Among intellectuals (defined here as all who self-consciously use their mind, whether well or badly) it seems to me that for at least a century (perhaps millenia) a, perhaps _the_, major way of exhibiting Good Taste does _not_ consist in laying out what one _likes_ but in making clear what one _dislikes_. That is, Good Taste is displayed, regularly, by displaying one's freedom from its opposite, Bad Taste (in some circles, equated with vulgarity). One IS what one hates.
This is really widespread -- browsing through my own back posts I catch myself at all too frequently, and there was certainly a great deal of it in the conversation of my grad school friends at Michigan. And it merges with manners & morals. The turning point of James's fine novel, _The Awkward Age_, is when the heroine admits she has read a certain book. Someone who was "proper" would not have touched the book. I haven't checked but I would wager that in any given month on this list there are a number of posts disavowing acquaintance with this, that, or the other author, musician, text, CD, TV show (or TV in general; disavowal of the "boob tube" is never of any risk). . . .Such disavowals establish both one's own "good taste" and the vulgarity of others.
Among literary scholars this practice operates even in distinguishing among 'acknowledged' authors. Lives there a lit student with taste so broad that he/she has not sneered at one of the following: Milton, Pope, Richardson, Ben Jonson, Wordsworth, Browning, W.C. Williams. . . ? (Well into my 75th year I suddenly discover that the 1805 _Prelude_ is continuously wonderful -- and the 1850 _Prelude_ has a lot to be said for it. I am sure that on various occasions in the past I must have mentioned the poem with curled lip.)
And of course, in political discussion it is always safer to sneer (with a label, not an argument) at the politics of others rather than develop a positive position of one's own.
There is some novel, but I can remember neither the author nor the book, in which a character is mortally offended when he (she?) is accused of "bad form." One can also notice that the way to establish one's "cool" seems, from what has been said recently on this list, by drawing in one's skirts at the "uncool."
Praise is always a risk, unless one's flanks are protected by a proper list of disavowals. Someone in the last half-year referred to the "middlebrow" taste for Vivaldi. Fifty years ago one could listen to Vivaldi in only one place in the U.S.: at 4 a.m. at Carnegie Hall, where a number of musicians who played for the Philharmonic would play Vivaldi once a week. No records. No concerts. In the 1930s, Wyndham Lewis sneered (!), "800 Vivaldi mss. unedited, and they dare to speak of western civilization." Most of those unedited mss. were in Dresden. Pound had them microfilmed. The originals were destroyed in the bombing of Dresden.
What made Pound a great critic was his generosity. Despite her sharp tongue, it is that quality that also distinguishes Marianne Moore in her comments on other writers.
Carrol