Why We Like Things

When I was 22, I met, and later fell in love with, a woman who had impeccable taste. She dressed well; that was the first thing I noticed. She always knew when to eschew the latest Michelin-starred restaurant for an obscure diner in her neighborhood. She could tell you what art openings to go to and what albums to listen to. I admired her; I wanted to be her and be with her.

For the first few years of our relationship, I remained over-awed at how easily she moved through the world, automatically affiliating herself with the right people, ideas, experiences.  Later on, I began to see that it wasn’t automatic: There was an art to knowing what was cool and seeming not to care. But it was an art she excelled at. Everything she did — the books she read, the music she listened to, the theorists and takes she referenced — seemed to exhibit that quality known as taste.

Good taste, as I understood it, meant that you were consuming the right things, from commodities to cultural works. But it was also, as I began to realize in my professional life, something that made people like, trust, and value you more. A few years into our relationship, I began working for a tech startup where the CEO encouraged us to watch French New Wave cinema. The most tenured designers on my team, dressed in Issey Miyake, were trusted for their taste as much as their work ethic. Informal meetings often took place at the Togo chairs scattered around the office, where people peered at laptops together and drafted PRDs. And all of this — the lunchtime conversations about Lemaire, the office that looked like a Design Within Reach showroom, the Heath ceramics in the kitchenettes — was understood to be, in some way, the reason for the company’s success.

The way we spoke about our work, too, leaned on evocative metaphors and instincts. We were distinguishing ourselves from the previous generation of tech companies, who often eschewed intuition for data: then-Google executive Marissa Mayer famously insisted that her team A/B test 41 different shades of blue. Skip ahead a few years though, and you’re more likely to hear founders evoke the ineffable. “We are extremely data-informed,” the co-founder of Shopify, Tobi Lütke, said in a podcast, but “comfortable with the unquantifiable things, such as tastes, quality, passion, love, hate.”

Tech’s preoccupation with taste has intensified in the last two years; it is now, the critic Kyle Chayka observed, “as much of a tech-world cliché as ‘disruption’ was in the 2010s.” And it has much to do with the industry’s embrace of generative AI, which is shifting the focus of knowledge work from production to selection and curation. “I can easily imagine a world,” OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman said to Die Welt, “where 30, 40% of the tasks that happen in the economy today get done by AI.”

Taste has become the catch-all term for what’s left. “In the AI age,” the Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham tweeted in February, “taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make.” Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, was even more succinct: “Taste,” he wrote, “is a new core skill.”

Taste is also what the music producer Rick Rubin — whose bestselling The Creative Act gave him a second career as Silicon Valley’s self-help guru — cites as the reason for his success. “I have no technical ability,” Rubin said in 2023. “So what,” his interviewer asked, “are you being paid for?” Rubin’s response, which has since been clipped and reshared thousands of times on YouTube and X, was simple: “The confidence I have,” he said slowly, “in my taste.” It’s this confidence that founders and funders alike (including the venture capitalist Joshua Kushner, who sought Rubin’s advice on “intuitions…that I cannot explain to anyone”) are hoping for.

But those who invoke taste often fail to explain what it is. And curiously, although many in Silicon Valley are bullish on AI’s potential to write novels, solve mathematical proofs, and generate feature-length films — to create outputs, in other words, that combine taste and technique — they seem convinced that taste itself is not replaceable. To the literary scholar Leif Weatherby, the idea that taste “is the last preserve of the human” seems flawed. LLMs, after all, already incorporate “judgments of taste,” from literary-critical texts to Likert scale assessments of response quality, “in a direct and infrastructural way.” Taste, he suggested to me in a phone call, “is a misnomer.” The idea that “this is the last preserve of the human, the ability to make judgments… it’s anxiety on the part of industry leaders…because they’re deskilling, right? They’re saying, If Codex writes the code, what’s your job?” If all code is fungible, if all software features can be commoditized, you need any competitive edge you can get. The fear goes beyond individual job loss; whole companies and business models are being replaced by OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s frontier models.

Taste, then, is that ineffable thing that makes you, and your business, irreplaceable. It separates the winners from the permanent underclass. It seems to be objectively measurable, or at the very least hierarchical, much like employee compensation or financial capital. To have good taste is to have more of it than other people. But to understand what taste is and how it’s cultivated, we may need to return to an earlier moment in history — when automation led to similar anxieties about human distinctiveness and economic competitiveness.

