Taste gets talked about as if it were a possession, a thing the fortunate are born with and the rest can only envy. It is nothing of the kind. Taste is built, slowly and deliberately, by anyone willing to pay attention, and the idea that it is innate mostly serves to keep people from bothering to develop their own.
Taste is not the same as preference
Everyone has preferences, the things they happen to like. Taste is something more demanding: a developed sense of why some things are better made than others, and the confidence to say so without needing permission. You can love something that is not very good and know that you do, and you can admire something that leaves you cold. That gap, between what you enjoy and what you judge to be well made, is where taste actually lives. People without it collapse the two, assuming whatever they like must be good and whatever they dislike must be worthless.
How it is built
Real taste comes from exposure and attention, not from rules handed down by someone else.
- Volume. You cannot judge what you have barely encountered. Seeing, reading, and hearing a great deal is the raw material of any discernment.
- Attention. Exposure alone is not enough; you have to notice why something worked, what the maker did, where it fell short.
- Comparison. Taste sharpens when you set things beside each other and ask which is better and, crucially, why. The why is the whole education.
The trap of borrowed opinions
The easy counterfeit of taste is simply adopting the approved opinions, learning which names to praise and which to dismiss, and repeating them. This fools people for a while and fools the speaker longest of all. But borrowed taste is brittle. Confronted with something genuinely new, it has nothing to say, because it was never built on actual seeing, only on memorised verdicts. Real taste can meet an unfamiliar work and respond to it honestly, because it rests on your own accumulated attention rather than on a list of safe answers.
Why it is worth the effort
Developing taste is not snobbery; done right, it is the opposite. The person with genuine taste can find quality anywhere, in a cheap film or a famous painting alike, because they judge the thing itself rather than its reputation. They are also harder to sell to, less swayed by hype, more able to say this is overrated and this unfashionable thing is wonderful. That independence is the real reward. A cultivated eye and ear make the whole world richer, full of fine distinctions that the undeveloped sense simply slides past.
The encouraging part is that it is open to anyone with patience. You do not need money or credentials, only the willingness to pay attention over years and to trust your own responses while remaining honest about them. Taste is less a gift than a practice, and like any practice it rewards whoever actually does the work. Start by noticing, as precisely as you can, what moves you and why. Everything else grows from there. For more, see our Culture coverage or browse all stories.
