Taste after the elite
W. David Marx writes that in 2026 good taste oppresses no one, because the elite no longer has it. What that means for the charge of snobbery.
W. David Marx sent out his first newsletter in nine months today. The title says where he is going. Good taste is not what is oppressing us in 2026. The piece touches on something I described in April, in the pamphlet on the discriminating eye, without knowing where it came from.
That pamphlet says the conversation closes the moment someone remarks that one baker still makes a real croquette while the other sells filler in breadcrumbs. The speaker is suspected of snobbery. I called that careless thinking. Marx shows its origin. Pierre Bourdieu published Distinction in 1979, on the basis of research from the mid-1960s. The book runs to six hundred pages and few people have finished it. One sentence survived, that good taste is a weapon of class. That sentence has shaped moral thinking about culture for forty years. Separating high from low became the building of a fence around the upper class, and taking the fence down meant celebrating what everyone enjoys.
Marx’s central point comes from Veblen, who wrote as early as 1899 that the taste of an era follows the composition of its elite. In the Paris of 1965 old money set the tone, and old money had an eye. Bourdieu described it accurately. Only that elite is gone.
The people with power in 2026 are the barons of tech and finance. Most of them grew up as upper-middle-class science geeks, with no interest in art and a preference for the practical. The richest man in the world loves video games. The most powerful man in the world gilds the White House with party-shop gold and has cage fights staged on the lawn. Where this elite buys art, it buys an asset. Marx cites an estimate from inside the trade that a third of transactions are money laundering, which explains why so many masterpieces sit in climate-controlled warehouses. The knowledge of complex music or difficult painting has moved to a small group of knowledge workers, and that group has no power.
So the fence guards an empty field. Discrimination no longer marks a class, because the class it should mark does not have it. The charge of snobbery persists, but it misses its target. Marx puts it sharply. To call avant-garde music elitist is absurd once its appreciation correlates with no capital at all, and the loudest cultural critics are at their most energetic when professing their love of the Top 40.
The pamphlet gave two answers to the charge of elitism. The economic answer is that over the years of use quality is the cheaper choice. The ecological answer is that nobody can have a coat altered any more once the corner tailor closes, at any price. Marx adds the third answer, the sociological one. In 2026 the difference between a hand-sewn buttonhole and a machine-stitched one says something about the buttonhole and nothing about the class of the person who sees it.
One difference deserves naming. Marx argues for the Kantian experience, the disinterested contemplation of a difficult work. The eye I described asks first whether something works. Both are forms of attention. Twenty minutes in front of one painting and three seconds of waiting before you chew come from the same source.
His closing thought matches mine. In an economy of hyper-commercialisation and automation, defending craft and complexity is a form of resistance, and celebrating market-minded, low-craft culture is a pledge of allegiance to the existing order. The baker with the real croquette is on the right side of that line. He already knew. Now the rest of us may say so too.
Sources: W. David Marx, ‘Good Taste is Not What’s Oppressing Us in 2026’, Culture: An Owner’s Manual, 22 September 2026. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Harvard University Press, 1984; French original 1979). Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Macmillan, 1899). Jacob Huibers, The Discriminating Eye, Nourishment, 28 April 2026.