An Essay on Taste

The promise

There's a sentence that ends every argument about music, food, or architecture: there's no accounting for taste. It sounds like tolerance. It's really a surrender. If taste were a causeless whim, nobody could improve it, nobody could explain it, and nobody could design anything on purpose. And yet every day someone decides which track opens the playlist, how the window display is stacked, where the cut lands in the video. Some of those decisions work and some don't, and the difference isn't luck.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, a French magistrate who had spent his life studying laws and climates left behind an unfinished, very short text with an uncomfortable wager: there is something written about taste — only it isn't written on the object's side of the exchange, it's written on the side of whoever receives it. And if that's where it sits, it can be described part by part. What follows takes five of those parts, translates them into problems you actually have this week — something that doesn't land, something that exhausts, a rule you don't know whether to break — and tests them against what psychology and sociology have found since.

The idea in one image

Picture the key-cutting counter at the back of a hardware store: hundreds of brass blanks hanging on a board, every one with different teeth, not one of them beautiful. Nobody argues about whether a key is beautiful, because a key means nothing on its own. It exists only in relation to a hidden object almost nobody looks at: the lock. And a lock is not a mystery. It's a row of pins cut to specific heights. The locksmith doesn't judge keys. He reads locks.