08. Lovestruck
The taste issue, and other tiny hills to die on.
“February arrives like a train and runs over the bones of January, and just like that— the death of a new year”
by Ritika Jyala, from "The Flesh I Burned" (unknown)
01/03/2024, London, UK
My dear,
Today I am relishing in being inflammatory. Really, truly. I am gasoline and I am eager for a match. All my fortunes have been horrendously bad. Forecasts of doom and gloom, and seven plagues, but those has no way of binding me. It’s best to laugh at fate’s assumptions for you. Really, truly. February has been a month of rainstorms, reminiscent of Shakespeare: “You have such a February face, so full of frost, of storm and cloudiness” (Much Ado About Nothing, 1623). And yet despite the continuous tempest I have a feeling spring is inching ever closer. Or so I’ve divined through the birdsong drifting into my living room, into my study. Soon, it will be a time of blossoming, but for now, we must weather the storm.
What’s new, what’s new. Dip your hands into the stream and let’s see what you’ll fish out. First of all, there’s a lovely poem commissioned for the White Lily Society by a local poet, for you to check out. There’s a peculiar list of dream techniques, crumpled up, the ink running. I sank my teeth into a local play about death and desire to write my very first theatre review (and hope to still be welcomed at the Arcola Theatre afterwards). And there, glimmering with the rocks and pebbles, down on the bottom, are some new thoughts on Marina Abramović. The White Lily Society archive is a little neglected at the moment, I must admit, but I have plans to catch up on updating her. Pinky promise. Just not today.
For now, do follow me, and let’s venture forth into this bright-eyed February newsletter.
I. Archive Updates
“You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.”
by James Baldwin collected in “Conversations with James Baldwin” (1989)
First of all, I would like to thank whichever sucker approved my personal JSTOR account to have full university access. Just kidding, I love you, oh kind mysterious stranger, and I am eternally grateful. I didn’t apply for it, but by no means will I look an educational gift horse in the mouth. A lady never tells.
Second of all, it is probably imperative that you know this months newsletter is all about dichotomy, and especially, the “high/low” art divide. Yes, really, I have decided to open that very can of worms. I have gleefully dug up a can opener and I’m ready for the fallout! It’s a subject that is always present on my mind, and always considered in my dealings with the White Lily Society, so high time we dissect it, no? Of course, we must start our autopsy at the very root, by examining some sources on the various forms and history of the subject. After all, we wouldn’t want to be sloppy with the scalpel.
“Good Breeding and Acute Discernment: The Politics of Literacy and Family in Gilmore Girls” - link
Oh, the paper that re-ignited this very flame. Gilmore Girls is a show that is near and dear to my heart, as a fellow self-admitted know-it-all with a penchant for obscure references. This paper examines the likes of class and cultural capital, and the performance of literacy in Gilmore Girls and the way in which the show “attempts to redefine literacy and taste while ultimately reinforcing traditional notions of how gender and class distinctions influence one's values, literacy practices, and tastes”. A very intriguing and enlightening read.
“In other words, what one likes signifies one's class status to others within a given society; one is marked as being of a certain class by what she or he enjoys. Further, those who enjoy aspects of mass culture are frequently deemed vulgar or uneducated, and those who prefer more elite forms of entertainment are presumed to be highly educated and, typically, of a higher social class regardless of their actual educational and social backgrounds.”
“The Popular Culture and Art Education” - link
Classifying popular art as [including] “posters, album covers, billboards, and […] cinema and television”, this paper talks a little bit about capitalism, elitism, and encourages methods of teaching art to young people that consciously incorporate “low” art. What stood out to me was the fact that “cinema” was considered part of these “lesser” art forms, something which we will read about in the next paper of my choosing.
“Popular culture has been accepted in much of the academic world as a valid reflection of a form of cultural pluralism in which many different kinds of cultures are expressing their values through various popular art forms. Further, an investigation of popular culture should be undertaken without a hierarchy of value judgements, but rather with a respect for art forms other than those of the established art world”
“Intellectualization and Art World Development: Film in the United States” - link
In its early development, film was no doubt a genre for the working class. Looking at the development of film from distraction for the masses to proper art form, in the United States specifically, this paper is quite an in-depth look at a lot of factors, including extensive primary research looking at film and book reviews from 1925-1985. Most intriguing perhaps is the notion that both the rise in television and an uptick in people’s education brought about the rise of “taste culture” and the performance of having “refined” taste. Both of which we shall heavily discuss later.
