The Case for Having Taste

In the early 1980s, a generation of artists, writers, choreographers, photographers, and dancers began dying of AIDS in New York City. The loss to creative culture was catastrophic and largely unmourned by mainstream America. But author and cultural critic Fran Lebowitz, who watched her community disappear person by person, identified something in that devastation that most elegies missed entirely. The cultural void left by the crisis wasn't only about the artists who died. It was equally about the audience they left behind.

Speaking in Martin Scorsese's 2010 documentary Public Speaking, Lebowitz argued that a discerning audience — one with a genuine capacity for aesthetic judgment — is "exactly as important to the culture as artists." When that audience dies, the work doesn't just lose its witnesses. It loses the standard against which new work is measured. The second tier rises. The third tier follows. The people who remain to set the terms of cultural legitimacy are, by definition, the people who weren't part of the conversation that preceded them. As Lebowitz observed with characteristic bluntness, if everyone who had died of AIDS came back to life and she told them who was now celebrated as a major artist, they would fall on the floor.[^1]

What made the generation Lebowitz mourned so culturally significant wasn't just their talent. It was their subversiveness. The queer artists, writers, and aesthetes who constituted the heart of New York's creative scene in the 1970s and early 1980s weren't the tastemakers of the establishment. They were its antagonists. Camp, drag, experimental performance, queer cinema, the particular sensibility that ran through Andy Warhol's Factory and the downtown art world — these weren't taste practices that reinforced respectability hierarchies. They were built in defiance of them. The connoisseurship Lebowitz describes was inseparable from its challenge to dominant social and aesthetic norms. It elevated what polite society dismissed, made genuine subversion legible as art, and refused the terms the mainstream offered.

This distinction matters enormously for how we understand what taste actually is and what it's for. The most powerful taste communities in cultural history haven't been the ones that enforced the dominant order. They've been the ones who challenged it.

Lebowitz articulated the mechanism at work in a later interview: "The audience for any art form is collaborative with the artist," she noted, and knowing that your audience is genuinely knowledgeable increases your ability to perform.[^2] Read that carefully. She isn't saying that audiences passively receive culture. She's saying they help produce it. A demanding, discerning audience raises the quality of the work made for it. An audience that can't tell the difference between good and merely adequate work — or that has been so thoroughly distracted it no longer tries — does not. The standard doesn't maintain itself. It requires people capable of holding it.

Taste has a reputation problem. The word carries decades of social baggage — images of cultural gatekeeping, class condescension, the sneering collector explaining why your preferences are wrong. It's worth acknowledging that this reputation has a real basis before making the case that it fundamentally misunderstands what taste actually is.

In his landmark 1979 work Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that aesthetic preferences function primarily as markers of social class — that what we call "good taste" is largely a mechanism by which the culturally powerful reproduce and enforce their dominance.[^3] Working-class aesthetics, in Bourdieu's analysis, is a dominated aesthetic: constantly obliged to define itself in relation to the standards of the ruling class rather than on its own terms. His argument was sociologically serious and empirically grounded, and it remains influential for good reason. Cultural gatekeeping is real. The weaponization of aesthetic judgment to police social boundaries is real.

But Bourdieu's framework almost entirely fails to account for Lebowitz's people. The queer aesthetes who built New York's downtown creative culture in the 1970s weren't using taste to reproduce dominant hierarchies. They were using it to dismantle them. Camp is not an aesthetic of deference; it's an aesthetic of subversion — a practice of finding beauty and meaning in what the mainstream had dismissed as low, ridiculous, or obscene. The connoisseurship of the AIDS generation was exercised against the grain of respectable culture, not with it. To reduce all aesthetic judgment to a mechanism of social reproduction is to miss the most interesting thing taste can do: identify and legitimize what the prevailing order has failed to see.

This is the distinction that matters. Taste, at its best, is not a hierarchy. It is a quality of attention.

Researchers studying aesthetic experience have found that what distinguishes genuine aesthetic engagement from passive consumption is a particular mode of heightened attention — what philosophers and psychologists have long called an "aesthetic attitude."[^4] The brain processes aesthetic stimuli differently from ordinary perception: activating not just sensory and reward systems, but the default mode network, which is associated with introspection, self-reflection, and the construction of meaning.[^5] Taste, in other words, isn't about having the correct opinions. It's about the depth and honesty of your engagement with the thing in front of you.

