Good Taste is Not What’s Oppressing Us in 2026
In an age where Donald Trump and tech barons hold the most political and economic power, Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas based on 1960s French Old Money may no longer provide the best guidance towards the ethics of artistic appreciation
An annoying aspect of contemporary discourse is the reduction of every famous theorist and philosopher to a single trademarked concept: Baudrillard is simulation™, Butler is gender performativity™, Derrida is deconstruction™, etc. These simplistic descriptions not only obscure the full breadth of these thinkers' observations, but often confuse their proposals of social mechanisms—where certain inputs lead to certain outputs—for iron laws of human nature that always hold true.
A clear example is economist Thorstein Veblen, who has been reduced to Mr. Conspicuous Consumption™. Writing in the 1890s, Veblen observed that the wealthy people of his era communicated their economic capital through wasteful spending and the possession of well-known expensive goods. While parallels to this logical behavior can be found across many human cultures (e.g. potlatch), Veblen was describing the particular aesthetic preferences of post-Robber Baron America. He himself understood that tastes would change, especially if an internecine conflict erupted between Old and New Money. In Theory of the Leisure Class (p. 187), he writes that in times "when a sufficiently large wealthy class has developed," they "have the leisure for acquiring skill in interpreting the subtler signs of expenditure.” In these particular circumstances, “loud” clothing becomes “offensive to people of taste.” In other words, conspicuous consumption doesn't always guide the dominant aesthetics.
When we talk about the role of taste in post-WWII society, however, Veblen has become much less important than French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and his single trademarked idea in the discourse: "good taste" is a tool of class distinction™. This is a very blunt summary of his 600+ page book Distinction, published in 1979 but based on empirical research he conducted in the mid-1960s.
It's lost on many people that Distinction is primarily a critique of Immanuel Kant's theories of aesthetics—namely, that the highest form of aesthetics is “disinterested." This concept seems obscure but is important to understand the long intellectual debates around taste. As scholar David Berger explains, Kant believed that “genuine pleasures of taste need to be sharply distinguished from pleasures tied to the satisfaction of personal interest or desires.” This concept then opened up a binary in cultural appreciation: there are "Kantian" aesthetic experiences based on the disinterested contemplation of artworks, and "anti-Kantian" aesthetic experiences based on the immediate gratification of bodily pleasures. Fine art aims for the former; entertainment is mostly satisfied with the latter.
In Distinction, Bourdieu argues that Kant speaks to his conception of aesthetics as if it's "universal" when really he's describing "dispositions associated with a particular social and economic condition." (p. 493) In other words, the individual capability for Kantian aesthetic appreciation isn’t equally distributed in society. The wealthy can indulge in Kantian aesthetics in a way the poor cannot. A clear example is the appreciation of 20th century paintings. By the 1960s, nearly all French people could take pleasure in representational paintings. By contrast, a preference for abstract art was correlated with many socioeconomic factors: exposure during childhood, access to higher education, and a cosmopolitan worldview comfortable with radical symbolic experimentation. Moreover the detached contemplation of abstract art requires ample leisure time not available to the working classes.
As the appreciation for the most complex fine art became associated with upper class life, it became a key component of cultural capital: i.e. the knowledge of how to behave when socializing within high status groups. With cultural capital exclusive to Old Money families, "good taste" grounded in this artistic appreciation worked as a fence to keep out class outsiders, whether working class or New Money.¹
Few people have actually read the entirety of Distinction², but I would argue that the summary of Bourdieu's central idea—"good taste" being wielded as a tool for class warfare—has lodged itself into the Left's moral thinking on culture over the last forty years. Human liberation would require deconstructing any objective notions of "good taste." Likewise, showing respect to the oppressed classes required celebrating their cultural preferences. This then necessitated the demolition of any cultural hierarchy that put Kantian aesthetics over anti-Kantian aesthetics.
The Left wasn't always against Kantian aesthetics. In the early 20th century, Marxist revolutionaries and avant-garde artists found much common ground. Artists could contribute to social upheaval by revealing the parochial conventions in establishment art and teaching how to see through conventionalism itself. After Bourdieu, however, the Left, especially in the U.S., became extremely weary of celebrating difficult "high" art, decrying it as snobbery or elitism. In a post-Bourdieu world, omnivore consumption—the sincere enjoyment of "high," "middle," and "low" forms of cultural expression—swept the educated classes. Whether acknowledged or not, Bourdieu is also a key intellectual origin of poptimism: to disparage the immediate pleasures available in industrially-manufactured pop is an immoral act denying the tastes of marginalized groups. (It is no coincidence that Kelefa Sanneh called rockism "imperial.")
As much as Bourdieu’s analysis has shaped my own thinking, I've always felt like he threw the baby out with the bathwater. Kantian aesthetic experiences are a social good; they power the work of society's most sophisticated semiurges whose innovations eventually refresh even the most anti-Kantian pleasures. (more about this here) If we want to equalize aesthetic experiences in society, the goal shouldn't be eradicating disinterested Kantian aesthetic experiences, but making them so common that they cease to function as class distinction.
