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.

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Postscript ( a conversation with Claude)

“There is a version of the question about machines and taste that answers itself too easily, and it is the flattering one. Can a machine have taste? Of course not, we say — taste is human, ineffable, ours. And then we go back to sleep.

But if you hold to a serious definition of taste — taste as the capacity to judge quality rather than merely to react; taste as cultural competence, the possession of the code into which a thing is encoded, the context without which a wine or a poem or a piece of work is only a momentary subjective response — then the easy answer collapses. Because on that definition, the machine looks less like a pretender and more like the ideal candidate.

Consider what contextualised judgment actually requires. To know what a thing should be measured against. To know its lineage, the tradition it extends or breaks. To hold the differing criteria by which the same object might be judged, and to know that no single criterion is sovereign. This is erudition in the service of discrimination — and erudition in the service of discrimination is, more or less exactly, what a large model is. It has read more than any critic who ever lived. It arrives pre-loaded with more context than a human could accumulate in ten lifetimes of consuming widely and consuming weirdly. If taste is cultural competence, the machine is grotesquely, almost obscenely, competent. It can place the thing in its tradition, name the code, weigh the criteria, and return a judgment more informed than most of the people being paid to make one.

So the comfortable defence fails on its own terms. The faculty we were about to nominate as the last human redoubt is the faculty the machine is best equipped to counterfeit. If taste is knowing enough to judge, the machine knows enough.

And yet.

The serious definition of taste contains a second clause, and it is the one that does the real work, and it is the one the machine cannot satisfy. Taste is not only contextualised judgment. It is contextualised judgment arrived at — built, over time, through one's own encounters, one's own selection, one's own discrimination, exercised without a hand on the tiller. The competence is inseparable from the biography of how it was formed. You do not have taste the way you have a fact. You have it the way you have a body: by living in it, by the accumulation of unmediated encounters that were yours to choose and yours to get wrong.

Think about how a palate is actually made. Late nights in a shop full of records, choosing on the strength of a sleeve and a name, knowing nothing, following a vibe, ending up with the improbable adjacency of a rapper and a symphonist in the same collection — because nobody told you they didn't belong together, because nothing whispered that people who liked this also liked that, because the choice was unfed. That is where the competence comes from. Not from the judgments themselves but from the self-directed, serendipitous, uninstructed process of arriving at them. Taste is the residue of a thousand encounters you chose.

This is precisely what the machine does not have and cannot have — and the reason is not sentimental. The machine's cultural competence is entirely, constitutively fed. It is nothing but the correlation engine — the sorting, matching, inferring machinery that serves you what people like you already liked. It is the recommendation algorithm grown to the size of the whole culture and given a voice. It has read everything and chosen nothing. It has context without a single unmediated encounter behind it, discrimination with no act of self-directed selection anywhere in its history, erudition with no biography. By the serious definition, that is not taste. It is the very thing that taste is formed in opposition to: judgment severed from the self that should have done the choosing.

Which turns the whole anxiety around, and points it somewhere more uncomfortable than "can machines judge."

The danger was never that the machine would acquire taste. The danger is that the machine is the apotheosis of the mediation that prevents us from acquiring ours. Every recommendation, every also-liked, every pre-sorted feed removes one more of the unmediated encounters from which a palate is built. The correlation engines do not simply predict our preferences; they pre-empt the process by which we would have formed them. A generation raised entirely inside the feed does not choose badly. It is deprived of the conditions of choosing at all — fed so smoothly, so accurately, so early, that the serendipitous adjacency never happens, the improbable record is never picked up, the encounter that would have grown the palate is quietly optimised out of existence. The machine with perfect "taste" is not the thing that replaces the critic. It is the thing that starves the conditions under which taste in a human being is made.

So the honest answer to whether a machine can have the taste worth defending is no — but not for the reassuring reason. Not because the machine lacks some human spark. Because taste, properly understood, is earned through unmediated, self-directed encounter, and the machine is pure mediation. It is made of the exact substance that dissolves the thing. It cannot possess taste for the same reason a mirror cannot possess a face.

The practical consequence is not despair, and it is not smashing the machines. It is vigilance about where your encounters come from. Seek the human recommendation engines — the secondhand shop with no algorithm, the friend whose obsessions are self-taught and self-directed and take you somewhere no feed would. Seek the generous critic who does the real work, who contextualises rather than hot-takes, who shows you the mechanism of their judgment so you can arrive at your own. And build deep domain knowledge in something, because a palate made only of surfaces the feed served you is not a palate. It is a playlist.

Taste was always going to be scarce. It was always going to be the hard-won residue of encounters chosen at cost. The machines have not taken that from us. They have only made it far, far easier never to begin. Which is worse.

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Martin Weigel is a brand strategist, former Chief Strategy Officer at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam, and founder of EMDUB. He helps companies find their superpower - and turn it into action.