Overview

Some disjointed thoughts on taste.

In my aimless wanderings around the Internet, I have heard a lot of people talking about taste, specifically that it’s a huge differentiator and especially so in the age of AI, when anyone is able to generate the most generic oatmeal-bland forgettable work you’ve ever spent the energy of laying eyes on. I grew up doing lots of creative things—writing poetry, painting, graphic design—before making my way over to product design, so I had never really thought much about the concept of taste before getting into tech. I think I have good taste in books, for example, but that’s mostly because I read anything and everything I could get my hands on for most of my childhood (from Sarah J. Maas novels to Jane Eyre) with absolutely no consideration of whether it would be any good or not, until that consideration started to develop organically of its own accord.

I never deliberately tried to cultivate taste. I just consumed a lot of stuff and created a lot of stuff. Mostly because it was fun.

The first time I really thought about taste was when I read this quote by Ira Glass. I still frequently revisit it, mainly because I find it reassuring whenever I’m stressed about the gap between my skill level and my taste (which is pretty much always).

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? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. 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, you know what I mean?

A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that 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.

And the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay?

I haven’t even watched the full movie itself, but I’ve often rewatched the cerulean sweater speech from The Devil Wears Prada. I really like it, especially as I’ve been thinking a lot lately about fashion and the ways it can convey taste and status and self-expression and privilege. In the speech, fashion editor-in-chief Miranda Priestly reproaches her subordinate, Andy, for looking down on her coworkers for their obsession with fashion:

You think this has nothing to do with you.

You… go to your closet, and you select… I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater [you’re wearing], for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back, but what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean.

You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that, in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns, and then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent, wasn’t it?… who showed cerulean military jackets.

And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.

However, that blue represents millions of dollars of countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room… from a pile of “stuff.”

Miranda’s speech gets at something important that I often see missing from conversations about taste: there is a social history attached to it. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Taste influences; it’s political; it Exists In A Society. If you see ten designers do the same thing and then you just copy them without thinking about why (ask yourself: who are “the people in this room” of Miranda’s speech for you, and what’s the impact they’ve had?), you don’t actually have any taste. The people with the best taste take risks. They try stuff other people think is ugly or shocking or gauche. They try new things constantly.

(The other thing I like about Miranda’s speech is that it notes part of having good taste is paying attention to the details. It’s not blue; it’s cerulean! Picasso remarked, “When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.” You have to look at the big picture and you have to look at the pixels.)

The thing about taste is that it’s not as subjective as people often make it out to be. I am pretty fine with saying Jane Eyre is a better book than anything Sarah J. Maas has ever written. Apple.com is better designed than starter Wordpress templates. It’s more at the outer edges of taste that things get really controversial, for instance, like what you think of Material 3 Expressive or Lady Gaga’s meat dress, but then I can’t say that someone who feels positively or negatively about those definitively has good or bad taste.

Good taste is also not purely mechanical, but those with good taste tend to be good at the mechanics. Being good at Figma won’t make you a good designer, but I’ve yet to meet a good designer who wasn’t good at some design tool. Having a good grasp of spelling and grammar will not make you a good writer, but good writers do need to know how to construct sentences that are coherent and readable and interesting. (Rumor has it some of them even know how to use an em dash!)

Maybe this is stating overly obvious things, but the people I know with good taste don’t really talk about it. (I realize the hypocrisy of writing this post.) They’re too busy being obsessed with whatever it is they have good taste in. People with good taste in books are busy reading or writing them; people with good taste in design are busy interacting with or making designs. And then they go and talk about what they think makes a certain piece of work good or bad, and maybe what makes work in that category good or bad in general. But something as broad as “taste” never comes into the equation. (They do, however, often love to talk about craft, which in practice heavily overlaps with—but is not synonymous with—taste.)

It’s also interesting what sorts of taste people do and don’t place value judgments on. For instance, I see a lot of judgment about people who have poor taste in books, whether that means they just read whatever’s popular on TikTok, or they only read self-help books, or they think books should never depict anything traumatic or upsetting. Poor taste in books signals the death of media literacy, ChatGPT is destroying our reading comprehension, it’s an indictment of our education system, etc. (I’ve sometimes had these judgments myself, although I also think they are a bit elitist and out-of-touch.) Whereas someone whose favorite coffee shop is Starbucks probably doesn’t have amazing taste in coffee, but it doesn’t necessarily indicate any character flaws.

Taste is also part of where many creatives’ reaction to AI art comes from. As Glass said, they got into this because they have good taste. If Hayao Miyazaki spent some time with Midjourney, he could prompt engineer his way into art far beyond the heights of the Ghibli filter he called “an insult to life itself.” But why would he? What’s the point of just regurgitating an imitation of the same stuff he’s made already? (To go back to the cerulean sweater metaphor: Miyazaki is one of the people in the room, and the output of the Ghibli filter is a bargain bin sweater. Even if you can’t tell it apart from the original, it will never be original.)

And I’m not sure that we actually live in a society that rewards good taste. We reward a high quantity of cheap things, quickly mass produced for maximum profit. How many people with good taste are actually given the space and support to express and execute it? How can we give them that space and support? How can we create it for ourselves? (To be clear, any “us/them” divide here is purely artificial.)

In Brie Wolfson’s excellent essay “Notes on Taste,” she writes:

Writer George Saunders calls this “achieving the iconic space,” and it’s what he’s after when he meets his creative writing students. “They arrive already wonderful. What we try to do over the next three years is help them achieve what I call their “iconic space” — the place from which they will write the stories only they could write, using what makes them uniquely themselves…At this level, good writing is assumed; the goal is to help them acquire the technical means to become defiantly and joyfully themselves.”

As Michelangelo supposedly said: “It is easy. You just chip away the stone that doesn’t look like David.” The process of creation is simply understanding and building conviction in what your work is, and making it more intensely itself.