If our media bothered to check, it’d find enough research that shows that it’s not just the urban rich who find culture and entertainment an essential expenditure- the rural poor do allocate a certain portion of their incomes towards such needs. Anindita Ghose questions the presumptions underlying the media outrage over Vogue magazine using rural women to model high fashion clothing:

I wonder how much of the outrage stems from a cultural and racial perspective. Is it because the people in these pictures look different or are dressed differently that they elicit more pity than an underage Russian model exploited in the high fashion circuit? Would it have been charming if it used Italian farmers instead? If exploitation of the poor, or the less unfortunate is an issue, I don’t see how the two are any different. Purely at the psychological level in which they respond to art, it seems like all the “utterly shocked” critics are unknowingly still harbouring Hume’s elitist ideas from Of the Standard of Taste (1757). Is public taste still unable to decode the aesthetic and the “peasant” when they come together?