Art and taste in the age of the Internet

Interesting. This article and the book it reviews are expansive in their investigation of the determinants of taste, but I’ve been thinking over the last few years that aesthetics are probably more socially determined than I’d thought. Does that mean everyone in the same house will have the same tastes? Not necessarily. But it does mean what you judge as good or bad will be connected, probably inseparably, to some social group’s understanding (‘your people.’)

If you connect tastes to groups of people rather than to preferences in the characteristics of something, it follows that taste will have trends (as people have generations), that will tastes differ from one city to another, etc., which is what we observe.

>Somewhere in America, there is a college professor who will never buy a Prius. The outlier is not extraneous to the type; the outlier is essential to the type.

sniff and theez iz the essence of the Hegelian dialectic, and so on and so on...

> That was a waste of our time and, much more important, of the advertiser’s dollars.

No, my time is more important. I hope that was supposed to be sarcastic.

It's not accidental. See "The Tastemakers"[1], about food trends and how they're manipulated. Then there's the woman who introduced and named kiwi fruit.[2] Also passionfruit, spaghetti squash, starfruit, rambutan, tamarind, cherimoya and sunchokes. She runs a big produce distributor.

For fashion, this clip from The Devil Wears Prada says it best.[3]

The Color Association of the United States doesn't have the clout it used to, because brands have moved to China, but for years, they orchestrated the consumer electronics cycle from grey to black to white to off-white and back to grey again.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IHGVS5U [2] https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/248222 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5WWy_0VLS4