The paradigmatic example of disruptive automation is, of course, the Industrial Revolution. In 19th-century Britain, taste was a central concern for both industrialists and their critics, as new technologies replaced small-scale artisanal production with mass-produced goods. More goods, however, seemed to invite more mediocrity. The sheer quantity of Britain’s factories made it the “workshop of the world,” but the luxury market — at home and abroad — was dominated by French-made products.

The reason, according to the statesman William Ewart, was that French industry benefited from “the reverence that prevailed for the Arts in all classes, and the good taste exhibited in all branches of manufactures.” In an 1835 parliamentary motion, Ewart argued that, to compete with France, Britain needed to find “the best means of extending a knowledge of the Fine Arts, and of the Principles of Design among the people.” At his urging, a parliamentary committee was formed to investigate how British taste could be improved. The committee’s report led to the establishment of publicly funded design schools in London and other manufacturing centers around the country, as well as the creation of museums like the V&A.

Then, as now, accelerating automation led to new anxieties about how good taste could be cultivated. But taste, here, was not a private, innate skill, but one that could be cultivated — through educational and cultural institutions — for the benefit of the nation. There were vigorous disagreements about how taste could be taught. The government’s design schools embraced the machine, while the contemporaneous Arts and Crafts movement resisted industrialization, insisting that designers needed to return to older artisanal practices. But they were unified in seeing taste as a national responsibility: In an 1864 lecture, John Ruskin, the Victorian age’s foremost critic of industrial slop, echoed Ewart in stating that great architecture could only be “produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty.”

One of Ruskin’s admirers, the designer and socialist activist William Morris, eagerly absorbed his beliefs, and began applying them to his own theories of how to teach, and produce, great design. Morris disagreed with the prevailing tendency to separate the prestigious “fine arts” (architecture, painting, and sculpture) from the lowly, commercial “decorative arts” like furniture, woodworking, ceramics, glass and textiles. Better-designed goods, Morris believed, were only possible if the fine and decorative arts were taught together.

Morris’s dream was realized several decades later, when the architect Walter Gropius was asked to direct a new school that combined an academy of fine arts and a school of arts and crafts. He threw himself into the task of hiring the right founding team — of teachers, that is — for the Bauhaus. “It is naturally vital for everyone,” he wrote in a letter, “that we attract strong, lively personalities. We must not start with mediocrity; it is our duty to enlist powerful, famous personalities wherever possible, even if we do not yet fully understand them.” One of his first and most influential hires was Johannes Itten, a painter and theorist who was responsible for the Bauhaus’s most enduring contributions to design pedagogy: the Vorkurs, or preliminary course, for new students.

Before the Bauhaus, most art and design schools were focused on teaching specialized, medium-specific skills. First-year artists practiced figure drawing, while craftsmen copied existing objects and ornamentation. But Itten, inspired by theories from educational reformists and the practices of avant-garde artists, took a different approach. He began his classes with breathing exercises that helped students relax and access a more instinctual, intuitive way of working. Then, students were instructed in more abstract concepts: line, form, color, contrast, and material. Once students had completed the Vorkurs, they could advance to specialized workshops in textiles, graphic design, ceramics, glass, and more. Workshops had two teachers — one specializing in artistic “form,” the other in technical “craft.” (Because “there were neither craftsmen with sufficient imagination to solve artistic problems,” Gropius later wrote, “nor artists with sufficient technical skills to take charge of workshop operations…a new generation…had to be trained who were able to combine both talents.”)

Although the Bauhaus was open for less than two decades, it had a lasting influence on art and design pedagogy. When the school was shuttered in 1933 under pressure from the Nazis, many prominent Bauhauslers emigrated to the U.S., where they were welcomed by America’s educational institutions. It helped that many Americans held the Bauhaus in high regard: “No other school,” the critic Sheldon Warren Cheney wrote in 1930, offered “a firmer foundation for creative endeavor in the fields of modern architecture and craftswork.” Gropius and his Bauhaus protégé, Marcel Breuer, ended up at Harvard’s architecture school.

