
Art and taste in the age of the Internet - miraj
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/20/art-and-taste-in-the-internet-age
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firasd
Interesting. This article and the book it reviews are expansive in their
investigation of the determinants of taste, but I’ve been thinking over the
last few years that aesthetics are probably more socially determined than I’d
thought. Does that mean everyone in the same house will have the same tastes?
Not necessarily. But it does mean what you judge as good or bad will be
connected, probably inseparably, to some social group’s understanding (‘your
people.’)

If you connect tastes to groups of people rather than to preferences in the
characteristics of something, it follows that taste will have trends (as
people have generations), that will tastes differ from one city to another,
etc., which is what we observe.

~~~
sixo
A recent reddit thread had a lot of interesting material on taste:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4oiqvw/dan_brown_don...](https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4oiqvw/dan_brown_donates_300000_euros_to_library_to/d4dczoy)

~~~
firasd
Great comment there. _" Taste creates groups, or at the very least polices
their boundaries..."_

------
Jimmy
>Somewhere in America, there is a college professor who will never buy a
Prius. The outlier is not extraneous to the type; the outlier is essential to
the type.

 _sniff_ and theez iz the essence of the Hegelian dialectic, and so on and so
on...

~~~
clentaminator
Instantly recognisable as the inimitable Slavoj Žižek.

------
PeterHorne
> That was a waste of our time and, much more important, of the advertiser’s
> dollars.

No, my time is more important. I hope that was supposed to be sarcastic.

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Animats
It's not accidental. See "The Tastemakers"[1], about food trends and how
they're manipulated. Then there's the woman who introduced and named kiwi
fruit.[2] Also passionfruit, spaghetti squash, starfruit, rambutan, tamarind,
cherimoya and sunchokes. She runs a big produce distributor.

For fashion, this clip from The Devil Wears Prada says it best.[3]

The Color Association of the United States doesn't have the clout it used to,
because brands have moved to China, but for years, they orchestrated the
consumer electronics cycle from grey to black to white to off-white and back
to grey again.

[1]
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IHGVS5U](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IHGVS5U)
[2]
[https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/248222](https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/248222)
[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5WWy_0VLS4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5WWy_0VLS4)

~~~
jacobolus
Frieda Caplan did not name all of the fruits you listed. Most of those are
names dating from centuries ago. The article you linked says that she marketed
them in the US, but I’m not sure how successfully; a lot of those fruits are
predominantly sold in various “ethnic” markets, and are not especially well
known or relevant in mainstream American culture.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
"Starfruit" is purely an American name, dating from the 1970's (its known as
Carambola elsewhere). So it could be Caplan's doing?

This article credits her with the name "Champagne Grapes" for fresh Zante
currant grapes: [http://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-kiwi-queen-
fried...](http://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-kiwi-queen-frieda-
caplan-turns-90-20130809-story.html)

