Taste Culture

We have distinct tastes of food but our appetite for good taste doesn’t limit us to food only. We relish many types of art, entertainment, architecture, consumer goods for our taste buds. It embodies — songs we continuously listen, type of movies we devour often, trendy clothes we drape ourselves with — the lifestyle we live or wish to live in our dreams.

Somebody’s Taste, in this context, tells his artistic or aesthetic interests and choices. From choosing specific novel to read, to have a distinct friend circle — taste serves as an identity and status marker of a person; therefore, it categories people in groups with unequal values. It is displayed in person’s conversation, habits, manners, and in the possession of goods, which signals in which category you fall in. As the groups are discrete and homogeneous mixture of people, they also act as identification of outside person who doesn’t fit in. These inclusion exclusion factors with strong bonding of inside people give rise to a taste culture. Taste cultures are clusters of cultural forms (e.g. role model, media, products etc.) which embody similar values and aesthetic standards.

Taste is an individual and subjective sentiment. But, it is also about the pleasure we receive from an object due to its intrinsic objective properties. Since aesthetic standards are not static but based on tradition, culture and human experiences; the aesthetic self of an object comes from shared consciousness of a community. As a person familiarizes with different cultures, gets more knowledge and goes through different experiences; he can easily move from one taste group to another. However, The subjective taste of an individual remains contested with objective high standards — both, most of the times, co-exist in a society.

Taste also defines class of a person. In capitalist economy, wealth sits at the apex of human success pyramid. Accumulation of wealth is driven not only to ensure basic needs, but to command respect from others — prestige. For this, a wealthy person must display its wealth such a way that people perceive it as a big success. One way is through acquiring costlier goods. This standards of taste does not reflect eternal or autonomous beauty of a person and thing, but spectacle of wealth masquerading under name of beauty.

Taste cultures have been categorized and arranged hierarchically. In the past, taste acted as a means of maintaining class distinction — mainly two. It could be divided into High Culture — found in art galleries, prestigious museums — and Low Culture or Popular Culture as in — commercialized cinema, street fashion etc. Previously, taste cultures were dominated by highbrows. They considered their aesthetics superior than the proletariat’s, and their’s — crude, immature, vulgar; which had no sophistication and thoughts in them. But, rise of middle class developed their own aesthetics and started dominating taste cultures. Taste-based domination is constantly challenged, as no one group succeeds in imposing as legitimate its own standards of taste. This leads to the coexistence of multiple interest groups with constantly shifting identities and hierarchies.

But, taste culture is much like public culture. Contrary to above statement, actually, different taste cultures are unequally distributed across taste publics. It corresponds to a diversity of taste groups, which are unorganized aggregates of people sharing similar aesthetic standards. There is convergence between high and popular culture. One person belongs to highbrow society can have some lowbrow tastes. This erosion of boundaries between taste cultures makes is hard to pin-points which public belongs to what taste culture. This culminated in the notion that tastes are strictly an expression of individual preferences and private choices.

There are factors which participated in this increased breadth and anonymity of social relations. Such as instant transfer of information across the globe followed by development of communication technology, new and cheaper means of transportation which resulted in high geographic mobility, accessibility to higher education, globalization etc. And as an outcome we got a new kind of taste culture called “Omnivorous Taste Culture.” Omnivorous consumers have an increased breadth of cultural tastes, and willingness to cross established hierarchical cultural genre boundaries. In other words, the concept refers to a taste profile that includes both highbrow and lowbrow genres.

Regardless of the specific patterns and meanings attached to them, it is clear that tastes are no longer considered an expression of universal and eternal standards of beauty originating outside social settings. Tastes are part of symbolic systems of classification which both express and shape social interaction. They are closely linked to processes of identity formation and status exclusion.

http://educ.jmu.edu/~brysonbp/symbound/papers2001/Olivier.html