You May Also Like (45 page)

“abandon their own prejudices”
: See Michelle Mason, “Moral Prejudice and Aesthetic Deformity: Rereading Hume's ‘Of the Standard of Taste,' ”
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
59, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 60. She raises a larger problem, what she calls the “moral prejudice dilemma.” If a work of art—say something generated by the Nazi regime—goes against the moral convictions of a critic, the critic must disregard his moral objections (she says Hume calls this a “perversion of sentiments”), or if he takes a moral stand against the artwork, he risks failing the “freedom from prejudice” standard of the ideal critic. She argues Hume sides with the moralists in the end. And what about a critic's “delicacy of taste”—was there an optimal range in his sensory apparatus? So-called supertasters, with their heightened discriminatory powers, would seem super-ideal critics. But they often dislike foods that most of us like. Does that make them good or bad judges? Frances Raven raises this point in an interesting essay, “Are Supertasters Good Candidates for Being Humean Ideal Critics?,”
Contemporary Aesthetics
,
http://​www.​contempaes​thetics.​org/​newvolume/​pages/​article.​php?​articleID=​282
. Perhaps most provocatively, Jerrold Levinson wonders why we should actually follow the aesthetic judgment of ideal critics: “Why should one be moved by the fact that such and such things are preferred by ideal critics, if one is not oneself?” If you are already aesthetically gratified by, say, Thomas Kinkade, why should you care if critics say he is not a great artist? Sure, you could go and learn about all
the better painters that are out there, spending all that time in earnest aesthetic apprenticeship, learning to (one hopes) like what ideal critics like. “Granted,” Levinson notes, “this would allow one to register the qualities of and be gratified by works that one was blind to and unmoved by before.” But is all that
worth
it—all that time, energy, not to mention the “foregone pleasures of what has already come to appreciate,” when you could simply stick with what you already know and like? See Jerrold Levinson, “Hume's Standard of Taste: The Real Problem,”
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
60, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 227–37.

“instead of fixing”
: From the
Critical Review
3 (1757): 213, quoted in Kivy, “Hume's Standard of Taste,” 65.

As the professor of philosophy
: James Shelley, “Hume's Double Standard of Taste,”
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
52, no. 4 (Autumn 1994): 437–45.

Kinkade may be in
: See Boylan,
Thomas Kinkade
, 1.

but the work of Maxfield Parrish
: See, for example, “Maxfield Parrish: The Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Murals,”
http://​www.​tylermuseum.​org/​Maxfield​Parrish.​aspx
.

Good luck finding him
: Interestingly, the critical take on Maxfield Parrish is still evolving; see, for example, Edward J. Sozanski, “Taking Maxfield Parrish Seriously,”
Philly.​com
, June 9, 1999,
http://​articles.​philly.​com/​1999-​06-​09/​entertainment/​25498843_​1_​maxfield-​parrish-​fine-​arts-​currier-​gallery
.

“You can hate something”
: See Plimpton, “Art of the Matter.” Or, as another MOBA curator said, “If someone says ‘turn around and look at that,' you don't know whether it's good or bad—either way, people want to share it.” This quotation comes from a MOBA video presentation accessed at
http://​vimeo.​com/​11917386
.

“that are almost identical”
: Semir Zeki and John Paul Romaya, “Neural Correlates of Hate,”
PLoS ONE
3, no. 10 (Oct. 2008): 4.

“formless, incoherent”
: Kendall Walton, “Categories of Art,”
Philosophical Review
79, no. 3 (1970): 334–67. Thanks to Jonathan Neufeld for recommending this paper.

There is a bit of a causal loop
: See Rachel Smallman and Neal J. Roese, “Preference Invites Categorization,”
Psychological Science
19, no. 12 (2008): 1228–32.

