Bad Taste

1 Course Unit

"Beauty is not a quality inherent to things: it only exists in the mind of the beholder." (David Hume) " Most of us can recognize bad taste as soon as we see it: Harlequin romances, Elvis on black velvet, lawn ornaments. But bad taste also has a history, and kitsch has been identified as a peculiarly modern invention related to capitalism and consumerism. Beginning with a discussion of taste in the eighteenth century, we will investigate under what conditions good taste can go bad, for example when it is the object of mass reproduction, and, on the other hand, why bad taste in recent times has increasingly been viewed in positive terms. Categories such as the cute, the sentimental, the popular, the miniature, kitsch, and camp will be explored. We will also ask what forms of ideological work have been done by this brand of aesthetics, for example in the connection between politics and kitsch, femininity and the low-brow, or camp and queer identity. Writers and film-makers to be discussed include: Hume, Kant, Goethe, Flaubert, Bourdieu, Sacher-Masoch, Thomas Mann, Nabokov, Benjamin, Greenberg, Sontag, John Waters. Not Offered Every Year 1 Course Unit