Taste Is a Discipline, Not a Personality
Taste is usually described as a preference, which makes it sound like a flavour of personality. It is better understood as a discipline: a trained capacity to tell the difference between things that are almost the same, acquired by making mistakes and paying for them.
Preference and discrimination
Preference is what a person likes. Discrimination is what a person can distinguish, and the two are not the same faculty. Someone may prefer a ripe Burgundy to an older one and still be unable to say which is which in a blind glass; that is a preference without discrimination, and it is the ordinary condition of most consumers, including most wealthy ones.
Taste requires the second. It is comparative before it is evaluative, which is why the training is always the same: put two things side by side, remove the labels, and try to say what changed. A person who can do that reliably has taste in that domain, whatever their preferences turn out to be.
The tuition
This is expensive. Learning to tell things apart usually means buying the wrong thing, wearing it, and discovering over a year why it was wrong. The tuition is paid in money and in time, and it cannot be paid in advance, which is why taste correlates with age and exposure rather than with sensitivity or income.
It is also why taste is unevenly distributed across domains. A person can have an excellent eye for furniture and none at all for wine, because the tuition has to be paid separately in each field. There is no general faculty of taste, only a set of specific apprenticeships.
What the algorithm removed
Recommendation systems are designed to eliminate error, and error is the curriculum. A feed that shows a person more of what they already respond to will produce a very confident consumer with no comparative experience, because the one thing the system will never recommend is the thing that would have taught them something by being wrong.
The consequence is a generation that has opinions in abundance and standards in short supply. An opinion costs nothing; a standard costs a purchase, a season of wearing it and the honesty to admit the mistake. The internet has made the first cheap and the second optional, and the difference shows in the way people talk about objects: fluent in adjectives, silent on comparison.
There is a technological version of the same problem. A person who reads forty reviews of a jacket has more information than someone who owned one, and less knowledge, because reviews describe the object at the moment of arrival and ownership describes it at the end of the second winter. Information accumulates in the present tense. Knowledge requires a past.
The class problem
It would be dishonest to ignore that taste has functioned as a marker of class, and that the resentment of it is often justified. The vocabulary of discernment has been used to exclude people for centuries, and the exclusion was frequently arbitrary. Any defence of taste has to begin by admitting that.
But the answer to exclusion is wider access to the discipline, not the abolition of the standard. A standard is not a gate; it is a description of what good work looks like, and it is available to anyone willing to look at enough examples. The gate is the price of admission to the examples, which is a political question and a different one.
The practice
The method is unglamorous and takes years. Visit the same museum twice and look at ten objects instead of a hundred. Eat the same dish in five restaurants and write down what changed. Keep the thing that disappointed, and wear it until the reason becomes clear. Comparison, attention, repetition: there is no fourth ingredient.
It also requires staying longer rather than seeing more, which is the opposite of how cultural consumption is now organised. A person who has looked at one painting for an hour has more to say about it than one who has photographed forty, and the second person is the one the institution is designed for.
None of this is a defence of expertise as a caste. The discipline is open, and its methods are public: compare, wait, record, admit error, compare again. What it is not open to is a shortcut, and the culture has spent twenty years insisting that a shortcut exists in the form of good taste being innate, or purchasable, or available by following the right accounts.
Taste is not a personality, and it is not a birthright. It is a practice with a cost, and the cost is the only thing that makes the judgments worth listening to.
The people whose opinions are worth having are almost always the ones who can describe their own mistakes in detail. That is not a coincidence. It is the whole method.