Good taste is accumulated through wide knowledge, but that knowledge can only be acquired through one crucial trait - i.e. curiosity. Which is what drove Klein to attempting to investigate classical music, and which is a trait I'd wager many of those who are 'content with mediocrity' (including, sometimes, myself) usually lack.
Even taking the example of Harry Potter - there are those who read it and then feel compelled to seek out information about the works and people cited as J.K. Rowling's influences and favourites, from Jessica Mitford to E. Nesbit to Jane Austen (I had a friend whose interest in Latin American magical realist literature was triggered, indirectly, through the Harry Potter films films - she loved Alfonso Cuaron's one so much that she made her way through his entire filmography and then sought out 'books with the same feel' - she was 19 at the time). I've had friends who read Asterix as small children and then, as adults, proceeded to investigate - even if it was through a mere wikipedia search in some cases - every work of art and literature referenced in the comics (the same friend mentioned above read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar because said Julius frequently turns up in Asterix - she didn't like it, but mentioned to me that she enjoyed it more than she'd thought she would because she pictured Julius in the play the way he was drawn in the comics).
The 'Harry Potter adults' who only read YA fiction, are operating in the opposite direction - they aren't seeking a greater understanding of the forces that created the thing they like, they just want 'something like it'. Something the algorithm understands very well, with the 'if you liked this, you'll like that' genre of recommendations proving so popular.
Yeah, that's a super fun activity - i first did that with jazz recordings- tracing the history and the geography across the US continent, through the individual musicians. What's also cool to me is that each piece of art has a life of its own in my head/myself. A particular movement, the andante of Ibert's flute concerto was catastrophically good to me, eclipsing the other 2 which i still haven t really explored, despite buying the score. If Ibert could make something so good, he clearly had a reason for making the enclosing movements - so the problem is probably me! I guess we can all improve our aptitude for appreciation, even if a style that doesn't move us frames or leads to something we love. Would be a great subject for a school class...
Taste is knowledge, sure. But it’s also power. And when you come from a place like Afghanistan, you learn pretty quickly that what the world considers “good taste” is really just what it has decided to pay attention to.
I read this and couldn’t help but think—if taste is about depth, about challenging yourself, then why is so much of the world’s literary diet so shallow? Why do people who consider themselves well-read know The Iliad but not Shahnama? Why do they dissect T.S. Eliot but have never heard of Rumi beyond an Instagram quote? Why does “good taste” always seem to align with Western traditions, while everything else is an “acquired taste”?
Afghanistan has produced poetry for over a thousand years, but you’d be hard-pressed to find it on a university syllabus outside the region. Our architecture, our art, our music—so much of it dismissed, reduced to the backdrop of war. Even when the world looks at Afghanistan, it sees rubble, not the ruins of civilisations that once shaped entire empires.
Maybe good taste isn’t just about refinement or expertise—it’s about curiosity. It’s about looking past what’s been handed to you and wondering what got left out. Because if taste is really about knowledge, then the greatest ignorance of all is assuming you already know enough.
I agree with you. Curiosity is the basis of my argument too, and as you say, it's a question of how far you take it. My logic and yours are not so far apart, in fact.
But it's also a question of context: it is inevitably more difficult to read something very far outside your own cultural tradition. Good taste aligns with Western traditions because that is most comprehensible to Western people. Most readers read primarily in their own language, and what translates well is also a barrier.
I ponder this question all the time, because I feel out of sync with 99.9 % of the people I encounter. Most people don’t read fiction, so now I produce audio stories in addition to fiction in print.
This reminds me of the central question at the heart of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, i.e. what is quality? We recognise quality, somehow, and yet it is somewhat subjective. We can't measure it like quantity, at least not in purely rational way. But we can't pretend quality doesn't matter, that everything is strictly utilitarian. In the age of LLMs and AI, this feels more and more like a pressing question. Maybe AI will push us to fully appreciate quality over quantity, moving us beyond the thinking-machine-worship that began in the 1970s and has accelerated to where we are now.
