Understanding cultural taste : sensation, skill and sensibility

Understanding Cultural Taste updates and critiques established theoretical and empirical accounts of cultural taste. It considers the roles of the cultural industries and cultural policies in shaping tastes and the significance of the technologies through which cultural goods are produced and circulated. Taking a historical and theoretical perspective which complicates an understanding of taste as a matter of personal preference or a crude weapon in social struggles, the book argues that taste remains a key concept for the sociology of culture, media and cultural studies, cultural policy studies and their applied sub-disciplines. Such disciplines have come to appreciate the relation between taste and individual or group identities but have been less attentive to other social and political dimensions of this important component of cultural life.