taste

The question of our time is how do you artistically rebel — and win — against a totally flat cultural landscape? And before my readers, who I assume are all approximately 36 years old and very tired, say, “so what, who cares?” This does matter. I mean, just look around right now lol. You know things are bad when even OpenAI President Greg Brockman... See more

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And the most dangerous thing for platforms is not racist garbage. It’s unmonetizeable content. The “metric” that will matter most going forward will not be the numbers at the bottom of a post or video, but the human beings in a room that left their house to experience something.

As much as I share his concerns, this book repeatedly made we want to yell back at him for willfully underplaying obvious exceptions and counterarguments.

Chief among these is to what degree Chayka’s “flattening” is anything new. When he writes, “If anything, mass culture lately appears more aesthetically homogenous than ever,” he seems to forget... See more

bookforum.com • Kyle Chayka Looks at Our Supposedly Flat New World

Taste isn't some mysterious gift bestowed at birth—it's simply what happens when you pay close attention to what moves you.

Sari Azout • What Matters in the Age of AI Is Taste

Also what I mean by a good reader is not like a good student of literature but more like a good listener. They read/listen for why something is on the page. They come to each work without a checklist of how to do something well, or what makes something a success or a failure. Their taste is unique and continually expanding with the work they turn... See more

Joanne McNeil • where do my legs go

Where I care about this stuff is, well, I wish there would be more good readers. That more people would turn to work with a sense of expansiveness rather than moral accounting. Art is created with work but our enjoyment and appreciation of it isn’t work. Well, it doesn’t have to be.

Joanne McNeil

I’m fascinated with Coppola partly because she does different things very well, something I think we all strive for. But the way she presents herself and her work walks a perfect line between highbrow and approachable, never veering too far either way. She doesn’t deny her lineage or commercial success but maintains her artistic sensibility. Not... See more

Chris Black • Article

But the curation was never about financial reward. It was “there's a small unscalable business here about taste, that people rely on and really like, and everyone who works on it doesn't make very much money, but they're very cool.” We just don't live in a world where that's an acceptable way to live. There's a lot of economic pressures and again,... See more

Dirt: Complicated Culture

KRF : How do you define taste?

BD : Taste is the natural tendency to filter, mix and recombine the like and the unlike to approximate sublimity.

The Taste Report™: Ben Dietz

Online discourse has debased and trivialized the concept of obsession.

People love to post about how they’re “obsessed” with a pair of jeans, or with Flossie the world’s oldest cat (respect), or with something else they will forget exists within minutes of posting about it. They love to pretend they “can’t stop thinking about” Bolivian neo-Andean... See more

Bring back real obsession

Jan 08, 2026

n this sense, Labubus do seem to be a defining moment of 2020s culture. For those interested in moving culture away from fads such as these, resistance requires much more than a refusal to consume. If fads are narratives as much as products, they need to be starved of engagement, as well. We haven't figured out how to do this yet.

W. David Marx • Only Fads: A Culture (And Economy) of Labubu

intentionality