruskin attributes the universality of his aesthetics to a Christian god.12 Ruskin’s arguments intertwine aesthetic excellence and morality, using precedents from both natural phenomena and Gothic architecture as evidence for his position. John Ruskin adapted principles of taste found in aesthetic philosophy to a social and physical milieu transformed by industrialization. In tying aesthetics to religious faith, he built on the goals of aesthetic philosophy to define taste in a way that could be understood as universal. Many of Ruskin’s books are still in print today, having given him a platform that extended well beyond even the scope that was afforded by early modern printing and transport. It is easy to see the problems with the assumption that the articles of a Protestant Christian faith are or should be universal, particularly from the vantage point of the twenty-first century. It may be that the most universal principle he ultimately would evoke was that of social anxiety. For Ruskin, taste is tied to one’s character, and it is through taste that one can be known, whether by a Protestant Christian god or by one another.13

26  Taste and books

Modern Painters (1843–1860) and The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) Ruskin’s clearest definition of taste can be found in Modern Painters, a ­five-volume treatise written between 1843 and 1860: Perfect taste is the faculty of receiving the greatest possible pleasure from those material sources which are attractive to our moral nature in its purity and perfection. He who receives little pleasure from these sources, wants taste; he who receives pleasure from any other sources, has false or bad taste.14 His definition shifts as it becomes applied to design, as opposed to fine art. Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture was originally published in 1849. Each chapter is an illustrated study of the religious, moral, economic, and political significance of British architecture. Ruskin makes the case for a relationship between the aesthetics of a civilization and its moral and ethical identity in the chapter names in The Seven Lamps of Architecture: “The Lamp of Truth,” “The Lamp of Sacrifice,” and “The Lamp of Obedience” among them, each recognizable as a moral principle. “The Lamp of Truth,” in particular, begins: “There is a marked likeness between the virtues of man and the enlightenment of the globe he inhabits.”15 In this chapter, Ruskin identifies myriad architectural falsehoods as anathema to proper design, including elements that only appear to provide structure, the use of paint to simulate costly finishes, and all use of machine-made ornamentation.16 One might recognize the relationship of those condemnations to the familiar dictum of modern architecture: “truth to materials.”17 Ruskin, however, makes an emphasis that places fakery closer to blasphemy than to simply representing poor design choices, referring to the use of false materials as both a vulgarity and a sin.18 Ruskin positions taste as a sensibility integral to the act of design. It is, however, used throughout Seven Lamps to describe failures of a design process. On architectural deceits of a structural nature, Ruskin writes: “Nothing can be worse, either as judged by the taste or the conscience, than affectedly inadequate supports—suspensions in air, and other such tricks and vanities.”19 Ruskin uses the term taste only to refer to what is base (“the declining and morbid taste of the later architects”), not what is noble or divine. 20 In Seven Lamps, there is curiously little explicit mention of taste in the chapter “The Lamp of Beauty.” There, Ruskin establishes the key characteristics of architectural beauty: that it should be derived from nature or understood as natural through familiarity.21 Ruskin does describe a universal instinctual preference for natural form, the result of divine will:

Taste and books  27

All men have sense of what is right in this manner, if they would only use and apply that sense; every man knows where and how beauty gives him pleasure…. People have no need of teaching if they could only think and speak truth, and ask for what they like and want, and for nothing else: nor can a right disposition of beauty be ever arrived at except by this common sense, and allowance for the circumstances of the time and place.22 To construct these arguments, however, Ruskin isolates aspects of architecture for consideration. “The Lamp of Beauty” emphasizes compositional principles, ornamental systems, and color; these features most closely resemble the fine arts, each having some degree of independence from utilitarian requirements.23 For Kant, considerations of use or purpose would compromise architecture’s status as beautiful.24 Both Kant and Ruskin describe a sense of what is right, hypothetically by all. Ruskin, however, starts to hint at circumstances where judgments might differ. Illustrations notwithstanding, Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture could be understood to be a manifesto, a written statement declaring the intentions, motives, or views of its author. A design manifesto describes a set of beliefs or principles and is often abstract or academic in nature. Manifestos are meant to be broad in reach and concerned with effects outside the scope of a single project or even a single designer’s oeuvre. In this way, a design manifesto is a form of advice. Manifestos provide guidance, written by designers or scholars for readers assumed to be designers or scholars.

The Crown of Wild Olive (1866) Ruskin defines the term taste again in a later book, The Crown of Wild Olive, first published in 1866. Unlike the earlier titles, this text consisted of transcriptions of a series of lectures that Ruskin gave directly to an audience, primarily of laypeople.25 From the chapter entitled “Traffic”: Taste is not only a part and an index of morality; it is the ONLY morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is, “What do you like?” Tell me what you like, and I’ll tell you what you are. Go out into the street, and ask the first man or woman you meet, what their “taste” is; and if they answer candidly, you know them, body and soul.26 What we like determines what we are and is the sign of what we are; and to teach taste is inevitably to form character.27 Ruskin had already established that one’s character might be related to the nature of one’s aesthetic assessments through the nobility of choices one might

28  Taste and books

make in the design or understanding of painting or architecture. This rationale recalls Kant’s evocation of autonomy as a concept in both his work on aesthetics and ethics.28 Just as a positive action cannot be considered moral unless the actor believed it to be right or true, an act of aesthetic assessment should reflect one’s own choice, evidence of one’s free will (and good character). Ruskin’s posing of the question “What do you like?” acknowledges the possibility of different answers. “[T]o teach taste is inevitably to form character” diverges from an ability to discern beauty that is divinely bestowed. A taste that can be taught would vary and could therefore be used as a way to distinguish people from one another, rather than to evoke a universal commonality. To an audience newly navigating a vastly expanded landscape of choice, Ruskin warns those choices will distinguish them to their social milieu: …my eye caught the title of a book standing open in a bookseller’s window. It was On the Necessity of the Diffusion of Taste among all Classes. “Ah,” I thought to myself, “my classifying friend, when you have diffused your taste, where will your classes be? The man who likes what you like, belongs to the same class with you, I think.29 Here Ruskin links aesthetic judgment to the specific judge, suggesting preferences as indicative of one’s social standing. This description positions the effects of taste outside the domains of art, design, or the divine. Evoking issues of class and identity speak to the difference of individuals, rather than innate and universal sensibilities.

Ruskin’s illustrations Ruskin espoused Gothic architecture, attributing excellence to a style of architecture strongly associated with religious structures in Europe and the United Kingdom. He used illustrations of Gothic and neo-Gothic architecture to illustrate The Seven Lamps of Architecture, drawings he made of cathedrals across Europe. While philosophy exclusively uses written principles to describe beauty, Ruskin expands the means of persuasion to include his skillful and evocative pencil drawings. The presence of these images in a book transforms them into precedents—examples to emulate, instances or circumstances which may be taken as fact.30 With words, one can elucidate arguments; with illustrations, one can provide visual evidence of their legitimacy. Ruskin, as the author and artist, was free to make choices that best illustrated a particular point or most effectively showed a detail embodying a particular proportion, geometry, or material.31 An artist is free to leave out aspects of their subject or content that they deem unsuitable to their ambitions for a composition. Everything that is included is unified between the covers of a book, creating an image of coherence.

Taste and books  29

I: Ornaments from Rouen, Saint-Lô and Venice | credit line: public domain

FIGURE 1.2 Plate

II: Part of the Cathedral of Saint-Lô, Normandy | credit line: public domain

FIGURE 1.3 Plate

In order to be reproduced, Ruskin’s drawings would have been translated onto etched metal plates as part of the printing process. This is a pre-­modern technology. Mechanically produced images have existed for centuries prior; the first known woodcuts in Europe date from the fourteenth century, a century before Gutenberg’s press and the use of movable print. 32 Illuminated manuscripts, with images produced directly on a page, have existed for longer still. Processes developed in the nineteenth century, however, provided a c­ ost-effective means of incorporating illustrations into the printing of books. It is ironic, then, that Ruskin’s illustrations could be used so effectively to argue against the products and technologies of the Industrial Revolution, given that those products and technologies were instrumental to the production and distribution of the book containing those arguments.

30  Taste and books

Case study: design advice books The nineteenth century saw a rise in the popularity of books to advise the consumer on how to make aesthetic choices as well. In The Modern Interior (2008), historian Penny Sparke documents the rise of the interior design advice book, responding to the demands placed on middle-class women regarding the aesthetic of home-making and decor. 33 Advice books are positioned to be more instrumental and “how-to” than design manifestos; the advice contained within them is meant to be deployed and acted upon by amateurs. The authors offering this advice may or may not have a background in design. The differences between manifestos and advice books are not always absolute or even particularly apparent. Advice books are not necessarily written to be examined critically or analytically, as they were generally positioned to be accessible to a broad readership assumed to be relatively uneducated vis-à-vis art and design.34 From the 1860s onward, a large number of interior design advice titles were published in the United States and the United Kingdom. Sparke points out that in particular, urban middle-class women wielded unprecedented buying power at a time when access to an ever-expanding array of manufactured goods was a relatively new phenomenon for many.35 Sparke identifies the emergent modern interior as a critical terrain for these women, through the application and cultivation of design. There, taste governs myriad choices in the making of a home. The Victorian domestic interior, according to Sparke, came to be seen as a respite from the increasing complexity of public life, a place to reinforce a sense of self (in part through self-expression).36 Advice books addressed this private realm, a domain of the (typically female) amateur, in contrast to the manifesto’s address of the (typically male) professional and the academic spheres.37 As described by design historian Grace Lees-Maffei, in advice books, we can see domesticity constructed in discourse.38 Lees-Maffei’s scholarship includes extensive documentation of the roots of domestic advice literature. She suggests that overlaps between the genres of etiquette and home design manuals helped account for a conflation in how taste was to become defined.39 Appropriate domestic decor and codes governing suitable behavior were to be governed by the same principles, a marriage of manners and material culture.40 Each of the following examples of the genre contains definitions (or possible inferences) of taste, enmeshed in and applied to the larger landscape of domestic concerns (and often beyond). Each too functions as a case study, containing images of design selected or produced by the authors, demonstrating the application of their advice. Each author produces a unique strategy to convince their reader of the legitimacy of their approach.

Taste and books  31

Charles Eastlake Charles Eastlake was a nineteenth-century English designer and author, educated through an apprenticeship as an architect, though best remembered as a furniture designer. Eastlake, like Ruskin, was a vociferous critic of mass production and the decline of hand-produced furniture and household goods.41 Eastlake’s Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery and Other Details was published in the United Kingdom in 1868 and in the United States in 1870.42 As befitting the title, Eastlake declares that his book is meant to suggest “some fixed principles on taste.”43 The first principle is citation, acknowledging that his concepts are based on those of “writers of acknowledged authority,” John Ruskin among them.44 Like Ruskin, Eastlake suggests universal and incontrovertible sources to legitimize aesthetic decisions, suggesting that “nature herself may be quoted as a supreme authority.”45 Yet when Eastlake writes that contemporary attitudes regarding art are divorced from any “standard of excellence which we might expect to be derived from common sense,” he suggests that excellence in design is made more recognizable over time through exposure, a process of naturalization.46

with illustration from Charles L. Eastlake’s Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery and Other Details (1869) | credit line: public domain

FIGURE 1.4 Page

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Eastlake positions precedents as an antidote to the vicissitudes of fashion, arguing that Gothic architecture was “a national and un-perverted tradition in design” in the United Kingdom, quoting Ruskin to defend this position.47 The Gothic style is also likely to be familiar to the British people, possessing the naturalization critical to beauty. Eastlake goes so far as to suggest the benefits of state interference regarding the design of buildings, to promote the formation of a specifically British taste.48 Despite the address of the far-reaching political impacts of design, Eastlake’s primary concern remains household taste, with chapters dedicated to domestic details like suitable table settings and modes of dress. Regarding the scale of individual preference, Eastlake points out issues with conventional wisdom on the matter: The faculty of distinguishing good from bad design in the familiar objects of domestic life is a faculty which most educated people and women especially conceive that they possess. How it has been acquired, few would be able to explain. The general impression seems to be that it is the peculiar inheritance of gentle blood, and independent of all training; that while a young lady is devoting at school, or under a governess, so many hours a day to music, so many to languages, and so many to general science, she is all this time unconsciously forming that sense of the beautiful, which we call taste that this sense, once developed, will enable her, unassisted by special study or experience, not only to appreciate the charms of nature in every aspect, but to form a correct estimate of the merits of art-manufacture.49 According to Household Hints, taste should be cultivated for all by studying “the sound artistic principles of early tradition.”50 Like Ruskin, Eastlake advocates avoiding imitation, especially the type of imitation inherent to the mass production of articles previously made by hand. Morality is mentioned only in passing: in keeping with a taste congruent with national identity, rather than affiliated with faith.51 That said, his advice is not universally applicable as is implied by the espousal of a national asethetic. While Eastlake suggests that poor decisions might be avoided by the use of precedents and “the well-directed and long-sustained efforts of designers,” this advice is actionable only by those in the position to make aesthetic decisions about interior detail—those with means. Moreover, Eastlake identifies the impertinence of shopkeepers who dispense design advice and dismisses them as vulgar “people of humble means [who] insist on assuming the semblance of luxuries which they cannot really afford.”52 Hints on Household Taste is illustrated by a series of woodcuts drawn by or under the supervision of Eastlake himself. These depict furniture and details as models to be emulated; many are images of Eastlake’s own designs: reproduction Gothic furniture which would come to be known as the “Eastlake style.” The design sensibility expressed in the text is reinforced by the contents of the

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illustrations, but the images are not referred to directly: text and image are simply juxtaposed. The reader is left to infer the connections between reading descriptions of the principles of excellence and advice and the offered illustrated examples.

Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe While design advice publishing in the United States and the United Kingdom addressed many similar concerns, by the middle of the nineteenth century, U.S. titles developed a particular preoccupation with efficiency and rationality regarding matters of home-making.53 Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The American Woman’s Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science; Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian Homes (1869) combines Ruskin’s divine evocations of beauty with practical concerns to be applied in the home. The extended title declares its concerns, the book mediating between the worldly and spiritual demands that Beecher and Stowe perceived to be central to the sensible construction and maintenance of the domestic sphere. Their goal: to provide a manual for the

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duties of that sphere and to elevate and honor the efforts of the women who pursue them.54 In The American Woman’s Home, Beecher and Beecher Stowe provide a methodical inventory of domestic concerns, from the care of the sick to “domestic amusements and social duties.”55 Taste is evoked frequently as an anti-rational desire for gratification, for the satisfaction of an appetite for diversion or pleasure; this taste is something to be controlled and regulated: Let a woman subtract from her domestic employments all the time given to pursuits which are of no use, except as they gratify a taste for ornament, or minister increased varieties to tempt the appetite, and she will find that much which she calls “domestic duty,” and which prevents her attention to intellectual, benevolent, and religious objects, should be called by a very different name.56 This interpretation of taste presents a distraction from the “intellectual, benevolent, and religious objects” to which the majority of one’s time should be spent.57 Beecher and Stowe emphasize the development of rules, schedules, and habits in the pursuit of sound domestic practice: Another general principle is, that our intellectual and social interests are to be preferred, to the mere gratification of taste or appetite. A portion of time, therefore, must be devoted to the cultivation of the intellect and the social affections.58 This cultivation takes the form of systematic practice, of a measured repetition resulting in another form of taste entirely: “a taste for regularity and a habit of system.”59 Ruskin theorized taste as originating from a divine source; Beecher and Stowe describe this taste as developing through very human effort. In the chapter “Home Decoration,” Beecher and Beecher Stowe claim beauty as wholesome and edifying, consistent with their objective to rationalize domestic concerns. Beauty itself is made useful, in its contributions to an inhabitant’s well-being. The presence of natural elements (such as potted plants) is emphasized with the same logic.60 The illustrations in this chapter feature rendered details or vignettes in elevation, a drawing type useful to fabricators, free of both perspective’s distortions of dimension and its ability to evoke the experience of its subject. The text of this chapter largely consists of calculations regarding expense. Like Ruskin, Beecher and Beecher Stowe hint at taste’s social function, suggesting that the ability to cultivate one’s taste is not universally bestowed. The American Woman’s Home acknowledges that refinements of taste are largely the purview of the wealthy (commensurate as it is with time free of labor). The wealthy are called upon to aid in the development of the tastes of the poor (largely through example and offers of education) in the pursuit of improving upon their social status.61 This is yet another definition of taste: a set of

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dispositions and forms of knowledge associated with a social class. This taste evokes the moral act of charity, but its purpose shifts yet again, now a hallmark of social identity. Historian Marjorie Garson suggests that morality as taste’s essential ­foundation—as espoused by Ruskin, Beecher, and Stowe—gradually becomes sublimated as it is applied to the details of everyday life. Applied to the interior, aesthetic decisions become a kind of art without artfulness, as excellent taste in the domestic realm required not the vulgarity of obvious self-conscious strategy, but “a kind of unmediated emanation of their refinement of spirit.”62 Garson quotes literary theorist Terry Eagleton in suggesting that the emergent middle class had redefined taste for their own ideological purposes, which were now a set of rules or principles expressing their own aesthetics and identities independent of oppressive external authorities.63 This suggests that the means to authenticate one’s taste had further shifted by the end of the century, from divine (or nationalistic) influences to social ones.

Edith Wharton The American novelist Edith Wharton and architect Ogden Codman Jr. published The Decoration of Houses in 1897. Wharton is best remembered for her works of fiction, the frequent subjects of which were the tribulations of New York City’s social elite. While she famously designed The Mount,

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her own house (including the interiors and landscape) in Lennox, MA, she was not trained as a designer. The Decoration of Houses was her first published work and the first of a series of nonfiction texts concerning design and culture. In academic scholarship, The Decoration of Houses is often categorized as advice literature, but it shares substantial characteristics with manifestos and other texts written for designers.64 Wharton avoids the identification of specific elements of design excellence, outlining instead essential characteristics, similar to Ruskin’s description of the principles that should govern design decisions.65 The Decoration of Houses consists primarily of principles: “Rooms may be decorated in two ways: by a superficial application of ornament totally independent of structure, or by means of those architectural features which are part of the organicism of every house, inside as well as out.”66 It is the latter approach that Wharton espouses, the profligate use of ornament signifying poor judgment. Organicism here refers to an integrated approach to unify a design inside and out; it also evokes a house as a metaphor for nature. A reader of The Decoration of Houses would be responsible for translating Wharton’s prescriptions into the physical arrangement of furniture or a selection of finishes, a scope of work (and a level of abstract thinking) suggesting the involvement of a professional.67 Moreover, while illustrated with 56 photographic plates, The Decoration of Houses provides no easily emulatable aesthetic models for an amateur reader. The photographs depict canonical design from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, including images of the Palace of Versailles and the Pitti Palace—examples likely familiar to those well-educated in design and art history.68 Like Ruskin and Eastlake, she is explicit in reliance on well-established aesthetic models; however, both the text and illustrations of The Decoration of Houses emphasize the use of classicism and neoclassicism regarding both architecture and interiors.69 What taste is, or how it might form, is not explicitly identified in The Decoration of Houses.70 However, Wharton refers to architecture and interiors as being the result of good taste, through the use of credible standards. While this suggests taste is the purview of design professionals, the freedom to make decisions remains constrained: Wharton refers consistently to the need to follow the rules as established by design styles or historical precedents and warns against entering the “labyrinth of dubious eclecticism.” 71 The use of precedents or reliance on tradition might inform the aesthetic choices for the many. Throughout The Decoration of Houses, however, Wharton suggests that good taste might be the purview of the few: Every good moulding, every carefully studied detail exacted by those who can afford to indulge their taste, will in time find its way to the carpenter-built cottage. Once the right precedent is established, it costs less to follow than oppose it.72

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It is a fact recognized by political economists that changes in manners and customs no matter under what form of government usually originate with the wealthy or aristocratic minority and are thence transmitted to other classes.73 Wharton identifies a kind of trickle-down aesthetics. While the possession of wealth affords a greater ability to make aesthetic choices, The Decoration of Houses implies wealth bestows the possession of excellent aesthetic discernment as well.74

Elsie de Wolfe American interior designer Elsie de Wolfe is credited as the first to practice interior decoration as a profession, though she (like Wharton) had no formal training as a designer. Historian Penny Sparke identifies de Wolfe’s best-known book, The House in Good Taste (1913), as having been influenced by Wharton and Codman, but with a popular and amateur readership in mind. The House in Good Taste was notable among contemporary advice books in eschewing practical domestic advice, containing guidance on neither kitchens nor baths, nor on issues of cleaning and maintenance.75 Like Wharton, de Wolfe was explicit in embrace of neoclassicism; unlike Wharton, de Wolfe avoids the formal

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address that would identify her as an obvious authority and speaks to her reader as a peer: We must avoid such aspiring architects and visualize our homes not as so many specially designated rooms… but as individual expressions of ourselves, of the future we plan, of our dreams for our children.76 De Wolfe makes it clear that she is speaking to the concerns of women and to the needs of non-professionals. That said, the text provides guidance for those procuring the services of designers as well: [You] must select for your architect a man who isn’t too determined to have his way. It is a fearful mistake to leave the entire planning of your home to a man whose social experience may be limited, for instance, for he can impose on you his conception of tastes with a damning permanency and emphasis. I once heard a certain Boston architect say that he taught his clients to be ladies and gentlemen. He couldn’t, you know. All he could do is to set the front door so that it would reprove them if they weren’t.77 De Wolfe is explicit here and throughout that taste is part of one’s social identity, as well as a component of a design process for the amateur and professional alike: I believe that good taste can be developed in any woman, just as surely as good manners are possible to anyone. And good taste is as necessary as good manners.78 Sparke positions de Wolfe as a liberating influence, a designer who espoused the domestic interior as an opportunity for middle-class women, a site of ­self-expression and self-identification.79 One’s home, however, was not free from the purview of extrinsic sources of validation. While de Wolfe might reject one’s architect as an appropriate source, existing styles of architecture should still be maintained as models of suitability. How do we develop taste? Some of us, alas, can never develop it, because we can never let go of shams. We must learn to recognize suitability, simplicity and proportion, and apply our knowledge to our needs.80 In her condemnation of imitations or fakery, de Wolfe’s advice recalls that of John Ruskin, although she avoids the absolutism of the term truth as applied to the interior’s design. De Wolfe’s cheerfully malleable interpretation of sham allows the use of reproductions: Certain reproductions are objectionable, and yet they are certainly better than poor originals, after all. The simplest advice is the best and easiest to follow: The less a

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copy suggests an attempt at ‘artistic reproduction,’ the more literal and mechanical it is in its copy of the original, the better it is81 Indeed, her frequent use of the term “suitable” (a term that Eastlake and Wharton also frequently use) suggests a relative approach to the assessment of a design feature, positioning taste as right or good in a particular place or time rather than universally. Across The House in Good Taste, de Wolfe seems to empathize with her middle-class readers. Her pronouncements regarding aesthetics and decorating acknowledge contingencies and economies; the tone overall is more conciliatory and forgiving than that found in Ruskin, Eastlake, or Wharton’s texts. There is, however, an ambiguity in her use of images throughout The House in Good Taste. As Penny Sparke has noted, The House in Good Taste is illustrated with photographs of interiors ostensibly demonstrating the “simplicity, suitability, and proportion” called for in a chapter title. The text, again, does not refer to them directly. The rooms represented in the photographs seem simply consistent with the book’s themes and principles, notably in the use of the eighteenth-century neoclassical French design as a precedent for good design. Their inclusion, however, suggests the interiors could be reproduced by her readers; advice books offer guidance in making design decisions for the layperson. Sparke points out that the majority of the photographed designs were of de Wolfe’s own home or had been created for her very wealthy clientele, and not identified as such through captions. These designs represented the choices afforded by a substantial budget and de Wolfe’s wealth of experience, advantages unavailable to the average reader. Sparke suggests that suppressing these differences was key to the book’s success.82 De Wolfe suggests that good taste can be developed in any woman, but that a preference for “suitability, simplicity and proportion” might best be demonstrated by emulating the aesthetic choices of the wealthy.

Conclusion Any book, no matter its ambition, is influenced by the social and political contexts in which it was produced. As just one example, Ruskin evangelizes articles of a Protestant Christian faith in his arguments espousing truth in design. To do so is to assume faith to be ubiquitous to his readership; it is also to exclude from consideration those not cleaving to that faith. Without it being made explicit, each author assumes a hierarchical social structure, often (roughly) commensurate with differences in wealth. These assume the reader possesses sufficient income and time to spend on assessing options or on aesthetic contemplation, differentiating those with choice and others that would serve or support them. In turn, each author implies (or states clearly) the superior taste of the wealthy, even beyond the

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advantages that access to education in the arts and design might afford. This superiority is largely unexplored; taste, as Wharton described it, largely remains “a great undefinable domain.”83 While advances in printing, publishing, and transportation technologies and rising literacy rates served to make their books newly available to a larger swath of society (the historian Lord Acton’s lateral effect), the conservatism of the arguments contained therein suggested that good taste remained the purview of a well-to-do minority. Over time, however, those arguments can be lent additional credibility by the popularity and subsequent authority of the author.84 So long as publication remains an important standard in the authentication of aesthetic values, this recursive relationship will remain: more notoriety, more books, more authority and influence, and therefore more notoriety. The longevity of the arguments themselves reinforces their apparent validity, and makes those arguments available for later generations, foundational to future scholarship and ideas (Acton’s vertical effect). These books become the means to connect personal preference to a sensus communis, through discourse now largely available to the public. As described in these early books on design, taste moves from its basis in absolute principles, rendered in academic argument, to heterogeneous sources for its validation. Further, taste comes to be defined as something possible to change—a paradox, in that the books in which these definitions are recorded could be themselves understood as a bid for permanence. These definitions of taste acknowledge and negotiate the aesthetics of a new identity required by the socially mobile but not quite recognizing those not prosperous enough to participate.

Notes 1 Penny Sparke, The Modern Interior (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 17. 2 Penny Sparke, “Taste and the Interior Designer,” in After Taste: Expanded Practice in Interior Design, eds. Kent Kleinman, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, and Lois Weinthal, 1st ed. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012), 15–16. Design writer Drew Plunkett points out that Victorian-era British aristocrats affected contempt for the nouveau riche need of purchasing furniture, as opposed to simply inheriting it (in Taste: A Cultural History of the Home Interior [London: RIBA Publishing, 2020], 30). 3 Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1–2. 4 Johns, 622–23. 5 Bill Kovarik, Revolutions in Communication: Media History from Gutenberg to the Digital Age, 2nd ed. (New York; London; Oxford, England; New Delhi; Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 103–5. 6 Lee Soltow, The Rise of Literacy and the Common School in the United States: A Socioeconomic Analysis to 1870 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 54. 7 Asa Briggs, Peter Burke, and Espen Ytreberg, A Social History of the Media (­Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2020), 44.

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8 Briggs, Burke, and Ytreberg, A Social History, 152. 9 Denise Gigante, Taste: A Literary History (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2005), 23. 10 Grace Lees-Maffei, Design at Home: Domestic Advice Books in Britain and the USA since 1945 (New York: Routledge, 2014), 11. 11 Ruskin is said to have influenced the work and thinking of Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius, as well as having inspired Postmodernism’s concern with historical consciousness; he is also used by the historian and theorist Reyner Banham as emblematic of anti-modernism: Rebecca Daniels, Brandwood, Geoffrey K., Victorian Society, Ruskin & Architecture (Reading: Spire Books, 2003, 19). 12 Ruskin was not the first to do so. In Moral Taste: Aesthetics, Subjectivity and Social Power in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, author Marjorie Garson traces the intertwining of taste, beauty, and morality to Plato. Garson notes that the Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671–1713) translated the Platonic ideals of truth and beauty into a seventeenth-century aesthetic philosophy (in Moral Taste: Aesthetics, Subjectivity and Social Power in the Nineteenth-Century Novel [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007], 5–7.) 13 Shaftesbury also evokes a Protestant God as the source of superior discernment but includes the explicit caveat that this ability was also dependent on breeding (in Moral Taste, 5–7). 14 John Ruskin, Modern Painters, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (New York: John W. Lovell Company, 1886), 92–93. 15 John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (Place of publication: Project Gutenberg, 2011), 39. 16 Ruskin, 43. It is notable that ornament is again evoked to connote inferior design decisions. In The Stones of Venice (1851–53), however, Ruskin makes his position with more nuance. In a chapter entitled “The Nature of Gothic,” he identifies Gothic architectural ornament as supporting the humanity of those working on its construction. Its reference to natural forms allowed interpretation and imperfection in its execution, freeing its fabricators from the tyranny of precision required in Classical architecture. Precision indicated the subjugation of the worker and could therefore not ethically be considered a source of pleasure (in John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, Volume II: The Sea-Stories (London: George Routledge & Sons Limited, 1907), 174–76). 17 The statements above are written with the architecture itself as the erstwhile ­actor—it is the nobility or base character of the architecture itself that appears to be at stake. 18 Ruskin, The Seven Lamps, 60. 19 Ruskin, 45. 20 In Modern Painters: Volume III, Ruskin explicitly evokes this sentiment: “Taste, Gout, Gusto—in all languages indicates the baseness of it, for it implies that art gives only a kind of pleasure analogous to that derived from eating by the palate” (quoted in George P. Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971], 54). 21 Ruskin, 111. 22 Ruskin, 108. 23 Cornelius J. Baljon, “Interpreting Ruskin: The Argument of The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55, no. 4 (Fall 1997): 404. 24 Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories, 96. 25 “Traffic,” the chapter cited, is subtitled “Lecture II, delivered in the Town Hall, Bradford.” Both the format and the likely audience may help account for the conversational tone and simpler language of this text.

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26 John Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive (New York: The Mershon Company, 1900), 52. 27 Ruskin, 54. 28 As the historian William Collingwood explains, it is unlikely that Ruskin read Kant directly, but he was likely to have been introduced to the German philosopher’s ideas via secondary texts. Collingwood goes on to suggest that Kantian logics are evident in other works by Ruskin, notably Modern Painters I (W. G. Collingwood, The Art Teaching of John Ruskin [New York: Putnam, 1891], 15). 29 Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive, 54–55. 30 Online Etymology Dictionary, “precedent (n.),” accessed 06.02.2021, https:// www.etymonline.com/search?q=precedent&ref=searchbar_searchhint. 31 A declaration that nature is a source of beauty is well supported by a series of sketches that momentarily reduce works of architecture to their details: carved ornaments inspired by plant life. 32 Asa Briggs and Peter Burke with Espen Ytreberg. A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to Facebook, 4th ed. (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2020): 65. 33 Sparke, The Modern Interior, 33. 34 Grace Lees-Maffei, “From Service to Self-Service: Advice Literature as Design Discourse, 1920–1970,” Journal of Design History 14, no. 3 (2001): 189–90. 35 Sparke, The Modern Interior, 13–15. 36 Sparke, 25. 37 Sparke, 35. 38 Grace Lees-Maffei, “Introduction | Studying Advice: Historiography, Methodology, Commentary, Bibliography,” Journal of Design History 16, no. 1 (2003): 1. 39 Lees-Maffei documents the history of etiquette literature to antiquity. She proposes that its relationship with design advice literature intensified in part due to other social impacts emerging from the Industrial Revolution: namely that industrialization required greater social contact between social groups—workers, merchants, and the wealthy owners of business concerns sought guidance for managing unfamiliar social settings (in Design at Home: Domestic Advice Books in Britain and the USA since 1945 [New York: Routledge, 2014], 13–14). 40 Lees-Maffei, Design at Home, 12. 41 Eastlake evinces little irony in that his vocation as a designer (having others fabricate designs to one’s specifications) itself could be understood as a product of the Industrial Revolution. 42 Sparke, The Modern Interior, 35. 43 Eastlake, Charles L. Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and Other Details (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1869), vi. 4 4 Eastlake, 13. 45 Eastlake, 204. 46 Eastlake, 1. 47 Eastlake, ix and 19. 48 Eastlake, 16. In the United Kingdom, the relationship between taste and nation was institutionalized as the Design Reform movement. Beginning in the 1830s, Parliamentary committees investigated design in British goods, interested in maintaining Britain’s industrial supremacy and managing British habits of consumption. Design reform was meant to legislate economic matters and the morality understood to be integral to one’s taste (in Julia Bninski, “The Many Functions of Taste: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Desire in Nineteenth-Century England” [Loyola University, 2013]). 49 Eastlake, 8. 50 Eastlake, 35. 51 Eastlake acknowledges the existence of a moral taste (p141) but as distinct from its aesthetic sense; the use of wood veneers, for example, might be defended as a necessary economy rather than as mimicking the visual effect of solid wood construction

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(p. 51). Eastlake does suggest that there might be moral grounds for a shopkeeper to advise their clientele on what is suitable or “genteel” (p. 9). 52 Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste, 16–17. 53 Penny Sparke, As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2010), 50–52. 54 Catharine Esther Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science; Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian Homes (New York; Boston: J.B. Ford and Company; H.A. Brown & Co., 1869), 13, https://archive.org/details/ americanwomansho0000unse. 55 Beecher and Stowe, 287–302. 56 Beecher and Stowe, 226. Of note is the evocation of ornament as evidence of a moral weakness, in contrast to its condemnation by the British Parliamentary Select Committee on Art and Manufactures as simply evidence of inferior design. 57 Beecher and Stowe, 223. 58 Beecher and Stowe, 223. 59 Beecher and Stowe, 232. 60 Beecher and Stowe, 84. 61 A young lady of wealth and position, with great musical culture and taste, found among the poor two young girls with fine voices and great musical talent. Gaining her parents’ consent, the young lady took one of them home, trained her in music, and saw that her school education was secured, so that when expensive masters and instruments were needed the girl herself earned the money required, as a governess in a family of wealthy friends. Then she aided the sister; and, as the result, one of them is married happily to a man of great wealth, and the other is receiving a large income as a popular musical artist (Beecher and Stowe, 254.) 62 Marjorie Garson, Moral Taste: Aesthetics, Subjectivity and Social Power in the ­Nineteenth-Century Novel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 5. 63 Garson, 7. 64 Penny Sparke implies the acknowledgment of a more professional readership, in its ambition to unify interiors and architecture (Sparke, The Modern Interior, 89). 65 A professional readership is also suggested through her emphasis on the need for a synthetic and unified design uniting interior and exterior and her use of the term interior architecture (in Alice H. Kinman, “The Making of a Professional: Edith Wharton’s The Decoration of Houses,” South Atlantic Review 65, no. 1 [2000]: 98). 66 Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, The Decoration of Houses (New York: Scribners, 1907), xix. 67 Wharton takes Eastlake to task for omitting doors, windows, and fireplaces from mention in Hints on Household Taste—all elements outside the ability of a layperson to modify without the aid of professional designer or fabricator (Warton and Codman, 128). 68 Wharton and Codman, xxii. 69 Sparke points out that the book was contemporary to Chicago’s Columbian exposition of 1893 and that the design values espoused were consistent with the ­then-current Colonial Revival design style, which Sparke characterizes as a particularly nationalistic form of neoclassicism (in Penny Sparke, “The ‘Ideal’ and the ‘Real’ Interior in Elsie de Wolfe’s The House in Good Taste of 1913,” Journal of Design History 16, no. 1 [2003]: 65). 70 In a later text—French Ways and Their Meaning (1919)—Wharton is more specific: “Taste…the recognition of a standard” (Edith Wharton, French Ways and Their Meaning [New York; London: D. Appleton and Company, 1919], 19). In the same text, however, Wharton avoids describing taste as a great undefinable domain (16). 71 Wharton and Codman, The Decoration of Houses, 31. 72 Wharton and Codman, 28. 73 Wharton and Codman, 35.

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74 Wharton is explicit in the principles governing her choices: “America has not lived long at her ease with beauty, like the old European races whose art reaches back through an unbroken inheritance of thousands of years of luxury and culture.” (Wharton, French Ways and Their Meaning, 29). 75 Sparke, “The ‘Ideal’ and the ‘Real’,” 65. In the same article, Sparke identifies Ruby Ross Wood, a journalist and advice book author, as the ghostwriter responsible for The House in Good Taste. 76 Elsie De Wolfe, The House in Good Taste (New York: The Century Co., 1913), 6. 77 De Wolfe, 5. 78 De Wolfe, 74. 79 Sparke, The Modern Interior, 20–25. 80 De Wolfe, The House in Good Taste, 21. 81 De Wolfe, 257. 82 In “The ‘Ideal’ and the ‘Real,’” Sparke cites the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s concept of model and series. A “model” is a high-status “original” article available only to the upper economic layers of society; “series” refers to the copies of the prototype model. 83 Wharton, French Ways, 16. 84 Grace Lees-Maffei notes this is not a universal phenomenon, citing domestic advice books written anonymously by members of the upper-class using pen names such as “A Lady” to simultaneously veil their taking on paid work and signifying a source of social authority (Lees-Maffei, Design at Home, 4).

Bibliography Baljon, Cornelius J. “Interpreting Ruskin: The Argument of The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55, no. 4 (Fall 1997): 401–14. Beecher, Catharine Esther, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The American Woman’s Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science; Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian Homes. New York; Boston: J.B. Ford and Company; H.A. Brown & Co., 1869. Blewitt, John. William Morris and John Ruskin: A New Road on Which the World Should Travel. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2019. Bninski, Julia. “The Many Functions of Taste: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Desire in ­Nineteenth-Century England.” Phd dissertation, Loyola University, 2013. Briggs, Asa, Peter Burke, and Espen Ytreberg. A Social History of the Media. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020. Collingwood, W. G. (William Gershom). The Art Teaching of John Ruskin. New York: Putnam, 1891. Daniels, Rebecca, Geoffrey K. Brandwood, and the Victorian Society. Ruskin & Architecture. Reading: Spire Books: in association with the Victorian Society, 2003. De Wolfe, Elsie. The House in Good Taste. New York: The Century Co., 1913. Eastlake, Charles L. (Charles Locke). Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and Other Details. London: Longmans, Green, 1869. Garson, Marjorie. Moral Taste: Aesthetics, Subjectivity and Social Power in the Nineteenth-­ Century Novel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Gigante, Denise. Taste: A Literary History. New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2005.

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Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Kinman, Alice H. “The Making of a Professional: Edith Wharton’s ‘The Decoration of Houses.’” South Atlantic Review 65, no. 1 (2000): 98–122. Kovarik, Bill. Revolutions in Communication: Media History from Gutenberg to the Digital Age. 2nd ed. New York; London; Oxford; New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Landow, George P. The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971. Lees-Maffei, Grace. Design at Home: Domestic Advice Books in Britain and the USA since 1945. New York, NY: Routledge, 2014. ———. “From Service to Self-Service: Advice Literature as Design Discourse, 1920– 1970.” Journal of Design History 14, no. 3 (2001): 187–206. ———. “Introduction | Studying Advice: Historiography, Methodology, Commentary, Bibliography.” Journal of Design History 16, no. 1 (2003): 1–14. Plunkett, Drew. Taste: A Cultural History of the Home Interior 1800 to the Present Day. London: RIBA Publishing, 2020. Ruskin, John. Modern Painters, Volume I. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. 5 vols. New York: John W. Lovell Company, 1886. ———. The Crown of Wild Olive & The Cestus of Aglaia. New York; London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.; E.P. Dutton & Co., 1911. ———. The Seven Lamps of Architecture. New York; London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.; E.P. Dutton & Co., 1908. ———. The Stones of Venice, Volume II: The Sea-Stories. London: George Routledge; Sons Limited, 1907. Soltow, Lee. The Rise of Literacy and the Common School in The United States: A Socioeconomic Analysis to 1870. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Sparke, Penny. As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2010. ———. “Taste and the Interior Designer.” In After Taste: Expanded Practice in Interior Design, edited by Kent Kleinman, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, and Lois Weinthal, 1st ed., 14–27. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012. ———. “The ‘Ideal’ and the ‘Real’ Interior in Elsie de Wolfe’s ‘The House in Good Taste’ of 1913.” Journal of Design History 16, no. 1 (2003): 63–76. ———. The Modern Interior. Illustrated edition. London: Reaktion Books, 2008. Wharton, Edith. French Ways and Their Meaning. New York; London: D. Appleton and Company, 1919. Wharton, Edith, and Ogden Codman. The Decoration of Houses. New York: Scribners, 1907.

TASTE AND PHOTOGRAPHY

Introduction Taste, as described by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, was a sensibility to be considered discreetly. Taste was the discernment of beauty, a value to be assessed free from concerns regarding use or everyday existence. Anything not intrinsic to the experience of the beautiful artifact itself was a distraction. This experience is often referred to as a pure gaze, which requires a distance from plebeian care (and most conditions concerning the material world). The pure gaze is a concept most

FIGURE 2.1 Photograph:

Passage Choiseul, Paris, France, c. 1910. Credit line: ­Roger-Viollet / The Image Works

DOI: 10.4324/9781003164388-3

Taste and photography  47

often applied to the fine arts or natural phenomena. However, changes to that material world throughout the nineteenth century required a new gaze, and a new concept of taste to be applied beyond the disinterested contemplation of aesthetic phenomena, in environments awash in new cultural forms, products, and design. As applied to a designed artifact, a taste judgment remains the recognition of excellence or beauty; what must change are the strategies for recognizing that excellence and the evidence one might rely on for guidance. These changes inspired the polemics of nineteenth-century authors, such as John Ruskin. As part of his critique of the effects of industrialization, Ruskin’s theories regarding taste embrace values exterior to an aesthetic experience, such as purpose and use. Ruskin, however, goes further still: proposing close relations between taste and Christian faith or morality. The beautiful would have its foundation in the good.1 Continuing to challenge the autonomy of taste, Ruskin identifies its social dimension, suggesting it to indicate character and identity. This aspect of taste becomes amplified in advice books on interior design. Authors like Charles Eastlake and Elsie de Wolfe insinuate the social pitfalls awaiting the reader should they diverge from their proffered advice and aesthetic precedents. From The Seven Lamps of Architecture to The House in Good Taste, one sees the evolution of technologies for the reproduction of illustrations, from drawings reproduced via etched plates to the use of photographs. Each form produces and reproduces aspects of the material world; there is, however, a way that photographs serve to help us forget the choices inherent to their making. Photography plays a unique role in our environments, how aesthetic phenomena are understood, and how taste is defined moving into the twentieth century.

The development of photography The desire to record or to create a likeness of a person or place existed long before photography. The transformation of subject into object has existed for millennia, across forms of media and method. One might assume that no matter the means, the subject matter would represent something its maker judged as worth commemorating.2 Perceptions of photography obscure this condition. According to the French theorist and author Roland Barthes, the taking of a photograph is commonly understood as an automatic process, resulting in a faithful record of its subject matter. The identity of a photo’s subject matter is problematized in Barthes’s analysis, because the photo itself is not usually distinguished from its content.3 These misunderstandings, and the eventual ubiquity of photographic images, contribute to photography’s cultural influence. Photography began its development with the camera obscura in the tenth century C.E. A camera obscura requires only a dark space with a single small aperture to let in light; this produces an image of the environment outside, projected upside down within the interior.4 A camera obscura could create only temporary images,

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lasting only as long as the space and aperture remained in place, changing as the exterior environment changed. It would require a series of technical developments for images to be fixed to media in more or less permanent forms: first on metal plates (as daguerreotypes) and later on paper, both early nineteenth-century developments.5 Throughout the nineteenth century, photographs were incorporated into existing forms of publishing to satisfy growing public demand. By the 1840s, the first photo-illustrated newspaper was circulating, and soon after, the first books were published using photographic illustrations.6 Historian Robert Hirsh suggested a highly reciprocal relationship between these new forms of media and their readership: … a burgeoning middle class, concerned with appearances that would convey its ideas of higher status, was eager to consume new images of reality. New visual thinking, based on ideas from machines, altered cultural constructs and perception while retraining public expectations of how the world was represented.7 Those expectations supported the continuing developments of the material means to produce those images; by the end of the century, printing based on

The Salon of Baron Gros, Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gros, c.1850-57.  Credit line: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

FIGURE 2.2 Daguerreotype:

Rufus Choate, Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes, c.1850 | Credit Line: Gift of I. N. Phelps Stokes, Edward S. Hawes, Alice Mary Hawes, and Marion Augusta Hawes, 1937

FIGURE 2.3 Daguerreotype:

Choate was an American lawyer and Congressman, depicted here in a setting with neoclassical elements in the background, signifying the gravitas of his profession

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lithography made photographic images less costly, increasing their presence. The pace at which images would saturate the visual landscape could pick up speed, responding to and further inspiring demand. The technological advancement to images on paper not only made photographs permanent: it made them abundantly reproducible. This reproducibility is inherent to the subsequent cultural impacts of photography. Barthes describes one effect in particular: “What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once.”8 With this observation, he identifies a homologous condition with the material world the photograph would record. By the end of the nineteenth century, the evolving technologies of photography fulfilled a post-Industrial Revolution ideal in their ability to make multiple and uniform copies. These qualities contribute, paradoxically, to a naturalization of the image, to the sense that photography produces a true and direct visual likeness of its subject matter, without the intervention of an artist or technician.9 This understanding supports an image of photography that was largely seen as objective, obfuscating the choices of the photographer involved in its creation. The creation of photos, like the products of an assembly line, appears to be somehow automatic, with no choice or taste involved.

Walter Benjamin: the effects of reproducibility The German critical theorist Walter Benjamin notes a disturbance to the perception of material things engendered by photography. While his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935) is primarily concerned with the ability to copy or reproduce a work of art, the principles he raises can be applied to everyday or useful objects as well. Benjamin reminds readers that while the ability to make things and images in series has existed for millennia, it was the speed of reproductive processes evident by the nineteenth century that Benjamin identified as novel. With photography, “the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech.”10 According to Benjamin, this rapid reproducibility irrevocably altered how cultural and aesthetic value was to be assessed and contributed to an epistemic change in perception: To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.11 For Benjamin, aura was the unique physical and temporal impact of the experience of a work of art.12 Mechanical reproduction flattened differences: art lost its status as a transcendent object as it appeared as multiples like other ­m ass-produced items.13

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Mass production of all kinds—of things, of images—undermines the perception of their importance, in part through disturbing one’s sense of their permanence.14 An identical copy could replace a lost or damaged image (or object) without notice. Moreover, manufactured goods were often designed to last for a limited time, a foundational concept of a consumer economy.15 As simply one instance in a series, neither manufactured objects nor reproduced images could claim the unique existence—and concomitant value—afforded to something produced to be one of a kind. Benjamin attributed significant perceptual shifts as inherent to the media of mechanical reproduction, film and photography among them; each promoted a distracted mode of apprehension, as opposed to the engaged concentration demanded for art.16 As defined by Kant, a judgment of taste requires a gaze free from concerns other than aesthetic contemplation. Benjamin suggested that these new forms of media engendered new, less reverential modes of aesthetic perception.17 According to Benjamin, the task facing the human apparatus of perception was to maintain a consciousness of the limits of merely optical considerations, “mastered gradually by habit.”18 This would be a challenge, as photographs became ubiquitous. It is easier to take in something familiar in one’s visual landscape in a distracted or incidental fashion, rather than to give it one’s rapt attention.19 Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography” (1931) was one of the earliest scholarly analyses of the medium.20 Benjamin identified the differences in how a human eye sees and what a camera makes available to be seen, explaining that “a space informed by human consciousness gives way to one informed by the unconscious.”21 He called this a kind of magic, photography producing images unavailable to embodied sight and revealing what was previously invisible.22 As this magic became commonplace, however, it served the “overcoming of whatever is unique in every situation by means of its reproduction.”23 In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin notes a growing “sense of the universal equality of things.”24 This could be understood as an inherent aspect of any mediation; media abstracts, representing limited aspects of its content. A photograph, for example, preserves an appearance of a space or thing, recording what is present in that moment. This process removes other sensory phenomena and other aspects that contribute to that experience as unique. In his theorizing of the impacts of images made of works of art, Benjamin borrows from the terminology of the German philosopher and economist Karl Marx, referring to an object’s use, cult, and exhibition values. Each term isolates an aspect of a space or thing, extracting characteristics for analysis or comparison. The most common of these categories might be exchange value or (roughly) cost.25 Marx charged capitalism with reducing any phenomenon to its exchange value, to what could be identified in strictly quantitative terms.26 This describes commodification, a process by which a thing becomes interchangeable with any other thing, when reduced to its price.

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(silver print): Eugène Atget, Boulevard de Strasbourg, Corsets, Paris, 1912 | Printed 1930s by Berenice Abbott | credit line: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY

FIGURE 2.4 Photograph

What Marx attributes to capitalism, Benjamin recognizes in the mechanical reproduction of images: that tendency toward abstraction. Photography inherently privileges the exhibition value of its subjects, in that it preserves visual appearances. If early aesthetic philosophy emphasized the sensible qualities of beauty, photography reduces those qualities to that which can be seen. A greater “sense of the universal equality of things” results if only the visual aspect of things is considered.27 Benjamin posits that photography further contributes to this interchangeability by producing this kind of equivalence in its subject matter, opening up

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the possibility of a trade in cultural meanings and aesthetic values. Benjamin rarely used the term taste explicitly in his writing, but throughout his oeuvre, he investigates and analyzes how media like film and photography affect one’s habits of perception and the concomitant impacts on the perceived value of its subject matter.

Photography and taste Photography’s relationship to value was particularly evident in its use by the growing middle class in the United States. Although early photography was associated with automated technical processes, its embrace by these consumers contributed to applications previously in the domain of art. Hirsch cites the use of the photograph for portraiture as an example: In the eighteenth century, a rising commercial class wanted to be commemorated in the same pictorial style as royalty and the wealthy. Inventors had commercial incentives to harness the camera for portrait making, as less training would decrease the cost of making a picture.28 Portraiture has maintained a social function for almost as long as the making of images has been in existence. In “Little History of Photography,” Benjamin identifies photography overtaking painting as a preferred medium for portraits, an attempt by the emergent bourgeoisie to reclaim “aura” for products of mechanical reproduction. These photographs inherited the essential function of a painted portrait as a permanent recognition of importance or status. Not surprisingly, these images seldom represented a radically novel exploration of the medium, often reproducing the classic poses of painted portraits. The reasons for this may be technical, as well: early photographs required long exposures, requiring the subjects to be still and motionless. These portraits represent an intersection between the technological development of photography and the social development of the bourgeoisie.29 Portraiture becomes more standardized and modern, and the photographic likeness more recognizable as a potential signifier of social status. In his exploration of the ontology of the photographic image, Roland Barthes suggests that being photographed engendered a kind of self-consciousness, of oneself shifting from subject to object. The difference in time, between the pose and the final fixed image, supported an awareness that others would see that image and concern for what those others’ impressions might be. He says: “For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from Identity.”30 This awareness of social relations is reflected in the use of the term image to describe one’s reputation, a use which emerged at

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the end of the nineteenth century.31 The sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen constructs a definition of taste for this cultural milieu, one in which appearance supersedes actual preference.

Thorstein Veblen: new definitions of taste Veblen had studied philosophy at Yale, writing a thesis on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Veblen’s work is often characterized by his critiques of industrialization and its associated impacts. It is sometimes classified as economic anthropology, as he found the simplicity and rationality of classical economic theory to be insufficient to explain actual economic behavior. 32 The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) is his best-known text and the source of his most influential concepts, incorporating commentary on economics, political form, social relations, and aesthetics. 33 There, Veblen establishes the term “conspicuous consumption,” used broadly to describe the public use of things, spaces, and even time in a manner not tied to an identifiable need. He suggests that objects, spaces, or pursuits are not necessarily valued for their inherent or embodied characteristics (including beauty) but as evidence of their consumer’s wealth to their community. Veblen characterizes the choices made by the titular leisure class as driven by the effects of their appearance. The totality of the social value of those choices is their exhibition value. Veblen theorized the development of aesthetic taste as intertwined with all forms of judgment, originating in an impulse to thematically unify perception itself.34 The practice of comparison, however, contextualized all perception in a system dominated by a non-productive ruling class.

