The critic who can explain every cut may still have no taste.
When people say someone has taste, they usually mean the person can tell good from bad. Imagine a film reviewer who can explain exactly why a scene works: the timing of the cut, the lighting, the performance, the history behind the director’s choices. Years of practice have taught her to notice what most viewers miss. If anyone has taste, it seems, she does.
Now imagine a first-time director who releases a strange comedy that respected reviewers, this one included, dismiss as awkward and badly paced. The director understands their standards and has violated them on purpose. If the film fails, she loses years of work, money, and perhaps her chance to make another. If it succeeds, other filmmakers copy its rhythm, and the reviewers develop new language to praise what they first called a mistake. Which of the two has taste?
There are two familiar answers, and neither handles the case well. One says taste is subjective, so you should like whatever you like; that protects the director’s preference but makes it impossible to say she saw something the reviewers missed. The other says taste is expertise: learn the accepted works, refine perception, and defer to cultivated judgment. That respects the reviewer’s real skill but would have ruled against the director at exactly the moment she was right. Venkatesh Rao’s “The Taste Essay” offers a third answer, and it puts the director at the center. Taste, on this view, is a wager made under social consequence, and the most interesting thing about it is what happens to the person after the wager pays off.
Taste begins where trained judgment becomes a social risk, and matures when the person no longer needs the fight that proved the judgment was theirs.
The reviewer knows; the director bets
The reviewer is what Rao calls a connoisseur, and she demonstrates discernment. The director is a taste pioneer, and she demonstrates taste. Discernment reads the current map, and every correct explanation the reviewer gives points back to standards the film world already understands. Taste bets that the map no longer points toward the most interesting destination.
The reviewer’s trained eyes genuinely see more, but detail alone cannot decide which details deserve a life. Taste appears when attention leaves the protected workshop and has to answer a harder question: what is worth noticing, making, and defending now?
Taste is making aesthetic choices someone does not want you to make. — Venkatesh Rao, “The Taste Essay”
Rao’s phrase matters because it puts stakes back into taste. A private preference never has to prove it can generate a shared world; the director’s comedy does. She risks ridicule, lost income, and the humiliation of having mistaken novelty for life, and then results grade the bet. If talented people follow her, yesterday’s mistake becomes tomorrow’s standard.
The same structure separates the pioneer from the contrarian. Contrarianism breaks rules to display independence. Taste breaks a rule because fidelity to the old rule would betray the work. If the director’s pacing is awkward only to prove she can ignore the reviewers, her film is a stunt. The strange work has to reveal something, not merely advertise the courage of its maker.
Who draws blood
Suppose the comedy succeeds. The reviewers now do necessary work: connoisseurs preserve distinctions, train perception, and keep a culture from dissolving into noise, and a pioneer without settlers leaves no tradition behind. But when no new pioneer can survive the gate, judgment turns inward, and Weaponized Taste draws blood downward. A living distinction becomes a class credential, unfamiliarity becomes inferiority, and the culture says it is protecting standards when it is often protecting the people whose identities depend on owning them. The pioneer draws blood in the other direction. When the director’s comedy is copied, she makes the reviewers’ judgment look stale. Without disruption, taste becomes heritage management. With nothing but disruption, it becomes adolescent theater. A culture stays alive only when preservation and rule-breaking can both do their work.
After the fight is won
The maturity in the opening thesis begins with a problem for the director herself. The young pioneer needs opposition, because opposition supplies a hard surface against which self-authorship becomes visible. But a person who needs the old guard to stay scandalized is still governed by the old guard. Rebellion is conformity with the sign reversed.
Respectability, rebellion, and freedom map onto three ages of taste. The conformist lets the culture author her, the rebel authors herself against it, and the free person can follow a culture’s standards, break them, or ignore them without turning any move into an identity claim. So connoisseurs know what a culture has learned to value, pioneers risk their position to discover what it can value next, and free people no longer need either role to secure a self.
That freedom changes conduct. Once other people no longer serve as judges, enemies, or converts, kindness becomes possible. Twenty years on, the director can sit on a panel next to a nervous first-time filmmaker and help without needing the newcomer’s mistakes to certify her own refinement.
The reviewer asked whether the comedy was good by the standards she had inherited. The director had to ask whose standards those were and what defying them would cost. Her last question comes later, when she has become the standard someone else wants to break: whether she can let the identity built by being right go. Taste finds new life by risking blood. Wisdom knows when to stop drawing it.
References
- Venkatesh Rao, “The Taste Essay”