What is taste?

Imagine someone shows you their bathroom and there's a golden swan water tap. Your gut reaction is immediate. Tacky. No taste.

But why? The thing is beautifully made. The craft is real. You're not reacting to the object. You're reacting to what it signals. Golden swan means a certain kind of person, a certain kind of house, a certain kind of money. You've been trained to place it in a category, and that category is "bad taste."

Now look at the rest of the bathroom. White walls, concrete floor, matte black fixtures. You nod. Tasteful. But this is 2026. That bathroom is in every design magazine, every Airbnb, every startup office. There is nothing in it that required a single judgment call. Someone googled "modern bathroom" and picked the first result. Is that taste? Or is that just knowing what's currently acceptable?

Most of what we call good taste is conformity with better marketing. You learn what the right people like. You learn what gets praised and what gets mocked. You internalize the rules, and then you follow them and call it discernment.

This works. People will compliment your apartment. Nobody will think you're tacky. But nothing you chose required you to actually feel anything about it. You just needed to know the current consensus and stay inside it. That's not taste. That's social navigation.

The ego is what keeps you there. Taste is supposed to be personal, but the risk of personal taste is that people might disagree. The golden swan tap is a risk. The matte black fixture is not. Most people would rather be safely generic than honestly wrong. So they choose what's defensible, not what they actually respond to, and they call it taste.

From a cultural point of view, the people we eventually recognize as having great taste were almost always contrarian in their moment. Not contrarian for the sake of it. That's just provocation, and provocation is its own kind of conformity. They were contrarian because they were paying attention to something the consensus hadn't caught up to yet.

The minimalists were contrarian once. When everything was ornate and cluttered, stripping it back was a genuine act of taste. It required seeing past what everyone agreed was beautiful. Now minimalism is the default. Making something minimalist in 2026 requires seeing nothing at all. The taste that built the movement has nothing to do with the conformity that followed it.

So what is taste, actually?

It might just be attention. The people who seem to have it are the ones who pay attention to what they experience. Not categorize it, not evaluate it against the current rules. Experience it. They notice how a room feels when they walk in. They notice when a sentence lands and when it doesn't. They sit with things long enough to have a genuine response, and then they trust that response more than the consensus.

You can't build this by studying what's good. You build it by experiencing a lot and being honest about what you feel. That's harder than it sounds, because the ego is always there, editing your reactions before you even notice. Taste requires you to hear your own signal through the noise of what's acceptable, what's cool, what's safe.

This is also why taste can't really be taught. You can teach someone the rules of good design, the principles, the history. That gives them knowledge. It doesn't give them taste. Taste is what happens when you've internalized enough experience that your gut reaction is worth listening to. There's no shortcut to that.

One more thing. None of this means taste is necessary. There are countless people living happy, successful, fulfilling lives without it. There are companies making billions with tasteless solutions to real problems. Taste isn't a requirement for a good life or a good business. Most of the time, solving the problem is what matters, and taste is beside the point.

But every once in a while, you encounter something where the person clearly gave a damn in a way that goes beyond functional. A building, a product, a sentence, a meal. And you feel it before you can explain it. That feeling, and the years of accumulated attention behind whatever produced it, is the closest I can get to an answer.