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From the start of her superstardom, Celine Dion's music had struck me as bland monotony raised to a pitch of obnoxious bombast - R&B with the sex and slyness surgically removed, French chanson severed from its wit and soul - and her repertoire as Oprah Winfrey - approved chicken soup for the consumerist soul, a never-ending crescendo of personal affirmation deaf to social conflict and context. In celebrity terms, she was another dull Canadian goody-goody. She could barely muster up a decent personal scandal, aside from the pre-existing squick-out of her marriage to the twice-her-age Svengali who began managing her when she was 12.

As far as I knew, I had never even met anybody who liked Celine Dion. Certainly not many other music critics.

But they were certainly out there. Dion has sold nearly 200 million albums, not counting the Titanic soundtrack. She has five recordings in the Recording Industry Association of America's list of the Top 100 albums by sales, making her the 23rd-best-selling pop act of all time. Globally she is the most successful French-language singer ever and could be the bestselling female singer. For four years her legions have tithed their salaries to fly to Las Vegas for her nightly revue, A New Day, in the custom-built Colosseum theatre at Caesars Palace, which wraps up at the end of 2007. She is beloved by people from Idaho to Iraq, who trade news and debate favourites on Internet message boards like any other group of fans. They cook, work out and date to her music, and when weightier events come, her songs are there, for first dances at weddings and processions at funerals.

When the singer herself is asked if her critics bother her, she answers as she did to Elle magazine in a 2007 interview: "We've been sold out for four years. The audience is my answer."

Which doesn't mean you have to admire her. Unless maybe it does. Certainly a generation of pop critics that's been determined to swear off elitist bias does seem called to account for the immense international popularity of someone we've designated so devoid of appeal.

Those who find Dion tacky, gauche, kitschy or, as they say in Quebec, kétaine - must be overlooking something, maybe beginning with why we have those sorts of labels. If "guilty pleasures" in pop music are out of date, perhaps the time has come to conceive of a guilty displeasure.

Musical subcultures exist because our guts tell us certain kinds of music are for certain kinds of people. We are attracted to a song's beat, its edge, its warmth, its idiosyncrasy, the singer's je ne sais quoi; we check out the music our friends or cultural guides commend. But it's hard not to notice how those processes reflect and contribute to self-definition, how often persona and musical taste happen to jibe. It's most blatant in the identity war that is high school, but music never stops being a badge of recognition. And in the offhand rhetoric of dismissal - "teenybopper pap," "only hippies like that band," "sounds like music for date rapists" - we bar the doors of the clubs we don't want to claim us as members. Psychoanalysis would say our aversions can tell us more than our conscious desires about what we are, unwillingly, drawn to. What unpleasant truths might we learn from looking closer at our musical fears and loathings, at what we consider "bad taste"?

And so I had set out on an experiment: It has to do with social affinities and rancours and what art and its appreciation can do to mediate or exacerbate them. Primarily, though, the question is whether anyone's tastes stand on solid ground, starting with mine: If I immersed myself in her music, talked to her fans, researched her influences, the sensibility she expressed - while also studying what scientists, philosophers and other thinkers have to tell us about the origins of artistic taste - perhaps I could find the Dionysian within, my inner Celine Dion fan. And what then?

Either way, where better to look than Las Vegas? So about halfway through the process, I set out on a field trip. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

What I hadn't counted on was Vegas. It was my first visit. I stupidly came alone. If there is a laboratory demonstration of the antagonism between economic and cultural capital, it is Las Vegas, a city of such pure commercialism that money is its entertainment, interrupted occasionally by a show. Nowhere else is it so palpable that art can be simply the green kid stepping in to give a brief break to the main greenback attraction. Alcohol and sex, too, are reduced to lubricants for or aftereffects of finance. In this non-stop carnival of social inversion, only money is purely beautiful, in Immanuel Kant's sense of being an end in itself. Vegas's fabled love of the ersatz, like its mini Eiffel Tower, is money giddily blaspheming culture's sacred icons.

All of which, in the abstract, seems kind of healthy. But in the flesh it depressed the hell out of me. I am averse to gambling. I am entirely too shy to hire prostitutes. In Sin City that leaves a solitary man at loose ends. I wandered in a haze through the gold towers and black pyramids, dancing water fountains, seizure-inducing signage and replicas of landmarks from cities where I'd rather have been, before slouching back to my room each night with a fifth of bourbon to watch pay-per-view. Muttering witticisms to myself got tired fast. I was a stray member of the cultural-capital tribe deported to a gaudy prison colony run by a phalanx of showgirls who held hourly re-education sessions to hammer me into feeling insignificant and micro-penised. In my shrivelled condition, the notion of interviewing people at Caesars seemed as absurd as some peasant dropping in on Versailles in the 1680s to demand the courtiers' opinions of Louis XIV.

