Who Makes Public Taste In Art?

“Once, a museum, a Hollywood studio, a book publisher or an orchestra shaped public conversation about the arts. Today, they respond. Where once there was tastemaking by decree, now there are trends arrived at by consensus. As ’50s bohemia morphed into ’60s counterculture and then into the rapid absorption by the mainstream of every hot fringe trend, the public challenged the establishment’s role in defining quality. In the age of podcasting, peer-to-peer file-sharing and pocket camcorders, everybody’s a curator, a critic and a producer, all at the same time.”