“In fields of restricted production, cultural goods are produced for an audience whose members are primarily cultural producers themselves-a relatively small audience with a great deal of cultural capital available for appreciating art. In contrast, fields of large-scale production create cultural goods that will appeal to nonproducers of cultural goods and to as large a market as possible. These two categories represent ends of a continuum along which all cultural production is situated.”
II. Tastebuds
“You can mold a beautiful future for yourself. You need to stop intellectualizing and turning love into a puzzle. You need to stop accepting less than you deserve, artistically and emotionally. You can't settle for the monastic loneliness you describe. You need to open your heart not just to your art but to the world and the people around you.”
by Heather Havrilesky, from “How to Be a Person in the World” (2016)
One of my favourite tiny hills to die on is no doubt the distinction between “high” and “low” art. Because really, the questions are endless and the answers so elusive, the topic so deliciously reactive and open for interpretation. Because asking what “good” taste is also means asking what taste is? What in particular makes any piece of art good, or bad? Who’s to say?
As you know, this newsletter is horribly subjective, meaning I decide what exactly we focus on. Which, for now, is this: I wish to take a look at the high/low art dichotomy, examine it a bit, and argue for a more relaxed stance on the divide between these two polar opposite valuations of art. Despite what you may think, I love and adore a multitude of “low” art. Seriously, you can pry my melodramatic teenage vampire media from my cold dead hands. And I certainly don’t tolerate unfounded disrespect for them either. You have been warned. I whole-heartedly believe that not everything we enjoy has to be “good”, and not everything “good” is necessarily enjoyable. Taking “good” here to reflect the depth of the subject matter, the opportunity for analysis, the idea that a piece of art has “something to say”. It’s a bit ridiculous: art has no mouth, and yet it must scream. So it screams through us, and through our interpretation of it. It infects our eyes, and if lucky, our hearts and souls.
Marcel Duchamp wrote that “All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act,” (via the MoMa). We bring to interpreting every piece of art the idea of a cultural framework- the values, symbols, and traditions of the society we find ourselves in- as well as our personal experiences, and some terms we shall come to discuss in depth later: “visual literacy” and “media literacy”. Somewhere in my mind there’s a quote floating around about how art is always “half the audience”, about how putting out art means the artist releases it as if it were a wild animal, relinquishing control— but I cannot for the life of me find its source, and so I will have to take a rain check on that.
Taste is something that is, for better or for “worse”, learned. Or at least, you learn the toolset for understanding art, which ultimately reflects in your changing tastes. We love what we understand, what is close to us. When it comes to art in all its forms, this understanding is tied in to two key concepts: visual literacy, and media literacy. The idea of “literacy” here is understood to be a sort of array of smaller tools and methods necessary for understanding a work. On the one hand, visual or aesthetic literacy pertains to “aesthetics, design and entertainment” and [an] “understanding of the forms of auditory and visual expression as well as styles, stories and references”, while media literacy is our ability to extract this type of understanding from media as a whole, not just visual media and visual art.
“Aristotle expressed himself in this connection by saying that the best interpreter of dreams is he who can best grasp similarities. For dream-pictures, like pictures in water, are disfigured by the motion (of the water), so that he hits the target best who is able to recognize the true picture in the distorted one”
By Sigmund Freud, from “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1899, p. 12)
As media continues to gain importance in our everyday lives (especially visual media through social media), it becomes increasingly more crucial to be able to grasp the nuance and fine details of the images we are bombarded with. This is why the concept of “literacy” is so defining: it is our strongest weapon in dismantling all the messages, all the visuals, all the media that comes our way. It’s a person’s cipher, their primary way of recognising the essence of an image.
Back to good taste being a learned thing, one of the universal hallmarks of a well-read, refined sense of taste is quite often the ability to connect works through a framework of other works, movements, art pieces, etc. The ability to weave a dense web of connections between the work you are looking at, and the work you have seen in passing. This, too, is something that is learned.
There is very little stopping anybody from understanding “bad” or “popular” art through a “high” art lens once they have gained the tools to do so through education, experience, or their own research. Yet, this does not uncover some previously unseen depth to the work in question. Instead, the context of the work has gained greater focus. But if we are to go by commonly accepted notions that “high” art is challenging, that it requires introspection, then this makes even the most basic common art able to be elevated. In many ways, it already is. Try explaining why you like a piece of art that is commonly looked down upon- your average “chickflick”, romance novel, or piece of art available to buy on little souvenir notebooks- and you may find that somehow justifying your approval of such works requires much more introspection than, say, your appreciation for Frankenstein. Instead, through intellectualising it your explanation often becomes more of a cold performance of logic and observation, rather than a passionate declaration of preferences.
