RLT Interview #4: W. David Marx, Writer

beyond identifying something as “cool.” Taste requires experiencing the creation in its entirety and evaluating one’s own authentic emotional response to it, parsing its effect.

1. To start very generally, taste is a mode. It’s a manner of interpretation, expression, or action. Things don’t feel tasteful, they demonstrate taste. Someone’s home can be decorated tastefully. Someone can dress tastefully. The vibe cannot be tasteful. The experien

Taste is when you’ve amassed enough of those cultural influences that you start to believe the ideas and the cultural synthesis comes from within. The moment that happens, you stop observing.

Taste is a fundamental part of the self; developing or indulging it means constructing a firmer sense of self. It…

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Montesquieu crucially argued that surprise, which can be alienating or challenging, like a particularly ugly wabi-sabi Japanese tea vessel, is a fundamental element of taste. “Something can surprise us because it excites wonder, or because it is new or unexpected,” he wrote—it exists outside the realm of what we already know we like. “Our soul ofte