The idea of good taste is not gatekeeping or snobby at all. It’s about knowledge, as you say. Say you’ve got person A, who’s only read Harry Potter, and person B who’s read Harry Potter plus the entire Western canon - when it comes to reporting back to the rest of us which books are worthwhile, what advantage does person A have over person B? None.
You can like Harry Potter, but don’t be upset if the literature-curious outsider puts more stock into Person B’s aesthetic sense. The proverbial pretentious literature snob is often merely a scout who’s been out further into uncharted lands than most people.
There may well be someone out there who has read everything under the sun and come back and decided, actually, Harry Potter is the peak of literary achievement, but I’ve yet to find them.
Finding good taste is like digging for treasure in your backyard. You might start with a map drawn by others, but the gold is found only when you start digging yourself.
I am a total grown-up now and have relatively good taste. However, when my husband met me, I wore dresses I made myself out of red satin and silver quilting fabric (I could not actually sew), and plastic shoes with fake goldfish in the heels. I loved Nutty Buddies (okay, I still love Nutty Buddies). Had I been quite so tasteful then as I am now, I doubt my husband, who declared that he loved only "small, soft, quirky girls," would have become my husband. I am happy to have aged into good(ish) taste with someone who knew me when I had bad taste.
Of course, back then, I had what the likes of Woods would probably consider "good taste" in literature. I was at that time a snob about absolutely nothing other than books. My literary snobbishness cut me off from a great deal of very good writing. I have since amended my ways. I read widely and well, and I find that contemporary books that are held up as "literary" (or marketed that way by the publisher) are often less skillfully done and less finely written than works considered too genre-specific to be excellent.
I like this a lot, but I think this is underplaying the role of history. Many things are in the cannon for resasons of historical importance, not just because they are great works of art (great though they are).
Art does not conflate with the aesthetic (it's much more expansive than that, e.g., normative), any more than the canon necessarily equates with the aesthetic (as it's greatly shaped by the social and political, even the accidental) - anymore than the canon necessarily equates with readership...
Simas is correct—an entirely merit-based (or a “repository of aesthetic merit”)—is missing the whole picture. There are social and historical factors that have gone into establishing the canon. The “literary canon”, which pieces make it and which do not, is not something chiseled into stone or passed down from on high.
The people who make this argument never actually tell me what canonical works don't deserve their place or why, or offer a list of alternatives. What great works of the past are excluded from the canon for social and historical factors? Who is the missing Milton?
Women for one. I’m not sure I agree about canonical works undeserving to be present but definitely large swathes of (non male non white) society were missing from art history and I assume a lot of literary works as well.
How would we know their names and titles when they were excluded to begin with (lack of literacy/free time being a huge factor for marginalized people). Smh! Doesn't negate the western canon at all–simply deserves to be acknowledged. (The fact I have to say that lest conservative defenders-of-the-west get offended is ridiculous).
I would highly recommend the play Emilia. Based on the life of little-known poet Emilia Bosano. Who certainly should have a place in the canon. (Yes, she has been studied of late, but she, like many other artists, was forgotten for centuries).
Its not about defining an authoritative list. Its about recognizing that whatever is considered Canon is always fluid and there is always a shortcoming to declaring something as canonical. Im not implying something trivial (IMO) as Harry Potter is or should even be considered literature. Just trying to poke where parts of your argument become specious, where you begin to declare things objectively when they are in fact more subjective.
Rather, there is something inherently elitist and paradoxical about “the canon.” I say this as someone who believes most works that fit into the Western canon are worth devoting time to and wrestling with.
Thanks for this. I listened to the Ezra Klein interview and felt it put too much emphasis on I like what I like and I don't need to be ashamed of it, and not enough on developing discernment, etc. Your piece helps!
This reminds me of a conversation I was having with a friend about my ranking of books on Goodreads, as someone who reads quite literally every genre out there. She couldn't understand how I had given four star ratings to both a handful of light-hearted romance books AND novels by authors like Clarice Lispector, Octavia Butler, Maggie O'Farrell, etc.
My thought process when it comes to rating (especially on a platform like Goodreads, which is more for keeping track IMO and less for dissecting content) is the level of enjoyability. I enjoy all my four star books about the same. However, I fully acknowledge, understand, and agree that the intelligence, content, and quality of romance novels versus award-winning fiction are quite vast. I'm ranking four stars within a certain genre, not comparing Elsie Silver to Claire Keegan.
