On the necessity, pursuit, and defence of taste

I’m thinking about taste because I’m skim-reading a book on customer experience. Business books aren’t my usual thing and this is confirming my prejudice, but hey, sometimes you have to background read. Anyway, I’m thinking about taste because the author - a self-styled C-suite whisperer -  writes as if they are talking to a child or on some morning TV show (though there’s not much of a difference between the two). It’s lecturing me about creating delightful experiences but the megaphone language is so lumpen and incessantly ALL CAPS in tone that it’s doing my head it. I’m thinking about taste because the supposed best-in-class positioning done for some Fortune 500 company reaches for truly parody-levels of corporate vacuousness.  And I’m thinking about taste because this thing is littered with give-a-shit ‘graphics’ that look they were created on a beta version of Powerpoint the day before the book went to print. I’m thinking about taste because honestly the author has no fucking idea what it is. But then, do any of us really know what taste is? What do we talk about when we talk about taste? 

Funny word, taste. Like Schrodinger’s cat it seems to exist in two states at the same time.  It carries a whiff of imperious elitism, infatuated with its own sense of objectivity and ethical superiority. Clutching its pre-approved list of cutural arfeacts, it sneers and tuts at those of us not blessed with such a finely-tuned appreciation of what is good and what is not good. Yet at the same time the idea of taste these days comes with an air of strident anti-elitism. Personal preference, it wants us to believe, is superior to judgements of quality. Who’s to say one is not permitted to prefer Banksy to Picasso? Or believe that Game of Thrones is superior to Hamlet? Every preference and prediliction is valid, and how dare anyone try and legislate otherwise. 

Funny word, taste. And it’s a relatively new one - it wasn’t until the eighteenth century “taste” had evolved from its narrow foody meaning and was being commonly used to denote discernment. Ah yes, discernment.  Here one really does have to turn to Susan Sontag’s seminal essay from 1965 entitled ‘On Style’. Sontag challenged the conventional wisdom that taste is merely a matter of personal preference, arguing instead that it constitutes a fundamental framework through which we engage with reality. "Taste," she wrote, "governs every free – as opposed to rote – human response. Nothing is more decisive.” 

Sontag’s claim for the decisiveness of taste in turn finds echo in the conversation between Anderson Cooper and Rick Rubin for 60-Minutes. Anderson asked Rubin what he was being being paid for if as Rubin acknowledged, he played no instruments, didn’t know how to soundboard, and had no technical ability. Rubin was clear where his value lay: “The confidence that I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel has proven helpful for artists.”

Taste then isn’t merely about unaccountable subjective preference. Taste involves making judgments about quality - which is why it should matter a very great deal to marketers, brand-builders, and communicators. On the exercise of judgement, Professor Paul Lukacs of Loyola University Maryland provides some quite excellent clarity. Luckas’ perspective is particuarly interesting because for some twenty years he’s worked simultaneously as both a professor of English and a professional wine writer  - “two jobs that are at heart about taste” as he says. Writing for the American Scholar, Lukacs argues that to be able to judge something’s quality (rather than merely react to it)  it must be contextualised :

“An object’s very status as something aesthetic comes from how it is perceived and hence judged. And how it is perceived depends in turn on the culture in which the judgment is made. As the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu notes, ‘A work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded.’ Much the same applies to a dish or a wine. Without the cultural competence to know both what the object should taste like and why it might be valued, a critic is incapable of appreciating anything more than a momentary subjective response to it.”

In other words, whatever we are judging cannot be judged in isolation and without placing it into some kind of broader context. That said, Luckas is sensitive to the fact that which critera to apply is complex: “A poem or novel or play may be judged in many ways, using many measures. To grant that value is not an inherent property of the object being valued is to also grant that no single standard is inherently superior to the others.” Knowing the broader context and having an awareness of those differing criteria is the source of that cultural competence.

So how are we to cultivate our cultural competence such that we may be able to judge quality, and be discriminating and decisive in our judgements? The glib and easy answer is to consume widely. To develop a  sustained engagement with art and ideas. Or wine or food or cinema or poetry or design or fashion or furniture… The slightly less glib and easy answer is to consume ‘weirdly’. Though personally I hate the performative connotations of this advice. So back to the question - how are we to cultivate our cultural competence? I begin to wonder if the real question should be - can we cultivate our own cultural competence at all? Or more bluntly, do we have any hope of cultivating our own cultural competence?

When I first moved to New York I lived just a few blocks from Times Square. Trust me, I upgraded my zip code as quickly as I could but during those first wintry months I’d take advantage of a city that really didn’t sleep and in the late night hours browse the acres of CDs in what was then the Virgin Megastore. I had grown up with classical music and knew almost new nothing about rock or pop or hiphop, so once a week I’d pick a few CDs based purely on their album art (that’s your cultural carbon dating right there) and the artist’s name. I chose on aesthetic vibe, man. Jay-Z now rubs shoulders with my beloved Sibelius in my collection of sounds. I wasn’t nudged or influenced. Nor was I told that people who bought This also bought That, or that I would like this because it shared the same genre, tempo, or sonic footprint with something I had listened to last week. And thus my palette and appreciation of hitherto unfamiliar things grew just a bit.