My favorite record store
: In what has been suggestively called the “mere categorization” effect, simply having categories, “even when those categories do not provide information about the options in the assortment,” seems to make consumers feel better about the things they choose. C. Mogilner, T. Rudnick, and S. S. Iyengar, “The Mere Categorization Effect: How the Presence of Categories Increases Choosers' Perceptions of Assortment Variety and Outcome Satisfaction,”
Journal of Consumer Research
35, no. 2 (2008): 202–15.

When we do not like something
: A study looking at the differences between architects' preferences and those of laypeople noted, “As consumers develop into connoisseurs they take account of new attributes in product evaluation, thereby changing their overall preferences; for example, a wine connoisseur will detect and attach importance to attributes of a wine that are not apparent to non-connoisseurs. This model suggests that non-connoisseurs have a simpler decision model, such as ‘pitched roof = good, flat roof = bad.'
The short time taken by users
to complete the visual preferences survey may support this hypothesis” (italics added). See William Fawcett, Ian Ellingham, and Stephen Platt, “Reconciling the
Architectural Preferences of Architects and the Public: The Ordered Preference Model,”
Environment and Behavior
40, no. 5 (2008): 599–618.

Liking seems to require
: See Rachel Smallman, Brittney Becker, and Neal J. Roese, “Preferences for Expressing Preferences: People Prefer Finer Evaluative Distinctions for Liked Than Disliked Objects,”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
52 (May 2014): 25–31.

“collective roots”
: From Simon Frith's excellent essay, “What Is Bad Music?,” in
Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate
, ed. Christopher Washburne and Maiken Derno (New York: Psychology Press, 2004), 17.

“transgressions of rule or order”
: Liking the bad upsets this argument, as well as many of the traditional theories of hedonic appreciation. The traditional model of exposure, per the Kinkade study, is that we will come to like the good more, and the less good less, upon repeated exposures. What happens, though, when you spend day after day with the works in the Museum of Bad Art, which are prized for their badness? If you start to like something, are you liking it more
as
bad? Or have you committed, in your initial enthusiasm, an error of judgment, per Hume—maybe what you thought was bad might actually be good or, more confusingly, not bad? And if you begin, over time, to like it less
for
its badness, does that mean it is starting to get, in your estimation at least,
good
?

“seriousness that fails”
: Susan Sontag,
Against Interpretation, and Other Essays
(New York: Picador, 2001), 283.

“are rough and tumble”
: See Erik Piepenburg, “Wild Rides to Inner Space,”
New York Times
, Aug. 28, 2014.

Irony is an emotional dead end
: Although you can of course end up loving what you set out to watch with ironic disdain, as in, for example, the case of many so-called bronies—older male followers of the colorful cartoon series
My Little Pony
. As one participant noted, “We were going to make fun of it, but instead everybody got hooked.” See Una LaMarche, “Pony Up Haters: How 4chan Gave Birth to the Haters,”
Observer
, Aug. 3, 2011,
http://​betabeat.​com/​2011/​08/​pony-​up-​haters-​how-​4chan-​gave-​birth-​to-​the-​bronies/​#ixzz3​MGiPbXdS
.

“bad good”
: As the design critic Stephen Bayley once opined, “Bad, it turns out, can be better than good and is always better than bad good, but good bad is perhaps the best of all (certainly the most entertaining).” Stephen Bayley, “Books We Hate to Love,”
Los Angeles Times
, March 3, 2006.

“dwelling with delight”
: Samuel Johnson,
The Works of Samuel Johnson
(London: Talboys and Wheeler; and W. Pickering, 1825), 50.

implicating women
: In the eighteenth century, novels, read widely by women, were viewed roughly with the derision of reality television. See Ana Vogrincic, “The Novel-Reading Panic in 18th Century in England: An Outline of an Early Moral Media Panic,”
Medijska istraživanja
14, no. 2 (2008): 103–23.

“I listen to it in secret”
: Quotation retrieved via “Guilty Pleasures: Nicholas McGegan's Symphonic Sweet Tooth,” NPR, March 16, 2011,
http://​www.​npr.​org/​blogs/​deceptive​cadence/​2011/​03/​14/​134543756/​guilty-​pleasures-​nicholas-​mcgegans-​symphonic-​sweet-​tooth
.