My friend was very baffled by this. I thought it quite simple.
Yeah I agree, you judge a work according to what it is, and, thus, Agatha Christie and Shakespeare can both be 5 star authors, in their own particular way. What matters is knowing what those particularities are.
Thanks for this article, Henry. It certainly stoked the fires of my thinking this evening. Please indulge me this lengthy response, as I’ve long gone back and forth regarding my perspective on the “value” of art, the parameters of taste, and their relationship to knowledge.
Over the years, I’ve found myself oscillating between the pleasure of intuitive engagement and the intellectual desire to locate that engagement within a broader cultural framework. This piece touches a nerve precisely because the tension between personal taste and cultural legitimacy has become more pronounced; especially in the internet age, where the authority of taste is both radically flattened and, paradoxically, more policed than ever.
There’s no denying that what often passes for taste today collapses into what I’d call algorithmic flattening. In a culture of distraction, deep engagement has been replaced by a kind of cultural skim-reading. Martin Amis in his autobiography lamented, and I'm paraphrasing here, that readers have essentially "downed tools" when it comes to the labour of interpretation.
Then there is tribalism of extreme cultural fandom. So me people today intertwine their identify with the thing they love, to the extent that they perceive an ownership over it. Any attack on their particular obsession is read as personal vilification.
I do think there’s something deeply resonant in the idea that we need to be “educated,” in the broadest sense of that term - not through the restrictive, institutionalised mechanisms that reinforce cultural hegemony, but through the cultivation of attention. An education in taste is, as you suggest, a labour of self-fashioning: the slow accumulation of references, explorations, and critically informed intuitions that allow us not simply to consume, but to appreciate within criteria we can articulate and interrogate.
But I’d push the point further: sometimes liking something emerges not from education but from what you might call a phenomenological resonance; a moment where the body responds before the mind does. Or more accurately, where our embodied sensitivity is triggered. There’s an aesthetic charge that is difficult to conceptualise within the strict subject–object binary.
The piece also took me back to reading Bourdieu, whose Distinction remains relevant here. He suggests that the judgments we make are always sedimented with cultural capital. And yet, there is something elusive - perhaps even excessive - in the affective moment of aesthetic experience that escapes purely sociological analysis.
I think here of the recently passed Mario Vargas Llosa and The Death of Culture, in which he mounts an impassioned defence of high art while also acknowledging its retreat in the face of massified media. It’s a powerful lament, but one that never quite resolves the question: whose culture are we mourning? Who was ever truly invited in?
That said, taste is not neutral, and while your piece gestures toward this, it doesn’t fully explore the problematic exclusions embedded in the canon. Bourdieu was clear: our aesthetic preferences are never just about the art itself. They’re about us, our social positioning, our accumulated capital, our desire to assert distinction. And it’s impossible to ignore how the canon, so often defended in these terms, reflects a Western-centric, patriarchal structure of cultural value.
This is the crux, then: we must aspire to good taste without ossifying it into elitism. How can we simultaneously make culture accessible without diluting what makes art complex, difficult, and revelatory? Can we acknowledge our biases while still championing a mode of engagement that transcends passive consumption? Crucially, can understand that taste is not simply what we like, but what we struggle with, what we return to, and what we allow to reconfigure us.
What you have quoted--"Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul" is by Alexander Pope, from The Rape of the Lock. "There are charms only made for distant admiration" is the Samuel Johnson quote.
Thank you, Henry, for writing this piece! As someone who came to literature in my early adulthood, I have always asked myself, how do I become a good reader? ie. how do I stop misreading? I find that books that are challenging to me require some reading guidance, or else, I’m barely catching the plot. I feel like it is because of this that I actually
prefer reading literary criticism, reviews and essays more, because most of the times critics are tracing what they enjoyed about a book, and therefore it is about pleasure, but well-informed pleasure. I still cannot get to the “well-informed” bit. Similarly, and Merve Emre actually had a conversation about this with someone in an interview, I probably prefer nonfiction because I do not have to really question where it is taking me, what I should be reading into, where my eyes should be looking. That is not to say it doesn’t have it’s own ideological intent, but that in nonfiction I am told what is important, not having to constantly ask and see what is. This isn’t very articulate but I hope it makes sense.