But now? How much of what we consume has really been actively chosen by us? How much of what we love really came into our lives through pure serendipity? How much of our portfolio of preferences was not shaped by us, through the exercise of our own selection and discrimination? How much are we consuming and how much are we simply being fed? How much of what we think we choose has been pre-filtered and pre-selected by invisible, non-human data engines sorting, matching, inferring, and correlating to serve us what people like us or people who liked what we liked are probably going to like?

Once upon a time we could look to critics to expand our horizons, introduce us to the new and unfamiliar, put cultural artefacts into a bigger broader context, and help us understand why they mattered. In ‘A Critic’s Manifesto’ written for the New Yorker, Daniel Mendelsohn articulates beautifully the true role and value of the critic:

“By dramatizing their own thinking on the page, by revealing the basis of their judgments and letting you glimpse the mechanisms by which they exercised their (individual, personal, quirky) taste, all these critics were, necessarily, implying that you could arrive at your own, quite different judgments - that a given work could operate on your own sensibility in a different way. What I was really learning from those critics each week was how to think. How to think (we use the term so often that we barely realize what we’re saying) critically - which is to say, how to think like a critic, how to judge things for myself. To think is to make judgments based on knowledge: period.”

Mendelsohn is clear that the popular wisdom is total fallacy - everyone is not a critic: “People who have strong reactions to a work - and most of us do - but don’t possess the wider erudition that can give an opinion heft, are not critics. (This is why a great deal of online reviewing by readers isn’t criticism proper.) Nor are those who have tremendous erudition but lack the taste or temperament that could give their judgment authority in the eyes of other people, people who are not experts. (This is why so many academic scholars are no good at reviewing for mainstream audiences.)”

So where those true, generous, informed critics?  The ones who take the job as Mendelsohn defines it, seriously - “to mediate intelligently and stylishly between a work and its audience; to educate and edify in an engaging and, preferably, entertaining way”. In her quite superb essay ‘The Rise of the TikTok Oracle’, Nikita Walia has argued that cultural criticism has given way to cultural hot-taking: 

“Digital criticism turns participants into content creators first and intellectuals second. The pressure to produce, react, and maintain visibility dictates how critique is conducted. Traditional criticism involved research, revision, and discourse; today, the model rewards speed, surface-level engagement, and hot takes… The incentive structure of digital platforms rewards speed, virality, and digestibility over substance. This shift turns analysis into a product, shaped by algorithmic pressures rather than intellectual pursuit. This transformation means that critique is often no longer created for intellectual or artistic exploration but as a means to an end: building personal brands, securing monetization opportunities, and ensuring continued audience growth.”

What then, are we to do? For if taste is a fundamental way of organizing and making sense of experience and choosing what is valuable, then outsourcing our taste to algorithms means outsourcing our very capacity for meaningful engagement with reality. I wonder if there are three strategies to pursue.

First, it strikes me that the first is to try and seek out human recommendation engines. So perhaps we should visit algorithm-free zones like secondhand bookshops. Or watch for what the self-taught, self-directed obsessives in our lives are exploring and listening to. Gareth Kay has opened my mind and ears and led me to new musical pastures that I never knew existed. That kind of stuff.

Second, we’d do well to take the time to seek out those few generous souls who offer more than self-promoting hot takes, but who see their role as being to unpick, understand, and contextualise cultural artefacts. I think here of how much I have learnt about fashion and luxury from the writings of James Denman.

Finally, we should consider developing deep domain knowledge. After all, if one wants to be able to make discriminating judgements about wines, no potpourri of random pop culture references is going to help. So perhaps we could seek out the true lineage of what appears to be a hot, totally new cultural artefact. Or perhaps (depending on our area of focus and practice) we should devote ourselves to becoming a student of the entire history and evolution of one cultural artefact. If we’re in the persuasion/narrative/story business we might study the history and evolution of state-sponsored propaganda. If we’re into writing we might devote an entire year to only reading stuff that’s good enough to still be in print after a hundred years or more. Or we might take Joseph Brodksy’s advice and read poetry so that we gain “new associative chains”.

But I hate these kinds of oven-ready lists. We could of course consider simply ripping out the algorithmic tendrils from our brain stems. But the loss would surely be as great as the gain. So perhaps we just need to be more vigilant. Perhaps at the end of the day the pursuit and defence of taste comes down to the an appreciation that ‘mindful consumption’ is a broader category than we might assume and includes more than just stuff we put in our mouths.