'Good' Taste vs. 'Bad' Taste
Deep Read #32 with Writer and Critic, Nathalie Olah
One of the pleasures of hosting Deep Read is the opportunity to pick up conversational threads from previous interviews with very different kinds of thinkers. Case in point: this week’s episode with writer and cultural critic, Nathalie Olah. Nathalie and I mostly discussed ideas from her 2023 book ‘Bad Taste: Or the Politics of Ugliness’, in which she explores the ways that ideas of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste have come to dominate our culture, with those deemed most ‘tasteful’ taking their place squarely at the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy.
It’s a compelling thesis that intersects at interesting junctures with, for example, my conversation with creative director Juliana Salazar, my interview with author Sheena Patel, or a recent episode with brand expert Ana Andjelic. In all these conversations, questions of aesthetics, visual imagery, perception, curation, and commercialism have risen to the forefront: a sign of our hyper-capitalist times. Invariably, things also turn to the ubiquitous impact of social media, which has become a powerful tool for people to showcase and monetise their taste for the consumption of eager followers. Nathalie assesses the above themes through an astute critical lens – it was a pleasure to explore these topics with someone far more intellectually rigorous than myself!
I hope you enjoy the conversation.
Phoebe
“What is elitist, exclusionary and a legitimate cause of grievance, in my opinion, is the weaponisation of second-hand knowledge by people, consumers to be more precise, who are not experts on a given subject, but derive a sense of superiority from having learned a set of rules with which to simulate knowledge. It is the reduction of learning to aesthetic codes. Or to put it more bluntly, it is ‘good taste’ masquerading as culture.”
Bad Taste: Or the Politics of Ugliness, Nathalie Olah
“Aren’t these wealthy aesthetes on Instagram merely another iteration of a class elite deciding what is good and what is not good, shaping our reality the way they always have just better disguised by technology which has the optics of transparency and democracy? Are they not the beneficiaries of the old, covert systems, descendants of the children of settlers and the children of Empire, left-leaning spawn from right-leaning families, who can pick and choose objects plucked outside of their cultural context in some sort of static menagerie in order to show how innately open-minded they are even as their wealth has been drawn from global structures that decimate the cultures those objects are from? If only we could all be buffered from exploitatively neoliberal regimes by family money and luxuriously austere domestic settings.”
I’m a Fan, Sheena Patel