Josef and Anni Albers — who had studied at the Bauhaus and later co-taught a workshop — ended up at Black Mountain College, an experimental liberal arts school in North Carolina. Josef Albers was Itten’s successor and one of the Bauhaus’s “most gifted pedagogues,” according to the archivist Margret Kentgens-Craig. He brought the Vorkurs and other Bauhaus principles to Black Mountain, where he taught some of America’s most renowned twentieth-century artists: Cy Twombly, Ruth Asawa, and Robert Rauschenberg. Throughout his career, Albers rejected the idea,the art historian Eva Díaz wrote, “that talent and an aptitude for art were inherent gifts and prerequisites.” His pedagogy was explicitly democratic: In a talk delivered at Black Mountain College in 1940, he urged his audience to develop a “respect for the beliefs and abilities of others.”

The key insight of the Bauhaus’s foundation year was to treat aesthetic perception as a domain-independent skill — shaped by material literacy and craft knowledge, but not in thrall to a particular medium. But the foundation year that Albers brought to America wasn’t just about transmitting a single, preferred form of perception from teacher to student. Instead, students developed a shared “understanding of different ways of seeing and representing” through critiques “coming from the [other] students and then from the teacher.” (These critiques, Albers noted dryly, also “diminish[ed] the tendency to overestimate one's own work.”) His approach encouraged students to sharpen their “intuitive perception,” and simultaneously practice conveying these perceptions to others.

Explicit training in form, material, and color, however, was only one part of a Bauhaus-style education. Students were encouraged to study existing works: “old and modern,” “handicraft and industrial products,” “typographic and photographic.” It’s a form of education that happens informally, too: at libraries, museums, and — for twenty-first-century creatives — online.

In my case, I spent most of my adolescence indiscriminately scrolling through images: posters for Swiss exhibitions or French indie concerts; scans of Japanese fashion magazines; websites designed by agencies in Melbourne or Amsterdam; apps designed in California. I learned to distinguish which styles were conventional and which were unusual, what was historically-inflected and what was definitively new.

It was a waste of time (I spent hours on tumblr instead of doing my homework) until it wasn’t — when I began designing magazines, websites, and software of my own. Then, if I needed to pick a typeface that would work well for longform reading, the right nouns — Sabon, Bembo, Plantin — would spring from my memory. If I needed to arrange photographs on a page, I had a repertoire of compositional techniques to try out, distilled from hundreds, if not thousands, of layouts I had seen before.

I had, essentially, trained myself by collecting a large dataset of images, scraped from the web, which taught me how to identify certain features (say, a geometric versus humanist sans-serif, say) and categorize what I was seeing. I learned, for example, that the use of Neue Haas Grotesk, a black and white color palette, and a strong grid were all associated with concepts like “Swiss Style” or “International Graphic Style” (which, I intuited, were semantically proximate and often interchangeable). Later on, in my classes, internships, and jobs, I was able to refine my work further, as I received regular feedback from peers and mentors alike.

If my education as a designer is so easily explained as a process of pre-training, fine-tuning, and RLHF, then what, exactly, distinguishes me from a generative AI model? Couldn’t a model consume even more images, and solicit even more feedback, to design something better? If great work can be generated purely by studying prior art at scale, then next year’s frontier models could easily replace a human designer, artist, writer, thinker. But scale seems less important than selectivity, at least when it comes to frontier-level creative work.

This is particularly obvious when studying the literary output of LLMs. Today’s frontier models are trained on enormous quantities of data. One takeaway from Anthropic’s 2025 settlement with a group of authors, in which the company agreed to pay $1.5 billion (or an estimated $3,000 per book) for scraping copyrighted books from shadow libraries like LibGen, is that its models have “read” at least 482,460 books. But even Claude Opus 4.8 hasn’t written a short story that I enjoy more than those by Lydia Davis or Jessi Jezewska Stevens — both of whom, despite being prodigiously well-read, have almost certainly read fewer books.

Not only do people make do with less data, but they also draw from seemingly irrelevant, unimportant inputs. When I began working as a product designer, I still found myself scrolling through images of ‘90s avant-garde Belgian fashion, instead of more obviously useful content, like screenshots of B2B SaaS software. If this was developing my taste, then what was being developed, and how? Taste is also invoked to describe the Fields Medal–winning mathematician June Huh’s youthful “poetic detour,” as the journalist Jordana Cepelewicz described it, when Huh dropped out of high school to become a poet. “When I found out that he came to mathematics after poetry,” Huh’s collaborator Federico Ardila-Mantilla told Cepelewicz, “I’m like, OK, this makes sense to me.” The reason?

