I think bad taste flourishes because it invites space for joy and human connection, unencumbered by the trappings of art or high culture. Compare the experience of watching Love Island with siblings/friends and gushing over the messy drama and absurd plots to the experience of watching something that is indisputably high culture. The Love Island experience, which is devoid of any pretensions to good taste, is really about the viewers’ interactions with each other - the gossip, the memes, the in-jokes. And it actually kind of works, creating a shared language and synthetic culture among groups of viewers that will be remembered a decade later. Low-brow restaurants are kind of the same. The kitschy decor, pumping music and transient clientele all signal to the customer “don’t take this too seriously, the meaning is what you make it.” A diet of purely low-brow culture would be exhausting, like a dopamine-saturated brain that cannot find joy in anything. But the enduring legacy of bad taste, when people are objectively capable of creating something less tacky, is that in moderate doses, bad taste is an invitation to step out of the heavy world of ideas and culture and find some child-like joy in bonding with others.
This!! I think bad taste enables us to bring our guards down. Love Island exists in an escapist vacuum, accessible to everyone that has the patience to watch.
I think bad taste flourishes because it invites space for joy and human connection, unencumbered by the trappings of art or high culture. Compare the experience of watching Love Island with siblings/friends and gushing over the messy drama and absurd plots to the experience of watching something that is indisputably high culture. The Love Island experience, which is devoid of any pretensions to good taste, is really about the viewers’ interactions with each other - the gossip, the memes, the in-jokes. And it actually kind of works, creating a shared language and synthetic culture among groups of viewers that will be remembered a decade later. Low-brow restaurants are kind of the same. The kitschy decor, pumping music and transient clientele all signal to the customer “don’t take this too seriously, the meaning is what you make it.” A diet of purely low-brow culture would be exhausting, like a dopamine-saturated brain that cannot find joy in anything. But the enduring legacy of bad taste, when people are objectively capable of creating something less tacky, is that in moderate doses, bad taste is an invitation to step out of the heavy world of ideas and culture and find some child-like joy in bonding with others.
This!! I think bad taste enables us to bring our guards down. Love Island exists in an escapist vacuum, accessible to everyone that has the patience to watch.
agree completely!
What a fun piece! Thanks for sharing. I enjoyed the juxtapositions between high-brow, low-brow, and lower-brow and how they can coexist.
Loved this, as always :)
👏👍👌
I have not watched love island but I enjoyed reading this
Thank you 🫶