I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
Thursday night I went to Ray’s house and he made me a delicious dinner of salmon, asparagus, and pineapple-mango salsa. Before dinner, he showed me the floater frame he made for my painting As Many Glasses As I Want, which was a painting of mine selected for Heritage Fine Art Guild’s This Is Colorado show, opening on September 3rd. The frame looked great, and we decided together that a dark brown stain he had used on my patio table would work great with the painting. He stained it before he made me dinner.
I’ve always dreamed of having a partner who could and would collaborate with me on my art and on my life. I have envied artist and online painting teacher Adele Sypesteyn, because her husband handles all her video recording and photographing and (I assume) website work too.
It helps that Ray has good taste, which kind of surprised me, given that he didn’t go to college, worked his whole life as a machine operator at quarries, and is a Boomer.1 But when he comes up with a menu for our dinner, or selects a color for his walls and a hardwood for his floor, or even chooses photos of himself for his dating profile, he does it with a level of taste I’ve rarely seen in guys I dated.
But what is taste anyway? Philosopher Immanuel Kant said that it’s subjective aesthetic judgment based on feelings of disinterested satisfaction or dissatisfaction. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued against the Kantian view, proposing instead that taste is a shared social activity, constructed by the ruling social class. To Bourdieu, taste is not individual and subjective but is rather a set of social norms.
Well, doesn’t that make it a little more interesting that I at once praised Ray’s taste while also noting his social class? Makes me feel a little weird that I so readily noted the disconnect.2
This isn’t a sociology blog so I’m not going to explore that much further. I will note, however, that one of my recent exes came from a wealthy upper-class family and yet had, in my opinion, terrible taste. So while the wealthy ruling class may collectively determine what is tasteful and what’s not, that doesn’t mean that any individual will have taste or not based on their social class.
I do not agree with this idea that “design is less about making and more about meaning” from the subtitle to this Fast Company article Why taste matters now more than ever.3 In it, Elliot Vredenburg writes “The craft is no longer a differentiator.” That may be true in graphic design, but not in making real, physical art. And, I suspect, it’s not true for writing either. Well-crafted writing stands out more than ever in an age of AI slop.
Is it true that in an age of artificial intelligence, taste has become one of the most important strengths to cultivate as a creator?
Maybe it’s not taste that you need to cultivate as a creator (whether you’re a writer or a painter or a graphic designer). Maybe it’s soul? Or soulfulness?
If taste is just reproducing what the ruling class wants to consume, well… how boring and uninspiring and oppressed is it to try to be tasteful?
In my article AI Has No Aura, I wrote about the essential soullnessness of AI-generated content:
When a person generates an original piece of content whether it’s a digital image or a chunk of text or abstract acrylic painting, it’s the product of someone with a full unique history and one point of view.
When a GenAI model generates a piece of content, it has absorbed many perspectives and creates a probabilistic amalgamation of them all, directed by the prompt you give it. The output may be unique in some trivial way but it doesn’t seem like it could be called authentic.
Because AI has no personal history, it has no soul, and cannot create any kind of authentic content. A person’s ability to create something soulful lies in their having a soul, a history, a personality that is unique to them.
I suspect that seeking to create something with soul rather than something tasteful is a better way to go about making art.
AI enthusiast and user Stepfanie Tyler published an article Taste Is the New Intelligence on her Substack newsletter. It has over 8500 likes. And yet the comment section is filled with loathing. For example:
This is actual brainrot, I’m so sick of stuff like this being peddled on Substack by literal robots. Stop curating Pinterest vibes pictures and pretending you have taste – you’re not ‘curating’ taste by bookmarking aesthetic posts on X, you’re just glorifying distraction and frying your capacity to pay attention or think critically – it’s solipsistic cope for being incapable of real intellectual or spiritual engagement with art.
I found this article via someone’s Substack Note calling Tyler out for her excessive reliance on AI. At first I thought the article was okay, and then I realized it was just a rehash of what had already been said—including the Fast Company article I linked above.
Her article lacked soulfulness even if it was fun to consume in the moment.
While I use AI regularly in my own creative process, I want to be careful not to lose the soulfulness of what I produce.
As an artist, or a writer, how do you ensure what you produce has soul? I’m pretty sure you have to be involved in its conception at the very start, versus asking AI to tell you what to do. You need to write it yourself, or come up with the composition yourself. In this way your work will grow out of who you are and who you have been.
But there’s more involved than that. If you are a budding artist or budding writer, you probably can’t create art or writing with much soul even though you have a soul. That’s because it takes time to find your voice. You need to develop skills but also you need to develop your own style, your own personal point of view.
You might start by imitating your favorite painters or writers, covering their work instead of producing your own. Stick with your work for long enough and eventually you will get bored of that, and start doing your own thing. At least that’s what happened to me. I painted for many years as a cover artist, just copying other people’s work and style. And then suddenly I was ready for my own art to emerge.
Once that happened, I couldn’t stop making art. My soul demands expression through writing and art now.
Is my work tasteful? Some of it is, and some of it isn’t. Is it soulful? I hope it is.
- I don’t know why I think “Boomers have no taste,” but I do. I think Gen Xers generally have way better taste than Boomers! I bet Gen Z thinks Millennials have no taste. The generation before you always seems a little lacking in pizzazz. ↩︎
- I don’t think it will bother Ray that I observed this here. I hope it won’t. ↩︎
- Although I do note that such a proposition aligns well with the drive behind conceptual art, where it’s not the making but the conceiving and thinking and meaning of something that matters. ↩︎