Taste and class Taste is differentiated by social class for Veblen, governed by class-specific codes of reputability; these in turn are influenced by economic conditions.35 Veblen’s “leisure class” referred to the most successful strata of the middle class. According to Veblen, this group was an indirect product of industrialization. “In its current incarnation,” Veblen wrote, “the men of a leisure class pursue only non-industrial forms of employment.”36 According to Veblen, all behaviors and dispositions of the contemporary leisure class involved public symbolic displays of power. The public nature of their pursuits meant that other members of one’s community could evaluate success in those arenas. Veblen suggested that a “taste for efficiency” develops through these public displays, a comparison of apparent effort.37 Less strenuous work and more leisure time become evidence of one’s success. Measures of that success, for Veblen, were fundamentally relative, constructed in comparison with one’s peers “with a view to rating and

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grading them in respect of relative worth or value—in an aesthetic or moral sense.”38 A distaste for physical labor, signifying wealth, could also express itself as a demonstration of disposable time in public leisure pursuits. One’s success could also be publicly displayed through a demonstrated preference for objects and environments that were at once not tied to need and recognized by one’s community. These characteristics form a theme throughout The Theory of the Leisure Class: So far as a person, in forming a judgment of taste, takes thought and reflects that the object of beauty under consideration is wasteful and reputable, and may therefore be accounted beautiful; so far the judgment is not a bona fide judgment of taste and does not come up for consideration in this connection.39 Taste as an assessment of beauty (“the object of beauty under consideration”) is consistent with Enlightenment definitions. That the object should be “wasteful and reputable” is Veblen’s subtle evocation of Kant’s argument that utility is a form of interest in an object, rendering it unfit for consideration as beautiful.40 That said, Veblen identifies the qualities of wastefulness and reputability, in and of themselves, as having social value. If an object is wasteful, it is evidence of its possessor’s ability to waste, suggesting the possessor’s apparent wealth and potential to elevate their social reputation so long as that object is reputable or valued by others. It is in the object’s recognized uselessness that its ostensible use emerges: as a status symbol. Veblen’s definition of taste decouples intuitive aesthetic pleasure from these choices; pleasure in sensible qualities is subsumed in the pleasure derived from “marks of expensiveness.”41 Expensiveness is a function of exchange value, making anything comparable in terms of cost. Unlike Kant, Veblen was able to consider taste regarding useful everyday objects: The requirements of pecuniary decency have, to a very appreciable extent, influenced the sense of beauty and of utility in articles of use or beauty. Articles are to an extent preferred for use on account of their being conspicuously wasteful; they are felt to be serviceable somewhat in proportion as they are wasteful and ill adapted to their ostensible use.42 In acknowledging the need for the object to be conspicuously wasteful, Veblen ties an aesthetic judgment to its social context; this waste requires witnesses, some community standard or recognition to be meaningful.43 In the case of the leisure class, that standard consisted of recognizable forms of waste, “conforming to established usage, to avoid unfavorable notice and comment.”44 Waste

Taste and photography  55

need not be permanent or even material, as implied by the title—leisure time spent was also time consumed. Even others’ time could be imbricated into this system, as evidenced by Veblen’s description of servants’ labor producing vicarious leisure for their employers.45

Unique value and mass production Walter Benjamin charged mechanical reproduction with a loss of aura, of the essential and unique value of its subject matter or content. In contrast, Veblen considered uniqueness to be at odds with socially recognized value. The expense of one’s possessions and practices should be discernible to one’s peers; those objects or praxis should be familiar, not completely novel or unique. For that reason, according to Veblen: “The canon of beauty requires expression of the generic.”46 With these metrics, the social value of a possession (the benefit to one’s social identity or standing) is roughly equivalent to its exchange value (its cost) but only if this exchange value is widely known. These principles could apply to the design and fabrication of objects and their consumption, as can be discerned from Veblen’s critiques of both traditional forms of craft and mass production. The Theory of the Leisure Class was published as the Arts and Crafts movement gained influence in the United States. Its philosophy is primarily credited to the British design critic and artist John Ruskin, in the rejection of mechanized production and the division of labor; its best-known design practitioner was William Morris, who drew inspiration from natural form and promoted pre-industrial modes of fabrication.47 Given the efficiency and lower costs associated with factory production, these handmade items could demonstrate socially advantageous waste, but Veblen’s assessment of the results was of “painstaking crudeness and elaborate ineptitude.”48 Veblen takes both Ruskin and Morris to task, accusing them of the “exaltation of the defective” in their rejection of industrially produced goods.49 While a machine-made product would exhibit generic qualities in their standardization, these too fall short: “Machine-made goods of daily use are often admired and preferred precisely on account of their excessive perfection by the vulgar and the underbred who have not given due thought to the punctilios of elegant consumption.”50 Veblen believed that, for an object or pursuit to create social value, it required a perceptual dissection of experience. To participate in this system of symbolic exchange, an object’s symbolic value (that of wastefulness or excess) must override all other functional or aesthetic values to function as a kind of currency. This exchange represents the very image of commodification. When Ruskin tied assessments of beauty to reflections of the divine, the examples given maintained a resemblance to their inspirations—representations of natural form, however abstracted, bear a visible resemblance to precedents designed by a supreme being, nature itself. Veblen did not describe specific physical

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Lyonel  Feininger, Hairdresser’s mannequin, Dessau,  1932. Credit line: Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum

FIGURE 2.5 Photograph:

attributes or characteristics of beauty. As a characteristic, beauty is fundamentally relative and associative, not experienced through direct apprehension. The sensible qualities of the artifact become secondary in importance and arbitrary to the taste assessment. That assessment itself could be understood to be abstracted, reduced to the perception of admiration of one’s peers.

“Habits of thought” The connection which is here insisted on between the reputability and the apprehended beauty of objects lies through the effect which the fact of reputability has upon the valuer’s habits of thought.51 For Veblen, taste develops much like other sensibilities: through habit. Habits are automatic responses, conditioned by memory and repetitive experience or exposure. Much of Veblen’s work on economics investigated habit as a component of human nature, as part of his hypothesis that economics could not be understood through rationality alone.52 It is central to his conception of the modern subject as a process, constantly evolving: “a coherent structure of propensities and habits which seeks realization and expression in an unfolding activity.”53 Habits were a source of continuity for an individual, though Veblen remained vague about whether this was understood simply as a repeated form

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of conduct or a propensity to that conduct.54 In other words, conspicuous consumption broadly might be informed by its legibility to others, but the specific act of making an aesthetic choice is implied as being not entirely conscious. This recalls Benjamin’s admonition, that the viewing of photographs engendered perceptual habits of inattention and distraction: a conditioned form of looking, not necessarily attentive to the subtleties of what one sees or what might be missing.55 Veblen’s interpretation of taste can be seen as an abstraction by which appearances become social currency, excluding the holistic apprehension of phenomena from their evaluation. It is the possession and display of things that Veblen foregrounds, a condition analogous to photography’s reduction of the physical world to an image. Moreover, that photography is experienced as an automatic (and largely unmediated) recording of reality recalls Veblen’s characterization of taste decisions as automatic, made through perceptual habit. There is some ambiguity over whether Veblen suggests that one’s habits constitute or even involve one’s actual aesthetic preferences. To make “the beautiful” equivalent to “the reputable” makes an emphatic rhetorical point but does not clarify whether an aesthetic response is being made.56 Veblen begs the question: is there a meaningful difference between what one feels and what one chooses? Taste, for Veblen, becomes a system of display indicating the possession of economic capital, a performance for one’s social group. In this system, taste decisions are rendered meaningless without the presence of that audience, their underlying subjective motivations outside the scope of his concept’s domain. Visibility dominates systems determining value, privileging image over other aspects of identity.

The end of morality? Veblen’s characterization of taste suggests intuitive access to one’s values or principles, that they form a comprehensive assessment stratagem informing decisions well beyond the purely aesthetic.57 This interpretation defies earlier forms of “taste as morality,” espoused by John Ruskin and Immanuel Kant, going so far as to suggest that it infiltrates even realms of spirituality. Veblen claims that an application of this kind of taste could be seen in the spaces and rituals of religious worship; he observes that in even modest neighborhoods, places of worship are “more conspicuously wasteful in architecture and decoration” than their contexts and that the rituals of service are examples of vicarious leisure.58 This aesthetic attention does not necessarily signify devotion as much as a rote application of the aesthetics of reputability. The principle of conspicuous waste guides the formation of habits of thought as to what is honest and reputable in life and in commodities. In so doing, this principle

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will traverse other norms of conduct which do not primarily have to do with the code of pecuniary honor, but which have, directly or incidentally, an economic significance of some magnitude. So the canon of honorific waste may, immediately or remotely, influence the sense of duty, the sense of beauty, the sense of utility, the sense of devotional or ritualistic fitness, and the scientific sense of truth.59 In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin reminds the reader of traditional ritual uses of art as part of his arguments around uniqueness and value; the sacred nature of ritual objects requires them to be singular, one of a kind. Veblen’s argument produces a kind of secularization, in evaluating houses of worship with the same metrics as a domestic interior or one’s form of dress. This contradicts Ruskin’s theory of the divine nature of beauty; the perception of beauty here is fully enculturated. The Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno calls Veblen to task for positioning aesthetics as essentially barbaric, tied so closely to leisure and waste as to be useless.60 Adorno suggests that in Veblen’s theoretical system, there are only social relationships between things discernible.61 While Veblen does not acknowledge any autonomy for aesthetics, his theories also do not entirely ignore the material qualities of things consumed. Cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken points out that Veblen’s schema involves an onlooker inferring the status of others from the likely cost of their things, not decoding a set of entirely abstract or symbolic meanings.62 Veblen’s taste, however, can be understood as a reflection of a market economy. A judgment of taste could not be assessed free from concerns extrinsic to the aesthetic experience, so long as taste was pressed into the service of symbolic domination. The pure gaze necessary to recognize beauty is impossible for those distracted by seeking status.

Case study: shop windows Veblen’s definitions relied on a historical analysis of behaviors and motivations in a specific social context, but the physical context of the leisure class bears mentioning as well. Veblen describes a fundamentally urban phenomenon, consumption being more conspicuous where opportunities for social contact are greater.63 From the 1880s until well into the twentieth century, environments for shopping were transforming the American city. The development of modern shopping typologies was inextricably tied to industrialization and its subsequent impacts on commerce. Key to its urban effects were its mechanisms of display.64 The display of goods has been a long-standing aspect of markets and trade. By the end of the nineteenth century, display could be understood instead as a characteristic of modernity, a type that privileged visual spectacle and shopping as an end unto itself.65 Photography contributed to that spectacle, a key component in making taste modern.66

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Eugène Atget, Avenue des Gobelins, 1925 | credit line: © The Museum of Modern Art | Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

FIGURE 2.6 Photograph:

The shop window may be the most analogous element of retail display to the photograph. Shop windows and other elements of display infrastructure negotiate between fleeting and transitory goods and the relative permanence of their architectural container, their specific impacts going largely unnoticed. They are a form of media, mechanisms of exchange: through sheets of plate glass, abstracting a landscape of physical things into commodities.67 Art historian Ingrid Pfeiffer analyzes how the photographs of Eugène Atget (see Figures 2.4 and 2.6) in particular represent this, reminding the reader that Benjamin analyzed

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Atget’s images of shop windows as reducing their contents to exhibition and exchange value.68 The shop window could be understood as presaged by arcades, early modern shopping spaces. Arcades were glass and iron roof structures used to span existing city streets to protect shoppers from the weather (see Figure 2.1). The earliest of these were constructed in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century, and found soon thereafter in other European and (by the 1820s) American metropolitan centers.69 Writing of his experiences with the Paris arcades, Walter Benjamin called them “a phantasmagoria which a person enters in order to be distracted.” In his unfinished text The Arcades Project, Benjamin described these spaces as offering a unifying structure to cities made chaotic in their rapid growth, environments that the French poet Charles Baudelaire immortalized as “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent.” 70 The arcades could be understood as a spatial system to manage the flux of consumer goods, made newly abundant by the same forces driving urbanism itself.71 They embodied for Benjamin what philosopher and academic Winfried Menninghaus called “para-architecture,” encompassing the objects, fittings, and actions contained therein, as well as the containing structure.72 Shop windows were (and are) public presentations of available goods, designed to generate desire. Design historian Anca Lasc describes their evolution, from displays of stacked goods emphasizing an accounting of available stock to elaborate simulations of “stage-like fictive worlds.” 73 These, lining the edges of an arcade or city street, would allow the passer-by to slip in and out of these immersive environments, entertainments designed to appeal to the middle and upper class.74 They represented shopping as a leisure activity, as opposed to a means to an end. Philosopher Mark C. Taylor compares this with Kant’s description of the aesthetic experience, embodying a purposiveness without purpose. Taylor’s description of shop windows positions its glazed front as the surface where art and capital meet.75 Pfeiffer describes them as creating “chimeras of luxury.” 76 That glazed surface allows consumer goods to supersede their commonplace significations. The value of goods is made unstable, reduced to elements of pure idealized visibility. With embodied material details (such as texture and weight) edited from its experience, the perception of any object becomes malleable. The same winter coat, suit, or umbrella can be positioned to evoke attending an exclusive party or attending to everyday concerns. These goods are made untouchable by the glass that protects them; by requiring protection, they become more precious. Goods displayed in this manner become open to the conditions of Veblen’s taste: limited to their appearance, abstracted to a form of currency. This conceptual unity of container and contained is key to the recursivity of the stabilizing and disorienting effects of the shop window and photographs alike. Akin to his description of the arcades, Benjamin described photography as both representing and creating the world.77 He charges photography with

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the problem of separating its subject from its original anchorage in space and time; the arcades (and shop windows) provide a new form of anchor, an ordering device managing the abundance of newly available consumer goods and creating an image of unity for the chaos of the modern urban condition.

Conclusion Veblen’s definition of taste encompasses a constellation of social and aesthetic considerations. This definition is free from attachment to long-standing tradition or from ascribing legitimacy by referencing concerns of church or state. This taste is adaptable to a new domain of choice made possible by a consumer economy. Taste itself is necessarily dynamic to account for the novel and unfamiliar. This adaptability foregrounds the instability of value associated with any aesthetic phenomena. Walter Benjamin warned about shifts in meaning made possible by photography, that the perception of the aesthetic value of any object or space changes when abstracted to its visual appearance alone. In Veblen’s description of taste, consumption and possession shift perceived values under the scrutiny of those in one’s social milieu. As broad as the impacts of urbanization and the development of the retail environment might have been, Veblen’s analysis isolated a narrow segment of the population for consideration. His method of assessment is applicable primarily to those with significant disposable income and time. Veblen concentrated on those with less economic advantage primarily in relation to the leisure class. In the forms of taste display that Veblen described, the leisure class is both actor and audience. Those outside of this rarefied milieu, however, would not remain unaffected. The mobility of images and new transparencies of the urban condition would expose a population well beyond the elite to the abundance of goods saturating American cities, but this is a definition of taste most applicable to the elite. Penny Sparke describes the modern city as representing new opportunities for women to participate in the public realm and the new economy. Shopping was an essential means to this end.78 However, the author Martha Banta (in her introduction to The Theory of the Leisure Class) points out that Veblen describes a system of exchange dominated by the concerns of men, and that the women of the leisure class were unlikely to enjoy the kind of independence to make choices unmitigated by those concerns.79 Grant McCracken contends that Veblen’s system relies on the ability to recognize social status based on what one owns and how one lives. This code, however, works better in conditions of social stability; under conditions of rapid change, the social value of a given possession or pastime might change too quickly for it to be widely recognizable and reliable as an indication of belonging.80 It may be that rates of change would render any object or practice recognizable as an arbitrary signifier. Moreover, Veblen’s taste can only be

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FIGURE 2.7 Photograph:

Pedestrians viewing Marshall Field & Company department store window display in the Loop community area of Chicago, Illinois, 1910 | credit line: DN-0008625, Chicago Daily News collection, Chicago History Museum

used to assess aesthetics under capitalism, where exchange and exhibition value dominate other forms. As novel as the conditions that Veblen describes, the effect can ultimately only be substantially conservative. If the assessment of any design element or characteristic depends on its recognizability, then already recognizable elements or characteristics would be the most desirable. This attributes less value to innovation or reform and less still to beauty. Excellence in design would eventually be in short supply, if it might be produced only once but reproduced to infinity. Veblen’s work continues to influence definitions of taste and value, lending his name to “Veblen goods,” a neologism in current use describing a peculiar phenomenon in the relationship between cost and perceived value. A Veblen good does not adhere to the traditional laws of price and demand. Below a certain price, the price/demand dynamics are consistent with conventional ­products—higher prices result in a lower demand. However, above a certain price, this relationship reverses, and demand rises along with price increases.81 This is taste as display, as reputation becomes image.

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Notes 1 Any form of good that is not intrinsic to the experience suggested the phenomenon as a means to an end and would fail Kant’s condition of distance from and disinterest in material cares. For more detail regarding Kant’s aesthetic philosophy, see the introduction of this book. 2 Robert Hirsch, Seizing the Light: A Social and Aesthetic History of Photography (­Abingdon, OX; New York: Routledge, 2017), 23. 3 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 5. 4 Hirsch, Seizing the Light, 23. 5 A critical technological development: William Henry Talbot was responsible for developing the process of using negatives from which multiple positive images could be developed and improving on the longevity of the images in the 1830s (in Asa Briggs, Peter Burke, and Espen Ytreberg, A Social History of the Media [Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2020], 240). 6 Hirsch, Seizing the Light, 33–37. 7 Hirsch, 37. 8 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 4. 9 André Bazin and Hugh Gray, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1960): 7–8, accessed 7.10.20, https://doi.org/10.2307/1210183. 10 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, eds. Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 219. 11 Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 223. 12 Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA; London, England: The Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 286. Also see “aura” in this book’s glossary. 13 Douglas Kellner, Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1989), 124. 14 A handmade bowl, once broken, is lost forever. A manufactured bowl, if broken, can be replaced by another indistinguishable from the first. A photograph could be replaced by another developed from the same negative. 15 Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, in The Bathroom, the Kitchen and the Aesthetics of Waste, remind the reader that to consume an object is to destroy it. The consumer economy is one whereby goods previously meant to be used (things like cars or clothing) were now meant to be used up, producing cycles of production and purchase. Lupton and Miller point out the planned obsolescence of products was tantamount to the design of waste. They further theorize this fascination with waste as transferable to the human body and foundational to the design of the modern kitchen and bathroom. (in Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, The Bathroom, the Kitchen and the Aesthetics of Waste: A Process of Elimination [Cambridge, MA; New York: MIT List Visual Arts Center; distributed by Princeton Architectural Press, 1992] 5-8). 16 Benjamin, 238–39. 17 Kellner, Critical Theory, 125. 18 Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 240. Benjamin is describing the apprehension of phenomena through “the guidance of tactile appropriation,” the development of habits of use and touch. He uses the experience of architecture to illuminate this point, as spaces are often experienced in a distracted state. 19 Sociologist and theorist Georg Simmel described the state of distraction as endemic to urban life (in Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903),” in The

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Blackwell City Reader, eds. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (Oxford; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002)). 20 Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, “Photography,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA; London, England: The Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 264. 21 Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 277. 22 This could be literal, as in the case of X-rays, developed in the 1890s (Bettyann Kevles, Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the Twentieth Century, Sloan Technology Series (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 19–21). Starting in the 1870s, Eadweard Muybridge produced motion studies that revealed the countless individual positions that constituted the gait of a horse or of a man with a cane, indiscernible to the naked eye, in Hirsch, Seizing the Light, 254–255. The novelist and theorist André Malraux suggests photography, in making images of ancient art mobile, helped rescue them from obscurity, a metaphoric invisibility (p. 20). Moreover, Malraux points out that photography changes the scale at which a work of art is apprehended, illuminating details that may have otherwise gone unnoticed (p. 23–24) (in André Malraux, Stuart Gilbert, and Francis Price, Museum Without Walls (New York: Doubleday, 1967)). 23 Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 283–287. Benjamin uses the work of the French photographer Eugène Atget to illustrate this point. 24 Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 223. 25 A rather simplified analysis of this form of abstracted value in Marx’s Das Kapital (1894) would be: describing something emphasizing exchange value made it possible to equivocate between anything, no matter how dissimilar, by representing its comparative value simply in terms of its equivalence in monetary value. 26 Kellner, Critical Theory, 45. 27 In Museum without Walls, André Malraux points out an advantage of photography’s abstraction—that sculptures and paintings are made more comparable when reduced to photographs (in Malraux et al., Museum Without Walls, 21). 28 Hirsch, Seizing the Light, 60. 29 Jennings, Doherty, and Levin, “Photography,” 266. 30 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 12. 31 OED Online, “image, n.,” accessed 06.20, https://www.oed.com.ezproxy.pratt. edu/view/Entry/91618?rskey=VJj48K&result=1. 32 John P. Diggens, The Bard of Savagery: Thorstein Veblen and Modern Social Theory (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), 110. 33 The original publication date was roughly contemporary to the first printing of Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman’s The Decoration of Houses, in 1897. For an analysis of taste vis-à-vis that text, please see the chapter “Taste and Books.” 34 Trygve Throntveit, “The Will to Behold: Thorstein Veblen’s Pragmatic Aesthetics,” Modern Intellectual History 5, no. 3 (2008): 521. 35 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 89. 36 Veblen, 9. The behaviors and dispositions of the contemporary leisure class bore resemblance to non-laboring groups of the past; their antecedents’ pursuits also involved public displays of power, though in less symbolic forms—expressing dominance through hunting and armed struggle. 37 Veblen, 16. 38 Veblen, 27. 39 Veblen, 99. 40 Veblen suggests that utility produces an inverse relation to perceived beauty. However, Kant’s argument concerns whether or not an object fulfills a use or need, its

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essential role outside aesthetic concerns. Veblen’s emphasis, on the other hand, is whether the object in question produces an appearance of utility. 41 Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 88. 42 Veblen, 85. Pecuniary refers to things having to do with money. 43 Throntveit, “The Will to Behold,” 521. 4 4 Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 112. 45 Veblen, 43. Veblen states that when servants’ labors became particularly onerous, akin to drudgery, it may be classified as “wasted effort,” amplifying its performance in regard to heightening their employer’s status. 46 Veblen, 102. 47 For an analysis of John Ruskin’s contribution to the evolution of taste, please refer to the chapter “Taste and Books.” 48 Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 108. 49 Veblen, 107. 50 Veblen, 106. Veblen uses the term breeding throughout this text, suggesting the possession of taste and other social graces to be a genetic trait. It is important to note that Veblen identifies this as a leisure-class assumption, not as something he himself espouses. 51 Veblen, 99. 52 Anna Klimina, “Veblenian Concept of Habit and Its Relevance to the Analysis of Captured Transition,” Journal of Economic Issues 42, no. 2 (2008): 546. 53 Thorstein Veblen, “Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 12, no. 4 (1898): 390, https://doi.org/10.2307/ 1882952. 54 Olivier Brette, Nathalie Lazaric, and Victor Vierira da Silva, “Habit, Decision Making, and Rationality: Comparing Veblen and Early Herbert Simon,” Journal of Economic Issues 51, no. 3 (2017): 575. 55 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 240–41. In the 1960s, the media theorist Marshall McLuhan characterized this effect: “Literate man is…numb and vague in the presence of film or photo.” (in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1st ed. [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994], 210). 56 In positioning taste as the ability to recognize what will be approved of by one’s social group (the reputable), Veblen displaces Kant’s object of a judgment of taste (the beautiful). 57 Veblen suggests that aesthetic tastes, for some, may be intertwined with concerns about use or suitability (he uses the term serviceability); the conflation of those concerns was in itself an article of individual taste or bias (Veblen, 107). 58 Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 81. 59 Veblen, 79. 60 Theodor W. Adorno, “Veblen’s Attack on Culture,” in Literary Taste, Culture and Mass Communication: The Cultural Debate Part II, eds. Peter Davison, Rolf Meyerson, and Edward Shils, vol. 14 (Cambridge, England; Teaneck, NJ: Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1983), 3. This condemnation forms a mirror image to Kant’s criterion of purposefulness without purpose required for an aesthetic response. 61 Adorno, 6. In this comparison, Adorno references Karl Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, whereby systems of production and consumption are described as the relationship between things and money. This concept is described in Marx’s Das Kapital. 62 Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 36–37. 63 Martha Banta, introduction to The Theory of the Leisure Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 61.

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64 Anca I. Lasc, Patricia Lara-Betancourt, and Margaret Maile Petty, “An Introduction,” in Architectures of Display: Department Stores and Modern Retail, eds. Anca I. Lasc, Patricia Lara-Betancourt, and Margaret Maile Petty (Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2018), 6. 65 Lasc, Lara-Betancourt, and Petty, 6. 66 Penny Sparke, in As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste, traces the particular impact of urban shopping on middle-class women as legitimizing their participation in the public sphere. 67 Karin Tehve, introduction to Interior Provocations: History, Theory, and Practice of Autonomous Interiors, eds. Anca I. Lasc et al. (New York: Routledge. 2020), 72. 68 Ingrid Pfeiffer, “Circumstantial Evidence: Shops and Display Windows in Photographs by Atget, Abbott and Evans,” in Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, eds. Christoph Grunenberg and Max Hollein (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 94. 69 Sze Tsung Leong, “Evolution of Shopping,” in Architectures of Display: Department Stores and Modern Retail, eds. Anca I. Lasc, Patricia Lara-Betancourt, and Margaret Maile Petty (Abingdon, OX; New York: Routledge, 2018), 82–83. 70 Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (London: Phaidon Press, 1986), 13. 71 The form The Arcades Project itself presents homologies to its subject—a series of fragments unified upon its posthumous publication between the covers of a book. In his essay “Paris, The Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” written concurrently with The Arcades Project, Benjamin positions photography as part of that flux: “For its part, photography greatly extends the sphere of commodity exchange, from mid-century onward, by flooding the market with countless images of figures, landscapes, and events which had previously been available either not at all or only as pictures for individual customers.” (p100) in Walter Benjamin, “Paris, The Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA; London, England: The Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008). 72 Winfried Menninghaus, “On the ‘Vital Significance’ of Kitsch: Walter Benjamin’s Politics of ‘Bad Taste,’” in Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity, eds. Andrew Benjamin and Charles Rice, 2009, 43–45. 73 Anca I. Lasc, “The Traveling Sidewalk: The Mobile Architecture of American Shop Windows at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Design History / Design History Society 31, no. 1 (2018): 25, https://doi.org/doi:10.1093/jdh/epw040. 74 Lasc, 36. 75 Mark C. Taylor, “Duty-Free Shopping,” in Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, eds. Christoph Grunenberg and Max Hollein (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 40–42. 76 Pfeiffer, “Circumstantial Evidence,” 94. 77 It could be shop windows that Benjamin describes when he describes photographs, here referring to the German photographer Karl Blossfeldt’s studies of plants: “… image worlds, which dwell in the smallest things-meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking dreams, but which… make the difference between technology and magic visible as a thoroughly historical variable.” 78 Penny Sparke, The Modern Interior (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 14–16. 79 Banta, Introduction, xviii. 80 McCracken, Culture and Consumption, 34. 81 John Greathouse, “Would You Pay $1,750 For This T-Shirt? The Stunning Story of This Veblen Brand,” Forbes, February 10, 2018, accessed 03.03.18, https://www. forbes.com/sites/johngreathouse/2018/02/10/would-you-pay-1750-for-a-t-shirtthe-stunning-story-of-this-veblen-brand/#3800c101aa36.

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Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. “Veblen’s Attack on Culture.” In Literary Taste, Culture and Mass Communication: The Cultural Debate Part II, edited by Peter Davison, Rolf Meyerson, and Edward Shils, Vol. 14, 3–24. Cambridge, England; Teaneck, NJ: ­Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1983. Banta, Martha. “Introduction.” In The Theory of the Leisure Class. Oxford: Oxford ­University Press, 2009. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Baudelaire, Charles. “The Painter of Modern Life.” In The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, edited and translated by Jonathan Mayne, 1–40. London: Phaidon Press, 1986. Bazin, André, and Hugh Gray. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1960): 4–9. Benjamin, Walter. “Little History of Photography.” In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, and Howard Eiland, 274–298. Cambridge, MA; London, England: The Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008. ———. “Paris, The Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, and Howard Eiland, 96–115. Cambridge, MA; London, ­England: The Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008. ———. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, edited by Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 217– 252. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Brette, Olivier, Nathalie Lazaric, and Victor Vierira da Silva. “Habit, Decision Making, and Rationality: Comparing Veblen and Early Herbert Simon.” Journal of Economic Issues 51, no. 3 (2017): 567–87. Briggs, Asa, Peter Burke, and Espen Ytreberg. A Social History of the Media. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020. Diggens, John P. The Bard of Savagery: Thorstein Veblen and Modern Social Theory. New York: Seabury Press, 1978. Greathouse, John. “Would You Pay $1,750 For This T-Shirt? The Stunning Story of This Veblen Brand.” Forbes, February 10, 2018. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ johngreathouse/2018/02/10/would-you-pay-1750-for-a-t-shirt-the-stunning-­ story-of-this-veblen-brand/#3800c101aa36. Hirsch, Robert. Seizing the Light: A Social & Aesthetic History of Photography. Abingdon, OX ; New York: Routledge, 2017. Kellner, Douglas. Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. Kant, Immanuel, Paul Guyer, and Patrick R. Frierson. Kant: Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Kevles, Bettyann. Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the Twentieth Century. Sloan Technology Series. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Klimina, Anna. “Veblenian Concept of Habit and Its Relevance to the Analysis of Captured Transition.” Journal of Economic Issues 42, no. 2 (2008): 545–52.

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Lasc, Anca I. “The Traveling Sidewalk: The Mobile Architecture of American Shop Windows at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” Journal of Design History / Design History Society 31, no. 1 (2018): 24–46. Lasc, Anca I., Patricia Lara-Betancourt, and Margaret Maile Petty, eds. “An Introduction.” In Architectures of Display: Department Stores and Modern Retail, 1–14. Abingdon, OX; New York: Routledge, 2018. Leong, Sze Tsung. “Evolution of Shopping.” In Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, edited by Christoph Grunenberg and Max Hollein, 80–84. Ostfildern-­ Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002. Lupton, Ellen, and J. Abbott Miller. The Bathroom, the Kitchen and the Aesthetics of Waste: A Process of Elimination. Cambridge, MA; New York: MIT List Visual Arts Center; distributed by Princeton Architectural Press, 1992. Malraux, André, Stuart Gilbert, and Francis Price. Museum Without Walls. New York: Doubleday, 1967. Marx, Karl 1818–1883., and Friedrich 1820–1895. Engels. Capital; a Critique of Political Economy. New World Paperbacks. New York: International Publishers, 1967. McCracken, Grant. Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 1st ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. Menninghaus, Winfried. “On the ‘Vital Significance’ of Kitsch: Walter Benjamin’s Politics of ‘Bad Taste.’” In Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity, edited by Andrew Benjamin and Charles Rice, 39–58. Melbourne: re.press, 2009. Pfeiffer, Ingrid. “Circumstantial Evidence: Shops and Display Windows in Photographs by Atget, Abbott and Evans.” In Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, edited by Christoph Grunenberg and Max Hollein, 93–111. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002. Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903).” In The Blackwell City Reader, edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, 11–19. Oxford; Malden, MA: Wiley-­ Blackwell, 2002. Sparke, Penny. As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2010. Taylor, Mark C. “Duty-Free Shopping.” In Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, edited by Christoph Grunenberg and Max Hollein, 39–54. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002. Tehve, Karin. “Introduction.” In Interior Provocations: History, Theory, and Practice of Autonomous Interiors, edited by Anca I. Lasc, Deborah Schneiderman, Keena Suh, Karin Tehve, Alexa Griffith Winton, and Karyn Zieve, 1–8.New York: Routledge, 2020. Throntveit, Trygve. “The Will to Behold: Thorstein Veblen’s Pragmatic Aesthetics.” Modern Intellectual History 5, no. 3 (2008): 519–46. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

TASTE AND MASS MEDIA

Introduction Definitions of taste can be understood to lean toward universal or relative models. Universal models comprise a single set of assessment standards, while relative models contain a number of sets adapted to local circumstances.

FIGURE 3.1 Published

in “High-Brow, Middle-Brow, Low-Brow,” LIFE Magazine, April 11, 1949.  Illustrations by Tom Funk, text by Russell Lynes credit line: the estate of Tom Funk, © The Picture Collection LLC DOI: 10.4324/9781003164388-4

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Writing about taste in the eighteenth century, the philosopher Immanuel Kant outlined the complexities inherent to aesthetic judgment and proposed a universal model of taste, novel for its time. Kant’s taste was an emotional response, a deeply personal and subjective pleasure. It was, however, also governed by what he termed sensus communis, a shared sensibility regarding beautiful things. This is the essence of the universal model, a concept of taste that should serve as a common characteristic of humanity. Universal models, however, do not readily account for differences or disagreements. Moreover, Kant’s arguments excluded categories of phenomena from aesthetic consideration—anything engendering interest, utility, and the satisfaction of bodily pleasures among them.1 Kant also explicitly excluded categories of people from this model—women, servants, and those he termed foreign.2 In narrowing what might be considered by a judgment of taste (and who might make them), he excludes the circumstances most likely to inspire different responses. In excluding useful characteristics from considerations of taste, Kant’s model cannot be easily applied to design, as utility is (arguably) a characteristic of most design. Nor can it be employed in assessing everyday choices confronting modern consumers, where aesthetic decisions are commonly enmeshed in other considerations. In contrast, relative models propose that taste assessments be considered good or bad only by considering them in context, proposing different criteria for different circumstances or scenarios. These definitions offer a means to consider taste assessments applied to useful goods. However, as the domain of taste expands, determining what criteria should be considered to make an aesthetic judgment only becomes more complex and often divisive. Throughout the early twentieth century, there was a discernible dialectic between universal and relative models of taste, discernable in writing about popular culture and mass media and the struggle to distinguish it from more rarefied forms of production. Embedded within these texts are significant social and political stakes, as different preferences for things can be used to propose differences in people.

Popular culture Popular (pop) culture refers to practices and objects widely consumed in a particular place and time. Pop culture is predominantly consumed for entertainment or diversion and envisioned as a by-product of (or simply equivalent to) popular media: television, movies, and magazines. It is sometimes also referred to as mass culture, a term popularized in the early twentieth century by its critics. Moreover, popular media is often considered as roughly equivalent to mass media, though the pejorative cast implicit in the term mass is a detail salient to the debates to ascertain its value.

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from Modern Times, 1936 (director: Charlie Chaplin) | credit line: © Roy Export S.A.S

FIGURE 3.2 Still

While ostensibly a popular film, Modern Times represented a vision of modern industrialized culture as destabilizing to contemporary society. According to the historian Lewis Mumford, film was the ideal medium for this message, as film itself epitomized the cultural role of the machine (Lawrence Howe, “Charlie Chaplin in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Reflexive Ambiguity in ‘Modern Times,’” College Literature 40, no. 1 (2013): 45–46.)

Mass media, aspersions aside, also refers to an empirical fact: the size of the audience it seeks and can address. The term acknowledges the breadth of this audience, media created for a hypothetical anyone, in that way democratic in the extreme. There is an irony, then, that it becomes a means to attribute distinctions between people, discernible in the twentieth-century debates regarding popular culture and their relationship to taste.

The rise of popular entertainment What different forms of mass media have in common is the tendency to be image-rich and time-based. Mass media is designed around novelty and often denigrated as being simply disposable. Much mass media is created to delight or distract, not to edify or instruct.3 Significantly, it is usually produced with a profit motive. Theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer coined the term “culture industry”—business concerns that produce these forms of media

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as commercial products.4 “Mass media” also refers to any form of media used “as a mechanism for stimulating desire and mass consumption.”5 These characteristics, however, are not always readily apparent to their reader or user. Intentionality may be vague or veiled with ostensible rationales (e.g., tabloid journalism). Adding to this ambiguity is the inclusion of advertising, often designed to resemble editorial content. Moreover, much mass media is what media theorist Marshall McLuhan termed “hot”—so dense with stimuli as to not require much intellectual engagement from its audience, engendering a habitual, passive and often distracted gaze. The early twentieth century is not the first time one sees what could be called popular media or media designed specifically around entertainment. What changes during this time is the scale, accessibility, and consistency of cultural products made accessible to a broad public, particularly in the United States. For example, the first public motion picture theater opened in the United States in 1905 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Its owners named the venue the Nickelodeon, after the admission cost—a nickel—and the Greek word for theater. Within two years, there were more than 8,000 of these theaters in the United States.6 In 1930, weekly attendance of movie performances in the United States was estimated at 90 million.7 Historian Michael Kammen suggests that the rise of popular entertainment in the United States reflects a complex relationship between popular culture and a class consciousness emergent in the late nineteenth century. Movies, in particular, were understood to be the most broadly appealing forms of early popular entertainment and seen as pivotal to democratizing amusements for the working and middle classes.8 Historically, Kammen suggests that elite and popular entertainment had not been understood as completely distinct realms, but while technology and economics made certain forms more broadly accessible, cultural hierarchies emerged to distinguish between both forms of media and their content.9 In addition to being low in cost and (eventually) widely distributed, movie theaters could be understood in contrast to theater-going in that there was no requirement for reserved seating.10 Rules concerning decorum were also more relaxed. Before the advent of sound, movie-going was a social event involving conversation and visiting with one’s neighbors, a contrast to the sober silence required by live theater.11 In 1915, the theater critic Randolf Bourne suggested that while film democratizes access to entertainment, its democratic nature was bound to depress the quality of films and therefore, the tastes of its audience.12 This assessment of the mass medium of cinema establishes a theme seen throughout analyses of popular culture—particularly American culture—well into the twentieth century: an often explicit causal relationship between the form of media one might consume and the tastes that consumption might engender. Through this

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relationship, the classification of cultural forms and the identity of their consumers become enmeshed.

Critical interpretations of mass media and culture The terminology used in debates about popular culture suggests that a taste for a particular cultural form might be (at least in part) inherited. Also in 1915, the literary critic and historian Van Wyck Brooks published America’s Coming-of-Age, a book-length essay about the state of culture in the United States. Across a long career, Brooks established a thesis that American culture places undue emphasis on material values (a characteristic he traces to the Puritans), roughly commensurate with the separation of spiritual and economic matters. In the chapter “Highbrow and Lowbrow,” he traces this duality across the American intellectual tradition.13 Highbrow pursuits involve “the unhypocritical assumption of transcendent theory,”14 while lowbrow endeavors are an “acceptance of catchpenny realities.”15 While not inventing those terms, Brooks deployed them in such a way as to attach sensibilities to the physical characteristics of the audiences. By referring to the height of one’s brow, he suggests that a propensity for ideas and intellectual capacity might be inborn, passing from one generation to the next. Brooks positioned an individual’s ideas and concerns as a means of classification but used derogatory terms to ascribe embodied, physiological characteristics as visible markers of thought. Over time, highbrow and lowbrow became associated more broadly with the production and consumption of cultural forms and aesthetic preferences, but the terms retain a physiognomic tang.16 This classification, linking taste and cultural production, is seen in the schema of several interwar and postwar social and cultural critics, establishing what could be understood as a high-modernist position on the subject.

Clement Greenberg The art critic Clement Greenberg used the term kitsch, roughly synonymous with objects in bad or lowbrow taste, to describe the artifacts of popular culture and media.17 His essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” appeared in the Fall 1939 issue of The Partisan Review (edited by Dwight Macdonald, an influential cultural critic and journalist) and became one of the most influential art-critical essays of the century.18 Kitsch, a German word meaning gaudy or trash, entered the English language in the 1920s.19 It is used to describe pretentious aesthetic objects or cultural products, attempting to impress by affecting greater merit than is actually possessed. Walter Benjamin, writing in 1925, described the effects of kitsch as a collapse of distance between the viewing subject and the object in question: that kitsch attempts to evoke a predictable reaction, the same for any viewer, rather than inviting a thoughtful and individual aesthetic response.20

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FIGURE 3.3 Still from Auntie Mamie, 1958 (director: Morton DaCosta) | credit line:

© Everett Collection Historian Penny Sparke notes that American popular films inspired its viewers to emulate their luxurious interiors (Penny Sparke, The Modern Interior, (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 72.) Here, set decorator George Hopkin’s design for Auntie Mame reinforce the identities of its characters as modern, wealthy and glamorous.

Greenberg referred to kitsch as the result of the Industrial Revolution and its “raw material[, ] the… academicized simulacra of genuine culture.” Kitsch is often used to describe awkward, unsuccessful translations—a decal used to simulate a hand-painted detail on a china cup, the image of a well-known painting converted to an inexpensive print or poster. The risk of kitsch loomed as objects or images previously hand-crafted become products of mass production. Kitsch, according to Greenberg, is easy, repetitive, and formulaic. It presupposes a reaction or has an ulterior motive: as sinister as propaganda or as banal as to be merely “entertaining” or “popular.” Greenberg saw kitsch as contributing to the decay of society and positioned himself as its defense, ironically by espousing a separation of the production of culture from that society (specifically, mainstream middle-class society).21 Throughout his career, he described strategies of resistance to the degrading influence of kitsch by embracing autonomy for works of legitimate culture. For Greenberg, the term culture implies the pursuit of rarefied ideals, as exemplified by the fine arts and architecture. This is the domain of the avant-garde, praxis engaged in the search for the exemplary.22 In the later essay “Modernist

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Painting” (1961), Greenberg cites Kant in defense of this position, particularly clear in his evocation of “purity” as a guarantee of legitimacy, made possible by disinterest and the separation of art from any other endeavor.23 For both Kant and Greenberg, aesthetic experience should satisfy no need, desire, or ­use—­including entertainment.24 Greenberg’s application of autonomy to painting refers to media’s specific power and consequences. What painting itself could do (that nothing else could in quite the same way) is the source of painting’s authenticity and quality.25 Any form of art would have its own characteristics: unique, irreducible, and specific. However, in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Greenberg acknowledges extrinsic effects on aesthetic experience. Greenberg described the avant-garde as a form of superior consciousness, embracing a search for the expression of the modern age and divested of any expectation of familiarity. Its practitioners required distance from everyday bourgeois concerns, to pursue creative praxis free from the constraints of convention. However, Greenberg acknowledges the functions of the elite (referring specifically to the ruling class) without whose patronage he believes no legitimate culture is possible. He argued that kitsch is for peasants, although it is ambiguous whether this is a condition driven by an embodied quality or circumstance. Greenberg suggests that peasants lack the leisure time and education required to enjoy Picasso. 26 He also explains that “the peasant finds no ‘natural’ urgency within himself that will drive him toward Picasso despite all difficulties.” 27 While embracing independence as necessary to produce art for the modern age, Greenberg describes the ways that it may not be: that social divisions are implicated in its classification and evaluation. In a later essay, “Can Taste be Objective?” (1971), Greenberg diverges from Kant’s aesthetic philosophy by dismantling Kant’s concept of the sensus communis around the existence of disagreements about taste. He asks: how could taste be universal if opinions differ?28 Greenberg’s explanation significantly qualifies that universality: “practiced taste—the taste of those who pay enough attention, of those who immerse themselves enough, of those who try hardest with art—speaks as if with one voice.”29 Greenberg acknowledges that “the best taste, cultivated taste, is not something within the reach of the ordinary poor or of people without a certain minimum of comfortable leisure.”30 This “best taste” is commensurate with consensus over time, but as with Kant’s model of universality, this is an esoteric “consensus.” Writer and academic Louis Menand suggests that Greenberg’s axis of avantgarde versus kitsch was part of a historical account that positioned “serious” culture as endangered by a mass society and its tastes, a mass made possible by universal literacy and the ostensible audience of mass media.31 This opposition parallels the high-low schema of the assessment of culture that was to be echoed by fellow critics throughout the twentieth century.

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Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer Greenberg’s contemporary, the philosopher and theorist Theodor Adorno, suggested that kitsch engenders a vicious cycle, part of the popular culture responsible for degrading authentic forms of taste. His 1944 essay “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (written with philosopher and sociologist Max Horkheimer) describes a process by which audiences become accustomed to formulaic fare, eventually making intellectual contemplation of any kind impossible. The popularity of this degraded mass media then inspires more cultural production to satisfy people’s debased appetites. Adorno and Horkheimer explicitly attribute characteristics of media as central to this vicious cycle; for instance, television is a gesamtkunstwerk (a fusion of all arts in one place), enabling a unified representation of reality under capitalism designed to inspire conformity: The alliance of word, image, and music is all the more perfect… because the sensuous elements which all approvingly reflect the surface of social reality are in principle embodied in the same technical process, the unity of which becomes its distinctive content.32

FIGURE 3.4 Still from Playtime, 1967 (director: Jacques Tati) | credit line: © Everett

Collection Playtime follows the tribulations of the protagonist Monsieur Hulot (played by the director and screenwriter Jacques Tati), alienated and confused by the modern design of his environment and the relentless and repetitive nature of contemporary consumer culture (Lee Hilliker,“In the Modernist Mirror: Jacques Tati and the Parisian Landscape,” The French Review 76, no. 2 (2002): 319–20.)

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The essay evokes Kant’s description of a taste assessment as requiring engagement on the part of the beholder (or audience member). Adorno and Horkheimer argue that popular media is so formulaic and repetitive that it requires no engagement, both an escape from and a reflection of mechanized labor.33 The culture industry itself pre-classifies and pre-judges experience, denying consumers the opportunity of real individual choice. Rather than the audience’s taste being negatively affected by debased or formulaic content, their taste is never engaged. There is less critique of the viewing public than Greenberg’s positions suggested—responsibility is ascribed to the producers of mass media. Adorno and Horkheimer argue that audiences are forced to accept the cultural fare they are offered.34 Greenberg’s larger goal is to protect the artifacts of high culture (albeit for those equipped for its legitimate experience). Adorno and Horkheimer raise the specter of the reproduction of hierarchical class relations. “The Culture Industry” recounts pop culture’s dehumanizing influence on everyman (embedded firmly within everyday experiences of media) but with particularly dire consequences for the working class. Adorno and Horkheimer’s position suggested that standardized mass culture was offered by the wealthy and powerful—the aforementioned “culture industry” among them—those with a vested interest in the production of workers without imagination, unused to the exercise of free will.35

Dwight Macdonald Journalist and cultural critic Dwight Macdonald was an editor at The Partisan Review, founder of the journal Politics, and contributor to other journals from

from 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968 (director: Stanley Kubrick) | credit line: © Everett Collection

FIGURE 3.5 Still

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the 1960s to the 1970s. As an editor and publisher, he promoted authors including Greenberg, Adorno, and Horkheimer.36 Throughout his career, Macdonald wrote polemics exploring what culture was to become under the conditions of capitalism. Macdonald published the essay “Masscult and Midcult” in The Partisan Review in 1960, suggesting (as Greenberg and Adorno had before him) that while pop culture produced a deleterious effect on its consumers, the disturbance to established social order was the more critical and immediate threat. Macdonald coined the terms masscult and midcult to refer to cultural artifacts distinct from those produced by high culture. He asserted that only high cultural works are expressions of taste in that they are idiosyncratic and require individualized responses from their audience. Macdonald identified the homogeneous nature of masscult, characterizing it much like Greenberg and Adorno had described kitsch: roughly commensurate with the products of popular culture.37 According to Macdonald, exposure to this sameness eventually transforms an individual into part of a mass, unable to express their human qualities. Midcult is a related category: Macdonald called it “that middlebrow compromise.” He described midcult as having many of the same qualities of masscult: “the formula, the built-in reaction, the lack of any standard except p­ opularity— but it decently covers them with a cultural fig-leaf.”38 It is more insidious for its shallow resemblance to artifacts of high culture, feigning conformance to its goals and standards, but it “waters them down and vulgarizes them.”39 Macdonald is vague as to whether mass taste is the a priori condition (with the producers of mass culture designing products in response) or if mass culture begets bad taste. Like Adorno and Horkheimer, Macdonald refers to the dangers of homogeneous fare on its audiences. But unlike Adorno and Horkheimer’s concern for this audience, Macdonald identifies the danger as the dissolution of cultural and social distinctions. He points out that masscult is democratic, but he uses “democratic” as a pejorative: “[masscult] refuses to discriminate between anything or anybody. Its products did not acknowledge the old barriers of class, tradition and taste.”40 Like Greenberg, Macdonald positions creative work as requiring defense, not the faceless, tasteless masses who consume indiscriminately.

Herbert Gans Not every mid-century critic commenting on the state of culture despaired of its quality or over challenges to cultural authority or expertise. Among the dissenting voices is sociologist Herbert Gans, publishing Popular Culture and High Culture in 1974. Gans analyzed the term mass culture, describing it as holding together two contrasting social domains. While mass has a uniformly negative association, Gans asserts that culture:

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…refers not only to the art, music, literature, and other symbolic products that were (and are) preferred by the well-educated elite of that European society but also to the styles of thought and feelings of those who chose these products—those who are ‘cultured.’41 Using culture to imply high culture is not unlike using taste to mean elite taste. That these terms would implicitly refer to a particular and rarefied set of praxis or preferences, according to Gans, speaks to the hegemony of traditional cultural gatekeepers.42 Gans argued that the totality of media constituting mass ­culture—television, films, and magazines among them—would more accurately reflect the aesthetic values of a whole society.43 To understand the relationship between taste and the larger culture, Gans proposed a model that rejected privileging idealized or high culture over other forms. The term he coined is taste culture, consisting of not only aesthetic preferences, but myriad cultural forms and everyday choices that express those values. Gans described the relations between taste cultures as a nonhierarchical aggregation rather than organized into a high–low scale; popular taste was simply one of many. According to Gans, the success of a taste culture should be measured in the pleasure and satisfaction brought to its participants. Pop taste fulfills its function, providing the means to entertain, inform, and beautify life; this should not be judged inferior to high culture’s goals to edify or provide a more autonomously aesthetic experience. Gans does, however, identify high culture as being ­creator-oriented and as setting the aesthetic standards for all of society. Moreover, Gans acknowledges that its creators, like its audiences, tend to be highly educated and are more likely to address social, political, and philosophical questions.44 That said, Gans was steadfast in his refusal to judge the audiences for popular and high culture in comparison with one another; the classifications themselves, according to his analysis, were more a reflection of the educational levels of their audiences than characteristics intrinsic to what was being compared.45 As for the social effects theorized by Adorno and Horkheimer, Gans could find no documentary evidence suggesting consistent causal links between the alienation or oppression of any social group and exposure to popular entertainment or media.46 Gans included Greenberg, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Macdonald in his analysis, suggesting their commentary reflected a pessimistic historical bias that idealized a pastoral past and the clarity of its social hierarchies. This is reflected in their unilateral support of high culture, once the purview of the aristocracy.47 Gans suggested that their stridency was ­counterproductive— that the esteem of high culture might be waning because it appeared to be more marginal than ever, becoming a culture almost exclusively of the expert and dominated by academics.48 There is something irreconcilable in this conflict. Greenberg, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Macdonald assume the responsibility of protecting a tradition of creative work done without the influence of the marketplace or audience

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opinion, a tradition Gans critiques as largely fictional. Gans is supportive of the work the aforementioned critics deride as debased, concerned less with the impacts of easy fare on the tastes of its user than on the user’s right to please themselves as they so choose. Whether concerned with the conditions of production or consumption, what appears not to be in question is the consistent use (by all these writers) of the terms high, middle, and low to describe categories of culture and media. This metaphor maintains the image of hierarchical values and the implied judgment of its audiences.

Authority versus power No matter their positions on how taste might be formed or in what forms it might be reflected, all the critics mentioned above are imbricated in that process. Critics of their stature wield influence and help shape and publicize the standards by which taste assessments might be judged. Greenberg, Adorno, Horkheimer, Macdonald, and Gans share expertise, the capacity to bestow ­legitimacy—to arbitrate what might be considered in good taste.49 It might be argued that ultimately, their influence was to be overshadowed and undermined by the very culture and media they critiqued. Historian Michael Kammen suggests that the proliferation of mass media throughout the early twentieth century in the United States shifted the locus of cultural influence. To use Kammen’s terms, an influential critic has cultural authority or the ability to legitimize an aesthetic or concept. This is distinct from cultural power, the ability to produce, promote, and disseminate cultural artifacts.50 The sheer scale of popular products available for public consumption diversifies cultural content. It expands the number of voices commenting on its quality, including through mechanisms to record and publish public opinion: anything from letters-to-the-editor to money spent could register approval.51 Kammen suggests that by the middle of the century, authority begins to take a backseat to power, shifting who or what might function as the gatekeepers of taste.

Interior design and “public taste” As discussed earlier, mass media often refers to media consumed as an end unto itself (rather than as a means) and that anticipates a broad and heterogeneous readership. This excludes media designed around particular interests (including esoteric or academic subjects) such as design journals. That having been said, mass media often served to disseminate design content to a broad public. Through that publicity, historian Penny Sparke suggested that mass media introduced a public nature to taste, especially regarding the interior.52 Sparke noted that various forms of mass media provided idealized representations of domestic interiors for their users or viewers. These might be featured content or

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the backdrop for other subjects, widely distributed and even delivered directly to one’s home through magazines, mail-order catalogs, and newspapers.53 Popular films provided another means to expose the public to images of interior design. Sparke points out that because movies were created to entertain and distract their audiences, they frequently offered an escape from the everyday. This created an ideal vehicle to position interiors (as stage sets) as not only idealized aesthetically but as a context that could serve to present furniture, finishes or other fittings as associated with the circumstances of the film’s content.54 Film itself is an immersive medium; McLuhan classified film as paradigmatically hot. The often luxurious and glamorous interiors depicted in Hollywood movies consistently inspired demand for similar styles by their audiences.55 McLuhan asserted that immersive media is a means to influence its viewers while in a distracted state, a work-around of one’s critical faculties.56 Background elements of a film set would be present to a movie-goer but less likely to be noticed than the dynamic aspects of the film. This implicit causeand-effect relationship between media and taste is commensurate with Adorno and Macdonald’s arguments: that taste is likely to be influenced by repeated exposure to external stimuli, particularly if that stimulus is so repetitive or familiar as not to require one’s full attention. Each of these propositions, however, positions an audience’s reception as problematically passive and uniform, treating those individuals as a mass. Sparke identified the modern domestic interior as a critical site for ­self-expression, especially for a growing middle class, its aestheticization expanding its possibilities as a terrain in which taste might be deployed.57 With its engagement with mass media, she positions both the interior and the taste by which it was governed as subject to expanding potential sources of exterior influence (and eventual scrutiny, as the possibility of their publicity or publication expands).58

Case study: Ray and Charles Eames In “Taste and the Interior Designer,” Penny Sparke describes the modern disciplines of interior design and architecture as defined in opposition to one another. The resulting binary positions interior design as pragmatic, linked to the production of status, while architecture is idealistic, linked to the production of knowledge.59 While architectural media espoused rationality and equality as characteristics to be protected from the influence of the marketplace, this produced ostensibly unintended effects. Notable among these is the positioning of the profession of architecture as a higher-status endeavor, aligned with the values of high culture. An association with the vagaries of taste relegates interiors to a lower cultural stratum and with it, the efforts of the amateur (and, according to Sparke, of women). However, if one were to apply a Gansian logic to d­ esign-disciplinary relations, each act of design may require somewhat

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different standards of assessment, depending on the goals and objectives of the project. To apply identical standards to entire disciplines or to rank them against one another is problematic, at best.60 There is a case to be made for interdisciplinarity to problematize high–low categories as applied to design, as the work of Ray and Charles Eames makes evident. A simultaneous public address of multiple taste cultures might have been critical to their success. Charles is quoted as saying that aesthetic pleasure should not be dependent solely on the fine arts but a natural product of the business of life itself.61 Their oeuvre includes the design of architecture, furniture, objects, interiors, graphics, exhibitions, and films. There is little evident concern over the preservation of disciplinary boundaries in the Eames’ work, treating the design of toys (like their House of Cards set from 1952) with the same seriousness as their iconic chairs.62 They worked for private businesses and nonprofits alike. Their contributions to the Museum of Modern Art Good Design exhibition series in the 1950s brought everyday goods into the rarefied atmosphere of the museum, a temple of high culture. That show also featured displays of their work in commercial settings: in the shop fronts of the Carson Pirie Scott Department Store and Merchandise Mart buildings of Chicago. The physical contexts of the exhibition—museum and department store—commonly serve to identify their contents as a rarefied cultural artifact or consumer product, the context of the displays themselves a form of mediation.63 However, the exhibits themselves were remarkably similar, and featured similar work; those similarities thwarted rote high–low classifications. Design theorist Beatriz Colomina suggests it may have been their consummate skill regarding publicity that made them pivotal figures in introducing modern design to the American consumer in the decades after WWII. Colomina describes the Eames as seeing few divisions between their work and their life; for Colomina, this is a point of critique. Ray and Charles had their clothing designed by a Hollywood costume designer; this clothing became their uniform, helping them become recognizable and memorable in their published photographs.64 The Eames could be understood as designing their public face. Colomina implies this to be a form of advertising, a practice considered a marker of lower cultural status than indicated by the practice of architecture. Design historian Pat Kirkham, however, points out that their designs for furniture and architecture were frequently published in design journals throughout their careers, a form of media associated with high culture. Much of their work—the chairs, the houses, the exhibitions—was technically innovative and within the ostensible taste culture of the design press, consistent with those publishers’ embrace of emerging technology and new materials.65 Over time, however, images of Eames chairs could be seen in a wide range of publications, including in advertising for other products, ranging from Marlboro cigarettes to luxury menswear; on album covers like Elton

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John’s The Fox (1981);66 and in comic strips like Dick Tracy (published in The Chicago Tribune in 1952).67 While the Eames’ fame may be due in part to their elevation of ordinary objects, those objects would have to be recognizable to consumers (not only designers and academics) to achieve popular iconic status.68 The presence of images of their work in popular media would serve to make that widespread recognition more possible. Despite that popular exposure, their bent-plywood chair would come to represent highbrow culture in Russell Lynes’s well-known illustration of the aesthetic hallmarks of high-, middle- and lowbrow tastes (Figure 3.1). Perhaps no other project captures the mercurial nature of their design identities as their film House: After Five Years of Living, made in 1954. Commercial or industrial film-making was a field that boomed after WWII, designed for American media appetites developed through exposure to the film and television industries.69 The Eames made more than 80 short films, describing them as a means of communicating an idea, rather than being ends unto themselves.70 Topics ranged from promoting products (often of their design) to not-for-profit educational content. House documents the Eames House, which had been occupied by Ray and Charles (and their studio) since its completion. The film consists of a series of still images (akin to a slide show) set to a soundtrack. The sequence begins outside the house, documenting the site and house in images that shift scale, from façade detail to expansive view. As the film brings the viewer inside, the images move from perspectival views of fixed and movable aspects of the architectural shell to overhead, plan-like images of arrangements of the Eames’ collections. Film historian John David Rhodes described the effect: “This movement between obliqueness and frontality expresses an interesting tension between the house as volumetric container of life (narrative, realism) and the house as flat surface of display (abstraction, modernism)—or else as some mediation of those two possibilities.” 71

from House: After Five Years of Living, 1954.  | credit line: © Eames Office LLC (eamesoffice.com). All rights reserved

FIGURE 3.6 AND 3.7 Stills

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Rarefied container and everyday contents have equal screen time.72 All the designed elements portrayed in the film are presented as agents of a design intent and of a life-as-lived. Rhodes described the house represented in House as “an accumulation and display of property” and “a cabinet of curiosities.” 73 These characterizations position the Eames as simply occupants (as opposed to skillful and educated design professionals) and their collections as simply sources of pleasure or status. Pat Kirkham pointed out that the Eames themselves referred to their collections as “functional decoration”; in House, one might argue that the collections blur distinctions between the pragmatic and idealistic ends of design, product and project, everyday and exalted, low and high. Herbert Gans suggested that the fiercest critiques of popular culture were creator-oriented.74 These arguments reflect definitions of culture limited to the most esoteric work and that an audience or user’s inability to appreciate that work was evidence of their shortcomings. Perhaps the Eames’ greatest strength was their ability to seemingly occupy the roles of user and creator simultaneously, disavowing absolute distinctions between taste and design process, and in so doing, producing innovative work embraced across cultural divisions.

