The Death of: Taste - Rebarbarization and The Rise of Moscato

 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.

The Death of: Dignity

This man is the most obvious choice for the personification of dignity.

Welcome to "The Death of" Series here at Arbiter Elegantiarum!  In this series, we - and by we, I mean I - intend to prove that the concept in question simply cannot exist in a time during which the accompanying stories could occur.

Today I have learned that the President of the United States has agreed to appear in a potential film sequel to the HBO series Entourage.  I feel a more apt selection would have been Il Cavaliere, (of the "bunga bunga" fame) but alas, these decisions are not mine to make.  There is, nonetheless, something disappointing about witnessing the pursuit of celebrity over that of respectability by a sitting president.  I would open the umbrella of  "pursuit of celebrity" to include appearing in a bizarre annual segment named after you in which you explain your NCAA picks; selling campaign tchotchkes created by twenty-three different fashion designers; and, keeping a wish list of "surrogates" for the upcoming election that reads more like an Oscar party guest list.  It would be unfair of me not to consider, however, the role that the American palate's turn towards such cloying tastes has played in these decisions.