Cultural policy and the meaning of modern and post‐modern taste, with concluding remarks on the case of Sweden

Abstract

The article scrutinizes how the relationship between the reformation of taste, descending from the middle of the nineteenth century, and the modern and post‐modern art revolutions in the twentieth century has affected cultural policy. By the dynamics and life‐cycles, but also enduring traits of these reform and art movements, and especially after the post‐modern art revolution and the coinciding decline of the Great Reformation of Taste, taste has become a bypassed and arduous subject in cultural policy, as can be discerned in the case of Sweden, which is highlighted in the last part of the article. Furthermore, without the solid and unanimous ambitions to reform taste, which the Great Reformation of Taste embodied up until the 1950s and 1960s, cultural policy makers can no longer rely on – but also find themselves more independent of – civil enterprises to reform taste. One plausible outcome of this is that cultural policies, more or less unintentionally, will enhance the subjectivization and privatization of taste.