Cherene Sherrard-Johnson explores the social and private spaces of the New Negro movement to delineate the subjective but recognizable element of taste. The chapter reads spaces such as the salon, the parlor, and the cabaret in order to define the aesthetic considerations of the period. The interior design of such locales offers a new way of understanding the period outside of the Black/white binary and simplistic assumptions about the black bourgeoisie. Readers can discern a great deal about New Negro style by focusing on "the spatially attentive narratives of the storied interiors of the Harlem Renaissance." Reading Edward Christopher Williams’s The Letters of Davy Carr, Jean Toomer’s play Natalie Mann, as well as descriptions of important salon spaces such as Villa Lewaro, Sherrard-Johnson analyzes how the objects and accoutrements within certain spaces reflect the aesthetic debates of the New Negro period.

Classicism and Romanticism are frequently used as a shorthand to designate the stylistic and aesthetic shifts that occurred as the eighteenth gave way to the nineteenth century. However, this neat picture blurs as one delves into the subject. Not only did Romantic musicians learn the foundations of harmony, phrasing, and texture from their predecessors, but many of the styles of innocent naïveté or exuberant striving beloved by Romantics emerged from specific eighteenth-century genre contexts, including opera, the fantasy, folk song, and church music. Change did happen, of course. Not only did the ethical concerns of the eighteenth century turn towards metaphysical ones in the nineteenth, but the social and institutional divides that had long separated musicians and writers began to lessen. As a result, musicians and writers learned to admire and emulate what each believed the other excelled at.