Culture

What Does It Mean to Have Taste?

Taste is one of those words everyone uses but almost no one defines. We talk about good or bad taste as if it were a substance that could be measured and bottled. Yet the moment you try to pin it down, it dissolves. Is taste inherited or learned? Democratic or elitist? Rational or intuitive? Does it live in the object, or in the eye that perceives it?

Historically, taste belonged to rules, proportion, balance, harmony, the scaffolding of Renaissance aesthetics. Later, the Romantics shattered that scaffolding, insisting that taste lived in feeling rather than formula. By the twentieth century, critics like Clement Greenberg treated taste as a battleground for cultural authority, while postmodernism rejected the hierarchy altogether. And now, in an age of unlimited visual access and infinite creative tools, the question returns with new urgency: what does it mean to have taste when everyone can make anything?

TASTE AS A WAY OF SEEING

For me, taste has always been less about style and more about sensibility. It is a quiet intelligence shaped by memory, exposure, curiosity, and emotional literacy. It’s built through the slow accumulation of references: the fresco that stayed with you longer than you expected, the architecture that altered your understanding of space, the colour you saw once and never forgot.

And in the art world, where I began, taste was inseparable from attention.

Artists were trained to see before they created: to study light before painting it, to understand proportion before sculpting it, to notice silence before composing it. Taste wasn’t decorative; it was a discipline. A way of noticing the world deeply enough that meaning could be translated into material.

Today, we rarely have the luxury of that slowness. We scroll more than we look. Images arrive faster than we can feel them. And yet, that same slowness remains the root of what we recognise as good taste, an intimacy with detail, context, and intention.

“Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.” — David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste, 1757

IF TASTE IS PERSONAL, CAN A BRAND HAVE IT?

Hume’s line has always felt like a quiet truth about taste, not a hierarchy, not a gatekeeping mechanism, but a recognition of perception itself. Taste isn’t an absolute standard bestowed by institutions or inherited through privilege; it emerges through the convergence of culture, memory, exposure, and lived experience. It is shaped by where we come from, what we notice, and how we make meaning.

It explains why two people can stand before the same painting and encounter entirely different worlds. One sees composition; another feels colour. One searches for symbolism; another recognises emotion. Taste has always been a cultural mirror, revealing our internal landscapes more than the external object. It reflects not only who we are, but how we have learned to see.

So if taste is inherently personal, a deeply human form of sense-making shaped by context, the next question follows naturally: can a brand have taste at all?

I believe it can, but only when taste is understood as a system of selection rather than decoration.

Taste determines what a brand pays attention to, what it elevates, what it refuses, and where it places rhythm, emotion, and restraint. It shapes tone, materiality, proportion, and the emotional cadence of communication. In this way, taste becomes a brand’s internal compass: a worldview rather than a stylistic preference, a way of perceiving rather than a palette applied at the end.

This is where many brands falter. They achieve aesthetics, but not intention. They maintain consistency, but not coherence. They become recognisable, but not resonant. Without discernment—without an organising sensibility, the work can feel hollow: attractive, sometimes impressive, yet rarely meaningful in a way that lingers.

Taste, in its truest sense, is what enables a brand to build a world rather than simply release content. It is the thread that ties decisions together, giving shape to meaning and anchoring expression in something deeper than trend cycles or market expectations.

And if Hume is right, if beauty (and by extension taste) lives in the mind of the beholder, then brands cannot rely on their internal definition of what is “good.” They must develop a sensibility that leaves room for the people encountering it: for different cultures, different histories, different desires, different emotional literacies. Taste becomes not a fixed identity, but a responsive form of orientation, an evolving way of choosing that helps a brand locate itself within a wider cultural and psychological landscape.

BORROWED TASTE IN AN AGE OF AI

And yet our world is moving in the opposite direction, toward abundance, instant creation, infinite choice. AI can produce a hundred versions of an idea in seconds, but it cannot tell you which one carries emotional weight. It cannot sense coherence. It cannot recognise the quiet tension that separates the good from the forgettable.

As critic Kyle Chayka notes, algorithmic culture creates “the lowest common denominator of aggregated taste". When every aesthetic is instantly replicable, the rarest quality becomes the ability to choose with intention.

Taste becomes the last frontier of human judgment, the pause before the decision, the instinct that says not that, the quiet knowing that guides coherence. It is the one thing machines cannot replicate: the slow accumulation of everything you’ve ever noticed.

Your architectural memory.
Your colour instincts.
Your emotional compass.
Your cultural references.
Your lived experience.

Taste is personal history turned into judgment.

THE TRACE THAT REMAINS

In art history, taste has always revealed more about the viewer than the work itself. Two people can stand before the same painting and one sees composition, the other sees devotion; one studies technique, the other feels the ache of a colour they can’t name. Taste sits at the meeting point between culture and consciousness, a synthesis of everything we’ve seen, remembered, and chosen to carry.

Brands, in their own way, attempt the same thing: to leave a trace. To shape meaning. To create something a person returns to not because they should, but because something in it quietly stays with them.

And maybe that is the real task for founders, for creatives, for anyone building something that hopes to last:
to pay better attention, to choose more slowly, to cultivate a sensibility that feels like a signature, not a strategy.

Perhaps this is why art continues to move us differently than most commercial work: it is created in conditions of attention, slowness, and intention. Taste grows in that space - through depth, not speed. And brands, when they’re at their best, borrow from that rhythm. They make room for contemplation, not just consumption.

Because in a world where anything can be generated instantly, the things made with care still feel different.

And people know it.
They always have.