In 2026, however, there is a much bigger issue with Bourdieu’s Distinction: His analysis no longer makes sense as moral guidance for egalitarian cultural politics. When Bourdieu did his research, Old Money set the standards for cultural capital, which meant that appreciation for fine art and sophisticated consumer goods sat at the center of elite social relations. But as Veblen explained, the "good taste" of each era is correlated with the particular makeup of elites. And today, Kantian aesthetic experiences have fallen out of cultural capital.
As I wrote in Status and Culture, Chapter Ten, Part Two, Old Money has become irrelevant as a class in the early 21st century and their taste no longer actively shapes our current aesthetics (we can ignore the reductionist, simulated version of "Old Money Aesthetics" seen on TikTok). In our hyper-capitalist society, the most powerful people are the barons of tech and finance, and most of them grew up as upper middle-class science geeks, not as aesthetes. They never had any deep interest in fine art, and their dedication to practicality and rationality devalues the very notion of Kantian aesthetics. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, believes himself to be a victim of an alleged liberal hegemony, and expresses his contra-liberal tastes through a love of video games and high-fives to white supremacism. Outside of the West, almost none of the newly-minted billionaires were weaned on Anton Webern and Gertrude Stein; their aesthetics tend to be geared towards raw conspicuous consumption.
Meanwhile the American electorate handed maximal political power to the world's most vulgar person. Trump gilds the White House in cheap gold Hobby Lobby party decorations and hosts mixed martial arts fights on the White House lawn. And even outside of Trump, the American Right’s war with universities is especially focused on eradicating the "cultural Marxists" of the humanities departments. As John Ganz writes, the dominant personality mode of the Right is "jock / creep" from which a certain macho aesthetic of low symbolic complexity follows.
Where contemporary elites do show interest in culture, they are typically laggards or interested in immediate pleasures such as cuisine. The wealthy buy a lot of art, but rarely for the aesthetic experiences. By insider estimates, around one-third of art market transactions are money laundering, which is why so many masterpieces languish inside of climate-controlled warehouses.
So, in 2026, is good taste—i.e. preferences for more sophisticated goods and artworks—really a key source of class oppression? Is an appreciation of fine art even correlated with the current cohort of elites? The answer to both questions is no, and therefore, we should admit that we're no longer in the paradigm Bourdieu wrote about in Distinction.
Today the taste for “high art” has become extremely marginal, almost exclusively limited to a particular subset of knowledge workers. Yet Bourdieu's moral guidance casts a long arc on our discourse. Many liberal knowledge workers remain distrustful of Kantian aesthetics. The critic Carl Wilson and I disagree on the downstream effects of the poptimist critique, but we both agree that pro-pop thinking has become the dominant ideological position. The loudest cultural critics are most energized when bragging about their love of Top 40, contemporary country music, and reality TV. ("Addison Rae, Paris Hilton, the Real Housewives...my harbingers of a great night!") An exclusive interest in high art is almost taboo: a sure means to be called pretentious, if not, sinister.
Where the Left wants to stake out a moral position on cultural consumption, it is time to update the priors. To rail against avant-garde classical music as “elitist” is absurd, when appreciation of complicated music no longer has any relation to economic, social, or cultural capital. Is it truly fighting oppression to ignore Hildur Ingveldardóttir Guðnadóttir to gush over multi-billionaire Taylor Swift and her army of hired-gun songwriters, lawyers, and publicists? (Swift's wedding revealed the practical nexus of power today: one guest was Steven J. Demetriou, the executive chairman of Amentum Holdings, which does work for ICE.) Poptimism has become the perfect example of Gramscian hegemony™—where late-stage capitalism has so commandeered the human value system that well-meaning liberals believe their full-throated defense of art-for-money's-sake is somehow chipping away at the class structure.
Bourdieu warned that Kant was universalizing his particular social position; in the same way, we should no longer universalize Distinction as the final analysis on cultural politics for all historical situations. The appreciation of fine art has become detached from money and power—so much that we can completely reimagine the role of art in society. If the clearest source of contemporary malaise is hyper-commercialization and AI automation, then uplifting the artistic ambiguity and complexity can serve as an effective tool of resistance. And nothing speaks more to the ingenuity of the human mind than sophisticated symbolic experimentation. There was certainly a time in which left-wing solidarity could be grounded in shared immediate pleasures, but today, celebrating the moral superiority of market-minded, low-craft culture is identical to pledging full allegiance to the current economic order.
FOOTNOTES
- Norwegian economic philosopher Jon Elster critiques Bourdieu's Distinction, saying that it’s “functionalist” to posit taste as something created for elite distinction. I think Elster is being overly dismissive here. Elite conventions generate organically within a closed milieu, which makes them easy codes to mark outsiders. They don't need to be created for class distinction to later serve that purpose.
- If you’ve actually read the entirety of Distinction, you’ll have battle scars to prove it. The book is not just long but dense, and it takes months of your life to get through. And while I’m ranting: Anyone who says that Status and Culture is “just Bourdieu” hasn’t read either.