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Matters of taste have been a bit sour lately.
You can tell it’s rough when you search “guilty pleasure” on Spotify, and it generates a good few thousand public playlists from self-conscious listeners. Spotify even has its own official “Guilty Pleasure” playlist and a “Guilty Pleasure Mix” it makes especially for users. I’m not going to pretend mine didn't hurt my feelings just a little. Users may lament their embarrassment over enjoying a mainstream pop song, but seriously, what makes a guilty pleasure so guilty?
If you’re on the internet often, you’ve likely seen various posts ranking artists and their work. This chart sorts famous musicians based on controversy and perceived talent. In Airbuds, a popular mobile app, users can react to one another’s tracks as they stream music throughout the day. There’s even a feature that “roasts” your music taste. And it’s hard to come across anything so drenched in sarcasm as a Letterboxd one-liner.
You may also be familiar with terms like “ironically” and “unironically” to describe enjoying a piece of media.
“I unironically have been singing the Kevin G song all day,” one Instagram user admits.
Me too, honestly. It is catchy.
So in a way, it is acceptable to like whatever it is you’re enjoying, as long as you acknowledge that it’s technically “bad.” We’ve also applied the term “camp” to add a sort of ironic sense of merit to what would be typically considered in poor taste.
First appearing in the 1909 Oxford English Dictionary under this context, camp was defined as an exaggerated, ostentatious or theatrical style. Largely driven by the LGTBQ+ community, this aesthetic appreciates “tackiness,” intentional or not.
In the words of the iconic director John Waters: “Isn’t it exciting to realize that you know better?”
However, this need to be self-aware about one’s poor taste begs the question: What is quality, who defines it and why should you define it for yourself?
Scottish philosopher David Hume argued in the 18th century that when we say how good or bad an artwork is, we merely report how we feel about it. Under this theory, quality is denoted by the viewer. He suggested that a “standard of taste” could be developed over time by a wide variety of critics from an array of expert backgrounds.
Later, German philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that any person could reach the same conclusion when judging an object, creating a universal standard of taste. Therefore, what is in good taste can be agreed upon by all, rather than something that can vary by individual.
Alternatively, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu claimed in the 20th century that there is no true standard of taste, but that we acquire our ideas about quality based on social factors. In his view, taste is a reflection of how we want others to perceive us. Instead of genuinely appreciating the media we consume, we want the social credentials that come with admiring it.
In his 1979 book “Distinction,” Bourdieu references a series of cultural taste surveys distributed among French upper, middle and lower classes. When asked to choose between three musical works, for example, participants’ classes would usually align with the ranking of the option they chose: high-brow, middle-brow or low-brow.
According to Bourdieu, what is widely considered to be “quality” is what correlates with upper-class sensibilities.
While we may not be thinking about social class or the bourgeoisie when deciding our top four on Letterboxd, Bourdieu’s idea of self-interest remains salient. Are you listening to that indie band out of sincere enjoyment, or will it just look cool on your Instagram story?
Our aversion to a Billboard hit or a popular TV show might not be due solely to individual preference. Within each of us, there may be a desire to elevate ourselves above the “everyman.” To affirm our individuality, we treat taste as a way to distinguish us from our peers. Only a goofy doofus would like “The VelociPastor,” and I am not a goofy doofus. To Bourdieu’s point, when we put so much effort into curating our tastes to look good on paper, we aren’t really appreciating the content itself. That’s what makes social media like Airbuds and Letterboxd so vexing.
On the other hand, Tiffany Jenkins, a culture columnist for the BBC, argues that a collective sense of taste would bring a sense of unity to the world we live in.
“Working out the answer to what is and isn’t good, and what everyone should like— what’s the best that has been thought and said — is essential to creating a common culture,” Jenkins wrote.
I like the idea of everybody in the world holding hands and singing in joyful unison as much as the next person. Constructive criticism is important for the arts and beyond. But if we narrowed down our tastes to fit into one uniform box denoting good from bad, we would become something of a hive mind.
The beauty of subjectivity is the variety of options it gives us. If taste was objective, you couldn’t stand out on a fire escape and hear the blends of music floating from neighboring apartments. You couldn’t get Chinese takeout and pizza on the same street. And a ballerina couldn’t perform with a hip hop dancer at the Olympics.
When we focus on curating everything we find tasteful and avoiding what’s "embarrassing," we rule out so many possibilities to truly enjoy what we consume.
In my subjective opinion, I think subjectivity is a little more fun.
Emma Howard (she/her) is a sophomore studying journalism.
