9 days ago
- The essay explores taste cultures, introducing archetypes like the indifferent outlaw, the unfashionable tasteless, the connoisseur, the taste pioneer, and the philistine.
- Mrs. Higgins in Shaw's 'Pygmalion' exemplifies transcending taste culture, moving beyond conformity and transgression to kindness and enlightenment.
- Taste is defined as making aesthetic choices someone does not want you to make, emphasizing risk and disruption in cultural evolution.
- Connoisseurs practice aesthetic erudition but lack autonomous creative agency, while taste pioneers drive cultural change through transgression and self-authorship.
- The philistine represents a threat by valuing other domains, diluting the culture's importance and challenging its totalizing claims.
- A hierarchy of aesthetic needs includes discernment, indifference, transgression, self-authorship, rightness surplus, and transcendence.
- Cruelty is central to taste cultures through exclusion and humiliation, but kindness marks transcendence, offering an ultimate tastelessness.
- The essay connects taste to AI, suggesting connoisseurship can be automated, but true taste requires exposure to aesthetic and social risks.