A BRIEF HISTORY OF BAD TASTE

Style guru Stephen Bayley’s countdown of kitsch

The opening sequence of Orson Welles’ greatest film has Charles Foster Kane contemplating a snowglobe: little shards of porcelain or non-soluble soap replicate snowfall over a nastily cute and miniaturised scene. Why, Welles seems to be prompting us to ask, is a great mind bothered with trash?

It is reckoned that the first snowglobe appeared in Paris in 1889 and held a little Eiffel Tower ridiculously captive. Their great rival, the chunky, vitreous paperweight with ferns or fossils suspended in glass, appeared 50 years before. So very much of what we consider bad taste had its origins in the 19th century.

Or the 20th. Take Jayne Mansfield’s Pink Palace on Sunset Boulevard. The actress, whose IQ actually exceeded her bust measurement expressed in centimetres, bought the Hollywood property in 1957. Ignorant, perhaps, of erotic Freudian associations, she promptly painted it pink with cupids, a heart-shaped bath and rose-hued furs. A fountain tinkled Champagne. The Pink Palace was eventually bought by Ringo Starr.

The list is endless. In his pioneering 1969 study, Kitsch: the World of Bad Taste, Gillo Dorfles, one of Milan’s great intellectuals and a confidante of all that city’s leading designers, made some interesting suggestions which I’ll one day adopt into my own encyclopaedia of bad taste: Mona Lisabranded cheese, a Giorgio Morandi painting turned into terrazzo, John Lennon’s psychedelic Rolls-Royce, gondolier ornaments, celebrity masks, any sort of porno-kitsch (but specially subtypes involving Jayne Mansfield) and the sleeve art of The Moody Blues’ 1968 album In Search of the Lost Chord.

Bad taste, they say, always involves an aesthetically lethal cocktail of swagger, facsimile, fakery, replication, bogus emotion and excess. It often involves fuss as well: in an observation which deserves a special entry in any anthology of poisonous snobbery, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm once remarked that the less educated the society, the greater the inclination towards decoration.

This might be true of Romford, but does not apply to Versailles. In fact, judgements about taste are always equivocal. The groundrules of taste are never stable. To understand taste, you always need to appreciate context. One of the only certainties is that discussing taste is a very satisfying way to start an argument. People today are fearless in their frankness about sex and money, subjects that were once taboo in polite conversation. But taste is different to sex and money, although both the latter are usually involved in the former. Because to an extent you are what you wear, eat, drive and where you live, your taste betrays you. Often cruelly. It is the last frontier of shame. So to be accused of having “bad taste” is to suffer a damaging assault on the soul.

In Thomas Mann’s 1957 novel Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, you know the man’s a scoundrel because his garden has earthenware gnomes and toadstools, a disco ball on a pedestal and a pneumatic device that plays Johann Strauss’s “Freut euch des Lebens” when the door opens… as well as grottoes. Grottoes are always a problem to the taste investigator as anyone who has seen Bernardo Buontalenti’s grotesque efforts in Florence’s Giardino di Boboli must have thought. How can such hideousness sit hugger-mugger with so much refined Renaissance beauty?

Bad taste presents itself as a calculated affront. It is surely willed and meaningful. Charles Baudelaire thought: “What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offence.” Bad taste is aesthetic head-butting, a reminder that we get our word “ugly” from the old Norse word ugga which means “aggressive”. An ugly customer is not someone ill-favoured in looks, but a rebarbative and argumentative twat. Very likely, he has bad taste. So what follows interests him.

It’s easy to make jokey additions and another time I would also argue for: stretch limos; Dolly Parton’s Dollywood resort in the Great Smoky Mountains, Tennessee; any form of wrestling; Peperami or any meat snack; Jeff Koons; anything with sequins; white high heels; fur; Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building (now empty); Terry Farrell’s MI6 Building (still full); dried flowers; Frieze Art Fair; the Madonna Inn at San Luis Obispo, California; coloured candles; gold-foiled Ferraris; fairy lights; Christmas decorations….

So who’s to blame? Samuel Beckett thought the great thing about bad taste was that the people who had it did not realise. That’s an amusing half-truth because, despite the evidence that people make terrible choices, there is, objectively speaking, no such thing as bad taste. There is your taste and there is my taste. I like this, but you like that. I would not wear sequinned double denim, but you may do so with pleasure.

Or to put it this way, as art historian Bernard Berenson did: “Taste begins when appetite is satisfied.” Food, you see, for thought.