Paul Graham speaks about the relevance of taste in the AI age. Source: X
What is taste?
As per the Oxford dictionary, amongst the many meanings of the word “taste”, one refers to a person’s ability to choose things that people recognize as being of good quality or appropriate.
To me, taste is the incessant war against mediocrity; it’s the climb beyond sloth and insincerity, toward meaning.
What does taste look like?
Taste is one of those things that’s insanely difficult to describe. But while writing this essay, it was mostly terms like meaningful, vigorous, and sincere that I found myself typing. Luckily I found one example that is a culmination of all three - The Cristo Velato by Giuseppe Sanmartino.
The Cristo Velato, carved from a single block of marble by Giuseppe Sanmartino. Source: Museo Sansevero
Made out of a single block of marble, when this sculpture was unveiled in 1753, visitors found it so unreal that they thought a real person was draped with a veil and then transformed into marble by a secret alchemical process.
Imagine making this masterpiece with zero margin for error with basic tools. Even with modern software, artists struggle to recreate how thin and translucent the veil looks and yet hard stone was turned into cloth. The obsession, the untiring attention to detail, is god-level.
The truth is - you can only fathom the sophistication of the process of building something so intricate when you see it through the eyes of someone trying to replicate it. Thanks to Ugo Maria Esposito, an artist in Italy, you can. He documented his glorious journey of recreating this sculpture as a 3D model here.
A 3D model of The Cristo Velato by Ugo Maria Esposito. Source: Behind the Scenes: 3D Cristo Velato
The measure of taste
Every example of taste passes all three of these tests and mediocrity fails at least one:
Vigour: Was real effort put in? Or is the maker settling for comfort?
Sincerity: Was it made for its own sake? Or made to be seen?
Meaning: Does it say something? Or is it noise made to be noticed?
Vigour and sincerity can be observed: the evidence is in the work. Meaning is subjective: it depends on who’s looking. So for each example, I’ll score all three, but the meaning score is only my read. If you disagree, look at the other two. They’re harder to argue with.
Note: These are videos that I have trimmed for the sake of making my point. If you’d like to watch the originals, they are added as links to the title of each example.
A Lavani (dance form) from the Marathi film Natarang. The lyrics, the music and the choreography don’t just sit side by side; each one deepens the other. Every expression on screen carries the meaning of the words, and the performance is delivered with grace that makes it look effortless.
This young kid took an internet trend and remixed it in his own way. It’s a hard act to pull off, and you can tell he’s put in hours of practice to make it look this easy. He didn’t copy the trend; he made it his own.
Christopher Nolan could have just made a black hole look cool. Instead, his team worked with physicist Kip Thorne to show what one might actually look like, so accurately that the work led to a scientific paper. Together with the music and the sheer sense of scale, they made it into an unforgettable, sincere moment.
What does bad taste look like?
The opposite of taste is mediocrity - the mindset of settling for less than you’re capable of. It’s not being imperfect in the moment that makes something mediocre; it’s giving up for comfort or for appearances, and being okay with it.
Unlike taste, describing mediocrity is easy. It fails all three tests. It’s meaningless, lazy and insincere. Here are a few examples:
The video uses sexuality for one reason only: to grab attention. It doesn’t celebrate anything or say anything meaningful - it exists to be clicked. When the goal is attention rather than meaning, all that’s left is noise. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the beat, but that doesn’t make it tasteful.
In 2021, an Italian artist sold an invisible sculpture at auction for about $18,000, stating, “You don’t see it, but it exists; it is made of air and spirit.” There was nothing to see, because nothing was made. It wasn’t clever, it was lazy and fraudulent.
In 2018, a shoe company called Payless set up a fake luxury store called Palessi and invited influencers to shop. They paid up to ten times the usual price, praising the quality, because the label looked expensive. They weren’t judging the shoes; they were paying for the brand.
Each test comes with a trap. And each trap has a question that gets you out:
Your encounter with taste.
Try answering these questions:
If you were designing your home, who would you call for advice?
If your grandmother knew your friends, who would she enjoy speaking with the most?
If you had limited means, how would you dress up for a royal ball tonight?