Five years ago, my wife and I took up wine tasting, and in that time we have proven to ourselves time and again that more knowledge both improves the enjoyment of the things that you prefer and also allows the enjoyment of the things that you do not prefer, because teasing apart the reasons for your preferences is, itself, something to enjoy. Knowing what you like about a particular wine, and why it is the way that it is, informs personal preference, but knowledge of what you don’t like, and why, is possibly even more instructive. I have always known that I didn’t enjoy oaky Napa Chardonnay, but if I had never been curious about what makes one what it is, I may have never discovered that the same grape, grown in a different place, becomes my favorite kinds of white burgundy. And sometimes, excitingly, a wine simply defeats me—its complexities beyond me, the flavor hard for me to grasp let alone articulate. Which, as you said, is where the learning happens.
My parents recently decided to play some recent work by a pop artist I’d never heard of, despite usually being a fan of the genre. It was ok to listen to, but with a dated, heavily-produced sound and a singer whose voice was not trained enough for the belting that he was doing. Apparently this is a bad thing to point out—all I should say about something is that is is “my preference” or “not my preference”, and anything beyond that is pretentious and snooty, but I find that pronouncing a thing as simply enjoyable or not is… boring. And unfulfilling. And maybe this is why I leave the marvel movies and Star Wars spinoffs to them.
Thank you for this piece, it’s refreshing to see someone defending the cultivation of depth in interests, especially when taste is often reduced just to personal preference.
Good taste is accumulated through wide knowledge, but that knowledge can only be acquired through one crucial trait - i.e. curiosity. Which is what drove Klein to attempting to investigate classical music, and which is a trait I'd wager many of those who are 'content with mediocrity' (including, sometimes, myself) usually lack.
Even taking the example of Harry Potter - there are those who read it and then feel compelled to seek out information about the works and people cited as J.K. Rowling's influences and favourites, from Jessica Mitford to E. Nesbit to Jane Austen (I had a friend whose interest in Latin American magical realist literature was triggered, indirectly, through the Harry Potter films films - she loved Alfonso Cuaron's one so much that she made her way through his entire filmography and then sought out 'books with the same feel' - she was 19 at the time). I've had friends who read Asterix as small children and then, as adults, proceeded to investigate - even if it was through a mere wikipedia search in some cases - every work of art and literature referenced in the comics (the same friend mentioned above read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar because said Julius frequently turns up in Asterix - she didn't like it, but mentioned to me that she enjoyed it more than she'd thought she would because she pictured Julius in the play the way he was drawn in the comics).
The 'Harry Potter adults' who only read YA fiction, are operating in the opposite direction - they aren't seeking a greater understanding of the forces that created the thing they like, they just want 'something like it'. Something the algorithm understands very well, with the 'if you liked this, you'll like that' genre of recommendations proving so popular.
Yes definitely—tracing influences is a great way to acquire good taste.
Yeah, that's a super fun activity - i first did that with jazz recordings- tracing the history and the geography across the US continent, through the individual musicians. What's also cool to me is that each piece of art has a life of its own in my head/myself. A particular movement, the andante of Ibert's flute concerto was catastrophically good to me, eclipsing the other 2 which i still haven t really explored, despite buying the score. If Ibert could make something so good, he clearly had a reason for making the enclosing movements - so the problem is probably me! I guess we can all improve our aptitude for appreciation, even if a style that doesn't move us frames or leads to something we love. Would be a great subject for a school class...
Taste is knowledge, sure. But it’s also power. And when you come from a place like Afghanistan, you learn pretty quickly that what the world considers “good taste” is really just what it has decided to pay attention to.
I read this and couldn’t help but think—if taste is about depth, about challenging yourself, then why is so much of the world’s literary diet so shallow? Why do people who consider themselves well-read know The Iliad but not Shahnama? Why do they dissect T.S. Eliot but have never heard of Rumi beyond an Instagram quote? Why does “good taste” always seem to align with Western traditions, while everything else is an “acquired taste”?
