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Something like camp, which did not become familiar until the twentieth century, could only flourish, Sontag argued, in “affluent societies,” where we had grown bored with all the good taste on display and were looking for a new kind of high, a liberation from the endless worrying over what was good. As a curator described some works of the cult filmmaker Ed Wood (who directed the famously awful
Plan 9 from Outer Space
), the films “
are rough and tumble and ugly, and if you can accept them on that level, then good or bad stops being a question.” Of course, like cultural “omnivorousness,” camp appreciation could also be a new way of proving one's cultural authority, by knowing what good camp is—a “good taste of bad taste,” as Sontag describes.

Camp is now only one of the many complicated ways we have of interacting with taste objects. Were David Hume to return and draft a new “Standard of Taste,” he would surely be flummoxed by the complex taxonomy that now prevails among our “contest of sentiment.” He would have to, for example, understand the difference that can exist between camp sensibility and the “ironic” consumption of a bad painting or television show. Irony is all about protective distance and derision; one watches “serious” (but bad) television for laughs. Camp too can be “frivolous about the serious,” as Sontag said, but it is a way of
celebrating, of getting closer, to the failed work.
Irony is an emotional dead end; you cannot ever love ironically.

Hume, too, would have had to grapple with the notion of “hate-watching,” a term popularized by the television critic Emily Nussbaum to signify the act of watching a show that one actively dislikes: “Why would I go out of my way to watch a show that makes me so mad?” She must, “on some level,” have been enjoying it, even though it “was bad in a truly spectacular way.” Hate-watching may be the inverse of camp: not loving a work because it tried something grand and failed, but hating it because it did not try hard enough and seemed annoyingly, not charmingly, unaware that it was not good (or, per Orwell, “
bad good”). Or, perhaps, as Stendhal hinted, the things that once seemed so hateful may come to signify love.

Lastly, Hume might have wanted to spend some time with the concept of the guilty pleasure. This is a term he would have known, though not in today's context. Samuel Johnson, writing in
The Rambler
in 1750, talks about a man who is rather self-satisfactorily “
dwelling with delight upon a stratagem of successful fraud, a night of licentious riot, or an intrigue of guilty pleasure.” In Johnson's day, of course, a guilty pleasure really
was
a guilty pleasure. It was not having a second piece of chocolate cake; it was visiting a brothel or some other actual transgression against established moral codes (the pleasure would wane, Johnson warned, but the guilt would not).

Only in the last few decades, however, as a survey of Google Ngram reveals, has the phrase “guilty pleasure” gained any real currency. We use it now to primarily talk about two things (often particularly
implicating women): consuming culture and food—here again that slippage of the word “taste”—that we know is not “good for us” but we like anyway. The composer Nicholas McGegan compares his love of Strauss's waltzes to a high-cholesterol dessert, things he is not
supposed
to like: “
I listen to it in secret much as one might eat a large portion of chocolate cake behind closed doors.”

“Guilty pleasure” is a curious concept. There is a question of causality: Does the pleasure cause the guilt, or does it in fact stem from it? Would guilty pleasures be pleasurable without guilt? Or does the guilt come because we are
not
feeling any guilt for indulging in the pleasure?

Indeed, if we truly felt remorseful in having indulged in the guilty pleasure, we would not speak of it. The act of saying it out loud declares we are merely tourists in this temporary departure lounge of bad taste. By labeling something a guilty pleasure, we give ourselves license to consume it.
In one study, subjects were offered a piece of chocolate cake (apparently, the benchmark for guilty pleasures!). While they were preempted by feelings of anticipated guilt, most were no less likely to want to consume it. The only people who were put off the cake by the prospect of guilt were those who least wanted it in the first place.
Merely triggering feelings of guilt, the researchers speculated, might forge a mental pathway to pleasure—as if we were primed to think that something which makes us feel guilty will also make us feel good. It probably will, after all, at least
before
the fact. As Samuel Johnson observed, “
In futurity events and chances are yet floating at large, without apparent connexion with their causes, we therefore indulge the liberty of gratifying ourselves with a pleasing choice.”

If we
really
felt bad about a book we had read and liked—some abominable, morally repugnant tract—we would feel shame, not guilt. The two words may be conflated in your mind, but psychologists have made a convincing case that they are distinct phenomena.

