There is no accounting for taste because the boundary conditions for bad taste are infinite like eternal space but those for good taste are sequestered by the boring and the familiar. There is a future in being a gatekeeper of taste but power corrupts etc.

Jun 23, 2021

What is taste? Essentially, a reflection of consensus¹.

Good Taste Is For Bad People

80s action movie villains and fictional villains (and anti-heroes) generally have good taste. Bad is intellectual and well-dressed, well-spoken, ready with quotes from literature, a fan of chess, and prefers classical music (opera, if available). Think Hannibal or Hans Gruber². Can you imagine Hans Landa (H is quite popular in the intellectual bad guy naming pool) listening to pop music? The subversion of Andrew Scott’s Moriarty dancing to ‘Stayin’ Alive’ pays off because you can’t. The ‘hero’ inevitably enjoys pop culture and even revels in bad taste. The cultural snob is an erudite scientist who dies early or the baddie. The off-beaten path breeds evil.

If we take for granted that ‘American prestige TV’ represents ‘good taste’ for us now, what does that do to the definition of ‘good taste’? It seems to suggest that ‘good taste’ is being confronted with exceptional amounts of realism and gratuitous reminders of the ugliness in Life. It seems to suggest that escapism is not ‘good taste.’

The character of Abed in Community represents something many of us do now: relate to each other via memes derived from pop culture. Abed’s taste is firmly rooted in pop culture³ that exists in our reality except for Inspector Spacetime, a Doctor Who analog in the Community-verse. Doctor Who, constrained as it has always been by a tiny BBC budget, is an excellent example of what won’t count as ‘good taste’ because it is fundamentally a show written for children. And yet, many adults, including me, continue to watch the show. In fact, I would say that Doctor Who is perhaps the only thing keeping me from turning into a villain. It wouldn’t fall in the ‘good taste’ bracket even though the story of the alien time-traveler, the Doctor, is fundamentally human. Should that not be considered ‘good taste’ then⁴?

Taste Gets In The Way

Chances are your ‘good taste’ led you, like it did me, to engage in creative pursuits. You watched or read or listened or experienced something that spoke to you in deep, resonant tones, and you thought to yourself, “That is exactly what I want to make.” It is an attractive proposition, but it took me a while to realize that the same ‘good taste’ gets in the way of actually making what I envisioned. I am thinking specifically of the dangers of attempting to imitate what you know to be good or using someone else’s ‘good’ work as a benchmark against which to judge yourself. And then there is the chance that you might actually create something with mainstream appeal⁵ while attempting to emulate ‘good taste.’ Each new imitation of the ‘good taste’ marker brings more disappointment, and most of us end up quitting. That is the part that is hard to understand. Quantity overrides quality at this point. Do as much as you can.

And if you do enough of it, one day, you will look at something you have created and find it adequate. But how do you know that it is the most you can do?

Local Maxima

Imagine that you and a friend climb hills to get to the highest point. Your friend is familiar with the area and leading the way. Once you get to hill A, you feel an incredible sense of accomplishment, but your friend points out that hill B is taller. So you climb towards hill B, and once you get to hill B, you can see that hill C is taller. Apart from proving why hiking is incredibly frustrating, this exercise is not fun. But, take heart, you are at least making progress, and soon you will be on the tallest hill.

Now imagine that your friend is suffering from sudden amnesia⁶ and has forgotten the path and their prescription eyewear. You decide to persevere, but you are surrounded by fog as soon as you start climbing. You can no longer see other hills. You can no longer tell if the hill you are on is the tallest. You can’t see the global maximum, so you might just end up finding the local maximum.

From the local maximum, improvement is much harder to achieve. The general advice is to make small incremental changes to make progress; sometimes, you need a more significant change to break out of the fog.

As per David Hume, taste is something all of us, beholders, possess. Think of the first time you experienced art and did not understand what you were supposed to appreciate about it. Until someone came along and helped you perceive it differently. So, working on perception, with help, can help you work on taste. If you ask Werner Herzog, he recommends reading anything, not just the greats, as a great exercise for budding filmmakers. In his own words, “It is the same with trash movies, trash TV. WrestleMania. The Kardashians. I’m fascinated by it. So I don’t say read Tolstoy and nothing else. Read everything. See everything. The poet must not avert his eyes.” In summation, do what you must.

The irony of quoting others on ‘taste’ is not lost on me. So, I will end by quoting myself.

Creativity, unappreciated and unseen, exists. Untouched by popular taste. Unpolished, uncut but perfect in a way.

Jun 23, 2021

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