Welcome to the Era of Unapologetic Bad Taste

Where good taste is demure, bad taste is bawdy. Where good taste is minimalist, bad taste is maximalist. Where good taste whispers, bad taste screams: “Look! React! Feel!”

Now it takes more energy, more audacity, more spectacle to jolt us out of our malaise—and that’s where bad taste comes in.

The upshot of taking mass culture seriously has been a growing awareness that much of what we call good taste is merely an aesthetic like any other.

what’s remarkable about this particular pendulum swing is that after centuries of wrestling with hierarchies of taste, the cultural stigma that has always come with indulging in bad taste has disappeared.

what we’re witnessing goes far beyond cool teens and the extremely online to encompass anyone with free time, disposable income, and internet access.

The 20-year nostalgia cycle, climate-change nihilism, information saturation, streaming-era content overload, and our collective Long COVID of the soul have converged in a tidal wave of tackiness.

We have entered an era of exuberant, even apocalyptic, bad taste. Call it a vibe shift if you must.

Perhaps the backlash isn’t coming because there’s so clearly nothing of substance to get up in arms about. Who but the dourest prudes are left to trash the bad-taste aesthetic, when we’re all busy trying to shock the pandemic into submission by living—vicariously, if not physically—as if we’re immortal?

And nothing kills numbness like a sensory onslaught—color, sound, hedonism, melodrama, sleaze.