Taste is Necessary (May 2020)

Interpreting art without developing any sense of taste is as absurd a proposition as talking about a car's engine without having ever taken one apart. Sure you can index some social and economic behavior around it and whatnot, just like you can say a car's engine makes a car move, but the work itself will remain an axiomatized black box, the full manifold of affections and affordances completely obscured.


One might ask if the real equivalent to taking apart a car engine is actually physically making art. In many ways, yes, but even enough experience simply viewing art can develop a material sensibility sufficient for traversing the artifact's crevices.

There are many different ways to develop a sense of hermeneutics, all of which will bring unique possibilities to the table, but what they all have in common is the development of familiarity. Taste is literacy, and literacy is dexterity: there's no strict ranking, but bad taste exists in the form of clumsy interfaces, and by extension, reductive interpretation.