What is good taste?
Taste can be learnt, and there has never been a better time to do so.
By Ane Cornelia Pade
If you have opened Pinterest lately and been struck by the uncanny sensation that some of those sunlit French kitchens filling your digital dream board seem just a little too pristine, then you have properly realised that AI has entered the realm of online curation. Creating beautiful and thrilling constellations of objects, sounds, words, flavours, or images was once the uncontested domain of the tastefully gifted. Nowadays, any second-rate algorithm can make your iPhone photo look as effortlessly Italian as any Loro Piana campaign (pre-quiet luxury propaganda, of course). It is little wonder that the recent flood of AI images has led to a surge of online articles declaring the death of taste. But before we administer the final rites to all the tastemakers out there (self-proclaimed and otherwise), let us take a moment to remember what taste is.
Taste, understood as the ability to judge aesthetic quality and worth, whether in art, fashion, wine, or literature, is a distinctly 18th century idea. As strange as it may seem today, some of history’s greatest minds, including Voltaire, Diderot, David Hume, and Edmund Burke, dedicated considerable time to exploring questions like: What is taste? Who has the authority to define it? Can it be cultivated, or is it innate? What lay behind this seemingly superficial debate over who gets to call a dress, a painting, a building, or a dish good or bad taste was the dramatic social changes shaping the period. For most of European history, deciding who held the authority to determine taste was straightforward. The nobility, led by the crown, dictated what was fashionable and what was not. In art, it was the academies, founded and funded by royals, that provided the rule book for what was considered good art. European monarchs even enacted laws, known as sumptuary laws, regulating the types of fabrics, jewellery, hats, and decorations permissible for different ranks. Taste was thought to be intertwined with courtly manners and inseparable from noble birth.