Afghanistan has produced poetry for over a thousand years, but you’d be hard-pressed to find it on a university syllabus outside the region. Our architecture, our art, our music—so much of it dismissed, reduced to the backdrop of war. Even when the world looks at Afghanistan, it sees rubble, not the ruins of civilisations that once shaped entire empires.
Maybe good taste isn’t just about refinement or expertise—it’s about curiosity. It’s about looking past what’s been handed to you and wondering what got left out. Because if taste is really about knowledge, then the greatest ignorance of all is assuming you already know enough.
I agree with you. Curiosity is the basis of my argument too, and as you say, it's a question of how far you take it. My logic and yours are not so far apart, in fact.
But it's also a question of context: it is inevitably more difficult to read something very far outside your own cultural tradition. Good taste aligns with Western traditions because that is most comprehensible to Western people. Most readers read primarily in their own language, and what translates well is also a barrier.
I ponder this question all the time, because I feel out of sync with 99.9 % of the people I encounter. Most people don’t read fiction, so now I produce audio stories in addition to fiction in print.
This reminds me of the central question at the heart of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, i.e. what is quality? We recognise quality, somehow, and yet it is somewhat subjective. We can't measure it like quantity, at least not in purely rational way. But we can't pretend quality doesn't matter, that everything is strictly utilitarian. In the age of LLMs and AI, this feels more and more like a pressing question. Maybe AI will push us to fully appreciate quality over quantity, moving us beyond the thinking-machine-worship that began in the 1970s and has accelerated to where we are now.
The idea of good taste is not gatekeeping or snobby at all. It’s about knowledge, as you say. Say you’ve got person A, who’s only read Harry Potter, and person B who’s read Harry Potter plus the entire Western canon - when it comes to reporting back to the rest of us which books are worthwhile, what advantage does person A have over person B? None.
You can like Harry Potter, but don’t be upset if the literature-curious outsider puts more stock into Person B’s aesthetic sense. The proverbial pretentious literature snob is often merely a scout who’s been out further into uncharted lands than most people.
There may well be someone out there who has read everything under the sun and come back and decided, actually, Harry Potter is the peak of literary achievement, but I’ve yet to find them.
I wholeheartedly agree with you.
Finding good taste is like digging for treasure in your backyard. You might start with a map drawn by others, but the gold is found only when you start digging yourself.
I am a total grown-up now and have relatively good taste. However, when my husband met me, I wore dresses I made myself out of red satin and silver quilting fabric (I could not actually sew), and plastic shoes with fake goldfish in the heels. I loved Nutty Buddies (okay, I still love Nutty Buddies). Had I been quite so tasteful then as I am now, I doubt my husband, who declared that he loved only "small, soft, quirky girls," would have become my husband. I am happy to have aged into good(ish) taste with someone who knew me when I had bad taste.
Of course, back then, I had what the likes of Woods would probably consider "good taste" in literature. I was at that time a snob about absolutely nothing other than books. My literary snobbishness cut me off from a great deal of very good writing. I have since amended my ways. I read widely and well, and I find that contemporary books that are held up as "literary" (or marketed that way by the publisher) are often less skillfully done and less finely written than works considered too genre-specific to be excellent.
Agree about genre--catholic taste is good.
I like this a lot, but I think this is underplaying the role of history. Many things are in the cannon for resasons of historical importance, not just because they are great works of art (great though they are).
Disagree!
I'd be very curious to hear why 😉
Well you asserted an opinion that I don’t agree with.. the canon is a repository of aesthetic merit, as evidence by readership
If evidence by readership is the only qualifying category then Harry Potter will be canon in 150 years..
Art does not conflate with the aesthetic (it's much more expansive than that, e.g., normative), any more than the canon necessarily equates with the aesthetic (as it's greatly shaped by the social and political, even the accidental) - anymore than the canon necessarily equates with readership...
Simas is correct—an entirely merit-based (or a “repository of aesthetic merit”)—is missing the whole picture. There are social and historical factors that have gone into establishing the canon. The “literary canon”, which pieces make it and which do not, is not something chiseled into stone or passed down from on high.
