A culture of "taste"

Knowing the difference between a confit and a consommé; being aware of the vagaries of font design; having an intimate knowledge of the Queen Anne period of architecture and the Bauhaus school. What once seemed to be knowledge kept in the realms of various specialities -- essentially all forms of craft that, over time, had accrued deep expertise and methodologies -- are now proliferating to the average person, the untrained generalist who probably finds it appealing to dabble in these areas in their spare time. Books and literature on gastronomy, graphic and furniture design, architecture, all fly off the shelves in a time when being cultured in this most materialistic of senses is immensely popular.

Can we look to people like Martha Stewart and the cast of the various television networks dedicated to cooking, home renovation and general aspirations to a perfect, sleek vision of domesticity for some of this appreciation? And simultaneously, the proliferation of consumer products as objects of design (like the iPod or the Karim Rashid designed Umbra wastebasket) available to the masses -- the dream of many designers, design populism! What to make of a culture where the average person might happen to care about letter spacing or authenticity in ottoman reupholstering?

I suppose it'd all be pretty harmless if it felt like this was just a pastime, a side story to people's lives, but in so many ways it seems as if people's existences are predicated on making things pretty, caring about looks, essentially being superficial in the guise of being cultured. I'm not one to say what "true culture" is, but I suspect that those denizens of past ages would look upon our current fixations and wonder where our brains were? Or am I wrong? Have we always, collectively, allowed taste and discernnment to be such a defining factor in our lives?

I think that strikes at the crux of the issue. Taste and discernment are things that are associated with people who are wealthy, who as members of Thorstein Veblen's "leisure class" sought to exhibit that wealth in so many ways. This is the lifestyle that has filtered down to Joe and Jane Average: everyone wants to be rich, so if we can't be rich, let's be tasteful. Let's care about beautiful things and have opinions on the aesthetics of things, opinions that define us. Perhaps, in some kind of subconscious reversal, we as consumers seek to become aesthetes first, without the concomitant requirement of money. It's a bad and craven thing to aspire to riches, goes the common wisdom, but to have taste? Well, terrific!

To me, this is where we're at -- we're immersed in lifestyles defined by what we consume, what we like, the things we find pretty and full of character. We surround ourselves with aesthetic values and claim it as culture, when in fact intellectual vibrancy among most of my peers these days is at an all time low. We see it in the innumerable blogs and websites devoted to food reviewing, gadget reviewing, home renovation and collecting. The sheer success of eBay. We're living some weird cross between mercantilism and aestheticism and there's very little going on in the gaps between. Even the reading culture, maybe one of the bastions of non- or anti-materialism has been infected by this taste-making virus, where Oprah's book club becomes one tremendous cog in a giant marketing machine of books, an arena that once depended on individual and mostly independent interest to determine their fates. Will "taste" stand the test of time? Or will all this "taste" ultimately render a culture with little trace?