How to develop "good" taste

Part 1

What is taste? If we’re discussing food, the definition I gravitate to is: Taste is the ability to tell the difference between flavors in your mouth. More broadly, taste means “the intellectual judgment of an object’s aesthetic merit.” 

Aesthetic value is subjective; different minds will appraise a given object differently. While many may disagree, I believe taste is both subjective and objective. It is subjective because it involves our personal desires, experiences, and physiology. And it is objective because categorizing “good” and “bad” requires collective judgments outside of one individual’s perspective. Taste is grounded in subjective pleasure and informed by knowing what is “good” and why. 

But what constitutes good taste? What rules and reasons can we agree on as the barometer for saying someone has good taste? How do we determine better or worse taste when it’s impossible to find stable standards or eternally true general principles that apply to everyone? Is outlining a criterion for what constitutes good taste a trap for elitism? I do not have an answer to satisfy everyone, but I hope to offer some ideas and explorations that might explain what I understand good taste to mean.

When I say someone has bad taste in the context of fashion, people often think I am strictly judging what someone is wearing and how they wear it. But when I state that someone lacks good taste, I am considering why a person wears what they wear, along with the tailoring, fit, and quality of the items that make up the outfit. But I wouldn’t judge an outfit on a celebrity like I would judge someone with an above-minimum-wage job. 

I know you all want me to get straight to the point about what taste is. I can’t because it isn’t black & white. Some people would ask, how can we argue about bad and good taste when there is no way to prove it? And to them, I say, I can! 

Who can make aesthetic judgments of taste?

David Hume, in “Of the Standard of Taste,” says judgments of beauty are sentiments or feelings because they do not extend beyond themselves. But judgments of taste cannot concern only what we find beautiful — because while our sentiments are always true, personal feeling is not objective. Reliable judgments of taste must include a judgment of the quality of the object — a quality that can be proven false or true — and a judgment of aesthetics. Kant, meanwhile, describes the judgment of aesthetics as a judgment based on a feeling. 

So when I say someone has good taste in picking something: it means the thing is good because it is well made (quality), AND you are wearing it well (feeling). This distinction is important because some people have the capital to purchase objectively “good objects” but do not know why what they own is good and do not put those “good objects” to good use. Many celebrities fall into this category, but I will use Zendaya and Kendall Jenner to illustrate my point.