What is good taste?

Or what does it mean to like the right art?

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It has become clear in these last decades of decadence, decline, and rampant bad taste that a lot of pop culture is stuck somewhere between turmoil and tacky. Messianic stans slurp from the corporate trough with either a perverse enthusiasm or a belligerent defensiveness over blockbuster slop that was manufactured for literal children. Unbearable histrionics bickering over Sabrina Carpenter’s wannabe-auteur album cover, all this before anyone considered if her music is too bland to justify these thermonuclear takes. A decade of cinema defined by the joyless multiverse of Marvel intellectual properties and their contrived crossovers. Poptimism metastasizing into the limitless affirmation of sterile bops, a merciless insistence that Taylor Swift and Beyoncé are making Very Important Music. Most stand-up specials have become MSNBC clapter bait or the same stale provocateur schtick from “cancelled” reactionaries who seem to misunderstand that offensiveness is a byproduct of comedy rather than the purpose.

It doesn’t help that all this is mediated through a tedious and interminable culture war, one that mandates pop culture to validate what we already believe about the world through obnoxious, hamfisted signifiers. This dynamic turns us into mere consumers of a product: Collecting, itemizing, prowling for Easter Eggs. It isn’t an attraction to art because of its actual qualities; it’s a compulsive addition to its mere existence and immediate gratification. In fact, this culture war cheapens art. When people expect a movie or a book to conform to their political values, or when they reverse engineer everything to fit in accordance with their priors, it dampens art’s ability to speak to different aspects of the human experience.

Given this backdrop, then, what is “good” taste? The oft-comparison of art to McDonald’s feels a bit hackneyed, but it’s at least partially useful. There’s nothing “wrong” with enjoying pop music or blockbuster movies, but only you indulging in those will inherently limit the scope of how you engage with human expression and conflict, much in the same way that only devouring Big Macs will leave you with a limited palette. This should be self-evident. Klaus Zynski has found a more useful throughline between enjoying the highbrow and the lowbrow as he writes about grinding his own coffee. The process envelops a sense of intentionality—in this case, buying a grinder, espresso machine, and different types of roasts and blends—and it engenders a kind of aspirational snobbishness, allowing us to engage with the world in a way that’s deeper than passive consumption. There’s a dichotomy between curiosity and familiarity: By going that extra step and challenging our notions of what we like, we learn more about ourselves and what truly fulfills us.

He writes:

“You need to free yourself from this idea that snobbishness is a position that should always be avoided. In some situations it’s understandable even if I (a snob in many respects) may disagree with the reasoning. Buying physical media can be expensive, especially before a neophyte consumer develops bargain-hunting instincts. Reading dense texts, watching a lot of films or TV, seeking new music, developing the cultural vocabulary to engage with foreign media, all of these pursuits are time-consuming and often lonely endeavors. There’s at least a value proposition at play there. I don’t see one of those here. I can’t be nice about this any further, if you’re spending like seven bucks every morning at Starbucks I won’t call you frivolous or irresponsible but I will call you a rube. Why are you letting these people pick your pocket like this? ... “Oh but I need my treat.” Then save the money and get a treat that doesn’t suck. Is that so hard? Or are so you degraded, demoralized, and debased that familiar treats are the only thing you aspire to? In an age where institutional contempt for the individual grows ever more apparent, sometimes being a snob is the only way we salvage dignity. Accusations of “doing too much” will always be a compliment coming from those who see it as an imposition to do anything at all.

This passage is poignant, and it articulates my issue with how the let people enjoy things sentiment has devolved from a noble pursuit of expanding the canon to a totalizing dictate against any form of criticism. There is this increasing attitude that holds that anyone who doesn’t actively celebrate every new pop album, prestige show, or blockbuster flick is inherently a snob. It’s an anti-intellectual argument. The idea of being pretentious in modern parlance is associated with going beyond the minimum effort of enjoyment, to have any sort of discerning taste that deviates from hype cycles or a momentary zeitgeist. If anything, let people enjoy things has become an inverted snobbery, a snobbery against value or anyone who tries to consider things by some measure of quality. It’s a forced optimism that lowers our standards and rationalizes the ongoing enshittification of everything, inadvertently serving a corporate agenda to transform art into pacifying content. Spotify and studio execs are telegraphing how little they think about their customers when they create AI wallpaper music like The Velvet Sundown and fake actresses like Tilly Norwood. The success of AI slop is contingent upon whether these boardroom lizards are correct in their assessment that the average consumer is as credulous and undiscerning as they believe.

In September, the New Yorker ran a feature piece about how music criticism has lost its edge, and it received a weird kind of backlash, as if it’s a cardinal sin for a critic to let their audience know if an album isn’t worth their time. A well-articulated takedown is necessary for tastemaking. Culture writing that is only agreeable or only heaps praise ceases to be substantive engagement and sterilizes itself into PR. Similar to stepping outside of our ideological echo chambers to familiarize ourselves with opposing political views, an understanding of what is “bad” develops a more well-rounded appreciation of what is “good.” Criticism isn’t antithetical to creation—Edgar Allan Poe, T.S. Eliot, and Walt Whitman were also critics—but necessary to it. A talented, thoughtful critic pins a song or a film or a book onto the still-wet spiderweb of culture, and tells us not only what it means to consume art and food and media, but what it means to be alive—here, now, in this place and time.