In one study, subjects were offered
: HaeEun Chun, Vanessa M. Patrick, and Deborah J. MacInnis, “Making Prudent vs. Impulsive Choices: The Role of Anticipated Shame and Guilt on Consumer Self-Control,”
Advances in Consumer Research
34 (Jan. 2007): 715–19.

Merely triggering feelings
: See Vanessa M. Patrick, HaeEun Helen Chun, and Deborah MacInnis, “Affective Forecasting and Self-Control: Why Anticipating Pride Wins over Anticipating Shame in a Self-Regulation Context,”
Journal of Consumer Psychology
19, no. 3 (2009): 537–45.

“In futurity events”
: Samuel Johnson,
The Works of Samuel Johnson
, ed. Samuel Johnson and Arthur Murphy (London: H. C. Carey and I. Lea, 1825), 310.

One proposed difference
: For a thorough account of the differences between shame and guilt, see Jeff Elison, “Shame and Guilt: A Hundred Years of Apples and Oranges,”
New Ideas in Psychology
23, no. 1 (2005): 5–32.

“affective-cognitive hybrid”
: Ibid.

To assuage guilt
: For a good discussion of the dynamics of guilt, see Roy F. Baumeister, Arlene M. Stillwell, and Todd F. Heatherton, “Guilt: An Interpersonal Approach,”
Psychological Bulletin
115, no. 2 (1994): 243–67.

We consume some bit of culture
: As Charles Allan McCoy and Roscoe C. Scarborough note, in an excellent discussion of guilty pleasure consumption, people who watch bad television as a guilty pleasure must simultaneously “consume” and “condemn”; “they do not completely resolve the normative contradiction, but instead suffer through it.” To defuse things, they excuse and apologize for “their viewing habits as a bit of mindless, ultimately harmless, fun that is ultimately beyond their control to resist watching.” See McCoy and Scarborough, “Watching ‘Bad' Television: Ironic Consumption, Camp, and Guilty Pleasures,”
Poetics
47 (Dec. 2014),
http://​dx.​doi.​org/​10.​10167j.​poetic.​2014.​10.​003
.

You would only call something
: There have been arguments “against” the concept of guilty pleasures, and when people start talking about things like “guilty pleasure cocktails,” I can sympathize. But these tend to be arguments “from above,” in the skyboxes of cultural capital, where the phrase is most often used and where it is most loaded.

“far-fetched”
: See Michael Seymour,
Babylon: Legend, History, and the Ancient City
(New York: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 178.

“painting of great merit”
: See John Ruskin,
The Complete Works of John Ruskin
(Philadelphia: Reuwee, Wattley & Walsh, 1891), 25: 181.

“richness and archaeology”
: The quotation is drawn from an excellent essay by Sophie Gilmartin, “For Sale in London, Paris, and Babylon: Edwin Long's
The Babylonian Marriage Market
” (2008),
http://​pure.​rhul.​ac.​uk/​portal/​en/​publica​tions/​for-​sale-​in-​london-​paris-​and-​babylon-​edwin-​longs-​the-​babylonian-​marriage-​market​(a2cebodf-​8eee-​475f-​bdic-​e9fa133​cb49b).​html
.

It even spoke slyly
:
The Art Journal
, in its obituary of Holloway, noted, “Those who were fortunate enough to send to auction pictures he fancied benefited no doubt largely from his princely mode of procedure…and those whose productions he acquired may possibly have to regret the inflated prices which for the moment their works assumed.” The quotation comes via Geraldine Norman, “Victorian Values, Modern Taste,”
Independent
, Nov. 14, 1993.

Indeed, the auctioneer
: See Shireen Huda,
Pedigree and Panache: A History of the Art Auction in Australia
(Canberra: ANU E Press, 2008), 19.

