“Trash has given us an appetite for art,” Pauline Kael noted in her snobbery-shattering 1969 essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies.” In other words, the scrappy subversiveness of B movies can ignite a passion for more sophisticated cinematic subversion.

Where good taste is demure, bad taste is bawdy. Where good taste is minimalist, bad taste is maximalist. Where good taste whispers, bad taste screams: “Look! React! Feel!”

What we’re dealing with is a full-blown cultural moment. The 20-year nostalgia cycle, climate-change nihilism, information saturation, streaming-era content overload, and our collective Long COVID of the soul have converged in a tidal wave of tackiness. What TikTok teens, white collar workers marooned in home offices, and the gatekept super-rich... See more

Perhaps the backlash isn’t coming because there’s so clearly nothing of substance to get up in arms about. Who but the dourest prudes are left to trash the bad-taste aesthetic, when we’re all busy trying to shock the pandemic into submission by living—vicariously, if not physically—as if we’re immortal?

There’s obviously something shallow about trading genuine cultural affinity for cosplay, yet it also reflects an understanding that style can signify a fleeting personal or societal mood more than a fixed identity.

It makes sense that norms are shifting in this direction as Gen Z’s influence spreads. Raised on social media, with access to once illicit bad-taste touchstones like Rocky Horror just a click away, they’ve largely replaced IRL subcultures with a constellation of aesthetics—cottagecore, dark academia, Y2K—to be performed, then discarded or demoted... See more

Now it takes more energy, more audacity, more spectacle to jolt us out of our malaise—and that’s where bad taste comes in.

Where good taste is demure, bad taste is bawdy. Where good taste is minimalist, bad taste is maximalist. Where good taste whispers, bad taste screams: “Look! React! Feel!”

The upshot of taking mass culture seriously has been a growing awareness that much of what we call good taste is merely an aesthetic like any other.