Gloriously gilded when they were first installed, a patina of soot and other pollutants was allowed to build up, and in the 1770s a layer of brown varnish was applied to conform to contemporary tastes of what antique bronze should look like.
He sets before us T. S. Eliot living in a condition of permanent exile, Wallace Stevens in his old age dwelling poetically in Connecticut, and author/critic William Empson, whose singular career was marked by both the pleasure of the text and the delight in conceptual issues that characterizes so much of the contemporary taste for theory.
The author makes enjoyable sport of the contemporary taste for porno-chic transgression, but, in repeatedly halting the narrative to liken his characters' callow problems, hesitancies, and dilemmas to episodes in the lives of Stalin, Mao, and Vaclav Havel, he sacrifices narrative engagement to the display of his own virtuosity.
What greets visitors is a recreation of an overt display of princely wealth and cultural discernment, much influenced by the contemporary taste for the high baroque.
This month, New York welcomes Frieze New York, the eagerly anticipated new subsidiary of the thorough-goingly hip Frieze London, a bellwether of contemporary taste that was born of the art magazine Frieze, in 2003.
This is not a purist's objection but simply a matter of contemporary taste: large ensemble performances of this music, conducted from the podium, are old-fashioned.
The stark simplicity of his furniture designs, in particular, appealed to contemporary taste, and reproductions of Mackintosh chairs and settees began to be manufactured.
In fact, it's a thoroughly modern New York institution intended to usher in the turn of the next century by catering to every contemporary taste, and one of those tastes just happens to be for classic bistro cooking.
JUST as William Christie has revitalized the French Baroque and brought it back into the mainstream of contemporary taste, Valery Gergiev has performed a similar act of reclamation over the last decade and more for Russian operas and, to a lesser but significant extent, Russian symphonic music.
