Good Taste is Not What’s Oppressing Us in 2026

W. David Marx · 22 Sept 2026

W. David Marx did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
The good taste of each era tracks the makeup of its elites.

Their wordsBut as Veblen explained, the "good taste" of each era is correlated with the particular makeup of elites.
Our reading
The taste for high art has become extremely marginal, limited almost entirely to a subset of knowledge workers.

Their wordsToday the taste for “high art” has become extremely marginal, almost exclusively limited to a particular subset of knowledge workers.

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