Monday 17 November 2014

Accounting for Taste

I have long believed that taste, one's aesthetic sense, one's choice in music, literature, art and fashion, is important, that it is not trivial or superficial. I've always struggled to articulate the idea, always wondering how people can like certain things which to me are clearly bad. Are these people deficient in some way? Sure, one can say "chacun son gout (to each his own)" or "there is no accounting for taste," but I've always felt that there is something deeper.  What we like is part of how we define ourselves as individuals. Our tastes are always on display, on our bookshelves, on our walls, in the clothes we wear, and as much of our lives have become digitized, we have our "likes" on our virtual walls, showing to everyone the music, movies and books we love. We say to the world, "This is what I like, therefore this is what I am like."

Like book covers, by which we have been told not to judge the contents, yet nevertheless always and reliably do, we surround and clothe ourselves with outward signs of our inner life. We live in an age of mass marketing and our associations with certain brands and logos are associations with certain values or ideals. It is simply unavoidable, and we, either consciously or not, put our values, or at least our tacit approval of others' values, on display every day.

I'm not talking about such ethical consumer choices where words like fair trade, local or organic might spring up, though, that is an important discussion. I am talking about cultural products. So, while a T-shirt made in a sweatshop in Bangladesh is a material product, weighted with the socioeconomic baggage of globalism, the company putting their logo on these shirts culpable for how it is produced, and that it is something of which we should be aware, I am right now trying to talk about that logo itself, the brand, the ephemeral marker of value, that we in the Western world interact with. And, just like logos on clothing, the music, movies, books and games, those things with which we occupy our imaginations, they too are brands that signify certain values. Certainly "genre" is a type of branding.

Our aesthetic choices say a lot about us, about how we want to be perceived, about our group identification. They can often tells us a lot about our personalities. A person's musical preferences, for example, can be predicted by how they score on a test of the Big Five personality traits, which are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism.Openness to experience has the highest predictive factor, showing that people who rate high in this category tend to like more complex and/or novel music. Those who are open to experience show curiosity, appreciation of art, and unusual ideas. At the same time, openness is also strongly correlated with liberal ethics, such as racial tolerance.

Stephen Harper
This is the point I want to come to: our aesthetics are political. Someone once told me that he had found a new appreciation for country music because he realized how political it is. Of course it is. It represents the values of a large segment of (mostly white, conservative) North America. My problem with it, with the so-called "new" country, is that it sells values like authenticity, small town pride and moral simplicity in a very deliberate and inauthentic way. It is to me as inauthentic and misleading as FOX News, the GOP and Canada's own Conservative Party.  Those who score high in the personality category of neuroticism, which is the tendency toward negative emotion, generally prefer conventional music like country music. At the same it has been shown that conservatives are much more sensitive to feelings of disgust, so maybe there is some correlation there. But regardless of my liberal bias against country music, it certainly cannot be said that it is any more political than say hip-hop or punk.

Robin Thicke and Miley Cyrus
But even that which seems apolitical is in fact not. Much of popular culture, especially music, is directed towards younger audiences and much of it reaffirms mindless capitalist consumption, sex, drinking, white privilege and hetero-normative stereotypes. In games and action movies we see the glorification of violence and the military. In fiction, we find stories that are purely escapist, which do not challenge our thinking or engage us morally, as good literature should. The seemingly apolitical nature of much our culture is in fact very political when it reaffirms the status-quo. And so, our aesthetic sensibilities are not superficial, even if what we like sometimes tends to be superficial. Our vision of how the world is and how it ought to is both a political and aesthetic one.

My point is that we must not be content only with what is sold to us on TV, in movies, magazines and on the radio, with what is popular, with what is spoon-fed to us. We are all cultural antennae and we have a choice of what we tune into. We must dig and sift to find art that is meaningful, important. Taste matters.

3 comments:

  1. Nice piece, and I agree that it's important for people to avoid ruts in their lives and to be open to new experiences.

    Though I do think escapism gets a bad rap, if only because for many of us, the reality we're escaping (when we read fantasy) is the commercial, racist, sexist and cis/heteronormative world.

    I think the conservative and liberal camps tend to demonize one another. Liberals (and I do consider myself to be one) tend to think of conservatives as people who don't care about those unlike themselves, or who fight change because they fear losing what they have, even when the status quo clearly isn't working for a lot of people. Conservatives often claim, though, that liberals are people who embrace change for the sake of change only, that they want to risk the good that exists for the sake of social experimentation. I suspect there are members of each political wing who don't agree with the way the other side characterizes them, however.

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  2. Of course the notions of liberals and conservatives have become caricatures and I agree that each side tends to unfairly demonize the other. I'm certainly guilty of that. I have read Jonathan Haidt's book 'The Righteous Mind," which is all about the judgements we make about others on the political spectrum, and it has helped me be more tolerant and understanding of right-wing mentality.

    As for escapism, I mean it in the sense not of being transported to another world, but in the sense where one basically turns their brain off for the duration and does not come away from the experience with anything new or interesting.

    And I do think people should be able to like whatever they want. But it means something, it reflects values.

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  3. Definitely true, which explains why things sometimes get so heated when people discuss their likes and dislikes in everything from baby clothes, to music, to fantasy.

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