Learning to have taste

What if you want to appreciate something unfamiliar? Many people seem to think that being tasteful just magically happens, but it’s a skill, like any other, that you can practice and get better at.

As with other any other skill, you need repetition and training to learn its subtleties (e.g., listening to the same song on repeat to break down a bassline or watching a movie multiple times to see why the director chose to structure the plot in a particular way).

But it’s less about doing or making something and more about consuming it. It’s much more about listening than about talking.

Example: Abstract art

Recently, many people have passed around variations of this article which strongly associates modern art with toddler art. This is a case in point example of people projecting criticism for a subject they have little appreciation for. Anyone who has spent time looking at many works from modern, abstract artists would generally be able to tell the difference for most, if not all, of these. The top comment from Reddit’s art subreddit on this article pretty much says how I feel about this.

Strictly in terms of approaches to mark-making, the modern artists’ works were/are much more sophisticated and interesting. […] the stereotypical phrase “my KID could do that!” is so strange to me. Sure, your child could apply paint to canvas in a way which you wouldn’t, but not due to rigorous investigation

Moreover, it’s not a fair comparison when many of the article’s pieces were heavily cropped and taken out of context. It’s like taking a swirl of a cloud and calling it Starry Night. It fucks with the composition.

This is the full version of the piece that was cropped above. Gerhard Richter’s Woods

Example: Hip hop music

Childish Gambino’s new album cover for “Because the Internet”

Many people cast off the whole genre of hip hop as being immature, vulgar, angry, or just generally uncultured and not artistic. And, don’t get me wrong, there are plenty examples of those criticisms, but it’s terrible to cast off the whole genre as a result. Hip hop is one of the most inventive genres in today’s music. The more you listen to it, the more you can understand how full of intricacies it is, including the use and modification of samples from other songs (e.g., Kanye and JAY Z’s Watch the Throne), complex rhyme structures (e.g., 3rd verse of Drake’s “Worst Behavior”), and ridiculous amounts of references and wordplay (e.g., RapGenius explanation of Childish Gambino’s “3005"), to name a few. It’s like each song is a beautiful puzzle waiting to be solved.

(And for those interested, here’s a primer—from the hiphopheads subreddit—on some of the elements to look for in hip hop music.)

Summary

Empathize and appreciate what you’re unfamiliar with. You can learn to appreciate new things if you spend time consuming it and learning its culture.

As to why this matters, for those that know me, I have an opinion on most things, but there are some things I don’t have a preference for nor the experience with, such as comedy or stand-up. Therefore, I often don’t judge comedies, but I can appreciate that other people do, and I respect that. I think the world would be a much better place if more people did this.

It’s disappointing because pointless criticism can completely derail others from something wonderful or cause them to be fearful of enjoying something that is disapproved. Even worse, pointless criticism belittles many beautiful things in the world—sometimes to the point where creators will stop creating. We should criticize for the sake of beauty, not in spite of it.