Conclusion The United States was a dominant producer and exporter of mass media for the better part of the twentieth century, establishing an association of the United States with popular culture globally. Michael Kammen characterized the cultural battles over the high and the low as particularly American, as well. These were conflicts establishing a fundamental opposition between the expansiveness of democratic ideals and the meritocratic ideals applied to literature, art, and design—as Van Wyck Brooks would have it, conflicts almost as old as the nation itself. To set high culture in opposition to low is an act of classification, reductive in its characterization of cultural artifacts. Reductive, too, is the suggestion that any product (from the popular to the esoteric) might be perceived or engaged identically by its consumers or users. The essays of Greenberg, Adorno and Horkheimer, and Macdonald all suggest a blunt causality, a taste degraded by exposure to inferior forms of media or content. At best, this positions the members of its audience as entirely passive, devoid of criticality, or even will.75 The authors mentioned above were unified in pursuing an ostensibly noble goal: to preserve the traditional status of the fine arts and design, and to protect a cultural landscape from becoming overwhelmed by profit motive. Their strategy, however, could be considered at cross purposes with those goals.76 Terms as reductive as high and low, however seductive in their clarity, veil the

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possibility of a richer pluralistic experience of culture. At worst, the classification is applied directly to the audience. Greenberg, in particular, suggests that a preference for kitsch is inborn, a characterization smacking of racism and elitism. Even Gans could not entirely elude the implication; while he described taste cultures as potentially equal in value, these were still organized on a scale from low to high. These systems of classifications have been amply dissected and critiqued, but their vocabulary remains in widespread use. Its casual and uncritical use reinforces a sense of stratification, however disavowed, of creative praxis and its creators and users. Writing about the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, the historian Larry Levine suggested that esoteric forms of culture represented an elite form of escape and as a mechanism by which a population made diverse (notably, through immigration) might be contained and ordered. Systems of taste and canons of behavior can be used to reinforce spatial boundaries, particularly regarding public entertainment venues. Levine positioned this containment as protecting traditional standards (and with it, one’s understanding of culture) from a new universe of strangers.77 Strategies of social containment are discernible in some of the definitions of taste discussed in this chapter, notably in the work of Dwight Macdonald. These aesthetic measures order and separate; once dissected, they appear to be a product of a different time. However, these systems of classification are habitually applied even today, remaining foundational to how design is assessed. It is difficult to overestimate the impacts of mass media on the cultural landscape, no matter whether the scope of culture being considered is inclusive or exclusive. All cultural praxes—art, design, the business of everyday life—were subject to the classifying practices developed to make sense of an environment newly dense with novel sources and vessels of content. The lure of classification is that it produces an image of order and provides curatorial guidance in conditions of abundant choice. After mass media, taste appears to become tastes as different measures develop to assess evolving and expanding cultural options. These tastes, however, remain inextricably linked and universalized, defined in relation to one another on a single scale from low to high.

Notes 1 This is the subject of Immanuel Kant and Paul Guyer, Critique of the Power of Judgment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 2 In an essay titled “On national character in so far as they rest upon the different feeling of the sublime and the beautiful,” Kant qualifies the sensibilities of the citizens of other nations, ascribing specific attributes to each. Concerning the “Negroes of Africa,” Kant wrote that they, by nature, had only “ridiculous feelings” (in Immanuel Kant, Paul Guyer, and Patrick R. Frierson, Kant: Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011], 50–63).

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3 These goals would classify most mass media as “agreeable,” a form of interest identified by Kant as base or bodily pleasures. 4 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Place of publication: Stanford University Press, 2002). Both Adorno and Horkheimer were associated with the Frankfurt School, a group of thinkers associated with the Institute of Social Research beginning in the 1930s (see “Glossary” for more details). 5 Sparke, The Modern Interior, 59. 6 Stella Ho, “Weekender | Behind the Curtains: A Brief History of Movie Theaters,” accessed 02.19.21, https://www.dailycal.org/2020/12/05/behind-the-curtains-abrief-history-of-movie-theaters. 7 Butsch, “American Movie Audiences of the 1930s,” 108. 8 Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century, 29–31. 9 Kammen, 33. 10 Kammen, 33. 11 Butsch, “American Movie Audiences of the 1930s,” 107. Butsch reports that by the end of the 1920s, the advent of sound changed behavior in movie theaters; audiences tended to watch silently, with greater concentration on the film itself. 12 Kammen suggests that Bourne acknowledges the existence of cultural and taste hierarchies in America but that the emergent cultural forms are no better than the stale aesthetics of the high culture it challenges (Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes, 33–34). 13 Brooks, America’s Coming-of-Age. 14 Brooks, 7. 15 Brooks, 7. 16 The terms highbrow and lowbrow were derived from the pseudoscience of phrenology, which used cranial shape and size to make predictions regarding intelligence. “Caucasians” were understood to have the highest brow, used as a justification for the privileging of white cultural history and values (in Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988], 221–23). 17 Greenberg does not use the terms “highbrow” and “lowbrow” in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” He does use those terms in another essay published by The Partisan Review in 1939: “Bertolt Brecht’s Poetry.” 18 Louis Menand suggests MacDonald had helped to co-write this essay (Louis Menand, “Browbeaten: Dwight Macdonald’s War on Midcult.”) 19 Harper, “Kitsch.” 20 Benjamin, “Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrealism,” 238. Benjamin also likened kitsch’s effects to a furnishing of the psyche of the modern subject; instead of the disinterested experience possible with art, kitsch “fashions its figures in his interior.” 21 Greenberg, “Avant-Garde & Kitsch,” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). 22 Greenberg describes architecture as akin to modernist sculpture “insofar as it’s purely visual” obeying its own internal law in “The Factor of Surprise,” in Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 31. This is a tidy refutation of the aphorism “form follows function” (attributed to the American architect Louis Sullivan); the legitimacy of architecture would require its value to be dependent on its experience as purely aesthetic. 23 Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts, eds. Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris (London: Phaidon Press, 1992), 308–14. 24 Greenberg positions kitsch as roughly equivalent to Kant’s aesthetic category of the agreeable. If it exists to distract, soothe, or amuse, it exists as a means to an end and can

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be understood as a type of interest in the existence of the object in question. These conditions would exclude the object in question from the category of the beautiful and its experience outside the bounds of legitimate judgments of taste for Kant. 25 Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 309. 26 This echoes historical critiques of Kant’s “pure gaze,” notably those of Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu asserted that the pure gaze was available only to the educated elite not by natural predilection but by a life-long exposure to art and socially constructed imperatives to educate oneself vis-à-vis its internal rules and codes (in Bourdieu, Distinction, 41–48). 27 Greenberg, “Avant-Garde & Kitsch,” 18. 28 The essay is a transcription of a lecture delivered at Bennington College in the 1970s, published in Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 29 Greenberg, “Can Taste Be Objective?” 27. 30 Greenberg, 28. 31 Menand, “Introduction,” 9–11. 32 Adorno and Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry,” 97. This attributes much hotter, immersive attributes to television than McLuhan allowed. 33 Adorno and Horkheimer, 109. 34 Adorno and Horkheimer, 113. 35 Adorno and Horkheimer, 95–97. It should be noted that while mass media was consumed by all social classes, the essay suggests its most deleterious effects were on the middle and working classes. 36 Menand, “Browbeaten,” accessed online, 09.13.21. 37 Greenberg’s concern, in “Avant Garde & Kitsch,” was of works of fine art falling short of the ideals of the avant-garde—work that, for Greenberg, included representational art. Adorno, Horkheimer, and Macdonald include a wide array of media as part of their critique. 38 Macdonald, “Masscult & Midcult,” 37. 39 Macdonald, “Masscult & Midcult,” 37. The film Auntie Mame (Figure 3.3), a broad stylized technicolor comedy, might have been termed masscult. The film 2001: A Space Odyssey (Figure 3.5), might have been termed midcult, despite its enduring critical acclaim. In other writing, Macdonald had admired the work of Chaplin (Figure 3.2) and Tati (Figure 3.4) as auteurs. Paradoxically, both Modern Times and Playtime explicitly critique the environments and aesthetics of modernity espoused by writers like Greenberg. 40 Macdonald, 25–26. 41 Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. (Place of publication: Basic Books, 1975), 9–10. 42 Cultural historian and theorist Dick Hebdige uses the term gate-keeping to refer to individuals and institutions with the ability to persuasively form and disseminate those standards (in Hebdige, “Towards a Cartography of Taste 1935– 1962,” 54). 43 Gans, Popular Culture, 21–26. Gans notes that popular cultural forms were likely to have been produced by large teams of producers, rather than by single authors or artists. In an earlier essay, however, Gans acknowledges that conflicts in creative teams may lead to aesthetic compromise (Herbert J. Gans, “The Creator-Audience Relationship in the Mass Media: An Analysis of Movie Making,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg [Glencoe, IL: Free Press of Glencoe, Collier-MacMillan Limited, 1957], 315–35). 4 4 Gans, Popular Culture, 78–79. 45 Gans asserted that every item of cultural content carries with it a built-in educational requirement: low for comics, high for the poetry of T.S. Eliot (in Gans, Popular Culture, 76).

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46 Gans, Popular Culture, 40–47. 47 Gans, 52–56. 48 Gans, as quoted by Michael Kammen in American Culture, American Tastes, 133. 49 Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes, 133. 50 Ostensibly, Macdonald might have both power and authority, as an editor and a writer. 51 Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes, 134. 52 This is the subject of a good deal of Sparke’s oeuvre, particularly The Modern Interior. 53 Sparke, The Modern Interior, 59. 54 Sparke, 70–71. 55 Sparke, 70–71. 56 McLuhan, “The Medium Is the Message,” 18. This statement interpolates from McLuhan’s description. McLuhan describes media as constructing a total configural awareness (10), the environment containing its content. This author positions a film’s action as content and its sets as environmental, enabling them to function like media. 57 Hebert Gans makes a similar point but distinguishes between public tastes in doing so. A low culture public might evince a preference for overstuffed furniture; a high culture public may choose the latest in Italian furniture. Both achieve self-expression in their pursuit of a common goal: a beautiful room (in Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture, 118). 58 Sparke, The Modern Interior, 109. 59 Sparke, “Taste and the Interior Designer,” 16–20. 60 Beatriz Colomina, “Reflections on the Eames House,” in The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention, ed. Donald Albrecht (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 128. 61 Colomina, 128. Charles made this statement in a lecture at Harvard, one in a series he was invited to deliver; his association with prestigious institutions may have been a factor that lent him credibility in academic and design-critical circles. This association might have also been a factor in his being solely credited for work to which Ray was also an integral part. The fact that Ray was a woman may have also been a factor. 62 Colomina points out that representations of their best-known work of architecture, their Case-Study House (aka the Eames House) illuminate its strong resemblance to a Herman Miller showroom completed at roughly the same time, employing the same rigor and principles (in Beatriz Colomina, “The Eames House,” in Domesticity at War [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007], 107). 63 For more discussion on spaces as media, see the chapter “Taste and Photography” for an analysis of shop windows and other display infrastructure, as well as “Taste and Algorithms” for an analysis of museums (and the software that organizes its collections). 64 Colomina, “The Eames House,” 80. 65 Kirkham, Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century, 1–2. 66 Albrecht, The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention, 101. 67 Albrecht, 98. 68 Stevenson, “Living Images: Charles and Ray Eames ‘At Home,’” 41. This idea recalls Thorstein Veblen’s assertions that objects with status (those considered beautiful) had to possess a generic quality—that is, be recognizable to their consumer’s social milieu. For more detail, see the chapter “Taste after Photography.” 69 Kirkham, Charles and Ray Eames, 309–16. 70 Kirkham, 309. 71 Rhodes, Spectacle of Property, 139. 72 Admittedly, this binary of architecture vs. interior design is as reductive as their high–low cultural characterizations.

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73 Rhodes, Spectacle of Property, 136 and 142. 74 Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture, 26. 75 This critique might be leveled at McLuhan as well, in his tendency not to allow for individual differences regarding how media or content might be received by users. 76 Michael Kammen quotes author and philosopher Susan Sontag as saying that to distinguish between what was elite or common was itself vulgar (in Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes, 123). 77 Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 176–77.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. 94-136. Albrecht, Donald. The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention. New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the Library of Congress and the Vitra Design Museum, 1997. Benjamin, Walter. “Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrealism.” In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, and Howard Eiland, 236–39. Cambridge, MA; London: The Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Brooks, Van Wyck. America’s Coming-of-Age. New York: Octagon Books, 1975. Butsch, Richard. “American Movie Audiences of the 1930s.” International Labor and Working-Class History 59 (2001): 106–20. Colomina, Beatriz. “Reflections on the Eames House.” In The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention, edited by Donald Albrecht. New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the Library of Congress and the Vitra Design Museum, 1997. 126-149. ———. “The Eames House.” In Domesticity at War. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007. 83-110. Gans, Herbert J. Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. New York: Basic Books, 1975. ———. “The Creator-Audience Relationship in the Mass Media: An Analysis of Movie Making.” In Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, edited by Bernard Rosenberg, 315–35. Glencoe, IL: Free Press of Glencoe, Collier-MacMillan Limited, 1957. Greenberg, Clement. “Avant-Garde & Kitsch.” In Art and Culture: Critical Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. 3-21. ———. “Bertolt Brecht’s Poetry.” In Art and Culture: Critical Essays, 252–265. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. ———. “Can Taste Be Objective?” In Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste, edited by Janice Van Horne Greenberg, 23–30. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ———. “Modernist Painting.” In Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts, edited by Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris, 308–14. Open University Set Book. London: Phaidon Press, in association with the Open University, 1992.

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———. “The Factor of Surprise.” Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste, edited by Janice Van Horne Greenberg, 31–39. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Harper, Douglas. “Kitsch.” In Online Etymology Dictionary, accessed 12.11.21. https:// www.etymonline.com/search?q=kitsch Hilliker, Lee, “In the Modernist Mirror: Jacques Tati and the Parisian Landscape,” The French Review 76, no. 2 (2002): 319–20. Hebdige, Dick. “Towards a Cartography of Taste 1935–1962.” In Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things. [A Comedia Book]. London; New York: Routledge, 2016. Ho, Stella. “Weekender | Behind the Curtains: A Brief History of Movie Theaters.” accessed 2.19.21. https://www.dailycal.org/2020/12/05/behind-the-curtains-a-briefhistory-of-movie-theaters/. Horkheimer, Max. Critical Theory: Selected Essays. Translated by Matthew J. O’Connell. New York; London: Continuum Publishing Corporation, 2002. Howe, Lawrence. “Charlie Chaplin in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Reflexive Ambiguity in ‘Modern Times.’” College Literature 40, no. 1 (2013): 45–65. Kammen, Michael G. American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century, 1st ed. New York: Basic Books/Knopf, 1999. Kant, Immanuel, and Paul Guyer. Critique of the Power of Judgment. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kant, Immanuel, Paul Guyer, and Patrick R. Frierson. Kant: Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Kirkham, Pat. Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001. Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Macdonald, Dwight. “Masscult & Midcult.” In Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain, edited by John Summers. New York: New York Review Books, 2011. 19-80. McLuhan, Marshall. “The Medium Is the Message.” In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, edited by Corinne McLuhan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. 7-21. ———. “Media Hot and Cold.” In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, edited by Corinne McLuhan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. 22-32. Menand, Louis. “Browbeaten: Dwight Macdonald’s War on Midcult.” The New Yorker, August 29, 2011. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/09/05/browbeaten. ———. “Introduction.” In Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain, edited by John Summers. New York: New York Review Books, 2011. 5-18. Rhodes, John David. Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Sparke, Penny. “Taste and the Interior Designer.” In After Taste: Expanded Practice in Interior Design, edited by Kent Kleinman, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, and Lois Weinthal, 1st ed. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012. 14-27. ———. The Modern Interior. Illustrated edition. London: Reaktion Books, 2008. Stevenson, Rachel. “Living Images: Charles and Ray Eames ‘At Home.’” Perspecta 37 (2005): 32–41.

TASTE AND MAGAZINES

Introduction

FIGURE 4.1 Berenice Abbott, Newsstand, East 32nd Street and Third Avenue, Man-

hattan, 1935. | credit line: The Museum of the City of New York/ Art Resource, NY DOI: 10.4324/9781003164388-5

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Definitions of taste changed dramatically after the Industrial Revolution. The mass-production of things and images expanded accessibility of both goods and information—both in terms of geography (where these things might be found) and demographics (who might find them). Foundational to a modern consumer economy, manufacturing changed the nature of things and called into question traditional ideas about value and how it might be measured. Production developed to target consumption, creating and satisfying desires well outside what might be required to satisfy the basic everyday needs of a population. For art and cultural critics like Clement Greenberg, Dwight Macdonald, and Theodor Adorno, taste (or at least preferences for high culture) would be eroded by that consumerist milieu. A consumer society that tended to produce unchallenging media products would make the development of good taste impossible. These authors evoked Immanuel Kant’s work to redefine the boundaries between art and the everyday, to champion and preserve esoteric forms of cultural production. Each used terms that classified both cultural products (largely in the form of media) and their consumers into vertical strata: high, middle, and low cultures. Of all twentieth-century forms of mass media, magazines reflect and support these cultural schemata most directly. Magazines produce an analogous condition to what sociologist Hebert Gans termed taste cultures: distinct, overlapping cultural domains within a population. Each taste culture could devise its own metrics, tailored to its participants’ concerns and interests, distinct from the concerns of other taste cultures. What taste cultures are to a population, genres are to forms of discourse. Magazines also can be positioned to answer diverse domains of need and desire, a model that embraces a democratic approach to cultural value and reflects broader market forces.1 This heterogeneity is ordered and classified into genres. Genres offer frameworks for constructing meaning or value in a particular medium, its offerings sorted by content, style, and form.2 These discrete domains, each with its own system of assessing suitability and value, offer homologies to the models of taste described by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, a critical figure in twentieth-century scholarship on the relationship between taste and social class. Taste is social distinction, according to Bourdieu. Like Gans, he posits that an individual’s taste has a recursive relationship with the values (aesthetic and otherwise) of their social milieu. But unlike Gans, Bourdieu proposes that taste anchors a fundamentally totalizing system.

The history and characteristics of magazines In their most familiar forms, magazines are bound pages, like books. They are classified as periodicals, which reflect events or phenomena in their own time, across a wide variety of content and frequency of publication. In that way,

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House & Garden August 1948 | cover design: Herbert Matter credit line: © Condé Nast

FIGURE 4.2 Cover:

FIGURE 4.3 Cover: Art & Architecture February 1947 | cover design: Herbert Matter

credit line: © Travers Family Trust

magazines are related to a broad category of ephemera that includes journals, newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, ballads, chapbooks, and almanacs.3 As close as they are in form, the labels journal and magazine suggest distinct categories of discourse: the former, for scholarly or esoteric pursuits, and the latter more likely to be a form of popular media, for entertainment. An early entertaining example: Le mercure galant, reporting on and to elegant French society from 1672 to 1724. Its subject matter was court life from the reign of Louis XIV onward. Within its purview were details about intellectual, artistic, and literary debates; society news; and reports on fashion. Le mercure galant represented the world of luxury and taste, at the time still the province of the aristocracy.4 Beginning in the nineteenth century, advances in printing and transportation technologies lowered the price of producing and distributing periodicals of all kinds, helping make magazines affordable and available to legions of readers well beyond the aristocracy.5 Illustrations became more commonplace as their production costs dropped, contributing to the development of magazines into hybrids of image and text. An unprecedented number of mass-circulation titles arose, as did classifications of those titles, to help potential readers navigate their abundant options.

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Genre and magazines Expansions of magazine readership in the United States could also be understood as attributable to a contemporary rise in literacy rates, especially among women (a factor in book publishing as well). Unlike books, magazines could be more immediately responsive to their growing potential audience, in terms of titles or content offered. Familiar types of magazines began to emerge by the end of the nineteenth century, moving away from a more general idea of readership traditionally typical of newspapers.6 These types can be distinguished by genre, a way of classifying and organizing forms of discourse.7 Genres of magazine—design journal, gossip tabloid, news analysis—­address narrowly defined issues or interests around a subject. Magazine publishing recognizes different needs and desires in different readers, whether organized around a common interest or for a particular audience. From the m ­ id-nineteenth century on, many of these categories organized around gender, assumed to be a dependable bellwether for readers’ concerns.8 This system of classification was clearly based on hypothetical distinctions between interests, so hybrids abounded. Interior design magazines, for instance, formed at the intersection between a variety of other types of magazines: women’s consumer titles, professional art and architectural journals, and trade journals for the building and furniture industries.9 Titles such as House Beautiful (first published in 1896) and House and Garden (begun in 1901) combined advice on design and decorating with features on celebrity homes.10 Magazines are not necessarily designed to last, produced with a deliberate obsolescence. Their ephemeral nature is inherent to much mass media—­popular films, music, newspapers—as novelty itself can be delightful and distracting. Magazines were a significant means to amplify the still nascent effects of photography, making images ever more mobile, the vehicles to regularly placing new content in front of the consumer. As magazines saturated the environment with alluring photographs of all that was new, they amplified a sense that even everyday life was becoming aestheticized.11

Hybridity and ambiguity The twentieth-century print magazine is a carefully designed artifact. It is a hybrid form of media, combining both visual and text-based information.12 An article in House and Garden, for example, might combine photographs of an interior at multiple scales and views, with captions providing descriptions of the photograph’s contents, while the main text describes the comfort and convenience those spaces would provide. Perhaps not surprisingly, by ­m id-century, lush and stylized photographs dominated the pages of most interior design magazines. These image-rich environments quickly engaged audiences in their content, and with less deliberation or conscious choice than written language alone.

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image (focus on plywood vault ceiling/roof assembly). Arts & Architecture, November 1958, 18-19 | Case Study House 20, Buff, Staub and Hensmen Architects (in association with Saul Bass), designers | Julius Shulman, photographer | credit line: © Travers Family Trust & © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10)

FIGURE 4.4 Editorial

for plywood vault systems, featuring CSH 20. Arts & Architecture, November 1958, 8 | Case Study House 20, Buff, Staub and Hensmen Architects (in association with Saul Bass), designers. | credit line: © Travers Family Trust

FIGURE 4.5 Advertisement

This style of engagement creates advantages for publishers. By the beginning of the twentieth century, publishers had found that increasing the amount of advertising per issue led to more revenue and higher circulation, permitting a corresponding reduction of the cost of the cover price.13 Historian Ellen Gruber Garvey, writing about the development of the advertising industry in the United States, points out that editorial content is often strategically placed to be adjacent to advertising. Accessing editorial content might be the goal of the reader, but advertising formed a critical part of the reader’s context. While genre regarding readership was becoming ever more specialized, distinctions between kinds of content could be made ambiguous through proximity, sharing adjacent page space, the boundaries between them de-emphasized by skillful graphic design. Moreover, the nature of handling a physical magazine contributed to its effectiveness as a vehicle for advertising. Garvey points out that the practice of fragmenting editorial content—moving sections of an article to the end of an issue—meant readers had to flip between pages to read

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an entire article, creating a somewhat segmented experience and exposing the reader/viewer to content (including ads) beyond what they consciously sought to engage. The resulting distraction could be a natural and pleasing aspect of reading but was unlikely to make distinguishing between advertising and editorial content a priority for the casual reader.14 The etymology of “magazine” suggests this is a conscious strategy. The word is derived from the French word magasin, meaning “warehouse” or “store.” Department stores, in particular, reflect the permeable boundary between content and commercialism that is seen in magazines; both department stores and magazines are representations of the bounty of goods, cloaking their commercial natures in seductive surfaces.15 Both could be understood as means to create new habits of looking, whereby looking and choosing can be understood as a form of leisure, an end as well as a means.16 Both reflected and supported an expansion of interest in fashion and taste: no longer just for the wealthy, never mind the aristocracy.17 Both could be understood as the products of the consumer economy. Magazines recognize and reflect different kinds of consumers: consumers with different interests, backgrounds, and spending power (having in common, however, the pursuit of both reading and shopping as pleasure). No other ­twentieth-century definition of taste so clearly addresses these articulated divisions than those of the renowned French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.

Pierre Bourdieu Pierre Bourdieu was a sociologist, anthropologist, philosopher, and author. His oeuvre was organized around ideas about the dynamics of social power, but his most influential work involved the sociology of aesthetics.18 In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, he makes the powerful cultural role of taste clear, as “the uncreated source of all ‘creation.’”19 It was Bourdieu’s position that issues of taste were at the center of all social life: “[Taste] functions as a sort of social orientation, a ‘sense of one’s place,’ guiding the occupants of a given… social space towards the social positions adjusted to their properties, and towards the practices or goods which befit the occupants of that position.”20 Throughout Distinction, Bourdieu describes taste in these spatial terms, creating hypothetical dimensions and relations between social actors. As with Thorstein Veblen’s descriptions of conspicuous consumption, Bourdieu positions taste as a means to perform one’s social status.21 While Veblen places emphasis on the public display of one’s choices (especially for the wealthy), Bourdieu’s system is totalizing: that taste plays a role in one’s behavior and choices whether private or public. Taste governs not only one’s choices regarding preferences for high culture, but all aspects of culture.

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Habitus and forms of capital Bourdieu uses the term habitus to describe the performance of taste: “a system of acquired dispositions functioning on the practical level as categories of perception and assessment.”22 One’s habitus can be discerned through one’s habits, skills, and dispositions acquired through experience—taken-for-granted, habitual ways of thinking and acting. Habitus itself can be understood to be the underlying rationale driving choices and behaviors, a pattern or code constantly adjusted in relation to the codes discerned from one’s social milieu; those codes, over time, adjust to reflect individual choices and behaviors. Because one’s perceptual habits operate below the level of conscious thought, they may be experienced as “common sense” or tradition.23 The basis of the analysis featured in Distinction is empirical research Bourdieu carried out in Paris, Lille, and environs in the 1960s and 1970s.24 The respondents filled out surveys, where they were asked about their preferences, aesthetic and otherwise. Bourdieu’s questions ranged from everyday ­practices— what each subject might eat, wear, read, listen to, do with their leisure time— to preferences regarding the fine arts and political affiliations. Bourdieu’s analysis of this data asserted that preferences strongly correlated with one’s socio-economic class, which he roughly derived from the respondents’ professions. Class is distinction, theorized as a fundamental dimension of all social life: Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed. And statistical analysis does indeed show that oppositions similar in structure to those found in cultural practices also appear in eating habits.25 Taste, for Bourdieu, functions as a social boundary condition. One’s preferences are both conditioned by membership in one’s social group or class, and in turn are part of shared dispositions that make that group or class recognizable. While Immanuel Kant’s definition of taste requires that aesthetic judgments be made free of need or utility, Bourdieu’s model positions quite the opposite: that taste itself has a fundamental social purpose of shaping one’s social identity and rendering that identity as perceivable to others. An individual’s preferences might shift in meaning or value in different contexts. Bourdieu’s term for this context is field, a boundary condition defined by the habitus of a particular group. This field’s limits do not correlate to a ­physical place. Each field has a unique set of rules, kinds of knowledge, and value ­ systems—the field’s limits are defined as wherever those rules, knowledge, and values are in play.26 The social world could be understood

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to be divided into fields, each with a relative autonomy from one another. Fields can vary in scale, from groups bound by kinship to those defined by one’s profession. Bourdieu’s field is to social life what genre is to discourse—a classification. In Distinction, Bourdieu uses his subjects’ professions as an indication or marker of their social status, and these professional labels become sub-categories of class in his taxonomies.27 Disciplinary domains—art, architecture, interior design, medicine, law—can function as fields. Constituted by actions, traditions, and beliefs, fields vary over time and geography. In a lecture delivered in Oslo in 1996, Bourdieu uses the example of French intellectuals preferring Asian food and American intellectuals preferring French food; these details, however minor and arbitrary, are indicative of the subtlety by which codes of belonging to a field might manifest.28 Fields might overlap—as an example, interior design and architecture education, especially when taught in the same department. They involve similar content, methods, and may share design faculty—but each field would maintain degrees of autonomy, recognized as ­d ifferent from the others. Participants in those fields may recognize subtle differences in pedagogic values: expectations about time spent working, or attention paid to disciplinary canons. For an outside observer, differences might be most recognizable through more visible associated characteristics—students’ styles of dress, or propensity to attend extracurricular academic events. A preference for an Eames lounge chair may, in some fields, connote high design, acknowledged as it is as an icon of mid-century modern design in both design and popular press. This widespread embrace might, for those in other fields, connote a popularity that renders the same chair as too common, and therefore undesirable. Bourdieu was careful to point out that these fields consist of performed relations. Habitus is a constellation of specific markers and underlying domain-­ specific codes that shift over time. These markers might be as ephemeral as choices regarding food or fashion, or as substantial as choices regarding education, profession, or political affiliation. He theorizes that these performances are driven largely by habit, from cues absorbed and adopted without examination or analysis.29 Neither the codes nor markers need to be identified formally or explicitly for their influence to be manifest—for an individual’s choices to act as a means of social identification and classification. Knowledge of these codes—of what might be suitable regarding dress, speech, posture, language, education, etc.—is described as a form of capital, conferring nothing less than social belonging. An individual’s cultural ­competence—their ability to navigate within a given field—could be conceptualized as possession of capital, each type conferring value, power, or authority to its possessor: • •

Economic capital is simply wealth: money, property, and other assets. Social capital is conferred through “resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of

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• •

mutual acquaintance and recognition—or in other words, to membership in a group.” Symbolic capital refers to socially recognized legitimization such as prestige or honor. Cultural capital is embodied and constituted by forms of knowledge, credentials, dispositions, and skills.30

Economic capital has the greatest potential to be translated into other forms; however, Bourdieu asserts that the subtleties of the social economy give the other forms a unique efficacy, different from the straightforward transactional nature of economic capital.31 As an example: it may be possible to increase one’s social capital by attending a prestigious institution of higher learning (an expenditure of economic capital to gain symbolic capital). Inclusion in that expanded and rarefied social network, however, may be predicated on developing proficiency in the knowledge and dispositions of one’s new peers (cultural capital)—i.e., one’s degree of success in learning to fit in. In the case of design students, even the performance of an appropriate degree of iconoclasm (a refusal to obey tacit contextual codes) would require significant cultural capital to avoid social censure. Learning to fit in, however suggestive of merely imitating one’s peers, presents subtle difficulties. Bourdieu asserts that much necessary capital is largely conditioned, lessons so thoroughly absorbed as to appear natural. Attempts to fit in by learning new codes or praxis may be marred by inadvertent disclosures of one’s social origin through embodied characteristics or unconscious habit. The reproduction of capital and the development of habitus are central to Bourdieu’s theories on how social relations are produced and reproduced. Habitus is acquired substantially by “the acquisition of legitimate culture by insensible familiarization within the family circle.”32 Insensible familiarization means that practices are learned or objects acquired without the strategies structuring them being explicit, entering one’s understanding as “common sense,” as natural or factual rather than representing choice. In other words, one’s sensibilities are conditioned over time through example, a form of learning that veils that anything is being learned. Moreover, Bourdieu’s habitus includes the embodiment of ­capital—characteristics like posture, accent, propensities toward fitness and diet. These concepts are key to Bourdieu’s assertions about social reproduction. Social divisions are maintained over time through a system which might have profound material effects but are so embedded in everyday praxis and contexts to go unnoticed. This invisible means of influence supports the unsupportable (and commonly held) belief that aesthetic sensibilities are inherited: The very title Distinction serves as a reminder that what is commonly called… a certain quality of bearing and manners, most often considered innate (one speaks …“natural refinement”), is nothing other than difference, a gap, a distinctive feature, in short, a relational property existing only in and through its relation with other properties.33

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To suggest that manners, or other manifestations of habitus, are inherited is to make social mobility an impossibility, and significantly undermines the role of education in social identification. It is a conservative bias masquerading as common sense.

Hierarchies: dominating/dominated In the quote above, Bourdieu makes a point central to his argument—that characteristics identifying an individual as a member of a particular class should be understood as neither better or worse than any other. Social distinctions should be understood simply as differences in one’s habitus. An object or behavior might be judged as reflecting “good taste” differently in different social contexts. Those contexts, however, still exist in a hierarchical relation to one another. Throughout Distinction, Bourdieu describes a system of dominating and dominated social fields. Those with more capital—economic, social, cultural—­dominate those with less. Bourdieu uses the term legitimate culture to refer to fine arts, architecture, and classical music. In his schema, use of the term “legitimate” acknowledges the ability of dominant individuals and institutions to establish the measures by which cultural content might be considered high culture, and which forms should be considered illegitimate or low. It is a tautological condition, reinforced by powerful and authoritative educational systems and cultural institutions that reiterate those aesthetic values as superior, and those individuals preferring that content as superior as well.34 The cultural capital of the dominant classes is systematically validated through means less accessible to the dominated.

Herbert Gans and universal versus relative values The relationship between a field and its constitution resembles the taste cultures described by the sociologist Herbert Gans. According to Gans, a taste culture consists of a group of values and the cultural forms that express those values; taste would be the reflection of those values in individual choices.35 Writing in the context of the twentieth-century debates about high versus low culture, Gans proposes that each taste culture should determine its own internal measures to assess cultural forms. Bourdieu, too, positions taste as something that requires a specific social context or field to be understood. Moreover, Bourdieu states explicitly that it is simply differences between fields that makes them recognizable—that high culture is not better than low culture, it simply distinguishes its users into distinct social groups.36 This is not to say that there is no universal aesthetic value system discernible in Bourdieu’s schema. For instance, his descriptions of middle-brow culture echo those of cultural critics Dwight Macdonald and Clement Greenberg. Bourdieu identifies accessible or simplified versions of legitimate culture that

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appeal to the middle class and suggests that the compromise of these forms involves the complicity of its consumers, “a kind of unconscious bluff which chiefly deceives the bluffer.”37 In this assertion, the aspirational aspect of class and taste become apparent, fuel for the distinction underpinning all social life. Despite these incongruities, Bourdieu’s model of taste is fundamentally recursive. Greenberg and Macdonald identify a single set of standards by which cultural life and its participants are assessed. Bourdieu suggests that all such standards reflect the preferences and praxis of the participants of a particular field, whose preferences and praxis are in turn governed (however tacitly) by those standards.

Bourdieu on media content Over his career, Bourdieu wrote extensively about media and its relations to social life. Any form of media could act as a part of an individual’s habitus. Choices regarding media can act as a class marker, when considered in the context of other choices. While operating at a subconscious level, the choices in Bourdieu’s description is reminiscent of a design process or the composition of a publication, in which all elements are meant to contribute to a conceptual or aesthetic unity: Choosing according to one’s tastes is a matter of identifying goods that are objectively attuned to one’s position and which “go together” because they are situated in roughly equivalent positions in their respective spaces, be they films or plays, cartoons or novels, clothes or furniture; this choice is assisted by institutions-shops, theatres (left- or right-bank), critics, newspapers, magazines—which are themselves defined by their position in a field and which are chosen on the same principles.38 Media also qualifies one’s access to the environment, each form representing the world (particularly, the designed world) according to its own internal rules and codes. Magazines, in responding to the expectations and desires of their readership, represent that world edited to reflect those expectations and desires.

Genre and field Bourdieu’s use of field to classify social life shares characteristics with genre, a term used to classify cultural production. Genres, like fields, differentiate and lend value to whatever is contained within. Literary theorist and cultural studies professor John Frow defines genre as a set of conventional and highly organized constraints on the production and interpretation of meaning.39 Genre is a taxonomic system; categories such as design journal or lifestyle magazine are

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indications of a systematic hierarchy of value that exists for the reader. Moreover, these categories are manifestations of the institutional structures by which such hierarchies are created and maintained.40 As mentioned above, magazines lend themselves handily to such classification. As popular media, magazine titles have emerged over time to respond to consumer demand, becoming ever more heterogeneous and specialized. As serialized and ephemeral media, they require guidelines or standards to determine content, to maintain the identity of the title over time. Magazines rely on genre to provide a process of elimination for the consumer, identifying categories of content—what might “go together.”41 Frow describes genre as both an industrialized sorting mechanism determined by publishers and as a provisional category generated by readers to help guide their choices.42 Magazines (and their genres) are a metaphor for the formation of taste as described by Bourdieu. Each has a readership, theoretically identifiable as a group. Each has its own logics and values, persisting over time. A reader comes to expect certain values from a given magazine; through their purchasing power (or letters to the editor), a reader can influence those logics and values over time. The reader of a design journal like Arts & Architecture might be understood, in Bourdieu’s schema, to occupy a different social position than a reader of a lifestyle magazine like Better Homes and Gardens or House and Garden, the possession of the magazine itself signifying or communicating that status. In actually reading the magazine, its consumer might find some of the same products, recontextualized. An Eames chair might lend gravitas to a gingham-curtained suburban kitchen, or whimsy to a minimal late-Modern residence.43 To the extent that the inclusion of any element fulfills a reader’s expectations, they help to reinforce a status quo; the role (or meaning) of the element itself, however, is unstable across its different contexts. In this way, genres like design and lifestyle magazines could also be understood to act as the field itself, exposing a reader to particular representations of the environment. Over time, these representations become naturalized, and start to simply seem like common sense: The effect of mode of acquisition is most marked in the ordinary choices of everyday existence, such as furniture, clothing or cooking, which are particularly revealing of deep-rooted and long-standing dispositions because, lying outside the scope of the educational system, they have to be confronted, as it were, by naked taste, without any explicit prescription or proscription, other than from semi-legitimate legitimizing agencies such as women’s weeklies or ‘ideal home’ magazines.44 Design and lifestyle magazines are numerous and varied; each title can be marketed to an audience made specific by taste (a domain or field of consumers). Bourdieu’s use of the term semi-legitimate, however, acknowledges the

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t­rickle-down nature of the cultural life as he theorizes. Magazines marketed specifically to women (like Better Homes and Gardens) are much more likely to include content about everyday concerns like cooking, cleaning, and raising a family. Design magazines (like Arts & Architecture) restrict their content to more esoteric pursuits, often isolating the aspects of the built environment that might be considered aesthetically. In doing so, design magazines might more easily be classified alongside other aspects of what Bourdieu identifies as legitimate (or high) culture, part of the habitus of dominant social fields.

Case study: the Case Study House Program Arts & Architecture’s Case Study House Program illuminates how media might participate in the construction of the kind of top-down taste hierarchies Bourdieu identifies. The program was introduced in the January 1945 issue of the magazine, in an essay by the editor-in-chief John Entenza, proposing a series of house designs to act as models for post-war housing in the United States.45 Each house was framed as prototypical, meant to be “capable of duplication and in no sense an individual performance,” each meant to provide an image of affordable housing to “the average American in search of a home.”46 The houses published as part of the program emphasized the use of mass-produced components. The use of steel-framing and of plywood, in particular, were embraced by contemporary modern architects, made newly more affordable by technologies and infrastructure developed for the war effort in the 1930s and 1940s. The program sponsored and publicized work by Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen, Pierre Koenig, and Richard Neutra; the results remain canonical examples of post-war residential architecture. These houses were custom designed and relatively unavailable to the middle class for which they were ostensibly produced. They were, however, still available as inspiration—arguably a form of duplication.47 In subsequent publications in contemporary magazines, Case Study Houses assumed a variety of roles: from uniquely supportive of an idealized suburban domestic milieu to that of a modern architectural paradigm. The architect and designer Rodney Walker designed Case Study House #16, the finished product published in the February 1947 issue of Art & Architecture (Figure 4.6).48 The article’s pages are laid out with strict adherence to a governing grid geometry, its commitment to a rigorous modernism discernible even before specific content might be apparent in images or text. In that publication, the features that it shared with other houses in the program were highlighted in the photographs—an open plan, expanses of glass, and a seamlessness between indoor and outdoor spaces. The accompanying text is also typical of articles about the program, describing the dimensions and features of each space in a

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FIGURE 4.6 Art

& Architecture, February 1947 | Case Study House #16, Rodney Walker, designer | Julius Shulman, photographer | credit line: © Travers Family Trust & © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10)

forthright manner, sober and factual. Intended functions can be inferred from room names and furniture layouts seen in the accompanying images. Case Study House #16 was also featured in the August 1948 issue of House & Garden magazine (Figure 4.7) The title of that article announces its distinguishing focus: “A house that does not depend on servants.” Its text describes the house as a means to support family life, emphasizing socializing, protection, and warmth. That issue of House & Garden contained, as was typical, articles about interior design, entertaining, and gardening. Remarkably, the two articles share photographs, taken by the noted architectural photographer Julius Shulman; only the sequence of images and minor differences distinguish them. However, the article’s other features serve different editorial aims. For instance, descriptive text and bold captions are closely paired with the images in House & Garden, inviting the viewer to see images qualified with labels identifying its content as comfortable or luxurious; a focus on the possible effects on its inhabitants, rather than on the designed artifact. No labels accompany the images in Arts & Architecture, nor are the images located in close proximity to descriptions of the spaces represented. Like an abstract painting displayed in a museum, the images invite aesthetic contemplation without descriptions to tie them to goals, uses, or effects. The adjacent

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FIGURE 4.7 House & Garden, August 1948 | Case Study House #16, Rodney Walker,

designer | Julius Shulman, photographer | credit line: © J. PaulGetty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10)

content in each publication (whether editorial or advertising) accompanying each article is available to reinforce the readers’ inferences as to how the house might “go together” with the rest of that issue. The perceived identity of the house shifts significantly between each publication without any physical changes to the house itself. Bourdieu suggests that it is through design-oriented publications like Arts & Architecture that the Case Study Houses are positioned to be canonical. He identifies the most influential work in a given field as “the most perfectly autonomous sector of the field of cultural production, where the only audience aimed at is other producers.”49 Autonomy, here, refers to cultural artifacts “taken in isolation and divorced from the conditions of their production and utilization.”50 A pure or autonomous aesthetic dominates to the degree that it is legitimized and authenticated by its field. Bourdieu suggests that this might exclude economic success, so long as the artifact’s merits are discernible to those sharing the same forms of capital.51 The perception of an artifact’s autonomy, however, can be dependent on its mediation. Arts & Architecture’s typical practice was to focus on the architectural artifact itself. This is consistent with the practice of design journals as a genre, the work of architecture represented (to varying degrees) in isolation from the conditions of its inhabitation.52 In Arts & Architecture, Case Study House #16

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is framed as a paradigm of modernism, and thus (according to Bourdieu) more likely to be influential to the design community. In the pages of House & Garden, a very different image of the house forms, this one dependent on its reception by its users, evoking the pleasure and comfort of a home. A magazine is a complex artifact, unifying heterogeneous content. Rules around genre can still permit a good deal of variation on the way to producing a stable identity. Arts & Architecture, in particular, represents several distinctive forms of the exchange of capital. Issues featuring the Case Study Houses as editorial content frequently contained advertising from manufacturers whose products had been incorporated into the house (see Figures 4.4 and 4.5). Advertising represents straightforward economic interest and therefore insufficient independence to warrant consideration as a legitimate aesthetic. Ads or other promotional content featuring the kind of modern components or systems used in the houses’ construction, however, could be designed to be perceived as relatively continuous with the house in editorial content, especially when aided and abetted by similar fonts or layout configurations.

FIGURES 4.8 AND 4.9 Arts

& Architecture. November 1958 | Case Study House 20, Buff, Staub and Hensmen Architects (in association with Saul Bass) | credit line: © Travers Family Trust & © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10), Figures 4.8 Editorial image (p20), Figures 4.9 Feature: “New Furniture from Knoll Associates” (p28)

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The Tulip Chair, designed by Eero Saarinen, is prominently featured in both interior and exterior photos of Case Study House #20, by Buff Straub and Hensman, in the November 1958 issue of Arts & Architecture. There is only one chair in any image, and it appears to have been moved from space to space by the photographer. The chair could be standing in for the inhabitants, absent from the images as is typical for photos of architecture in design magazines. It could be understood to be a form of product placement, as the Tulip Chair is featured prominently in a list of specified furniture in the same issue, provided to promote its specification (Figures 4.8 and 4.9). Featured in an image with Case Study House #20 as a backdrop suggests the Tulip Chair as legitimized by its rarefied context. It could, however, be featured to lend codified high-design culture back to the house, as the Tulip Chair had bestowed with symbolic capital by the Museum of Modern Art when it was added to its permanent design collection.53

Conclusion No twentieth-century scholar of taste has been more influential than Pierre Bourdieu, whose work has been cited nearly a million times in both academic and popular publications. His theories provide a persuasive analytic framework to understand the relationship of taste to social life; Distinction, in particular, positions the ordinary individual as an active assessing agent. Bourdieu’s model of taste is fundamentally recursive—the preferences of any social group would both influence and be influenced by its members. Critically, his theories allow for both continuity and change. On an individual scale, changes of environment, experience, or education could, over time, influence one’s habitus. In characterizing taste as a perceptual habit, developing often without notice, Bourdieu decouples taste from genetics. In his role as a preeminent scholar in the twentieth century, Bourdieu’s work has been analyzed and critiqued thoroughly. One such critic, British sociologist Tony Bennett, suggests a parochialism present in Distinction: that by concentrating on survey data taken from a relatively small region in France (near Paris), Bourdieu had produced a specifically French (even Parisian) perspective.54 Bennett goes on to suggest that because Bourdieu did not examine the impacts of age, race, ethnicity, physical ability, or their intersections, the results represent a more monolithic view of the relations of taste and class than might be otherwise produced.55 While Bourdieu himself fastidiously explains his results as context-specific, the excluded details are not marginal. A lack of representation regarding these fundamental details about identity may help reinforce the conservative social hegemonies that Bourdieu describes, perpetuating patterns of domination. As he himself acknowledged, de te fabula narrator—the story is about you.56 Bourdieu’s scholarly aims were of systematic objectivity in his analysis, and yet he would be susceptible to the influence of

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the values of his own social field regarding which distinctions might be considered meaningful. The critiques around gender, in particular, have been numerous. Contemporary feminist analysis of his oeuvre points out his reliance on hegemonic binaries concerning identity.57 In Distinction, Bourdieu suggests reductive homologies in class and gender relations, that “the ‘masses’, women, the young” are all described as dominated. That having been said, issues concerning gender are acknowledged, as well as the means to reproduce them: Women’s magazines and all the acknowledged authorities on the body and the legitimate ways to use it transmit the image of womanhood incarnated by those professional manipulators of bureaucratic charm, who are rationally selected and trained, in accordance with a strictly programmed career-structure (with specialized schools, beauty contests and so on), to fulfil the most traditional feminine functions in conformity with bureaucratic norms.58 Bennett’s review of the literature regarding Bourdieu’s engagement with gender suggests that it is a blind spot. Because the sexed body is commonly understood to be “natural,” the importance of gender vis-à-vis taste and class may have been too normalized to be discernible.59 Ironically, taste decisions retain a conservative force in Bourdieu’s definition: classified in a trickle-down model of cultural influence largely controlled by those with the greatest amount of cultural capital or class dominance. It has been said that Bourdieu’s work is embraced by the environmental design community due to his extensive use of spatial metaphors, and to his acknowledgment of space as a powerful social actor.60 Within his taxonomy, architecture and interior design would be recognized as disciplinary fields, their activity and knowledge defining recognizable territories. However, as much as their praxis might overlap, each maintains discrete codes and values that help maintain each with its own identity. Throughout the twentieth centuries, design periodicals aided and abetted in this self-definition. If concepts like genre help predict differences in content or tone in, for instance, an article in Architectural Record versus one in Architectural Digest, they might also help identify their reader’s disciplinary affiliation. Periodicals representing the built environment also could be understood to form and shape one’s context by providing a specific curated lens through which the designed world is perceived. This curation can be difficult to perceive, as the consistencies inherent to a particular genre support the development of perceptual habits. Anything that supports a status quo may read as normal or natural. Bourdieu would point out that a status quo would vary from field to field; constructed socially, not naturally. Any form of media edits, and each form produces its own views and values. Architects and interior designers, in particular, should maintain an active and critical stance in the consumption of design media.

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Kant described assessments of taste as the consideration of phenomena with no motive or use outside the disinterested contemplation of beauty or excellence. In its capacity to form our social identities, taste can be understood to have a very powerful and singular use. Taste is distinction, according to Bourdieu. Taste as it’s what I like both informs and is informed by taste as it’s what we like, an ongoing process.

Notes 1 Slater, Consumer Culture and Modernity, 17–20. 2 Frow, Genre, 72. 3 The malleable form of magazines makes a precise origin difficult to discern, but in the United States, the first titles addressed a broad readership on the subject of politics and history (in John William Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, The Magazine in America: 1741–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3–7. 4 Before the advent of mass production, only the wealthiest individuals had the economic means and the leisure time to spend making choices based on aesthetic considerations. For more detail, please refer to the Introduction of this book. 5 Aynsley and Berry, “Introduction: Publishing the Modern Home: Magazines and the Domestic Interior 1870–1965.” 6 Keeble, “Domesticating Modernity: Woman Magazine and the Modern Home.” 7 Frow, Genre, 2. 8 Aynsley and Berry, “Introduction: Publishing the Modern Home: Magazines and the Domestic Interior 1870–1965,” 1. 9 Muthesius, “Communications between Traders, Users and Artists: The Growth of German Language Serial Publications on Domestic Interior Decoration in the Later Nineteenth Century.” 10 Aynsley, “Graphic Change: Design Change: Magazines for the Domestic Interior, 1890–1930,” 45. 11 Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, 21. 12 Aynsley and Berry, “Introduction: Publishing the Modern Home: Magazines and the Domestic Interior 1870–1965.” 13 Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 9. 14 Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor. 15 For more detail regarding shopping display infrastructures as a form of media, please refer to the chapter “Taste and Photography.” 16 Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor, 12. 17 Slater, Consumer Culture and Modernity, 7. 18 Swartz, Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, 2. 19 Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 11. 20 Bourdieu, 466. 21 For analysis of Thorstein Veblen’s definition of taste, please see the chapter “Taste and Photography.” 22 Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, 13. 23 This is a characteristic of bias, including many forms of prejudice. One might argue that taste is aesthetic bias. For more on this interpretation, please refer to the chapter “Taste and Algorithms.” 24 Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 503. 25 Bourdieu, 6.

