This course offers a brief history of bad taste. Beginning with some foundational arguments about the judgment of taste from the 18th century (by Hume and Kant, among others), we will then move to some late 19th-century arguments about art and culture (by Arnold, Wilde, and Veblen, among others) to establish a frame for exploring a variety of 20th-century case studies in the practice of producing, destroying, and reclaiming aesthetic value. These case studies will include arguments structured by the art/kitsch binary, movements challenging that binary (such as Dada and Pop), and modes of explicitly transcoding taste into symbolic capital (such as Camp and Punk), as into modes of effecting subcultural formation. The course will be particularly concerned with understanding "personal taste" as an intersubjective phenomenon, and it will conclude by asking how or why violations of taste can remain effective once the "anti-aesthetic" achieves familiarity. Major artists will include Duchamp, Oldenberg, Warhol, and John Waters; major critics will include Greenberg, Benjamin, Burger, and Bourdieu; and major writers will include James, Breton, Isherwood, Nathaniel West, Genet, and Burroughs.