Cultivate Your Own Taste

With art, aesthetics and life:

Cultivate your own taste. Don’t let others superimpose their tastes upon you!

Food, lifestyle, art, photography, and more.

Probably the most useful thing I’ve done to discover and cultivate my own taste has been ‘via negativa’ (subtracting from my life).

For example:

Subtracting podcasts (I don’t listen to them anymore)
Subtracting any modern books (all of them are silly noise)
Subtracting social media, news, external noise.

Why? Everyone is trying to superimpose their tastes upon you, because they believe ‘they know what is best for you’. It makes the assumption that we don’t know what is best for ourselves.

Ignoring others is the goal

To cultivate your own taste, follow your own inner B.S. meter. Whenever something seems like BS to you, listen to yourself, or call out the BS out loud!

Why I think wine criticism is ridiculous

For example, wine critics. This is BS. If the wine tastes good to you, it is good. The goal ain’t to ‘maximize your pleasure taste buds’– this is silly. Also you don’t need to have ‘optimal wine pairings’. It is totally fine to drink steak with white wine, or drink red wine with fish. Whoever says otherwise is just a pretentious person with too much time on their hands.

Ignore art critics

I have a personal heuristic:

Never pay any attention or trust the opinion of an art critic who he/she doesn’t make art themselves.

My theory about the psychology of an art critic (who doesn’t make art):

They want to make their own art, but they are too afraid to attempt to make their own art .

Thus they classify, categorize, and critique/judge the art works of others. Why? It involves no risk. To make your own artwork and to share it publicly is much more dangerous. You expose yourself to risk. You gain skin in the game.

Art critics have no skin in the game.