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26 A useful metaphor can be found in forms of play; when children play tag, they establish rules and conditions: in-bounds or out-of-bounds, agreed upon explicitly or tacitly for the game to be coherent. A field, for Bourdieu, is in-bounds for a particular set of values, agreed upon tacitly. 27 Bourdieu himself acknowledges that this is an abstraction, and that factors such as gender, ethnicity, and geographic location (among others) would affect the perception of one’s social class (Bourdieu, Distinction, p102). That having been said, it is occupation and educational level that identify his respondents, as labels on the tables that represent his data throughout Distinction. 28 Bourdieu, “Physical Space, Social Space and Habitus,” 9. 29 To trade in clichés: an architect in the 1990s in New York City might have worn black clothing and black-framed glasses without paying direct attention to their ubiquity among other architects in New York City in the 1990s. 30 Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital.” 31 Bourdieu, 24. 32 Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 3. 33 Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, 6. 34 Historian Michael Kammen’s terms authority (the ability to confer status or prestige) would apply to the dominant culture’s legitimizing function. (Michael G. Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century, 1st ed. (Knopf, 1999), 133–134.) 35 Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture; an Analysis and Evaluation of Taste, 11. For more about Gans and taste cultures, please see the chapter “Taste and Mass Media.” 36 Referring back to the example of French intellectuals preferring Asian food and American intellectuals preferring French food: Bourdieu points out that neither choice is demonstrably better than the other. Those preferences are a distinguishing characteristic of that particular field or social domain simply because they are different from the preferences of those participating in other domains. 37 Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 323. 38 Bourdieu, 232. 39 Frow, Genre, 10. 40 Frow, 130. 41 An everyday example would be the use of genres by popular films: romantic comedies, slasher films, etc. 42 Frow, Genre, 12–14. 43 For an in-depth discussion of the Eames and their ability to elude cultural classification, please see the chapter “Taste and Mass Media.” 4 4 Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 77. 45 Entenza, “The Case-Study House Program,” 37. 46 Entenza, 38. 47 This condition mirrors Elsie de Wolfe’s use of photographs illustrating her highend interiors for the middle-class readership of The House in Good Taste, as identified by Penny Sparke. Please see the chapter “Taste and Books” for more details. 48 An article featuring the house also appears in the June 1946 issue of Arts & Architecture, while the house was still under construction. This analysis borrows details from student analyses of CSH #16, by Thomas Bonamici (in 2012) and Eunice Kim (in 2013). 49 Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production,” 39. 50 Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, xvi–xvii. 51 Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production,” 39–41. 52 The simplest and most consistent evidence of this: the absence of people in photographs of architecture in design journals.

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53 This analysis also owes a debt to students’ analyses, notably by Alexandra Goldberg and Ann Skinner (2015). 54 Bennett et al., Culture, Class, Distinction. 55 Bennett et al. 56 Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 12. 57 Bennet et al. produce a thorough review of this critical literature in Culture, Class, Distinction (London; New York: Routledge, 2009). 58 Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 153. 59 Bennett et al., Culture, Class, Distinction, 214–15. 60 There are hundreds of thousands of articles, books, and book chapters on the subject of Bourdieu and architecture. One notable title: Helena Webster, Bourdieu for Architects, Thinkers for Architects; 05 (Abingdon, OX; Routledge, 2011).

Bibliography Aynsley, Jeremy. “Graphic Change: Design Change: Magazines for the Domestic Interior, 1890–1930.” Journal of Design History 18, no. 1 (2005): 43–59. Aynsley, Jeremy, and Francesca Berry. “Introduction: Publishing the Modern Home: Magazines and the Domestic Interior 1870–1965.” Journal of Design History 18, no. 1 (March 2005): 1–5. Aynsley, Jeremy, and Kate Forde, eds. Design and the Modern Magazine. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Bennett, Tony, Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva, Warde Alan, Modesto GayoCal, and David Wright. Culture, Class, Distinction. London; New York: Routledge, 2009. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. ———. In Other Words: Essays towards a Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. ———. “Physical Space, Social Space and Habitus.” Lecture at the University of Oslo, 5.15.1995. ———. Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008. ———. Homo Academicus. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996. ———. “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed.” In The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, edited by Randal Johnson, 29–73. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by J. Richardson. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/bourdieu-­ forms-capital.htm. ———. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. Entenza, John. “Case Study House No. 16 by Rodney A. Walker.” Arts & Architecture, June 1946. ———. “Case Study House No. 20 by Buff, Staub & Hensman, Architects,” November 1958. ———. “The Case-Study House Program.” Arts & Architecture, January 1945.

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Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage Publications, 2011. Frow, John. Genre. London; New York: Routledge, 2005. Gans, Herbert J. Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. New York: Basic Books, 1975. Gruber Garvey, Ellen. The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Kammen, Michael G. American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century. 1st ed. New York: Basic Books/Knopf, 1999. Keeble, Trevor. “Domesticating Modernity: Woman Magazine and the Modern Home.” In Design and the Modern Magazine, edited by Kate Forde and Jeremy Aynsley, 120–137. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Kristina Wilson. “Like a ‘Girl in a Bikini Suit’ and Other Stories: The Herman Miller Furniture Company, Gender and Race at Mid-Century.” Journal of Design History 28, no. 2 ( January 1, 2015): 161–81. Muthesius, Stefan. “Communications between Traders, Users and Artists: The Growth of German Language Serial Publications on Domestic Interior Decoration in the Later Nineteenth Century.” Journal of Design History 18, no. 1 (March 2005): 7–20. Slater, Don. Consumer Culture and Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc. 2008. Sparke, Penny. The Modern Interior. London: Reaktion Books, 2008. Swartz, David. Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Tebbel, John William, and Mary Ellen Zuckerman. The Magazine in America: 1741– 1990. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Walker, Rodney. “A House That Does Not Depend on Servants,” House and Garden, August 1948. ———. “Case Study House #16: Rodney Walker, Architect.” Arts & Architecture, February 1947. Webster, Helena. Bourdieu for Architects. Abingdon, OX; New York: Routledge, 2011.

TASTE AND ZINES

Introduction One way to differentiate between definitions of taste throughout the twentieth century is to consider whether the definition acknowledges hierarchies. Aesthetic assessment, judged universally, would measure all beauty or excellence according to a single scale. Any choice or judgment could be compared with any other: ranked, graded, and ordered. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, working in the late twentieth century, sought to examine taste judgments holistically, examining decisions concerning the most common to the most rarefied issues.1 Each assessment could be classified in a theoretical system describing struggles for social dominance, which, for Bourdieu, is the modus operandi of all taste. His model defined myriad differentiated social domains, in turn created by and reinforcing internal standards of taste. While this schema embraces a plurality of taste standards, these domains retained a hierarchy. His analysis positioned the preferences of socially or economically dominant groups (who embrace “high culture”) as exerting influence over the less so (who embrace popular culture).2 Bourdieu identified the desire for upward social mobility as integral to these relations. The sociologist Hebert Gans identified taste cultures as hypothetical social domains defined by choice. Each taste domain has a set of aesthetic standards that helps differentiate that social group from the next. Unlike Bourdieu’s hierarchical taste structure, Gans’ standards each had a degree of autonomy from the others, predicated on the pleasure or enjoyment that the individuals comprising each domain might experience. Gans referred to these domains as subcultures, reflecting the plural nature of American culture and taste.3 The term subculture shifts in the hands of a number of late-twentieth-century academics. As described in the writing of authors like Dick Hebdige and Stuart Hall, a DOI: 10.4324/9781003164388-6

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FIGURE 5.1 Kurt

Schwitters and Theo van Doesburg. Kleine Dada Soiree. 1922 | credit line: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art | Licensed by SCALA/ Art Resource, NY

FIGURE 5.2 ONYX/

Charles Albatross & Patrick Redson (Woodson Rainey & Ron Williams), 1970. The first broadsheet (Woodson Rainey, Ron Willaims, and Esther Choi, “ONYX: Another Interview,” May 11, 2013. | credit line: ©ONYX 19

subculture is made identifiable by its distinction from mainstream values, aesthetic or otherwise. Subcultural taste is an anti-taste, a form of resistance. This taste is a conscious tactic, a set of choices designed or chosen deliberately to create a recognizable boundary condition to a status quo. These preferences and aesthetics actively challenge the possibility of a universal definition of taste by those who would challenge assumptions about social and aesthetic norms. Decentralized ­media—media made for and by its users—plays a vital role in those identities being manifest, both to its members and society at large. Posters, leaflets, mailart, and zines publicize alternative aesthetics quickly and cheaply from materials available at hand, by and for an alternative public.4

Decentralized media and the rise of zines Decentralization refers to systems of both production and distribution, often indicating peer-to-peer communication.5 It is a phenomenon significantly predating the late twentieth century. In their loosest forms, informal local media

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systems have existed since people began to write, copy, and self-publish. Posters, pamphlets, fliers, and broadsheets have been used by individuals to communicate for centuries, often to express resistance in some form.6

FIGURE 5.3 Jamie

Reid, Sophie Richmond, Vivienne Westwood, and Ray Stevenson. Anarchy in the UK no. 1 (Zine cover featuring Soo Catwoman), 1976. | credit line: Digital Image© The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/ Art Resource, NY/ Copyright Sex Pistols Residuals

This is the first issue of a fanzine for the punk band Sex Pistols, produced in to promote a tour to support an album by the same name (Subcultures Network, Ripped, Torn and Cut: Pop, Politics and Punk Fanzines From 1976 [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018], 4)

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Self-publishing has been a means of distribution deployed by several art movements in the twentieth century. Artists associated with Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, and the Situationists employed techniques such as collages, bricolages, and detournement of images to produce ephemera that could be exhibited or distributed beyond the editorial influence of conventional gallery systems or publishers.7 British-Jamaican academic and author Stuart Hall, cites mainstream and mass media as mechanisms to reproduce social conditions. Mass media, along with state and cultural institutions, normalizes cultural constructs. From determining what skills or knowledge are valued to promoting particular family structures, mass media reflects and transmits those values. Hall identifies this process as sustained by cooperation across social classes while benefiting the interests of the most powerful classes.8 The consistency of mass media messaging naturalizes its values and reflections of taste, making them so ubiquitous as to render them almost invisible. However, decentralized media systems have an advantage over mass media: their ability to address a smaller readership. Niche topics can target niche audiences with interests not likely represented by the “media for everyone” approach of mass media. The interest of the few or even the marginalized can be made visible and shared, if largely local to the community that produced it. One form of decentralized media associated with the subcultural movements of the late twentieth century in both the United Kingdom and the United States is the zine. Zines are said to have originated in the 1930s in the United States when fans of science fiction began to publish and trade their own stories. The term “fanzine” became recognized as the abbreviation of “fan magazine” and later on was shortened to “zine.”9 Critical to its late twentieth-century rise were developments in the technologies used to produce paper copies and affordable access to those technologies. Zines are made by amateurs, often notfor-profit operations, their producers rarely commanding the credentials nor the economic capital required to produce printed publications formally. By the 1970s, the ubiquity of copy shops and cheap photocopies enabled the inexpensive and speedy reproduction required for a small-batch press.10 Zines are by nature well-positioned to be vehicles of protest or critique. In the tradition of an underground press, a zine can be produced without any form of official approval, whether that approval is governmental, religious, or institutional. Production requires no traditional gatekeepers of taste—no publishers, critics, not even a significant marketplace. Dissemination encounters no academic or institutional obstacles. Walter Benjamin, writing in the 1930s, had identified an analogous condition in “letters to the editor”: For centuries it was in the nature of literature that a small number of writers confronted many thousands of readers. But this began to change toward the end of the past century….It began with the space set aside for ‘letters to the editor’ in the

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daily press.…[T]he distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic [axiomatic] character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer.11 Benjamin describes an effect that could be attributed to forms of decentralized media, as well—a blur between author and public, suggesting an expansion of who might be considered an artist or an author. When the power to disseminate content becomes distributed, the authority (or capital, per Bourdieu) to determine what should be published or broadcast can be claimed as well. Unregulated nonhierarchical communications systems like zines provide alternatives to conventional publishing. They become a critical means by which shared forms of knowledge like common sense or taste develop among specific populations. Zines are positioned to address heterogeneous readerships with multiple voices, each potentially espousing a different set of values and together challenging monolithic or universal models of taste. As zines and other decentralized forms circulate—posters and fliers among them—ideas and aesthetics well beyond the conventional manifest in the physical environment, however subtle its messages might be to an uncomprehending larger public.

FIGURE 5.4 Untitled,

1970, Linder, Purchased 2007 (Tate) | Credit line: © Linder, Photo: Tate

Much of Linder’s photo-collage work was featured in The Secret Public, a zine published by the artist and John Savage. The zine’s title reflecting the lack of mainstream press coverage of their work (Laura Havlin, “Jon Savage’s The Secret Public,” Dazed).

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The production of zines, posters, and flyers appropriated reprographic technologies that had ostensibly been developed by and for relatively mainstream purposes. The ubiquity and accessibility of photocopies supported collage, montage, and assemblage in particular—the compositing of copied fragments into a new and unique whole.

Cultural studies Academic acknowledgment of subcultures is (historically) situated in the rise of cultural studies. In the 1950s and 1960s, cultural studies emerged as a field that investigates the relationship of cultural practices to their social and political milieu. This field has been described as a hybrid, incorporating approaches from sociology, anthropology, and semiotics.12 It is fundamentally inclusive. While the high-low culture debates published in the early twentieth century classified popular culture as a degraded form of cultural production, the field of cultural studies positions pop products and praxis as central to understanding social and political systems. Cultural studies began its emergence into prominence parallel to the sociologist Herbert Gans’ study of popular culture. It was Gans’ position that popular culture was not simply “imposed on the audience from above.”13 Writers like Stuart Hall and Dick Hebdige also produced analyses that helped recognize the power of the popular, with greater import and influence to taste than simply establishing its lack.

Early analyses of cultural studies A key spokesperson for cultural studies, Stuart Hall cautions against the dismissive ways that popular culture has been treated by its critics. Hall’s position is that popular (or low) culture has been set in opposition to esoteric (or high) culture in an ahistorical manner, as a fixed set of meanings and values.14 Moreover, pop culture has been treated as both internally homogeneous and monolithic (as if it were a clearly bounded domain). These conditions facilitate pop’s classification as distinct from more rarefied or esoteric cultural production, positioned below them on a universal scale of aesthetic value. This does not allow cultural values and meanings to evolve in different temporal and spatial contexts. Nor does this system of classification allow for the fluidity by which high and low culture appropriate elements from one another.15 Cultural studies moves the assessment of popular culture from the numbers of consumers (or dollars spent) to the production of cultural impacts and legitimacy. Its goal: a more holistic understanding. Hall does not define taste so much as he analyzes a social (and political) method through aesthetics. Like Bourdieu, Hall’s position is that legitimate

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assessment standards, as applied to any artifact or practice, would depend on genre, domain, or category.16 Like Hall, British cultural theorist Dick Hebdige’s writing is primarily concerned with the aesthetic and sociopolitical impacts of popular culture. Hebdige foregrounds the politics of aesthetics as integral to relationships between people and structures of power and representation. While Hall’s work concentrates on the theoretical underpinning of these relationships, Hebdige may be best known for the application of that theory to social groups and the development of their aesthetics. His analysis examines how rules, codes, and conventions constitute those groups. In particular, Hebdige investigates how standards establish normative cultural hegemonies, rendered universal and taken as “givens” for the whole of a society.17 Those conventions are identified as communication elements in a system that benefits the normative and dominant social groups. These include concepts like common sense: a kind of knowledge conventionally conditioned by mainstream values but experienced as natural. Hebdige’s essay “Towards a Cartography of Taste 1935–1962” uses post-war Britain as a case study, suggesting that mainstream assessments of aesthetics in that context correlate closely to tradition. Reliance on inherited, established, or customary taste conventions provide clear benefits, including the comforts of cultural continuity and a reinforcement of a sense of community. As described by Hebdige in this essay, taste is (seemingly) straightforward; it represents “where to draw the line between good and bad, high and low, the ugly and the beautiful, the ephemeral and the substantial.”18 While Pierre Bourdieu describes taste as a set of subconscious responses, forming patterns in a recursive relationship between individual preferences and those exhibited in their social contexts, Hebdige simply suggests that individual preference is the subconscious expression of community values. In his map of British taste, the familiarity of customary values often veiled the nationalism, elitism, and racism imbricated in that sense of tradition.

Americanization For Hebdige, media is both the subject and object in these debates. Hebdige identifies popular or commercial cultural products as consistently opposed to “quality” and “taste,” mining literary sources (writers like Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell) for the language describing these positions.19 Pop culture was seen to be an invasive, particularly American, influence. Americanization represents all things homogenized and disposable. The British consensus that Hebdige identifies represents America as having no past and therefore, no culture. It was seen as ruled by competition, profit, and the drive to acquire: the bête noire of the post-war British status quo.20

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The means of this invasion were largely mass media and its content, ephemeral consumer products. Styles of clothing, music, automobiles, and hairstyles were publicized directly through imported television programming and movies and indirectly through American trends represented in British media. This invasive influence is not limited to consumers but to the design community as well; Hebdige identifies streamlining—the smoothing of forms, emulating the aerodynamic geometries of planes or ships—as an early American import, applied liberally to products with no need for speed. Discernible in products from chairs to toasters, its arbitrary applications were in direct conflict with the sober functionalism promoted by modernism, the tenants of which were dominant in Europe from the 1930s onward.21 Unlike the relatively free market of U.S. post-war communications, the United Kingdom maintained a number of literary and artistic institutions dedicated to maintaining aesthetic standards, including state-run media systems like the British Broadcasting Corporation (the BBC) and design reform organizations such as the Design and Industries Associations (DIA). Hebdige identifies these as the gatekeepers of public taste. The close relationship between these institutions consolidated both power and authority regarding public taste. According to the historian Michael Kammen, power was produced in the production and distribution of media, influencing the landscape of cultural content available, while authority signified the ability to influence the public’s opinion on that content.22 In possessing power and authority, organizations such as the BBC and the DIA created and supported a remarkably coherent and clear image of mainstream aesthetic standards in the United Kingdom. This also constituted a consolidation, a centralized node of influence over publishing.23 Imported American aesthetics were reviled by the traditional British gatekeepers, who may have recognized the threat in their accessibility and reproducibility. According to Hebdige, under siege were the qualities claimed as ideals by both the British middle class and the European design establishment: authenticity, uniqueness, honesty, and functionality.24 The imported aesthetics, however, did have particular appeal to British youth, especially in the relative affluence of the post-war years. The influence of American style came to connote distinct domains within youth culture in the United Kingdom, as young people adopted fashion and music from popular sources from the United States.25 Using age to categorize forms of consumption was a relatively novel ­phenomenon—Hebdige points out that teenagers were not clearly identified as a kind of consumer until the 1960s.26 To describe the embrace of these alien imports in terms of the straightforward economic activity of youth, however, would be to miss the impacts of these choices on social identity. These American aesthetics were used to express generational distinctions and in some cases, evolved to become highly organized forms of resistance to dominant groups and ideology.

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It is not a single choice, nor the preferences of individuals per se, that Hebdige emphasizes. What seems to interest him most is the way that details from popular culture (as a broad spectrum of phenomena) start to form recognizable languages or codes: [A] fixing of a chain of associations…which has since become thoroughly sedimented in British common sense… such typifications emerge only slowly; meanings coalesce around particular configurations of attitudes, values and events and are gradually naturalised as they circulate in different contexts.27 This preoccupation was to inform his best-known work, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979).

Dick Hebdige: Subculture Subculture is an extensive analysis of the development of aesthetic, social, and political codes. In this text, Hebdige details the resistance of predominantly working-class youth in post-war Britain. Subculture analyzes their cultural

1839 Geary St., 1979 July 28. 1979 | credit line: Place: Box: 9, Folder: 17, Johan Kugelberg punk collection, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

FIGURE 5.5 Flier:

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norms and the role that things, spaces, attitudes, values, and events played in making those groups identifiable, a recognizable aesthetic constructed as a badge of belonging. Throughout, Hebdige describes these social ecologies and the evolution of American aesthetics into new differentiated forms. Hebdige frequently refers to clothing as the medium through which styles communicate meaning. For the conventional person, styles of dress are part of a system of differences fulfilling socially proscribed roles and options, qualified by economics and personal preference. Individual choices transmit messages about class, status, and self-regard, regardless of whether the message is intentional. These choices are judgments of taste, as Bourdieu might have described, made subconsciously, reflecting one’s social context. To the degree that these choices seem unremarkable or natural, they express a relative normality. The “deviant,” however, constructs an intentional message. A deviant choice, sartorial and otherwise, directs attention to itself and offers itself up to be read.28 As early as the 1950s, this was evident in groups like the Teddy Boys. “Teds” were predominantly white lower-working-class youth, adopting flamboyantly unconventional fashions such as zoot suits, popular in the 1940s African American jazz scene.29 Hebdige suggests this strategy of deviance as a response to exclusion and disenfranchisement. Conformity does not guarantee acceptance or a sense of belonging, illustrated by the failures of Black post-war immigrants’ attempts to assimilate into white UK middle-class society, despite adopting local cultural conventions such as dress.30 Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, sartorial influences from the United States and the Caribbean were borrowed and incorporated by groups of Black youth in the United Kingdom, creating aesthetics now deliberately distinct from the norms of a rejecting mainstream culture.31 As these signifying fashions continued to evolve, distinctions between these non-conforming groups became discernible. An ecology of signs, rendered in style, became perceptible in the relationship between Black and white youth cultures—the borrowing and adapting of elements (including from one another) to construct a group identity made visible in taste.32 However differently their aesthetics might evolve, their core ideologies had in common their opposition to the status quo. In that opposition, and to the degree that these groups developed recognizable “configurations of attitudes, values and events,” they became recognizable as subcultures.33

Punk aesthetics The U.K. punk scene is Subculture’s primary case study: emerging from this milieu into mainstream consciousness in the mid-1970s. Punks were largely disaffected white, urban, and working-class youth, united by devotion—to bands like the Sex Pistols—and alienation.34 Punk’s message: nihilism, a violent rejection of the status quo, and a protest of the structural inequities that

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marginalized its constituency. Punk’s aesthetic: noise. It is not enough to differentiate from the mainstream; punk style goes out of its way to upset and offend through a constellation of means: fashion, music, hairstyles, and graphics. It is amateurish (often do-it-yourself or DIY) and crude, in opposition to polish and professionalism. Above all, it is by and large ephemeral.35 Punk is manifest mainly in what can be fashioned from borrowed elements, like the zines that would disseminate its aesthetics.36 Author Greil Marcus, in Lipstick Traces: The Secret History of the 20th Century, compares the punk movement to the Dadaists, in their use of images designed to shock and in performances designed to confound.37 Both punk and Dada are anti-aesthetics, developed in response to normative cultural and political contexts, expressing resistance to power, tradition, and “good taste.” Punk uses the actively ugly to draw the eye, to engage and move the viewer—in contrast to unremarkable normative aesthetics, which by nature try not to offend.38 These aesthetic choices were clearly not the result of preferences conditioned from an early age by upbringing or education (as Bourdieu’s theories might have suggested), but neither were they devoid of contextual influence. These strategies depend on a shared cultural tradition and literacy in the same language of signs. When Hebdige suggests that mainstream taste can be understood as preferences substantially formed through a shared cultural tradition, subcultural taste seems at first an inversion of that form, relying on the novel or shocking to resist the status quo. Punk taste could be understood as a protest, a reaction to a restriction of choice. Hebdige identifies subcultures as local in nature, forming within a constellation of specific social, economic, and political conditions; the U.K. case studies he cites could also be considered placeless. Subcultural life frequently thrives in impersonal, highly regulated, and physically marginalized spaces like social housing complexes. Bourdieu notes the adage of making a virtue out of necessity in the formation of taste—in other words, that one may unconsciously learn to love or want that which one can have.39 Punk taste transmutes this principle, actively making virtues out of disadvantages.

Susan Sontag: camp Camp, like punk, is a set of performed preferences for kitsch, a deliberately bad taste. As described by writer, philosopher, and theorist Susan Sontag, camp is an unnatural sensibility, at its essence a love of artifice and exaggeration, a discovery of license to enjoy outside of narrow boundaries of good. Sontag’s essay Notes on Camp (1964) describes camp as a form of taste-making: embracing devalued cultural products and assigning them new values through this embrace.40 For Sontag, camp is a way of “seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.”41 It is a means to discover and enjoy style over substance, the artificial over the natural, the exaggerated over the elegant.42 Streamlining, cited by

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Hebdige as offensive to the functionalist sensibilities of early modern European design, could produce design susceptible to a camp gaze, in its exuberant forms and the occasionally pretentious rationalizations made by its designers. The aesthetics of camp do not (at first) seem to resemble those of punk; its methodologies, however, are similar. Borrowing from Clement Greenberg’s famous descriptions of kitsch, camp and punk both require “a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected ­self-consciousness [camp and punk] can take advantage of for its own ends.”43 Both find material from mainsteam culture and media to rework to new ends. Both punk and camp empower the consumer or user of pop culture to revise the perceived values of a cultural product. Sontag, however, describes camp as achieving this simply through its apprehension, a beauty (of sorts) in the eye of the beholder, but qualified by a shared sensibility.44 Camp and kitsch may both require “a fully matured cultural tradition,” but they are not synonymous. When Greenberg described kitsch as “the debased… simulacra of genuine culture,” he was describing the qualities of the artifact itself and referred to the physical conditions of its production. According to Sontag, camp is a mode of perception akin to an acquired taste; camp refers to the pleasure found in the artifact’s experience, not the artifact itself. A camp point of view sees a gap between intent and effect. Sontag’s definitions suggest that camp itself provides evidence of the mercurial nature of cultural meaning. Without physical alteration or change in context, camp acknowledges the possibility of different stories or meanings emerging: Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn’t reverse things. It doesn’t argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art and for life a different—or supplementary—set of standards.45 As described by Sontag, camp can be understood as a form of taste through the relationship between personal preferences or pleasures and those shared by a collective. To share a new interpretation of an existing object coherently (at a minimum) requires a shared understanding of its conventionally perceived meaning. Both Hebdige and Sontag describe aesthetic strategies that involve remaking the artifacts of mainstream culture by those who would or could not conform to its conventions. A punk aesthetic produces deliberate distinctions to normative aesthetic values, most effective when mobilized as a highly visible contrast to the status quo. Camp is also a strategy of the marginalized but one necessarily practiced in such a way as to be invisible to outsiders. Sontag (and others) describe camp as a specifically gay and transgendered sensibility.46 Sontag wrote “Notes on Camp” at a time when public disclosure of a non-conforming sexual identity was to leave one vulnerable to ostracism or violence. Camp offers

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an aesthetic (held in common) that secretly remade the conventional in plain sight. According to Sontag, this was the essential freedom embedded in taste— within the realm of subjective preferences, it is not governed by the sovereignty of reason. Taste has no system (and no proofs) and so could be understood to exist without responsibility to hegemonic values.47 Sontag’s position is that pure camp is naïve, that “you can’t do camp on purpose.”48 Its modus operandi was to re-write through a new reading, highlighting and exaggerating the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of the dominant culture, to show how any norm is socially constructed. Its dependence on its opposition to a status quo and on the re-working of existing artifacts meant camp design, according to Sontag, would be a contradiction in terms. That being said, a camp aesthetic is now generally understood to be any that embraces artifice or ostentation, often for fun (divesting some of its power as a secret aesthetic code of the oppressed), now something available to a dominated or dominating class.49 For Anglo-American author Christopher Isherwood, fun is essential to understand camp’s power and appeal: “you’re not making fun of it; you’re making fun out of it.”50 Isherwood’s characterization emphasizes the pleasure of participating in a shared sensibility. This form of taste would be considered illegitimate by much of Enlightenment philosophy, which required a suspension of any interest outside of aesthetic concerns in forming a judgment of taste. Camp taste describes an alternative form in poignant contrast to those disinterested pleasures. This taste, however ­characterized as frivolous, can foster a sense of belonging. It has a critical use, driven by necessity—turning the formerly frivolous into a virtue.

Case studies: spaces of appropriation With little access to capital, the spatial strategies associated with most youth subcultures are as appropriative as their ephemeral aesthetics. Punk culture is primarily performed. Performance is explicit in music, dress, and social forms; it is implicit through temporary occupations of spaces like clubs and bars.51 Most spaces identified as punk were occupied provisionally (not always legally) and not necessarily designed (in the way designers think about a design process).52

CBGB By the late 1970s, punk had expanded well beyond cities in the United Kingdom; an eventual epicenter was New York City. Its emergence in the United States illustrates Stuart Hall’s analysis: changes in context produce changes in culture, whether or not these changes are immediately discernible to those outside its immediate experience. Ostensibly defined as rejecting normative culture and politics, punk retains the hallmarks of taste in its attention to authenticity, defined here as a commitment to a group’s core values. Those too

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from Tuesday Night 1977 (a zine about CBGB), editor: Richard Frey, 09.20.1977 | credit line: Richard Frey

FIGURE 5.6 Page

FIGURE 5.7 Detail

of an interior wall, CBGB | credit line: Mary Altaffer/AP/ Shutterstock

might evolve, over time and in different contexts. Hebdige describes the New York punk scene as more cosmopolitan than its British incarnation, influenced by sources like the literary avant-garde and underground film. Punk in New York is less ideological, and its devotees significantly less distinguished by class or background.53 New York, however, was to be the site of punk’s best-known “authentic” interior: CBGB, a notorious music venue, usually attributed as the ground zero of punk in the United States.54 CBGB, in its early years, hosted performances from Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Misfits, and the Ramones. Its surfaces were a site of performance as well. Images of the interior record layers of graffiti, filth, posters, and leaflets applied to walls, ceilings, and even fixtures. At any moment, the audience member is ready to turn into a space-maker. This is a punk interior—the surfaces created for and by its users, an accrual of bad behavior over time, absorbing conventional (even banal) construction into a new, ever-evolving composition.55 CBGB is, in this way, the result of taste, ­unmitigated by an organized design process. Its interior directly reflects the choices and preferences of its users, a local and specific sensus communis writ large: less encoded than shouted.

Skatepunks Yet subcultural taste is only legible in the context of the mainstream aesthetic values it appropriates and reworks. Like satire, it is only entirely understandable to those well conscious of the ideological encoding of its source material. As defined by writers like Dick Hebdige, this taste values an inverse of dominant

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values found in a particular context. As that subculture produces a more mature cultural tradition (with its own discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness), it becomes available to others.56 Punk aesthetics remain present in the cultural landscape, produced and reproduced across forms of media (decentralized and otherwise). Through publication (via informal and conventional means) those aesthetics become available for re-appropriation.57 New audiences are free to participate, to take advantage of those artifacts and praxis for their own ends. As it becomes familiar, punk becomes less shocking and more naturalized. Over time, a taste for punk begins to resemble a taste predicated on tradition and a desire for belonging. The skatepunk scene, one moment in the ongoing evolution of punk aesthetics and sensibilities, is an example of this. Skatepunk is generally identified as a subgenre of punk rock. Its origin myths identify its emergence from the West Coast U.S. hardcore punk scene, named for its popularity among skateboarders and association with skateboarding culture. That culture, in turn, is a phenomenon associated with southern California beginning in the early 1980s.58 Like its namesake, skatepunk aesthetics were essentially ephemeral, primarily expressed through music, fashion, and graphics, all of which have been extensively recorded and disseminated through zines.59 Skatepunk spatial strategies are also appropriative, often oriented around borrowing existing spaces designed for other purposes. These occupations were pure performance, taking over plazas, stairs, and sturdier street furniture and fittings in the pursuit of venues to hone and demonstrate one’s skating prowess.60 As public (and outside) as these displays may be, tactical occupations of existing constructed environments have more in common with the adaptive processes that form interiors than to the codified design processes associated with urban design or architecture. Interiors exist within and without the domain of designed environments. Interior design includes both amateur and

from Skeezer (a zine), Spring 1988. Ian Birlem and Adam Ayer, editors. | credit line: Ian Birlem | Images found on skateandannoy.com (Randy Kilwag, editor).

FIGURES 5.8 AND 5.9 Pages

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professional praxis, reflecting and supporting a broader and more inclusive set of values. Architecture requires property and capital and is thus more likely to reflect the values of the status quo.61 Unlike the U.K. punk movement, however, skatepunk culture is most associated with white middle-class teenagers in the United States.62 While they too, as a group, might lack access to substantial capital on their own, theirs were not the same conditions of deprivation and alienation present as punk emerged in the United Kingdom. Skatepunk is recognizable as a subculture but is more fundamentally identified around a leisure activity and its associated music, with a less entrenched political position opposing the status quo. The appropriation cycle continues in its new socio-cultural context, as punk’s products and by-products are inculcated with new values.

Conclusion Whether the beauty of an object lies in the eye of the beholder or exists as intrinsic to the object itself is a recurrent theme throughout the history of taste. Most definitions acknowledge some relationship between individual perception and a collective assessment. Hall, Hebdige, and Sontag integrate philosophical and sociological concerns to pursue a paradoxically holistic view of culture and taste, one that fragments the concept of a unified and monolithic status quo as an ideal. Both Hebdige’s descriptions of subcultural taste and Sontag’s essay on camp foreground the alienating effects of the mainstream, concentrating instead on the aesthetic rules, codes, and conventions that identify groups at the margins. Their proposals challenge Bourdieu’s trickle-down model of cultural influence, whereby the aesthetic preferences of the most powerful consistently serve as models for powerless. Punk and camp aesthetics co-opt and remake (or reread) cultural artifacts made recognizable in the culture at large, now in service of opposition, not aspiration. Moreover, Hebdige points out that by repositioning and remaking these artifacts, their conventional uses and meanings are subverted. This reveals the constructed nature of all cultural codes and unmasks mainstream culture’s principle defining characteristic: “a tendency to masquerade as nature.”63 While Hebdige identifies social class as a factor in the adoption of a punk identity, it is one among many. Hebdige and Sontag’s definitions position age, race, and sexual orientation as critical to forming social distinctions. These ­d ivisions are more lateral vis-à-vis class, as opposed to the strictly vertical strata proposed by Veblen and Bourdieu. Zines and other decentralized forms of media were central to subcultural communality, media that could be produced outside the editorial control of traditional institutional gatekeepers of taste and relatively free of the economic pressures of a mainstream marketplace. Zines can be produced without access

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to power or authority, supporting alternative spaces and forms of creative production. Decentralized media empowers readers to become authors, artists, or publishers; in so doing, they challenge institutional hegemonies around what is design and who legitimately participates in its production. These struggles around legitimacy and recognition offer a means to define territory shared by punks and interior design, despite the entrenched sensibility that their concerns might never overlap. Historian Penny Sparke positions taste as associated with feminine spheres (notably the domestic interior); its role in the design and fabrication was uniformly marginalized by a male-dominated professional design establishment in both the United Kingdom and the United States in early modernity. According to Sparke, taste (as deployed in interiors) connoted the irrational, the personal, and the unprofessional. Nonconforming to the ideals of architectural modernity, interior design would evolve to provide an alternative set of aesthetic standards and values, contributing to an evolving design pluralism over the rest of the century. Both punk and camp acknowledge perception and consumption as potentially creative praxis, a vision of cultural production as fundamentally pluralistic. Taste, here, could be understood as an anti-taste, deliberately embracing what conventional standards of good taste would term vulgar, degraded, or ugly. It is a conscious tactic, a set of choices designed or chosen deliberately. While the discernment of beauty seems irrelevant here, both punk and camp taste enable the effects of a distinct and recognizable sensus communis, central to crafting a collective identity and offering a methodology to draft new standards as needed.

Notes 1 It was Bourdieu’s position that objective standards applied to art veiled the social hierarchies inherent to those standards, that universal models of taste privileged the tastes of the dominating classes. For more on Bourdieu and the art world, please see the chapter “Taste and Algorithms.” 2 “High culture” refers to the fine arts and architecture, and “popular culture” to myriad forms of entertainment, including mass media. For a more nuanced definition, please see the chapter “Taste and Mass Media.” 3 Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture, 13. 4 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London; New York: Routledge, 2010), 111. 5 Decentralization is a term usually used to refer to radically distributed communication systems, like the internet. However, small-scale publishing has long addressed the needs of particular groups, not uncommonly those marginalized by the status quo. As just one example, small-scale publishing supported the cohesion of Black church communities in the United States throughout the twentieth century (William Vance Tollinger Jr., “An Outpouring of ‘Faithful’ Words: Protestant Publishing in the United States,” in A History of the Book in America: Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940, eds. Carl F.

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Kaestle and Janice A. Radway, vol. 4 [Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009], 360–316.). 6 Shannon Mattern, “Steel and Ink: The Printed City,” in Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 44–49, https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt1pwt6rn.5. 7 Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). Marcus defines détournement as “the theft of aesthetic artifacts from their contexts and their diversion into contexts of one’s own devise” (190). 8 Stuart Hall, “Culture, the Media, and the ‘Ideological Effect,’” in STUART HALL: Essential Essays, ed. David Morley, vol. 1 (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2019), 317–20. Unlike Bourdieu, Hall sees this dominance maintained by a reverence for tradition, a reproduction of the social hierarchies of an idealized past. 9 Frank Farmer, “Zines and Those Who Make Them: Introducing the Citizen Bricoleur,” in After the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics, and the Citizen Bricoleur (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2013), 34–38, https://doi.org/10.2307/j. ctt4cgk3b.5. 10 Subcultures Network, Ripped, Torn and Cut, 31–32. 11 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, eds. Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969). 12 David Morley, “General Introduction: A Life in Essays,” in STUART HALL: Essential Essays, ed. David Morley, vol. 1 (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2019), 10. 13 Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture, 1. For more on Herbert Gans’ definitions of taste, please see chapter “Taste after Mass Media.” 14 Hall, “Culture, the Media, and the ‘Ideological Effect,’” 358. 15 Hall, 359. The techniques of appropriation are studied in depth in the chapter “Taste and the Internet.” 16 For more on Pierre Bourdieu’s theories, please see chapter “Taste and Magazines.” 17 Hebdige, Subculture, 5–11. 18 Dick Hebdige, “Towards a Cartography of Taste 1935–1962,” in Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (London; New York: Routledge 2016), 47. 19 Hebdige does not mention personal preferences in his definitions of taste—strictly about aesthetics groups might have in common, but the authors he cites use descriptions of individual characters with anti-establishment aesthetics. 20 Hebdige suggests this was assessment driven by a mixture of curiosity, envy, and resentment. 21 Hebdige, “Towards a Cartography of Taste 1935–1962,” 59–60. Design historian Penny Sparke characterized modernism’s rejection of what was perceived to be arbitrary or merely decorative as an attempt to marginalize taste itself, characterizing excellence in design as espousing rational and quantitative measures, such as function or efficiency (Penny Sparke, “Taste and the Interior Designer,” in After Taste: Expanded Practice in Interior Design, eds. Kent Kleinman, Joanna Merwood-­Salisbury, and Lois Weinthal, 1st ed. [New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012]). 22 Michael G. Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 1999), 133–36. 23 Design Historian Jonathan M. Woodham’s analysis of British design organizations was largely run by a cultural elite and promoted the ideas that aesthetic judgment required training and taste (in Jonathan M. Woodham, “Managing British Design Reform I: Fresh Perspectives on the Early Years of the Council of Industrial Design,” Journal of Design History 9, no. 1 [1996]: 55–65.). 24 Hebdige, “Towards a Cartography of Taste 1935–1962,” 72.

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25 In 1958, Dwight Macdonald published an article in The New Yorker that credited American businessman Eugene Gilbert with inventing the American teenager, suggesting that they are the product of marketing and popular media. Macdonald suggests the impossibility of determining whether popular culture reflected or molded them. (Dwight Macdonald, “A Caste, a Culture, a Market—II,” The New Yorker, November 21, 1958, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1958/11/29/ inventing-the-american-teenager.) 26 Both Hebdige and Bourdieu position class as differentiating taste, but Hebdige is to put particular emphasis on age as an active factor. (Hebdige, “Towards a Cartography of Taste 1935–1962,” 69). 27 Hebdige, Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things, 57. 28 Hebdige, Subculture, 101. 29 Harry Sword, “Greased Quiffs and Switchblades: Growing Up Teddy Boy in 1970s England,” VICE, February 2, 2015. https://www.vice.com/en/article/yvq8kx/ what-will-become-of-the-teddy-boys-282. 30 Throughout Subculture, Hebdige is explicit about the racism that Black immigrants encountered in the United Kingdom, a more entrenched and sinister boundary condition. 31 Hebdige, Subculture, 41–45. To put this in terms Bourdieu might have used: immigrant populations may lack the cultural capital (the knowledge, dispositions, and perceptual habits) of a native or colonizing population, having been conditioned to norms in a different social and cultural milieu. 32 Hebdige, 41–45. Bourdieu might have characterized this relationship as a struggle for distinction. 33 Hebdige, Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things, 57. 34 Stuart Hall described the precarious economic conditions of the U.K. working class in the 1970s–80s largely as the result of globalization and the authoritarian populism dominating national politics (in Morley, “General Introduction: A Life in Essays,” 6–7). 35 Frank Farmer, After the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics, and the Citizen Bricoleur, (Boulder, CO: Utah State University Press, 2013), 47. 36 It is missing where property and economic capital are required, as is the case with architecture (Karin Tehve, introduction to Appropriate(d) Interiors, eds. Deborah Schneiderman, Anca I. Lasc, and Karin Tehve (New York; London: Routledge, 2022), 3). 37 Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, 33–37. 38 Hebdige remarks on the “positive meaning in such a blatant disavowal of Britishness” (Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 64). 39 Bourdieu, Distinction, 317. 40 Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1966), 275–292. 41 Sontag, 277. 42 Sontag, 277–79. 43 Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde & Kitsch.” 4 4 Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 277. 45 Sontag, 286. 46 Notable among these are the author Christopher Isherwood and artist/writer Philip Core. One of Core’s key camp characteristics: “CAMP is not necessarily homosexual. Anyone of anything can be camp. But it takes one to know one.” (Philip Core, Camp: The Lie That Tells the Truth [London: Plexus, 1984].) 47 Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 34. 48 A few examples: author Christopher Isherwood (cited below) uses camp as a verb but suggests that its deliberate performance is a low form. The early films of director

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John Waters are an oft-cited example of camp artifacts, designed to be so. The Spring 2019 Costume Institute Gala and Exhibition, Camp: Notes on Fashion, explored its evocation by contemporary fashion design. 49 Camp: Notes on Fashion is an example. 50 Christopher Isherwood, The World in the Evening (London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1954), 125. 51 The shop was famously co-owned by Malcom McLaren, manager of the Sex Pistols, and set through several incarnations. In 1971, it was named “Let It Rock” and sold Teddy Boy clothing (in Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 41). 52 Retail outlets like Vivien Westwood’s shop at 430 King’s Road in London are frequently cited as punk. The clothing sold at 430 King’s Row in London may be identifiable as punk, but the design of the shop interior itself was fairly conventional. 53 Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 27. 54 The website for the now defunct club (cbgb.com) proclaims it to be “THE UNDISPUTED BIRTHPLACE OF PUNK.” 55 Karin Tehve, introduction to Appropriate(d) Interiors, 4. 56 A reference to Clement Greenberg’s essay “Avant Garde & Kitsch.” The full quote: “The precondition for kitsch, a condition without which kitsch would be impossible, is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends” (Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde & Kitsch,” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays [Boston: Beacon Press, 1992].) 57 In his essay “Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy and the Cultural Turn,” Stuart Hall describes consuming or borrowing from popular forms of media as a process and says that even the most formulaic mass-produced cultural artifacts might be integrated and transformed—with “new modes of feeling, habits and judgments”— over time. (Stuart Hall, “Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy and the Cultural Turn,” in STUART HALL: Essential Essays, ed. David Morley, vol. 1 [Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2019, 39].) 58 Monica Sklar, Punk Style (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 60–61. 59 Randy Kilwag, “Skate and Annoy,” accessed 07.12.22, skateandannoy.com. 60 “The Boys of Dogtown,” National Museum of American History, accessed 09.19.22, https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/2011/09/the-boys-of-dogtown.html. 61 Tehve, introduction to Appropriate(d) Interiors, 3. 62 Sklar, Punk Style, 64. 63 Hebdige is quoting the French theorist Roland Barthes, who cautions against the confusion of history and nature throughout his work, notably in Mythologies (Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 102).

Bibliography Barabas, Chelsea, Neha Narula, and Ethan Zuckerman. “Decentralized Social Networks Sound Great. Too Bad They’ll Never Work,” September 8, 2017. https://www. wired.com/story/decentralized-social-networks-sound-great-too-bad-theyllnever-work/. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 2012. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, edited by Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, 217–252. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

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CBGB | Birthplace of NYC’s Rock, Folk & Punk Music. “CBGB & OMFUG: Home.” Accessed November 20, 2020. cbgb.com. Core, Philip. Camp: The Lie That Tells the Truth. London: Plexus, 1984. Davis, Helen. Understanding Stuart Hall. London: Sage Publications, 2004. Farmer, Frank. After the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics, and the Citizen Bricoleur. Boulder, CO: Utah State University Press, 2013. Gans, Herbert J. Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. New York: Basic Books, 1975. Greenberg, Clement. “Avant-Garde & Kitsch.” In Art and Culture: Critical Essays, 3–21. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms [1980].” In Stuart Hall: Selected Writings Essential Essays Vol. 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley, 47–70. Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2019. ———. “Culture, the Media, and the ‘Ideological Effect’ [1977].” In STUART HALL: SELECTED WRITINGS Essential Essays, Volume 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley, 298–335. Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2019. ———. “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular [1981].” In Stuart Hall: Selected Writings Essential Essays Vol. 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley, 347–361. Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2019. ———. “Richard Hoggart, the Uses of Literacy and the Cultural Turn [2007].” In Stuart Hall: Selected Writings Essential Essays Vol. 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley. Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2019. 35-46. Havlin, Laura. “Jon Savage’s The Secret Public,” Dazed, May 10, 202. Accessed October 22, 2022, https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/7477/1/jon-savagesthe-secret-public. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London; New York: Routledge, 2010. ———. “Towards a Cartography of Taste 1935–1962.” In Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things, edited by David Morley. [A Comedia Book]. London; New York: Routledge, 2016. 45-76. Isherwood, Christopher. The World in the Evening. London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1954. Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York; London: Routledge, 2015. Kammen, Michael G. American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century, 1st ed. New York: Basic Books/Knopf, 1999. Kilwag, Randy. “Skate and Annoy.” Accessed July 12, 2022. skateandannoy.com. Macdonald, Dwight. “A Caste, a Culture, a Market— II.” The New Yorker, November 21, 1958. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1958/11/29/inventing-theamerican-teenager. Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Mattern, Shannon. “Steel and Ink: The Printed City.” In Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media, 43–84. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Morley, David. “General Introduction: A Life in Essays.” In Essential Essays Vol. 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley, 1–26. Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2019. Rainey, Woodson (Woody), Ron Willaims, and Esther Choi, “ONYX: Another Interview,” May 11, 2013, https://2onyx.com/another-interview.html

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Sklar, Monica. Punk Style. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” In Against Interpretation, and Other Essays, Ninth Printing, 275–92. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1966. Sparke, Penny. “Taste and the Interior Designer.” In After Taste: Expanded Practice in Interior Design, edited by Kent Kleinman, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, and Lois Weinthal, 1st ed., 14–27. Princeton Architectural Press, 2012. Subcultures Network. Ripped, Torn and Cut: Pop, Politics and Punk Fanzines from 1976. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Sword, Harry. “Greased Quiffs and Switchblades: Growing Up Teddy Boy in 1970s England.” February 2, 2015. https://www.vice.com/en/article/yvq8kx/ what-will-become-of-the-teddy-boys-282. Tehve, Karin. “Introduction.” In Appropriate(d) Interiors, edited by Deborah Schneiderman, Anca I. Lasc, and Karin Tehve, 1–13. New York; London: Routledge, 2022. “The Boys of Dogtown | National Museum of American History.” Accessed September 19, 2022. https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/2011/09/the-boys-of-dogtown. html. Tollinger, William Vance Jr. “An Outpouring of ‘Faithful’ Words: Protestant Publishing in the United States.” In A History of the Book in America: Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940, edited by Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway, vol. 4. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Woodham, Jonathan M. “Managing British Design Reform I: Fresh Perspectives on the Early Years of the Council of Industrial Design.” Journal of Design History 9, no. 1 (1996): 55–65.

TASTE AND THE INTERNET

Introduction

FIGURE 6.1 

 awai-Vacances Summer Vacation in the Kingdom of the Golden by artK ist Takashi Murakami, displayed as part of a major retrospective of the artist’s work. Versailles, France, September 09, 2010 | credit line: ©  2010 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. | Photo: Patrick Aventurier/Getty Images. Murakami’s work borrows imagery from comic books and other forms of popular culture. Here, the painting is installed in front of a Murakami-­ designed rug, making the boundary between fine art and design ambiguous. DOI: 10.4324/9781003164388-7

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Mid-twentieth-century writers and intellectuals like Dwight Macdonald, Theodor Adorno, and Clement Greenberg argued that one’s taste would be degraded through exposure to popular cultural products, the formulaic and repetitive entertainments and diversions produced by mass media. These authors actively promoted a high–medium–low system of classifying culture, each stratum with its own producers and consumers. These concepts, however, classify more than culture—they were used to classify their audiences as well. These theories were used to identify those whose sensibilities had been compromised by the homogenizing effects of mass media as socially (and often intellectually) inferior. Whether low culture caused the low taste of its consumers, or whether their ability to appreciate high culture was simply absent, varied across those accounts. These definitions of taste were actively challenged by later-twentieth-­ century writers like Susan Sontag,1 Stuart Hall, and Dick Hebdige.2 Their definitions position taste as a consciously deployed form of agency, for social groups made marginal to (and by) the status quo. Each also acknowledged the production and assessment of culture as having far more heterogeneous sources than those recognized institutionally and that all forms of culture could be appropriated by their audiences into novel, unauthorized forms. Decentralized forms of media (i.e., those produced without the intervention of a publisher) offered the ability to produce tailor-made content for social subsets. Free from the need to address the hypothetical desires of an entire population, decentralized media like zines supported communication that could reinforce a particular group’s identity (whether that communication is about a concert or the upcoming revolution). New variations on these debates emerged in the internet age. The internet continues to evolve as both a form of decentralized media and a global marketplace, expanding access to public communication and consumer goods. As a system of distribution of user-generated content, the internet challenges the hegemony of mass media. Contemporary critics argue whether this latest expansion of the accessibility and reproducibility of goods and cultural content diversifies taste or reinforces existing standards.

The rise of the internet The ubiquity of the internet in contemporary life reinforces its perception as a nearly natural form of communication. As a technological, economic, social, political, and cultural phenomenon, it is impossible to describe or analyze its effects succinctly. Suffice it to say that the development of the internet was (and is) a revolution of information and media and access to goods, information, and culture. The following (deeply truncated) history is provided to denaturalize a very familiar condition and to identify a few particular characteristics to illuminate its nature. It should be acknowledged that its effects are still unfolding.

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The internet can be described through the technologies that make it possible, as an infrastructural network made up of hardware and software. In this light, it can be seen as an arrangement of connected but autonomous networks of computing devices. Each device uses software (or protocol) to communicate with other devices on the network. These protocols establish links between networks as well as the codes and norms for communication between all computers on the internet.3 Its earliest incarnations can be traced to the 1950s, to communications networks developed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a civilian agency within the Pentagon that pursued research in the service of national defense and space exploration. Over time, ARPA’s mission expanded to include the potential of interactive computing to support the collaboration of discrete groups pursuing various forms of research.4 Commercial applications developed soon thereafter. As early as 1969, companies like CompuServe were providing what was termed “time-sharing” for commercial applications: the ability to connect discrete computer terminals via existing phone lines.5 CompuServe began to offer this service to individual households starting in 1978.6 The first consumer computer with a graphical user interface was the Apple Macintosh of 1984.7 Apple computers were designed for ease of use by the non-technically literate, and their creation proved to be a landmark moment in personal computing. In that same year, personal computer sales overtook sales of the large mainframe computers used by institutions or businesses.8 The number of companies providing internet connectivity expanded soon thereafter, by the likes of America Online (AOL) in 1989 and Prodigy in 1990.9 From its conception, what eventually was termed the World Wide Web (or the internet) was conceived of as a collaborative environment. Its early development has been essentially collective as well, with contributions to code or protocols generated by computer engineers and researchers using the nascent communications networks across institutions and projects.10 The academics and authors Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin characterize the internet’s development as a dialogue between its developers, including amateur users in that definition: The World Wide Web is not merely a software protocol and text and data files. It is also the sum of the uses to which this protocol is now being put: for marketing and advertising, scholarship, personal expression, and so on. These uses are as much a part of the technology as the software itself.11

Web 2.0 By the mid-1990s, internet content was new media, a label that foregrounded its novel fluidity, interactivity, and responsiveness, conditions often co-created by its users.12 User experience designer and author Darcy DiNucci, writing in 1999,

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pointed out that the earliest Web pages were static and brochure-like (albeit with the ability to connect instantly to any other pages via hyperlinks).13 These were essentially proof of concept—individual pages consisting of interactive content accessible through a standard interface.14 By the late 1990s, the technologies driving connectivity protocols, expansion of the networks themselves, falling prices for personal computers, and expanded consumer use would help drive what is now termed Web 2.0: fragmentation of the internet into “countless permutations with different looks, behaviors, uses and hardware hosts.”15 The internet has been referred to as a form of mass media; it is easy to understand it as such, given the scale and distribution of its content, interfaces, and participants.16 Internet media is fundamentally hybrid, sharing characteristics with multiple forms of mass media: periodicals, radio, television, and more.17 This new iteration, however, produces novel effects through compounding media capabilities. The term new media could be understood as emphatically convergent, rather than as a simple sum of the multiple existing forms of media (photography, video, text) being adapted to distribution through networks.18 Bolter and Grusin distill the mediating effects of the internet to the term remediation, a kind of double logic.19 Remediation refers to immediacy—the instant nature of shared communication and the flattening of distances between participants. Immediacy can also refer to a perceived transparency between interface and content. Bolter and Grusin charge that the hybrid nature of internet publishing veils its users’ perception of its effects. One example of this phenomenon is attributable to one of the internet’s most basic programmed features—the hyperlink. Thresholds between spaces in the physical designed environment tend to be obvious. Hyperlinks enable an internet user to easily access content by different authors, made public by different hosts, produced by different technologies for different purposes. Hyperlinks would allow users to move fluidly and frictionlessly between cultural domains, often with no thresholds in sight. Like photography, remediated transparency could be understood as the function of its perceived automation, erasing the author or reducing them conceptually to an invisible technician.20 This suppression of an author may encourage the interpretation of participation or co-creation on the internet as being free of the barriers of expertise. The sheer volume of content producers and the content itself on the internet begins to blur differences between cultural categories and between users and makers. Internet media shares characteristics with analog forms of decentralized media, commensurate with the DIY ethos baked into its code. Internet publishing, even at its nascent stages, was broadly accessible (though not to all—the requirement of a computer, an internet connection, rudimentary coding skills, and free time were, and remain, real obstacles to participation).21 Despite this, Web 2.0 protocols substantially increased the number of non-professionals participating in content generation and communications.

