Things I'm Torn About: Fancy Things

There are a lot of ways one could describe this phenomenon: bougie culture, snobbery, hipsterism, bohemianism.

Refined tastes. A preference for small-batch culture over mass produced culture. You get the idea.

This is one of those areas where I am genuinely torn. As I mentioned on facebook the other day, my torn-ness is perfectly encapsulated by my feelings about Wes Anderson movies, which are equal parts eye-rolling over the preposterous cutesyness of them and genuine delight at their cleverness and tastefulness. Anderson may be getting a bit long in the tooth and popular to be as much a hero of hipsterism as he once was, but I think he still carries most of the bona fides he's always had. Anyway, I generally love his movies despite myself. They have the intentional but lovely shabbiness of a tasteful antiques collection. They are designed to pique my overly-educated white liberal aesthetic delight centers as surely as taco bell was engineered in a taste lab to pique my midwestern taste-gasm center. And I know this, and Anderson knows this, but I love it anyway.

The first thing to say is that often, items produced for a relatively smaller market on a smaller scale are indeed superior in quality. I, anyway, often find myself enjoying those items more than their mass-culture analogs. So, at least one pro side of this stuff is fairly clear: usually, I like it better. I really do prefer my expensive American-made banjo to a mass-produced Asian import. I really do prefer Woodford to Jack Daniels. I really do prefer Townes Van Zandt to Kenny Chesney. So, in one sense, I'm glad these things exist because they make my life better.

One negative thing about unique, delightful items and experiences is that they are usually also quite expensive. The reason that the mass culture has had such a strong reaction to the rise of hipsterism is that the confounding of artisanal and expensive leads to a tremendous amount of eye-roll inducing hypocrisy. This would be the "rich kid in thrift store clothes" phenomenon (though, to be fair, this "slumming" has been around forever and is not relegated solely to modern hipsters). So, here's one place where this stuff tears at my soul. You can't very well look down on the masses with one eye while gazing lovingly on all the things they can't possibly afford with the other. As somebody who has spent a good bit of my adult life studying about and teaching about poverty and income inequality in America, this is one flavor-note of delicious small-batch locally made bourbon that's hard to swallow. I can't help but think of the scenes in American Psycho of rich Wall Street execs throwing down on preposterously fancy food (right before the main character then goes out and commits vicious blood thirsty murder, of course). Something about "rich people enjoying rich people things" makes me uneasy. Not to mention that I have finally come to accept that I (shocker) am not rich. Almost nobody thinks of themselves as rich, especially in the United States (seriously, we have empirical proof of this fact), but really, I'm so not rich (grad student here), and I doubt I'll ever have a particularly lucrative job. And I still make more now (and will in the future) than a sizeable portion of the country. I just can't have nice things all the time. I need to accept that.

If we were really just talking about things people do or do not enjoy and purchase with their own private dollars, this would not be a big deal, but taste is also a way that people denigrate and depersonalize others. If people were allowed to just eat what they like and buy what they like and watch what they like and listen to what they like, I probably would not be writing this blog post. People's tastes just wouldn't be anybody else's concern, and that would be that. I wish this were the case, but it isn't. Taste is marker of status. Taste is part of somebody's "cultural capital." People engage in "conspicuous consumption" around matters of taste, because they are intentionally trying to cultivate their image as a tasteful person. Taste is to certain elements of the culture what honor is to the Klingons.

Because taste is about a person's image as much as it is about finding things they enjoy consuming, much of the culture's dialog about taste is probably disingenuous. And everybody knows that. Which is also one of the reasons hipster culture has induced so much collective eye-rolling around the culture. There is so much hypocrisy and generalized bullshit surrounding the conspicuous display of taste that one cannot help but be skeptical of the small-batch world.

For instance, much like honor in honor-cultures can sometimes be enhanced by denigrating others, taste-image can be enhanced by denigrating other people's tastes. This is why I really hate hyper-critical reviews of things on the internet. You know, the ones where the author is clearly trying to distinguish himself by how clever he can be in tearing apart somebody else. It's the cultural equivalent of beating somebody up in prison to try to establish your own toughness. It's parasitic and mean and uncivilized.

The other reason this image-cultivation is so easy to hate is that it's often just straight up bullshit. People lie about what they like and don't like. Recently a video was making the rounds on the internet of attendees at a music festival expressing excitement to see bands that the interviewers made up. The bands didn't exist. The opposite phenomenon happens all the time, too. That is, people claim to hate things they actually enjoy (good middle-class educated folks would call these "guilty pleasures"). There are plenty of mass-market items that I think are really fantastic. Egg McMuffins are delicious. Just hands down freaking delicious. Anything from McDonald's carries not only no cultural capital; it actually probably hurts yours. In other words, if you like McDonald's, you will pay a cultural price for talking about it. Nobody posts instagram pics of their "fun morning at Mickey D's!!!!" There may be plenty of reasons to not like McDonald's, like health reasons or environmental reasons or business practices, but for me, taste is certainly not one of them. I think it's pretty delicious.

Any halfway decent human despises this type of image-conscious taste performance, but it's ubiquitous and hard to avoid. Everybody wants to be cool, and for good reason. They call it cultural "capital" for a reason; how people see you can impact you in very concrete ways. Nevertheless, I hate it so much that I can't help but keep a skeptical eye on all things small-batch/artisanal/artsy/unique/hand-crafted/locally made/etc. On the other hand, it's pretty much impossible to tell what's genuine and what's bullshit. I always struggled with this when I was studying philosophy as an undergrad. Was Hegel really saying something profound in Phenomenology of Spirit, or was it just intentionally obscure horseshit designed to make the reader feel stupid and the author look smart? Apparently, I was not the only person to struggle with that. I told a professor at the time that I had been reading Hegel. His response, "Some people think Hegel was one of the greatest thinkers of all time; some people think he was one of the greatest bullshitters of all time." (BTW, I have come down more on the side of "not a bullshitter").

I'll end this long rant on one more positive aspect of small-batch culture (hey, i like this term!). There are non-taste reasons a person might want to patronize small-market, locally owned businesses. They may do so for environmental reasons, or to support the local economy and oppose globalizations. For those reasons, and for taste reasons, I sometimes patronize the small market world, and I often enjoy the hell out of it. But for taste reasons and for financial reasons, I often also patronize the mass-market world.

Because the eye-roll inducing reasons and the legitimate reasons are fairly indistinguishable from an outside observer, I will try to not hate on this world, but I will never feel completely at ease with it.