But what lesson can we draw from Huh’s biography? That mathematicians should spend their formative years reading Hermann Hesse? Doing so seems inefficient, to say the least. It also seems very distinctively human — to train yourself in ways that seem like a waste of time.

If there was such a thing as optimal taste, then a person could train it by constructing an objective measure of quality — or borrow someone else’s — when deciding what to consume. Only watch films on the BFI’s Sight and Sound list. Only read novels by Pulitzer or Nobel Prize winners (or, for a different kind of creative, only novels published by Fitzcarraldo and Deep Vellum). Only buy clothes stocked at Dover Street Market or recommended by Blackbird Spyplane. I’d be lying if my preferences weren’t shaped by, and sometimes outsourced to, external curators like these. But some of my tastes are less deliberately chosen.

I’m thinking, for instance, about why I always order a cardamom pastry at cafés, something I never did until I began living with my girlfriend, who grew up speaking Swedish at home. And how the flavor still prompts memories of the Saturday mornings I spent in bed, reading her copy of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts while she slid a tray of kardemummabullar into the oven. And I’m thinking of the music that I recommend to my friends, the ones I only learned about through her. All the people I’ve played Fergus Jones’s Ephemera for, with its languid trip-hop tracks, as if I had found this album on my own. And how, in the months after our breakup, my sonic landscape was still, mostly, songs we had listened to together and danced to together.

“Why,” the artist and entrepreneur Charles Broskoski asked in a 2023 talk, “are we attracted to the things we’re attracted to?” The answer, he suggested, was a combination of internal and external influences. “Even as a 12 year old,” he said,

We are not self-made in our tastes; instead, we move through an infinitely expanding landscape of information and objects, guided by the people we meet, admire, and love.

There’s a cynical way to interpret this, courtesy of Pierre Bourdieu. In Distinction, a comprehensive sociological portrait of twentieth-century French tastes, he argued that our tastes are determined by the social class we occupy. Cultivating your taste was, in large part, about becoming fluent in the styles, codes, and artistic gestures of the elite — and thereby accumulating enough cultural capital to elevate yourself. For Bourdieu, taste is never truly individual; it is always strategic, socially motivated, and stratifying. To me, however, Bourdieu’s explanation is oppressively jaded. Although a sociological perspective demystifies some aspects of taste, it easily obscures other, more personal ones. “Can we no longer,” the editor Marco Roth lamented, “provide good-faith reasons for our cultural preferences, reasons rooted in private and idiosyncratic experience but articulated in a common language?”

A similar critique could be levied at René Girard, the literary critic whose theory of mimetic desire holds that what we like and do — perhaps all of what we like and do — is motivated by imitation, envy, and competition. In Deceit, Desire and the Novel, Girard argued that our interest in certain objects, experiences, or romantic partners is motivated by “an irresistible impulse to desire what Others desire.” What seems to be personal taste is just petty rivalry, and an unoriginal rivalry at that. Girard’s stature in Silicon Valley may lend some truth to his theory: Those who cite Girard are often imitating the tastes of his former student, Peter Thiel.

But there is something unsatisfying, the literary scholar Joshua Landy notes, about a theory that suppresses all individual, differentiated desires. “It’s true,” Landy wrote, “that we tend not to make choices in splendid isolation…but we do make the choices. Other people cannot make them for us, precisely because there are too many other people, with too many different opinions.” Our tastes are partly social, but they can’t be entirely so; there remains that “small intuitive sense,” in Broskoski’s words, of what we, as individuals, prefer. And the theorist who most persuasively captures this, in my mind, is Hannah Arendt.

Arendt is better known as a political philosopher, and she herself acknowledged that questions of taste, because “​​they concern merely aesthetic matters, have always been supposed to lie outside the political realm.” But after publishing The Origins of Totalitarianism, she turned her attention to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (titled Critique of Taste in early drafts).