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In the beginning of the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin made the observation that letters-to-the-editor features in newspapers made differences between authors, audiences, and critics ambiguous. Anyone had access to the attention of a newspaper’s readers through those letters, theoretically independent of one’s level of education or social identity. These effects could be attributed to many extant forms of self-publishing, from pamphlets to zines to early internet pages, each reaching some potential public.22 In other words, Benjamin could have been commenting on Wikipedia. The sheer volume of content and the heterogeneity of possible participants on the internet supports a broad range of purposes and goals, lending itself to a comparison with traditional mass media. Unlike traditional mass media, however, this distributed accessibility is not concentrated in the hands of a limited number of publishing gatekeepers. Without traditional requirements of investments and approval, internet communication promised opportunities to make and share work of all kinds. By the mid-1990s, however, much of the internet had been essentially privatized: developed, supported, and maintained by commercial interests.23 The emergent internet marketplace supported by those networks included retailers like eBay and Amazon, who translated access to global communications into a digital marketplace. Journalist Virginia Postrel suggests, however, that the presence of large retailers did not simply translate to the traditional relations between production and consumption. Expanded consumer access quickly supported the proliferation of new products as well. If the conventional logic of mass production requires goods that have broad mass appeal to maximize profitability, e-commerce has a significant diversifying influence; consumer preference, no matter how niche, can now find preferred content.

Google To be legible, taste requires choice within a recognizable (if often theoretical) domain. It is important to note that choice is predicated on being able to find content or information. Access to media in general might demonstrably increase in volume and variety over time, but access to specific content is not necessarily equal. Choice and access to internet media are fundamentally indebted to the search engine, which is yet another form of mediation now so ubiquitous as to render its effects largely below the level of notice. The earliest iterations of Google, the most popular search engine in the United States as of this writing,24 used a trademarked algorithm nicknamed PageRank. Invented in 1997, this algorithm returned results based on several criteria: the frequency and locations of search terms within the page, the age of the page, and the number of other pages linked to the page being evaluated.25 The number of linked pages appears, at first, to be a straightforward quantitative assessment, much like the first two criteria. Arguably, which criteria to

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value is always qualitative, even if measured quantitatively. The page-to-page links, however, function as an ostensibly peer-based feedback system; through linking, creators assess other creators on content quality or relevance.26 PageRank was eventually replaced by RankBrain (in 2015), its programming so complex as to be identified as artificial intelligence, software that teaches itself how to improve.27 Each search through RankBrain is customized to the individual user, using data points such as the estimated physical location of the user, other searches that person has made, other media that person has accessed, and content or affiliations of social media (for example, whom that person follows on social media).28 RankBrain assembles a digital habitus for each user, a portrait in data, and a powerful means to atomize taste. In the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant defined a judgment in taste as laying claim to the agreement of everyone, emphasizing a sensus communis or shared faculty for judgments of taste. Pierre Bourdieu’s twentieth-century definition of taste required understanding the social and cultural context of one’s choices. If aesthetic decisions are made in the substantially different domains of individual search results, then some of the assumptions foundational to both Kant’s and Bourdieu’s definitions require revisiting. Of course, a Web search does not happen in a cultural or social vacuum.29 Internet users remain influenced by life offline: experiences, attributes, environmental factors, and alternate information sources. Information and influence continue to flow interpersonally and via other existing forms of media.30 That said, insofar as the internet is intertwined in one’s offline life, customized search results inevitably produce disparities—access to some edited segment of the internet, each a unique domain or context.

Transgressive taste A number of sociological theories regarding taste emerged during the first decades of the internet, proposing effects as divergent as diversification, ­hyper-segmentation, and massification.31 These propose taste unbounded by socioeconomic divisions. Some popular definitions of taste, however, appear to simply reverse engineer consumer activity discerned in this new domain.

Virginia Postrel’s “aesthetic plenitude” Virginia Postrel analyzes taste through things individuals prefer, predominantly tracked through things consumed.32 Postrel published The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness in 2003, identifying an emergent importance of aesthetic experience vis-àvis consumer goods. Postrel emphasizes sensual pleasure—visual, aural, tactile, ­olfactory—as a form of pre-cognitive communication.33 She broadly identifies the raison d’être of aesthetics as a source of delight for its consumer. While

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FIGURE 6.2 The

© MURAKAMI show, Brooklyn, New York, April 3, 2008. | credit line: © 2008 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. | Photo: Patrick McMullan/ Getty Images

The show was an extensive retrospective of the artist’s work, co-­ presented by The Brooklyn Museum (its site) and Louis Vuitton. The show featured a fully-operational Louis Vuitton boutique selling Murakami’s designs for the luxury brand (Carol Vogel, “Watch Out, Warhol, Here’s Japanese Shock Pop.” The New York Times (online), April 2, 2008). The shop was part of the sequence of galleries where the artist’s work was installed, legible as a refusal of the cultural categories separating fine art and commercial work

Postrel makes few specific references to e-commerce, her argument positions aesthetics as a means to stand out in a marketplace of unprecedented scale and to satisfy a growing demand for individualization inspired by an abundance of choice. Her definition of taste encapsulates that individualism: “Personal taste, not an elite imprimatur, is what matters.”34 Postrel quickly rejects universal standards as legitimate measures of value, whether from academic or institutional sources or from social consensus.35 Further, the influence of dominant or “high” aesthetic sources (that elite imprimatur) on the relatively dominated or “low” sources is also dismissed. Good design under these conditions would embrace a market-driven pluralism, its success measured in popularity and profitability.36 In the context of the early internet, Postrel’s definition of taste suggests an expectation that market conditions would lead to the desire to hyper-individuate

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oneself: a different taste for each individual positioned as a libertarian ideal. However, it also satisfies a progressive impulse, in that all tastes could be understood as equal. In that respect, Postrel’s definition recalls the sociologist Herbert Gans’ taste cultures.37 Writing in the 1960s, Gans described taste cultures as aggregates of the public, made identifiable by shared preferences.38 Using Gans’ metrics, a taste culture demonstrating a preference for the popular was considered equally legitimate to those with predilections for the esoteric. Value within any taste culture is a function of whether it is representative of and satisfying to its audience. In this respect, Gans’ analysis positions popular culture as having an advantage due to its relative heterogeneity, therefore more likely to find a receptive reader or user.39 However, he refutes the idea that media or available products determine users’ tastes, pointing out the possibility that any choice is simply the least of all available evils—choice alone would not guarantee pleasure. It is also likely that the relationship of production and consumption is mutually responsive—that media designed to be popular would already reflect the preferences of its potential audience, however flawed that reflection might be.40 Postrel, too, positions the consumer or user as an active agent: A sort of chemical transformation through recombination is, in fact, where much of today’s aesthetic plenitude comes from. Like atoms bouncing about in a boiling solution, aesthetic elements are bumping into each other, creating new style compounds. We are constantly exposed to new aesthetic material, ripe for recombination, borrowed from other people’s traditional cultures or contemporary subcultures. Thanks to media, migration, and cultural pluralism, what once was exotic is now familiar.41 Postrel describes consumer strategy in terms that recall cultural theorist Dick Hebidge’s analysis of the aesthetics of subcultures.42 Hebdige describes youth cultures identifying themselves through sampling, recontextualizing, and synthesizing fragments from mainstream culture. These new styles were designed to distance their producers and users from the status quo and declare their affinity to one another. While Postrel embraces a similar fundamental democracy of taste, it is a democracy of the marketplace. She mentions “tribal affinities” between consumers of similar goods, a departure from tribe denoting family or community ties. If, however, taste exists simply to craft a unique identity, relations or responsibility to anyone else are occluded. Postrel describes a system in which one’s desires are the only measure of value, in which the individual becomes abstracted into a consumer. An issue with this strategy is illustrated with a case study from The Substance of Style concerning the popularity of dreadlocks. Postrel analyzes dreadlocks across contexts, identifying them as signifiers of creativity and individuality. In particular, she notes that for second-adopters (loosely, those who emulate

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an aesthetic after it becomes familiar or commonplace), dreadlocks are available for adoption: “Those dreads are you, not Those dreads are the authentic black experience.”43 Within an ecumenical position regarding one’s source material (whether from high or popular culture) lies the demonstrated weakness of defending cultural appropriation, the borrowing of cultural content by a dominant group from a dominated group, generally without permission. The ability to produce, disseminate, and self-authenticate cultural products of all kinds, made possible by the internet, redistributes cultural power and authority.44 Without many of the traditional editorial obstacles to production and publishing, internet users find themselves in an environment with no universally recognizable metrics of value or excellence. This should challenge definitions of taste that rely on top-down models of cultural influence (dominant to dominated), given this shift to lateral flows of influence (between individual or groups of more similar status).45 Postrel’s definition of taste is commensurate with these effects, suggesting that anyone wields the authority to legitimize (at least) one’s own choices. She points out that a social consensus is not required for a homeowner to mix contemporary furnishings with antique rugs.46 However, Postrel goes on to note the use of stylists to stage homes for sales; some concept of a consensus would surely be useful in that practice.47 There is a gap in this definition—what mechanisms would exist to compare taste judgments to those made by others? Would any commonality of taste, beyond the micro-social scale, be discernible? These questions have been critical to earlier definitions, but they may be rendered moot in Postrel’s definition. Tracking choices alone is insufficient to confirm preference. While a taste decision always involves choice, every choice does not mean acceptance or love. Herbert Gans was careful to distinguish between media output, an audience’s choices, and that audience’s aesthetic values; he points out that selecting cultural content was not necessarily commensurate with that content representing one’s values or even a guarantee that media produced pleasure in its user.48 Gans’ observation qualifies Postrel’s assertions, more easily identifiable as a fundamentally commodified version of taste. Taste is made radically distinct from any aesthetic sensus communis, rooted in the search for pleasure and self-definition.

Omnivorism If Postrel’s definition of taste was more fundamentally contextualized in a social field, it might resemble omnivorism, described in a 1996 article by sociologists Richard Peterson and Roger Kern, professors at Vanderbilt University. According to Peterson and Kern: “Since the 90s not only are high-status Americans far more likely than others to consume the fine arts … they are also more likely to be involved in a wide range of low-status activities.”49

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FIGURE 6.3 

 utside the © MURAKAMI show opening party, Brooklyn, New O York, April 3, 2008. | credit line: © 2008 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. | Photo: Patrick McMullan/ Getty Images. Guests were invited to buy more of the artist-designed Louis Vuitton goods. The environment was designed to resemble the storefronts on Canal Street in New York City, well-known as the site of trade in counterfeit luxury goods (Lynn Yaeger, “Hitting the Vuitton Murakami Shop at the Brooklyn Museum.” The Village Voice (online), April 15, 2008). Although the products themselves were authentic, they were presented as if to a different category of consumer

Their analysis suggests not a lack of discrimination in aesthetic choices but an openness to options outside the cultural domains commonly correlated with one’s social status, a position resistant to snobbishness.50 Peterson and Kern suggest that this condition offers “new rules governing symbolic boundaries” in contrast to Bourdieu’s position, predicated on “rigid rules of exclusion.” 51 Their research (and their review of related scholarship) suggests several factors for the emergence of this phenomenon, including the availability of content and an abundance of choice. Above all, they cite exposure to the tastes of other taste cultures (to borrow Gans’ term) through diverse means.52 These include rising levels of education and geographic mobility, as well as a wide array of cultural products made available through a variety of media channels, including the internet. Peterson and Kern describe these changes in consumption habits as a kind of cultural gentrification.53 Omnivorism is sometimes also

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referred to as eclecticism, triggering an association with interior design (if not a style precisely, recognizable as a modality). While omnivorism and the internet may be related phenomena, there remain myriad non-aesthetic qualifiers for choice: economics, time, geography, and aesthetic proclivities developed through other means still limit or guide choice.54 Referring to omnivorism as gentrification helps illuminate the power relations made evident by this modality of aesthetic choice: “when highbrows are open to non-highbrow art forms, they seek out lowbrow forms created by socially marginal groups (Blacks, youth, isolated rural folks) while still holding commercial middle-brow forms in contempt.”55 In The Uses of Literacy, British academic Richard Hoggart calls this form of consumption “slumming.”56 “Slumming” refers to the practice of deliberately making choices associated with the dominated (those in a disadvantaged social class) by the dominant (those in a more powerful class) to satisfy one’s curiosity or to pursue pleasure via novelty.57 This is consistent with Bourdieu’s assertions that the abundance of cultural competence commensurate with elite classes increases mobility across different social contexts; that is, understating the behaviors of more than one social context would likely be available to the socially dominant. It is also possible to understand slumming as an explicit performance of privilege and (under some circumstances) another form of topdown appropriation. Kern and Peterson are sanguine, suggesting omnivorism is an unsurprising adaptation to an increasingly global world. Hoggart identifies slumming as a badge of exclusivity, a kind of ostentatious, self-serving tolerance.58 The impulse to consume outside of culturally codified parameters correlates with consumers accustomed to the ability to make increasingly personalized choices, a condition aided and abetted by the internet. It could also be attributed, in part, to the ease with which an internet user moves between domains.

“Nobrow” taste The term nobrow emerged in popular journalism in the 1990s to describe a form of cultural production and consumption between the familiar categories of high and low. Nobrow might be applied to strategies adopted by elite producers of culture to absorb the influences of popular culture and products to broaden their appeal, positioning it as a source of currency and status. In 1999, the journalist John Seabrook referred to the examples of designer brands emulating the products of mass-market retailers and artists sampling from pop products such as music videos. Seabrook identifies this as a sea-change, as relevance is predicated not on distinguishing between the high and low (or luxury versus mass) but on the high embracing the low.59

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FIGURE 6.4 

 akashi Murakami X ComplexCon. | credit line: © 2019 Takashi T Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Murakami collaborated with ComplexCon to launch shoes produced by Crocs, the popular footwear company. Murakami has participated in a number of high-profile collaborations for both luxury and non-luxury high-­status products, including graphics for Google and t-shirts and skateboard decks for Supreme (Danforth, “25 OF THE BEST TAKASHI MURAKAMI COLLABORATIONS”)

At the end of the nineteenth century, Thorstein Veblen defined elite taste as a means to publicly display one’s wealth and status.60 Veblen coined the term conspicuous consumption, suggesting that the choices of the wealthy were driven by the apparent cost of goods to prove their economic superiority. Nobrow, at its surface, seems to be in marked contrast to this strategy. It may also be understood, as Seabrook suggests, to be simply a variant of Bourdieu’s observation that taste decisions constructed social differences. Only those with particularly honed cultural capital could discern distinctions in these aesthetic choices. A designer T-shirt casually indistinguishable from a mass-market version would only be identifiable as luxurious to those familiar with the luxury brand. Specifying industrial (or industrially inspired) furniture and fixtures avoids obvious (and possibly common) expressions of luxury. This strategy could be understood as a reaction to an excess of access. If luxury goods (or their facsimiles) are too available to signify exclusivity, nobrow could be understood as a proclivity for deeply subtle signifiers of wealth or status. Nobrow could also be understood as a form of slumming, if in image alone. Finally, nobrow

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products could also be understood as similar to Veblen goods. Veblen goods are predicated on conspicuous consumption: the greater the cost, the greater the status. A Veblen good inverts traditional laws of supply and demand; at a theoretical upper limit, demand rises along with price, desire itself pacing itself with cost.61 Bourdieu’s schema of class influence on taste was uniformly top-down, via the aesthetics of class distinction.62 Designers and artists are part of this theoretical structure. While Bourdieu labeled designers as part of the “dominated among the dominants,” they are not without influence or power among the dominant. According to Bourdieu, artists, intellectuals, and designers determine and promote aesthetics through their work, which the dominant class can use to express their dominance.63 In a top-down model, the tastes of the elite influence the tastes of the nonelite. However, the tastes described as nobrow and omnivorous suggest that aesthetics may flow in either direction, although they may require a particular form of translation on their way up. According to Bourdieu’s analysis of cultural production, a designer T-shirt has been consecrated by its new position in a field of restricted production. These fields are defined in contrast to fields or markets reliant on large-scale production, for which accumulating economic capital would be its fundamental aim.64 Fields of restricted production trade in other forms of capital, as well—like prestige or celebrity.65 Bourdieu used this concept to classify domains dedicated to the production of art, which accumulate superior status through their distance from the marketplace.66 This concept could also be applied to couture houses or interior designers, in their pursuit of the design of the avant-garde (ironically through the inclusion of the everyday or ordinary). While not technically separate from the pressures of the marketplace, couture houses and designers are perceived to operate under a more rarefied and esoteric set of metrics governing their value. A T-shirt (or “industrial” light fixture) produced by a designer could thus be perceived to jump categories, from mass-market to high design, whether or not it was significantly different in material or workpersonship. Designers and artists with rarefied or esoteric practices may borrow from low or popular sources as easily as an elite consumer might enjoy them; again, a condition supported by the internet.67 An elite consumer, whether nobrow or omnivorous, would be arguably more likely to partake in this form of sampling if already familiar with what is being sampled. In this way, designers and artists can be understood to transform the everyday for the taste of the elite.

Case studies: The Selby; The Met Costume Institute Show For those new to the mechanics of internet publishing, the collaborative DIY ethics that characterized its initial developments meant that abundant support to participate existed online, if one knew where to look. Internet browsers

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allow for the copying of the source code for individual pages, available for adaptive reuse; copying of page content is also widely possible. This is a new bricolage, still involving the cut-and-paste sampling of text and images.68 Both sampled aesthetics and a position in the public eye further blur perceived differences between users and producers, between so-called “amateurs” and professionals, between authors and audiences. This blur does not, however, fully erase the desire to differentiate. If the internet helps diminish the importance of traditional centralized sources of cultural authority, it does not necessarily diminish the impulse to authenticate one’s choices.69 The two-step flow of information is a sociological theory originally used to analyze interactions between mass media and its users. The two steps involve taking in content from media then turning to a trusted thirdparty or opinion leader to interpret it. Both information and influence may flow face to face, from person to person.70 They also flow online. The development of internet software to count visits to websites provides a means to do so. Postrel’s definition of taste, with its focus on consumer choice, can theoretically be measured quantitatively, counting hits or clicks. However, generating aesthetic leadership or authority on the internet could be best understood as a hybrid or convergent affair.

The Selby The Selby began in June 2008 as a website where photographer Todd Selby posted photo shoots of his friends in their homes. Requests quickly started coming from viewers all over the world who wanted their homes to be featured on the site.71 The Selby’s early influence can be measured, in part, through its popularity- the size of its audience. When The Selby reached 100,000 unique visitors daily, the traditional elite producers of content and gatekeepers of taste worldwide began asking to collaborate.72 This led to ad campaigns and collaborations with several more conventional producers of influence, such as luxury retailers and designers, forming new alliances. Like so many sites dedicated to creative pursuits, The Selby can duplicate some of the conditions of the traditional gatekeeping institution (or publication) traditionally wielding cultural authority. 73 The power to select content to be exposed to a public sphere is curation, on the internet as in museums. The nature of authority changes in this context. The Selby leverages both the symbolic capital of association with existing luxury brands and the measurable popularity of the site itself to produce a hybrid, remediated form of authority. Consumers/users are active in this model, free to pick and choose to whom they attribute the authority to guide aesthetic decisions. There is, however, another kind of distinction blurred by this hybridized mediation. It is more complex to ascertain or authenticate purposes or intentions around presented content.

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The current incarnation of The Selby website contains a variety of content. There is a dense mixture of editorial images of spaces as well as advertising campaigns and collaborations with other brands. The programming of the page itself contributes to an ambiguity between forms of content—as the user rolls over each image, the roll-over reveals a title for the feature represented by the initial image. What appears as monolithically editorial is shown to be similar to the mix of content originally found in print journalism: advertising and editorial content sharing the space of a page. Here again, the effects of remediation are apparent—the user/reader is encouraged to travel across media created for different purposes with a deliberately designed ease. These ambiguities may, over time, contribute to the erosion of traditional distinctions between forms of cultural production. Writing in 1990, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard commented on what he perceived to be a collapse of distinctions between the domains of art and the economy. Baudrillard noted that as aesthetic objects are ever more published and mediated, they lose their ability to generate any autonomous effect, a condition to which consumers are indifferent. He identifies “a general aestheticization” through what he describes as all phenomena’s translations into images.74 According to Baudrillard, this erosion excises any social operations of taste, reducing those sensibilities to simply what I like. It is also possible, however, to understand the collapse of these distinctions as acknowledging new paradigms around power (who creates and distributes) and authority (who influences).

The Metropolitan Museum of Art 2013 Costume Institute Show Stuart Hall writes extensively on the instability of classifications of cultural production: Popular forms become enhanced in cultural value, go up the cultural escalator— and find themselves on the opposite side. Other things cease to have high cultural value, and are appropriated into the popular, becoming transformed in the process. The structuring principle does not consist of the contents of each category—which, I insist, will alter from one period to another. Rather it consists of the forces and relations which sustain the distinction, the difference: roughly, between what, at any time, counts as an elite cultural activity or form, and what does not.75 Inclusion in or adaptations by restrictive fields of production could be understood to be one of the forces that Hall mentions. Dick Hebdige analyzed the praxis of punks in the 1970s—disaffected ­working-class youth borrowing details from mainstream culture to produce alternative aesthetics, profligate in creating new music, graphics, and fashions.76 Once the punk aesthetic became recognizable as a unified visual code, it became available for appropriation. Some of this borrowing occurs laterally, as

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FIGURE 6.5 PUNK:

Chaos to Couture | DIY: Graffiti & Agitprop, New York, Spring 2013.  | Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Image source: Art Resource, NY

Hebdige describes as a common practice between any number of youth subcultures in the United Kingdom from the post-war on—one group borrowing from another.77 This influence might also travel bottom-up. Punk aesthetics have been maintained as a trope quite independent from the politics characterizing its initial uses, influencing more conventionally professional design. It remains shorthand for youth or rebellion in the public imagination, consistently reproduced in the media. Over time, punk became subject to the same shifts in meaning and value as its sampled source material. A notable instance of this evolution is the Metropolitan Museum’s 2013 Costume Institute show, entitled PUNK: Chaos to Couture. The exhibit consisted of garments inspired by punk produced by luxury fashion labels. The rooms in the show were organized by the devices or aspects borrowed from its source material and labeled as such: DIY hardware, DIY agitprop, and Graffiti among them. Many of the categories frankly acknowledged the translation from street fashion to esoteric garments by couture houses, explicitly referencing (if not reproducing) the crude amateur nature of the originals. The exhibition design reinforced these translations and displacements: its most prominent recurring motif was an arched niche used as a frame for clothing on mannequins. This  detail is neoclassical, versioned from a style

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of architecture used in the United States to lend a sense of permanence and stability, especially when deployed by government and institutional buildings. Its inclusion as part of the temporary display infrastructure suggests a tongue-in-cheek gravitas, borrowed for a show of ephemeral goods, an aesthetic signifying institutional legitimacy for a show inspired by the deliberately illegitimate. The niche motif both structured and unified a viewer’s experience of the physical exhibition and functioned as a metaphor for travel between cultural domains. The couture exhibited in this show could arguably satisfy an omnivorous desire for difference: an embrace of the popular or an association with the rebellious and edgy.78 In this context, however, it is not a signifier of the desire for social upheaval. This occupation of the Metropolitan Museum is a paradox, not entirely unrelated to slumming. As seen within the space of an established cultural authority, the aesthetic is legitimized in a new domain, anointed with what Bourdieu would term “symbolic cultural capital.” 79 This occupation would constitute a de-authentication within its original context; it looks punk, but it certainly no longer is punk, relocated and made available to the taste of the mainstream (elite) consumer. PUNK: From Chaos to Couture itself remediates: the Met is a container for the show, the show contains esoteric fashion, that fashion samples punk style (if not its ethos), and that style recomposits fragments of a status quo. Each step recontextualizes and remakes its content, shifting its perceived value and consumers.

Conclusion At its essence, the technology driving the internet was designed to be open to further adaptation. Empowered online users would rewrite and enrich the source code, contributing to its evolution.80 By the end of the twentieth century, online digital platforms for communication and exchange were already changing the landscape of available goods and services, quickly adopted as a territory of commerce and exchange by producers at every scale. Normative methods of navigation and search encourage the exploration of content beyond what is available in physical space. All of this could be understood to contribute to growing ambiguities between categories of cultural production and consequently to the metrics one might use to evaluate elements of culture. This ambiguity represents some advantages to creators. The erosion of orthodoxies around who is recognized as a designer (or what is recognized as art or design) potentially helps level the playing field, particularly if a limited number of institutions or interests are entrusted with the distribution of key forms of cultural authority and capital. The blur between users, authors, and critics forms as new voices and forms of praxis gain access to public fora. But these ambiguities may also represent disadvantages to users—designer and layperson

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FIGURE 6.6 Saint

Michael x Takashi Murakami Saint Graffiti Tee | credit line: © 2021 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

A product of Takashi Murukami’s collaboration with Saint Michael, itself a collaboration between artist and designer Cali Thornhill Dewitt and designer Yuta Hosokawa (from the brand READYMADE)

alike—who navigate content without many traditional signifiers of the classification or purpose of content, both of which serve curatorial functions. The work of Takashi Murakami (featured in this chapter’s illustrations) lives in the elision of the domains of edification and entertainment. Each project illustrates the power of transgressing the boundaries conventionally used to distinguish types of cultural production, creating a (productive) critical confusion regarding how it might be assessed or understood. That the interior can be imbricated into these shifts is evident in Murakami’s installations, in the way that surface motifs slide frictionlessly from sculptures into the patterns of adjacent wallpaper, problematizing differences between object and enclosure, as well as between art and ornament (see Figure 6.1). It bears mentioning once more that internet service access is not universal. Documentation of internet access at the beginning of the twenty-first century found that users were more likely to be college educated, wealthy, white, and young. In the earliest studies, men and urban dwellers were significantly better represented.81 Assumptions about universal access, therefore, may reproduce inequality, underrepresenting those left out in debates about aesthetics and design.

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Internet participation also requires new forms of highly analytic vigilance to avoid disrespectful or destructive appropriations. Schemas of aesthetic ­self-determination would represent little advantage to those most disadvantaged in capital. The cultural markers, traditions, and styles of dominated groups become vulnerable to bottom-up consumption, refashioned for the habitus of the dominant.82 This is a new kitsch, a borrowing of effects with insufficient concern for its sources and the cultural contexts that produced them. Taste, after the internet, first appears to atomize. Virginia Postrel, for one, embraces the development of hyper-individualized aesthetics made possible by excesses of access. Theories regarding nobrow and omnivorous tastes suggest that individual preferences become more heterogeneous in a vastly expanded market, outside the categories of consumption that Bourdieu theorized. Bourdieu acknowledged, however, that those rich in social, cultural, or economic capital were likely to enjoy access to a greater variety of milieu; these advantages might afford choices beyond the normative with no loss of status. Here the ability to make exceptions to the rules, codes, or conventions of taste generates its own prestige.

Notes 1 Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 191–202. 2 Hebdige, “Towards a Cartography of Taste 1935–1962,” 45–76. 3 Johnny Ryan, A History of the Internet and the Digital Future (London: Reaktion, 2010), 31, http://site.ebrary.com/id/10430638. 4 This organization is now known as DARPA: “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,” accessed 10.30.22, https://www.darpa.mil/. 5 “About CompuServe,” CompuServe, accessed 09.18.21, https://www.compuserve. com/home/about.jsp. 6 Ryan, A History of the Internet and the Digital Future, 2. 7 Ryan, 53. 8 Ryan, 61. 9 Ryan, 71. 10 Tim Berners-Lee et al., “The World-Wide Web,” in The New Media Reader, eds. Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 791. 11 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 21. 12 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Introduction: Did Somebody Say New Media?,” in New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, eds. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan (New York; London: Routledge, 2006), 2. 13 Darcy DiNucci, “Fragmented Future,” Print 53, no. 4 (August 7, 1999): 32. 14 DiNucci, “Fragmented Future,” 32. 15 DiNucci, 32. 16 Merrill Morris and Christine Ogan, “Internet as Mass Medium,” Journal of Communication 46, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 39–42. 17 Morris and Ogan, 45. 18 Chun, “Introduction: Did Somebody Say New Media?,” 2. 19 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 9. 20 Bolter and Grusin, 26–29.

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21 Paul DiMaggio et al., “Social Implications of the Internet,” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 310–12. Writing in the early internet age, sociologist Paul DiMaggio and his co-authors’ analysis included not only access to technology but other factors (such as gender, ethnicity, income level, and work status, among others) that contributed to internet use. 22 For an extended discussion of decentralized media, please see the preceding chapter “Taste after Zines.” 23 Ryan, A History of the Internet, 120. 24 “Search Engine Market Share Worldwide,” Statcounter Global Stats, accessed 10.03.22, https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share. 25 Steven Levy, “How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web,” Wired, February 22, 2010, https://www.wired.com/2010/02/ff-google-algorithm/. 26 Levy. 27 For an extended discussion regarding artificial intelligence and taste, please refer to the chapter “Taste and Algorithms.” 28 Levy, “How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web.” 29 Writing in 2001, sociologists associated with the University of Chicago Sociology department, analyzing survey data, asserted that time spent on the internet did not reduce time spent engaged in offline socialization (DiMaggio et al., “Social Implications,” 316). 30 Kayahara and Wellman, “Searching for Culture—High and Low,” 824–27. 31 Paul DiMaggio et al., “Social Implications,” 325. 32 Virginia I. Postrel, The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture & Consciousness (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003). 33 Postrel, The Substance of Style, 6. 34 Postrel, 12. 35 Postrel, 10–13. 36 Postrel, 146–47. 37 See chapter on mass media. 38 Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture, 11. 39 Gans, 21. 40 Gans, ix. 41 Gans, 12. 42 For an extended description of Hebdige’s analysis, please refer to the chapter “Taste and Zines.” 43 Postrel, The Substance of Style, 99. The aforementioned use of tribal also falls into this category. 4 4 Borrowing from Michael Kammen’s use of the terms, power refers to the ability to produce and disseminate media, while authority refers to the ability to influence perceptions of its value. These concepts are expanded upon in the chapter “Taste and Mass Media” and in Kammen’s own book American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century (1999). 45 Lateral, here, means an exchange in which no participants are dominant, in contrast to institution to individual, producer to consumer. 46 Postrel, The Substance of Style, 11. 47 Postrel, 18. 48 Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture, 12. 49 Richard A. Peterson and Roger M. Kern, “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore,” American Sociological Review 61, no. 5 (1996): 900, https://doi. org/10.2307/2096460. 50 Peterson and Kern, 904. 51 Peterson and Kern, 904. 52 Peterson and Kern, 905. 53 Peterson and Kern, 906.

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54 Nicolas Robette and Olivier Roueff, “An Eclectic Eclecticism: Methodological and Theoretical Issues about the Quantification of Cultural Omnivorism,” Poetics 47 (December 1, 2014): 23–26, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2014.10.002. The authors cite Richard Peterson as influential in the field of sociology on the subject of omnivorism/eclecticism since the 1990s. 55 Peterson and Kern, 901. 56 Richard Hoggart, John Corner, and Andrew Goodwin, The Uses of Literacy (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008), 281. 57 These choices might also be understood as “guilty pleasures.” 58 Hoggart, Corner, and Goodwin, The Uses of Literacy, 281. 59 John Seabrook, “Nobrow Culture: Why It’s Become So Hard to Know What You Like,” The New Yorker, September 20, 1999. https://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/1999/09/20/nobrow-culture. 60 For more on Veblen’s characterizations of taste, please see the chapter “Taste and Photography.” 61 John Greathouse, “Would You Pay $1,750 For This T-Shirt? The Stunning Story of This Veblen Brand,” Forbes, February 10, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ johngreathouse/2018/02/10/would-you-pay-1750-for-a-t-shirt-the-stunning-­ story-of-this-veblen-brand/#3800c101aa36. 62 Bourdieu, Distinction. 63 Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 57. 64 Sarah Brouillett, “Postcolonial Authorship Revisited,” in Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies, ed. Raphael Dalleo (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), 92. 65 Randal Johnson, “Editor’s Introduction: Pierre Bourdieu on Art, Literature and Culture,” in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 15. 66 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production,” In The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 52–53. 67 Not for the last time, it should be said that this is not a new phenomenon. One popular example: Marie Antoinette’s follies at Versailles. 68 For an expanded discussion of appropriative or bricolage aesthetics, please see the chapter “Taste and Zines.” 69 Jennifer Kayahara and Barry Wellman, “Searching for Culture—High and Low,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12, no. 3 (April 1, 2007): 827, https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1083–6101.2007.00352.x. 70 Kayahara and Wellman, “Searching for Culture—High and Low,” 827. 71 Todd Selby, “About,” The Selby, accessed 06.21.20. https://theselby.com/about/. 72 These included Louis Vuitton, American Express, FENDI, Nike, Microsoft, Sony, Airbnb, Hennessy, Ikea, eBay, Heineken, Vogue, Architectural Digest (France), Casa Brutus ( Japan), and T: The New York Times Style Magazine. There was also a solo show/pop-up shop at Colette, an influential Parisian boutique. 73 These uses of the terms power and authority are borrowed from the historian Michael Kammen’s American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century (1999). 74 Jean Baudrillard and James Benedict, “Transaesthetics,” in The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (London; New York: Verso, 2002), 72. 75 Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular,” in STUART HALL: Essential Essays, ed. David Morley, vol. 1 (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2019), 355. 76 For the extended discussion of subcultures and the work of Dick Hebdige, please see the chapter “Taste and Zines.” 77 Hebdige, Subculture, 41–45.

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78 For a discussion about museums and contemporary struggles around inclusivity and taste, please see the chapter “Taste and Algorithms.” 79 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital.” 80 Ryan, A History of the Internet, 139. 81 DiMaggio et al., “Social Implications of the Internet,” 311. 82 Punk transmuting to skatepunk? A largely lateral move. Punk motifs borrowed by Chanel or Versace? Those aesthetics travel vertically.

Bibliography “About CompuServe,” CompuServe. Accessed September 18, 2021, https://www. compuserve.com/home/about.jsp. Baudrillard, Jean, and James Benedict. “Transaesthetics.” In The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, 14–19. London; New York: Verso, 2002. Berners-Lee, Tim, Robert Caillau, Ari Luotonen, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen, and Arthur Secret. “The World-Wide Web.” In The New Media Reader, edited by Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, 791–98. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. ———. “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed.” In The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, edited by Randal Johnson, 29–73. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. ———. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by J. Richardson. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. https://www. marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/bourdieu-forms-­capital.htm. ———. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. Brouillett, Sarah. “Postcolonial Authorship Revisited.” In Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies, edited by Raphael Dalleo, 80–101. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “Introduction: Did Somebody Say New Media?” In New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, edited by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan, 1–10. New York; London: Routledge, 2006. Danforth, Chris. “25 OF THE BEST TAKASHI MURAKAMI COLLABORATIONS.” Highsnobiety.com, accessed 10.12.22. https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/ takashi-murakamis-15-collaborations/. “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.” Accessed October 30, 2022, https:// www.darpa.mil/. DiMaggio, Paul, Eszter Hargittai, W. Russell Neuman, and John P. Robinson. “Social Implications of the Internet.” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 307–36. DiNucci, Darcy. “Fragmented Future.” Print 53, no. 4 (August 7, 1999): 32. Gans, Herbert J. Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. New York: Basic Books, 1975. Greathouse, John. “Would You Pay $1,750 for This T-Shirt? The Stunning Story of This Veblen Brand.” Forbes, February 10, 2018. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johngreathouse/2018/02/10/would-you-pay-1750-for-a-t-shirt-the-stunning-story-of-thisveblen-brand/#3800c101aa36.

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Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular [1981].” In Essential Essays Vol. 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley, 347–361. Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2019. ———. “Richard Hoggart. The Uses of Literacy and the Cultural Turn [2007].” In Essential Essays Vol. 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley, 35–46. Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2019. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London; New York: Routledge, 2010. ———. “Towards a Cartography of Taste 1935–1962.” In Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things, edited by David Morley, 45–76. [A Comedia Book]. London; New York: Routledge, 2016. Hoggart, Richard, John Corner, and Andrew. Goodwin. The Uses of Literacy. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008. Johnson, Randal. “Editor’s Introduction: Pierre Bourdieu on Art, Literature and Culture.” In The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, edited by Randal Johnson, 1–28. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Kammen, Michael G. American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century. 1st ed. New York: Basic Books/Knopf, 1999. Kayahara, Jennifer, and Barry Wellman. “Searching for Culture—High and Low.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12, no. 3 (April 1, 2007): 824–45. Levy, Steven. “How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web.” Wired, February 22, 2010. https://www.wired.com/2010/02/ff-google-algorithm/. Morris, Merrill, and Christine Ogan. “Internet as Mass Medium.” Journal of Communication 46, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 39–50. Peterson, Richard A., and Roger M. Kern. “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore.” American Sociological Review 61, no. 5 (1996): 900–907. Postrel, Virginia I. The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture & Consciousness. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003. Robette, Nicolas, and Olivier Roueff. “An Eclectic Eclecticism: Methodological and Theoretical Issues about the Quantification of Cultural Omnivorism.” Poetics 47 (December 1, 2014): 23–40. Ryan, Johnny. A History of the Internet and the Digital Future. London: Reaktion, 2010. Seabrook, John. “Nobrow Culture: Why It’s Become So Hard to Know What You Like.” The New Yorker, September 20, 1999. https://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/1999/09/20/nobrow-culture. Selby, Todd. “About.” The Selby. https://theselby.com/about/. Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” In Against Interpretation, and Other Essays, Ninth Printing, 275–292. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1966. Vogel, Carol. “Watch Out, Warhol, Here’s Japanese Shock Pop.” The New York Times (online), April 2, 2008. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/arts/ design/02mura.html Yaeger, Lynn. “Hitting the Vuitton Murakami Shop at the Brooklyn Museum.” The Village Voice (online), April 15, 2008. https://www.villagevoice.com/2008/04/15/ hitting-the-vuitton-murakami-shop-at-the-brooklyn-museum/ “Search Engine Market Share Worldwide.” Statcounter Global Stats. Accessed October 3, 2022,https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share. “Saint Michael,” FEATURE, accessed 10.03.22, https://feature.com/collections/ saint-michael.

TASTE AND SOCIAL MEDIA

Introduction Taste is understood as a component of identity, that the aesthetic choices one makes and displays reveal something about who they are. Options for those choices expand as the internet enables users to access an unprecedented and global body of goods, services, and media. That expansion of choice, to cultural goods across categories of production and consumption, requires a reexamination of existing definitions of how taste is formed and of the new social roles that taste might play. When Pierre Bourdieu described the need to contextualize any aesthetic choice for it to be understood vis-à-vis taste, he was referring to a model with a spatial metaphor at its core. Taste decisions had to be understood within a social domain, a domain reciprocally formed by individual taste decisions. Those individual decisions might be given different weight in influencing group taste norms, depending on the social or cultural power of the chooser, a power Bourdieu referred to as “capital.” Bourdieu’s theories emphasized the corporeal aspects of capital, positing that social identity was conditioned into social bodies. He was, of course, writing about physical bodies in physical space. The advent of digital communication begs the question: what is the effect of the mediated body on taste? Sociologist Manuel Castells characterizes post-internet social structures by their linked nature, arguing that all social life (online and off ) comprises networks rather than fixed and recognizably bounded domains.1 A domain may be understood as relatively fixed: a physical space is understood as such, as is a territory defined by rules or laws. A domain can also refer to more abstract phenomena; when it is used as a mathematical term, a domain can contain all DOI: 10.4324/9781003164388-8

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FIGURE 7.1 Social

Media post: @anniecoggan (designer & educator) | credit line: Annie Coggan

FIGURE 7.2 Social

Media post: @daquinomonaco (design firm) | credit line: D’Aquino Monaco

the solutions for a given problem. In mathematics, the limits of that domain are theoretically dynamic if there is the potential for additional future solutions. The internet creates something between the physical and the abstract: a digital communications domain enabling connections between the virtual and the corporeal—media and goods, bodies and values. In this context, the meaning of the term curation has expanded; once used primarily to refer to the selection of things, now it is used to describe the process of selecting aspects of identity might be made visible and public. Evidence of bodies is not absent in identities presented online, but neither are they fully present—represented in text, image, video, animation, 3D avatars, and hybridized forms. The representations might be present in real-time or asynchronously. Interaction online is inherently mediated, but digital social life is supported by platforms so complex as to render the nature of their mediation largely invisible.2

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“Social media” is the umbrella term used to describe sites that enable interpersonal communication via the internet. However, any contemporary reader will understand that this is not in firm opposition to sites that connect people and things.3 Social media platforms are another form of domain. Their identity as territories might be clear, but they blur the boundaries and conditions of social domains formed in physical time and space, as their users can occupy multiple domains simultaneously. Some definitions of taste contemporary to the rise of social media adapt to this flux, questioning the validity of a unified self and a unified taste. Some strive to re-situate taste in the corporeal, recuperating and celebrating the sensation of bodies. Capital is rebranded as influence, its distribution and impacts on taste now as dynamic as the digital domains in which it is wielded.

Social media: background Social media platforms, such as Myspace, Facebook, and Instagram, are also known as social network sites. Each originated as a forum to socialize and share personal narratives and information. While the term site connotes a physical place, these sites consist of web-based services that allow users to communicate online. The first, SixDegrees.com, launched in 1997, was followed rapidly by sites such as Friendster (2002), Myspace (2003), and Facebook (2005). These platforms share the ability for each user to construct a public (or semi-public) profile specific to that domain—a combination of text, image, video, or additional programming that represents that user to fellow users.4 Images may or may not include the likeness of that user; profiles may consist primarily of images representing interests or preferences. Each platform allows methods to link profiles to other users’ profiles and display a list of those connections. Those lists, in turn, can be accessed and viewed by fellow users.5 The social milieus made possible by social media sites are often referred to as communities, enabling their users to create or maintain social ties over time irrespective of geography. In the physical domain, a community is usually defined as a group of people defined by shared values, including aesthetic preferences. Social media has enabled connections between individuals with interests too esoteric to be represented in their immediate environs; notably, it has fostered relationships between those whose identity or appearance mark them for ridicule or violence. In that way, social media can be understood to foster new publics. It is now an active component in public life and activism, even used to organize and communicate in protests in real time—a potent mixture of media, bodies, and values.6 That said, the nature of any form of communication shifts with public exposure inherent to these kinds of media.

The unmooring of identity As early as the 1990s, scholars began to analyze emerging patterns regarding individuals and social structures emergent on these platforms. Early on, much

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writing emerged that focused on constructing identity through images, noting the changes due to the absence of present bodies. Judith Donath, founder of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab, identified the loss of the body’s unifying anchor as a kind of unmooring of identity from physical personhood and warns that this disembodiment may have a potentially destabilizing force on communities.7 Social media profiles are the locus of identity on social media platforms. They are abstractions, short-form representations of an individual user, edited both for brevity and (often) to accentuate one’s most flattering or ­status-building features or preferences. While most platforms promote accurate s­ elf-representations, accuracy itself becomes a contested term. The degree to which any user reveals personal information largely remains a personal choice.8 Images of things or spaces on a user’s post may not necessarily indicate ownership or authorship; to let these conditions remain undefined is not precisely inaccurate.9 As social interactions supported on these platforms may involve communications with individuals unknown to the user, this tendency to be less than truthful may involve self-protection or simply cleaving to domain-specific rules of behavior. Technology and social media scholars danah boyd and Nicole Ellison point out that the more public the profile, the more likely it contains false information.10 As social media has evolved to often incorporate one’s professional identity (on sites like LinkedIn, launched in 2003), a user may limit disclosed information to that which would be considered appropriate in that milieu. When using the same platforms for personal and professional interactions, the appropriate limits of those disclosures are not always clear. Ironically, Donath suggests that by limiting “identity cues” (characteristics more likely to be apparent in face-to-face interactions) a profile is perceived to be more accurate by other users.11 Like a blurry photograph, a scant profile would present less evidence that could be used to authenticate one’s identity. The absence of this evidence is less noticeable than the presence of cues that might raise alarms about their accuracy. Even without the constraints of physical distance, online social life does not connect every social media user to every other user non-hierarchically. As in the physical world, levels or kinds of contact can become differentiated and classified. Lists of social connections (identified most commonly as friends) could be understood as a new form and source of social capital or influence—the public visual display of one’s social network.12 These links, however, are also ambiguous, disclosing little of the level of intimacy between the linked. They do not disclose the nature of the context in which two users might be acquainted or whether the online connection corresponds to a relationship in physical space.13 boyd points out that linking or “friending” co-creates a user’s social context: an egocentric network, with each user at a center of their own creation.14 Given the variability of the depth of social (or professional) ties that might be represented in a list of “friends,” this context may or may not perform the physical community function of enforcing behavioral norms or calling out inaccurate or inauthentic self-representations.15

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Internet media remediates—the ubiquity and complexity of its hybrid forms draw attention away from media’s impacts.16 As just one example: most social media platforms use a standard interface, which can promote a kind of equivalence between individual posts or even accounts. Moreover, that the term profile is used to signify the representation of a user veils its inherent ambiguity; a profile may not represent an individual, functioning instead as a vehicle for a business or brand’s identity. Figures 7.3 and 7.4 feature reconstructed images of two accounts—one account holder is a designer and educator, the other an organization, a difference requiring some scrutiny to discern.

FIGURE 7.3 Social

Media post: @vasfsf (designer and educator) | credit line: ­Virginia San Fratello

FIGURE 7.4 Social

Media post: @interior_provocations (scholarly organization) | credit line: images, from top left: Liz Teston, Igor Siddiqui, Selma Catovic Hughes, Loukia Tsafoulia & Severino Alfonso, Annie Coggan, Alexandra Goldberg, Nataly Rojas & Gabriela Rosas, Interior Provocations (Anca Lasc, Karyn Zieve, Erica Morawski, Deborah Schneiderman, Keena Suh, Karin Tehve)

Taste and social media  163

Those without access to the internet would be unaccounted for in any analysis of digital socializing. Moreover, even when access to the internet is not an obstacle, accessibility to particular sites does not translate universally. Many early sites were designed to attract specific populations. These might link users around professional goals (such as LinkedIn), interests (Couchsurfing, launched in 2003), or aspects of identity (BlackPlanet, established in 1999). boyd and Ellison point out that even when a more general usership is intended by a site’s designer, it is not unusual that groups using a site might segregate themselves by factors such as nationality, age, or educational level.17 These groups can become micro-publics, domains created by shared values or concerns. For some, the ability to edit physically manifest aspects of their identities is necessary to participate in a public life at all. The formation of micro-publics or domains construct digital places in the immensity of internet space; in 2019, there were 2.13 billion Facebook accounts, roughly equivalent to the earth’s population in the 1930s.18 These communities notwithstanding, making generalizations about online social life remains difficult. As suggested by the analysis presented above, assessing intentions is problematic. Much analysis of online behavior tends to rely on quantifiable data, recording numbers of links or likes and correlating those with identity markers that users have self-disclosed: gender, race, ethnicity, and age. This data produces evidence of interactions but is unable to reveal underlying motivations. With this evidence, however, it becomes possible to theorize some critical aspects of the shifting relations between users, their social circles, and the role of taste. Many definitions of taste theorize how it might form (whether inborn, learned, or conditioned), and many reference one’s social circumstances. Underlying most of those theories is the assumption that much of social life comprises face-to-face interactions—people in proximity to one another in physical space. These interactions are particularly central to the work of Pierre Bourdieu. When Judith Donath refers to the body as a “unifying anchor” for identity, she reinforces Bourdieu’s assertions around the embodiment of cultural capital.19 Bourdieu described clues to one’s taste and social class as manifest in physical characteristics (such as posture, level of fitness, or one’s dialect) or in habituated behaviors (i.e., actions performed as rote, eluding conscious thought). Any of these might be modified or veiled through the mediation of a digital platform. The ability to digitally alter one’s public presentation presents significant opportunities for curation. Users may select only attractive photographs (or status-engendering content) to post online, edit images to make them more flattering, or use sophisticated video filters to change their appearance or context in real time. While an experienced social media user might recognize these effects on others’ representations, the existence of these tropes destabilizes embodied capital as reliably indicative of social position.

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Social media and the interior Images of interiors, in particular, shift in meaning under these new shared conditions. In her analysis of the use of Instagram (launched in 2010), new media scholar Kim Barbour points out that posts of interior images capture many more of the mundane details of everyday life than would have previously had a public airing.20 Images taken in one’s private domain afford access to spaces and events once visible only to one’s intimates. This is a phenomenon that historian Penny Sparke identifies as having its origins in analog publications about design, publicized images blurring distinctions between the private and public realms. This blur changes the nature of taste, as the aesthetic decisions comprising an interior environment are exposed to the judgment of others.21 Barbour notes that images posted on social media are part of this shift over time, now reflecting an increasing public interest to peer into the private lives of others.22 These shared images of interiors (as aesthetics, as newly public) gain the potential to influence others, to contribute to group norms: they become a form of capital with that influence. Remediated ambiguity might arise without any intent to deceive others. For example, Barbour’s analysis of images of domestic interiors on Instagram points out emergent representational idioms. Many images taken of one’s private domain appear to be influenced by professional photography of designed spaces, idealized in the elimination of clutter, dirt, or family members.23 It might be argued that this absence is a bid for privacy (even as those images are publicized), concealing the informality and intimacy of home life. Professional designers posted the images in Figures 7.1 and 7.2; the images in Figures 7.5 and 7.6 are shared photos of a home, albeit by design influencers (those holding popular accounts, often able to monetize their efforts through product promotion or collaborations with designers or retailers). The differences between images are subtle: the “professional” images include objects that an owner or inhabitant could have easily selected; while the “home” images contain more personal belongings, they are carefully arranged and composed.24 In the United States, what is considered interior design may or may not refer to the work of a professional. Images of homes without evidence of their inhabitants contribute to the sense that those spaces have been designed. Aestheticized images of the home online raise the question once more—for whom were these aesthetic decisions made? Do these images reflect the preferences of its inhabitants, or were they produced to satisfy the tastes of others?

Taste as social performance Prior to the advent of the internet, physical proximity was a critical factor regarding access and exposure to people, spaces, and things. Most forms of media (books, magazines, even films) were themselves physical objects that required

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its reader or audience to be present in the same physical space for its experience. It follows that an individual was likely to have access and exposure to similar things, spaces, and experiences as others in their immediate environment. Sharing digital media online diffuses that similarity, upon which community traditionally relied. This diffusion of context, changing photographic idioms, and opportunities to curate one’s (apparent) taste via online performance shift the relationship between taste and identity assumed in earlier definitions.

Hugo Liu Hugo Liu offers us a definition of taste reflecting life online. Liu self-identifies as a taste researcher and data scientist and was the “chief scientist” at Artsy, the world’s largest online art marketplace, until 2022. Artsy launched in 2012 as an app (Art.sy). Its founder, Carter Cleveland, worked with art historians to analyze thousands of works of art, compiling a list of characteristics by which those works might be described, from the factual (the artist’s name, its medium) to the subjective (style, “mood,” or subject matter).25 These characteristics could be used to suggest art or artists based on a selected work. Liu joined Artsy shortly after the expansion of its scope and mission to sell art as well as to recommend it; in 2017, Artsy acquired Liu and his data science startup ArtAdvisor, which uses machine learning to predict the current and future prices of particular works of art.26 Liu’s pre-Artsy work borrows terminology and methodology from multiple disciplines, including linguistics, literature, semiotics, critical theory, and neuroscience.27 As part of his praxis as a taste researcher, Liu’s explorations include methods that mirrored Bourdieu’s use of interviews and surveys but also used modern-day software and data analysis.28 Liu’s early research mined the lists of preferences native to social media profiles (such as stated likes and dislikes) and the posts made as part of everyday interactions on the site, both abundant data sources. Liu describes this method as person modeling—the individual emerging from a cloud of behavioral traces mined entirely from data.29 Liu’s method involved using software that scanned and classified the language found in posts according to mood and affect to better understand how those posts expressed the subjective interests of their authors.30 While identifying “cultural tastes” is the explicit objective, one might infer that it is choice itself that is described and classified, as Liu’s work does not investigate the specifics of an aesthetic experience. As Liu describes it, taste is simply a discernible unity, pattern, or gestalt of choice.31 The lists of preferences found on social media profiles (Liu, working in 2006, used Myspace for source material) are fragmentary, often with little explicit relation between line items; a favorite band might share spaces with an espoused political position. To derive a pattern, Liu analyzed data from 100,000 profiles, looking for “pairwise affinities between interests,” examining matches

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between other users’ preferences.32 These affinities would serve to situate the subject, to locate them within a topology of preferences, with the hypothesis that other preferences might be derived from user profiles with whom one has previously matched. Liu identifies one of the techniques used to make those connections as spreading activation, a theory (based on neurological function) that concepts are organized into networks, with associations to other concepts qualified by hypothetical proximities.33 The emergent pattern is “a semantic fabric of taste,” or “taste fabric,” how the fragments of a social media profile’s list of preferences can be generalized as an individual’s taste. Unlike Bourdieu’s models, in which the reciprocity between preferences of a group and its individual constituents are foregrounded, Liu’s descriptions of his initial research originate at personal preference, which remains discernible at every scale of his analysis. In “Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances” (2008), Liu proposes subtle alterations to that fabric, turning his attention to social influence on expressed preference. Borrowing from Bourdieu explicitly, Liu’s analysis of Myspace user preferences compares similarities in stated preferences to both a user’s “friends” and to Myspace users as a whole.34 Liu’s hypothesis identifies Myspace as a “taste community,” where identity is explicitly curated specifically to the norms and values supported by that platform. His conclusions mirror Bourdieu’s: that the pursuit of status and individual differentiation is most discernible in users’ choices compared with group norms at the scale of “friends.” However, Liu continues to foreground the individual’s agency in determining preferences, emphasizing a “milieu of cultural interests one creates for oneself ” through cultural consumption.35 In this, Liu’s definition recalls the independence to which Virginia Postrel assigns consumer preferences, with each actor relatively free to choose the markers of identity.36 Also like Postrel, Liu’s conclusions speak to results more than motivations. No matter the sophistication with which user statements are analyzed to derive a theoretical point of view, the preferences analyzed are more statements than demonstrations. There remains ambiguity about the vectors of influence—whether from group to individual or the reverse. It remains challenging to authenticate the degree to which choices represent aesthetic assessments or deliberate social gestures.