“Good” taste in itself can act as a sort of performance, made up by faux nonchalant snapshots of books, carefully chosen postcards of artworks plastered on teenage bedrooms, and zingy one-liner Letterboxd reviews. There is prestige to be gained in having a “refined” or “intellectual” taste, there is benefit in projecting an image of oneself as knowledgable, intellectual, cultured. I myself won’t deny that my own first yearnings for the classics were most definitely concerned more with looks than with the idea of expanding my mind. But does that make the resulting expansion any less valid? On my own long road of gaining cultural capital I have no doubt reached a larger understanding of art— from historical contexts to a more precise definition of my own likes and dislikes, my own tastes.
“Taste” at large is also subject to the time period we shape it in. The classification of art can also be a reflection of the audience it attracts, and vice versa (see paper 3 in Section II). Often, the art and entertainment of the “upper” classes is (unjustly) automatically seen as “refined” or “high” art, while the inverse is true for those associated with lower classes, or even different races, genders, and sexualities. But popular art has merit exactly because of this: it is a broader reflection of society and culture at large, a more accessible or subtle way of holding the mirror up.
Popularity in itself implies the existence of something not popular, something niche. One cannot exist without the other. Something being thought of as “popular” is a uniquely conflicting notion. What is popular is by no means uniform: a myriad of subcultures exist even within the most mass-produced, most viewed forms of art. The performance of taste is just as much about fitting into these certain subcultures as it is about looking “cultured”. Hell, there are endless subcultures that base themselves around few key pieces of art and media. We are all refracted, and through our the social algorithm dictating a lot of our life, categorised into groups of people with similar interests. This is how digital echo-chambers form, and with the ubiquity of the internet it can be very easy to believe that the norms for your specific subculture go for everyone. If you surround yourself with “well-read” people, it’s easier to feel insecure about the amount of works you have read than if you find yourself with people who choose to watch films instead. And it’s much sooner than you’ll feel the need to overcompensate, to put on a pantomime of taste.
But of course, as more and more people make a habit of intellectualising their entertainment, the other side of the spectrum has to rise to meet it. Elitism and anti-intellectualism are on the rise globally, and they are on two far ends of the spectrum of “taste”. It’s highly likely that the only remedy for this is nuance. Don’t encourage the gap between those willing to be laughed at, and those doing the laughing. Be both.
If we see our own artistic preferences and enjoyment as a reflection of a taste hierarchy, we are inevitably connecting some silly notion of self-worth to the “worth” of the art we consume. And while there are arguments to be made for people to seek out challenging art to broaden their perspectives and develop their visual and media literacy, that should not ever mean that by stepping into the world of “high” art one is forsaking the “low” art. Quite the opposite, actually. Really, I think we’d all be happier if we were a little weirder and we weren’t afraid to like simple things for simple reasons. If we broadcasted out interests freely, if we embraced the full spectrum of our tastes, both “high” and “low, if we freed ourselves from the notion of having to justify our artistic preferences.
Some simple things hit harder for people who have seen less art, because that simple thing might be the first piece of art they have connected with on such a deep level. More seasoned critics might scoff and scorn at this, but it does not decrease the impact of the art itself. The impact of art has no value attached to it.
Personally, when I started the White Lily Society, I knew I wanted it to be, above all other things, welcoming. No matter how much you are familiar with, how many terms you can recognise, and how many definitions you can work with, it mattered to me that it was all as accessible as possible. Judgement free. Before I had put words to my own particular tastes (ie. the Intersection of Love and Violence, tm) I defined this endeavour purely by what I envisioned it would be[come]: a “kind of niche collection of art and [pop] culture moments”. And that means that I can and will alternate between discussing aesthetic theory, and my appreciation of light-hearted vampire novels, because guess what, baby, Walt Whitman had it right when he wrote “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.” (Song of Myself, 1892).
So be not ashamed, ever, and don’t shy away from the things you love. It’s the White Lily Society way to be open to both “high” and “low” art, and to, of course, redefine those terms as you see fit. This is intended to be a message of hope. Do not be daunted by art as a whole, don’t be frightened to add to the conversation surrounding it. Yes, you may contribute familiar insights, yes, you may be seen as “wrong”, you may be met with elitism and condescension. But that is not what matters. We are all here to learn, and share, and connect. You are not chained to your tastes. Go out into the world, and cultivate them.
