Destruction from The Course of the Empire by Thomas Cole, 1836.
Welcome to my second installment of "The Death of" Series! Today I intend to prove that taste is dead. I was prompted to do so after reading the following passage from Albert Jay Nock's 1942 Memoirs of a Superfluous Man :
"Whether by some means or another, I was somehow prepared to see, as when I was still quite young I did see, that in our society the purview of legal, religious and ethical sanctions were monstrously over-extended. They had usurped control over an area of conduct much larger than right reason would assign them. On the other hand, I saw that the area of conduct properly answerable to the sanctions of taste and manners was correspondingly attenuated."
I very much agreed with this, and was struck by the thought that, if in his time he felt taste was undernourished, then surely by our present time it must have succumb to starvation. I will, in the usual fashion, further this idea by presenting actual cultural episodes, and providing brief analyses to show that such episodes are incongruous with a world in which taste could exist.