Erving Goffman Liu quotes the work of American sociologist Erving Goffman throughout his scholarship on taste, particularly Goffman’s description of the rules (inherent to all social life) to discern expressive coherence across disparate categories of preferences. Goffman wrote The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life in 1956, comparing everyday face-to-face interactions to performances, its actors attempting to control the impressions made on others. When defined through an individual’s conscious and deliberate actions, taste can also be characterized as a type of performance.37 Taste is performed through these interactions—choices

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regarding objects and dress, equivalent to props and costumes, and physical settings like stage sets. Like Bourdieu, Goffman identifies performances as site-specific, with roles changing as the “stage” changes. Space is used not only as a metaphor but identified as an active agent.38 Goffman uses the term region for these territories. Regions are akin to domains; according to Goffman, they are spaces bounded by barriers to perception that change over time.39 A barrier to perception might be physical (e.g., a kind of decor, suggesting specific manners to be deployed) or ephemeral (the presence of family members, as opposed to friends, again suggesting particular kinds of behaviors). Goffman defines performance as public, requiring proximity and visibility to others to be meaningful. That said, one’s role is not necessarily meant to be understood as equivalent to the whole of one’s character: a role is a form of mask, editing out features inappropriate to a particular situation. Goffman emphasizes the in-person interaction as critical to the actor-stage analogy, as slips or gaps in an individual’s performance would be available to their audience. It is through the unintentional aspects of a performance or setting that the actor is understood as distinct from their role.40 One’s character is authenticated in these subconscious disclosures. While Goffman’s concepts are extensively cited in Liu’s work to explain the performance of social life online, Goffman’s analogies (crafted in the 1950s) rely on embodiment and physical space. The presentation of self in contemporary digital life lacks the real-space mechanisms of authentication required in Goffman’s descriptions. Assuming that little content posted to social media sites is fundamentally accidental or unconscious, there are fewer opportunities for subconscious disclosures than in a physical space. How, then, can other online users understand the “actor” to be distinct from their “role”? The avoidance of excessive disclosure can be seen in the use of spaces and objects (Goffman’s sets and props) online as well; this can be discerned in the idealized images of domestic interiors (whether posted by owners or designers) on Instagram. Much advice concerning posting those images emphasizes authenticity as the key to their success. There is irony in that advice about constructing authenticity often emphasizes the exposure of personal details to ground the idealized nature of those home images.41

Digital disclosures Liu’s method of text analysis—using software to analyze mood or tone—is one way to seek a posted statement’s subconscious disclosure or authenticity. However, identifying a specific word, phrase, or preference as subconsciously selected is difficult to fully prove. Appropriate moods or tones might also be learned, reflecting the expectations or codes engendered by that particular milieu. The choice of text or label is a deliberate action that can engender associations and inspire engagement, as in the use of hashtags on contemporary platforms (#goodtaste).42

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FIGURE 7.5 Social

Media post: @rusty_7s | credit line: Jessica Stegbauer (design entrepreneur)

FIGURE 7.6 Social

Media post: @mo_morshuis | credit line: Mo Morshuis (design entrepreneur)

Liu’s analyses are ultimately rooted in mathematics, looking for numbers of shared preferences or matches. This rational approach mirrors many metrics applied to or by social media to quantify one’s online life—in numbers of friends, followers, clicks, hits, or likes, whatever one’s objectives might be. The numbers emphasize popularity as the valid measure of their object, whether that object is a person or a product. Combining user-generated labels and the use of hits as a measure can translate to formulas for a successful post. Because search functions on platforms like Instagram privilege posts with greater engagement, more visits beget more visits. Popular journalism concludes that this homogenizes tastes. Posts seek recognition by imitating other successful posts, particularly endemic in images of interior design.43 Like Liu’s conclusions about motivations—seeking online popularity cannot be authenticated as preference or taste. This popularity is not an abstraction where it translates to visibility or financial opportunities like co-branding or product promotion. It is abstract, however, when considered as a holistic equivalent to value or worth or as evidence of why an image is posted or “liked.”

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If taste decisions can be understood to be specific to their contexts, then social media ( just one of the domains one might inhabit) demonstrates that a single individual may possess or perform more than one taste. Liu and Goffman emphasize the development of individual taste, but social media use demonstrates that even an individual’s taste may be profoundly plural in nature.

Taste and bodies, reconsidered While contemplating a social landscape transformed by social media, one might devalue the importance of physical bodies and the everyday praxis that bodies engender on the development and uses of taste. The following definitions emphatically reintegrate the body into consideration.

Antoine Hennion Sociology professor Antoine Hennion, writing in 2005, suggested taste as a cultural practice in its own right, analyzed through what he calls a “pragmatic lens.” His stated aim was a holistic analysis of hidden determinants of cultural practices involving media, objects, collectives, devices, and bodies.44 Taste, for Hennion, is the productive activity of critical amateurs—of deeply engaged users or audiences—not an externally determined attribute of passive subjects.45 He is critical of what he characterized as Bourdieu’s unilateral position on cultural domination: that preferences should be understood as primarily passed from the socially dominant to the dominated. Anyone experiencing culture actively and analytically had agency regarding their preferences. But like Bourdieu, Hennion positioned the development of taste as dynamic and dependent on one’s context.46 Hennion’s model of taste is co-creative, using examples borrowed from art history to support this position—that when analysis moves from a focus on the production of a work of art to one that includes its reception, even works of art held to be canonical can shift meanings and values over time.47 Central to those shifts is art’s mediation; for Hennion, this includes all the mechanisms by which it is selected, presented, commented on, reproduced, and experienced.48 Hennion’s primary focus is music: its performance, reception, and mediation. Music is constantly recreated (and always produced through intermediaries), illuminating the relationship between a cultural object (a piece of music) and its associated publics (academics, audiences, collectors, merchants, critics, the media, etc.).49 Each performance of a piece of music offers precedent for other performances; each performance may reflect the reactions of its audience in real-time, those reactions themselves a performance. In live performance, the bodies of musicians and listeners become apparent as the vehicles for the recursive relationship between subjects and objects. Singing along, dancing, and even nodding one’s head can inspire others in an audience to join in; the

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collective movement of an audience may influence music as it is performed. These dynamic and fleeting group norms can influence culture (here, in the form of music) as it is being made.50 Hennion describes taste, like music, as not mere observation but performance: it acts, engages, transforms, and is felt.51 Hennion qualifies Bourdieu’s assertion that taste is unconscious conditioning with a gentler idea about practice and training. One learns to love what one loves, practicing and repeating acts or experiences until they become so familiar as to become part of oneself.

Luca Vercelloni The recuperation of the body as integral to taste can be indicated through an emphasis on the senses beyond vision alone. A body that listens and reacts to music recuperates that music from its status as an arbitrary symbol in a social system, emptied and neutralized.52 The apex of this pendulum swing might be found in the re-annexation of the taste of food in considering taste for aesthetic phenomena. Luca Vercelloni is the author of The Invention of Taste: A Cultural Account of Desire, Delight and Disgust in Fashion, Food and Art (2005).53 Vercelloni analyzes the history of taste via comparisons between taste as a bodily sense and taste as aesthetic assessment. Both gastronomic and aesthetic taste are, according to Vercelloni, both natural and enculturated. Vercelloni traces how their definitions were split, then reintegrated, and now intertwined: Taste, or rather good taste, is the compass that directs our perceptive apparatus on the high seas of sensation. Refinement of taste is what allows a person to become a connoisseur, to rise above blind, emotional reaction and the innate tendency that guides it.54 The goals of (good) taste, according to Vercelloni, are neither the disinterested appreciation described by Kant nor the social identification described by Bourdieu: it is simply pleasure. Taste is re-essentialized to it’s what I like. Vercelloni claims that taste-as-aesthetic-assessment eventually reabsorbs tasteas-the-palate’s-sensation, aided and abetted by the development of gastronomy, the preparation and appreciation of food distinct from need, elevated to an art form. Vercelloni positions gastronomy’s rise as evidence that taste is fundamentally concerned with gratification—an immediate, intuitive recognition of excellence and satisfaction.55 Vercelloni suggests that his definition of taste represents the culmination of the evolution of capitalism. Luxury is described as its engine—the perception and gratification of desires beyond need, requiring cycles of production and consumption. Vercelloni describes the current economy as driven by “­hyper-consumption,” characterized by the acceleration and intensification of

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emotional and personal gratification and experience.56 Its driver: the pursuit of happiness. Luca Vercelloni is also the CEO of Brandvoyent, a firm specializing in the design of brands. This presents a paradoxical contrast with his definition of taste, which fundamentally embraces a body’s presence. A brand once simply referred to the name of a product (or the producer of a product). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, brands had evolved to manage a set of psychological associations created by marketing to pursue consumers.57 These brands can be understood as a constellation of attributes that distinguish a product or service from others. This mirrors Bourdieu’s definition of habitus, the collection of preferences and behaviorsof an individual that distinguishes them as a member of a social group. Taste, for Bourdieu, is embodied—manifest in habits and pleasures. In the case of a brand, however, its salient characteristics might have little to do with the intrinsic qualities of the product it represents. A brand’s attributes are often substantially connotative, a narrative overlay to make a product memorable, not requiring reference to the physical reality of its referent.58 While habitus includes both knowledge and physical attributes (such as posture or accent), modern brand “identities” can be simply suggestive and unconnected from physical realities. In The Invention of Taste, Vercelloni’s definition of taste embraces physical sensation, in the context of a media landscape operating in representations. On Brandvoyent’s blog, Vercelloni suggests that social media influencers are the most potent influence on its audience’s tastes.59 What connects these seemingly divergent positions can be summarized as a right to desire.

Case study: Instagram backdrops While inherent to any discussion of mediation, authenticity is a term frequently evoked in debates around social media and identity, well-studied and documented since internet access became widespread. The concept of authenticity concerns whether an individual’s actions are commensurate with their values and feelings: if what one does (or how one appears) correlates with who one is. As examining Hugo Liu’s analysis makes clear, it is difficult to deduce motivations behind actions (and declaring one’s likes and dislikes publicly is an action). The actions and reactions involved in musical performance, described by Antoine Hennion, suggest a lack of pretense or artifice. This interpretation—of a spontaneous expression of engagement—would be problematized if some form of coercion could be detected. This question of the relationship between aesthetic choice and performance is raised by Instagram-able environments. Social media’s impacts on the physical designed environment foreground these issues beyond digital settings. That relationship is most clearly manifest in spaces for immersive experiences, also known as pop-up museums or ­Instagram-able spaces. 60 Among these are The Museum of Ice Cream and

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FIGURE 7.7 

Social Media post: @lauramoreta | credit line: Laura Moreta

FIGURE 7.8 

Social Media post: @alenavarron | credit line: Alejandra Navarro

FIGURE 7.9 

Social Media post: @_kadrii | credit line: @_kadrii

The Color Factory. With locations in New York City (and now, worldwide), these are physical places designed around one of the most popular photographic idioms on Instagram: the selfie.61 Both provide colorful and memorable backdrops, popular with Instagram users, producing images that are eye-catching, inspiring views and the accrual of followers.62 These spaces could be described as supporting behaviors dedicated to appearances only. In a scenario predicted by the philosopher and theorist Roland Barthes: each participant, observed by a lens, changes.63 Each constitutes themselves in the process of posing, making another body for themselves, transforming themselves in advance into an image.64 The pose, that “selfied”-body, must be understood as both a choice and as a response to an inferred choreography. Bourdieu wrote extensively about amateur photography as a social rite, both driven by and recursively validating social values.65 As social media supports sharing images, the associated rites and behaviors move beyond the influence produced by intimate or community social ties to the pool of social media users. Instagram creates opportunities to share images of oneself; Instagram-able spaces reinforce opportunities to reproduce the poses of others. These spaces appear, at first, to be “cool,” using Marshall McLuhan’s terminology—­ participatory and open to interpretation, not unlike Hennion’s active audience– performer relationship. To the degree that existing images on social media influence the production of new ones, they are “hot,” with their participants’ performances more reactive than purely spontaneous. Goffman suggests that taste is performed in public social exchanges and that emulation of one another

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enacts belonging. Pop-up museums provide the setting and a novel form of choreography for that particular brand of performance. That said—an analysis of social media offers an image of a domain where the presence of bodies is made ambiguous. One effect contributing to this ambiguity: the ability to reposition bodies in space in relation to one another. Social media platforms use spatial metaphors in the descriptions of the digital connections between people and things; these connections may also produce effects in physical spaces. The choreographies supported by pop-up museums, as discussed above, are an example. Those particular effects are relatively benign: pop-up museums are essentially retail typologies, and to participate is a choice, a popular form of entertainment. Instagram backdrops, however, have begun to encroach into other typologies. Design media has been reporting the inclusion of Instagram-ready backdrops as part of hospitality and retail design for some time.66 The qualities of highly Instagram-able backdrops are now being incorporated into a wide variety of projects, including some identified as public spaces, like parks and plazas. Goffman suggests that social life is akin to acting on a stage. Environments like The Color Factory may be the stage physically occupied by the actors, but the audience is elsewhere—social media sites are the site of viewing and being viewed. If taste is conditioned through experience in specific environments (as per Bourdieu), then environments designed around taking and sharing selfies may draw attention away from the performances of other physical bodies sharing those environments. What is missed is the opportunity to view and be viewed directly, unmediated. This includes the opportunity to better understand and learn from one’s immediate contexts and neighbors in real-time—the conditions by which one’s experience and perceptions might be enriched, and one’s preferences and predilections might be challenged.67 Images on Instagram are edited, framed, and aestheticized, with fewer opportunities to either observe or perform the slips or gaps through which the actor is understood as distinct from their role. Platforms like Instagram are often referred to as public realms, but in their ability to curate the presentation of self, they disrupt the very definition of the word “public.” Moreover, social media can also transform how physical public realms are used and understood, which can include relegating them to the status of a backdrop. In this light, it is possible to see socially mediated social life as a condition more pernicious than an expanded field of social opportunities. According to the theories of the French philosopher Guy DeBord, social media platforms could be understood as a form of spectacle.68

Conclusion Social media is recognizable as a network of social relations. However, social media also maintains boundary conditions with variable levels of detectability.

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FIGURE 7.10 

Social Media post: @nikkimcwilliams | credit line: Nikki McWilliams

Social media platforms support distinct domains where aspects or elements of taste might be displayed or performed, and others withheld or concealed. Moreover, the parameters of these digital domains require an expansion of how taste might be understood. Curation may be an apt term for this expansion, these forms of assessment and display. That editorial step—of selecting content to make public—is a conscious overlay to intuition or initial automatic responses. Author Michael Bhaskar positions curation as a response to the excesses of access enabled by the internet; social media supports the association of goods and praxis with individuals, through selecting and posting choices.69 Bhaskar suggests that this association led to the rise of the “influencer”—individuals or brands skilled at constructing unities from often sampled content, constructing atmospheres and narratives through edits and arrangements.70 This curation by influencers could be understood as a skillful wielding of cultural capital, case studies upon which Bourdieu himself would have found much to support his assertions. Influencers

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become invested by the authority of those who choose to follow them, capitalized players adjusting shared representational idioms and other group norms. Once consistency between personal actions and values, authenticity becomes translated to consistency in posted content and the cultivation of uniqueness.71 Despite the popularity and influence of platforms like Instagram, there remain impediments to access. Limits to capital, technology, and connectivity maintain a digital divide. Like any form of media, social media furnishes evidence predominantly of those who post, not those who abstain. Even among its users, the utility of social media is not monolithic nor universal—its potential benefits (and potential for harm) are as varied as its users. That said, group norms around posting privilege images taken of oneself or one’s companions. In spaces with public access, this excludes strangers: those unknown to the photographer. The presence of strangers is integral to public life, contributing to the cultivation of social and cultural capital. Taking a selfie (or groupie) shifts the focus of its subjects from their physical contexts to a screen in their hand. This interferes with the face-to-face interactions Goffman describes as integral to the performance of taste comprising social life in the physical realm. In the domestic arena, posted images tend to exclude highly personal details, including the occupants of that home. These images gain a kind of legitimacy by resembling professional photographs of design projects, but they lose the ability to authenticate the taste and identity of their owner. These idiomatic appropriations continue the blurring of distinctions between users, authors, and critics engendered by both analog and digital forms of decentralized media. Social media affords expanded access: to post, perchance to influence. Its current constellation of uses raises productive questions about the nature of authority, as users navigate territories in which influence and expertise are uncoupled. The opportunity to curate one’s (apparent) taste may change the nature of identity itself, as constructed in part by the perception of others. If taste can be understood to be specific to its context, then social media demonstrates that a single individual may possess or perform more than one taste.

Notes 1 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Chichester, West Sussex; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 3. 2 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (­Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 9. Remediation is a term coined by Bolter and Grusin. For a more in-depth discussion of remediation and its effects, please see the chapter “Taste and the Internet.” 3 Instagram is just one example: a site used across genres of interactions. 4 The most ubiquitous form of “additional programming” is the hyperlink, the digital connection between internet loci. 5 danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison, “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (October 2007): 211, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083–6101.2007.00393.x.

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6 Shira Ovide, “How Social Media Has Changed Civil Rights Protests,” The New York Times (New York), June 18, 2020. 7 Judith Donath, “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community,” in Communities in Cyberspace, eds. Marc A. Smith and Peter Kollock (London; New York: Routledge, 2006), 27. 8 boyd and Ellison, “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship,” 220. 9 Author Michael Bhaskar offers an analogy useful to the praxis of maintaining a social media presence: that of a DJ who samples and remixes existing music, half creator, half curator (in Michael Bhaskar, Curation: The Power of Selection in a World of Excess [London: Piatkus, 2016]). 10 boyd and Ellison, 222. 11 Donath, “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community,” 28. 12 boyd and Ellison, “Social Network Sites,” 210. 13 Donath and boyd, “Public Displays of Connection,” 73. 14 danah m. boyd, “View of Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing Community into Being on Social Network Sites,” First Monday: Peer-Reviewed Journal on the Internet, December 4, 2006, https://firstmonday.org/article/view/1418/1336. 15 boyd and Ellison, “Social Network Sites,” 220. 16 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, 9–21. 17 boyd and Ellison, 214. In 2007, sociologist Eszter Hargittai documented these self-segregations (an example: that Latinx users were most likely to be found on Myspace) in “Whose Space? Differences among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (October 2007). It should be noted that the tendency toward segregation is contradicted by a few significant exceptions, as is the case with Facebook (originally limited to users with.edu email addresses). 18 http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/ 19 Donath, “Identity and Deception,” 27. 20 Kim Barbour, Katja Lee, and Christopher Moore, “Online Persona Research: An Instagram Case Study,” Persona Studies 3, no. 2 (December 13, 2077): 1. 21 Sparke, The Modern Interior, 15. 22 Kim Barbour and Lydia Heise, “Sharing #home on Instagram,” Me dia International Australia 172, no. 1 (August 1, 2019): 35–47, https://doi. org/10.1177/1329878X19853305. 23 Barbour and Heise, “Sharing #home on Instagram.” 24 Figure 8.1 is an image of the designer’s home, lending an additional degree of ambiguity to its identification. 25 Shahan Mufti, “Art.Sy’s ‘Genome’ Predicts What Paintings You Will Like,” Wired, November 23, 2011, https://www.wired.com/2011/11/mf-artsy/. 26 Margaret Rhodes, “Inside Artsy’s Quest to Make You Love Art as Much as Music,” Wired, May 3, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/05/inside-artsys-quest-makelove-art-much-music/. In that article, Artsy founder Carter Cleveland explains that taste in art is a function of information and familiarity, but that familiarity will eventually foment boredom, leading to more exploration on Artsy and eventually sales. For greater detail regarding machine learning and taste, please refer to the chapter “Taste and Algorithms.” 27 From linguistics, references to how the meaning of a word in the context of a sentence or longer passage is disambiguated; from literature, the relations between themes and styles; from neuroscience, the means by which language is understood differently depending on the beliefs of the audience. Hugo Liu, “Computing Pointof-View: Modeling and Simulating Judgments of Taste,” PhD diss., (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006), 151.

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28 One critique of Bourdieu’s method: that the data used in his analysis was collected from a resoundingly French (and urban) population and its results could not necessarily be interpolated universally. Liu’s data is similarly narrow, privileging youth, and those with the means and proclivity toward socializing online in 2007. 29 Liu, “Computing Point-of-View,” 151. 30 Hugo Liu, “Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances,” Journal of Computer-­ Mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (October 1, 2007): 253. 31 Liu, “Computing Point-of-View,” 19. Liu acknowledges the inherent issues of describing taste as an aesthetic issue when he described aesthetics as “fuzzy.” 32 Liu, “Computing Point-of-View,” 14. 33 Khan Academy, “Semantic Networks and Spreading Activation,” accessed 10.21.21, video, https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/mcat/processing-the-environment/ cognition/v/semantic-networks-and-spreading-activation. 34 In 2008, Myspace profiles included a sub-list of social links called “Top 8.” 35 Liu, “Computing Point-of-View,” 252. 36 Virginia Postrel’s description of taste is featured in the chapter “Taste and the Internet.” 37 Liu cites danah boyd’s work in his characterization of taste as a performance (in “Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances,” 254). 38 Goffman’s work is quoted extensively in scholarship about taste, notably by Pierre Bourdieu: “Erving Goffman once pointed out to me, the Parisian version of the art of living has never ceased to exert a sort of fascination in the ‘AngloSaxon’ world, even beyond the circle of snobs and socialites, thereby attaining a kind of universality” (in Distinction, xi). 39 Goffman uses the term region where Bourdieu might use field. 40 Goffman gives the example of “American college girls” being expected to play down their intelligence in the presence of young men, cleaving to the group norm that women should be understood as inferior to men. In this region, a woman’s failure to conceal their proficiency would be a slip that revealed inferiority as a performance (in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life [New York: Anchor Books; Random House, 2008], 39). 41 Ronda Kaysen, “Could Your House Be an Instagram Star?,” The New York Times (New York), August 9, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/realestate/ could-your-house-be-an-instagram-star.html. 42 817, 720 posts on Instagram, as of September 29, 2022. 43 Yelena Moroz Alpert, “How Instagram’s Algorithm Might Be Limiting Your Interior Design,” The Wall Street Journal, April 2, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-instagrams-algorithm-might-be-limiting-your-interior-design-11617 374096. 4 4 Hennion refers to relations between these components as “infra-theory.” 45 Antoine Hennion, “Pragmatics of Taste,” in The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture, eds. Mark D. Jacobs and Nancy Weiss Hanrahan (Williston: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2005), 131–135, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pratt/detail. action?docID=228522. 46 Unlike Bourdieu, Hennion questions the autonomy of the artistic field. For an analysis of Bourdieu’s arguments about the relationship between art and its context, please see the chapter “Taste and Algorithms.” 47 Hennion, “Pragmatics of Taste,” 133. 48 Hennion, 133. 49 Hennion, The Passion for Music, 4. 50 There are parallels to Hennion’s description of a recursive audience–performer relationship on platforms like TikTok, a forum supporting performance and feedback;

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that said, it is unclear if the real-time reactions made possible by live performance can be replicated, as the primary medium on TikTok is video—adapting to feedback would be asynchronous. 51 Hennion, “Pragmatics of Taste,” 135. 52 Hennion, 132. 53 It should be noted that The Invention of Taste was not translated into English until 2015. 54 Luca Vercelloni and Kate Singleton, The Invention of Taste: A Cultural Account of Desire, Delight and Disgust in Fashion, Food and Art (London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 17. 55 Vercelloni and Singleton, 11–12. 56 Vercelloni and Singleton, 157. 57 Douglas Holt, “Branding in the Age of Social Media,” Harvard Business Review, March 2016, 42. 58 Author and former Harvard Business School professor Douglas Holt uses the example of marketing mid-market whiskey through an association with the American cowboy, exploiting the popular association of both whiskey and the American West with a primitive concept of masculinity (in Holt, “Branding in the Age of Social Media”). 59 Luca Vercelloni, “Luxury for Whom?,” Brandvoyant, March 22, 2018, http://­ brandvoyant.qwentes.it/critics-corner. 60 The following case study and analysis borrows extensively from a class presentation by Xinchun Hu (Pratt Interior Design MFA, 2019). 61 While among the most popular forms, “selfies” are a particular category of ­self-portrait in which the photographer’s face is included. Many related forms are common on social media as well, including “groupies” and other forms of informal portraiture. 62 Images from each Instagram account followed appear in a user’s feed (a term referring to the display of posts within the platform); the number of followers indicate the popularity of particular accounts. 63 This is a reference to the ideas that Barthes pursues in Camera Lucida (1981). 64 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 10. 65 Amateur photography is the subject of Pierre Bourdieu and Luc Boltanski’s Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). 66 The earliest use of “Instagram-ing” in the journal Interior Design was in 2013 (in Dan Rubinstein’s “It Takes Two to Tango: Gensler and Tom Dixon Play off Each Other’s Strengths at McCann Ericson in Midtown,” Interior Design, September 2013. “Instagram-worthy” begins to appear by 2014, most often referring to the presentations of food (both amateur and professional). By 2016, “Instagram-worthy” is used to describe design by designers. Just one example: Craig Kellogg on a design by Alex Gorlin: Craig Kellogg, “The Men in the Mirror,” Interior Design 87, no. 9 [September 2016]: 123–26). 67 This is an interpretation of sociologist Richard Sennett’s observation that the public realm enables access to strangers and that access both reinforces and expands an individual’s sense of self, in Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (London: Penguin, 2002), 295. 68 One could easily argue that taste and social life reduced to the construction of images was central to Thorstein Veblen’s observations as well, writing at the turn of the last century. See this book’s glossary for an explanation of the term spectacle. 69 Michael Bhaskar, Curation: The Power of Selection in a World of Excess (London: Piatkus, 2016), 39. 70 Bhaskar, 100–1. 71 Bhaskar, 164.

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Bibliography Alpert, Yelena Moroz. “How Instagram’s Algorithm Might Be Limiting Your Interior Design.” The Wall Street Journal. Accessed September 29, 2022. https://www. wsj.com/articles/how-instagrams-algorithm-might-be-limiting-your-interior-­ design-11617374096. Barbour, Kim, and Lydia Heise. “Sharing #home on Instagram.” Media International Australia 172, no. 1 (August 1, 2019): 35–47. Barbour, Kim, Katja Lee, and Christopher Moore. “Online Persona Research: An Instagram Case Study.” Persona Studies 3, no. 2 (December 13, 2017): 1–12. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Bhaskar, Michael. Curation: The Power of Selection in a World of Excess. London: Piatkus, 2016. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Luc Boltanski. Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. boyd, danah m. “View of Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing Community into Being on Social Network Sites.” First Monday: Peer-Reviewed Journal on the Internet, December 4, 2006. https://firstmonday.org/article/view/1418/1336. boyd, danah m., and Nicole B. Ellison. “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (October 2007). 210–230. Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Chichester, West Sussex; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Donath, Judith. “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community.” In Communities in Cyberspace, edited by Marc A. Smith and Peter Kollock, 29–59. London; New York: Routledge, 2006. Donath, Judith, and danah m. boyd. “Public Displays of Connection.” BT Technology Journal 22, no. 4 (October 2004): 71–82. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books/ Random House, 2008. Hargittai, Eszter. “Whose Space? Differences among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (October 2007): 276–97. Hennion, Antoine. “Pragmatics of Taste.” In The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture, edited by Mark D. Jacobs and Nancy Weiss Hanrahan, 131–44. Williston: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2005. Hennion, Antoine, Peter Collier, and Margaret Rigaud. The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation. London: Routledge, 2015. Holt, Douglas. “Branding in the Age of Social Media.” Harvard Business Review, March 2016. https://hbr.org/2016/03/branding-in-the-age-of-social-media. Kaysen, Ronda. “Could Your House Be an Instagram Star?” The New York Times, August 9, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/realestate/could-your-housebe-an-instagram-star.html. Kellogg, Craig. “The Men in the Mirror.” Interior Design 87, no. 9 (September 2016): 123–26.

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Liu, Hugo. “Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances.” Journal of Computer-­ Mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (October 1, 2007): 252–75. Liu, Hugo, P. Maes, and G. Davenport. “Unraveling the Taste Fabric of Social Networks.” International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems, Social Networking Communities and E-Dating Services: Concepts and Implications 2, no. 1 (2009): 42–71. Liu, Xinyu Hugo. “Computing Point-of-View: Modeling and Simulating Judgments of Taste.” Doctor of Philosophy in Media Arts and Sciences, Massachussetts Institute of Technology, 2006. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 1st ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. Mufti, Shahan. “Art.Sy’s ‘Genome’ Predicts What Paintings You Will Like.” Wired, November 23, 2011. https://www.wired.com/2011/11/mf-artsy/. Ovide, Shira. “How Social Media Has Changed Civil Rights Protests.” The New York Times, June 18, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/technology/­socialmedia-protests.html. Rhodes, Margaret. “Inside Artsy’s Quest to Make You Love Art as Much as Music.” Wired, May 3, 2017. https://www.wired.com/2017/05/inside-artsys-questmake-love-art-much-music/. Rubinstein, Dan. “It Takes Two to Tango: Gensler Teams with Tom Dixon at McCann Erickson.” Interior Design. Sandow Media, LLC, September 1, 2013. Gale Academic OneFile. https://interiordesign.net/projects/it-takes-two-to-tango-gensler-teamswith-tom-dixon-at-mccann-erickson/. “Semantic Networks and Spreading Activation (Video) | Khan Academy.” Accessed October 21, 2021. https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/mcat/processing-the-environment/ cognition/v/semantic-networks-and-spreading-activation. Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. London: Penguin, 2002. Sparke, Penny. The Modern Interior. Illustrated edition. London: Reaktion Books, 2008. Vercelloni, Luca. “Luxury for Whom?” Brandvoyant, March 22, 2018, http://­ brandvoyant.qwentes.it/critics-corner. Vercelloni, Luca, and Kate Singleton. The Invention of Taste: A Cultural Account of Desire, Delight and Disgust in Fashion, Food and Art. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. “World Population by Year.” World Meter, http://www.worldometers.info/ world-population/world-population-by-year/ “(99+) Hugo Liu, Ph.D. | LinkedIn.” Accessed September 26, 2022. https://www. linkedin.com/in/dochugo/.

TASTE AND ALGORITHMS

Introduction Taste is judgment, variously theorized as a conscious or subconscious assessment of aesthetic value. The degree of consciousness may depend on the judge’s identity: a layperson may have a different experience than an artist or designer trained to critique an intuitive response. A judgment of taste has been described as a single thought or part of a larger process of conditioning or learning.1 Nonetheless, one thing all of the previously presented models share is the role

FIGURE 8.1 DALL-E

(AI) generated image: prompt “A museum gallery” | credit line: DALL-E/ author

FIGURE 8.2 DALL-E

(AI) generated image: prompt “A museum gallery filled with art created by AIs” | credit line: DALL-E/ author DOI: 10.4324/9781003164388-9

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of human choice, however aggregated into institutions or disciplinary domains. That sovereignty is challenged by the use of artificial intelligence (AI). Media theorist Marshall McLuhan, on information in an electronic age, suggested all media is a translation of ourselves, “a technological extension of consciousness.” 2 Because AI is now used to automate choice, it also stands in for the independent sentient subject. This raises the question of whether AI is used to practice a form of synthetic taste or simply an attempt to circumvent it. This chapter explores the use of algorithms and AI by Tate, the United Kingdom’s national museum of British, modern, and contemporary art. Algorithms are sets of computer code designed for particular tasks. AI refers to algorithms working in concert, able to perform tasks so complex as to engender comparison with human sentience. Tate was among the first art institutions to develop algorithms to search, display, and analyze its collection, which is now a common practice. They are now one of a handful of institutions using AI to expand their collections as part of a curatorial process or in creating new work.

AI and the museum AI is, simplistically, a set of nested algorithms that work together to create a form of media.3 As described by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and subsequent generations of scholars, a museum is also a form of media. There is a paradox in comparing AI (abstract and ephemeral) and art museums (monumental and enduring), but both museums and these forms of computer code are complex systems of the organization and presentation of content—the artifacts that comprise an institution’s collection or items in a dataset. When artifacts are the data in question, an AI can become a curator, a pivotal role in constructing a museum’s identity. The traditional understanding of an art museum is of a physical place containing material things. According to Bourdieu, museums produce the fundamentally embodied practice of museum-going. Bourdieu’s extensive analysis positions the art museum as constructing public taste, and visits are central to his hypothesis regarding how that taste is imparted. However, museums worldwide have changed significantly since Bourdieu’s study, both in form and mission.4 Collections are now available to view online, changing the nature of what a visit might be. The accessibility afforded by an online presence also addresses long-standing critiques that museums should be more open and inclusive. The use of AI in museum settings can be understood to be part of that project. Without subjectivity, AI stands to eliminate bias as a means of exclusion. Contemporary scholarship on the changes to museum culture and taste directly addresses Bourdieu’s models and methodology. Close examination of

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these texts foregrounds the entrenchment of both taste and bias in museums, and this chapter examines the role of algorithmic media in this process. AI operates through rules and on content constructed by humans, revealing the inherent subjectivity in both. AI-driven techniques are being used across the museological landscape. These are used as part of data analysis, collection information management, and visitor research and evaluation.5 They are also used to search for ahistorical and discursive approaches to creating new artifacts and new views of their collections.6 Notable examples include the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, the Dallas Art Museum, and Barnes Foundation websites; these all use search functions based on image recognition, making it possible to search content by color or shape.7 At the frontier of the use of AI applications was The Museum of Digital Art (MuDA) in Zurich. Dedicated to the digital arts, MuDA was exclusively curated by an AI nicknamed HAL 101.8 Image recognition software is a kind of AI, deep-learning software that abstracts complex phenomena into layers of information for analysis. This involves teaching or training an AI to perform tasks based on the comparative analysis of examples. It is sometimes referred to as unsupervised learning, where data is processed without prior labeling; this is in contrast to supervised learning, a term that would apply to the use of metadata to classify and label graphic information prior to algorithmic sorting.9 Unlike processes relying on metadata, image recognition software relies on only the visible information in a digital image to determine its identity.10 This method eliminates the need for text-based descriptions and their associated vicissitudes of subjectivity, including taste and bias. The project of universality is translated into one of neutrality, now through technology unburdened by tradition or subjectivity. Bourdieu suggested that his work represents a “theoretical intention…to get out from under the philosophy of consciousness without doing away with the agent.”11 We might assume that Bourdieu refers to a human agent. Deep learning is a dominant technique in AI.12 The term neural networks is used to describe the structure of deep-learning software. Learning and intelligence are the preferred analogies of the computer-programming industry. Both terms refer to the fact that AI performs in ways deemed analogous to the human mind. An AI “mind,” however, is a synthetic mind; it is able to process tasks at a speed and for durations unavailable to a human being and functions without traditional notions of subjectivity. The AI’s programmer defines the tasks to be performed and the means of its performance, but the AI produces the specific results (e.g., identification of image content). This suggests a transparency to the process—all selection parameters are explicitly stated. The AI has no habits or traditions to qualify its choices and can process information unencumbered by any form of a priori judgment or bias, aesthetic or social.

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The role of the traditional museum As a physical space, a museum is a designed condition. Traditionally, museums implied the presence of material things and the existence of a physical space that contained them. Few other building types are so associated with permanence: finite, fixed, and (generally) corporeal. The physical building, however, produces effects well beyond the straightforward provision of boundedness. It is a museum’s interior where its mediating function is most directly manifest. There, artifacts are arranged and positioned in relation to one another, and these juxtapositions are made available for the visitor. The order, sequence, and proximity of work in an exhibition all influence a visitor’s understanding of the exhibited artifact. This, too, is a designed condition—the result of a curator’s vision and mission. It may not be immediately apparent that this arrangement of material things in space is a form of mediation. The visitor, after all, has access to the sensible qualities of the exhibit directly. Their aesthetic experience may appear unmitigated, as artifacts can be seen (or heard) directly.13 Despite providing opportunities for an individual aesthetic experience, an exhibition’s defining characteristic may be understood to be less than fully visible. Strategies of display depend on aspects of what each element has in common. In the presence of material things, we have access to a wide range of characteristics taken in by the senses: we can perceive form, size, color, texture, etc. Even mere proximity—artifacts sharing a common space—suggests some

FIGURE 8.3 

Tate Britain | Photo: Tony Hisgett, Birmingham, UK

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commonality.14 Each element, however, will also have empirical characteristics not necessarily apparent to the senses—the date of creation, the name of the creator, the place it was created. Possession produces commonality, whether by ownership or institutional custodianship.15 The designation of style, a curatorial act, reflects and in turn confers commonality between objects. The mediating effects of the museum would further include the descriptive texts or labels that accompany the work. Reading these, a visitor can see what is in common, even if the characteristics described—the date of creation, the name of the creator, the place it was created—are not discernible viewing the artifacts themselves. The understanding imparted by the labels would produce an overlay of new information over the sensible apprehension of the work. Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis defined a museum as a recognizable large-scale field of cultural production, recursive relations of behaviors, exhibited objects, and a physically sensible environment.16 It is a set of values and relationships between people and things made recognizable in physical spaces. For Bourdieu, the characteristics of this particular field made museums singularly powerful in their impacts on taste and a reinforcement of a status quo; museums are exclusive, restricted, and generally open to esoteric goods only. This is, according to Bourdieu, a key to a museum’s cultural role as a producer of social and cultural assets. Not only do museums contain objectified cultural capital (value intrinsic to the artifacts), they produce institutionalized social capital, a form of autonomous validation that could be bestowed on people.17 For Bourdieu, museum visits are a cultural practice linked to education and social origin. The act of visiting a museum is an indication of the visitor’s taste, for Bourdieu, a key characteristic of one’s class identity. Presenting consecrated artifacts to the museum-going public serves to influence the aesthetic dispositions of the visitor, making the museum a dominant force in the construction of public taste: The prohibition against touching the objects, the religious silence which is forced upon visitors, the puritan asceticism of the facilities, always scarce and uncomfortable… the grandiose solemnity of the decoration and the decorum, colonnades, vast galleries, decorated ceilings, monumental staircases both outside and inside, everything seems done to remind people that the transition from the profane world to the sacred world presupposes… a radical spiritual change.18 For Bourdieu, any field is characterized by both implicit and explicit rules of behavior. These are reinforced by participation—for example, the repeated practice of museum visitors of not touching the objects. In the quote above, Bourdieu lists taken-for-granted behaviors exhibited within the physical context of a museum building by its visitors; these codes may be internalized, experienced as habit or tradition, below the level of conscious thought. This

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is embodied cultural capital, “long-standing dispositions of the mind and body.”19 He takes care not to attribute causality to either behavior or “the puritan asceticism of the facilities” but suggests that each is understood in relation to one another. 20 One understanding of Bourdieu’s position is that simply visiting and learning to exhibit the appropriate site-specific manners is sufficient to explain embodied capital and produce status.21 Sociologist Laurie Hanquinet, in “J’adore! Aesthetics in Bourdieu’s Account of Tastes,” cautions the contemporary reader that singling out aspects of enculturation is misleading and reductive, pointing out that a visitor’s upbringing would have likely reinforced a taste for high culture. Hanquinet rejects a reading of Bourdieu that replaces a genuinely aesthetic disposition with simply going through the motions. An embodied disposition would include levels of ability to decode, decipher, or interpret the work of art, not merely use it as a status-bestowing prop.22 For Bourdieu, the aesthetic experience made possible by visiting was a critical part of the development of taste; this, too, acknowledges the role of the museum in mediating their experience: Nothing more totally manifests and achieves the autonomizing of aesthetic activity vis-a-vis extra-aesthetic interests or functions than the art museum’s juxtaposition of works. Though originally subordinated to quite different or even incompatible functions (crucifix and fetish, Pied and still life), these juxtaposed works tacitly demand attention to form rather than function, technique rather than theme.23 Occupying the space is a means of taste-making, supporting the reproduction of consumers capable of consuming the objects contained therein. Penelope Curtis, a former director of Tate Britain, suggests that gallery labels should be recognized as explicitly representative of the values of the institution and that they interfere with the aesthetic experience of the user. Curtis invokes Immanuel Kant’s sensibility in avowing a return to direct apprehension in her curatorial strategy for Tate Britain: [T]he idea of taste as something acquired instinctively, viscerally, subliminally, under as much as above the surface. Something we don’t know we know. Its primary meaning is to try or to test, something very mobile and exploratory, rather than fixed. To experience or perceive. This is close to what the rehang of Tate Britain aimed to do: to put experience before knowledge, and to use the physical qualities of the building to do the guiding, rather than using words.24 Is this aesthetic disposition equivalent to Kant’s “pure gaze”?25 Bourdieu described this, too, as a form of embodied cultural capital: “A quasi-creative power which sets the aesthete apart from the common herd by a radical difference which seems to be inscribed in ‘persons.’”26 Inhabiting temple-like

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galleries, spaces made separate from the everyday by design, it is possible to imagine that a visitor could have an experience of art distinct from any other concern, as autonomous and disinterested as Kant required for a judgment of taste. Bourdieu’s reading of Kant points out that the ability to produce a pure gaze is a mark of social class, and as such, even the gaze itself is not distinct from all other concerns.

Taste-making and the museological field Does a museum have taste, in addition to producing taste in others? A museum’s public image suggests a more-or-less unified aesthetic sensibility—of patterns of inclusion that appear to be homologous to an individual’s patterns of choice. An individual with sufficient cultural capital could influence the taste of others, as well as possess taste themselves.27 For Bourdieu, taste is a set of embodied dispositions to differentiate and appreciate functioning below the level of consciousness.28 Taste could arguably be attributed to the human actors within the museological field but not the field itself. According to Bourdieu, the codes of behavior inherent to a field—in this case, the museum—would influence all actors involved, not just visitors. This would include all actors concerned with the collection’s governance, maintenance, and organization. The identity of any actor is formed by the codes they are obliged to follow, and consequently to the positions they might occupy within a given field.29 These spatial differentiations were integral to the field’s definition and yet not necessarily apparent to those outside its boundaries. Sociologist Tony Bennett suggested that the invisibility of the internal workings of the museum were critical to its institutional capital and dominant cultural role in aesthetic assessment: [T]he division between the hidden space of the museum in which knowledge is produced and organized and the public spaces in which it is offered for passive consumption produces a monologic discourse dominated by the authoritative cultural voice of the museum.30 In this way, the configuration of a museum’s physical space is integral (and analogous) to its social hierarchies and distributions of authority or capital. Curators are one source of that capital. While an individual curator could be understood to have taste, curatorial praxis requires a conscious address of institutional values; the decisions they make are influenced by institutional codes and influence them in turn.31 Within this recursive relationship, curators are the active classifiers, deploying expertise in determining the characteristics an artifact should have to be considered for inclusion in a museum collection or exhibition. This enables a given artifact to be understood in relation to other artifacts, establishing (and established by) their position in a collection or

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exhibit. These characteristics may or may not be apparent to a visitor without reading labels. Bennett identifies the historic influence of principles of scientific taxonomies on curatorial practice.32 These emphasized categories are based on observable differences between things, a process theoretically democratic in its accessibility. It could also be understood as a deliberate distinction from individual taste, an attempt to find and adhere to universal principles valid for all time and outside the vagaries of subjectivity.

The evolution of mediation and museums The labels bearing descriptions of an artwork’s pertinent characteristics are a subtle clue to a critical aspect of the museum’s mission: a system of classification and assessment. As identified by Penelope Curtis, labels are visible indications of what is considered essential to understand and so reveal the attributes that that institution values. Bennett identifies a museum’s architecture as creating divisions necessary to maintain its cultural position. One critical division: what is revealed or concealed about its curatorial process and values. Another: its distinction from everyday spaces.With careful management of these divisions, a museum could present itself as depoliticized.33 This separation is integral to long-standing critiques regarding the need for its collections to be widely open and accessible to the public it serves.34 Broad public access challenges what Bourdieu, too, identified as the museum’s raison d’être—a space apart and rarefied, classifying and consecrating art around specialized forms of knowledge. In this context, Tate developed an online presence. Like many prominent art institutions, Tate launched a website in the late 1990s. The early versions of the site served as a brochure and calendar for the physical galleries; it added features and content steadily over time.35 By 2013, Tate had digitized over 70,000 objects in its collection for inclusion on its website, including work not available for public display. In addition to images of its physical holdings, the website would now provide access to non-physical artifacts—transcripts of lectures and essays, as well as audio and video files. The mission statement contemporary to the launch of its digitized holdings emphasized increased access to its collection as a goal, both online and as a mechanism to promote and enhance physical visits.36 An online experience of a museum’s collection remediates—ease of access may play a part in veiling the impacts of this translation.37 Visitors to a website now have access to images of the work, not the artifacts themselves. Famously, art theorist André Malraux championed a similar translation well before the advent of the internet. In Museum Without Walls (1947), Malraux argues that images of art are an equalizing force. Images are portable and thus increase accessibility. They also provide access to aspects of an artifact that may have previously gone unnoticed, like small details or subtle changes to materials. Distinctions between

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kinds of work—painting versus sculpture, for instance—are minimized, affording comparisons between work previously thought to be incomparable.38 Malraux envisioned books as the vehicle for the new mobility of museum collections.39 For Bourdieu, this new mobility of the collection’s images would represent multivalent changes to the work’s domain, including its embodied nature. Tate’s digital presence served to revise the identity of the art museum as a system of enclosure.40 The work would now be experienced outside the museum interiors and thus would not be subject to its effects. The curator’s spatial strategy, the effect on the viewer’s disposition, the museum visit itself as a source of status: all would be absent in the two-dimensional user interface of a website. This is not to suggest, however, that the mediating effect of the institution would be absent to its collection’s viewer. These effects would be translated, now to a new potential audience, as a museum’s holding would now be accessible to anyone with access to the internet.41 A collection of artifacts this size required the development of a search engine for the site: algorithmically driven functions used to search, organize, and display the extensive holdings. This might suggest that the display of the work was now the pure purview of the user, able to select and group anything they might prefer, an operation so ubiquitous that it renders its power nearly invisible. A search engine conventionally requires an artifact to be represented by short descriptive phrases, lines of text. A search of Tate’s online collections uses metadata to pair search terms with the digitized images of its collection and associated media.42 The metadata would contain information about each artist or artifact, similar to that provided to visitors to physical gallery spaces on the written labels accompanying each displayed work, as well as the name and description of the exhibition.43 Curatorial staff determines metadata, which functions as a hidden a priori classification of a given work. Its use places limits on the kinds of successful searches possible—the familiar and often frictionless nature of a search transaction veils that translation. According to new critiques of Bourdieu’s work, the editorial power of metadata shares characteristics with Bourdieu’s use of class as a lens through which to view taste and social life. Short descriptive phrases are reductive, when compared to the experience of a work of art itself. Bennett revisited Bourdieu’s project of gathering empirical data to study the relationship between taste and class position. Bennett charged that Bourdieu’s focus on social class deemphasized many intersectional characteristics of identity—gender, race, ethnicity, and age among them—and so their effects on choice or taste are less apparent. The reductive nature of Bourdieu’s analysis allowed for clear description but at the cost of eliminating potentially illuminating detail about the nature of social life. In the data collected and analyzed by Bennett and his team, they found that including those characteristics changed the apparent impact of class. Bennett’s models accounted for the intersectional details of identity—some

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FIGURE 8.4 Recreation

of screenshot of Tate website search results, term: “jenny” (accessed 07.20.20) | credit line: © 2022 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York | Courtesy Tate

visible, some not. Their results did not neatly organize into distinct strata but as concentrations in clouds of phenomena.44 In addition to images of artifacts making the collection more visibly accessible, Tate’s digital evolution was designed to respond to a public ever more interested in the relationship between a collection and larger social and political

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issues.45 This encompassed ongoing critiques Bennet identified: that a museum’s mission to serve a universal public translates to a collection better representative of humanity.46 This would necessarily involve making the internal logics of the field formerly invisible to those outside the institution. This proposed transparency, however, would challenge the museum’s autonomy and ability to avoid external concerns in determining its internal culture.47 Professor of cultural and political history Malcolm Quinn pointed out that this attempt to “open up” the museum was tantamount to an identity crisis and that the contemporary museum was now “caught between communitarian agendas and the perception that the mission of the museum is to adjudicate on questions of public taste.”48 Paul Goodwin, a former curator at Tate Britain and director of the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) at University of the Arts London, acknowledges the pressures on museums. But to be recognized as relevant, museums could not avoid embracing contemporary cultural values, including diversity in staff, artist, and visitor identity. This condition would be foundational to the goal of the post-taste museum, a relinquishing of its role as a mechanism of social domination.49

FIGURE 8.5 

Data posted for Jenny Holzer’s BLUE PURPLE TILT (GitHub)

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As part of Tate’s project of transparency, Tate published datasets about its collection in 2013, aggregating all its metadata into databases, and making these files available for public use via websites.50 While an individual database entry regarding an artifact provides information similar to that which is obtainable via web searches or physical visits, the fact that each detail can be used to reorganize and compile the collection into new representations allows for views of the collection challenging to form through any other means. Data analysis enables pattern recognition—the ability to scrutinize the collection via its metadata for its (almost) invisible commonalities. This view is exclusive of any visual experience of the collection’s artifacts themselves, constructed with only the artifacts’ descriptions. Using data provided by this dataset reveals that female artists made up only 30% of Tate’s collection.51 According to Bourdieu, the recursivity of any field may play a substantial role in perpetuating patterns of inclusion or exclusion: “a present past that tends to perpetuate itself into the future by reactivation in similarly structured practices.”52 These conditions are exacerbated by processes of assessment experienced as tradition or habit and not necessarily apparent as a conscious choice. Existing artifacts in a collection themselves can be understood as an institutional standard, if criteria for new acquisitions include resemblance to what already exists in that collection. Collecting practice would be thereby defined as inherently conservative or biased, if this inspires similar choices over time.53 Taste itself may be understood as a form of bias, both embodied and social in nature. Philosopher Celine Labouef used Bourdieu’s model of habitus to explain that both taste and bias are perceptual habits. Both are conditioned by one’s social milieu, while simultaneously influencing it.54 Bias—like taste—is habitual; it operates below the level of conscious assessment. This helps to allow for the entrenchment of both, reactivated in similarly structured practices. Like taste, bias becomes hard to consciously reason away, no matter how much one may consciously (and conscientiously) like to. Any project to free an institution of bias in order to embrace diversity and inclusion would have to devise processes as a workaround to this conundrum. One possible solution might be to double down on increasing access to and visibility of the museum’s collections and its internal praxis. Another approach is to more fully automate the means by which an institution might classify the work in its collection.

Tate’s Recognition The next step in Tate’s digital evolution was the commissioning and presentation of a work of art produced by an AI. In 2016, Tate launched Recognition, an exhibition pairing images from its digital collection with photographs available through the Reuters News Service. Recognition uses a combination of image-recognition and text-recognition

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algorithms to match digital photographs, their commonality strictly visible and ostensibly recognizable to the viewer. The exhibition was active for several months in the fall of 2016 as a website and installation at Tate Britain; selections from the exhibition remained present online for longer still.55 Recognition is both process and result, both an artifact and a collection. It uses four layers of algorithms to construct its neural network. Each layer of algorithm contains multiple layers of processing sequences of tasks to be performed. The first layer includes functions for object recognition, by which figures are isolated from backgrounds and used to compare the results to other objects. The second layer is facial recognition, its goal to determine the age, gender, and emotional state of each identified face. The third layer is compositional recognition, which identifies relations between shapes within the field of the image and identified color. The fourth is context recognition, which mines the metadata associated with a given file.56 Over its three-month activation, Recognition produced 7,271 matches.57 Including journalistic images in the domain of art is only one challenge to institutional sovereignty. Recognition’s content is derived from dynamically defined sets: Tate’s digitized images and Reuters News Service, collections of data that continue to grow, with no proscribed limits. If a collection is theoretically boundless, exclusion is problematized, challenging institutional inclusion as a source of value. Recognition could be understood as an interrogation of Tate’s role as a gatekeeper or taste-maker in its theoretical refusal to exclude. For a visitor, Recognition’s algorithms assume the position of the curator of physical spaces in creating new structures and sequences to experience artifacts

FIGURES 8.6 Recognition

(details): Pope Francis and George Frederic Watts, Daphne (c1879-82) | credit line @Dinuka Liyanamatte/ Reuters News & Media Inc. | Courtesy Tate

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in the collection. The tasks performed by the Recognition software mimic curatorial processes, albeit in a radically simplified form. Recognition’s parameters and the resulting pairs follow the most straightforward and most recognizable code of collecting: new artifacts should in some way resemble the existing collected artifacts based on appearance. The eye of the AI is not quite human; this condition is quite the point and is evident in its results. Yet Recognition’s results do reveal a human bias entrenched in perception. While installed at Tate Britain, visitors were given the opportunity to make matches themselves between the sets of images. Over 4,500 visitor-proposed pairs were submitted, and a selection of these was made available via the Tate website.58 The choices made by visitors to the exhibition rarely matched the selections made by Recognition’s AI. Visitors tended to select matches based on the most prominent figures in the images—for example, figures of men matched with figures of men.59 Similarities between the AI’s pairs of images are often subtle, sometimes comparing characteristics of a background condition in one image to attributes of a figure in the other. Figures of men might be matched with sailboats or towers or identified as equivalent to abstract figures (see Figure 8.7). Recognition can see a commonality in images not readily perceptible to human sight, recalling Malraux’s argument for a boundless museum. A person’s perception is altered by preconceptions engendered by a priori classifications. Can an AI have bias? As a curator, Recognition can pursue a radically formalist interpretation of the images, eluding the disciplinary, institutional, and social contexts in which a human curator would perform. As a visitor, it eludes the established categorical nature of assessment. In eliminating context, the bias of approaching an artifact with a priori traditions or standards should be eliminated. However, the cost of eliminating bias is in eliminating all analytic self-consciousness regarding the new selections, structures, and organizations that make up Recognition. Mathematician Cathy O’Neil puts a fine point on the issue at hand: “What is less evident is…whether we’ve eliminated human bias or simply camouflaged it with technology.”60

Replicating bias Professor of African American Studies Ruha Benjamin, in Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019), argues that coded inequities form when we perceive our tools to rise above human subjectivity.61 Emphasis on the emancipatory nature of the software occludes conditions embedded in the content on which it operates. The release of Tate’s database illuminated patterns of inclusion or exclusion visible when scrutinizing the collection as a whole. Recognition had access to the entire digitized collection, but made its selections one at a time. Because Recognition sampled individual artifacts, patterns vis-à-vis choices made over time were not discernible.