That framing clarifies the distinctions that often get muddled when taste is discussed:

Taste is what emerges when you bring genuine curiosity to why something works, what it is trying to do, and whether it succeeds on its own terms. It requires engagement, analysis, and — crucially — a willingness to be surprised, challenged, and changed by what you encounter. You can develop it regardless of your background, your education, your class position. But you do have to develop it. It doesn't arrive on its own.

Nobody with a functioning recommendation feed needs to be told that contemporary culture has a quality problem. What's less obvious is how systematically the problem has been engineered.

Recommendation algorithms — the systems that determine what you watch, read, and listen to on every major platform — do not optimize for quality. They optimize for engagement, which is a meaningfully different thing. A 2019 analysis published in New Media & Society examined the behavior of YouTube creators and found that 70% had adapted their content strategies specifically to match algorithm preferences for sensationalism, producing a homogenized cultural landscape that consistently prioritizes virality over depth.[^6] The creators didn't decide to make worse content. They responded rationally to the incentive structure they were operating inside. The platform wanted engagement. They provided it.

This is the structural mechanism Lebowitz identified in a different context, now running through every cultural domain simultaneously and at scale.

As Lebowitz put it with characteristic economy: "Too much democracy in the culture, not enough democracy in the society."[^7] The provocation deserves unpacking. She isn't arguing against accessibility. She's arguing against the confusion of access with judgment — the assumption that because everyone can publish, curate, and create, the act of developing genuine standards is either unnecessary or elitist. Radical accessibility is genuinely valuable. But it does not, by itself, produce quality or the capacity to recognize it. Those require something else.

Now add AI content generation to a media ecosystem already optimized for engagement over quality. Researchers studying the effects of AI-assisted creative work have found that while AI tools improve individual creative output — increasing novelty and usefulness in specific tasks — they simultaneously reduce collective creative diversity, with AI-assisted outputs showing measurably greater similarity to one another than human-produced work.[^8] Individual gains, aggregate losses. The pieces each improve slightly. The range narrows significantly. What we end up with is a cultural landscape that is technically more competent and aesthetically more uniform — a vast quantity of content that resembles art without the animating intelligence that art requires.

The audience hasn't died. But it has been systematically conditioned away from the habits of attention that discernment requires.

The most common misunderstanding about taste is that you either have it or you don't — that it's a disposition some people are born with, refined through expensive education or lucky circumstance, and unavailable to everyone else. This is wrong in ways that cognitive science makes fairly clear.

Research on aesthetic judgment and personality has found that the trait most strongly associated with developed taste is not intelligence, education, or cultural background. It's openness to experience — a willingness to encounter unfamiliar things without immediately retreating to the comfort of the already-known. People who score high on openness make more flexible and interconnected associations in semantic memory when engaging with art, and this cognitive flexibility connects propositions that lead to genuinely new knowledge and understanding.[^9] The brain that practices genuine aesthetic engagement gets better at it, and the capacities it develops — sustained attention, tolerance for ambiguity, the ability to hold complexity without resolving it prematurely — transfer to other domains of thinking.

Taste, in other words, is trainable. But it trains through friction, not exposure.

This is where Lebowitz's social world becomes instructive in ways that extend well beyond cultural criticism. The community she describes wasn't constituted by shared preferences. It was constituted by shared argument — by people who brought genuine conviction to their aesthetic positions and were willing to defend them against genuine disagreement. Toni Morrison told Lebowitz she was "almost always right, but never fair."[^10] That tension — between conviction and fairness, between having standards and remaining open to revision — is exactly where taste lives. An echo chamber of validated preferences produces comfort. It does not produce discernment.

Developing taste requires seeking out the kind of friction that most of us spend considerable energy avoiding:

None of this requires access to elite institutions, expensive experiences, or the right social connections. It requires sustained attention and genuine curiosity — which are available to anyone willing to practice them.

The structural incompatibility between taste development and contemporary digital culture is not accidental. Algorithmic feeds are engineered to produce a specific kind of attention: fast, reactive, easily redirected, and above all passive. The user who scrolls is the user who stays. A person who has developed genuine aesthetic judgment — who can evaluate what they're being served, decide whether it merits their sustained attention, and choose something better when it doesn't — is, from the platform's perspective, a less reliable engagement unit.

