Every so often, someone points out that good taste looks suspiciously like having money. The linen that crumples just right, the unbranded coat whose price you would never guess, the kitchen that seems to contain nothing at all: these are the aesthetics of people who can afford to hide their wealth. It is tempting to conclude that taste is merely a costume class wears to disguise itself. The suspicion is not new, and neither is the argument against it.
The most famous version of the suspicion belongs to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose book Distinction drew on surveys of French households in the 1960s. Bourdieu found that tastes in music, food, art and furniture mapped closely onto education and class, and argued that taste works as a form of social sorting. Our preferences, he suggested, classify us even as we use them to classify others. Liking the right thing, in the right way, is a quiet signal of where we come from.
The eighteenth century had a more hopeful answer. David Hume, in his essay on the standard of taste, conceded that preferences vary enormously but insisted that some judges are better than others. The qualified critic, he argued, combines strong sense with delicate sentiment, sharpened by practice and comparison and free of prejudice. His favourite illustration is a story from Don Quixote about two wine tasters, one of whom detects leather in a barrel and the other iron. They are mocked, until an old key on a leather thong is found at the bottom.
Beauty without wanting
Kant went further. For him, a genuine judgement of beauty must be disinterested: it cannot depend on wanting to own, use or consume the object. When I call a flower beautiful, I am not saying I would like to have it, and I am claiming that others ought to agree, even though I cannot prove it. On this view, the pleasure of beauty is precisely the pleasure that has nothing to do with possession, which is why it can never be fully purchased.
Mirela Kovač, a curator at the Harrow Street Museum of Everyday Objects, thinks the three thinkers are best read together. Bourdieu, she says, is right about how taste is used, Hume about how it is developed and Kant about what it is ultimately for. Her museum displays mass-produced tools, cheap ceramics and forgotten packaging alongside expensive design classics, without labels indicating price. Visitors are routinely unable to tell which is which, and often prefer the cheaper object.
Taste becomes snobbery the moment it stops being curious. Good taste should make you want to look longer, not make you want to be seen looking.
Perhaps the answer to the opening question, then, is yes and no. Taste as a social performance is often money in disguise, and Bourdieu's critique should make us wary whenever an aesthetic seems designed mainly to exclude. But taste as a practised capacity to notice, compare and delight is something else. It can be cultivated in a public library, a flea market or a municipal park. It costs time and attention rather than money, and it is, in principle, open to anyone willing to look carefully.
The test, if there is one, is whether our taste makes the world larger or smaller. Taste that sneers narrows it, dividing things into the acceptable and the embarrassing. Taste that looks closely tends to widen it, discovering beauty in places no one thought to label. The wine tasters in Hume's story were not proving their status. They were simply paying attention, and they happened to be right.