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FIGURES 8.7 Recognition

(details): Ban Ki-moon and Harold Cohen, Before the Event (1963) | credit line: @POOL/ Reuters News & Media Inc. | Courtesy Tate

An AI can only learn from the content to which it is given access and so reflects any bias embedded there. One example: it has been thoroughly documented that men appear more frequently in news photos than women.62 The pairs made by Recognition using images from Reuters News Service would then logically feature more images of work created by men paired with images that featured men more often than women. As Bourdieu might have described: the primary act of deciphering perpetuates a present past.63 An AI may not embody bias, but it replicates its effects. The transparency implicit in an AI’s programming is problematized by the complexity of its operations. Recognition’s software, like other forms of AI, is successful at tasks like identifying characteristics of images, but precisely how it does so remains a mystery. Their creators’ intentions may be clear, but their inner workings are inaccessible and invisible, buried in their layers of computations.64 This process arguably replaces the encoded and private nature of museological practice with another opaque process.

Non-human taste Can AI have taste? One might infer that this question places AI as a consumer or visitor, as did Tate’s decision to compare visitors’ pairings with those created by Recognition. According to Malcolm Quinn: “The algorithm, which can deliver choice without relying on forms of self-representation, diminishes the social value of judgments of taste as a privileged mode of self-management in the world of goods.”65

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Quinn, here, defines taste as self-representation through choice, nonsensical when applied to a non-human. AI has no choice but to make its choices, being programmed to do so. It has no body and yet exhibits qualities of embodied capital in its simulation of cognitive processes. The complexity of Recognition’s operation produces the image of a subconscious for the software, but this image should be understood as false. Like any form of media, AIs divert attention from their nature to edit and translate content. Philosopher Giorgio Agamben most succinctly answers the question regarding taste and AIs, describing taste as a special form of knowledge that enjoys and a special form of pleasure that judges.66 Recognition may produce beauty but cannot feel the pleasure of an aesthetic experience, having no emotions (or a body) to do so. It remains that choices to make, deploy, edit, and publicize Recognition are still very human operations. It is notable that while it is not explicitly stated, the selection of images produced by Recognition on the Tate website was made by human curators. The selection parameters are expressly stated: “the most striking, humorous, controversial, thought-provoking or simply beautiful.”67

Conclusion As an AI, Recognition challenges fundamental assumptions about museum praxis in its ability to mimic their results. It itself is an esoteric object, consecrated by the very field it fails to indemnify. As a popular and critical success, it may serve to divert or misdirect attention from the continued dominance of Tate as a taste-making institution. Bennett demands that contemporary museums (regarding representational adequacy against public perception) should embody a principle of general human universality and be held accountable for any exclusion (whether based on gender, race, or class).68 This project is a recalibration of the museum recognized by Bourdieu’s analysis: an institution that produces exclusion. While curator of Cross Cultural Programmes at Tate Britain, Paul Goodwin formed doubts about the efficacy of new paradigms of curation and display to successfully free the museum from a top-down hierarchy of influence or the pursuit of the pure gaze.69 There remains the issue of whether visibility or transparency alone are sufficient to revise the museum’s dominant cultural position. In “Confessions of a Recalcitrant Curator or How to Reprogramme the Global Museum,” Goodwin discusses the work of Martiniquan writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant: Glissant talks about the rights of people and things not to be understood, to resist full scrutiny. The demand for opacity is not a demand for invisibility but an insistence that I exist on other than your terms: my sense of being-in-the-world is not dependent on yours. It is an assertion of the right not to be incorporated into your way of understanding the world.70

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For Goodwin, this also speaks to the basis of classifications of taste. Certainly, Bourdieu could agree, positioning every taste assessment in relation to a dominant way of understanding. Incorporation into the institutional fields of the museum may involve untenable assimilation as well as straightforward representation. Therein remains a tension between the museum’s power to confer cultural capital and its mission to remain culturally relevant. Although Bourdieu did not focus on the intersectional details of identity vis-à-vis taste and the museum, he did shine a light on the fact that even the purest of gazes is inextricable from its social context, warts and all. It is within the power of both Recognition and Tate, as forms of media, to make some things visible and by omission render others invisible. The analysis of their relationship makes apparent that perceptual habits are hard to work around, even with the best of intentions. Media may be complicit in their perpetuation, even while deployed in their elimination. Taste requires choice, but it is not the ability to choose alone that defines it. As described above, taste is the process of aesthetic assessment that imbricates us in our cultural contexts, and those contexts are a reflection of us. No matter the new forms of perception or technological extension available to us in the service of choice, taste is something that makes us recognizable as human.

Notes 1 Some reactionary positions remain insistent on the possibility of genetics playing a role, notably as part of the debates around high versus low culture. For an in-depth discussion, please see the chapter “Taste and Mass Media.” 2 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: MIT Press, [1964] 1994), 57. 3 This assertion is also explored in the chapter “Taste and the Internet” (on the use of algorithms by search engines). 4 Bourdieu’s work on museums was largely conducted in the 1990s, although related themes have informed his work since the 1960s. 5 Ariana French and Elena Villaespesa, “AI Visitor Experience and Museum Operations: A Closer Look at the Possible,” in Humanizing the Digital: Unproceedings from the MCN 2018 Conference, eds. Suse Anderson, Isabella Bruno, Hannah Hethmon, Seema Rao, Ed Rodley, and Rachel Ropeik. https://ad-hoc-museum-collective. github.io/humanizing-the-digital/chapters/13 6 Manique Hendricks, “In Search of a Non-narrated Collection Presentation,” Stedelijk Studies, no. 5 (2017), accessed 06.20.20, https://stedelijkstudies.com/journal/ algorithm-curator-search-non-narrated-collection-presentation/. 7 French and Villaespesa, “AI Visitor Experience.” 8 HAL 101 is a cheeky reference to HAL, the AI in 2001: A Space Odyssey. “MuDA,” Hendricks, 2017. Note: MuDA closed in June 2020 due to the global pandemic. 9 Nicholas Thompson, “An AI Pioneer Explains the Evolution of Neural Networks,” Wired, May 13, 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/ai-pioneer-explainsevolution-neural-networks/. 10 This function is built into the social media platforms used every day by millions of participants. It is the process by which Google Image finds a match to u ­ ser-uploaded photos and by which Pinterest recommends similar images to ones selected by its

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users for inclusion in collections. It is also used by Facebook to suggest the identities of subjects of posted photographs. 11 Randal Johnson, “Editor’s Introduction: Pierre Bourdieu on Art, Literature and Culture,” in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 4. 12 Jason Pontin, “Greedy, Brittle, Opaque, and Shallow: The Downsides to Deep Learning,” Wired, February 2, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/ greedy-brittle-opaque-and-shallow-the-downsides-to-deep-learning/. 13 Seen: usually. Heard: sometimes. Touched: almost never. A reminder that, according to the OED, the roots of the term “taste” include to try, to test, and to touch sharply. (Oxford English Dictionary, “taste (part of speech),” accessed 09.14.22, https:// www.oed.com/view/Entry/198050.) 14 Philosopher Michel Foucault referred to the commonality perceived through proximity as “[c]onvenientia…a resemblance connected with space,” in “The Prose of the World,” in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, [1971] 1994), 18. 15 Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, [1968] 1996), 76. 16 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 120–22. 17 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J. Richardson (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 241–58. Bourdieu identifies three forms of cultural capital, or assets that confer power or influence: embodied, objectified, and institutionalized. Bourdieu’s concepts of capital are analyzed in the chapter “Taste and Magazines.” 18 Bourdieu, Field, 236–237. 19 Bourdieu, Capital, 241–258. 20 Bourdieu, Field, 23. 21 Embodied capital includes social assets that require a body to have or use: skills, posture, mannerisms, accents, etc. 22 Laurie Hanquinet, “‘J’Adore!’ Aesthetics in Bourdieu’s Account of Tastes,” in The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums, and Everyday Life after Bourdieu, eds. Malcolm Quinn et al. (New York; Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 141–42. 23 Bourdieu, Distinction, 31. 24 Penelope Curtis, “The (un)narrated, the (un)curated,” in The Persistence of Taste (New York; Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 120. 25 The pure gaze and other concepts that Immanuel Kant proposed regarding taste are explored in the introduction to this book. 26 Bourdieu, Distinction, 31. 27 For an exploration of the term influencer, please refer to the chapter “Taste and Social Media.” 28 Bourdieu, Distinction, 466. 29 The term code is used here for clarity, but it carries with it the implication of a conscious act in its application. Bourdieu would have used the term doxa: “an adherence to relations of order which…are accepted as self-evident” (Bourdieu, Distinction, 471). 30 Tony Bennett, “The Political Rationality of the Museum,” Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture 3, no. 1 (1990), accessed 06.22.20, https://www. tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10304319009388148. 31 In this, curators are much like designers, deploying a process that may be informed by taste but that any choice is qualified by myriad other factors (see introduction). 32 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York; Abingdon: Routledge, 1995), 96.

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33 Bennett, 92. 34 Bennett, 90. 35 Jill Avery, “The Tate’s Digital Transformation,” Harvard Business Publishing Education, July 31, 2017. 2. 36 John Stack, “Tate Digital Strategy 2013–2015: Digital as a Dimension of Everything,” Tate Papers No. 19, accessed 09.15.20, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/19/ tate-digital-strategy-2013–15-digital-as-a-dimension-of-everything. 37 The impact of image-making, the ability of an image to change the context of its subject, and its subsequent impacts on our understanding of taste is analyzed in the chapter “Taste and Photography.” The impacts of changes to access (including remediation) are analyzed in “Taste and the Internet.” 38 André Malraux, Museum without Walls (New York: Doubleday, 1967). 39 Key to Malraux’s discontents with art in museums were how museums qualified the work in their collections, transposed from their original contexts (in Voices of Silence, trans. Gilbert Stuart (Garden City, NY: [publisher], 1953), 13–14). 40 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 92. 41 This would still require embodied capital, including everything from the skills to navigate the internet and the familiarity and comfort with user-interfaces to the physical actions of clicking and swiping. 42 Simson Garfinkel, “Metadata, Sooner or Later,” Wired, May, 21, 1997, accessed 07.02.20, https://www.wired.com/1997/05/metadata-sooner-or-later/. Loosely defined as data that refers to other data, metadata may be embedded into the structure of the file itself or may be stored separately in a database. 43 Tate’s website entries include a reproduction of that descriptive text, as well as an expanded history and analysis of the work (“TATE” website). 4 4 Tony Bennett, Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde, Modesto Gayo-Cal and David Wright, Culture, Class, Distinction (New York; Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), Kindle. 45 Rachel Esner and Fieke Konjin, “Curating the Collection-Editorial,” Stedelijk Studies, no. 5 (2017): accessed 07.11.19, https://stedelijkstudies.com/journal/ curating-the-collection/. 46 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 102. This is also roughly the subject of artist Grayson Perry’s 2013 Reith Lecture series, commissioned by the BBC and delivered at Tate Modern. “Perry has argued that ‘bad taste’ is ‘a good thing’ that emerges from an unchecked plurality of voices and choices—consequently, ‘good taste’ would be a ‘bad thing’ emerging from a non-persuasive or rather oppressively imposing oligarchic discourse” (quoted from Michael Lehnert, “Musealisierung: leadership, tastemaking, and cultural diplomacy,” in The Persistence of Taste, eds. Malcolm Quinn, Dave Beech, Michael Lehnert, Carol Tulloch and Stephen Wilson (New York; Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 100. 47 Randal Johnson, “Editor’s Introduction: Pierre Bourdieu on Art, Literature and Culture,” in The Field of Cultural Production: essays on art and literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 15. 48 Malcom Quinn, “Coda: The tastemaker and the algorithm,” in The Persistence of Taste, eds. Malcolm Quinn, Dave Beech, Michael Lehnert, Carol Tulloch and Stephen Wilson (New York; Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 236. 49 Malcom Quinn, “Taste, Hierarchy and Social Value after Bourdieu,” in The Persistence of Taste, eds. Malcolm Quinn, Dave Beech, Michael Lehnert, Carol Tulloch and Stephen Wilson (New York; Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 12. 50 A common name for a file that contains a dataset is a database. The most everyday version is a spreadsheet, a file made with programs like Microsoft Excel used to organize and visualize numbers or text. The Tate collection data is hosted on GitHub, a site dedicated to open-source sharing of data and code, accessible via links provided on the Tate website. That data is available as standard internet-based

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database files, as well as CSV files. The data contained therein is written in English and available to be read through most contemporary web browsers. 51 Helen Gørrill, “Are Female Artists Worth Collecting? Tate Doesn’t Seem to Think So,” The Guardian, August 31, 2018, accessed 07.23.20, https:// w w w.theg uard ian.com/com mentisf ree/2018/aug/13/tate-fema le-ar tistsmuseum-diversity-acquisitions-art-collect. 52 Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 54. 53 After Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (London: Penguin Books, 2017). 54 Celine Labouef, “The Embodied Biased Mind,” in An Introduction to Implicit Bias, eds. Erin Beeghly and Alex Madva (New York; Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 49, Kindle. 55 “Recognition,” Tate, accessed 07.11.19, http://recognition.tate.org.uk/. 56 While this layer of processing does utilize text descriptions of the work, it is hierarchically the least important of the steps in the overall process. Anecdotally, the author was unable to determine the influence of the text descriptions on the final pairs. 57 Tate, “Recognition.” 58 Tate. 59 Observed by the author during analysis for this chapter (in August 2020). 60 O’Neil, Weapons, 25. 61 Ruha Benjamin, Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Cambridge; Oxford; Boston; New York: Polity, 2019), 98. 62 The lack of representation in the news has been the subject of countless ar ticles in the past few years. Just two articles documenting this phenomenon: Tom Simonite, “Machines Taught by Photos Learn a Sexist View of Women,” Wired, August 21, 2017, accessed 08.07.20, https://www.wired.com/story/ machines-taught-by-photos-learn-a-sexist-view-of-women/. Adrienne Lafrance, “I Analyzed a Year of My Reporting for Gender Bias (Again),” The Atlantic, February 22, 2020, accessed 06.17.20, https://www.­theatlantic.com/ technology/archive/2016/02/gender-diversity-journalism/463023/. 63 Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 54. 64 Gregory Barber, “Shark or Baseball? Inside the ‘Black Box’ of a Neural Network,” Wired, March 6, 2019, accessed 01.23.20, https://www.wired.com/story/ inside-black-box-of-neural-network/. 65 Quinn, “Coda: The tastemaker and the algorithm,” 345–346. 66 Giorgio Agamben, TASTE, trans. Cooper Francis (London; Calcutta; New York: Seagull Books, [1979] 2017), 5. 67 Tate, “Recognition.” 68 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 92. 69 Bennett, 177. 70 Paul Goodwin, “Confessions of a Recalcitrant Curator or How to Reprogramme the Global Museum,” in The Persistence of Taste, eds. Malcolm Quinn, Dave Beech, Michael Lehnert, Carol Tulloch and Stephen Wilson (New York; Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 183, Kindle.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Taste. Translated by Cooper Francis. The Italian List. London: Seagull Books, 2017. Avery, Jill. “The Tate’s Digital Transformation.” Harvard Business Publishing Education (online), July 31, 2017. https://hbsp.harvard.edu/product/314122-PDF-ENG.

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Barber, Gregory. “Shark or Baseball? Inside the ‘Black Box’ of a Neural Network.” Wired, March 6, 2019. https://www.wired.com/story/inside-black-box-of-neural-network. Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. London; New York: Verso, 1996. Benjamin, Ruha. Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge; Oxford; Boston; New York: Polity Press, 2019. Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London; New York: Routledge, 1995. ———. “The Political Rationality of the Museum.” Edited by the Institute for Cultural Policy Studies, Griffith University. Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture 3, no. 1 (1990): 35–55. Accessed https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/ abs/10.1080/10304319009388148. Bennett, Tony, Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde, Modesto Gayo-Cal, and David Wright. Culture, Class, Distinction. London; New York: Routledge, 2009. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. ———. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Edited by Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. ———. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by J. Richardson. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. https://www. marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/bourdieu-forms-­capital.htm. ———. The Logic of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. Curtis, Penelope. “‘The (Un)Narrated, the (Un)Curated.’” In The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums, and Everyday Life After Bourdieu, edited by Malcolm Quinn, Dave Beech, Michael Lehnert, Carol Tulloch, and Stephen Wilson, 116–123. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2018. Esner, Rachel, and Fieke Konjin. “Curating the Collection-Editorial.” Stedelijk Studies, no. 5 (2017). https://stedelijkstudies.com/journal/curating-the-collection/. Foucault, Michel. “The Prose of the World.” In The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, 17–25. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. French, Ariana, and Elena Villaespesa. “AI Visitor Experience and Museum Operations: A Closer Look at the Possible.” In Humanizing the Digital: Unproceedings from the MCN 2018 Conferenceeds. Suse Anderson, Isabella Bruno, Hannah Hethmon, Seema Rao, Ed Rodley, and Rachel Ropeik. , https://ad-hoc-museum-collective. github.io/humanizing-the-digital/chapters/13/. Garfinkel, Simson. “Metadata, Sooner or Later,” Wired, May, 21, 1997, https://www. wired.com/1997/05/metadata-sooner-or-later/. Goodwin, Paul. “Confessions of a Recalcitrant Curator or How to Reprogramme the Global Museum.” In The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums, and Everyday Life After Bourdieu, edited by Malcolm Quinn, Dave Beech, Michael Lehnert, Carol Tulloch, and Stephen Wilson, 174–186. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2018. Gørrill, Helen. “Are Female Artists Worth Collecting? Tate Doesn’t Seem to Think so.” The Guardian, August 31, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/ aug/13/tate-female-artists-museum-diversity-acquisitions-art-collect. Hanquinet, Laurie. “‘J’Adore!’ Aesthetics in Bourdieu’s Account of Tastes.” In The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums, and Everyday Life After Bourdieu, edited by Malcolm Quinn, Dave Beech, Michael Lehnert, Carol Tulloch, and Stephen Wilson, 141–152. Abingdon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2018.

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Hendriks, Manique. “In Search of a Non-Narrated Collection Presentation.” Stedelijk Studies (blog), No 2017. https://stedelijkstudies.com/journal/algorithmcurator-search-non-narrated-collection-presentation/. Johnson, Randal. “Editor’s Introduction: Pierre Bourdieu on Art, Literature and Culture.” In The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, edited by Randal Johnson, 1–28. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Lafrance, Adrienne. “I Analyzed a Year of My Reporting for Gender Bias (Again).” The Atlantic, February 22, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ archive/2016/02/gender-diversity-journalism/463023/. Leboeuf, Celine. “The Embodied Biased Mind.” In An Introduction to Implicit Bias: Knowledge, Justice, and the Social Mind, edited by Erin Beeghly and Alex Madva, 41–56. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. Lehnert, Michael. “Musealisierung: Leadership, Tastemaking, and Cultural Diplomacy.” In The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums, and Everyday Life after Bourdieu, edited by Malcolm Quinn, Dave Beech, Carol Tulloch, and Stephen Wilson, 99–115. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2018. Malraux, André. The Voices of Silence. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1953. Malraux, André, Stuart Gilbert, and Francis Price. Museum without Walls. New York: Doubleday, 1967. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1st ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. O’Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. London: Penguin Books, 2017. Pontin, Jason. “Greedy, Brittle, Opaque, and Shallow: The Downsides to Deep Learning.” Wired, February 2, 2018. https://www.wired.com/story/ greedy-brittle-opaque-and-shallow-the-downsides-to-deep-learning/. Quinn, Malcolm. “Coda: The Tastemaker and the Algorithm.” In The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums, and Everyday Life After Bourdieu, edited by Malcolm Quinn, Dave Beech, Michael Lehnert, Carol Tulloch, and Stephen Wilson, 345–350. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2018. ———. “Introduction: Taste, Hierarchy and Social Value after Bourdieu.” In The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums, and Everyday Life After Bourdieu, edited by Malcolm Quinn, Dave Beech, Michael Lehnert, Carol Tulloch, and Stephen Wilson, 1–18. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2018. “Recognition.” Tate. Accessed July 11, 2019. http://recognition.tate.org.uk/. Search of Tate’s online collection. Accessed February 9, 2020. https://tate.org.uk/ search?q=jenny. Simonite, Tom. “Machines Taught by Photos Learn a Sexist View of Women,” August 21, 2017. https://www.wired.com/story/machines-taught-by-photos-learn-asexist-view-of-women/. Stack, John. “Tate Digital Strategy 2013–15: Digital as a Dimension of Everything.” Tate Papers No. 19. https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/19/ tate-digital-strategy-2013-15-digital-as-a-dimension-of-everything. Thompson, Nicholas. “An AI Pioneer Explains the Evolution of Neural Networks.” Wired, May 13, 2019. https://www.wired.com/story/ai-pioneer-explains-­evolutionneural-networks/.conclusion. “History of Tate.” Tate. Accessed December 20, 2019. https://www.tate.org.uk/ about-us/history-tate.

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“History of Tate Britain.” Tate. Accessed December 20, 2019. https://www.tate.org.uk/ about-us/history-tate/history-tate-britain. “Project. Digital transformation.” Tate. Accessed September 16, 2019. https://www. tate.org.uk/about-us/projects/digital-transformation. “Tate Britain.” Tate. Accessed December 20, 2019. https://www.tate.org.uk/visit/ tate-britain.

CONCLUSION

Evolutions

Atget. Pendant l’éclipse. Albumen silver print, 6 7/16 × 8 5/8˝ (16.3  × 21.9  cm). Abbott-Levy Collection. Partial gift of Shirley C. Burden.1912 | credit line: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

FIGURE 9.1 Eugène

DOI: 10.4324/9781003164388-10

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This book charts a particular, even idiosyncratic, path through the history of taste since the eighteenth century. The concept of taste has been explored by examining definitions found in prominent texts and analyzed against the recursive relationship between its definitions to developments in media and interior design. An evolution emerges: descriptions of what taste is, what purpose it may serve, and how it develops and changes at both the scale of individual preference and at a social scale change over time. In each definition examined, it is possible to trace a relation to its precursors, many of which subtly inform a holistic understanding of taste today. This book is arguably a work of interior design theory. Design theory’s primary function is (or rather, should be) to contextualize the praxis of a discipline, to situate its defining concepts into a larger culture. That interior design theory should be the site of an investigation of taste is perhaps not surprising, as the stakes are exceptionally high for a discipline so closely associated with taste. As a concept, taste had been exiled from atelier and classroom alike, suspect for its associations with subjectivity and social class. This book makes a case for the need for recuperation (and critical examination) of the term, as a means to interrogate the very values that drove taste’s marginalization. Although emerging from an academic context, this book is meant for both academics and professionals. The arguments and analysis found in the preceding chapters provide tools to understand taste today and, if not to predict its future definitions, to provide the means for future inquiry and analysis. For a better future, this would have to include an examination of who might be excluded or adversely affected by how taste is defined and aesthetics are assessed.

Applications Every designer is obliged to validate design reasoning beyond one’s own concerns and preferences: a tall order, given that design, by its nature, requires the address of aspects both rational and irrational. The goal of much Enlightenment philosophy concerning aesthetics addressed this issue by constructing a set of universal rules regarding what might be called beautiful or good. These arguments were meant to demonstrate a rational response to matters of aesthetics, one ostensibly beyond reproach and one that might ensure agreement from all. This possibility would be seductive to any creative discipline, and in fact, Immanuel Kant’s philosophy on taste remains foundational to design theory. His philosophy was, however, written concerning aesthetics discrete from non-aesthetic concerns, thereby excluding economy, ethics, usefulness, sustainability, and relevance from its concerns—concerns central to a designer’s praxis. Kant’s approach concerns pure aesthetics, a term that appears to cast design as impure, as somehow less (rather than different) from the fine arts that satisfy Kant’s criteria.

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A designer has any number of extra-aesthetic factors to contend with in making a design decision, including issues of economy, equity, and sustainability. These values help constitute the disciplinary field values that influence design decisions, a reflection of collective design decisions already made. To cleave to these values is to reinforce these metrics as valid. In this way, even a decision that involves largely empirical factors can be understood to involve taste—a choice, influenced by and influencing a set of community values. It is easier to see the difficulties in discerning the differences between choice and need in examples involving cultural conditions other than one’s own. For example, nineteenth-century design advice frequently evoked religious teaching regarding honesty or humility (although without fully acknowledging the translations required to apply honesty to art or design). Cleaving to a tradition of equating taste with a particular decorative style translates those aesthetics into a constraint, one condemning future design to recognizable versioning of past design. From a contemporary point of view, it is easy to understand that an overreliance on tradition or precedent is inherently conservative, replicating long-standing cultural conditions, and influencing social conditions in turn. What is more difficult to understand is how honesty or authenticity in design might be understood as enculturated rather than factual, as these are terms in contemporary use. Both bear a trace of how morality remains imbricated in taste today.

Authenticity and appearance Conventional use of the term authenticity places it as central to mainstream definitions of value or quality, and yet it is a term as ambiguous as taste; it may mean traditional, customary, original, or simply convincing. One contemporary definition of authenticity seems to recall its philosophical foundations, concerned with the consistency of one’s character and one’s actions. Actions, in a contemporary context, should be understood broadly, encompassing anything from performance to the products of a creative process. This authenticity is particularly foregrounded in this age of digital self-publishing: designers as individuals have never been so associated with their designs. This promotes a closer relationship between ethics and aesthetics than is commonly acknowledged. One might hope this inspires exemplary ethical standards, although a philosopher might argue that ethical behavior engendered by the threat of exposure was deeply inauthentic. A related contemporary meaning for authenticity refers to the exposure of personal information. As Penny Sparke described as a condition of the modern interior, publicity (via publishing) requires that the aesthetic rules and codes governing public life be applied ever further into previously private domains.

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These conditions foreground taste as involving public performance, often maintaining an illusory appearance of intimacy. Most of one’s experience of interior design is now gleaned through images. A mastery of image-management is critical for the contemporary designer, as both a producer and consumer of images of design. In turn, it is critical to maintain an analytic point of view both in the construction of design representations and in their consumption. To subconsciously experience any representation of a space as roughly equivalent to its physical experience (as Roland Barthes suggested as common practice) helps marginalize all unseen aspects of experience: phenomena taken in via the other senses, or the passage of time. This practice may overemphasize design’s value at the moment of its completion and obscure the importance of the drivers of design (material integrity, sustainability, economy, social equity, etc.) that are not apparent or present in conventional images of designed spaces.

Spatial design To classify work into hierarchical cultural categories can be a way to declare that different kinds of work have different stakes and perhaps should be judged by different standards. To judge a space designed to delight by the same measure as a monument designed to produce an enduring image of a cultural moment is obviously absurd, but this is the absurdity embedded in the use of high and low as cultural categories. This system perpetuates a radically reductive metric. That said—these metrics continue to influence perception regarding forms of environmental or spatial design. There are real stakes in maintaining disciplinary status hierarchies. The cultural role of architecture, as just one example, would be undermined if it were not recognized as high culture. Its autonomy is a source of its value, affiliating architecture categorically with the fine arts. In order to recognize anything as “highbrow,” however, something else must present itself as middle or low. Interior design is less autonomous than architecture by its nature and practice, in two critical ways: first, interior design developed in affiliation with other design disciplines, such as fashion; its praxes are less differentiated from other design praxes. Second, interior design is often embedded in the everyday issues of inhabitation, with greater ambiguity between realms of professional and amateur efforts.1 To define interior design as less “high” than architecture suggests a reductive competition between the disciplines, instead of a consideration that their overlapping disciplinary praxis are both culturally critical. The operations of culture and taste are still often described through these hierarchical models, setting high versus low. Contemporary forms of media offer both new influences to their formation and new metaphors by which to describe them. One example: urban sociologist Manuel Castells is credited with the invention of the term “space of flows,” used to reimagine urban space

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as a nexus of flows of people, capital, goods, and information.2 This invites a reconsideration of cities not as clearly defined geographic, social, and political domains, but rather formed continuously by broader social and economic processes. These dynamically defined boundaries could be understood to be enabled by and a metaphor for information systems in a digital age. Contemporary design practice and disciplinary boundaries might be understood in similar ways. Interior design, in particular, can be defined in relation with its neighboring disciplines: architecture, decorating, industrial design, fashion, and beyond. This condition supports the embrace of a plurality of design values, as interior design is exposed to and borrows from its neighboring design domains. These values are evaluated and recontextualized, in turn producing new forms of knowledge and praxis. This further supports a critical consciousness of conventions of practice changing in different contexts (discipline, geography, or platform) is necessary both for innovation and for navigating an ever-more global marketplace of design. Expansion of the field, as Bourdieu might point out, becomes an opportunity for its inhabitants and practitioners to reexamine their own perceptual habits, to reevaluate their own taste under new conditions and in turn contribute their preferences in establishing group norms. Many of the definitions of taste discussed in this book benefit from a comparison with the principles central to Georg Simmel’s essay “Fashion.” Simmel declares that one is driven by a desire for both individuality and belonging.3 Simmel is referring to an individual psychology, but there are parallels in the design process. Much design involves a balancing act between innovation in a creative process and a respect for rules or codes held in common, between individual expression and the preferences or expectations of others. Those codes could be understood as helping define a disciplinary field. They may also represent the powerful influence of the status quo: conventional, mainstream, the existing state of affairs. In the pursuit of a more fundamentally equitable practice, however, designers will have to actively interrogate that status quo.

Impacts A respect for standards, rules, and codes suggests a respect for others, a respect for values held in common. However, the uncritical use of standards often suggests a universal sameness in their users or audiences. Kant proposed a hypothetical universal similarity in his concept of sensus communis. The concept itself could be considered beautiful: the idea that we all share the recognition of beauty, a form of love in common, binding us to one another. It appears to bid for the validity of everyone’s preferences. However, any search for a universal set of standards by its nature (aesthetic or otherwise) that might apply to all assumes similarities that simply do not exist. Standards, rules, and codes may reflect the commonality of upbringing, education, and experience of (and for) a theoretical status quo that, upon examination, proves to be an exclusionary concept.

Conclusion  209

FIGURE 9.2 Every

page ... from Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida. | credit line: Photograph: © Idris Khan

Participation in a design process (whether at the scale of a private residence or of a city) requires sufficient economic capital to support choice beyond simply satisfying basic needs. Writing about design (and taste) does not always include those who do not or cannot participate in this aspect of the economy; there is no taste without choice. Many of the texts cited in this book ascribe superior taste to those with the capital and time to pursue the experience of good design as well as education on its principal merits, good design whose exemplars were in turn produced by those with means. The preferences and desires of those whose experiences or opportunities are different are categorized as less tasteful and less important. Many attempts to define good taste transfer judgments regarding the qualities of objects or spaces to those that prefer them, creating a metric not just for the results of human endeavor but for people as well.

Classification and bias Analysis of classificatory praxis calls attention to the relationship of taste with other forms of bias, when the labels of cultural classifications are applied to their users or audiences. The terms highbrow and lowbrow are derived from phrenology, a pseudoscience that suggested that the form of one’s skull was directly

210 Conclusion

related to their intellectual capacities. The -brow terms, applied to forms of cultural production, reinforce the nature of aesthetic appreciation as a hereditary capacity, as inherited and therefore predestined. Whether or not this is the explicit argument being made by its use, the use of -brow terms reinforce an elitist and racist notion about to whom particular works of art, design, or entertainment might appeal. Referring to culture as high or low mirrors terms like upper and lower vis-à-vis class, with an unmistakable connotation that the value of an individual or group could be understood to be of greater or lesser value depending on their cultural habits or preferences. Classification involves the reduction of a phenomenon to key characteristics; this produces clarity by focusing on particular salient details. Using classification, Pierre Bourdieu produces a clear and elegant analysis of the mechanics of the production and reproduction of taste and of social milieu. But this clarity is achieved in part through eliminating characteristics such as gender, race, ethnicity, and age as explicit categories when classifying evidence of preferences. Bourdieu’s own conclusions point out the difficulties raised by these omissions. If an individual’s taste is largely predicated on context and experience, one should acknowledge that access to contexts and experiences might be limited by the intersectional aspects of one’s identity well beyond social class. The effects of this are recursive. Consider the term normal and how it suggests the rewards of conformance, the celebration of the average. Normal excludes those who will not or cannot conform to mainstream values. Historically, an environment designed around normal needs and desires has excluded not only those whose nonconformance is a choice, but also those whose nonconformance is embodied, including any intersectional combination of race, ethnicity, age, physical ability, gender, sexuality, and class.4 Exclusion from normal contexts and experiences constitutes another obstacle to represent the needs or desires of those excluded from those contexts and environments and to contribute a more diverse set of community values or group norms. Professor and postcolonial scholar Simon Gikandi makes the case that the effects of systematic exclusions endure culturally. In Slavery and the Culture of Taste, Gikandi makes a materialist argument: that the labor of enslaved people effectively underwrote the ability of enslavers to pursue aesthetic choice. He also makes a philosophical argument: that an enslaved person was categorically denied free will and the ability to act in a way that reflected their own needs or desires, making taste (philosophically) impossible.5 Gikandi’s analysis is in turn sociological: displaced from their home into the environment of the slave-owner, enslaved people produced a culture borrowing fragments from an often dimly-remembered Africa and the intolerable conditions of the American everyday.6 W.E.B. Du Bois called this duality a d­ouble-consciousness in 1903, irreconcilable values conditioned by an occupation of two worlds.7 Gikandi positions this condition as foundational to modern American identity and to the understanding of taste as a means to categorize and differentiate.

Conclusion  211

Exclusion Access to technology is afforded by the continuing developments in the technologies themselves (particularly communications technologies), but it is critical to remember that access to these technologies is not universal. For instance, as of this writing, just over 60% of the world’s population has access to the internet.8 What is at stake is the representation and participation of nearly 40% of the world’s population in the shaping of the built environment. Definitions of taste may continue to embrace plurality, but limits on the kinds of access afforded by contemporary technologies means these definitions are still not universally representative. All media has the potential to occlude whatsoever (or whomsoever) is not present. There is little in a given image that might remind the viewer of spaces, objects, and people not represented. To take (or post) a photograph is to make a choice, and to declare (if momentarily) that something is worth photographing or sharing. That image is then fixed, preserving one moment in the life of a space, object, or person for all time. That photographs appear to represent the world without interference is to veil the role of choice, of taste, in their making. There is nothing inherently sinister in media’s editorial effect, but in order to design inclusive and representative environments in the future, these edits require designers to seek out who and what is missing from documentation of the current environment. Any form of media is an abstraction, necessarily excluding some forms of information, foregrounding others. It is only through close examinations of the systematic exclusions that are endemic to any form of mediation that we might correct them. It is a difficult task, to remember or acknowledge what is not in front of us.

Conclusions to conclusions No matter the specific nature of one’s praxis, every design discipline has a common query: how do we recognize good design? For designers, academics, and consumers of design to answer this question, one must ultimately construct one’s own measures of assessment. To thoroughly pursue this question, however, one must also be aware of existing measures, to ensure an answer that has relevance beyond oneself, one’s own preconceptions and opinions. This book serves as a call to examine the complex recursions of interior and exterior standards, often sublimated in the complexities of a design process. Media shows us versions of the world. Each version co-creates a new context, and each context shapes our experience and understanding. Each form of visual media changes looking: what we can see, which over time becomes what we have the right to see.9 New forms of media transform their content in new ways, in ways we have to learn to recognize because each has the potential to

212 Conclusion

change how we recognize the beautiful, the good, the authentic. If taste is a set of intuited preferences to which we are largely conditioned, then quite simply: we have to acknowledge that we cannot be conditioned by what is not there, by what we cannot touch, experience, or see. We cannot become familiar or comfortable with phenomena to which we have had no access or exposure. So long as we do not perceive the exclusionary effects of our ever-more mediated environments, we can maintain the illusion that that environment is something we all share universally. Taste always involves choice, including choices about what and how we see. A decision driven solely by need or without options is categorically not a judgment of taste. While this condition inherently privileges individuals or groups with means, it does not follow that the pursuit to understand taste is necessarily elitist. Nor is the pursuit of excellence in design. To understand taste is to better understand whose needs or desires are met by design, and to whom the built environment largely responds the first step in the pursuit of more inclusionary praxis. Every definition presented in this book informs our understanding of taste today. No legitimate definition of taste can be fundamentally unitary. Like Idris Khan’s image of Camera Lucida (Figure 9.2), a holistic understanding of taste eludes the elegant clarity of reduction. That definition of taste is indeed hazy; its details are difficult to discern. Taste was and is a representation of a fundamentally complex aspect of humanity, involving both cognition and emotion, experience and analysis, knowledge and pleasure.

Notes 1 Moreover, amateur praxis is understood to be the purview of women, overlapping with the design and maintenance of one’s home. Sparke identifies these disciplinary distinctions as emerging from the sensibilities of European and American architects in the first decades of the twentieth century, for whom the interior was the veritable domain of taste, inextricable from concerns of domesticity and consumption (in Sparke, “Taste and the Interior Designer,” 20). 2 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Chichester, West Sussex; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 3. 3 Georg Simmel, “Fashion,” American Journal of Sociology 62, no. 6 (1957): 541–58. 4 “Intersectional” or “intersectionality” are terms credited to Kimberlé Crenshaw (found in “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and  Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum, no.1 [1989]: 140). 5 “The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the ridiculous. Mr. Hume challenges anyone to adduce a single example where a Negro has demonstrated talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who have been transported elsewhere from their countries, although very many of them have been set free, nevertheless not a single one has ever been found who has accomplished something great in art or science or shown any other praiseworthy quality, while among the whites there are always those who rise up from the lowest rabble and through extraordinary gifts earn respect in the world,” in Kant, Kant:

Conclusion  213

6 7 8 9

Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings, 58–59. Mr. Hume is David Hume, also an aesthetic philosopher. Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 236. Gikandi, 236. “Internet and Social Media Users in the World 2022,” Statista, accessed 10.25.2022, https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-population-worldwide/. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 2010), 12.

Bibliography Gikandi, Simon. Slavery and the Culture of Taste. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Kant, Immanuel, Paul Guyer, and Patrick R. Frierson. Kant: Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

GLOSSARY

A definition may be very exact, and yet go but a very little way towards informing us of the nature of the thing defined… - Edmund Burke, from A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

The following definitions all reference entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, significantly abridged to be specific to this text. It is recommended, for the engaged reader, to seek out the full dictionary entry. As Pierre Bourdieu might say, a knowledge of the context of any phenomenon is critical to developing real understanding. For entries referring to philosophical concepts, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an authoritative online source to lend additional detail and nuance to the definitions presented below. All other sources are noted.

216 Glossary

OED (edited) abstraction

The consideration of something, independently of its associations or attributes. Abstraction often involves a process of isolating particular properties or characteristics in an object, in order to compare it with other objects with that property or characteristic. Abstraction simplifies. Consequently there must be attached to the judgment of taste, with the consciousness of an abstraction in it from all interest, a claim to validity for everyone without the universality that pertains to objects…1 –  Immanuel Kant, in Critique of the Power of Judgement. Translated by Paul Guyer, 2000 [1790]. …to think about or to analyze the complexity of the real, the act of practice of thinking is required; and this necessitates the use of the power of abstraction and analysis, the formation of concepts with which to cut into the complexity of the real, in order precisely to reveal and bring to light relationships and structures which cannot be visible to the naive naked eye, and which can neither present nor authenticate themselves…2 –  Stuart Hall, in “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms” [1980]

aesthetic

Of or relating to the perception, appreciation, or criticism of that which is beautiful. The term still hints at an obsolete meaning: phenomena taken in by one’s senses. It may refer to a concern for the principles of (good) taste. It may refer to a dispassionate stance regarding appreciation in the arts or design (see “disinterest”). The OED acknowledges Kant’s contributions to its contemporary usage. …an aesthetic judgment is that whose determining ground lies in a sensation that is immediately connected with the feeling of pleasure and displeasure.3 –  Immanuel Kant, in Critique of the Power of Judgement. Translated by Paul Guyer, 2000 [1790]. The capacity to adopt the aesthetic attitude is…measured by the gap…between what is constituted as an aesthetic object by the individual or group concerned and what is constituted aesthetically in a given state of the field of production by the holders of aesthetic legitimacy. 4 –  Pierre Bourdieu, in Distinction (1984)

Glossary  217

OED (edited) agreeable (Kant)

That which is delightful or pleasing, having consequence only for whom it delights or pleases. The agreeable is that which pleases the senses in sensation…Hence everything that pleases, just because it pleases, is agreeable (and, according to its different degrees or relations to other agreeable sensations, graceful, lovely, enchanting, enjoyable, etc.).5 –  Immanuel Kant, in Critique of the Power of Judgement. Translated by Paul Guyer, 2000 [1790]. In order to apprehend what makes the specificity of aesthetic judgement, Kant ingeniously distinguished “that which pleases” from “that which gratifies,” and, more generally, strove to separate “disinterestedness,” the sole guarantee of the specifically aesthetic quality of contemplation, from “the interest of the senses,” which defines “the agreeable,” and from “the interest of Reason”…6 –  Pierre Bourdieu, in Distinction (1984)

aura

Atmosphere or emanation; the holistic perceived effect of a work of art. What is aura, actually? A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be. While at rest on a summer’s noon, to trace a range of mountains on the horizon, or a branch that throws its shadow on the observer, until the moment or the hour become part of their appearance-this is what it means to breathe the aura of those mountains, that branch…7 -  Walter Benjamin, in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935).

authentic, authenticity

All of the following: true, accurate, verifiable, done in the traditional way; consistent, having the quality of verisimilitude, believable or convincing. From philosophy: personal behavior that truly reflects one’s inner feelings; not affected, unfeigned. The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.8 –  Walter Benjamin, in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935) The demand for authenticity appeals to our desire not to be deceived by surfaces, but the pursuit of an objective definition goes too far. That quest conflates deception—forgery—with recombination, reappropriation, and change. It removes both the subject and the audience, the source and the recipient, from the play of aesthetic symbolism. “Authenticity” becomes little more than a rhetorical club to enforce the critic’s taste.9 –  Virginia Postrel, in The Substance of Style (2003)

218 Glossary

OED (edited) authority

Its etymology refers to power, control, and prestige as antecedents of the current definition. Specific to aesthetic assessment: the ability to influence the opinions of others. Traditional sources of authority: one’s recognized knowledge, scholarship, or expertise. Contemporary sources of authority may include popularity or the ability to craft a convincing argument. Cultural expertise as a social force conveyed by people who function as authorities has the capacity to bestow legitimacy or respectability upon a cultural custom or “product” in the broadest sense of those terms.10 –  Michael Kammen, in American Culture, American Tastes (1999) A society, as it becomes less and less able, in the course of its development, to justify the inevitability of its particular forms, breaks up the accepted notions upon which artists and writers must depend in large part for communication with their audiences. It becomes difficult to assume anything. All the verities involved by religion, authority, tradition, style, are thrown into question, and the writer or artist is no longer able to estimate the response of his audience to the symbols and references with which he works.11 –  Clement Greenberg, in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939)

autonomy (Kant)

Independence, or the ability to exercise one’s free will. When referring to art or design: the fact or quality of being unrelated to anything else, or independence from concern for issues extrinsic to the discipline or medium. [aesthetic judgment] … its determining ground must lie not merely in the feeling of pleasure and displeasure in itself alone, but at the same time in a rule of the higher faculty of cognition, in this case, namely, in the rule of the power of judgment, which is thus legislative with regard to the conditions of reflection a priori, and demonstrates autonomy; this autonomy is not, however (like that of the understanding, with regard to the theoretical laws of nature, or of reason, in the practical laws of freedom), valid objectively, i.e., through concepts of things or possible actions, but is merely subjectively valid, for the judgment from feeling, which, if it can make a claim to universal validity, demonstrates its origin grounded in a priori principles. –  Immanuel Kant, in Critique of the Power of Judgement. Translated by Paul Guyer, 2000 [1790]. The autonomy of a field of restricted production can be measured by its power to define its own criteria for the production and evaluation of its products.12 –  Pierre Bourdieu, in “The Market of Symbolic Goods” [1985].

Glossary  219

OED (edited) beauty

The quality of a person, object or space which is highly pleasing to the senses (most often: sight). Also may refer to the prevailing standard for what might be considered beautiful. Admirable, excellent. The definition of taste that is the basis here is that it is the faculty for the judging of the beautiful.13 –  Immanuel Kant, in Critique of the Power of Judgement. Translated by Paul Guyer, 2000 [1790].

bias

An inclination, leaning, tendency, bent, predisposition, predilection, or prejudice. An internalized model of social structure, reflecting widespread cultural stereotypes.14 Taste may be understood as an aesthetic bias, a perceptual habit, a way of making associations between concepts very quickly.15 In a nutshell, to say that implicit biases are social is to say that they are not just enacted in individual bodily behavior, but that they are enacted by social groups as a whole. –  Celine Leboeuf, in “The Embodied Biased Mind” (2020)

brand

A useful archaic definition: a sign or mark (possibly made with heat or fire/ sometimes conveying a stigma). Its contemporary use: a set of attributes designed to distinguish a particular firm, product, or line, with the intention of promoting awareness and loyalty on the part of consumers. Also: the impression or perception engendered by those attributes, in the mind of a user or customer.16 The TV image renders the world of standard brands and consumer goods merely amusing.17 –  Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media [1964]

-brow, high

colloquial. Occasionally somewhat depreciative. Of the nature of or characterized by high culture; rarefied; intellectually demanding. Of a person: highly intellectual or cultured (may be used as a compliment or criticism, implying snobbery or elitism). …although he liked the movies, he had distinctly highbrow tastes— Chaplin, Stroheim, the early Eisenstein.18 –  Louis Menand on Dwight Macdonald, in the introduction to Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain [1983]

220 Glossary

OED (edited) -brow, middle

colloquial. Frequently derogatory. Of the nature of or characterized by culture associated with the middle-class; intellectually unchallenging or of limited intellectual or cultural value. Conventional. Of a person: only moderately intellectual; one who has average or limited cultural interests (sometimes with the implication of pretensions to more than this). Middle-class, middlebrow—the all-too-democratic expression of the first great modern nation to begin its history unencumbered by either a peasantry or a nobility.19 –  Dwight Macdonald, in Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain [1960]

-brow, low

colloquial (originally U.S.). Frequently derogatory. In all senses contrasted with highbrow and middlebrow. Of the nature of or characterized by culture requiring little intellectual sophistication on the part of its audience or having no serious artistic value. Of a person: to whom the aforementioned culture would appeal (used to imply a lack of sophistication or intellect). …Readers Digest is not middlebrow but lowbrow, or maybe by now upper-lowbrow; let’s say pale blue-collar.20 –  Dwight Macdonald, in Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain [1960] …in their private lives, sociologists belong.to a taste public like everyone else, and make their own cultural choices and private evaluations about the standards and content of other taste cultures accordingly, condemning those they dislike as too highbrow or lowbrow the same way as other people.21 –  Herbert Gans, in Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (1964)

capital

Its etymology refers to something of or relating to the head. A unit of power or influence. Capital is accumulated labor…It is a vis insita, a force inscribed in objective or subjective structures, but it is also a lex insita, the principle underlying the immanent regularities of the social world.22 –  Pierre Bourdieu, in “The Forms of Capital” [1986]

Glossary  221

OED (edited) capital, social (Bourdieu)

The interpersonal networks and common civic values which influence the infrastructure and economy of a particular society; the nature, extent, or value of these. Cultural capital can exist in three forms: in the embodied state, i.e., in the form of long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body; in the objectified state, in the form of cultural goods (pictures, books, dictionaries, instruments, machines, etc.), which are the trace or realization of theories or critiques of these theories, problematics, etc.; and in the institutionalized state, a form of objectification which must be set apart because…it confers entirely original properties on the cultural capital which it is presumed to guarantee.23 –  Pierre Bourdieu, in “The Forms of Capital” [1986]

class

Its etymology refers to the division of people based on property. Groups, ranks, or categories of people or things. The implication is that these people or things are differentiated according to grade or quality. A class is defined as much by its being-perceived and by its being, by its consumption—which need not be conspicuous to be symbolic— as much as by its position in the relations of production.24 –  Pierre Bourdieu, in Distinction (1984)

commodity

Its etymology refers to opportuneness, timeliness, aptness, suitability, advantage, convenience, and utility. Simply, an article of commerce (a thing or resource for sale). Often used to refer the abstraction that occurs when things or resources are reduced to their monetary value, the other attributes of that thing or resource made unimportant in comparison. …the conversion of subcultural signs (dress, music, etc.) into massproduced objects (i.e. the commodity form) 25 –  Dick Hebdige, in Subculture: The Meaning of Style [1979] To fill the demand of the new market, a new commodity was devised: ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide. –  Clement Greenberg, in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” [1939]

222 Glossary

OED (edited) critical theory

A school of social theory developed from the 1930s through to the late 1960s, often associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt (also known as the Frankfurt School), and engaging in the critique of capitalism (understood in Marxist terms), involving the analysis of society in all aspects (economic, social, and cultural) and of the relation of society to individuals. Intellectuals associated with the Frankfurt School include Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor W. Adorno. A theoretically mediated criticism or analysis of culture and society, maintaining a recognizable philosophical point of view (acknowledges the theorist’s awareness of their own partiality).26

culture

Its etymology includes references to formation, training, and the cultivation of plants. Author and critic Raymond Williams, writing in the 1960s, offers a taxonomy. Culture may refer to the ideal, a process towards human perfection. This view of culture may be governed by absolute or universal values. A more expansive view of culture encompasses a broader range of creative and intellectual pursuits. William’s third definition of culture is the broadest, most familiar and arguably the most democratic: culture as acknowledging the embodied practices of everyday life, fundamentally embedded in the material world.27

curation

Obsolete definitions include references to successful medical treatments and the care of those not capable of conducting their own affairs. The action or work of looking after and preserving the exhibits in a collection, as in a museum. The careful selection and organization of a collection of items, especially for exhibition, display, or publication. Curation became a buzzword because it was one answer to a new set of problems; the problems caused by having too much.28 –  Michael Bhaskar, in Curation: The Power of Selection in a World of Excess (2016)

design

Its etymology includes references to initial sketches and intentions. A plan; also, the realization of that plan: the arrangement of features according to functional (and usually aesthetic) criteria.

Glossary  223

OED (edited) disinterest (and interest)

Disinterest: The absence of the possibility of personal gain or advantage. Impartiality. Interest: A right, share, stake, or concern. A judgment on an object of satisfaction can be entirely disinterested yet still very interesting, i.e., it is not grounded on any interest but it produces an interest; all pure moral judgments are like this. But the pure judgment of taste does not in itself even ground any interest. Only in society does it become interesting to have taste…29 –  Immanuel Kant, in Critique of the Power of Judgement. Translated by Paul Guyer, 2000 [1790].

domain

A sphere of thought or action. Field, region, province, territory, or scope. The breadth, extension, circuit, or sphere of a notion. In mathematics, the set of values that an independent variable of a function can take. In logic, the class of all terms that bear a given relation to any term.

enlightenment, Enlightenment

The action or process of freeing human understanding from the accepted and customary beliefs sanctioned by traditional authority, chiefly by rational and scientific inquiry into all aspects of human life, which became a characteristic goal of philosophical writing in the late 17th and 18th centuries.

field (Bourdieu)

See domain. …analysis initially conceals the structure of the life-style characteristic of an agent or class of agents, that is, the unity hidden under the diversity and multiplicity of the set of practices performed in fields governed by different logics and therefore inducing different forms of realization, in accordance with the formula: [ (habitus) (capital) ] + field = practice.30 A field, for Bourdieu, is not a fixed location, but formed through relationships. Fields may encompass zones of production or exchange of goods, services, or knowledge (a constellation of practices). Fields are conceptual spaces that structure (and are structed by) specific types of capital (power or status). Agents (participants in the field) are both influenced by that field’s internal codes of behavior, and influence them in turn.

gatekeeper

A person or thing that controls access or monitors or selects information.

