The answer to this question can be found in the most popular of all the paintings featured in the #whichodalisque series, discussed in BEAUTY TIPS FOR BRAINY GIRLS at the link below.

https://twitter.com/JohnSanilac/status/1241156498153025536 https://twitter.com/annakhachiyan/status/1248441885615689729

The least popular painting is also relevant evidence.

I also wrote about these two paintings in the following thread:

https://twitter.com/JohnSanilac/status/1243671908513546240

I'd love to attract a middlebrow audience and explode into a six digit follower count for the sake of promoting my art; but for better or worse my followers are impressively high brow, as you can see from the wonderful comments they occasionally leave amongst my humble threads!

Too often appeals to "good taste" are virtue signalling that doesn't match reality.

These same appeals to taste used to place abstract expressionism above the Pre-Raphaelites, and academic serialist composers above the Rolling Stones.

As my dear followers well know, I like to mix honesty with exaggeration, comedy, and parody on this account. But I just can't stand this kind of appeal to "good taste." It's ultimately dishonest and anti-aesthetic.

That's why I inform my dear female readers, the brainy girls who would like to defeat their tiny-craniumed competitors, that cosmetic surgery, when well chosen, can be very effective, though it's hardly obligatory. https://twitter.com/JohnSanilac/status/1241156498153025536

Those who deny that cosmetic surgery (or makeup!) can be effective are putting their need to have "respectable seeming" taste above their ability to actually appreciate aesthetics.

This attitude is deadly to the arts, and helped destroy traditional art in the mid 20th century.

A translation of "good taste" from New Yorkais to English might be "rejection of things that obviously taste good in order to feign appreciation for things that actually taste kind of yucky but are somehow associated with high social class."

(When I read the opening retweet I thought to myself "that sounds like something a New York woman from a Woody Allen movie would say, and sure enough...)

By showing appreciation for something that seems yucky and scoffing at something that obviously tastes good, you get ahead in an intellectual signalling game--as if to say, "you less refined people are too dumb to even understand the language this poetry is written in--but I do!"

This works best if the poetry is total nonsense; then no one can one-up you.

And that, in a nutshell, is the story of how art was destroyed in the 20th century.

It's partly to thumb my nose at this kind of attitude that I put MSG on my beef.

Completely unnecessary of course, but why not artificially gild the lily to have a laugh at the posturing purists??

Just beef and MSG. A very pure diet!

But that's another story.

As a counterweight to "good taste" posturing, I think it's beneficial to indulge in things that you enjoy, but which seem to be definitely "in bad taste." This helps you to exit the intellectual signalling game even if you're surrounded by it (say, in academia, or Manhattan).

Incidentally, the odalisque at the top, the most popular on this site, isn't my personal favorite.

Yet I can't help but notice that the most popular painting in over 100 days of #whichodalisque... is also the ONLY one with cosmetic surgery.