There’s no greater test of a relationship than the first trip to IKEA, so the meme goes. You and your better half wander the aisles and fight about shape, color, size, every piece of décor, a miniature battle in the long war to exit the store with both furnishings and your relationship. But ask yourself: is it better to have a spouse whose taste is different, even bad, or one with no opinions at all?
You might think no taste is best, but actually, someone with bad taste is in a far better position in the long run. (To be clear, by no taste, we mean someone without any preferences, as opposed to bad taste, someone with poor, uninformed or untrained preferences.)
So how could the former be worse than the latter? The answer lies in uncovering the path towards good taste, which we’ll be taking you on today. So read on to discover why bad taste can be a good thing, how tech is encroaching on taste as a concept, and what musicians, radio hosts and programmers can teach you about acquiring good taste.
Our mission here at Letters from the Old World is to share the secrets of Old World elegance, and our approach is two-fold:
1) Every Wednesday, we send a free article exploring the theology and philosophy of why beauty matters, particularly in regards to decor and dress.
2) Every Friday, we send What’s In a Fit, a members-only article exploring practical tips and guidelines for dressing well.
If this resonates with you, then subscribe below to join the aesthetic renaissance.
Personal vs Objective Taste
Saying that taste is just personal preference is a good way to prevent disputes. The trouble is, it’s not true. –Paul Graham, Taste for Makers
For taste to be more than subjective requires an acknowledgment of hierarchy; some things are more refined, better made or more beautiful than others. But we live in an environment where this truth is half-believed. In his essay Taste for Makers, writer/programmer Paul Graham relates a paradox many children encounter. On the one hand, they are told that taste is subjective; the child’s brother can color people green in his coloring book and that’s just as good as anything else. Yet when the child is brought to the museum, they are told to pay special attention, because Leonardo Da Vinci is a great artist. These two things, everyone’s taste being equal, and some things being better than others, are not easily reconciled.
And British philosopher David Hume agreed. He wrote of this tension in his essay Of the Standard of Taste. In it, he tries to square personal taste to the idea of good taste, or having proper critical faculty to evaluate the qualities of a work.
His conclusion? You need a personal sense of taste to start, but it must be honed through various exercises before you can reach the level of objectively good taste:
Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character; and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty.
In other words, you need to have an informed, practiced, field tested and self-aware level of personal taste in order for it to be “good.” According to Hume, this takes the form of being, to use a modern term, “media literate” when speaking of storytelling art, detecting the subtler flavors in a wine only present to one practiced in tasting, or who has spent enough time comparing themselves to peers with recognized taste. It can sound like a real laundry list, but the first step towards good taste is both surprising and easy.
Why Bad Taste Is Better Than No Taste
“Beauty is the archenemy of mediocrity.” — Dietrich von Hildebrand
The truth is you need to get your feet wet if you hope to become someone with good taste. That means taking a risk and moving from “no taste” through to “bad taste.” Chances are if you have a desire to dabble in some creative act, whether it be dress, décor, painting, or simply a learned appreciation of an art, you have an inkling that some things work better – are better – than others, and you want to put that intuition to the test. This correlates with degrees of beauty, as the recognition of beauty is the great mediator between the subjective and the objective. As The Culturist put it: “the power of beauty is that it’s rooted in an objective ideal, and is therefore a bridge between individual experience and objective reality.” In a sense, refining your taste is you better aligning yourself with beauty.
In an aside from one of his early biblical lectures, Jordan Peterson explains why the move from not attempting to have taste to risking bad taste is necessary if you’re to establish a coherent relationship with beauty and, by extension, the divine:
“People are terrified of color. They paint their walls beige. They’re terrified of art. They buy some mass-produced thing, because they don’t want anybody laughing at them for their lack of taste. And they would get laughed at because they have no taste. But you have to…
Because what do you know, right? You have to develop it. And so you’re going to stumble along and make mistakes to begin with. And you’re going to show yourself. Because if you buy [based on] “Oh, I think this is pretty.” And [...] somebody comes over and goes, “Hey, what’s up with you?” It’s kind of hard on your self-esteem, but it’s a stumbling towards the right [...] you’re stumbling towards the kingdom of God.
That’s what you’re stumbling towards when you try to make an aesthetic decision and to put something in your life that’s beautiful, and it’s unbelievably worthwhile to do that.”
If this makes aesthetic choices sound like a battle for your soul, that’s because now, more than ever, it is. And the reason is likely resting in the palm of your hand…
Tech and the Algorithm’s Attack on Taste
Globalized digital platforms and feeds of algorithmic recommendations have flattened vast swaths of culture, encouraging uniformity and frictionless mediocrity. – Kyle Chayka, Airspace Redux
If you think Peterson’s choice of the word “terrified” is too strong for someone’s approach to color, consider how many people you know who either default to, or are strongly influenced by, online trends for much of their style. Author Kyle Chayka has written on the effect of tech and algorithms on taste many times, and in his latest piece for The New Yorker, Why Tech Bros Are Now Obsessed With Taste, he chronicles how big tech seeks to associate itself with the concept of taste because of how unpalatable they are to the public. Unfortunately, Silicon Valley’s understanding of the term equates to “that which will be most profitable,” which goes a long way to explaining how algorithms have been flattening people’s tastes into the a blandly palatable, no-one’s-favorite-but-acceptable-to-all elements of fashion, lifestyle and décor. After reading a poll where half of respondents said they preferred AI passages to real literary excerpts, Chayka proposed one possible reason for this sad state of affairs: “the online ecosystem has become so polluted—so fragmented, deceptive, overstimulating, ersatz—that it has warped our ability to exercise taste at all.”
