The Taste Era
Why "taste" became the defining currency of contemporary culture, and what it means that personal aesthetic sensibility is now both a lifestyle marker and an economic signal.
A few years ago, describing something as "tasteful" meant it was inoffensive — well-made, appropriate, restrained. Now "taste" means something different. It means the set of aesthetic choices, consumption preferences, and cultural references that define a particular person or scene.
Having taste means having a legible sensibility. Having good taste means your sensibility is admired.
Where This Came From
The democratization of production tools and distribution channels created a situation where almost anyone can make and share their taste at low cost. Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and their successors effectively turned personal aesthetic into a media format.
The result: a culture where one's consumption choices — how you decorate your home, what music you listen to, where you eat, what you read — are legible signals about who you are and what group you belong to.
Taste as Capital
Pierre Bourdieu described "cultural capital" in 1984: the knowledge, skills, and cultural dispositions that are valued by society and can be converted into economic and social advantages. Taste is a form of cultural capital.
What's new is the platform infrastructure for converting taste into visible, liquid capital. Having cultural capital used to confer status within particular social circles. Now it can be converted into followers, brand deals, speaking invitations, and hiring advantages.
This creates a new kind of inequality. The class of people who are fluent in the aesthetic codes of particular cultures — who can walk into a room and immediately signal their belonging — has real economic advantages over those who don't.
The Paradox
Taste is supposed to be authentic — the expression of a genuine self. But taste in the contemporary sense is also deeply social: it means knowing the codes, being legible to the people whose opinion matters.
The most successful taste creators are those who can perform authenticity convincingly while navigating the social codes precisely enough to build an audience.
Whether this is possible — whether you can have genuine taste and perform it at the same time — is the existential question of the current cultural moment.