The ambience of the estate was maintained by a mixture of contractual
obligation (“no caravans”) and communal taboos (“no net curtains”). Talking to
the residents, I found a genuine community spirit, but I sensed that for all of
the convenience, security and luxury of their lifestyle, true middle-class
status, if they actually wanted it, was beyond an intangible exclusion barrier.
What that divide is made of, I think, is largely culture and education. The
people basking on the sunlit uplands of the chattering classes have either
passed through this miasmic barrier at university, or were born beyond it, where
people just seem to know how to be fully middle class. Crucially, they
understand that despite all the rules about taste that they have picked up by
osmosis – when to wear shorts, what to name one’s child, what to serve at a
kitchen supper – none of them matters; one can flout them all as long as, and
this is paramount, everyone knows you are doing it on purpose. So I can buy a
Porsche and have it gold-plated, but it has to be full of rubbish and dog hair,
and I must NEVER, EVER wash it.
Another driver of taste that I noticed among the upper middle class was the
desire to show the world that one was an upright moral citizen. In the past, a
good burgher might have regularly attended church or done voluntary work; today
they buy organic, recycle, drive an electric car or deny their child television.
This need to pay inconvenient penance to society seems to come partly from
guilt. The liberal, educated middle class have done well, but they must pay with
hard labour on their allotment, or by cycling to work.
Professional aesthetes in deconstructed suits and statement spectacles would
love it if there were strict overarching rules of good taste. I fear they search
in vain. I started my research with a full set of prejudices about the
“inferior” taste of the working class I had left behind. I now find myself
agreeing with the cultural critic Stephen Bayley that good taste is that which
does not alienate your peers. Shared taste helps bind the tribe. It signals to
fellow adherents of a particular subculture that you understand the rules.
Within the group of, say, modified hatchback drivers, there is good and bad
taste in loud cars in much the same way as there is good and bad taste in
installations within the art world. Outsiders may find it baffling or
irritating, but that is of less importance to insiders than impressing one’s
peers.
Grayson Perry’s tapestry series The Vanity of Small Differences is
on show at the RA, London W1, until August 18. The Arts Council Collection tour
of The Vanity of Small Differences starts at Sunderland Museum on June 28.
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