The Omnivore Elite

At a dinner following the opening day of a fair, seated between a museum trustee and a curator, a collector spends ten minutes talking about a reality dating show. Not apologising for it. Not framing it as research. Enthusing, fluently, with episode-level detail, moving without a gear change from the show’s editing grammar to a Rosemarie Trockel work he underbid on that afternoon.

Nobody at the table flinches. Thirty years ago this performance would have been social suicide in that room. Today it is the opposite: the reality show is doing exactly what the Trockel is doing, which is establishing that this man can hold anything, from anywhere on the cultural spectrum, with total confidence. The person who would actually embarrass himself at that table is the one who only knows about Trockel.

This series has been tracking what happened to cultural capital after Bourdieu. The first essay argued that it mutated from good taste into institutional legibility. The second argued that taste is not born but trained, a treaty handed down at dinner tables and finished in crit rooms, laundered afterwards into gift. This essay is about the treaty’s strangest modern clause, the one that would have baffled Bourdieu’s original informants: the elite no longer excludes popular culture. It requires it.

The question is what, exactly, is being required. Because the omnivore’s openness is not openness. It is the most demanding entry exam the culture has ever set.

The finding arrived in 1996 with an unglamorous title. Richard Peterson and Roger Kern, analysing American survey data on musical taste, showed that high-status respondents were abandoning exclusive attachment to highbrow forms.

The prestigious person of the mid-century, the one who signalled through opera and a pointed ignorance of everything else, was being replaced by someone with range: classical and country, jazz and rock, the canon and its opposite. They called the new figure the omnivore, and the label stuck because everyone recognised the person immediately.

What is often missed about the omnivore thesis is that Peterson and Kern never claimed hierarchy had dissolved. They claimed it had relocated. The snob distinguished himself through what he consumed. The omnivore distinguishes himself through how: with range, with framing, with the ability to move between registers and explain each one in the language of the others. Mike Savage and colleagues, mapping British cultural life two decades later, found the same structure and named its currency emerging cultural capital, the fluency in contemporary and popular forms that now sorts people just as efficiently as Beethoven ever did.

The practical consequence is visible in a phrase that quietly died sometime in the last fifteen years: the guilty pleasure. Nobody with cultural capital feels guilt anymore, because guilt implied a hierarchy you could sin against. The omnivore does not sin. The omnivore contextualises. Trash television becomes an interest in narrative economy. Mall food becomes vernacular foodways. A boy band becomes a case study in the pop machine. There is no object the omnivore cannot hold, provided it is held at the correct angle.

And that is the tell. The exclusion did not disappear. It moved from objects to modes. You can now like anything. What you cannot do is like it the wrong way: earnestly, helplessly, without distance, the way the people it was made for like it. The reality show at the fair dinner was admissible because the collector held it like an object. The person who simply loves the show, who cried at the finale and owns the merchandise without irony, still fails the exam, and fails it harder than ever, because now the failure cannot even name itself. Under the old snobbery you at least knew you were being excluded. The omnivore smiles, agrees the show is fantastic, and files you precisely.

There is one asterisk, and it is the most revealing data point in the entire omnivore literature. In 1996, the same year as Peterson and Kern, the sociologist Bethany Bryson published a study with a title that does most of the work: “Anything But Heavy Metal.” Examining what tolerant, educated Americans actually disliked, she found their openness had a floor, and the floor was not random. The genres the omnivores still rejected, heavy metal, rap, country and gospel in her data, were precisely the genres most strongly associated with the least-educated audiences. Tolerance itself was patterned by class.

The omnivore does not refuse low culture. The omnivore refuses the unconverted culture of the poor, the forms that have not yet been carried through the treaty, and the refusal is experienced not as snobbery but as a matter of quality, which is what makes it invulnerable. Rap has since been admitted, laundered through exactly the framing apparatus this essay describes. Something else now occupies the floor. Something always does. Range is the new snobbery. It just has better manners.

Below the line for paid subscribers: the forgotten history that explains everything, including the decades when Shakespeare was popular entertainment and the essay that wrote the omnivore’s training manual in 1964. The museum show that tried the high/low collapse too early and got savaged for it. How the art market then perfected the move, from Murakami x Vuitton to the sneaker show, and who takes the margin. Why algorithmic flattening made human curation a luxury good. And the strangest development of 2026: Silicon Valley’s sudden conversion to the gospel of taste, what Paul Graham and OpenAI’s president got right, what they are selling, and why the art world should feel less flattered than observed.