One proposed difference is that shame is a “pure affective state”; you know it when you feel it (or see it upon a person's face). Guilt, on the other hand, is an “
affective-cognitive hybrid”; one often has to think about
why
one feels guilty. Shame, it has been argued, more often indicts the self, while guilt indicts a particular act. One says you are a bad person; the other says you did a bad thing. Guilt offers the promise of atonement, hence “confessing” that we watched bad reality television. The only punishment will come from ourselves.
To assuage guilt when we “transgress” against someone, the thinking goes, we may try to become more helpful, or we may in fact channel our negative feelings onto the victim (particularly if he is in an “out group”). This, I would argue, is what we do with “guilty pleasures”:
We consume some bit of culture that we feel is beneath us and then label
it
trash (not ourselves!).

The guilty pleasure is not only a “license to consume” but a signaling device: You and I both know this is beneath us, or, perhaps, we are above thinking it is beneath us. By calling it a guilty pleasure, we can assure ourselves (and others) this is actually the case.
You would only call something a guilty pleasure in the presence of someone who would
also find it a guilty pleasure. To the person who considers eating at a fast-food restaurant a relative luxury (as I did when I was young), you do not speak of eating there as a guilty pleasure. The whole construct of the guilty pleasure is oriented, culturally, downward. If the guy who every night watches mixed martial arts while eating atomic wings on his La-Z-Boy recliner (whether the Thomas Kinkade model or not) is tempted by a box at the Metropolitan Opera for the matinee of
Rigoletto
, he is probably not thinking of it as a guilty pleasure.

But to argue the opposite, that guilty pleasures should not exist, smacks of condescension even as it flaunts its democratic inclusiveness. For to declare what should
not
be considered a guilty pleasure is as judgmental a move as to declare what should be. To go further and declare that
nothing
we eat, watch, listen to, or read should be done without a twinge that something better lies out there is the chauvinism of one who knows there is and has already been there. In a way, this catholic, nonjudgmental omnivorousness might be the new snobbery, and you can almost feel the mix of pity and raised-eyebrow disdain as someone asks, “Oh, you feel weird about liking this?” Even as the idea of overarching standards is dismissed, a thousand new ones are invented, and it is now not so much what you like or should like as why or how you like. That contested terrain between you and what you like, on the one hand, and what you (or others)
should
like, on the other, so vexatious to Hume, now resembles a hopelessly booby-trapped minefield in a DMZ of taste, that thing we try not to mention but say much about in our silences.

In 1882, at a Christie's auction in London, the record was set for the highest price ever paid (six thousand pounds) for a painting by a living artist. The work?
The Babylonian Marriage Market
, by Edwin Longsden Long. If the crickets are chirping as you ransack your memory, do not worry: Neither Long nor his monumental canvas is a household name today.

But both certainly were in 1882, when Thomas Holloway, the famed English vendor of patently iffy patent medicines (Queen Victoria herself was said to have consumed Holloway's Pills), paid his colossal sum. The painting, a large, dramatic, exquisitely detailed study of an ancient market where women without dowries were subsidized via the trade in more desirable brides (as described in a “
far-fetched” tale by Herodotus), was a sensation, both popular and critical. No less an eminence than John Ruskin deemed it a “
painting of great merit.”

Despite its ancient subject, it was very much of its day. Its eroticized Orientalist imagery and none-too-subtle commentary on the pecuniary nature of marriage in contemporary London were Victorian catnip.
As the magazine of the Royal Academy suggested, the painting had it all: “
richness and archaeology, scenic drama and amusement, much beauty and some grotesque by-play, antique fact and modern innuendo.”
It even spoke slyly to the ascendant—some said inflated—art market, roiled by men of money like Holloway.
Indeed, the auctioneer in the picture was reputedly modeled on Christie's own auctioneer, the would-be bride buyers a subtle play on art dealers.

Long, a prolific and popular painter in his day, completed his blockbuster in 1875. The date stands out, for it was the year another noteworthy, though very different, art auction was held, at the Parisian house Drouot. The artists included Monet, Sisley, and Renoir. Instead of historical and painterly accuracy and big social themes, these works took on mundane subjects in a style one French critic—hardly out of touch with prevailing taste—described as what happens when a monkey “might have got hold of a box of paints.” Far from commanding record-setting sums, the prices realized at the auction, as the onetime Christie's director Philip Hook notes, “
were dispiritingly low.”

We know how the story turned out. Long, while largely maintaining critical respect as an artist, gradually faded from view, while the much-scorned Impressionists, whose work could often not be
given
away, went on to become the equivalent of rock stars playing to sold-out arenas—the kinds of artists who are familiar to people who are not into art.
Renoir's
La Loge
, which sold for a then paltry 220 francs at the 1875 auction, sold for $14.8 million in 2008.

