“When you say about a painting, a music video, or a pair of jeans, ‘I like this,’ you make some sort of judgment, but it’s not a judgment of quality. In Nobrow, judgments about which brand of jeans to wear are more like judgments of identity than quality. These judgments do not depend on knowledge of the canon, tradition, history, or some shared set-up standards about what constitutes ‘good taste’ to give them weight; this kind of taste is more like appetite than disinterested judgment. Taste is the act of making the thing part of your identity . . . You construct an identity out of a collective of these investments, mixed up in such a way that it makes you seem unique (this is your art) . . . You’re a snowboarder who listens to classical music, drinks Coke, and loves Quentin Tarantino; you’re a preppy who likes rap; you’re a chop-socky B-movie fan who prefers Frusen Gladje to Haagen-Dazs, or a World Cup soccer fan who wears FUBU and likes opera.” [John Seabrook, Nobrow (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), pp. 170-2].
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