Abstract
In ‘Bad Taste (or the Politics of Ugliness)’, Nathalie Olah dissects what we render ‘good’ or ‘bad’ aesthetically, how we reach these conclusions, and the impacts these conclusions leave on understandings of class. ‘Bad Taste’ questions whether taste is a tangible object or a social fantasy, and whether individuals of different socio-cultural standings attach the same importance to it. Pierre Bourdieu’s influence on Olah’s work cannot be denied, as she references throughout. Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of cultural capital, the “cultural knowledge and social assets that endear people to those in power” (p. 22), is discussed in reference to people’s aesthetic preferences and lifestyle choices. Olah feels that cultural capital can be both bestowed from birth and acquired over a person’s lifetime, inevitably shaping the material goods individuals consume and the parts of ‘dominant’ culture they can identify with. Pierre Bourdieu (1984) stated that “Taste is amor fati, the choice of destiny, but a forced choice”. There appears to be a degree of choice in how culturally educated someone can be by adulthood, but it cannot be denied that a person’s aesthetic preferences are inextricably linked to their educational level and upbringing. Bourdieu argues that cultural engagement from a young age, such as visiting galleries and museums or developing particular preferences in art and music, increases a person’s cultural competence (Bourdieu, 1984). This competence will allow them to understand works of art, fashion pieces, or an expensive meal in later life. Olah feels that this is often conveyed as a “tacit communication of acquired wisdom” (p. 72), a quiet consumer choice or unspoken class-based language, rather than a showy display of cultural understanding. This ties in to Olah’s exploration of displays of wealth in the ‘Tastemakers’ chapter. Olah’s decision to divide the book into chapters that each focus on a separate aspect of consumer society allows for a nuanced and in-depth exploration of the extent to which taste truly shapes our consumption. Through exploring homes, beauty, food and leisure, Bad Taste manages to cover a breadth of cultural capital’s influence in a few hundred pages, using a wide range of pop culture examples throughout - from Jamie Oliver’s influence on food culture in the UK to the emulation of beauty by Princess Diana.
A pressing question Olah seeks to answer in the first chapter, ‘Tastemakers’, is whether money can buy taste. Through her exploration of taste according to financial status and the means by which people have acquired wealth, Olah finds that status anxiety and consumerist greed are the foundations for quantifying taste. Using various examples, the author discusses how there appears to be a class difference in the level of concern surrounding taste (in terms of the acquisition of material goods). Flashes of wealth, it appears, are less common the more monetarily rich an individual becomes. To contextualise this, Olah references the relatively new concept of ‘crew-neck capitalism’, coined by David Beer (2019). Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg’s exponential success as Silicon Valley entrepreneurs was aesthetically characterised not by sharp suits and briefcases, but by simple turtleneck sweaters, blue jeans, and ¾ -zip jumpers. Despite their combined net worth of hundreds of billions of dollars, their wealth remains unassuming and visually quiet. This idea is supported by Olah’s examples of the Princess Royal’s living room, which was historically photographed with cluttered, mismatched furniture and a dog bed, despite her monetary wealth and global notoriety. These two groups, both with large disposable incomes to spend on material goods, do not appear focused on doing so. Why is this? Olah dichotomises this by providing a different example of those emerging from ‘new money’, such as the families of United States mafias, notably the fictional Italian-American mafia family the Sopranos. The overarching argument Olah reaches is that you can be cash-rich whilst lacking cultural standing, or incredibly wealthy with no regard for ‘good’ aesthetics or material consumption. Financial comfort must walk hand in hand with cultural understanding for people to be viewed as truly tasteful. ‘Old money’ will always be viewed differently from ‘new money’, as the former is perceived to be already bestowed with cultural capital and true aesthetic understanding, whilst the latter often relies on material displays of wealth to try to validate their cultural capital and prove it to others. This begs the question - does a lack of cultural capital always result in flashier, showier displays of wealth when it is acquired? For example, a lack of financial education may lead newly rich individuals to avoid investing their money or diversifying their assets, and instead prioritise buying new material goods. This mentality, compared to ‘old money’ individuals with a higher preexisting cultural capital - where their education may have involved deeper understandings of financial literacy - displays a clear contrast and insight into how the acquisition of wealth in combination with cultural standing is socially perceived, and to what extent cultural capital can be acquired throughout one’s life.
