What Makes Good Taste?

People tend to argue about “taste” a lot online — whether someone has “good” taste or “bad” taste is considered to be an upmost importance, especially in debates about media. But what the hell is taste, anyway?

Let’s say you go on IMDB. You’ll find that, as of writing, The Shawshank Redemption is the highest rated movie on the site, with a 9.3 review score. Conversely, you’ll find that The Disaster Movie is the lowest rated movie with a score of 1.9.

What this is telling us is that the wide majority of people believe The Shawshank Redemption to be good, whereas the majority of people believe The Disaster Movie is bad. This is something you can refer to rather esoterically as objective aesthetic quality, or just quality to keep it short.

Taste, however, is typically not seen as just liking quality movies. Given the prominence of films like The Shawshank Redemption, Goodfellas, or 12 Angry Men, its by default assumed that you both 1) already watched them, and 2) enjoyed them. You might not like them, which would give you an interesting take and therefore discussion topic, but that isn’t really related to taste either.

Rather, taste — at least at the most concrete definition I could muster — is the art of finding quality content others wouldn’t be able to spot. This is why taste is such an important characteristic when hiring for someone like a producer or a talent agent: It might be easy to see how Scorsese films are quality, but what about an indie director starting out in their basement, who doesn’t have the IMDB ratings to show for it? This is where taste really comes into play.

It does, however, raise into question how one develops taste. Virtually no one is born with a good palate (think about the sort of stuff you watched when you were 9) and so it certainly is a nuture over nature thing. My best guess here is somewhere between openness and tolerance. Openness as in you are more willing to check out media which is well out of your comfort zone, and tolerance as in you’ve seen enough of the media landscape to know when something is truly innovative. In other words, when you start out everything looks shiny and new, and as you gain experience you begin to see through it — it is true that “people with taste” tend to also be more grumpy as a result, but when one of these people point out a hit, it usually becomes just that.

That being said, another interesting case is when work is considered to be quality by the tastemakers, but not to the everyday audience. Satanago is lauded to be a masterpiece, but most everymen would scoff at its 7 hour long runtime. Contrast that with Goodfellas — seen as being good by the same people — but with an action-packed plot that never gets boring.

If I had to guess, this has to do with the “openness” I mentioned earlier. It’s a bit of contention I’ve brought up before in the past — art can often die not by its quality, but by how open it requires the audience to be. Perhaps Satanago would’ve played better with wider audiences if it had been a 7-episode HBO miniseries instead. I doubt that’s what Bela Tarr would’ve wanted, and good for him: art should remain in the hands of the creator. But it does show how fickle audiences can be.

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