What We Actually Mean When We Talk About Good Taste |
Western design's "good taste" reflects cultural institutionalization, not universal truth.
Aesthetic preference operates across five layers, from neurology to cultural hegemony.
Dominant instinctual drives predict visual aesthetic preference at 77.6% concordance.
Imagine you're plopped into a room with fluorescent lighting and ceilings low enough that, without fully extending your arms, you can touch them. The walls are close enough that you cannot extend them without grazing stark white drywall, and the room runs long and narrow in that particular way that registers as wrong before you can say why, like a corridor that forgot it was supposed to become a room. Every corner is lit, nothing is in shadow, the light humming with the unmistakable sound of chemical conduction, unforgiving, flat, and completely indifferent to the human body inside it. Unless you want to live in an A24 horror movie, your flight response was likely slightly activated just reading about it.
That fluorescent room is the one place where something approaching a universal aesthetic response actually exists: a hardwired brain response rooted in our ancestral threat-detection system. Above that neurological floor, the question of what constitutes good taste becomes considerably more complicated, historically entangled, and frankly, more interesting than most conversations about it acknowledge.
So let me try to have that conversation more authentically.
The first thing worth saying (and I say this as someone trained as a postcolonial scholar in my graduate program) is that what the Western design world has historically called "good taste" is not a natural standard that certain people have the refinement to perceive and others don't. It is, in substantial part, a product of Western European aesthetic........