A person’s proximity to the dominant culture impacts their ability to acquire cultural capital, which inevitably disadvantages particular demographic groups. Olah argues that this pressure to conform to a dominant culture contributes to cultural erasure, encouraging an aesthetic agenda tailored towards certain groups. The author evidences this in the chapter ‘Beauty’, where actress Merle Oberon is discussed, a woman expected to conform to Western beauty standards in order to be a Hollywood success by self-describing as a white woman. This conformity involved not disclosing her racial heritage as a Sri Lankan woman, wearing pale makeup and exerting other physical efforts to appear to be a white actress. Frantz Fanon (1970) discussed a similar conformity in Black Skin, White Masks over 50 years ago, stating that people of colour subject to colonisation have had an inferiority complex bestowed upon them by the dominant - often white - culture, a complex which kills and buries the originality of their racial origins. Fanon argues that the only way for a person of colour to adopt the “mother country’s cultural standards”, to conform and assimilate to their standards of ‘good taste’, is to renounce their race.
Olah argues that we can never extract ourselves from our preconceived judgments of others when it comes to determining what we deem as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ taste. These preconceptions may stem from class, sex, race or other demographic factors where we hold pre-existing notions, stigmas or bias. This judgment is also heavily influenced by advertising and popular media, which peddle ‘trends’ as a means to accelerate consumption. Although contextualised throughout the book with many pop culture examples, Bad Taste would have benefited from a deeper exploration of the impact of intersectionality and racial bias on taste and aesthetic preferences, perhaps through the integration of social theory on race and ethnicity. This idea is touched on by Olah, who emphasises that beauty is a product of oppression and is subject to social and political forces. The author highlights a common social acceptance of people based on looks, and that beauty lends an individual a degree of power unattainable by somebody less conventionally attractive - what younger generations have coined ‘pretty privilege’ (p. 136). There is a deeper element of exploitation within the idea of beauty and power coexisting and influencing one another, which Olah could have further explored regarding misogynistic attitudes towards beauty amidst a rise of sexist culture being perpetrated online. Beauty and power are inseparable, and Olah questions what beauty - or power - would look like if they were no longer linked, or an extension of one another.
Olah emphasises the increasing plasticity of what is good or bad taste in our personal relationships, despite the preexisting cultural capital required to differentiate between the two. In line with individualistic and postmodern ideas, Olah describes taste in terms of our attraction to others as liable to being destroyed by the smallest divergence from a highly strict set of aesthetic criteria. This idea fits into a culture of ‘ghosting’, ‘icks’ and the boom of photo-based dating apps, all designed to seek out transactional, short-lived relationships. Such phenomena have previously been explored by the likes of Eva Illouz in The End of Love (2021) and Timmermans et al. (2020) in Gone with the Wind: Exploring mobile daters’ ghosting experiences. As timely as these works have been in their exploration of romantic sociology, Olah makes a unique contribution through her dissection of the aesthetics of modern dating, and how cultural capital impacts the ways in which we form - or end - relationships because they aren’t ‘good’ taste.
The chapter focusing on food was particularly compelling, and the standout of the book was this chapter’s deep dive into the intersectional nature of our food consumption and the complex relationship between cultural capital and food. Olah discusses the dichotomy of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste in the food world being replaced by the words ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’. What is clean and what is dirty appears to be defined by the quality of the food, its freshness and whether it has positive or negative ramifications for your health. However, the idea of food being simple appears to be a double standard - simply prepared meals are praised if you are rich, but critiqued if you are not. The cost of food is also tied to this, with a superiority being allocated to certain stores based on preconceived notions of the ‘cleanliness’ of their food. Olah stresses the ambiguity of the buzzword ‘organic’ in persuading consumers of a food’s health benefits, and observes the importance of wording in store names such as ‘Whole Foods’, implying a completeness that cannot be acquired in a cheaper, less polished establishment. In a similar vein, independent research found that US health supermarket Erewhon was aptly named after a dystopian land depicted in Samuel Butler’s eponymous work (1981) where unhealthiness is treated as a crime. Dieticians have discussed this clean-dirty dichotomy previously, with McCartney (2016: p. 1) stating that the command to eat cleanly “implies that everyone else is filthy”. The class element of the consumer culture surrounding food cannot be ignored.
