Against Taste

Taste arrived quietly, somewhere over the last few months. It arrived the way a new technology consensus always arrives. It wasn't argued into place. It simply appeared there one morning, like the weather. No one proposed it. No one even had to. It was a clean and easy answer to the question everyone in technology has been asking: what are humans for once the models get good enough? Taste was a clean and easy answer. It could be deployed at deliberative catch up coffees in San Francisco matcha bars, the kind with overstuffed croissants that end up on viral TikToks and hashtag-food Slack channels featuring sober coworker chat about slop bowls. And taste arrived at boozy New York allocator dinners where people counted their carry and felt bad about it while deploying it into Gin Lane houses and Park Avenue condos while discussed which venture capitalist got divorced that week. Taste, of course, was the only thing that mattered. The ability to select, the ability to curate. The thing humans have been doing forever. Taste was an easy answer. Taste comes to the party wearing Yohji Yamamoto pants and an OpenAI commercial-leadership-offsite Patagonia quarter-zip. Taste does drink, just a bit and sometimes more than a bit on weekends, but it does have a shockingly high VO2. Taste is a complete vision of what post-scarcity protein-heavy brunch looks like: shiny Accutane-and-GHK skin, emotions muted by insulin inhibitors and novel neurotoxic research chemicals. I hate Taste. Not because taste isn't real. Taste is very real. I hate it because what we're calling taste is a very dangerous and slippery thing. And when you look at what came before taste, you realize that what the taste thesis actually proposes is not an empowerment of human agency but a fundamental demotion. It might be the most elegant and well-branded demotion in the history of human self-regard. Consider what the word actually means. For most of human history there was no concept of taste as we understand it. There was patronage. Patronage was anything but taste. Patronage was a relationship between capital and artistic labor so intimate that the two were functionally a single body. The patron did not select from finished works on a wall, allocating neat sums of money to purchase them. The patron animated the work before it existed. "The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it." Genesis 2:15 The first vocation in Scripture is not to sit atop creation and admire its beauty. It is labor. Co-creation. Man's original calling is to tend, to make, to participate in the ongoing work of creation. The garden is not a tasteful Japandi department store, finished so that software engineers can walk through it and tithe their income to its best elements. It is a living thing that requires redemptive labor. The taste thesis, at its deepest and most simple structure, reverses this order. It places man at the end of the chain of creation, evaluating what has already been generated, rather than at the beginning, participating in the generation itself. It makes man what he has been slowly becoming for a century: a critic of creation rather than a co-creator. A consumer at his core. The bottega system, first pioneered in Florence in the fifteenth century, animated some of the greatest works humanity has ever produced. A bottega was not an artist's studio in any modern sense. It was not a private room where a thoughtful artist communed with his own genius and waited for the muse. It was a commercial enterprise that took commissions. Verrocchio's bottega, where the young Leonardo trained, was exactly this kind of place. The patron didn't stroll in once the painting was finished to evaluate it. He arrived before the first brushstroke. He specified the subject. He specified the materials. The contract was explicit down to the gram — how much ultramarine, how much gold leaf — because these things cost real money and the patron was not interested in artistic ambiguity. He specified the dimensions, he specified what figures should appear and where. The painter pushed back. He knew things the patron did not. He understood composition, perspective, the play of light, the behavior of pigment on gesso, the structural properties of the poplar panels he would paint on. The patron's money bought the ultramarine and the painter's knowledge determined what it could become. The negotiation between these two was the generative act. The patron's capital and ambition, the painter's skill and stubbornness. They were locked in a generative argument about what the thing should be, and what emerged was a product of that argument — not of anyone's judgment, but of their shared labor. This is how artistic creation worked for most of human history. Think of the medieval cathedral. The bishop raised the money, the master mason designed the structure, but the relationship between them was not commissioner and contractor. It was a decades-long collabor