Slay the Cult of Taste

If "taste" were a person, it would have long since been promoted from hobbyist to head of strategy. Perhaps it's time to send it back to the kitchen, where it belongs among garlic butter and grape varietals.

© Kathleen Ryan "Pleasures Known" 2019 | Josh Lilley, London

Lately, every scroll through LinkedIn, Instagram, or Substack reads like a toast to taste, the supposed cure to AI slop, the last human edge against the algorithm, the salvation of branding, design, art, and leadership itself. "Chief Taste Officer" is suddenly a serious title, and curation is marketed as a thousand little rituals of appetite.

Let's be honest: this whole obsession with taste is barking up the wrong tree. What keeps being described as taste is rarely anything more profound than preference. It is a flattering costume we have tailored for ordinary inclination, a way of making personal desire sound like cultivated discernment behind which lurks the simplest phrase in business and art alike: I (don't) like it. A sentence that has ended more promising ideas than budgets ever did.

Taste often charms precisely because it requires so little thinking. It gives people the comfort of a decision without the discomfort or articulation. When the killer phrase enters the room, reasoning quietly leaves it. The discussion collapses from principle to appetite, from aesthetics to instinct.

The odd thing is that we have mistaken this softness for sophistication and keep confusing taste with aesthetic intelligence. They are not twins, hardly even cousins.

Taste is a personality trait.

Aesthetics is a discipline.

It's the study of proportion, golden ratio, rhythm, tension, coherence, saturation, and balance. It turns visual and sensory intuition into language we can share, argue, and learn from. In short, the invisible structure that makes beauty functional and meaning persuasive by asking what it's doing and why it works.

Social media has made the confusion worse. Platforms are built on repetition and reward the symbols that affirm belonging. The same muted palette, typeface, chair, and blazer appear again and again, turning imitation into currency. What looks tasteful merely signals that one has seen enough of the same things in the right place. It's all about mirroring and not about a lens.

The even deeper tragedy is corporate. When businesses and creative studios adopt this mindset, the consequences become structural. Decisions are deferred to mood, not method. Leaders confuse authority with natural inclination. Teams labour over systems, structures, and storytelling only to have it all reduced to personal likes. This is not how serious work is built, but how promising work is neutralized. Brands then emerge over-referenced and under-argued, beautiful enough to scroll past yet empty enough to forget.

But creativity, true creative leadership, operates by a different logic entirely. It moves in proportions and rhythm, in contrast and scale, in timing and tension. It knows when to expand and when to cut, when chaos becomes choreography. Aesthetics gives that choreography its grip. Taste just watches and applauds, depending on mood.

So let us not pretend that taste will rescue creative culture from its current sameness. Taste is simply too vain, too soft, too dependent on the safety of approval. The world needs judgment again, not preference. It needs, as a discipline, aesthetic literacy and confidence, avoiding the performance of likeability masquerading as vision.

Let us, then, retire taste from the higher conversations of the age. Send it back to the dining table, where it can live peacefully among the flavours it understands and the polite compliments. In the spaces where ideas are made, the standard must be raised, and the language must change. What we need is an aesthetic principle and creative intelligence. They do not flatter but build.

Yours truly,

Margot

MDA sidenote: Sculptor Kathleen Ryan (b. 1984, Santa Monica, California, United States) transforms ordinary objects into ironic meditations on desire, decay, and excess. Drawing from her West Coast roots, she merges industrial and natural materials with traditional craftsmanship to turn pop-cultural icons and organic forms into refined allegories of life's entropic cycles.