The people who make this argument never actually tell me what canonical works don't deserve their place or why, or offer a list of alternatives. What great works of the past are excluded from the canon for social and historical factors? Who is the missing Milton?
Women for one. I’m not sure I agree about canonical works undeserving to be present but definitely large swathes of (non male non white) society were missing from art history and I assume a lot of literary works as well.
we need names and titles! who is it that you want to add to the anthologies?
How would we know their names and titles when they were excluded to begin with (lack of literacy/free time being a huge factor for marginalized people). Smh! Doesn't negate the western canon at all–simply deserves to be acknowledged. (The fact I have to say that lest conservative defenders-of-the-west get offended is ridiculous).
I would highly recommend the play Emilia. Based on the life of little-known poet Emilia Bosano. Who certainly should have a place in the canon. (Yes, she has been studied of late, but she, like many other artists, was forgotten for centuries).
Its not about defining an authoritative list. Its about recognizing that whatever is considered Canon is always fluid and there is always a shortcoming to declaring something as canonical. Im not implying something trivial (IMO) as Harry Potter is or should even be considered literature. Just trying to poke where parts of your argument become specious, where you begin to declare things objectively when they are in fact more subjective.
Rather, there is something inherently elitist and paradoxical about “the canon.” I say this as someone who believes most works that fit into the Western canon are worth devoting time to and wrestling with.
Thanks for this. I listened to the Ezra Klein interview and felt it put too much emphasis on I like what I like and I don't need to be ashamed of it, and not enough on developing discernment, etc. Your piece helps!
Glad to hear! You should know what you like but the knowing is the hard part
This reminds me of a conversation I was having with a friend about my ranking of books on Goodreads, as someone who reads quite literally every genre out there. She couldn't understand how I had given four star ratings to both a handful of light-hearted romance books AND novels by authors like Clarice Lispector, Octavia Butler, Maggie O'Farrell, etc.
My thought process when it comes to rating (especially on a platform like Goodreads, which is more for keeping track IMO and less for dissecting content) is the level of enjoyability. I enjoy all my four star books about the same. However, I fully acknowledge, understand, and agree that the intelligence, content, and quality of romance novels versus award-winning fiction are quite vast. I'm ranking four stars within a certain genre, not comparing Elsie Silver to Claire Keegan.
My friend was very baffled by this. I thought it quite simple.
Yeah I agree, you judge a work according to what it is, and, thus, Agatha Christie and Shakespeare can both be 5 star authors, in their own particular way. What matters is knowing what those particularities are.
Yum yum. (Sorry.)
Thanks for this article, Henry. It certainly stoked the fires of my thinking this evening. Please indulge me this lengthy response, as I’ve long gone back and forth regarding my perspective on the “value” of art, the parameters of taste, and their relationship to knowledge.
Over the years, I’ve found myself oscillating between the pleasure of intuitive engagement and the intellectual desire to locate that engagement within a broader cultural framework. This piece touches a nerve precisely because the tension between personal taste and cultural legitimacy has become more pronounced; especially in the internet age, where the authority of taste is both radically flattened and, paradoxically, more policed than ever.
There’s no denying that what often passes for taste today collapses into what I’d call algorithmic flattening. In a culture of distraction, deep engagement has been replaced by a kind of cultural skim-reading. Martin Amis in his autobiography lamented, and I'm paraphrasing here, that readers have essentially "downed tools" when it comes to the labour of interpretation.
Then there is tribalism of extreme cultural fandom. So me people today intertwine their identify with the thing they love, to the extent that they perceive an ownership over it. Any attack on their particular obsession is read as personal vilification.
I do think there’s something deeply resonant in the idea that we need to be “educated,” in the broadest sense of that term - not through the restrictive, institutionalised mechanisms that reinforce cultural hegemony, but through the cultivation of attention. An education in taste is, as you suggest, a labour of self-fashioning: the slow accumulation of references, explorations, and critically informed intuitions that allow us not simply to consume, but to appreciate within criteria we can articulate and interrogate.