Notice who came to mind. Probably not the richest person you know, or the most fashionable. For the royal ball, you probably didn’t imagine buying anything at all; you imagined making do, cleverly. That’s taste. Not money, not trends, but judgement and care: mostly just putting your best show, honestly. The people you thought of probably share a few traits.
Traits that people with taste exhibit
Wide perspectives - have a variety of interests, always learning
Seek perfection - need things in order, obsessed with craft
Sincerely upfront - always seek truth over comfort, risk being disliked
Definitively clear - have complete opinions, not driven by trends
In love with nature - consider it the ultimate form of beauty
So far we have seen what taste looks like. Now let's see where taste comes from.
The origin of taste
The universe is in a state of flux; the only constant is change. Everything within keeps evolving to adapt to its surroundings in the pursuit of perfection. The result is beauty - the deep satisfaction you experience when you realise how everything just fits in the grand scheme of things. The competence to judge this fit is taste. Knowing what fits is how you know which way to climb.
So taste isn’t about spending money on expensive objects to look sophisticated. It’s all about good judgement. And it starts with bias.
We are all biased
There’s a lovely movie called The Gods Must Be Crazy, where Xi is a Kalahari Bushman living a traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle. This is his perspective about Kate Thompson, a white person - something Xi had never seen before:
Interesting point of view, right? Xi is not at fault here. His opinions are beyond his likes or dislikes to something far more innate - survival. You probably had a reaction to Anaconda too, one way or the other. That reaction was shaped long before you watched it.
Beliefs shape judgement
Humans have always been curious about things that could not be explained. Why does lightning strike? Why do rainbows appear? Where do people go when they die?
To explain these uncertainties, we told stories, and these stories were based on our surroundings. For example, the Egyptians perceived their gods as forgiving, for the Nile was predictable with its annual floods. But the Sumerians considered their deities wrathful due to the turbulent and unpredictable Tigris.
Over centuries, these stories culminated into distinct belief systems, each one locked away in different geographies and shaping our judgement since the day we were born.
The way we perceive the world around us is a result of what we are conditioned to as we grow up. It’s not a bad thing. In fact, it’s normal.
Here’s something you may relate to more if you are Indian or belong to cultures where being light-skinned is deemed more attractive. Below is a young woman with darker skin to the left. At the risk of sounding prejudiced, I must state that most Indians would find that less attractive than the face to the right. That preference isn’t instinct. It’s centuries of conditioning, and it’s worth questioning.
Remember Palessi? The influencers weren’t judging shoes. They were judging what they believed a luxury label meant. Belief can deepen judgement too - a Marathi viewer watching Apsara Aali brings centuries of Lavani tradition with them, and sees layers others might miss.
People exhibit patterns of preferences. And that’s just how the world works. People who share similar beliefs mostly think alike, dress alike, eat similar food, celebrate similar festivals and are highly likely to aspire for similar goals. But, not strictly - there are exceptions. The kid in the One Piece video is one of them: everyone copied the trend, he made it his own.
Which raises a question: if our judgement is shaped by where we’re born, is taste just opinion?
What does taste aim at?
Xi found Kate ugly. Most of us in India are conditioned to prefer fair skin. The Egyptians and the Sumerians built different temples for different gods. Who’s to say which of them got it right?
And yet, we all recognise a careless thing when we see it. A building that leaks in its first monsoon. A song written only to trend. A meal cooked without love. You don’t need to share someone’s culture to notice when they didn’t care.
That’s the clue. What we like is shaped by where we come from. But whether something was made with vigour and sincerity shows up everywhere.
Impact and intent are not the same. We glorify impact because it feels like the destination. But intent is the quiet force that gives meaning to the journey.
The billion rocks scattered on Mars will never be as glorious as the hundred that form a cave sheltering a bear somewhere on Earth, because those few rocks hold meaning for a life that depends on them.
Not everyone has the privilege to chase impact. Many are simply trying to make ends meet, care for their parents, or raise their children. But intent, the vigour with which we do these things, is within everyone’s reach.
This is why Io Sono and Palessi fail. It isn’t their style; it’s that the intent was missing. And it’s why a kid remixing a trend in his bedroom can show more taste than a million-dollar production.