“were dispiritingly low”
: Philip Hook,
The Ultimate Trophy: How the Impressionist Painting Conquered the World
(Munich: Prestel, 2012), 36.

Renoir's
La Loge:
Philip Hook, “The Lure of Impressionism for the Newly Rich,”
Financial Times
, Jan. 30, 2009.

“The garish color”
: Hook,
Ultimate Trophy
, 53.

There is always the chance
: Indeed, as Ken Johnson noted in 2009, reviewing a show of Victorian paintings, including the rarely traveled
Babylonian Marriage Market
, “Disdained, derided and dismissed by Modernist art critics from Roger Fry to Clement Greenberg, Victorian painting staged a comeback in the Postmodern era. Its novelistic storytelling, florid symbolism and polished, academic technique appealed to art lovers bored by the pure abstraction and abstruse conceptualism of the 1960s and '70s.” See Johnson, “Social Commentary on Canvas: Dickensian Take on the Real World,”
New York Times
, June 18, 2009.

“Authority or prejudice”
: David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in
The Philosophical Works of David Hume
, vol. 3 (New York: Little, Brown, 1854), 255.

“People behave as if”
: See George Loewenstein and Erik Angner, “Predicting and Indulging Changing Preferences,” in
Time and Decision: Economic and Psychological Perspectives of Intertemporal Choice
, ed. George Loewenstein, Daniel Read, and Roy F. Baumeister (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2003), 372.

By the time we get home
: Rebates also go unclaimed because companies have traditionally made it hard to claim them. See Katy McLaughlin, “Claiming That Holiday Rebate: Is It Really Worth the Headache?,”
Wall Street Journal
, Dec. 3, 2002,
http://​www.​wsj.​com/​articles/​SB10388​57494436​020153
.

It is what keeps tattoo removal
: Of course, some people have found strategies for reconciling the permanence of tattoos. As Eric Madfis and Tammi Arford write, “Some tattooed people become aware that almost every tattoo will be subject to infinite interpretations and misinterpretations by people who view the image. Even these varied meanings associated with whatever image one chooses are ultimately likely to change, as are the values and desires of the individual tattoo recipient. Accordingly, some people are able to transcend these dilemmas by placing value on esthetic beauty over concrete symbolic meaning and, whenever possible, understanding tattoos as markers of the past rather than indicators of stable identity.” See Madfis and Arford, “The Dilemmas of Embodied Symbolic Representation: Regret in Contemporary American Tattoo Narratives,”
Social Science Journal
50, no. 4 (Dec. 2013): 547–56.

“watershed moment”
: See Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Timothy Wilson, “The End of History Illusion,”
Science
, Jan. 4, 2003, 96–98.

“a field of ugliness”
: Oscar Wilde, “The Philosophy of Dress,”
New-York Tribune
, April 19, 1885, 9. Thanks to the Web site
www.​oscarwi​rican.​com
for supplying the reference.

“We like what we are used to”
: Quoted in Sara Ahmed,
The Promise of Happiness
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 79.

“are taught to want new things”
: Quoted in Nathan Rosenberg,
Exploring the Black Box: Technology
,
Economics, and History
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 57.

“a lot of times”
: Chunka Mui, “Five Dangerous Lessons to Learn from Steve Jobs,”
Forbes
, Oct. 17, 2011,
http://​www.​forbes.​com/​sites/​chunkamui/​2011/​10/​17/​five-​dangerous-​lessons-​to-​learn-​from-​steve-​jobs/
.

“a completely new category”
: Mat Honan, “Remembering the Apple Newton's Prophetic Failure and Lasting Impact,”
Wired
, Aug. 5, 2013.

“resistance to the unfamiliar”
: Raymond Loewy,
Never Leave Well Enough Alone
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 277.

“If beer went on tasting”
: See Daniel C. Dennett, “Quining Qualia,” in
Consciousness in Contemporary Science
, ed. A. J. Marcel and E. Bisiach (Oxford University Press, 1988), reprinted in
Mind and Cognition: A Reader
, ed. William G. Lycan (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 60.

