What is everyone talking about this week: What does snobbery look like now?
If the snobs of yore saw popularity as inimical to artistic merit, today's snobs tend to take more readily to success.
When David Hockney died three weeks ago, my mind travelled back to the worst date of my entire life. It was shortly after starting this job and my would-be suitor said that he hated Hockney because he appealed to the lowest common denominator. Against this incident, our enduring grief for the late artist speaks to a culture that seems to have abandoned old-school notions of snobbery. People have learnt to appreciate what the classic snob could never: that joy can beget great art, just as more intentionally creative efforts can lead to dismal results.
My date, 15 years my senior, made the claim that great art should be rooted in pain — but he obviously hadn’t seen ABBA Voyage or listened to Caroline Polachek. Snobbery has always been a slippery concept: a designation that applies to both the guardians of civility and their vulgar imitators (cue Mrs Bennet). Today’s arbiters of taste are more discerning. They realise that having fun with one’s chosen art form is as, if not more, expressive than those who treat art as religion. As for making money from it, that’s a happy bonus. Good art is no longer good because it ticks this or that box, but because it excels at ticking whatever box it has set out to excel in.
Pop music provides the clearest example of this shift: it used to be seen as frivolous, but is now the music critic’s favourite genre. Nearly all of last year’s best-album lists were topped by Rosalía’s Lux, a pop record that drew on classical music and the lives of Catholic saints. Being indelibly tied to consumerism and a society that weighs success in numbers, it has evolved to offer some of the sharpest commentary on contemporary life. The same is true of hit television shows such as The White Lotus, which hold a mirror up to the very culture they satirise through gloss, fancy and artifice.
At Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, the opera’s ‘ultras’ — hardcore fans who occupy the (cheaper) Upper Gallery seats — are known for making and breaking productions through cheers and jeers. As of last week, they are also raining down flyers onto those in the stalls, lamenting a hike in seat prices that would keep out poorer, but sharper listeners such as themselves. I for one applaud them. Snobbery has always been the backbone of a healthy artistic culture (and, for that matter, of a healthy intellectual culture: what is a social-media ban for the under-16s, if not a state-sanctioned attempt to stop the brainrot?). Only, its face is changing. Word on the block says that is for the better.
This feature originally appeared in the June 24, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.