When Messi dribbles past three defenders, nobody shouts “perfect.” We say “beautiful.” Perfection pursued with intent turns the most ordinary act into art.
Things exist because we notice them. They come alive only when we give them meaning. Without meaning, everything is as good as dead.
Remember the fit we spoke of earlier? Beauty is the satisfaction of seeing how everything fits. Meaning is what makes that fit matter. Without meaning, taste cannot exist.
Every time you encounter something made, two parties are involved: the artist who made it, and you, the beholder.
The two begin with trust. The artist promises appeal; the beholder promises patience.
The artist follows the norms, and the beholder nods.
The artist breaks the rules, and the beholder empathises.
Sanskrit has a word for the beholder’s side: sahrudaya, which means “one with a heart.” A performance is believed to come alive, to release its rasa (essence), only when it meets such a person. Not someone rich or trained. Just someone open, and honest enough to feel what’s really there. The artist’s job is to give them something worth feeling.
When the contract breaks
Trust breaks the moment the artist compromises quality. It also breaks when the beholder refuses to engage with the belief system the work comes from.
In The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton tells the story of the housing Le Corbusier, one of the most celebrated architects of the last century, designed for factory workers in Pessac, France. His style was clean, consistent and admired. But the people living there found it bland because their lives were already monotonous, working most of their waking hours in a factory doing repetitive work.
With no regard for his design, they added pitched roofs, smaller windows, wallpaper and garden fences. Corbusier was consistent, but he had put his style before the people he was building for. The contract broke from the artist’s side.
How do you grow taste?
Let’s say you have a piece of clay and your intent is to make a beautiful pot. You may be limited by your tools: how good your wheel is, how well it spins, even the quality of the clay. But beyond a certain standard, everything else is a function of your mindset.
The beauty isn’t just in the finished pot. It’s in what the act of shaping it does to you. Even something this simple forces you to decide what beautiful means, to notice details you’d never noticed, and to question what you assumed was right. And here, detailing doesn’t mean ornamentation.
In shaping the clay, you reshape your perspective. That’s how taste grows.
Popping bubbles
Our environment conditions us to think a certain way, and over time it builds a thin layer around us, like a bubble. I call it our perspective.
Most of us spend our lives staring at what the bubble reflects back. Architects notice door handles, engineers see functions everywhere, and economists see game theory.
But if you look hard enough, you start to see what lies beyond your bubble. With a little courage, it pops, and it humbles you with the knowledge that you’re still inside yet another bubble. Each one you pop widens your perspective.
Crabs understand this better than most. Their hard shell doesn’t grow with them, so the only way to grow is to molt - shed the old shell and form a new one. Outgrowing doesn’t mean forgetting. It means adapting, until you reach a kind of harmony with your surroundings.
Those who pop bubbles will always be fewer. That’s okay. But the more you pop, the clearer your judgement becomes.
How to pop bubbles
If you take only one thing from this essay, take this. Repeat it and you’ll grow good taste.
Wherever you are, sit down and look around. It doesn’t matter where. Pick anything: a chair, a sign, a cup, the building across the street. Then ask:
Vigour: Whoever built this, did they put in real effort? Or did they settle?
Sincerity: Was it made honestly, for its own sake? Or just to be seen?
Meaning: Now think about what it means to you. Do you connect with it?
If it means nothing to you, look it up. Why is it made this way? What do people who admire it say? What makes it special to them? See whether any of it fits with what you believe. Try your best. And if it still doesn’t speak to you, let it go. Not everything has to.
Growing taste is like learning anything new. Form your own opinion first. Then seek out people who agree with you, and, more importantly, people who don’t. Weigh both, and make your own judgement. That’s all anyone can really do.
Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, in their book How to Read a Book, call a version of this syntopical reading: reading many perspectives on one subject until you can form a view of your own. Taste works the same way, except the subject is everything around you.
The rest of the climb
Paul Graham said that when anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make. Machines can now make almost anything. What they can’t do is care on your behalf.
That’s what taste is. It’s choosing what’s worth making, and refusing to settle while you make it.
The word mediocre comes from the Latin mediocris, meaning halfway up a mountain. Mediocrity isn’t failure - it’s settling halfway because the view seems good enough.
