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by Tom Vanderbilt

  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.

  CHAPTER 5

  WHY (AND HOW) TASTES CHANGE

  “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 Jo
hn 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 Communicat
ion 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.