Taste Today

Chapter headings and selected contents: Foreword. Preface. Acknowledgements. What is Taste? Taste yesterday. Discriminating palates and keen eyes. Taste and temperament. Attitudes, beliefs and choices. The pleasures of the table - taste as a metaphor. Goods and Language. Purifying the dialect of the tribe. Structuralism and the world of goods. Good form: Gestalt and the nature of nuance. Product semantics. Metaphor and the importance of context. Irony, sophistication and camp. What is kitsch? Critical Values and Social Behaviour. Beauty and truth. On technique. Restraint - rhetoric and moral values. 'A sprawling, highly ornamental rococo extravagance'. Managing impressions. Taste and the Professionals. Creators and curators. Raising the nation's taste. Artists, intellectuals and the market place. The professionalization of taste. Design as a profession. Educating the taste makers. Ivory towers and real worlds - reward systems in curator professions. Them and Us. Taste cultures and taste publics. Styles and the structure of society. High Art, Big Design and What Sells. Legitimacy, quality and value. Professional ideology and good design. Popular, vernacular and pop. Fashion. Stability and change in symbolic forms. The diffusion of innovation. Fashion and commerce. Innovators, opinion leaders and gatekeepers. The dialectics of display. Fashion cycles. Quality and Equality. Quantification or understanding. Taste engineering. Quality in a democracy - the designer's responsibility. The 'grey area' of aesthetics. Design and the poetry of everyday things. Consumer education and cultural values. Notes and references. Index.