As You Like It

Everyone knows it exists. Everyone thinks they possess it. Yet no one has ever seen it: taste, our sense of beauty, our antenna for happiness and the tactile sense of our desires. Ulrich Raulff explores this ability to appreciate beauty, and he takes us on a materialistic journey through a vanity fair, a parade of likes from Meissen to Mac and from Diderot's dressing gown to Victoria's Secret. The trail leads to Winckelmann's Rome and Jeerson's Washington, to Paris around 1800, to Victorian England, and right up to our own time of Airbnb and food as an 'experience.'

Great tastemakers from Madame Pompadour to Steve Jobs welcome us as portal figures at the beginning of new taste eras. But the history of taste and its transformations is not just a history of aesthetic codes. It is also the story of a European invention, of raids, of the suering of others and of our own historical guilt. And it is even more than that: it reveals an immense cultural achievement, a human capacity and a wealth of sensations helping us to perceive difference and transform it into culture.