“Real good taste is appreciating all kinds of taste — learning from bad taste and using it as a spice to fight the tyranny of humorless good taste.”
I have worked at highbrow places, inside some pretty carefully curated rooms, surrounded by people who have devoted their personas to deciding what is good or cool.
And what I actually believe is that true magic lives in the things that may not be planned or curated but in the humorous or ordinary. My favorite example is a Costco that sits directly across from the Noguchi Museum.
Nobody planned that pairing. The universe just did it, I sometimes believe for my personal enjoyment. A warehouse full of bulk olive oil and enormous flat screen televisions, across the street from one of the most quietly beautiful sculpture museums in the world. I think about this more than is probably reasonable and I experience them together even more often than I care to admit.
When John Waters said fight the tyranny of humorless good taste, it is truly at the core of who I am. I want it on my tombstone. I have met this tyranny in certain conference rooms and birthday parties, places where delight in the wrong thing was treated as a lapse in judgment.
But the people I have always admired never bought into that. Diana Vreeland religiously ate a peanut butter sandwich (with whiskey, in a dixie cup naturally) for lunch and remarked that peanut butter was the greatest invention since Christianity. Karl Lagerfeld kept a McDonald’s order in his otherwise impossibly grand Paris apartment, saying, “I like the way they present the Diet Cokes in a large paper cup with all that ice.” These are understanding that greatness is actually found in the contrast.
We are in a strange moment. AI is in every conversation, being used every minute, and the rapid change kind of takes my breath away. The fear of it taking the creative jobs is real. And I keep seeing people work hard at developing taste. Follow the right accounts. Watch the right movies. Which is great and useful, but may I offer that one section in this education should include the bits that are slightly off, the weird, the funny, the ordinary.
Because underneath all of it is this quiet worry about who will have it. Whether taste can be learned or only lived. And I keep thinking the thing that will save us is maybe not more refinement. A machine can learn that. It however cannot feel the specific pleasure of the wrong thing in exactly the right place. It cannot use ordinary in the ways humans can. And I think that is our secret.
So I was curious and asked a few lovely people here on Substack this question:
What is one thing the world sees as lowbrow or ordinary that you experience as highbrow or beautiful? It can be an object, place, food, packaging, tool, piece of signage, or film/TV. What makes it feel thoughtful, beautiful, or meaningful, despite or because of its ordinariness?
Their answers are below and I loved them. I hope you enjoy.
Gracie Wiener
Social Media Editor, Air Mail | Substack: Party Line
Bojangles. It is a fried chicken and biscuit fast food chain that originated in North Carolina (my home state). It is incredibly affordable and delicious—plus there is bottomless iced tea! I wrote my Common App essay about what Bojangles means to me, in high school, and named my childhood dog after it. While, it is, unironically, one of my favorite restaurants and meals, I think the sentimentality of shared time and conversation makes it incredibly special to me. I think a lot of people dismiss Southern food, and the South in general, as lowbrow. However, there are so many stories and histories within each bite when you look into it.
Additionally, the red in their branding is perfect. I reference it constantly.
Jaye Thomas
Account Executive, CAA Brand Consulting | Substack: Just a Fashion Passion
Something some may consider ‘low brow’ but I consider a delicacy is my family’s delicious cream cheese and olive sandwich recipe, which I associate the most with my grandmother.
This dish, as simple as it is, resembles comfort and consistency in a way few objects in my life do.
I presume the reason why some may find it ‘low brow’ is because of its simplicity. It does, merely consist of cream cheese and olives (pimento stuffed), with a few salient additives like lemon juice, mayo, hot sauce, garlic powder, etc.
Being part of a big Black family from South Carolina, I’d imagine part of the dishes inception came from a matter of convenience, but convenience didn’t carry the dish through my family for generations. It was preserved through family tradition, the need for a snack on a hot summer’s day, and a quiet but sincere gratitude.
Tadzio Dlugolecki
Run a gallery with my sister maja and her 3 best friends
Substack: lobster club
let’s address the elephant in the room — i was outvoted on this one. that said, i see their point. i personally haven’t participated in many viewing sessions (the last one was on a team retreat where the girls disappeared into the sauna with a laptop..) so i’m working secondhand here, but here’s the argument: love is blind offers a unique study in human psychology wrapped in a trashy package. it compresses months of relationship development into days. like a pressure cooker for human nature. out comes the best and the worst.
4/5 lobsters recommend. verdict is still out on the 5th.
Erin Pollard
Founder, Underwater Weaving | Substack: Baskets for Breakfast
Wow! I mean, I think that line is constantly shifting, no? Something that might be considered lowbrow, may be seen as art later (a film or band for example) or the opposite- a design element, let’s say the Bow, becomes over exposed mass produced, over exposed and there’s cross over to middle or lowbrow. I can’t answer this question without talking about baskets, of course and I think about the framing of what we do at the studio, intentionally straddling low, middle and highbrow. More explicitly, through our name, we’re owning a lowbrow reference, but our work, often purchased by interior design studios and trade is considered art for homes and special projects. Finally, our weaving club, workshops and kits live in the middle. I think perhaps if you dig into most things you can find the historical references you can pull them over or under the line (see what I did there?)
Michaela Carpenter
Creative Brand Strategist / Hotelier | Substack: Michaela Carpenter
Old diners. The food is mid, the coffee is mid, the vinyl booths are usually splitting at the seams. There’s no pretense of quality, but there is consistency. You can order anything at any time; pancakes for dinner, a Reuben for breakfast, coconut cream pie in the middle of the day. You arrive knowing exactly what you’ll get, and that expectation is always met. In contrast to a service culture that increasingly feels uneven, that kind of consistency becomes beautiful in its reliability. Change is inevitable, but I pray this never does.
Stella
Design & Culture Editor | Substack: Tuesdays with Stella
When people ask me what I love about Italy, one of my answers is always: extraordinary design hidden in the most ordinary details. When living in Milan, the daily trip to the bar for a coffee was non-negotiable. I’d stand at the counter in the mornings, alongside businessmen in tan suits and ladies with tiny dogs, drink my espresso in the blink of an eye and quietly slip a sugar packet into my bag.
Italy, it turns out, takes its sugar packets seriously. They come in all kinds of different designs and unique fonts, inspired by the retro logos of the coffee shops. Some are minimalist. A few remind of Milan’s Art Nouveau era while others feel straight out of a 1970s design fever dream. My personal favorite: a tiny portrait of Empress Elisabeth, printed on the packet from the iconic Pasticceria Sissi.
At home, they collect dust in a little bowl – I’ll be honest about that. But still, they remind me that in Italy even the most throwaway things are made with care.
Thank you so much for reading. Please go check out these wonderful people's letters! I would love to know yours, drop it in the comments. I am endlessly fascinated by the answers. I’ll be back at the end of the month with a new letter.
Enjoy something really stupid this week for me.
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