Looking back, we can find it
: Take the archetypal case of Nick Drake, the English folksinger who died of an overdose in 1974 after a short, brilliant, and cosmically unsuccessful career (and who later became far more popular). It is often suggested he was “ahead of his time.” But Joe Boyd, his producer and stalwart torchbearer, has argued that Drake's music was of its time; it was recorded then; it bears certain contemporary influences. He suggested that something else might be at work. “In a way its failure at the time has been part of its success now,” he said. Rather than being musically unanchored from the period in which it was made, Boyd argued, it was “culturally unanchored.” It was not showing up on the soundtrack of endless baby boomer films, it was not endlessly played by parents of his future fans, it was not played on “classic” radio stations. “It's free to be adapted and embraced by people from other generations and people who just come upon it,” Boyd said. “It doesn't say ‘I'm from the 60s.' It just says, ‘I'm Nick Drake.' ” It was not new, but it was
novel
.

Mittie or Virgie
: See
BabyName​Wizard.​com
,
http://​www.​babyname​wizard.​com/​archives/​2011/​6/​the-​antique-​name-​illusion-​in-​search-​of-​the-​next-​ava-​and-​isabella
.

“it took a couple of years”
: See Matt Tyrnauer, “Architecture in the Age of Gehry,”
Vanity Fair
, Aug. 2010,
http://​www.​vanityfair.​com/​culture/​2010/​08/​architec​ture-​survey-​201008
.

“maybe we only ever learn”
: The Wigley quotation is taken from Joachim Bessing, “Mark Wigley,”
032c
(Summer 2007): 55.

“less complex”
: See Kimberly Devlin and Jack L. Nasar, “The Beauty and the Beast: Some Preliminary Comparisons of ‘High' Versus ‘Popular' Residential Architecture and Public Versus Architect Judgments of Same,”
Journal of Environmental Psychology
9, no. 4 (Dec. 1989): 333–44.

“Utzon's breathtaking building”
: Jonathan Glancey, “Sydney Opera House: ‘An Architectural Marvel,' ”
BBC.​com
, July 11, 2013,
http://​www.​bbc.​com/​culture/​story/​20130711-​design-​classic-​down-​under
.

“non-concerted emergent collective phenomenon”
: See Jonathan Touboul, “The Hipster Effect: When Anticonformists All Look the Same,”
arXiv
, Oct. 29, 2014.

“disaligned with the majority”
: See Jeff Guo, “The Mathematician Who Proved Why Hipsters All Look Alike,”
Washington Post
, Nov. 11, 2014.

“The quest for distinctiveness”
: See Paul Smaldino and Joshua Epstein, “Social Conformity Despite Individual Preferences for Distinctiveness,”
Royal Society Open Science
2 (2015): 14037,
http://​dx.​doi.​org/​10.​1098/​rsos.​140437
.

“The social being”
: Gabriel Tarde,
The Laws of Imitation
(New York: Henry Holt, 1903), 12. Elihu Katz suggests that one reason Tarde may be overlooked today is that a word like “imitation” is out of fashion. “It sounds altogether too mechanistic
and unthinking, although it may well be that [Tarde] had ‘influence'—a better word—in mind.” See Katz, “Rediscovering Gabriel Tarde,”
Political Communication
23, no. 3 (2006): 263–70.

As the anthropologist
: See Joseph Henrich, “A Cultural Species: Why a Theory of Culture Is Required to Build a Science of Human Behavior,”
http://​www2.​psych.​ubc.​ca/​~henrich/​Website/​Papers/​HenrichCulture​Final.​pdf
.

“We take our medicine”
: Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd,
Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 11.

My favorite example
: Catherine Hobaiter and Richard W. Byrne, “Able-Bodied Wild Chimpanzees Imitate a Motor Procedure Used by a Disabled Individual to Overcome Handicap,”
PLoS ONE
5, no. 8 (Aug. 2010).

