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Taste gives you the credentials of either social acceptance or outright rejection. In an intensely engaging book, critic and cultural philosopher Peter Trifonas and art historian Effie Balomenos closely look at the absurdity of good and bad taste that seems to be the single most important criterion of defining an individual. All choices, according to them, from what we eat to what we wear to what ideology we follow are controlled by the social whims that define cultural history of taste: You are what you choose, though personal experience inculcated from our upbringing promotes a certain creativity of originality "from a knowledge of taste that has established in us mental templates of ‘good’ and ‘bad’." As the writers emphasise, "The aristocrat and the artist, the scholar and the musician, like all of us belong to a culture that establishes standards to live by." Idiosyncrasies in culture are often radical, conservative or traditional. Love of dreadlocks among the Rastafarians is customary, but the traditional middle class would scoff at such a ‘freak’ fashion. Love of Reggae or Heavy Metal could be normal to the tastes of one group, but their likings would be termed unaesthetic and loud by another group that adores Bach or Beethoven. Snub-nosed aristocrats can be rather intolerable of language spoken by a commoner, whereas crusty academics might detest the popular novels of Sydney Sheldon to the horror of a whole generation. I remember we had Sunday classes in wine tasting, a practice that pushed the love of taste to such extremes of fastidiousness that it became a lesson in science or a pursuit of rules that dictate ways of swirling the wine in your mouth, having it rest on your palate before taking it in, along with checking the colour, the clarity and the bouquet of the wine and its vintage year. To me it seemed all too pretentious, but connoisseurs feel that "good taste in any endeavour means understanding the principles that must be considered in order to execute it beautifully, with skill and understanding." Taste, therefore, gives people their sense of social location. Continuous consumption, new habits of gastronomy, cars, or proper tableware, are all preoccupations consumers. Eating itself, as Roland Barthes puts it, becomes a "system of communication." The Lamborghini Diablo (meaning Devil) becomes the artistic expression of potency, beauty and danger, with no value on the everyday functionality and economic reality of a car meant for only transporting us from one place to another. The only message that such a car gives is: "Nothing spells success, better than excess." The competitive display of taste or other emblems of cultural production seem to impart on the individual, as Joanne Finkelstein writes in her essay Fashion Taste and Eating out, "A degree of self-control over the external realm and to feel as if s/he has some mastery over what have been traditionally regarded as the ineluctable movements of history." Fashion gets inevitably enmeshed with time and becomes a "historical indicator." The continuous change of fashion itself makes certain pursuits more valuable then others; it is the manufacturing of taste and its social manipulation that gives taste an ever-changing complexion. For instance, tattooing becomes popular for no reason. For many tattooing becomes the "epitome of good taste in the pit of anti-establishment culture zones`85a voluntary deviance from the norm." A tattoo emblazoned on the arm of a soldier in praise of valour becomes a personal expression, where as a tattoo of a sacred symbol emblazoned on the naked back of a celebrity can be construed as a mindless blasphemy. A sari or bell-bottoms ‘sit low on the hips’ of both the young and the old, and often leads to indecent exposure of the back, but it seems to be regarded aesthetic in the same way as turned up trousers are by elites though in the 18th century rolling up trousers was one way of not soiling them in the muddy streets of England. Taste and the itch to be fashionable are apparently inherent in Prufrock’s statement where he says in T.S. Eliot’s poem, "I grow old, I grow old. Should I wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled." Through the rather absorbing analysis of body piercing, of the history of the cleavage, of Madonna, of eating out and the dominance of ‘food porn’, the authors, like Pierre Bordieu the cultural philosopher, show that no judgment of taste is ever innocent and that you are what you wear, eat or say. Good taste is indeed an enabling factor
that allows us to suitably fit into the social systems which best define
us while simultaneously enabling us to have a healthy understanding of
people we interact with.
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