And so, a dismal failure at overstepping my own boundaries, I stepped passively into line to make my grudging pilgrimage, to throw myself to the Colosseum's 3-D, full-colour, computer-animated lions.

In the preshow of A New Day, the stage appears to be overhung by a mammoth gilded picture frame, within which is a real-time, live-video projection of us, the audience. As show time nears, the camera zooms in on selected spectators, creating a serial comic pantomime in which we get to catch people catch themselves being caught on camera and flinch in embarrassment or mug for our amusement. First it's three girls in J'ADORE DION T-shirts; then two low-key parents with their daughter (Dad is reading a book and never even notices his 15 seconds); then an impressively tanked pair, the guy's shirt half-unbuttoned and the woman with huge silicon boobs; last, a couple still wearing their wedding outfits.

And at that, the frame, which is merely a computer-generated illusion on North America's largest indoor LED screen, expands and shatters into a thousand shards of glassy light, which all spin tinkling through the air and converge ... on Celine herself, revealed poised atop a sweeping red staircase.

I hardly needed to see the rest of the show. It was a perfect figure of music calling forth, representing, breaking and remaking identities. Celine was offering to reflect us back to ourselves, with all our endearing foibles but larger, fancier, better. She put an 18th-century golden frame around us, the ultimate in egalitarian bling, then shattered our collective self to draw the fragments into her own body, itself little but a container for her voice, its own kind of exquisite antique.

Yet the frame was long out of fashion - no elite connoisseur or curator would fix it to a contemporary picture. And this, I thought, in my cut-price balcony seat, is why Celine winds up mocked, because her efforts at class and taste always go wrong. With her synthesized strings and genuine pearls and her opera-crossover attempts, she aspires to the highbrow culture of a half-century ago. She doesn't pass the retina scan: The real elites now are busy affecting muttonchops and trucker caps and reading about teen pop in The New Yorker.

But the fact is, A New Day, which I'd been dreading as I boarded the plane, was the most fun I had the whole trip. Celine was gawky and funny and, compared to most of Vegas, human-scale. I liked it best when she came downstage, out of the knot of dancers and numbingly literal CGI projections that illustrated every song, to chat a bit stiffly and accept flowers. It was easy then to see that she was Canadian, and we could be un-American and uncool together, along with the tiny Filipino mom who sat beside me whispering, "Wow. Oh wow," and occasionally weeping behind the sunglasses that she wore, sitting in the dark, the whole show.

Her oversized shades reminded me of Phil Spector and the lost Celine recordings he produced, and I started to get sucked in by the music, too. The songs of devotion - If You Asked Me To or Because You Loved Me - began to probe at the open sore of my own recent marital separation, and even coaxed a few tears.

For a few moments, I got it. Of course, then Celine would do something unforgivable, like a duet with an enormous projection of the head of the late Frank Sinatra. Still, I could see the point of her in Vegas, land of ejaculating slot machines and flows of global capital through artificial rivers: As she exclaimed in her infamous Larry King Show interview about poor New Orleans looters, Let them touch those things! And I could answer, Yes, touch me, Celine.

But when I had escaped from Vegastraz, back home in Toronto with her CDs, I couldn't find the feeling again.

Adapted by the author from Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson, published by Continuum Internation al, $13.95 © Carl Wilson

SCENES FROM A LIFE

1. Halfway through what would be a two-year hiatus from her singing career, Dion gave birth to her and René Angélil's only child, René-Charles, on July 25, 2001. His baptism was broadcast live throughout Canada.

2. Dion at the 1998 Academy Awards, wearing a replica of the blue diamond that figured in the hit movie Titanic. Dion's album Let's Talk About Love was released on the same day in 1997 as the soundtrack of the blockbuster motion picture, Titanic. Both albums featured the movie's hit theme song, My Heart Will Go On, which won the Oscar for best original song. It was the second Dion song to win an Academy Award: The title track for the animated Disney movie Beauty and the Beast won best original song in 1992.

3. Dion belts out God Bless America at the start of Super Bowl XXXVII at San Diego's Qualcomm Stadium on Jan. 26, 2003. Two months later, Dion began a four-year commitment to appear five nights a week at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, a 4,000-seat arena designed for her 90-minute show, A New Day.

4. Dion salutes following a performance for hundreds of Air Canada employees during an unveiling of the newly restructured airline in a hangar at Toronto's Pearson Airport in 2004. Air Canada hired Dion as spokesperson following the airline's emergence from bankruptcy.

5. Dion receives a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Jan. 6, 2004.

6. Dion renewed her vows with husband René Angélil in 2000, in a $1.5-million Las Vegas extravaganza that included camels, six Berber tents, jugglers and musicians. The couple was married on Dec. 17, 1994, at Notre Dame Basilica in Montreal.