There are plenty of issues with Pitchfork, but their scathing review of Greta Van Fleet’s debut album was the most prescient writing that has come out of that publication in over a decade. At the time, this Detroit-based outfit was poised to become the face of rock music that was desperate for young blood, despite their artistic aspirations capping out at dimestore Led Zeppelin. In addition to its blatantly derivative schtick, GVF represented every garbage rockist boomer revivalism tendency, and Pitchfork’s massacring held a mirror to the genre. Ironically, this review dropped around the same time Jack White released Boarding House Reach, a polarizing album, but one that at least embodied his left-field oddball persona. The negative receptions seemed rooted in a subconscious desire for Jack White to keep pumping out blues-influenced garage rock that was increasingly becoming a pale imitation of his former classics. The dichotomy of critical receptiveness to Jack White and the willingness to pass the mantle of the Next Great American Rock Band to Greta Van Fleet was pretty telling of how stagnant and regressive the genre had become. Pitchfork’s roasting was a wake-up call. If fans want rock to remain culturally relevant, its most popular bands should be given the latitude to be forward-thinking, open to change, and reinvent the form with interesting genre fusions.

It would be convenient and self-satisfying to consider the music and movies I do consume (more emotional nuance and complexity) and the music and movies I don’t consume (unsubtle and simple) to amount to a positive value to be placed on my “taste,” but I’d be lying to myself. And a lot of that seems like a crutch or a weird signifier to hang my identity on. But the ability to engage with art and culture is important. I watch old movies or listen to classic albums, not because there is cultural capital attached to them, but because they remind us that our struggles are universally human, and that I will likely survive whatever conflict I’m currently embroiled in. And time is an effective filter of what was passingly popular and what is lasting, resonating art that speaks to shared experiences.

To me, at least, “good” taste doesn’t come from liking the “right” art. It mostly comes from perspective—and with that, curiosity, open-mindedness, and a willingness to broaden your comfort zone. Anyone who’s a person of culture should be able to do the following:

• Explain why they like or don’t like specific movies/shows/music/books on a substantive level.

• Understand that what makes something a classic is not contingent upon their personal preferences (RE: “The Beatles are overrated”).

• Step outside their preferences and recommend movies/shows/music/books based on an understanding of what other people are into or their level of familiarity with a specific genre.

• Understand that popularity doesn’t determine whether something is good, and that popularity doesn’t mean that something is overrated.

• Recommend movies/shows/music/books that are “problematic” or “cancel material.”

• Name a highly acclaimed movie/show/album/book that they dislike or believe is underrated.

• Name a minor or underground movie/show/album/book that they consider to be an unrecognized masterpiece.

If they can’t, they are probably into culture as fashion or performance.

When we’re analyzing or even obsessing over pop bangers or superhero films, it’s important to reiterate the difference between what is culturally enriching and what is bingeable entertainment. Art separates itself from entertainment by lending insights into the values you already hold or challenging them. Also, part of enjoying art and entertainment is just engaging with the material on its terms; in many instances, when something is dismissed as vapid or lacking complexity, it’s because that person was seeking qualities and traits found in one genre that don’t necessarily translate to another. For example, if I’m listening to a rock album in search of the same kind of revolutionary melody and harmony that would be found in a John Coltrane record, I’d be disappointed, but substance can be found in so many other aspects of the medium. But a culture that only makes space for pop music or blockbuster flicks will eventually stagnate, as we will run out of influences to draw from. The ‘80s have been thoroughly drained of every single drop of nostalgia, but pop artists still return to that particular well. There needs to be room in the mainstream for oddballs willing to take creative risks.

Funny enough, as poptimists insist that anything that racks up streams or sales is important and significant, they are gentrifying a genre of music that has artistic merit specifically because of its accessibility. They are coopting pop music in the same way that yuppies and nepo babies boujee-ified lobsters, thrifting, loft apartments, Brooklyn, DIY aesthetics, etc.

As Eris points out in “Poptimism’s great lie and the infantilization of taste”:

What is deeply ironic is that these same poptimists then over-intellectualize the pop music slop they praise using the hallmarks of the exact same education they claim makes cultural “snobbery” so alienating in the first place… If poptimists of this sort really cared about cultural equity then they could work to make their writing more accessible and help the lowly peons to gain some of their cultural education via osmosis, instead of continuing to cloister such an understanding behind said writers’ overwrought shit and pulling the items of low culture in with them instead. “I’m on One” is not a difficult piece of art to access, but the appearance that it is difficult to access is fostered by how it’s talked about.

None of this is to say that there is no difference between something with genuine artistic intent versus cynical and pandering corporate slop for the sole purpose of profit. Or that there isn’t legitimately tacky art out there: Seriously, how the fuck does anyone enjoy Imagine Dragons or Big Mouth? But by consistently expanding our horizons, we enrich our understanding of culture beyond products that are made to reward shallow, immediate gratification. It also turns passive interactions into meaningful experiences: Diving into a full album vs. Spotify-curated playlists, immersing yourself in a movie theatre vs. binging something on a streaming platform, challenging yourself as a reader vs. retreating to the familiar YA drivel.

Art doesn’t fix the world, but it helps you live through it or understand your place within it. Art is an expression of human conflict, and while it can’t resolve it, it can deepen our wells of empathy and add technicolor to moral clarity. Stories may not end oppression, but they remind us that we’re not crazy for wanting a better world. Beauty can’t pay rent, but it can keep us from going numb. What separates humans from machines is our yearning for meaning beyond mere survival. If we have a better understanding of what gives us meaning, maybe it would be reflected in our political and economic systems. There is something powerful and joyful about the power of art to shape reality, and through any creative endeavor, we can build a better present and future.

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