We have entered an era of exuberant, even apocalyptic, bad taste. Call it a vibe shift if you must.

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!”

“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.

And nothing kills numbness like a sensory onslaught—color, sound, hedonism, melodrama, sleaze.

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.

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.

what’s remarkable about this particular pendulum swing is that after centuries of wrestling with hierarchies of taste, the cultural stigma that has always come with indulging in bad taste has disappeared.

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?

The old high-low spectrum was policed by people who shared identity markers, experiences, and educational backgrounds, so it reflects their prejudices.