the elusiveness of taste

Haruki Murakami, writer: If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you only think what everyone else is thinking.

Katie Dalebout • this last list is light...

Writer Gertrude Stein's definition of genius: somebody who knows who to be influenced by.

this last list is light...

Twitter killed the link but healed my media diet. Now I rely almost entirely on human curators sharing things in chronological order: newsletters, podcasts, group chat recs, and a few social platforms that actually show me what my friends are up to. Even magazines and legacy publications have good email newsletters these days. It takes some effort ... See more

The Monday Media Diet with Jasmine Sun

If a person seems to have a good grasp of a book or other artistic or aesthetic object, by all means be willing to let the conversation flow in that direction, because you will end up staring right into that person’s soul.

Tyler Cowen • Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World

Looking closely is valuable at every scale. From looking closely at a sentence, a photograph, a building, a government. It scales and it cascades — one cognizant detail begets another and then another. Suddenly you’ve traveled very far from that first little: Huh.

I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. To get good at the huh i... See more

Craig Mod • Looking Closely Is Everything

In early interviews with Whaley, he often talked about the internet being the magic ingredient to MSCHF: “Life is too short and the internet is too big to not make what you want.”

Evan Armstrong • The Art of Scaling Taste

How to Discover Your Own Taste

open.spotify.com

There is a time for any fledgling artist where one's taste exceeds one's abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.

Gabrielle Zevin • Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: A novel

Taste is not the same as correctness, though. To do something correctly is not necessarily to do it tastefully. For most things, correctness is good enough, so we skate by on that as the default. And there are many correct paths to take. You’ll be able to cook a yummy meal, enjoy the movie, build a useable product, don a shirt that fits. But taste ... See more

Attend to your influences.
I suppose this is the ur-message - to be more aware of what’s influencing you and how. Acknowledge just how much of what you think, feel and do is picked up from others, consciously and unconsciously, and try to become more conscious of more of them. Artists pay attention to this because they love their influences, while a