You seem to be up to something. DeTocqueville was making a similar point some 150 years ago, linking the poor taste to democracy. I tend to agree that elitism, for all its social drwabacks, has no equals in the realm of aesthetics. Populism (which passes for democracy here) does not even compare.
wojtek
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Well, I am not at work, so I can stretch out a little. No this wasn't really the point to dissing toxic chickens and culture by Jim Bob. At the same time, American mainstream politics is very much like the standard American diet---neither has much character---empty calories. There is something not just blah about them, but toxic; toxic to reason, toxic to health, toxic to sensibility.
Doug, bored, offers with blase urbanity, so it all sucks, so we kill ourselves? No, Dude, get radical, get off the computer and fix dinner.
Stuff a sirloin roast with garlic and pepper corns, saute some mushrooms in olive oil, red wine, roast drippings, ladled on a rice pilaf, with what(?) green beans, asparagus, get out the candles, serve with Merlot, or Pino Noir. Follow with sliced oranges and a sherbet, toast it all off with cognac and coffee. Get rid of those damned Madonna tapes and microwave dinners. Sheesh.
It is a matter of articulating form through all manner of nuance, in the work of unfolding the sensibility through style and taste. Food is equivalent to painting for some reason I have never been able to figure out. If you pick a painter like Wayne Thiebaud, you can see the connection immediately--say the cake or delicatessen or candy series. Somewhere in all that lush color and juicy pigment lives the void I am complaining about.
Yoshie comes back with fin-de-siecle decadence:
``...It was the vast, foul bagnio of America transported to our Continent; it was, in a word, the limitless, unfathomable, incommensurable firmament of blackguardism of the financier and the self-made man, beaming down, like a despicable sun, on the idolatrous city that grovelled on its belly, hymning vile songs of praise before the impious tabernacle of Commerce...''
And yet simultaneous with this or its painterly equivalent, Gustave Moreaux, were the Impressionists, the good life in exile.
In any event, as I have mentioned before, the shop where I work is full of gourmet mechanics, where discussing food will always outlast sex and politics. And yet, I get the feeling that our shared revolt against blah food, has to be linked somehow to what could become a more sophisticated political sensibility, if only I could figure how...
Chuck Grimes