What changed? Not the paintings themselves, but tastes: the way the paintings were seen, what they seemed to say, the rules they adhered to (or broke). Long's painting, however much it tapped into a kind of Victorian zeitgeist, did not seem to speak as much to succeeding generations, nor did its scrupulous academic style seem to excite subsequent critics. Photography captured the ground of realism. The Impressionists, meanwhile, saw all their faults turn into virtues. Writes Hook, “
The garish color started looking exciting; the lack of finish was increasingly perceived as an exhilarating freedom of brush stroke; and the banality of subject matter took on the reassurance of the everyday, a confirmation of the universality of bourgeois experience.”

There is always the chance, however unlikely, that the story may yet change again, with Long and his fellow Victorians propelled to some new esteem, the Impressionists pushed into some dark dustbin. Hume
was well aware of the volatile, market-like shifts in taste. “
Authority or prejudice may give a temporary vogue to a bad poet or orator,” he wrote, “but his reputation will never be durable or general.” He had enduring faith in the test of time: “On the contrary, a real genius, the longer his works endure, and the more wide they are spread, the more sincere is the admiration he meets with.” Yet this hardly reassures. Are the Impressionists as qualitatively better than Long as the swing in valuation would imply, or is popular taste at work? And consider how many “lost masterpieces” have been revived. If they were so great to begin with, how did they go missing? Perhaps this only reaffirms Hume: that they fell out of favor because of “temporary vogue,” but then, having been rediscovered and championed by one of his qualified critics, they are there, as good as ever, waiting to rejoin their deserved place in the canon.

The point is that we have little guarantee that those things most celebrated and esteemed today will be celebrated and esteemed tomorrow. But why are tastes, such an anchor in our daily lives, also so fleeting?

If you had asked me, when I was ten, to forecast my life as a situated adult, I would probably have sketched out something like this: I would be driving a Trans Am, a Corvette, or some other muscle car. My house would boast a mammoth collection of pinball machines. I would sip sophisticated drinks (like Baileys Irish Cream), read Robert Ludlum novels, and blast Van Halen while sitting in an easy chair wearing sunglasses, Maxell-ad style. Now that I am at a point to actually be able to realize
every one
of these feverishly envisioned tastes, they hold zero interest (well, perhaps the pinball machines in a weak moment).

It was not just that my ten-year-old self could not predict whom I would become but that I was incapable of imagining that my tastes could undergo such wholesale change. How could I know what I would want if I did not know who I would be? The psychologist George Loewenstein has called this “projection bias.” “
People behave as if their future preferences will be more like their current preferences than they actually will be,” he writes, “as if they project their current preferences onto their future selves.”

One problem, raised in earlier chapters with food or music, is that
we often do not anticipate the effect of experiencing things themselves. We may instinctively realize we will tire of our favorite food if we eat too much of it, but we might underestimate how much more we could like something—if only we ate it more often. Another issue, notes Loewenstein, is psychological “salience,” or the things we pay attention to. In the moment we buy a consumer good that offers a rebate, the rebate is hugely salient; it might even have influenced the purchase.
By the time we get home, the salience fades; the rebate goes unclaimed. When I was ten, what was salient in a car to me was that it be “cool” and fast.
Not
salient to me were monthly payments, side-impact crash protection, being able to fit a stroller in the back, and wanting to avoid the appearance of being in a midlife crisis.

Even when we look back and see how much our tastes have changed, the idea that we will change equally in the future seems to confound us.
It is what keeps tattoo removal practitioners in business. The psychologist Timothy Wilson and colleagues have called this the “end of history illusion,” the idea that the present is a “
watershed moment at which they have finally become the person they will be for the rest of their lives.”

In one experiment, they found that people were willing to pay more money to see their favorite band perform ten years from now than they were willing to pay to see their favorite band from ten years ago play
now
. It is reminiscent of the moment, looking through an old photo album, when you see an earlier picture of yourself and exclaim something like “Oh my God, that hair!” Or “Those corduroy pants!” Just as pictures of ourselves can look jarring because we do not normally see ourselves as others see us, our previous tastes, viewed from “outside,” from the perspective of what looks good now, come as a surprise. And yet your hairstyle per se was probably not good or bad, simply a reflection of contemporary taste. We say, with condescension, “I can't believe people actually dressed like that,” without realizing we ourselves are currently living in what will be considered bad taste
in the future
.

