Taste is a commitment

Imagine a restaurant able to generate a thousand plausible menus in an afternoon.

Some would be fashionable. Some would be adventurous. Many would sound appealing. The restaurant still has to serve dinner.

It has a kitchen of a particular size, ingredients it can obtain, staff with particular skills and customers who have chosen to spend their evening there.

The menu has to belong to that situation.

That is where taste becomes more interesting than preference.

An option has a context

An attractive object is relatively easy to admire in isolation. A useful choice has to survive contact with everything around it.

A chair may look beautiful and be uncomfortable for the person using it. A sentence may be elegant and obscure the point of the paragraph. A dish may be impressive and make the meal feel incoherent.

Taste involves noticing these relationships. It includes an idea of what the whole is trying to become and a willingness to reject something appealing because it does not belong.

This makes taste difficult to reduce to a list of admired examples. The same choice can be excellent in one setting and poor in another.

More options change the work

When producing an option is costly, exploration has a natural limit. People develop a few possibilities and become invested in them.

When possibilities are cheap, that limit weakens. There is always another version to consider. Something slightly more dramatic, cleaner or more fashionable may be one request away.

Exploration can become a way of postponing commitment.

The useful question is whether another option is likely to reveal something important. Sometimes it will. Sometimes the real work is making the current choice coherent and finding out what happens when people encounter it.

Taste includes a sense of when to stop searching.

Beyond immediate approval

A generated option can satisfy the description given to it. But the description may itself be narrow.

Ask for a beautiful room and receive something visually convincing. Spend a week in it and discover nowhere convenient to put a bag, poor light for reading and surfaces that are difficult to maintain.

The image answered an aesthetic request. The room has other obligations.

This is why taste benefits from experience. Encountering things over time reveals qualities that first impressions miss. It teaches us which compromises matter and which details are merely conspicuous.

Tools can contribute to this understanding. They can compare alternatives, expose inconsistencies and suggest possibilities we would otherwise overlook. The judgement still needs criteria connected to the life the thing will have.

Whose taste counts

There is a danger in describing taste as a scarce advantage. It can become a flattering story about people already authorised to decide what is good.

Familiarity with expensive objects or fashionable references does not establish superior judgement. It may simply establish access.

Good taste should be open to explanation and challenge. Who is the choice for? What does it enable? Which trade-off does it make? Does it work beyond the setting in which it is being praised?

Different people can answer those questions differently without one group being deficient. A useful culture of taste allows more than one standard of excellence.

Living with the choice

The restaurant eventually has to select its menu. Selection creates obligations: to source the ingredients, train the staff, serve the dishes and notice what diners leave uneaten.

That feedback can improve the next menu. An endless collection of hypothetical menus cannot provide the same knowledge.

Taste becomes valuable through commitment and revision. It is expressed in what is chosen, but also in what is learned after choosing.

Abundant possibilities give us more room to explore. They also make it more important to develop a considered point of view and let it encounter the world.