Not For The Faint OF Taste

Is good taste a matter of culture or courage?

I have long enjoyed The Gilded Age as a show not just as a portrait of that era and its irreversible effects on modern day America, but also a perfect example of the classic question: who decides the constituents of good taste?

Although the central tensions, like old versus new money, the social struggles of divorcees, and the dawn of women’s suffrage are disparate, they are bound by a common thread: to belong.

Each character is trying to achieve this in their own way, by buying their way into a box at the opera or ladies maids making their way through hook or by crook (mostly by crook in this case). Just as in our world, it’s a mixture of what they hope to belong to; there are those who ‘want in’ the circles that arbitrate good taste, those who just want to stay where they feel most at home even if destiny calls somewhere else, and those who’s past unfortunate circumstances keeps them from entering new seasons of life. 

In the world of old New York, taste is not about personal preference. It’s a language, passed down like an heirloom, legible only to those who have been raised in its grammar. The right art is not simply beautiful—it is correct. The dinner menu is not merely lavish—it is appropriate. This is luxury not as acquisition, but as fluency.

Yet, there is an undeniable sense of artifice in formatting one’s life ‘just so’; personal problems are to be masked at any cost, and almost all the characters seem to live in fear of being ‘found out’. 

It appears that belonging was as much about performance as wealth. 

It’s easy to scoff at this kind of posturing from our vantage point, but we still play our own versions of this game—knowing when to speak, what to wear, and which parts of ourselves to keep offstage. The trappings may change, but taste, like belonging, has always been about more than what meets the eye. 

But unlike taste, even today, belonging comes with an ability to read and perform the subtleties of a culture’s aesthetic values. 

And yet, there is also the subversive pleasure of the outsider who learns the code, only to bend it. The ambitious Mrs. Russell stops imitating old money—she stages her own vision of grandeur, forcing society to take notice. In doing so, she proves that taste, while seemingly fixed, is always under quiet negotiation.

Taste is a complicated braid of culture, restraint and originality, and in this instance the first is salient. We are always in negotiation, between making our own choices and others’ reception of those choices. What was once met with disdain is now heralded, like Jazz; it was once branded as vulgar, low-class entertainment, but now it is a symbol of sophistication and artistry. 

Is that to say that everything will have its day in the sun? That’s unlikely, you can’t make an ugly thing beautiful, no matter how generously you choose to see it. Is it simply a matter of “getting in” to the circles that postulate good taste, after which our original choices will be celebrated? Certainly possible, man is a social animal after all.  

The sticking point, however, is that taste is relative but not arbitrary. It is a balance between shared cultural codes (so others can read it) and personal interpretation (so it isn’t hollow).

True taste is not just the possession of beauty, but the mastery of its language—and the courage to speak it with one’s own accent.