Life & Wisdom Quote by Manuel Puig

Bad taste, in Puig's hands, isn't a confession; it's a crowbar. He treats "bad taste" as a social accusation disguised as an aesthetic judgment, a way institutions and peers police what kinds of pleasure are allowed to count as culture. The phrase "soi-disant" is doing quiet damage here: self-styled, allegedly, the whole category is already suspect. "Bad taste" isn't an objective stain; it's a label applied by people with enough authority to make their preferences feel like natural law.

Puig came up writing from Argentina, far from the metropolitan centers that certify "serious" art, and he built his fiction out of the stuff critics loved to sneer at: melodrama, Hollywood, radio serials, romance, gossip, the overheard voices of ordinary life. In novels like Kiss of the Spider Woman, those materials aren't decorative; they're a politics of attention. Taking kitsch seriously becomes a way to take marginalized people seriously, especially the queer, the poor, the provincial, the exiled - the kinds of audiences whose tastes are routinely treated as evidence against them.

The line about "special cultural zones" hints at contraband: pockets of experience that respectable culture cordons off. Fear is the real antagonist. Puig suggests that self-censorship - the dread of looking tacky, sentimental, unserious - keeps artists and readers from entering the places where desire, fantasy, and identity actually get negotiated. His intent is permission-giving, but also accusatory: if you won't risk bad taste, you're probably protecting your status, not your art.