But I’d push the point further: sometimes liking something emerges not from education but from what you might call a phenomenological resonance; a moment where the body responds before the mind does. Or more accurately, where our embodied sensitivity is triggered. There’s an aesthetic charge that is difficult to conceptualise within the strict subject–object binary.
The piece also took me back to reading Bourdieu, whose Distinction remains relevant here. He suggests that the judgments we make are always sedimented with cultural capital. And yet, there is something elusive - perhaps even excessive - in the affective moment of aesthetic experience that escapes purely sociological analysis.
I think here of the recently passed Mario Vargas Llosa and The Death of Culture, in which he mounts an impassioned defence of high art while also acknowledging its retreat in the face of massified media. It’s a powerful lament, but one that never quite resolves the question: whose culture are we mourning? Who was ever truly invited in?
That said, taste is not neutral, and while your piece gestures toward this, it doesn’t fully explore the problematic exclusions embedded in the canon. Bourdieu was clear: our aesthetic preferences are never just about the art itself. They’re about us, our social positioning, our accumulated capital, our desire to assert distinction. And it’s impossible to ignore how the canon, so often defended in these terms, reflects a Western-centric, patriarchal structure of cultural value.
This is the crux, then: we must aspire to good taste without ossifying it into elitism. How can we simultaneously make culture accessible without diluting what makes art complex, difficult, and revelatory? Can we acknowledge our biases while still championing a mode of engagement that transcends passive consumption? Crucially, can understand that taste is not simply what we like, but what we struggle with, what we return to, and what we allow to reconfigure us.
Thanks again for writing this.
What you have quoted--"Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul" is by Alexander Pope, from The Rape of the Lock. "There are charms only made for distant admiration" is the Samuel Johnson quote.
Thank you, Henry, for writing this piece! As someone who came to literature in my early adulthood, I have always asked myself, how do I become a good reader? ie. how do I stop misreading? I find that books that are challenging to me require some reading guidance, or else, I’m barely catching the plot. I feel like it is because of this that I actually
prefer reading literary criticism, reviews and essays more, because most of the times critics are tracing what they enjoyed about a book, and therefore it is about pleasure, but well-informed pleasure. I still cannot get to the “well-informed” bit. Similarly, and Merve Emre actually had a conversation about this with someone in an interview, I probably prefer nonfiction because I do not have to really question where it is taking me, what I should be reading into, where my eyes should be looking. That is not to say it doesn’t have it’s own ideological intent, but that in nonfiction I am told what is important, not having to constantly ask and see what is. This isn’t very articulate but I hope it makes sense.
This is a very pondersome, thought-provoking essay that warrants another read. Thank you for this depth.
You're a good influence :-)
:)
Five years ago, my wife and I took up wine tasting, and in that time we have proven to ourselves time and again that more knowledge both improves the enjoyment of the things that you prefer and also allows the enjoyment of the things that you do not prefer, because teasing apart the reasons for your preferences is, itself, something to enjoy. Knowing what you like about a particular wine, and why it is the way that it is, informs personal preference, but knowledge of what you don’t like, and why, is possibly even more instructive. I have always known that I didn’t enjoy oaky Napa Chardonnay, but if I had never been curious about what makes one what it is, I may have never discovered that the same grape, grown in a different place, becomes my favorite kinds of white burgundy. And sometimes, excitingly, a wine simply defeats me—its complexities beyond me, the flavor hard for me to grasp let alone articulate. Which, as you said, is where the learning happens.
My parents recently decided to play some recent work by a pop artist I’d never heard of, despite usually being a fan of the genre. It was ok to listen to, but with a dated, heavily-produced sound and a singer whose voice was not trained enough for the belting that he was doing. Apparently this is a bad thing to point out—all I should say about something is that is is “my preference” or “not my preference”, and anything beyond that is pretentious and snooty, but I find that pronouncing a thing as simply enjoyable or not is… boring. And unfulfilling. And maybe this is why I leave the marvel movies and Star Wars spinoffs to them.
Thank you for this piece, it’s refreshing to see someone defending the cultivation of depth in interests, especially when taste is often reduced just to personal preference.
I like this comment very much: " teasing apart the reasons for your preferences is, itself, something to enjoy"---quite so!