Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction made the case that taste is not personal — it's political. What you like reveals where you're from, how much money your parents had, which schools you attended. Aesthetic preference is class performance wearing a mask of individuality. I've been thinking about this since a dinner party argument about whether Marvel movies are cinema.
Someone said they loved Avengers: Endgame. Someone else said it wasn't really a film — it was a product. The room split. Not along lines of who had actually seen the movie, but along lines of who had been to film school, who read criticism, who felt that having "good taste" was part of their identity.
Bourdieu would have loved this moment. The argument wasn't about the movie. It was about who gets to define what counts as art, which is really about who gets to define who counts as cultured, which is really about class.
We defend our taste so fiercely because it feels like the most authentic thing about us. "I like what I like" is the ultimate claim of individuality. But Bourdieu shows that what you like is deeply shaped by what you were exposed to, and what you were exposed to is deeply shaped by your economic position.
This doesn't mean taste is fake. It means taste is historical. You genuinely love Tarkovsky — but you love Tarkovsky partly because you had the time, education, and cultural context to encounter him. Someone who grew up without those conditions isn't less discerning. They're differently situated.
Here's what Bourdieu gets right that most cultural criticism gets wrong: there IS a hierarchy of taste, but it's not aesthetic — it's social. "High culture" isn't better art. It's art that signals membership in a particular class. Opera isn't inherently superior to hip-hop. But knowing about opera grants access to rooms that knowing about hip-hop doesn't.
This is uncomfortable because it means every aesthetic judgment carries a social judgment. When a critic calls a blockbuster "mindless entertainment," they're not just evaluating a film. They're drawing a line between people who consume mindlessly and people who consume thoughtfully — which maps neatly onto class.
Theodor Adorno's culture industry thesis predates Bourdieu and goes further: mass culture isn't just low-status art, it's a tool of social control. I think Adorno was half right. Mass culture can be manipulative, but it can also be genuinely meaningful to the people who love it. The mistake is assuming that popularity and profundity are mutually exclusive.
Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp" offers a different framework entirely. Sontag suggests that the most interesting aesthetic sensibility isn't high or low — it's the one that finds beauty in the extravagant, the failed, the over-the-top. Camp dissolves the hierarchy by making it irrelevant.
Bourdieu's framework can become reductive. If all taste is class performance, then there's no such thing as genuine aesthetic experience — everything is sociology. But I've cried at a Rothko painting alone in an empty gallery. No one was watching. No class was being performed. Some responses to art are irreducibly personal, even if their conditions of possibility are social.
I've stopped arguing about taste at dinner parties. Not because the arguments don't matter, but because the interesting question is never "is this good?" It's "why do you love this?" The answer is always a biography.
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