Good or bad taste, does it matter?

Do I have good taste? I’d like to think so, but if there were such a thing as good taste, wouldn’t it be widely agreed upon? Is it possible to litigate which is the better movie between “The Eternals” and “Dune”? Lately, I don’t think so.

Thanks to the internet, the consumer is bombarded with many potential media choices. It’s like trying to drink from a garden hose. We have to filter these choices out, but how? I could watch a Pasolini film, a Netflix documentary or a new Marvel movie. But which is more worthy than the other?

Once I’ve made my choice, I can retroactively justify it, then build a kind of personal brand around my choices. Watched the Pasolini film? I guess I’m a bit of a film buff. Netflix doc? Well, I’m more of a science-y person. Marvel movie? I’m kind of a nerd I guess. This is called “taste”.

But the problems don’t stop here. As students, we learn about a lot of the analytical tools we apply to classic texts. We look for things like metaphors, imagery, motifs. We develop ambitious psychological analyses of characters.

Sometimes we apply them to Shakespeare, but we could just as easily apply them to “Riverdale” or “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” (the show from 1970? The one from ’96? One of the movies? The comic books? The franchise as a whole?) This is the general thrust of the YouTube video essay format: using a sandblaster on a soup cracker. Or is it?

With our tools, we could take something almost at random and build the scholarly support structure to make it a part of a canon.

Take Harry Potter, for example. There is already some writing which could form the basis of its inclusion at the same time as, say, the plays of Sophocles in literature studies. Books like “Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays” or “Harry Potter and International Relations,” “The Politics of Harry Potter” and “The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a Literary Phenomenon” already exist.

I think now is a fruitful time to ask the question: if we could set “taste” aside, what texts do we need to study? Perhaps August Wilson’s “Century Cycle” instead of “The Iliad?” Have we finally reached a point where the Bible has nothing to say to us? In the current environment of Critical Race Theory hysteria, however, such retooling is impossible.