The Great American Cool
getpocket.com:extract_focal()/https%253A%252F%252Fcdn.vox-cdn.com%252Fthumbor%252F9o6r5vJaL_IKqmGWMTc65Gd3_4k%253D%252F0x0%253A3000x2000%252F1200x675%252Ffilters%253Afocal(1260x760%253A1740x1240)%252Fcdn.vox-cdn.com%252Fuploads%252Fchorus_image%252Fimage%252F69580252%252FThe_Great_American_Cool_2.0.jpg)
The Great American Cool
Over the last generation, academics have tried to demystify aesthetic taste and show that it is a social construct driven by constantly shifting cultural and economic factors.
Ted Gioia • How to Listen to Jazz
The idea of taste became a series of ever more granular preferences, liking A instead of B, rather than a deeper-seated, holistic sense of self.
Kyle Chayka • Filterworld
In short, with democratized access, the web became more saturated than ever before, and as consumers, we began to spend more and more time trying to sort through it all. In a state of analysis paralysis, how do we disaggregate signal from noise?
This problem of overabundance is why I wrote my piece last year. As consumption of digital media increas... See more
This problem of overabundance is why I wrote my piece last year. As consumption of digital media increas... See more
Gaby Goldberg • Curators All the Way Down
It was usually cooler to seem poor than seem rich, whatever your status actually was. Indie sleaze is back, I’m told, but the PBR-swilling ‘00s hipster—however affluent underneath the blue-collar disguise—would surely recoil from the $20 espresso martinis that their present-day counterparts celebrate.
Drew Austin • The Culture of Cope
beyond identifying something as “cool.” Taste requires experiencing the creation in its entirety and evaluating one’s own authentic emotional response to it, parsing its effect.