Olah effectively debates the role food plays in our lives, the judgments and preconceptions it can attract, and the moralities and aesthetics surrounding food choices. These choices seem to be imbued with, arguably, more intersectional context than any other facet of modern consumerism. Class, age, sex, ability, and race all play a part in how we consume food, the food we choose, and the judgments we cast on others’ food choices. Olah emphasises that wealth and inequality heavily determine food choices, despite popular media - and at times the upper classes’ - verdict that it is easy to access a healthy diet regardless of your income or geographical location. Geographers have highlighted the impact of social and spatial inequality when it comes to accessing fresh food by the concept of ‘food deserts’ (Janatabadi et al., 2024), areas with low fresh food store access and potentially high numbers of fast food chains, emphasising the domino effect that this has on the health and eating habits of people living in these places. A lack of nutritious food due to mobility barriers perpetuates deprivation and invites judgment from others who are perceived as ‘cleaner’ eaters. Particularly relevant is the emphasis in this chapter on the importance of time and money on people’s aesthetic choices in general, but particularly in their food consumption. The “driving differences of consumer choice” (p. 156) are not grounded in personal preference as much as we have been led to believe by advertising, but are rooted in our levels of income, where we live, and what demographic groups we belong to. What the dominant culture views as ‘clean’ eating is imbued in financial, temporal and spatial privilege. As Olah states, the threshold for our pleasure is set by GDP (p. 159). As perceptive as this chapter was, I felt it could have been longer due to the vast amount of topics and areas of culture that can be dissected regarding the aesthetics of food, such as the racial and gendered elements of food consumption, and the impact of eating disorders on food aesthetics and what is deemed as ‘clean’ food consumption.
Although not as captivating and elaborative as the ‘Food’ chapter, Olah’s navigation of aesthetic preferences continues in the ‘Leisure’ chapter, which makes a compelling case for the rise of the ‘experience economy’ (p. 174) being displayed on social media, how there is a pressure to try to do everything - see, hear, visit, experience - and how this has an inevitable class element, further distancing and othering certain groups from dominant culture through financial inaccessibility. Olah cleverly unpacks the idea of viewing life as a finite resource that has to be spent well - to enhance one’s cultural capital - and that this overlooks the money required to do so. In the final chapter, ‘Abundance’, Olah’s exploration of environmentalism and taste is particularly topical and engaging. She emphasises that the current economic systems in place, alongside the consumer corporations owned by the mega-wealthy, do not support a world that is not characterised by consumer desire and aspiration, where our lives do not centre on materialistically curating the perfect, ‘tasteful’ lifestyle. The pursuit of this lifestyle has inevitable, and sobering, environmental implications, and cannot be sustained for generations to come.
Bad Taste makes a notable multidisciplinary contribution to the sociology of consumption and consumer culture, through its discussion of how taste necessitates consumption in a variety of areas (from food, to beauty to leisure activities), and that people have less autonomy than they think in terms of their possession of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ taste. As supported by Bourdieu’s work, Olah’s debate of how much cultural capital can be self-attained versus bestowed from birth was particularly insightful in its application to beauty, leisure, food and clothing, interweaving issues of class throughout. Although the insertion of popular culture examples throughout was a useful means of translating complex ideas to a universal audience, I felt that the work would have been further enriched by a greater sociological and philosophical foundation to construct these discussions. For example, the tension between individualism and belonging would have been a positive means of contextualising consumer habits, as well as established arguments regarding wealth and life trajectory (see Miles, 1998; Young, 1958). Furthermore, exploration of racialised and gendered elements of taste would have been a worthwhile area to elaborate on, further enriching an insightful and important body of work. Olah’s ability to cover a wide range of consumerist sectors is impressive, and ‘Bad Taste’ makes a worthwhile contribution to the sociology of consumption in its compelling case for academics and individuals alike to examine the socio-economic conditions that have founded our aesthetic preferences.