Are You A Cultural Omnivore If You Take Very Careful Bites?

Here is an interesting insight from Stanford University Graduate School of Business (h/t Marginal Revolution blog). According to some latest research, cultural omnivores may be as rigid in their thinking as those they disdain as monoculturalists. (Though I guess they don’t use that term.)

That is, those dubbed “cultural omnivores” — because they eat Thai for lunch, play bocce ball after work, and stream a French film that night — are the very ones opposed to mixing it up. No hummus on their hot dogs, forget about spaghetti Westerns, and do not mention Switched-On Bach. Those offerings are not considered culturally authentic. They are a hodgepodge to which these folks would likely wrinkle their collective noses — as they did in 1968 when Wendy (nee’ Walter) Carlos electrified J.S. Bach. Today’s cultural elites approve only if the experience is authentic, which means eating pigs’ feet at a Texas barbecue passes the test and slathering a taco with tahini does not.

[…]

Today, a higher status accrues to those who are perceived as open to new experiences, and those who oppose experimentation are dismissed as narrow-minded monoculturists, or worse, rednecks, Goldberg notes. Therefore, the elites resist anything that undermines their identities as social and cultural leaders, and that means they are more likely to maintain boundaries.

So I guess the way to read that is that today’s snobs are just snobby about a wider range of things?

While there are probably boundaries that cultural omnivores maintain, I suspect it isn’t as simple an example of hummus on hot dogs. My guess is that Korean Taco food trucks are acceptable to a wide range of cultural omnivores even though on paper the concept is as strange as hummus on hot dogs.

The article does suggest that there is a small segment of people who are open to change so perhaps they normalize things like food trucks for the wide range of omnivores.

If this research is accurate, the larger question this raises for me is what constitutes an “authentic experience” for cultural omnivores? Recent research cites finding that people want to have an authentic creative/artistic experience.

In the context of the Stanford piece, I become a little more concerned that perception of what an authentic experience is may not match the reality of an authentic experience. (And not only in respect to silly manifestations of preconceived notions of authenticity.)

When a performing arts group presents a chamber music concert in an edgy, new, boundary breaking format, do the musicians need to be conservatory trained or will the music ensemble from the local community college be acceptable?

If you say the former, why does an unorthodox approach require such a high level of training in order to be deemed acceptable? If the effort fails (succeeds), will you be more satisfied with the experience knowing the performers were highly trained?

I do think it is important that people who invest time and study to render an authentic experience of a certain genre or culture be in a position to delineate themselves from people providing a superficial representation of those things and labeling it authentic. Though the discussion of who gets to call themselves authentic practitioners is an entirely different can of worms, especially in regard to cultural and ethnic practice.

But as I am reading the Stanford article, it almost sounds as if it could be just as problematic trying to provide an acceptable authentic experience to people who describe themselves as cultural omnivores as it is to those who consider themselves to be purists of a certain genre of artistic expression.

New audiences may feel the experience is just as elitist when they overhear others expressing disdain for a show they liked as they would when people glared at them for clapping between movements of a musical work.

The Stanford article says Big Data will provide needed guidance, but I am not sure how many arts organizations will have the resources to access and interpret the data effectively. (I would happily be wrong if in 5 years there was an app for that.)

About Joe Patti

I have been writing Butts in the Seats (BitS) on topics of arts and cultural administration since 2004 (yikes!). Given the ever evolving concerns facing the sector, I have yet to exhaust the available subject matter. In addition to BitS, I am a founding contributor to the ArtsHacker (artshacker.com) website where I focus on topics related to boards, law, governance, policy and practice.

I am also an evangelist for the effort to Build Public Will For Arts and Culture being helmed by Arts Midwest and the Metropolitan Group. (http://www.creatingconnection.org/about/)

My most recent role was as Executive Director of the Grand Opera House in Macon, GA.

Among the things I am most proud are having produced an opera in the Hawaiian language and a dance drama about Hawaii's snow goddess Poli'ahu while working as a Theater Manager in Hawaii. Though there are many more highlights than there is space here to list.

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1 thought on “Are You A Cultural Omnivore If You Take Very Careful Bites?”

  1. I can’t help but feel this study parallels the findings in Dan Kahan’s 2012 paper on ‘Ideology, motivated reasoning, and cognitive reflection’ where “subjects who scored highest in cognitive reflection were the most likely to display ideologically motivated cognition.” (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2182588) The abstract phrases it this way:

    “Social psychologists have identified various plausible sources of ideological polarization over climate change, gun violence, national security, and like societal risks. This paper describes a study of three of them: the predominance of heuristic-driven information processing by members of the public; ideologically motivated cognition; and personality-trait correlates of political conservativism. The results of the study suggest reason to doubt two common surmises about how these dynamics interact. First, the study presents both observational and experimental data inconsistent with the hypothesis that political conservatism is distinctively associated with closed-mindedness: conservatives did no better or worse than liberals on an objective measure of cognitive reflection; and more importantly, both demonstrated the same unconscious tendency to fit assessments of empirical evidence to their ideological predispositions. Second, the study suggests that this form of bias is not a consequence of overreliance on heuristic or intuitive forms of reasoning; on the contrary, subjects who scored highest in cognitive reflection were the most likely to display ideologically motivated cognition. These findings corroborated the hypotheses of a third theory, which identifies motivated cognition as a form of information processing that rationally promotes individuals’ interests in forming and maintaining beliefs that signify their loyalty to important affinity groups. The paper discusses the normative significance of these findings, including the need to develop science communication strategies that shield policy-relevant facts from the influences that turn them into divisive symbols of identity.”

    I think you are right to question the role an nature of ‘authenticity’, because this is a fundamental value in the context of group affiliations. If authenticity can be mapped on a graph with inauthenticity and fraudulence on the opposite extreme I wonder how closely it would match a similar graph between infexibility and flexibility. In other words, the more one values authenticity the more inflexible one may be, and the less one values it the more flexible…… So a third graph might be the strength of group affiliation to a lack of affiliation. The more we think of ourselves in terms of specific identifying criteria the less room we give ourselves outside that self definition. And perhaps therefor the more we may exhibit cognitive reflection the more ideologically driven things tend to be. Lots of dots to connect, but it seems to make sense. The psychological need for authenticity is not a universal predisposition but characteristic of a specific mindset. If it matters to be authentic it also matters what one thinks of oneself pursuing it.

    Of course the opposite of the pursuit of authenticity would be the organic curiosity of taking the world as it is. There is no prescriptive bias just an inquisitive grappling with the whatever the world presents, even the search for newness. Less an imposition of values than a discovery of values. Interesting to think that the arts express both these motivations, both call for group affiliations and genre loyalties and for embracing innovation and the avant garde. And authenticity struggles where the ground is continually being broken. Until, of course, breaking it in this particular way becomes the new norm and itself grounds for authenticity…… Which also means that given enough time and the right circumstances ANYTHING can be ‘authentic’ (Which also reminds me of Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality).

    Those are my thoughts at least 🙂

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