My response to you both will be posted presently. Please dress appropriately. It’s gonna snow.

“The allegiance is to the idea of rank, of file, of inequality. For without inequality, there can be no better and no worse. The allegiance is to distinction.”

As you describe the cult of connoisseurism, you briskly move from inequality to distinction. This is very interesting, especially if you are actually talking about identity and you didn’t even know it.

Responding to your post without consulting an influential intellectual on my side of the ring makes me feel as if I am entering a sword fight with a overly-ripe banana, so I’m going to keep this brief. By and large I agree with many of the claims by you and Bourdieu (but you may be leaning on him a bit heavily). However, you finish with:

“The allegiance is not to the brand itself – that’s a short sighted and silly idea. The allegiance is to connoisseurism, the idea that taste is something true, and that there is a better and a less good. The allegiance is to the idea of rank, of file, of inequality. For without inequality, there can be no better and no worse. The allegiance is to distinction.

And this allegiance to distinction is what captivates us. It’s an old story, the story of the haves and the have nots, the difference between thriving and mere survival.”

What struck me overall was that identity was not mentioned. My question is this: do the choices we make about what brands we eat and drink and wear and drive– do these things make up our identity? Or, is it that we have an identity and we flesh it out more finely when we have the opportunity to do so? Sometimes I get the idea that you are arguing that because we have all these ways to express ourselves (albeit motivated from the distasteful source of shameless, almighty dollar), we are only becoming worse. When I read your piece I was thinking about connoisseurism among those of the King’s Court in 18th Century England: a bunch of uneducated idiots finding special ways to appease themselves and simultaneously assert themselves above the masses.

We can talk about history and how it was in the ages of yore when Nike and McDonald’s didn’t make everything about commodities, but I’d go back to what I was talking about in the last post comment about knowledge. Sure, there’s this distasteful stuff about commodifying everything and ugly capitalism. But we are smarter. We have opportunities to limit some of this nonsense. We have the education to know how shit works, and we can respond to it.
Acting on personal taste doesn’t have to deal with inequality, does it?
Get your Gen Y hat on, and get back at me.

Yes, education plays a factor, but it is more about experience for someone who truly loves art. Some people don’t like opera because they have never seen an opera. But still, it wouldn’t require any education in the history of music to enjoy an opera for the first time.

A great painting should inspire a feeling in someone without having to read a critique of the work or be told by an art scholar that it is good. There are still true feelings people have towards food, art, music, etc. It’s not always just some placebo effect, causing people to think they enjoy one cup of coffee over another.

I don’t think a language of appreciation of some nuance in life is created by snobs, but it probably will be picked up on by a few of them. With wine, there will always be people who can’t tell one wine from another and rely on a few clever-sounding stock phrases they picked up from their wine guide so they can hang out with their sophisticated friends at wine tastings and congratulate themselves on an their sophisticated palates. But some people will get a true enjoyment that is deeper than this. The connoisseur enjoys the wine, the snob enjoys enjoying the wine, and the wine makers enjoy anybody who drinks their wine (even if they are secretly ridiculing their consumer’s tastes).

The vocabularies of an art come from people wanting to share what they feel with others, but when they overuse them, these vocabularies become cliché and meaningless. Unless the English language is your forte, it may be difficult to come up with an original description of exactly what a glass of wine tastes like to you, so people use a cheat sheet.

Next, we are, as you mentioned or the French guy mentioned, distanced from necessities. With all the basic survival needs met, we have time and money to waste on random interests.

The keep my sanity during a dull office job where I go to work in the morning and sit at the same desk and stare at the same computer for eight hours or more a day, I need to tighten my scope on what it exciting. On days where I can’t do this the extraordinary dullness leaves me agitated and discontent.
I notice the difference in this morning’s cup of coffee from yesterday’s coffee. Sometimes I walk a little farther to get a certain kind of coffee. Does it really matter? No. Sometimes the extra effort makes it feel a little more worth it. It’s just a nice distraction to temporarily focus on. It’s these little palliatives that people compulsively self-medicate on to make the day a little more enjoyable.
Is it pathetic that tiny things like this really do make a difference in a person’s life? Maybe. Have I totally forgotten if I was trying to make a point and what that point was? Probably so. Will I continue to keep typing, regardless of this fact? ……yes.

Even though you continue to interrupt me every 20 seconds from the other side of the couch we are currently sitting on? Sure. Do I think many people will make it through your whole blog and then read my comment? If they have a ready supply of popsicles, maybe so.

To wrap it up, there are true connoisseurs, who end up being the trendsetters, and there are the trend followers. Of course, the evil advertising agencies will hunt down the trendsetters and exploit their tastes to sell to the masses.