The people in the auction room in 1882 in London, gathered before Long's painting, might well have thought that they were gazing upon the pinnacle of artistic achievement—and financial outlay—one that would continue to speak to them, and their successors, throughout the years. An important, popular artist, painting in a familiar style, with an
epic work that spoke to current obsessions. The Impressionists? They were social misfits with weird ideas and few discernible skills. They were going nowhere.

This evokes what I call the High School Popularity Problem. We are all aware of the radiant prom king, who excels at various sports, an alpha surrounded by his retinue of friends and would-be romantic partners. He seems poised for big things but eventually settles into a life of quiet inconsequence. Meanwhile, there is the terminally shy geek, prone to be picked on or aggressively ignored, a seemingly unaccomplished sort who goes on to change the world.

There is a salience issue here. The things that the majority may tend to pay attention to in high school, the qualities that constitute popularity (contrived contests, cruel conformity, a small and captive audience), turn out to be poor predictors of success in the future. Someone who could see through those contextual blinders—the blinders that told us high school was some “end of history” moment—might be able to spot the “underachievers,” often so dubbed because they did not meet the narrow normative standards of high school. Perhaps they could sense some nascent spark, which simply needed the right outlet and audience, much the way a few shrewd art dealers saw there might be something, if only financial gain, in the Impressionists' work, something that did not speak to a wide current audience but
might
speak to an audience in the future.

One of the reasons we cannot often predict our future preferences is, curiously, one of the things that makes those very preferences change: novelty. In the science of taste and preferences, novelty is a rather elusive phenomenon. On the one hand, we crave novelty, which virtually defines a field like fashion (“
a field of ugliness so absolutely unbearable,” quipped Oscar Wilde, “that we have to alter it every six months”). As Ronald Frasch, the dapper president of Saks Fifth Avenue, once told me, on the women's designer floor of the flagship store, “The first thing the customer asks when they come into the store is, ‘What's new?' They don't want to know what was; they want to know what is.” How strong is this impulse? “We will sell 60 percent of what we're going to sell the first four weeks the goods are on the floor.”

We also, as we have seen, adore familiarity.
“We like what we are
used to,” wrote Charlotte Perkins Gilman. And yet if this were strictly true, nothing would ever change. There would be no new art styles, no new musical genres, no new products. The economist Joseph Schumpeter argued that capitalism's role was in teaching people to like (and buy) new things. Producers drive economic change, he wrote, and consumers “
are taught to want new things, or things which differ in some respect or other from those which they have been in the habit of using.”

Or, as Steve Jobs put it, “
a lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.” And even then, they still might not want it. Apple's ill-fated Newton PDA device, as quaint as it now looks in this age of smartphone as human prosthesis, was arguably
too
new at the time of its release, anticipating needs and behaviors that were not yet fully realized. As
Wired
described it, it was “
a completely new category of device running an entirely new architecture housed in a form factor that represented a completely new and bold design language.”

So, novelty or familiarity? As is often the case, the answer lies somewhere in between, on the midway point of some optimal U-shaped curve plotting the new and the known. The noted industrial designer Raymond Loewy sensed this optimum in what he termed the “MAYA stage,” for “most advanced, yet acceptable.” This was the moment in a product design cycle when, Loewy argued, “
resistance to the unfamiliar reaches the threshold of a shock-zone and resistance to buying sets in.” We like the new as long as it reminds us in some way of the old.

Anticipating how much our tastes will change is hard because we cannot see past this inherent resistance. Or how much
we
will change when we do and how each change will open the door to another change. We forget just how fleeting even the most jarring novelty can be. Think back to the discussion of how we come to like foods we did not initially like. When you had your first sip of beer (or whiskey), you probably did not slap your knee and exclaim, “Where has this been all my life?” It was, “People
like
this?”

We come to like beer, but it is arguably wrong to call beer an “acquired taste,” as the philosopher Daniel Dennett argues, because it is not that first taste that people are coming to like. “
If beer went on tasting to me the way the first sip tasted,” he writes, “I would never have gone on drinking beer!” Part of the problem is that alcohol is a shock to the system: It tastes like nothing that has come before, or at least nothing pleasant. New music or art can have the same effect. In a
New Yorker
profile, the music producer Rick Rubin recounted that when he first heard
Pretty Hate Machine
, the album by Nine Inch Nails, he did not care for it. But it soon became his favorite. Faced with something discordantly novel, “we don't always have the reference points to absorb and digest it,” Rubin said. “It's a bit like learning a new language.” The album, like the beer, was not an acquired taste, because he was not hearing the same album.