It was this work, Arendt suggested, that “contains the greatest and most original aspect of Kant’s political philosophy.” Kant’s earlier work on reason had framed it as a solitary, individual activity. His definition of aesthetic judgment, however, was different. To judge something as beautiful, you had to interpret your private reaction alongside the imagined reactions of others. This “enlarged mentality” meant that you were always engaged in “an anticipated communication” with the people you wanted to articulate and defend your judgments to. “Taste judgments,” Arendt observed, “do not compel” agreement based on “demonstrable facts or truth proved by argument.” Instead,

It was this quality that led Arendt to assert that “judgment may be one of the fundamental abilities of man as a political being.” In articulating your tastes, you are participating in a shared world.

But Arendt’s elevated understanding of taste — as one of “man’s political abilities,” and not a purely cultural capacity — might seem, as she herself acknowledged, a little “strange.” To justify this reading, Arendt offered the following observation:

We like when people agree with our tastes, and we may even pursue that gratification by winning others to our side. But agreement isn’t always possible — or, in many cases, desirable. Having our tastes challenged can be invigorating: It is, for many, one of the greatest pleasures of a shared cultural life.“All [of] life is a dispute about taste,” Nietzsche observed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra; I happen to enjoy the dispute.

To have confidence in your own taste, however idiosyncratic or eccentric, can also elevate you to the status of a tastemaker. “All an editor has,” the longtime (and former) Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Graydon Carter reflected in his memoir, “is confidence in his or her own judgment and taste.” These judgments, as the journalist Bryan Burroughs vividly recalled, were sometimes hard to understand:

More polarizing tastemakers, like the fiction editor and professor Gordon Lish, trusted their instincts almost to a fault. Lish was, in corporate terms, an inveterate micromanager — but his aggressive editorial interventions helped make Raymond Carver an American literary legend. In an essay on Lish’s legacy, Carla Blumenkranz observed that by “cutting most of Carver’s stories to half their intended length,” Lish “turn[ed] a deeply traditional writer into a groundbreaking minimalist.” As a teacher, Lish reportedly seduced some of his students and secured publishing deals for others; some writers had the dubious honor of experiencing both. But the uniform style he imposed led to a “School of Gordon Lish,” in the disapproving evaluation of the literary critic Sven Birkerts. “Lish’s progeny,” Birkerts acerbically observed, “come across almost without exception as purveyors of the slight and fragmented,” with “disembodied characters…scorched to blankness by the inchoate forces of modernity.”

Stories like these illuminate a particularly interesting aspect of taste: “good taste” is always shifting. Once a preference — for a literary style, commodity, form of speech, way of life — becomes hegemonic, a backlash usually results. Our tastes are most meaningful when they convey an individual’s discernment, and not an incurious desire to conform. Tastes that are universally held are also boring; there’s nothing left to discuss.

Those exhausted by “good taste” may find pleasure in the “good taste of bad taste,” to borrow Susan Sontag’s memorable articulation of camp aesthetics. Camp’s enthusiasm for things in poor taste, Sontag wrote, was not an embrace of contrarianism: Camp “doesn’t argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good.” Instead, “camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment…to offer for art (and life) a different — a supplementary — set of standards.” It gave people permission to escape from “the tyranny of good taste,” as the underground filmmaker and “king of camp” John Waters put it.

Anxious technologists ought to free themselves from tyranny, but that doesn’t mean they need to give up on taste. They may need, however, to reconsider how they pursue it. Our tastes may be personal and idiosyncratic — but they are refined, by and large, when we relate to each other. Explaining our tastes is how we train our perceptual abilities, and our ability to participate in a pluralistic world. It’s a world in which our differences are energizing, not deflating: “The goal,” as the critic Carl Wilson wrote, “is not that we all end up with the same taste.” In an essay on musical taste — republished, years later, as a book with the seductively judgmental subtitle Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste — Wilson suggests that we learn to “relish the plenitude of tastes,” including when someone else’s tastes are “alien to our own.”

It’s true that our tastes can help with minor decisions: the music you listen to in the evenings, the shoes you buy when your Salomons wear out, and when to use an em dash (or, for the advanced aesthetes, an en). And they inform our larger decisions, too: what research problems to pursue, which films get screened, what startups get funded, what features you ship. But the lifelong project of training our tastes might serve a higher purpose than building a personal brand or profitable business. Our tastes are how we understand ourselves — and communicating them is how we understand each other.