So when you deliberately make a decision based on your own taste rather than copy styles of algorithmically generated “frictionless mediocrity”, as Chayka puts it, you’re doing something more difficult that you may realize. When you risk ridicule by voicing your opinion that some thing is good, you are taking the first step towards knowing whether it is. As scary as it can be, risking bad taste makes you the man in the arena, so to speak. You have stepped onto the field, ready to be tried and tested, and by virtue of this trial and error, come out the other side with a better understanding of what good taste is. And while that first step is vital, there are more important traits to cultivate your taste.
The Three Traits to Build Taste: Curiosity, Perseverance and Exposure
You have to understand a field well before you develop a good nose for what needs fixing. You have to do your homework. But as you become expert in a field, you’ll start to hear little voices saying, What a hack! There must be a better way. Don’t ignore those voices. Cultivate them. The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it. –Paul Graham, Taste for Makers
There are many ways to approach the cultivation of good taste, as many as there are think pieces recommending them. But for our money, the three essential traits you’ll need are curiosity, perseverance and care, so let’s go through them one by one.
Curiosity
A few years ago, guitarist John Mayer gave an interview where he said he wasn’t much of an advice guy, only to then give really good advice. Essentially, he said when you enjoy something you have learned, trace back why you enjoyed that thing, and learn the underlying patterns that built it . As it was meant for aspiring guitarists, Mayer uses the example of learning the scale from which a certain riff or section of song gets its structure to better understand what makes that combination of notes work.
But this advice applies to anything where quality is in question. When choosing what to wear, for example, it’s helpful to know why certain patterns or colors complement one another, and why some clash. To apply Mayer’s advice in this one area, notice when an outfit you’ve put together just works, and break it down into its components. Do these elements work well together? Do they work well with your body? If so, why? Ask yourself those questions enough, and soon you’ll know the answers intuitively, and will be able to bring that expertise into your whole wardrobe.
Perseverance
Once you’ve begun developing taste in something you love, you’re still only halfway there. In a now famous 2009 interview with Current TV, Ira Glass, longtime NPR host of This American Life, explained his approach to taste and where it gets you in creative fields. For him, anyone drawn to the arts, especially those doing creative work, do have somewhat good taste, but rarely the ability to execute on that taste in the first years of trying:
“Nobody tells people who are beginners—and I really wish somebody had told this to me — is that all of us who do creative work […] we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? […] But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you[…]
A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. […] most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be — they knew it fell short, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have.
And the thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase — you gotta know it’s totally normal.”
This is a key point for taste – as with almost any skill – is that the gap between what you’d like to do and what you can do only closes the more you work at it. Your initial forays into buying art might be duds or your attempt at a new duck a l’orange dish didn’t go as planned, but in those middle stages between understanding of good taste and acting on it, it’s normal to make mistakes. The only way to get through it is to stick it out, and if you can do that, you’re nearly there.
Exposure
Another vital piece of the taste puzzle is exposure, diving headfirst into whatever area in which you’d like to develop good taste. This can be mentorship, it can be a university course, it can be a themed book club, or even an online discussion group. Hume makes a point of this in his essay, that would-be critics should take note of those already known for their taste and learn at their feet.
Likewise, if, say you’d like to develop good taste in architecture, spend time learning from those willing to talk or teach, visit a building that inspires you. And then, visit another one. And then another. The more time you spend around the things you want to develop good taste in, the more you’ll be able to say what works, what doesn’t and how your personal sense of such things corresponds to objective standards (whatever those may be in a particular domain). “A man, who had had no opportunity of comparing the different kinds of beauty, is indeed totally unqualified to pronounce an opinion with regard to any object presented to him,” writes Hume. “By comparison alone we fix the epithets of praise or blame, and learn how to assign the due degree of each.”
It boils down to this: spend time submerged in the things or styles you are drawn to naturally, especially those things which have stood the test of time and represent the pinnacle of whatever domain you wish to swim in. By virtue of that proximity, you will absorb the patterns, proportions and details that signify a thing is in good taste. Basically, good people and good works rub off on you, and produce the magic fairy dust of good taste in due time.
Come on In, the Water’s Fine
You may have noticed some swimming or diving metaphors in this piece. Thematically, that’s exactly right. When you’re starting out, learning about taste can feel like teaching yourself not to drown; there’s so much to know, and you don’t even know where to start!
Know that no matter your background or your budget, taste is no longer reserved for the moneyed elites; anyone with the desire and drive can develop good taste, if they only have enough curiosity, perseverance, and exposure to it. Just dip your toe in, and trust that pretty soon you’ll acclimatize. But might we suggest you hurry up and do it before Big Tech pees in the pool and ruins it for everyone?
St. Paul's spiritual advice for developing good taste: "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is...good [in accord with Divine Will] and acceptable [pleasing] and perfect [complete]." (Romans 12:2)
There’s an interring parallel somewhere in here with the desaturation of color in automobiles too. I think part of it has to do with the financialization of everything. Don’t buy a car in a fun color because it lowers the resale value. Instead of picking the thing you like or that looks the best people feel forced into the “smartest“ financial decision.