Sense @ Sensibility

I left my contrastive dictionary of proverbs in Zagreb, so I am now not sure whether English has an equivalent of the cat liking caresses "but down its hair".
My teacher in a course on postmodernism often repeats the fact of the age - apparently when Romans used "there's no arguing about taste" what they meant was - "Naturally. Because we all know what good taste is. It's the taste of the few, who have seen the world." Today it's mostly taken to imply the democratic levelling of the thing.
There is actually a book by a Spaniard on the topic. "The Revolt of the Masses" was written sometime around 1920s. (I am a prole child; the richest felt the phenomenon first.)
I have no real worries about the fate of art but I have also often voiced my complaint how everything seems to boil down to joke nowadays. An installation can be a more or less clever joke, true, but most often than not it is to be joked with.
Here's mine: an entangled piece of long rope. I call it "Culture".