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Acquiring it, demonstrating it, refining it – why is everyone so obsessed with taste these days?
When I started working in marketing, fresh out of uni and riddled with too much anxiety to question any of the corporate jargon clogging up my inbox, I soon learnt that society is built on buzzwords.
Back then, the term everyone was flinging about was ‘culture.’ Tapping into culture, connecting with culture – we were all hunkering down to do work ‘for the culture’. But what did it mean? Beats me. I doubt if anyone in my office knew. But it was the trendy thing to do, to make your work sound ‘culturally charged’.
Culture still buzzes around a low-budget advertising office like the ex you can’t shake, but there’s a new word in town these days. That would be ‘taste.’ It’s not reserved solely for creative professionals, but it functions in much the same way as its predecessors.
‘Taste,’ and the art of refining it, acquiring it, and displaying it, has become the foremost priority of my generation. Substacks abound telling you what ‘taste’ is, how to differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forms of it, and where to buy the products that will ostensibly help you achieve the taste you seek.
Like most things that emerge in the zeitgeist, our taste obsession is arguably a thinly veiled tool for making us spend money on things we don’t need (frankly, what isn’t), but it’s also a reflection of the way young people are interacting with the world around them.
After all, taste has quietly become one of the few status symbols that still feels attainable. Most of us can’t afford a £1,000 dress. We can, however, cultivate a carefully curated life online. No matter what our critics say, we can learn the difference between natural wine and regular wine and develop strong opinions about chairs designed by Scandinavian men in the 1960s.
Taste offers the illusion of exclusivity without necessarily requiring wealth. Better yet, it allows us to perform individuality while participating in the same trends as everyone else – a capitalist dream in a world that’s growing ever more expansive and homogenous.
As Otegha Uwagba writes for Glamour’s Culture Debrief, ‘It seems that taste has become the preeminent online social currency, and even celebrities are getting in on the act.’
Never before have so many people worked so hard to appear unique while looking increasingly alike.
Part of this can be explained by the algorithm. Social media platforms reward familiarity because familiarity generates engagement. The things we are told are tasteful are often simply the things that have already been validated by enough people before us.
Modern taste is more about successful pattern recognition than anything else. Which perhaps explains why the conversation around taste has intensified precisely as artificial intelligence becomes impossible to ignore.
As AI tools make it easier to generate just about anything, tech leaders have started arguing that human value will increasingly lie in knowing what to make rather than how to make it.
Kyle Chayka has dissected the emergence of a distinct understanding of ‘taste’ in the AI era, suggesting that ‘AI is gradually democratizing technological production’ and thus driving an emphasis on ‘tasteful decision-making.’
It’s an appealing idea given it conveniently reframes human creativity as a form of quality control. Taste therefore represents one of the last places where people feel they can still exercise agency. It offers reassurance that there remains something fundamentally human that cannot be automated.