III. Love and Violence, addendum
“The corruption begins with the mouth, the tongue, the wanting. The first poem in the world is I want to eat"
by Erica Jong, from “Where it Begins” (1971)
In the rare case you somehow haven’t read it yet, the White Lily Society has a bonafide manifesto in the form of a long essay on the concept of the Intersection of Love and Violence. Do check it out if you are unfamiliar, or need a little refresher.
Anyhow, I was going to start a second lengthy ramble here, much like the one you just read, about the sheer violence of our cultural Romantic metaphors, a perfect post-Valentine dessert, but I have instead decided to practice the art of brevity (which I still desperately need to be tutored in) and instead serve you this all-encapsulating quote:
“Desire, I was only beginning to understand […] comes in many forms, and some of them are violent. Struck by an angel’s arrow, or drugged by a loveflower, desire wounds, and I have felt its blue sting. The thought of him all day, like pushing on a bruise”
by Madelaine Lucas, from “Thirst For Salt” (2023)
Maybe this topic will be on the menu for next month instead, if you all behave of course. After all, the original “Intersection of Love and Violence” thoughts began to stir in my head exactly around this time last year. Something about February makes the mind jump to strawberry jam, knives, and anatomical hearts.
For now though I will just indulge myself and do a little February recap / report, whichever you prefer. Last month’s round-up of all my cultural exploits was well received, and I enjoyed putting it together. So, here we go again.
Lady Sabrina Angelina’s February R.E.P.O.R.T.
Reading— Stories of the Fae (I’m back in my annual February “Folk of Air” phase, yes), folktales, botanical horror that leaves me dreaming about ensnaring plants and succulent florals. See: The British Library’s “Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic”, “Botanical Folk Tales of Britain and Ireland” by Lisa Schneidau, and Holly Black’s “Folk of Air” series starting with “the Cruel Prince”.
Eating— Steak frites from a local French bistro near me.
Playing— the White Lily Society playlist, always. Current hyperfixation songs:
Burn Alive - the Last Dinner Party Mentally Not Here - Elita Girl with One Eye - Florence and the Machine Yayo - Lana del Rey Brand New City - Mitski Pain - Boy Harsher Heart Shaped Bed - Nicole Dollanganger Mine Own - Avice Caro Black No 1. (Little Miss Scare-All) - Type O Negative
Obsessing— Over advice I got to live my unemployment as if it’s a regency story (very intriguing). Over omens and folk superstitions. Over long phone calls with friends who are far away but feel near.
Recommending— the Fresh Beauty Black Tea Instant Perfecting Mask. Truth be told I just adore the smell of black tea, and the ritual of this mask in the morning. It’s the perfect little extra step to add. Simple, but incredibly energising.
Mug reveal! “Memento Mori” mug by the Unemployed Philosopher’s Guild. Treating— Fortnum and Mason’s black tea with fig, or rooibos tea (in general), drank from a new mug I bought at the cemetery I volunteer at (Highgate Cemetery), of course paired with gluten-free biscuits and/or pear-flavoured pates de fruits, also from Fortnums. Additionally, a BFI subscription to nourish my need for strange, niche, and surreal movies.
Once more, we are nearing the end of another newsletter. Sorry to spoil your fun, love. If nobody stopped me I am sure I could continue writing to you until the stars all burn out, but then again I would assume that is not a very desirable madness. Nevertheless, since I have shared my favourite word of the month here and there for the past eight newsletters, I would like to declare it upfront for once. For March, the official hyperfixation word of choice shall be “Limerence”, which
“[…] is a state of mind which results from romantic or non-romantic feelings for another person, and typically includes intrusive, melancholic thoughts, or tragic concerns for the object of one's affection as well as a desire to form or maintain a relationship with the object of love and to have one's feelings reciprocated. Limerence can also be defined as an involuntary state of intense desire.” (Wikipedia definition)
I just think spring is the most wonderful time for yearning, pining, longing. And with that said, I will take my leave. Please, do tell the trees about your love. Dream only the loveliest dreams, indulge in all the things you adore.
Until my next letter,
x Sabrina Angelina, the White Lily Society
Currently reading: “Botanical Folk Tales of Britain and Ireland” by Lisa Schneidau // Most recent read: “Down the Drain” by Julia Fox
White Lily Society links // Sabrina Angelina links
The Fae call to you! Will you answer their birdsong, will you agree to sip cherry wine from acorn cups, and tell stories of tragic romances and brave heroes? [YES/NO] Don’t hesitate. Come, become a martyr of deliciousness. Join the White Lily Society today.
adore this <3