One day in 2010
: See Edwin J. V. van Leeuwen, Katherine A. Cronin, and Daniel B. M. Haun, “A Group-Specific Arbitrary Tradition in Chimpanzees (
Pan troglodytes
),”
Animal Cognition
17, no. 6 (2014): 1421–25.

“tended to re-create”
: Victoria Horner and Andrew Whiten, “Causal Knowledge and Imitation/Emulation Switching in Chimpanzees (
Pan troglodytes
) and Children (
Homo sapiens
),”
Animal Cognition
8, no. 3 (2005): 164–81. See also Daniel Haun, Yvonne Rekers, and Michael Tomasello, “Children Conform to the Behavior of Peers; Other Great Apes Stick with What They Know,”
Psychological Science
25, no. 12 (2014): 2160–67.

“they are independent”
: As Georg Simmel wrote, “Fashion is merely a product of social demands…This is clearly proved by the fact that very frequently not the slightest reason can be found for the creations of fashion from the standpoint of an objective, aesthetic, or other expediency.” See Simmel, “Fashion,” 544.

“The modes of furniture”
: Adam Smith,
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(London: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 228.

In a study conducted
: Curiously, the children reported having no memory of which model was watched and which one was not, as if they had picked up the cue subconsciously. See Maciej Chudek et al., “Prestige-Biased Cultural Learning: Bystander's Differential Attention to Potential Models Influences Children's Learning,”
Evolution and Human Behavior
33, no. 1 (2012): 46–56.

“When environmental cues”
: See Joe Henrich and Robert Boyd, “The Evolution of Conformist Transmission and the Emergence of Between-Group Differences,”
Evolution and Human Behavior
19, no. 4 (1998): 215–41.

“arrival of the fittest”
: The quotation is taken from an excellent article by Philip Ball, “The Strange Inevitability of Evolution,”
Nautilus
, Jan. 8, 2015.

The artist or innovator
: Gabriel Tarde, the fin-de-siècle French economist who was one of the first to compare innovation with evolution, described the innovator as a “madman…leading sleepwalkers.” The quotation comes from Faridah Djellal and Faïz Gallouj, “The Laws of Imitation and Invention: Gabriel Tarde and the Evolutionary Economics of Innovation” (March 2014),
https://​halshs.​archives-​ouvertes.​fr/​halshs-​00960607
.

People want to feel
: See, for instance, Michael Lynn and C. R. Snyder, “Uniqueness Seeking,” in
Handbook of Positive Psychology
, ed. C. R. Snyder and Shane Lopez (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 395–410.

“Differences of opinion”
: Thanks to Robert Sapolsky for this example.

Under a theory called
: See Dan Ariely and Jonathan Levav, “Sequential Choice in Group Settings: Taking the Road Less Traveled and Less Enjoyed,”
Journal of Consumer Research
27, no. 3 (Dec. 2000): 279–90.

The psychologists Matthew Hornsey
: Matthew Hornsey and Jolanda Jetten, “The Individual Within the Group: Balancing the Need to Belong with the Need to Be Different,”
Personality and Social Psychology Review
8, no. 3 (Aug. 2004): 248–64.

In a study of people with body piercings
: Jolanda Jetten et al., “Rebels with a Cause: Group Identification as a Response to Perceived Discrimination from the Mainstream,”
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
27, no. 9 (2001): 1204–13.

“normcore”
: For an excellent analysis of the trend, see Eugenia Williamson, “The Revolution Will Probably Wear Mom Jeans,”
Baffler
, no. 27 (2015).

antifashion trend
: As Elihu Katz has noted, “There are unlabeled fads or fashions.” Labels give shape to inchoate activities and help them build upon themselves. “It is usually through the label,” writes Katz, “that the fashion acquires fame—even beyond its consumer audience.” Rolf Myersohn and Elihu Katz, “Notes on a Natural History of Fads,”
American Journal of Sociology
62, no. 6 (1957): 594–601.