224 Glossary

OED (edited) habit

Its etymology includes references to demeanor or appearance. An (involuntary) tendency to act in a certain way, especially as acquired by repetition. An automatic reaction, customary and familiar. According to well-established laws of human nature, prescription presently seizes upon this conventional evidence of wealth and fixes it in men’s habits of thought as something that is in itself substantially meritorious and ennobling; while productive labour at the same time and by a like process becomes in a double sense intrinsically unworthy.31 –  Thorstein Veblen, in The Theory of the Leisure Class [1899] To borrow a geological metaphor often used by phenomenologists, habits become “sedimented” in our bodies: just as mountains emerge through the gradual layering of sediments in a particular location, so too habits emerge through the repeated enactment of bodily movements.32 –  Celine Leboeuf, in “The Embodied Biased Mind” (2020)

habitus (Bourdieu)

An individual’s embodied knowledge, sensibilities, and dispositions, as a unity. …a system of schemes of perception and appreciation of practices, cognitive and evaluative structures which are acquired through the lasting experience of a social position.33 –  Pierre Bourdieu, in “Social Space and Symbolic Power” (1989) …the tastes and distastes, sympathies and aversions, fantasies and phobias which, more than declared opinions, forge the unconscious unity of a class.34 –  Pierre Bourdieu, in Distinction (1984)

hegemony

Undue influence of one group within a society or milieu, or by a particular set of social or cultural ideas, especially to the exclusion of others. Gramsci argued that “hegemony” exists when a ruling class (or, rather, an alliance of ruling class fractions, a “historical bloc”) is able not only to coerce a subordinate class to conform to its interests, but exerts a “total social authority” over those classes and the social formation as a whole. “Hegemony” is in operation when the dominant class fractions not only dominate but direct or lead: when they not only possess the power to coerce but actively organize so as to command and win the consent of the subordinated classes to their continuing sway. “Hegemony” thus depends on a combination of force and consent.35 –  Antonio Gramsci, quoted in Stuart Hall, in “Culture, the Media, and the Ideological Effect” [1977]

Glossary  225

OED (edited) identity

Its etymology includes references to sameness. The consistency of a person, group or thing. A distinct, distinguishing, or unique impression or a person, group, or thing. Groups invest themselves totally, with everything that opposes them to other groups, in the common words which express their social identity, i.e. their difference.36 –  Pierre Bourdieu, in Distinction (1984) The communication of a significant difference, then (and the parallel communication of a group identity), is the “point” behind the style of all spectacular subcultures.37 –  Dick Hebdige, in Subculture [1979]

image

Imitation, representation, semblance, likeness, simulation, appearance, copy The “private life” is nothing but that zone of space, of time, where I am not an image, an object.38 –  Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography [1980]

interior design

The design of the interior of a building, including wallpaper, furniture, fittings, etc., according to artistic and architectural criteria. From the International Interior Design Association (IIDA) website: Interior design is defined as the professional and comprehensive practice of creating an interior environment that addresses, protects, and responds to human need(s). It is the art, science, and business planning of a creative, technical, sustainable, and functional interior solution that corresponds to the architecture of a space, while incorporating process and strategy, a mandate for well-being, safety, and health, with informed decisions about style and aesthetics. Interior design may also refer to the creation of an environment outside a professional milieu (e.g., by a homeowner for themselves). It may also refer to the design of bounded environments beyond the constraints of architecture.39

226 Glossary

OED (edited) kitsch

In the broadest sense: any artifact considered vulgar or lacking merit. Specific to design: often applied to imitations, whether due to material choices or craft/fabrication techniques. Specific to art and literature: culture produced to be popular or profitable, and exhibiting the following qualities: Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates… insensibility. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money—not even their time.40 –  Clement Greenberg, in “Avant-Garde & Kitsch” [1939]

medium (pl: media)

A person or thing between two states; middle. A channel or means of communication. An intervening substance or condition, through which a force acts on objects at a distance. A pervading or enveloping substance or condition. Any material that acts as a container. The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.41 –  Marshall McLuhan, in “The Medium is the Message” [1964]

objective

In philosophy: an object outside of the consciousness that perceives it. Not influenced by personal feelings or opinions: factual, impartial, detached.

popular

Its etymology refers to belonging to, used by or available to ordinary people (sometimes: the entire community). Obsolete synonyms include vulgar and plebian. Generally accepted, commonly known. Generated by the general public; democratic. Intended for the understanding or taste of ordinary people (as opposed to specialists or academics). (Continued)

Glossary  227

OED (edited) Liked or admired by many. The assumption of high culture’s universality would be justified if the critics could prove that popular culture harmed society or a significant number of individuals, interfered with the achievement of the goals of the majority of citizens, or seriously endangered the goals of a minority.42 –  Herbert Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture (1964) In America the very notion of privileging “aesthetic” principles over considerations of market demand and “popular” taste tended to be regarded as an expensive indulgence.43 –  Dick Hebdige, “Towards a Cartography of Taste 1935– 1962” (1988) power, cultural

In the broadest sense: the ability to act or to have an effect; strength. Cultural power involves the production, promotion, and dissemination of cultural artifacts.44 –  Michael Kammen, in American Culture, American Tastes (1999)

relative

Considered similar or connected to another by common origin, similarity in structure, properties or purpose. Existing or possessing a characteristic only in comparison with something else. Not absolute, not independent. To be evaluated differently depending on one’s perspective.

sensible

Its etymology refers to physical sensation, that which can be apprehended by the senses. Its contemporary use expands that to include that which can be perceived by the mind or intellect. To be aware, conscious, responsive to one’s surroundings.

sensus communis (Kant)

According to Immanuel Kant: a faculty of judgment that takes into account all potential human judgment and reason, a kind of hypothetical aesthetic empathy. Sensus communis enables Kant to define the principles of taste as both subjective (individual judgment) and universal (all human judgment). One could designate taste as sensus communis aestheticus, common human understanding as sensus communis logicus. –  Immanuel Kant, in Critique of the Power of Judgement. Translated by Paul Guyer. 2000 [1790]

228 Glossary

OED (edited) spectacle

Its etymology: to look. A prepared diplay of a public nature. A thing seen or capable of being seen, especially of an unusual character. The object of a gaze inspired by curiosity, contempt, marvel, or admiration. The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.45 –  Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle (1994) Debord described spectacle as driven by economic interest and profit, replacing lived reality with its contemplation.

style

A characteristic manner of expression; method, custom. The features of such expression belonging to form or appearance (rather than the concept it might express). Kind, sort, or type. …objects are made to mean and mean again as “style” in subculture.46 –  Dick Hebdige, in Subculture [1979]

subjective

In philosophy: that which relates to a sentient individual; its source is in one’s mind, that which belongs to conscious life. Relating to one’s own thoughts, views, or emotions. Not impartial.

Technological determinism

A reductionist theory that technology causes change, or directly shapes how individuals think or feel. The notion that advancements in technology (independent of social, cultural, or political contexts) dictate social, cultural, or political change.

theory

Its etymology refers to contemplation. The conceptual basis of a subject or are of study (considered in contrast to practice). Analysis incorporating concepts or methods from philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the social sciences. An approach intended to challenge established methods or assumptions. Theory is a particularly apt word because we are dealing with seeing—theorein—and of making others see.47 –  Pierre Bourdieu, in “The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic” (1987) Also: see “critical theory.”

Glossary  229

OED (edited) universal

In philosophy: applicable to all (of a class or group). Extending over or including the whole of something: a group, the world. Provided for (or accessible to) all members of a community, regardless of wealth, social status, or other distinguishing features.

value

Its etymology refers to the concept of social standing. Worth measured by a standard of equivalence; cost. Estimation or opinion of (or liking for) a person or thing. Principles or moral standards, held by an individual or group. Behind their apparent neutrality, words as ordinary as “practical, “sober,” “clean,” “functional,” “amusing,” “delicate,” “cozy,” “distinguished” are thus divided against themselves, because the different classes either give them different meanings, or give them the same meaning but attribute opposite values to the things named.48 –  Pierre Bourdieu, in Distinction (1984) Agreeable is that which everyone calls what gratifies him; beautiful, what merely pleases him; good, what is esteemed, approved, i.e., that on which he sets an objective value.49 –  Immanuel Kant, in Critique of the Power of Judgement. Translated by Paul Guyer, 2000 [1790]

Notes 1 Immanuel Kant and Paul Guyer, Critique of the Power of Judgment, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 97. 2 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms [1980],” in Essential Essays Vol. 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley (Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press, 2019), 62. 3 Kant and Guyer, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 26. 4 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 35. 5 Kant and Guyer, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 91. 6 Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 41. 7 Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA; London, England: The Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 285–86. 8 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, eds. Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 220.

230 Glossary

9 Virginia I. Postrel, The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture & Consciousness. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003), 113. 10 Michael G. Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century, 1st ed. (New York: Basic Books/Knopf, 1999), 133. 11 Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde & Kitsch,” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 3. 12 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Market of Symbolic Goods,” in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 115. For Bourdieu, “symbolic goods” are the material products of intellectuals and artists. 13 Kant and Guyer, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 89. 14 Erin Beeghly and Alex Madva, eds., “Glossary,” An Introduction to Implicit Bias: Knowledge, Justice, and the Social Mind, Kindle (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020), 273. 15 Celine Leboeuf, “The Embodied Biased Mind,” in An Introduction to Implicit Bias: Knowledge, Justice, and the Social Mind, eds. Erin Beeghly and Alex Madva (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020), 41. 16 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jerrymclaughlin/2011/12/21/what-is-a-brandanyway/?sh=207b1fde2a1b Jerry McLaughlin (marketing executive). “What Is a Brand, Anyway?” Forbes, 12.21.11/ accessed 8.8.22. 17 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1st ed. (MIT Press, 1994), 230. 18 Louis Menand, “Introduction,” in Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain, edited by John Summers. New York: New York Review Books, 2011.), 10. 19 Dwight Macdonald, Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain, edited by John Summers. New York: New York Review Books, 2011,255. 20 Macdonald, 272. 21 Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 121. 22 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J. Richardson (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 1, https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/bourdieuforms-capital.htm. 23 Bourdieu, 1. 24 Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 483. 25 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London; New York: Routledge, 2010), 94. 26 Stanley Aronowitz, “Introduction,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, by Max Horkheimer (New York & London: Continuum Publishing Corporation, 2002), XIV. 27 Stahl, “Colonial Entanglements and the Practices of Taste: An Alternative to Logocentric Approaches,” 828. 28 Michael Bhaskar, Curation: The Power of Selection in a World of Excess (London: Piatkus, 2016), 12. 29 Kant and Guyer, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 91. 30 Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 101. 31 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 32. 32 Leboeuf, “The Embodied Biased Mind,” 47. 33 Pierre Bourdieu, “Social Space and Symbolic Power,” Sociological Theory 7, no. 1 (1989): 19. 34 Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 77.

Glossary  231

35 Stuart Hall, “Culture, the Media, and the ‘Ideological Effect’ [1977],” in STUART HALL: SELECTED WRITINGS Essential Essays, Volume 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley (Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press, 2019), 317–18. 36 Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 194. 37 Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 102. 38 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 15. 39 Amy Campos and Deborah Schneiderman, eds., Interiors Beyond Architecture (London; New York: Routledge, 2018). 40 Greenberg, “Avant-Garde & Kitsch,” 4. 41 Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium Is the Message,” in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1st ed. (MIT Press, 1994), 25. 42 Gans, 122. 43 Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things, 2016, 60. 4 4 Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes, 133. 45 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 8. 46 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London; New York: Routledge, 2010), 3. 47 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, 258. 48 Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 194. 49 Kant and Guyer, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 95.

READING LIST

The following texts are selected to augment or accompany each chapter. Those under “sources: primary definitions of taste” are cited directly in the chapter itself, and are the definitions featured in that chapter’s analysis. The texts listed as “on media” each contain concepts either cited or referenced. Like all classifications, these distinctions are reductive: many texts mention both taste (or related concepts) and media. The texts listed as “further reading” either expand on the primary polemic, critique the featured arguments, or explore a different aspect of the same subject. As with the book itself, the following offerings focus on the development of taste and related subjects primarily in the United States (although the United Kingdom is well-represented as well). An understanding of taste is inextricable from the social, economic and cultural conditions of its making. Moreover, these texts were selected to participate in the interrogation of the values embedded in what is sometimes referred to as the “Western canon,” texts that continue to inform design education in the United States.

Introduction Sources: primary definitions of taste Kant, Immanuel, and Paul Guyer. Critique of the Power of Judgment. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Burke, Edmund, and Adam Phillips. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford [England]; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Reading list  233

On media McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 1st ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994 [1964].

Further reading Barthes, Roland. “Myth Today” and “Rhetoric of the Image.” Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Barthes uses semiotics (simply: the study of signs) to explain that cultural symbols and images are part of a communications systems. These signs communicate both directly (denotative) and indirectly (connotative or associative). Barthes describes myth as forming in connotative messages, the means by which values (Barthes uses ideology) are publicized, the content of their communication coded. Images are part of this system, a form of subconscious polemic. Bernstein, J.M. “Tasty: On the Aesthetic and Ethical Universality of What Cannot Be Proved.” After-Taste: Expanded Practice in Interior Design, edited by Kent Kleinman, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, and Lois Weinthal, 1st ed., 28–41. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012. Bernstein’s discursive analysis of taste via Immanuel Kant considers the impacts of aesthetics on community and humanity. Gikandi, Simon. “The Ontology of Play: Mimicry and the Counterculture of Taste” Slavery and the Culture of Taste. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Gikandi argues that the legacy of American slavery continues to influence theories of taste, beauty and identity. Sparke, Penny. The Modern Interior. Illustrated edition. London: Reaktion Books, 2008. Sparke, Penny. As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2010. No other scholar has done more to foreground the relationship of taste and interior design than Sparke. As Long as it’s Pink focuses on late and early twentieth century domestic interiors. Here Sparke explores taste as a gendered issue: that design was the domain of men and professional life, taste that of women and the domestic sphere. The Modern Interior is a history informed by theory, substantially presented chronologically, full of details that illuminate a rich analytic history of the modern interior.

Taste and books Sources: primary definitions of taste Beecher, Catharine Esther, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The American Woman’s Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science; Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian Homes. New York; Boston: J.B. Ford and company; H.A. Brown & Co., 1869. De Wolfe, Elsie. The House in Good Taste. New York: The Century Co., 1913. Eastlake, Charles L. (Charles Locke). Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and Other Details. London: Longmans, Green, 1869. Ruskin, John. “Traffic.” The Crown of Wild Olive & The Cestus of Aglaia. New York; London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.; E.P. Dutton & Co., 1911.

234  Reading list

Ruskin, John. “The Lamp of Beauty.” New York; London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.; E.P. Dutton & Co., 1908. Wharton, Edith, and Ogden Codman. The Decoration of Houses. New York:  Scribners, 1907.

On media Lees-Maffei, Grace. Design at Home: Domestic Advice Books in Britain and the USA since 1945. New York: Routledge, 2014. Colomina, Beatriz. “Publicity.” Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001. Colomina’s work has been groundbreaking in examining the relationship between media and architecture. In this chapter, (an interrogation of Le Corbusier’s publications) Colomina examines the free play between the architect’s built work, philosophies and the images that populate the books and journal that (she argues) substantially constitute the site of his legacy.

Further reading Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford, UK; Cambridge, MA, USA: Blackwell, 1990. Lamont, Michèle. Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and American Upper-Middle Class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1992.

Taste and photography Sources: primary definitions of taste Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

On media Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 217–252. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Benjamin, Walter. “Little History of Photography.” In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, and Howard Eiland, 274–298. Cambridge, MA; London, England: The Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Benton, Tim. “The Twentieth Century Architectural Interior: Representing Modernity.” Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Interior Since the Renaissance, edited by Aynsley, Jeremy, Charlotte Grant, and Arts & Humanities Research Council (Great Britain). Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior. 220–39. London: V & A Publishing, 2006.

Reading list  235

Further reading Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Picador, 2010. If (in Camera Lucida) Barthes’s primary goal was to describe the ontology of the image, Sontag’s (in On Photography) is to ask that we consider images in their social and political contexts (not only what it is, but what does it do). Bourdieu, Pierre and Luc Boltanski. Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Here Bourdieu considers photography as an everyday pastime, contending that the rituals around the taking of photographs connect even a casual hobbyist to their social context, and participates in the construction of the cultural identity of all images.

Taste and mass-media Sources: primary definitions of taste (and their relationship to media) Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott, 94–136. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Gans, Herbert J. Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. New York: Basic Books, 1975. Greenberg, Clement. “Avant-Garde & Kitsch.” In Art and Culture: Critical Essays, 3–21. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. Macdonald, Dwight. “Masscult & Midcult.” In Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain, edited by John Summers, 19–80. New York: New York Review Books, 2011.

On media Colomina, Beatriz. “The Eames House.” In Domesticity at War, 83–110. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007.

Further reading Williams, Raymond. “The Analysis of Culture.” The Long Revolution, 57–88. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975. Culture is a term requiring an acknowledgement of its inherent ambiguities. Williams primary subject is literature, but his emphasis on “the creative act” makes his thinking broadly applicable. Hall, Stuart. “Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, and the Cultural Turn [2007]” In Essential Essays Vol. 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley, 35–46. Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2019. Hall uses a reading of Hoggart’s essay to discuss the evolution of Cultural Studies. Hoggart recognizes the working class as a producer of legitimate culture, more local and distinct than offered in definitions of popular or mass culture. Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.

236  Reading list

Levine describes the cultural debates through the rise of popular culture in the US, paying particular attention to the means by which the traditional fine and performing arts maintained their cultural status, a pursuit he characterizes as conservative.

Taste and magazines Sources: primary definitions of taste Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

On media Aynsley, Jeremy, and Francesca Berry. “Introduction: Publishing the Modern Home: Magazines and the Domestic Interior 1870–1965.” Journal of Design History 18, no. 1 (March 2005): 1–5. Aynsley, Jeremy, and Kate Forde, eds. Design and the Modern Magazine. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Frow, John. “Approaching Genre.” Genre, 6–28. London; New York: Routledge, 2005.

Further reading Bennett, Tony (et al.) “Culture after Distinction.” In Culture, Class, Distinction, edited by Bennett, Tony, Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde, Modesto Gayo-Cal, and David Wright, 9–23. London; New York: Routledge, 2009. Although Bennett’s work is cited in the body of the text, his analysis and critique of Bourdieu’s oeuvre deserves closer scrutiny. One critical contribution of this chapter (and the book that contains it) is an examination of the intersectional characteristics of identity depreciated in Bourdieu’s work, and the consequences of their inclusion in similar field work, to correlate identity markers with preference. DiMaggio, Paul. “Classification in Art.” American Sociological Review. 52, no. 4 (1987): 440–55. DiMaggio proposes a framework to examine the relationships between social structures and both the production and consumption of art. This essay positions taste as a form of ritual identification of one another; the term ritual acknowledges a structuring of the symbolic values that a community or group might assign to essentially ineffable experiences. Gruber Garvey, Ellen. “Rewriting Mrs. Consumer: Class, Gender and Consumption.” The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Garvey analyzes a wide range of publications (up to and including magazines) to propose relations between the perceptual habits those forms of media support, with claims that mass-market magazines and the advertising they contain were integral to the rise of a culture of consumption in the US.

Reading list  237

Taste and zines Sources: primary definitions of taste (and related concepts) Hebdige, Dick. “Towards a Cartography of Taste 1935–1962.” In Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things, edited by David Morley, 45–76. [A Comedia Book]. London; New York: Routledge, 2016. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London; New York: Routledge, 2010. Sontag, Susan, “Notes on Camp.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Ninth Printing. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1966. 275–292.

On media Colomina, Beatriz, Buckley, Craig, Grau, Urtzi. Clip, Stamp, Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines, 196X to 197X. Barcelona; New York: Actar; M+M Books, Media and Modernity Program, Princeton University 2010. Farmer, Frank. “Zines and Those Who Make Them: Introducing the Citizen Bricoleur.” In After the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics, and the Citizen Bricoleur, 29–55. Boulder, CO: Utah State University Press, 2013.

Further reading Hall, Stuart. “Culture, the Media, and the ‘Ideological Effect’ [1977].” In STUART HALL: SELECTED WRITINGS Essential Essays, Volume 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley, 298–335. Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2019. Hall asserts that considerations of culture are meaningless without considering their relations to power. This chapter proposes that the means by which values are become hegemonic is a complex interrelation between social and historical conditions. Not entirely unlike Barthes, Hall positions the media as a critical to this process, in constructing and evolving connotational codes. Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Ostensibly about the development of punk culture, Lipstick Traces traces cultural production in the service of rebellion from the beginning of the twentieth century. Marcus’s scholarship bears the hallmarks of subcultural sampling, crossing disciplinary boundaries to position punk as part of an avant-garde tradition.

Taste and the internet Sources: primary definitions of taste Peterson, Richard A., and Roger M. Kern. “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore.” American Sociological Review 61, no. 5 (1996): 900–7. Postrel, Virginia I. The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture & Consciousness. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003. Seabrook, John. “Nobrow Culture.” The New Yorker, September 20, 1999.

238  Reading list

On media Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “Introduction: Did Somebody Say New Media?” In New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, edited by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan, 1–10. New York; London: Routledge, 2006. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. “Immediacy, Hypermediacy, and Remediation.” In Remediation: Understanding New Media, 20–51. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.

Further reading Lamont, Michèle, and Marcel Fournier, eds. Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality. Chicago, IL; London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Baudrillard, Jean, and James Benedict. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. London; New York: Verso, 2002. McCracken, Grant. Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Taste and social media Sources: primary definitions of taste Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books; Random House, 2008. Hennion, Antoine. “Pragmatics of Taste.” In The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture, edited by Mark D. Jacobs and Nancy Weiss Hanrahan, 131–44. Williston: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2005. Liu, Hugo. “Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances.” Journal of ­Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (October 1, 2007): 252–75. Vercelloni, Luca, and Kate Singleton. The Invention of Taste: A Cultural Account of Desire, Delight and Disgust in Fashion, Food and Art. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

On media Boyd, Danah M., and Nicole B. Ellison. “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (October 2007): 210–30. Maares, Phoebe, Sandra Banjac, and Folker Hanusch. “The Labour of Visual Authenticity on Social Media: Exploring Producers’ and Audiences’ Perceptions on Instagram.” Poetics 84 (February 1, 2021): 101502.

Further reading Bhaskar, Michael. Curation: The Power of Selection in a World of Excess. London: ­Piatkus, 2016.

Reading list  239

Although written for an audience broader than simply academic, Bhaskar documents and contextualizes curation’s contemporary multi-valent definitions. In his analysis, curation is positioned as an informed and strategic choice, a prosthetic for taste made necessary by excesses of access to choice. Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Chichester, West Sussex; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1994 [1967]. Debord’s influential (and prescient) text positions spectacle as relationships between images standing in for relationships between people. While his larger critique concerns the pernicious effects of capitalism and commodification, Debord positions mass media as the means by which the mass is distracted and pacified (an argument recalling Adorno and Horkheimer’s position).

Taste and algorithms Sources: primary definitions of taste (and related concepts) Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Edited by Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Leboeuf, Celine. “The Embodied Biased Mind.” In An Introduction to Implicit Bias: Knowledge, Justice, and the Social Mind, edited by Erin Beeghly and Alex Madva, 41–56. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. Quinn, Malcolm, Dave Beech, Michael Lehnert, Carol Tulloch, and Stephen Wilson. eds. The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums, and Everyday Life After Bourdieu. Abingdon, OX; New York: Routledge, 2018.

On media Malraux, André, Stuart Gilbert, and Francis Price. Museum Without Walls. New York: Doubleday, 1967.

Further reading Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge; Oxford; Boston; New York: Polity Press, 2019. Benjamin analysis ways that media encodes the bias of the culture in which it is produced. The problem is not merely that technology reflects (and repeats) racism, but that technology and media continues to be perceived as producing objective mirrors of reality, correcting for the fallibility of human subjectivity. Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London; New York: Routledge, 1995.

INDEX

Note: Bold page numbers refer to tables; italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Abbott, B. 51, 91 abstraction 51, 57, 64n27, 110n27, 161, 168, 211 actor-stage analogy 167 Acton, J. Dalberg 24 Adorno, T. 58, 65n61, 71, 76–81, 84, 87n32, 87n35, 87n37, 92, 136; “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” 76, 86n4 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) 137 advice books 30–39 aestheticization 81, 94, 149, 164, 173 aesthetic philosophy 7, 13, 22, 24, 25, 51, 75 aesthetics: assessment 2, 6, 27, 28, 113, 166, 170, 187, 197; camp 124; civilization 26; class distinction 147; classifications 7; communis 16; conceptual unity 101; contemplation 39, 47, 50, 104; decisions 11, 25, 31, 32, 35, 70, 140, 164; dispositions 185, 186; hereditary capacity 210; home-making and decor 30; hyper-individualized 153; institutional legitimacy 151; leadership/ authority 148; modality 145; moral/ ethical issues 14; moral sense 54; perception 50; philosophies 3, 8, 13,

22, 24, 25, 51, 75; plenitude 140–143; popular culture 119; religious faith 25; reputability 57; self-determination 153; sensibilities 99, 187; sensible experience 8; social and political method 121; sociology 96; trickle-down 37; universal value system 9, 100–101; see also punk aesthetics Agamben, G. 14n41, 196 agreeable 4, 6, 9, 18n7, 86n3, 86n24 Albatross, C. (Woodson Rainey) 114; see also Redson, P. (Ron Williams) Alfonso, S. 162 algorithms: aesthetic assessment 197; AI 181–183; conscious/subconscious assessment 181; human universality 196; PageRank (Google) 139, 140; RankBrain (Google) 140; taste and 16, 181–200; use by museums 182–183 Altaffer, M. 126 ambiguity 3, 14, 17, 39, 57, 72, 94–96, 149, 151, 162, 164, 166, 173, 207 The American Woman’s Home (Beecher and Stowe) 33, 33, 34 America Online (AOL) 137 America’s Coming-of-Age (Brooks) 73 antiquity 7, 42n39 anti-taste 15, 114, 129

242 Index

Antoinette, M. 155n67 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Burke and Phillips) 18n3 appropriation 15, 50n18, 118n15, 145, 149, 153, 175; cultural 143; spaces of appropriation 125–128 The Arcades Project (Benjamin) 60, 66n71 architecture 8, 14, 25, 26–28, 32, 36, 36n64, 38, 50n18, 57, 74, 74n22, 81–82, 84n72, 108, 108n60, 113n2, 123n36, 127–128, 151, 188, 207–208; architectural beauty 26; architectural media 24, 81, 105n52; Arts & Architecture magazine 93, 95, 102, 103–107, 104, 106; para-architecture 60; see also interior architecture aristocracy 6, 22, 79, 93, 96 artificial intelligence (AI) 13, 16, 140, 182, 194 Atget, E. 51, 59, 60, 204 Auntie Mamie (film) 74 aura 49, 52, 55 authenticity: and appearance 206–207; and authority 40; and cultural appropriation 143; ideal quality 120; identity 161, 166–167; and the internet 148; punk 125–126, 151; and social media 168, 171, 175 authority 14, 16, 25, 31, 38, 40, 80, 98, 110n34, 117, 120, 129, 143, 148, 149, 154n44, 175, 187; vs. power 80, 80n50, 83, 98, 117, 120, 129, 143, 143n44, 148, 149, 158 autonomy 4, 6, 8, 22, 28, 47, 58, 74, 75, 98, 105, 113, 191, 207 avant-garde 74, 75, 87n37, 126, 147 “Avant-Garde & Kitsch” (Greenberg) 86n21, 132n56 Avenue des Gobelins (photograph) 59 Ayer, A. 127 Banham, R. 41n11 Banta, M. 61 Barbour, K. 164 Barthes, R. 47, 49, 52, 132n63, 172 Baudelaire, C. 60 Baudrillard, J. 44n82, 149 beauty 4–8, 15, 22, 24, 26–28, 32–34, 46, 47, 51–58, 62, 108, 109, 113, 124, 128, 129, 196, 208 Beecher, C. 33–35, 33, 43n56; The American Woman’s Home 33, 33, 34 Benjamin, R. 194

Benjamin, W. 49–52, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63n18, 64n23, 66n71, 66n77, 73, 86n20, 116, 117, 139; “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” 49 Bennett, T. 107, 187, 188, 189, 196, 199n46 Bhaskar, M. 174, 176n9 bias 16, 79, 100, 109n23, 182, 183, 192– 195, 209–210; replicating bias 194–195; see also racism, racist Birlem, I. 127 Blossfeldt, K. 66n77 Bolter, J.D. 137, 138 books: design 24–39; photographic illustrations 48; printing, publishing and transportation technologies 40; taste and 13–14, 22–45 Boulevard de Strasbourg, Corsets, Paris (photograph) 51 Bourdieu, P. 3, 6, 10–13, 15, 20n39, 87n26, 92, 96–108, 110n27, 110n36, 113, 119, 122, 123, 128, 129n1, 130n8, 131n26, 131n31, 140, 144–147, 151, 153, 158, 163, 165–167, 169–174, 177n28, 177n46, 178n65, 182–189, 192, 195, 196, 197, 198n17, 210; Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste 3 Bourne, R. 72, 86n12 boyd, danah m. 161, 163, 177n37 brand 141, 145, 146, 148, 149, 152, 162, 168, 171, 173 Brecht, B. 86n17 breeding 25n13, 65n50; physiognomy and taste 73; see also genetic and innate British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 120 Brooks,V.W. 73, 88; America’s Coming-ofAge 73 Burke, E. 4, 7, 8, 18n8, 22; A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful 18n3 Butsch, R. 86n11 camp 123–125, 128, 129, 131n46, 131–132n48 capital 97–103, 105, 106, 116, 117, 147, 151, 153, 158, 160, 161, 163, 174, 175, 185, 186, 208, 209; cultural capital 98–100, 108, 131n31, 146, 153, 163, 174, 175, 185, 186, 197, 198n17 capitalism 50, 51, 62, 76, 78, 170 Castells, M. 158, 207 cathedrals 28, 31 CBGB 125–126, 126

Index  243

“Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore” (Peterson and Kern) 154n49 class (social) 10, 28, 37, 53–55, 72, 75, 77, 78, 81, 97–98, 110, 108, 116, 120, 122, 147, 185, 210 classicism 36 Cleveland, C. 165, 176n26 Codman, O., Jr. 35, 35, 37, 64n33; The Decoration of Houses 35, 35–36 Coggan, A. 159, 162 cognitive, cognition 140, 196, 212 Cohen, H. 193 Collingwood, W. 42n28 Colomina, B. 82, 88n61, 88n62 commodity 57, 59, 66n71; commodity fetishism 65n61 common sense 5, 27, 31, 97, 100, 102, 117, 119, 121 communities 53–55, 106, 108, 116, 119, 120, 142, 160, 163, 165, 172, 206, 210 compositional recognition 193 CompuServe 137 condition, conditioning 97, 170, 181 conspicuous consumption 53, 57, 96, 146–147 consumer economy 8, 50, 61, 63n15, 92, 96 context recognition 193 Cooper, A.A 41n12 Corbusier, L. 41n11 Core, P. 131n46 Crenshaw, K. 212n4 critical theory 12, 165; see also theory Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 53 The Crown of Wild Olive (Ruskin) 27–28 cultural studies: Americanization 119–121; early analyses 118–119; popular culture 118; social and political milieu 118 culture: authority 78, 80, 148, 151; authority vs. power 80; capital 98–100, 108, 131n31, 146, 153, 163, 174, 175, 185, 186, 197, 198n17; characteristics 75; conformity 76; consensus 75; context 10, 17, 140, 153, 197; domination 169; entertaining/ popular 74; industry 71, 77; influence 47, 80, 108, 128, 143; intellectual contemplation 76; legitimate 74; marketplace/audience opinion 80; masscult and midcult 78; and media 73; power 80, 143, 158; production 73, 76,

92, 101, 105, 118, 129, 145, 147, 149, 151, 152, 185, 210; universality 75 “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (Adorno and Horkheimer) 76, 86n4 curation, curatorial 16, 85, 108, 148, 152, 159, 161n9, 163, 174, 182, 185, 186, 196; curators 182, 184, 187–189, 191, 193, 194, 196 Curtis, P. 186, 188 daguerreotypes 48, 48 DeBord, G. 173 de Wolfe, E. 37–39, 37, 47, 110n47; The House in Good Taste 37, 37, 39, 44n75 decentralization 114, 129n5 decentralized media 114–118, 129, 136, 138, 175; see also self-publishing The Decoration of Houses (Wharton and Codman) 35, 35–37 décor, decoration 30, 37, 57, 84, 167, 185 deep learning 183 demographics 92 Dent, J. 23 Derrida, J. 19n27 department store 58n64, 60n69, 82, 96; Marshall Field & Company department store 62 design: American consumer 82; artifact 47, 104; autonomy 8; books 24–39; brands 171; as entertainment 60, 72; European establishment 120; fabrication 55, 129; high–low categories 82; influences 1; journals 101, 102, 105; magazines 102, 107; media 173; objects and spaces 2; participation 209; professional/amateur 23; spatial 207–208 Design and Industries Associations (DIA) 120 Design Reform movement 42n48 desire 4, 17, 34, 47, 60, 72, 75, 92, 113, 127, 141, 147, 148, 151, 170–171, 208; see also pleasure and emotion Dewitt, C.T. 152 digital: communication 158, 159; disclosures 167–169; evolution 190, 192; habitus 140; marketplace 139; media 165; photographs 193; self-publishing 206; socializing 163 DiMaggio, P. 154n21 DiNucci, D. 137 discourse 12, 24, 30, 40, 92, 93, 94, 98

244 Index

disinterest/interest 4, 7, 8, 15, 47, 54, 70, 75, 77, 80, 92, 94, 96, 106, 116, 121, 125, 151, 160, 163, 165, 170, 187, 190 display: form of 14, 61; of goods 58, 60; public 53, 96, 146, 161, 188; strategies of 184 distinction: aesthetics of class 147; collapse of 15; cultural 78; erosion 149; generational 120; between kinds of work 188–189; social 78, 92, 100, 128 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Bourdieu) 3 Doesburg, T. van 114 domain: abstract phenomena 158; aesthetic decisions 140; arbitrariness and subjectivity 3; avant-garde 74; designed environments 127; digital communications 159; disciplinary 98, 182; edification and entertainment 152; institutional sovereignty 193; magazines 92; micro-publics 163; multivalent changes 189; professional 11; public profile 160; regions 167; subcultures 113; subject matter and sensibilities 15; taste 22, 28, 70; youth culture 120 Donath, J. 161, 163 double-consciousness 210 Du Bois, W.E.B. 210 Eagleton, T. 6, 35 Eames, C. 81–84, 103 Eames, R. 81–84 Eastlake, C.L. 31–33, 31, 36, 39, 42n41, 42n48, 42n51, 43n67, 47; Eastlake style 32; Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery and Other Details 31, 42n43 eclecticism see omnivorism e-commerce 139, 141 economic anthropology 53 economic capital 57, 99, 116, 147, 153, 209 egocentric network 161 Eliot, T.S. 87n45 elite, elitism; 35, 61, 72, 75, 75n36, 79, 84n76, 85, 119, 120n23, 141, 145–147, 148, 149, 151, 210, 212 Ellison, N. 161, 163 embodied sensation 8 emotion: cognition 212; facial recognition 193; emotional response 4, 70; personal gratification and experience 171; and sensation 22; see also desire and pleasure Enlightenment philosophy 7, 125, 205 Entenza, J. 103 esoteric: consensus 75; forms of culture 85, 92; object 196; pursuits 93, 103

Evan, R. 19n24 evolutions: American aesthetics 120; capitalism 170; media 17; mediation and museums 188–192; online users 151; reproduction technologies 47; skatepunk scene 127; stacked goods 60; taste 23, 204–205 Facebook 160, 163 facial recognition 193 fan magazine 116 fanzine 115, 116 Feininger, L. 56 field 22, 83, 97–98, 100, 101–103, 105, 108, 143, 147, 149, 151, 173, 177n39, 185, 187–188, 191–193, 196, 197, 206, 208 Francis, P. 195 Frey, R. 126 Friendster 160 Frow, J. 102 Funk, T. 69 Gans, H. 78–80, 81, 84, 87n43, 87n45, 88n57, 92, 100–101, 113, 118, 142, 143; Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste 87n41 Garson, M. 35, 41n12 Garvey, E.G. 95 gastronomy 170 gatekeeper 79, 80, 116, 120, 128, 139, 148, 193; gate-keeping 87n42 genetic 65n50; see also breeding and innate genre, genres 94, 101–103 geography 16, 92, 98, 145, 160 Getty, J.P. 95, 104, 105, 106 Gikandi, S. 210 Gilbert, E. 131n25 GitHub 191 Glissant, É. 196 global marketplace 16, 136, 208 global village 12 Goffman, E. 166–167, 169, 172, 173, 175, 177n38, 177n39, 177n40 Goldberg, A. 162 Goodwin, P. 191, 196, 197 Google 139–140 Gothic architecture 28, 32 Greenberg, C. 73–80, 84, 85, 86n17, 86n22, 86n24, 87n37, 87n39, 92, 100, 101, 124, 132n56, 136; “Avant-Garde & Kitsch” 86n21, 132n56 Gropius, W. 41n11 Gros, J.-B.-L. 48 Grusin, R. 137, 138

Index  245

habit34, 50, 56–57, 98, 99, 107, 185, 192, 219 habitus: aesthetic sensibilities 99; Bourdieu’s model 192; capital reproduction and development 99; conscious thought 97; contexts 98; disciplinary domains 98; iconoclasm 99; inclusion 99; leisure time 97; markers 98; pedagogic values 98; refashioned 153; social life 97; social reproduction 99; taste performance 97 Hairdresser’s mannequin, Dessau (photograph) 56 Hall, S. 113, 116, 118, 119, 125, 128, 131n34, 132n57, 136, 149 Hanquinet, L. 186 Hawes, J.J. 48 Hebdige, D. 87n42, 113, 118–126, 128, 130n19, 130n20, 130n21, 131n26, 131n30–32, 132n63, 136, 142, 149, 150, 155n76; Subculture:The Meaning of Style 121–122; “Towards a Cartography of Taste 1935–1962” 119, 130n21 hegemony 15, 79, 136 Hell, R. 126 Hennion, A. 169–170, 171, 177n46, 177n50 highbrow 69, 73, 83n16, 86n17, 209 high culture 77–79, 82, 84, 92, 96, 129n2, 136, 186, 207 Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery and Other Details (Eastlake) 31, 42n43 Hirsch, R. 48, 52 Hisgett, T. 184 Hoggart, R. 132n57, 145 Holt, D. 178n58 Holzer, J. 190, 191 “Home Decoration” (Beecher and Stowe) 34 Hopkin, G. 74 Horkheimer, M. 71, 76–80, 84, 86n32, 87n35, 87n37; “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” 76, 86n4 Hosokawa,Y. 152 House: After Five Years of Living (film) 83, 83 The House in Good Taste (de Wolfe) 37, 37–39, 44n75 Hughes, S.C. 162 hybridity 94–96 hyper-consumption 170 hyperlinks 138

identity 6, 14, 16, 28, 40, 47, 52, 57, 73, 97, 102, 105, 106, 107, 142, 158–163, 165, 166, 171, 175, 181, 182, 183, 185, 187, 191 identity cues 161 image: artifacts 189; book 28; commodification 55; cultural moment 207; domestic interiors 167; editorial 95, 149; hand-crafted 74; Instagram 173; interior design 84, 168; interior record layers 126; journalistic 193; management 207; mass-production 92; mechanical reproduction 51; metaphor 12, 80; mobility 61; naturalization 49; photography 14, 50; professional designers 164; recognition 183, 192– 193; social media 173; social relations 52; technical developments 48 individualism 141 individual psychology 208 industrial economy 6 industrialization 22, 25, 42n39, 47, 53, 58 Industrial Revolution 6, 24, 29, 42n39, 74, 92 influencers 164, 171, 174, 198n27 information age 12 innate 28, 99, 170; see also breeding and genetic insensible familiarization 99 Instagram: 3, 160, 164, 167, 171–173, 175, 175n3, 178n62; Instagram-able spaces 173; Instagram backdrops 171–173; Instagram-worthy 178n66 interior architecture 43n65 interior design: advice book 30, 39; amateur and professional praxis 128; architecture education 98; binary positions 81; disciplines 208; implications 13; magazines 94; media 205; modernity 22; profession 11; public identity 1; public image 11; and public taste 80–81; punks 129; theory 205 Interior Provocations xiv, 8n22, 162 internet: adaptation 151; ambiguity 151; artist’s work 135; atomize 153; case studies 147–151; documentation 152; interpersonal communication 168; mass media 136; media 170; Murakami’s installations 152; normative methods 151; participation 153; physical proximity 174; rise of 136–140; taste and 16–17, 135–164; transgressive taste 140–147; variations 136; World Wide Web 137 intersectionality 212n4

246 Index

The Invention of Taste (Vercelloni) 170 Isherwood, C. 125, 131n46, 131n48 John, E. 83 Kammen, M. 72, 80, 84, 86n12, 89n76, 110n34, 120, 154n44 Kant, I. 3–8, 12, 15, 20n39, 22, 24, 27, 28, 42n28, 46, 50, 53–54, 57, 60, 63n1, 64n40, 65n56, 70, 75, 77, 85n2, 86n3, 86–87n24, 87n26, 92, 97, 109, 140, 170, 186, 198n25, 205, 208; Critique of Pure Reason 53 Kern, R. 143–145; “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore” 154n49 Khan, I. 209, 212, 212n5 Ki-moon, B. 193 Kirkham, P. 82, 84 kitsch 73–76, 78, 85, 86n20, 123, 124, 132n56, 153 Kleinman, K. 5 Klotz, A. 3 Koeditz, M. 7 Koenig, P. 103 Kugelberg, J. 121 Labouef, C. 192 Lasc, A. 60 lateral (influence) 24, 40, 128, 143, 143n45, 149, 153n82 Lees-Maffei, G. 25, 30, 42n39, 44n84 legitimate 12n38, 25, 74, 75, 75n24, 77, 99, 100, 103, 106, 108, 118, 141, 142; semi-legitimate 102 leisure class 53–55, 58, 61, 64n36 Levine, L. 85 Levittown 5 “Little History of Photography” (Benjamin) 50, 52 Liu, H. 165–169, 171, 176n27, 177n28, 177n37 Lott, M. 3 lowbrow 69, 73, 83, 86n16, 86n17, 145, 209 Lupton, E. 8, 18n23, 63n15 Lynes, R. 69, 83 Macdonald, D. 77–78, 85, 86n18, 87n37, 87n39, 92, 100, 131n25, 136; “Masscult & Midcult” 78, 87n39 magazines: Architectural Digest 108; Architectural Record 108; Arts &

Architecture 93, 95, 102, 103–107, 104, 106; Better Homes and Gardens 102; consumers 96–97; cultural influence 108; etymology 96; genre 94; history and characteristics 92–96; House and Garden 93, 94, 102, 104, 105, 106; House Beautiful 94; hybridity and ambiguity 94–96; lifestyle 101, 102; magasin 96; market forces 92; media content 101–103; perceptual habits 108; publishing 15; taste and 15, 91–111; taste cultures 92 Malraux, A. 64n22, 64n27, 188, 199n39 manifestos 30 Marcus, G. 123 Marx, K. 50, 51, 64n25, 65n61 masscult 78, 87n39 “Masscult & Midcult” (Macdonald) 78, 87n39 mass culture 70, 77–79 mass media: and culture 73–80; vs. decentralized media systems 114, 116; hegemony 15, 136; homogenizing effects 136; interior design and public taste 80–81; internet 138; popular culture 70–73; producer and exporter 84; taste and 14, 69–89 mass production: accessibility 92; consumer economy 8, 50; critic of 31; handcrafted products 74; imitation 32; industrialization 25; profitability 139; unique value 55–56 Matter, H. 93 McCracken, G. 58, 61 McLaren, M. 132n51 McLuhan, M. 9, 10, 12, 19n25, 19n29, 72, 81, 87n32, 88n56, 89n75, 172, 182; Understanding Media:The Extensions of Man (McLuhan) 9, 19n28 McMullan, P. 141, 144 McWilliams, N. 174 mechanical reproduction 49, 50, 51, 55 media: aesthetic experience 8; content 101–103; editorial effect 211; electronic age 182; embodied sensation 8; influence 1; information movement 9; hot and cool, 9–10, 172; invisibility 9; medium is the message 9–10; perceptual shifts 50; readership 48; reciprocal relationship 13; study 12; vs. taste 10–11; total configural awareness 88n56; ubiquity 2; visibility and mobility 9; see also mass media; social media

Index  247

mediation 2, 9, 12, 16, 50, 82, 83, 105, 139, 148, 159, 163, 169, 171, 184, 188–192, 211 Menand, L. 75, 86n18 Menninghaus, W. 60 micro-publics 163 midcult 78, 87n39 middlebrow 69, 78, 100, 145 Miller, H. 88n62 Miller, J.A. 63n15 modernity 8, 19n37, 22, 58, 129 Modern Times (film) 71 morality 5, 7, 25, 32, 35, 47, 57–58 Moreta, L. 172 Morris, W. 55 Morshuis, M. 168 Mumford, L. 71 Murakami, T. 135, 141, 144, 146, 152, 152 museum: abstract painting 104; AIs 16, 182–183; art museum 182–183, 189; department store 82; gallery 181; enculturation 186; internet 148; mediation 188–192; mediating experience 186; The Metropolitan Museum of Art 149–151; ownership/ institutional custodianship 185; permanence 184; physical spaces 185; post-taste 191; public taste 185; recreation 190; replicating bias 194–195; social and cultural assets 185; taste-making and museological field 187–188; vision and mission 184, 188; see also Tate Museum of Digital Art (MuDA) 183 Muthesius, S. 109n9 Muybridge, E. 64n22 Myspace 160, 165, 166 national identity 32 naturalization 31, 32, 49 Navarro, A. 172 neoclassicism 36, 37, 43n69 neural networks 193, 193 neurological function 166 neutrality 16, 183 Neutra, R. 103 new media 137, 138, 164 Newsstand (photograph) 91 nobrow 145–147, 153 “Nobrow Culture” (Seabrook) 155n59 non-human taste 195–196 “Notes on Camp” (Sontag) 123, 124

objective 34, 49, 82, 129n1, 165, 168 object recognition 193 omnivorous, omnivorism 16, 143–145, 147, 151, 153 O’Neil, C. 194 ONYX 114 organicism 36 Orlova, M. 3 ornament, ornamentation 26, 27, 28n31, 29, 34, 36, 41n16, 43n56, 152 The Partisan Review 77 Passage Choiseul, France 46 pattern recognition 192 Perry, G. 199n46 Peterson, R. 143–145; “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore” 154n49 Pfeiffer, I. 60 Phelps Stokes, I.N. 48 Phillips, A. 18n8; A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful 18n3 philosophy 7, 9, 28, 55, 125, 205; aesthetic 7, 13, 22, 24, 25, 51, 75 photography: aesthetic value 61; development 47–53; environments 47; evolution 47, 49; industrialization 47; magazines 94; recognizability 62; reproducibility effects 49–52; social dimension 47; social stability 61; taste and 14, 46–66; urbanization 61 Playtime (film) 76 pleasure 3–5, 16, 26, 26n16, 27, 27n20, 34, 54, 70, 79, 82, 84, 96, 106, 113, 124–125, 140, 142, 143, 145, 170, 196, 212; see also desire and emotion Plunkett, D. 17n1, 40n2 popular: culture 70–73, 76, 78, 84, 113, 118, 119, 129n2, 131n25, 142, 145; entertainment 71–73, 79; media 70, 72, 77, 83, 93, 102, 131n25 Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (Gans) 87n41 pop-up museums 171, 173 Postrel,V. 139, 140–143, 148, 153, 166, 177n36; The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness 140 power, cultural 80, 80n50, 83, 98, 117, 120, 129, 143, 143n44, 148, 149, 158 Prodigy 137

248 Index

publicity 80–82, 206 public realms 61, 164, 173, 178n67 public taste 80–81, 88n57, 120, 182, 185, 191 punk aesthetics 122–124, 127, 149, 150 PUNK: Chaos to Couture (exhibition) 150, 150, 151 pure gaze 46–47, 87n26, 187, 196 Quinn, M. 191, 196 racism, racist 85, 119, 122n30, 210; see also bias rational, rationality 25, 34, 120n21, 168, 205 recognition 4, 5, 14, 22, 47, 52, 54, 83, 129, 168, 170; see also image recognition; pattern recognition Recognition (art installation) 192–197, 193, 195, 208 Redson, P. (Ron Williams) 114 Reid, J. 115 relative (models of taste) 39, 53–54, 56, 69–70, 98, 122; universal vs. relative 14, 69–70, 100–101 remediation 138, 149 reputability 53, 56, 57 Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) 191 Rhodes, J.D. 83 Rhodes, M. 176n26 Richmond, S. 115 Rojas, N. 162 Rosas, G. 162 Ruskin, J. 23, 25–37, 38, 39, 41n11, 41n12, 41n16, 41n20, 42n28, 47, 55, 57, 65n47; The Seven Lamps of Architecture 26–27; Modern Painters (Ruskin) 26–27; The Crown of Wild Olive (Ruskin) 27–28 Saarinen, E. 103, 107 San Fratello,V. 162 Savage, J. 117 Schwitters, K. 114 Seabrook, J. 145, 146; “Nobrow Culture” 155n59 The Secret Public (zine) 117 The Selby (website) 148–149 Selby, T. 148–149 self-consciousness 52, 124, 127, 194 self-determination 6, 153 self-expression 30, 38, 81

self-identification 38 self-publishing 116, 139, 206; see also decentralized media Sennett, R. 178n67 sensible 8, 33, 51, 54, 56, 184, 185 sensus communis 5, 40, 70, 75, 126, 129, 140, 143, 208 shop windows 58–61, 66n77 Shulman, J. 95, 104, 104, 105 Siddiqui, I. 162 Simmel, G. 63n19, 208 skatepunks 126–128 Skeezer (zine) 127 slumming 145, 146, 151 Smith, P. 126 social capital 98, 153, 161, 185 social context 10, 17, 54, 58, 100, 119, 122, 145, 161, 194, 197 social domination 191 social hierarchies 79, 129n1, 130n8, 187 social identity 6, 15, 35, 38, 55, 97, 109, 120, 139, 158 social media: background 160–164; bodies, taste and 169–171; capital 158, 160; communities 160; curation 159, 174; definitions 160; detectability 173–174; digital communication 158; influencer 174; and interior 164; online interaction 159; performance 164–169; post 159, 162, 168, 172, 174; strangers 175; taste and 16, 158–178; unmooring of identity 160–163 social mobility 6, 22, 100, 113 socio-economic class 15, 97; see also class (social) sociological theory 140, 148 sociology of aesthetics 96 Sontag, S. 89n76, 123–125, 128, 136; “Notes on Camp” 123, 124 Southworth, A.S. 48 A Space Odyssey (film) 77 space of flows 207–208 Sparke, P. 6, 8, 11, 18n23, 19n37, 22, 25, 30, 37–39, 43n64, 43n69, 44n75, 44n82, 61, 66n66, 74, 80–81, 129, 130n21, 164, 206, 212n1 spatial design 207–208; see also interior design and architecture spectacle 58, 173, 178n68 spreading activation 166 Stegbauer, J. 168 Stevenson, R. 88n68, 115

Index  249

Stowe, H.B. 33–35, 33, 43n56; The American Woman’s Home 33, 33, 34 streamlining 120, 123–124 style 28, 32, 36, 38, 81, 92, 95, 98, 120, 122, 123, 142, 150–151, 153, 185, 206 subcultures 15, 113–114, 118, 121–123, 125, 127, 128, 142, 150 subjectivity 1, 3–5, 16, 17, 57, 70, 125, 165, 182, 183, 188, 194, 205 suitability, simplicity/proportion 39 Sullivan, L. 17n1 supervised learning 183 The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness (Postrel) 140 symbolic capital 99, 107, 148 symbolic cultural capital 151 Talbot, W.H. 63n5 taste: aesthetic values 13; and algorithms 16, 181–200; applications 205–208; as-aesthetic-assessment 170; as-thepalate’s-sensation 170; authenticity and appearance 206–207; and books 13, 22–44; class 53–55; classification and bias 209–210; community 166; conclusions 211–212; cultural and material conditions 13; cultural stakes 17; cultures 79, 92, 142; definitions 1–8, 53–58; design 1, 11–12; elite taste 79, 146; efficiency 53; evolution 23, 204–205; excessive signification 20n41; exclusion 211; household 32; impacts 208–211; influences 1; Instagram post 3; and internet 15–16, 135–156; and magazines 15, 91–111; and mass media 14, 69–89; media 1, 8–11; metaphor 12; metrics 2; and photography 14, 46–66; reverse-engineer consumer activity 15; social function 34; and social media 16, 158–178; spatial design 207–208; transgressive 140–147; and zines 15, 113–132 taste-making 15, 123, 187–188 Tate 182, 184, 186, 188–190, 190, 191–197, 193, 195 Taylor, M.C. 60 technological determinism 10, 19n33 Teston, L. 162 text-recognition 192–193

theory 10, 12, 13, 58; 73, 119, 166, 205 architectural 7n19, 7n21, 11n37; critical 12, 165; design 8; infra-theory 177n44; sociological 140, 148; see also The Theory of the Leisure Class top-down (influence) 16, 103, 143, 147, 196 “Towards a Cartography of Taste 1935–1962” (Hebdige) 119, 130n21 Toynbee, A. 24 truth: materials 26; reproductions 38; self-protection 161; universal 7, 22; see also authenticity Tsafoulia, L. 162 Tulip Chair 107 Understanding Media:The Extensions of Man (McLuhan) 9, 19n28 unique value 55–56 universality 16, 25, 75, 85, 177n38, 183, 196 universal (models of taste) 5–7, 9, 22, 25, 26, 28, 31–32, 34, 39, 49, 50–51, 69–70, 100, 113, 114, 117, 118, 119, 129n1, 141, 143, 152, 188, 205, 208, 211; see also relative vs. universal unsupervised learning 183 values: cultural habits/preferences 210; cultural product 124; curatorial process 188; customary 119; embodied 14; exchange 50, 54, 59; exterior 47; high culture 81; instability 61; material 73; pedagogic 98; preferences 10, 78; reflections of taste 116; relative worth 53; sensibilities 15; shared 15, 78, 160, 163; status quo 128; taste culture 142; unique 55–56; universal vs. relative 100–101; use, cult and exhibition values 50 Veblen, T. 53–58, 60–62, 64n36, 64–65n40, 65n45, 65n50, 65n56, 65n57, 88n68, 96, 109n21, 128, 146, 147, 178n68; The Theory of the Leisure Class 53–55, 61; Veblen goods 61–62 Vercelloni, L. 170–171; The Invention of Taste 171 vertical (influence) 24, 40, 153n82; see also top-down Vitruvius 18n19 Walker, R. 103, 104, 105

250 Index

waste, wastefulness 50n15, 54, 55, 57, 58; wasted effort 65n45 Waters, J. 132n48 Watts, G.F. 195 Web 2.0 137–139 Westwood,V. 115, 132n52 Wharton, E. 35, 35–39, 43n67, 44n74, 64n33; The Decoration of Houses 35, 36–37 Wikipedia 139 Wilson, M.O. 19n37 Woodham, J.M. 130n23

Wood, R.R. 44n75 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Benjamin) 49 Wright, F.L. 41n11 zines: cultural influence 128; cultural studies 118–121; decentralized media and rise of 114–118; economic pressures 128; group identity 136; internet publishing 139; punk identity 128; subcultures 113–114, 121–123; and taste 15, 113–132