Developing taste is, in this sense, a form of resistance. Not a dramatic or politically obvious form, but a structural one. It means reclaiming the act of curation — deciding what actually deserves your attention rather than accepting what the feed surfaces. It means practicing the kind of slow, analytical engagement that recommendation systems are explicitly designed to interrupt. It means developing your own signal for quality, so that you're no longer dependent on algorithmic proxies that optimize for everything except quality.

The cognitive benefits compound in ways that extend well beyond aesthetic experience. Research on the attentional effects of aesthetic engagement suggests that the practice of genuine aesthetic attention strengthens the same capacities that knowledge work, deep reading, and creative practice all require: sustained focus, tolerance for complexity, and the ability to sit with something long enough to actually understand it.[^11] The person who develops taste is not just a better audience for art. They are a better thinker.

But the case for taste doesn't ultimately rest on its individual benefits. It rests on what Lebowitz identified in her mourning: the audience is half the work. The quality of what gets made is not determined solely by the ambitions of the people who make it. It is co-determined by the capacity of the people who receive it to recognize and reward quality when they encounter it. Every person who develops the ability to distinguish good work from merely adequate work raises the standard for what gets made — not through any grand intervention, but through the aggregate effect of their attention and their choices.

The AIDS crisis produced a sudden, catastrophic collapse of a discerning audience. What we're experiencing now is something slower and more ambient: the gradual erosion of the habits of attention that discernment requires, engineered by systems that benefit from their absence. The mechanism is different. The structural outcome trends in the same direction.

The answer, if there is one, isn't a policy or a platform feature. It's the same thing it has always been: people who care enough about quality to develop the capacity to recognize it, and who take seriously the role that the audience plays in determining what culture gets to be.

That's not gatekeeping. It's the opposite. It's what gatekeeping has always been trying to prevent.

[^1]: Fran Lebowitz, Public Speaking, directed by Martin Scorsese (HBO, 2010). Lebowitz's remarks on the AIDS crisis and cultural connoisseurship are extensively documented in coverage of the documentary. See also Colby Smith, "OK, How Funny is Fran Lebowitz Really?," Really Smart, January 29, 2021, https://reallysmart.substack.com/p/ok-how-funny-is-fran-lebowitz-really

[^2]: Fran Lebowitz, interview with The Face, January 2021, https://theface.com/culture/fran-lebowitz-martin-scorsese-pretend-city-timothee-chalamet-interview

[^3]: Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674212770

[^4]: PhilPapers, "Aesthetic Taste," bibliography entry summarizing research on aesthetic attention, https://philpapers.org/browse/aesthetic-taste. The framing of aesthetic experience as "heightened attention" is a consistent finding across empirical aesthetics research.

[^5]: Anjan Chatterjee and Oshin Vartanian, "Neuroscience of Aesthetics," in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Science, eds. J.E. Cadle and A.M. Windsor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 343–358.

[^6]: Cited in "Algorithmic Culture," Grokipedia, drawing on a 2019 analysis published in New Media & Society examining YouTube creator behavior and algorithmic adaptation, https://grokipedia.com/page/algorithmic_culture

[^7]: Fran Lebowitz, Public Speaking, directed by Martin Scorsese (HBO, 2010), as quoted in "Public Speaking: Scorsese's Fran Lebowitz Doc Delights," Salon, November 22, 2010, https://www.salon.com/2010/11/22/public_speaking_scorsese_doc_fran_lebowitz/

[^8]: Research on AI-assisted creative work and collective diversity, cited in "Algorithmic Culture," Grokipedia, https://grokipedia.com/page/algorithmic_culture. The finding — individual output novelty increases while group output similarity increases by 8.9–10.7% — draws on empirical studies of AI-assisted writing.

[^9]: Andrew P. Christensen et al., "Remotely Close Associations: Openness to Experience and Semantic Memory Structure," European Journal of Personality 32, no. 4 (2018), as cited in "Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts," American Psychological Association, https://neuroaesthetics.med.upenn.edu/assets/user-content/documents/publications/2023-36170-001.pdf

[^10]: Fran Lebowitz and Toni Morrison, as recounted in Public Speaking, directed by Martin Scorsese (HBO, 2010), and quoted in "Public Speaking: Scorsese's Fran Lebowitz Doc Delights," Salon, November 22, 2010, https://www.salon.com/2010/11/22/public_speaking_scorsese_doc_fran_lebowitz/

[^11]: PhilPapers, "Aesthetic Taste," summarizing interdisciplinary research on aesthetic attention and its cognitive correlates, https://philpapers.org/browse/aesthetic-taste