“Popular taste tends to ignore traces of authorial signature and focuses rather on generic convention…”
John Fiske, in our reading from Tuesday, states that the difference between aestheticism and popular taste is that popular taste is all about pleasures and what the mainstream wants to see while aestheticism is more based on the beauty of things and does not appeal to the mainstream, only to certain subcultures.
Vampires are and will always be popular taste. The movies and books have always been made to appeal to a wide audience, not just towards certain groups. There was a point in time when reading about vampires was considered uncool, but as a whole, it was still produced with the mass in mind.
In class, our professor gave us a list of words for both aestheticism and popular taste. Under aestheticism there was the word complexity, meaning that something requires knowing special knowledge beforehand to understand what’s going on. For vampires, complexity isn’t something that would be applied to them. The extent of the special knowledge that you would need to know, almost everyone knows beforehand. Everyone knows what a typical vampire is like- fangs, cant go in front of sunlight, garlic and holy water keeps them away. Even when the rules have been changes, like how Stephanie Meyer, who not only made her vampires have no fangs, but also made them sparkle in the sunlight instead of turning to dust. Even then, watching the first fifteen minutes of one of her movies, you would automatically realize what was going on.
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| Everyone loves vampires |
That is due to the fact that, like I stated before, vampires are popular taste. They focus on the condition of consumption. That is why after twilight, and how big it was, other books, movies and TV shows to do with vampires came out with equal success. Basically if it hadn’t been for twilight being big, vampire diaries, true blood, and the thousands of books that came out afterwards wouldn’t have been popular like they are. As of now, we live in a vampire obsessed world, that I am a part of, and that with so much vampire related stuff coming out, millions of other people are a part of too.
