Taste, Revisited

Back to the principles

In high school, learning about Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square short-circuited my brain. Nearly finished with my junior year of high school and deep into my art history class, I was looking at art from a movement described as “the supremacy of pure artistic feeling.” In my teenage arrogance, I thought I had a good sense for the way the world worked — I saw people as operating logically and predictably, the way that I did, the way that most of my peers did in our buttoned-up, competitive-high-schoolers-trying-to-get-into-Ivy-League-schools sort of lives. And then, I saw a black square on a canvas that shattered me.

How could something so plain, so simple, so boring, ever be seen as an expression of any feeling at all, let alone the SUPREMACY OF ARTISTIC FEELING? Perhaps this man was insane, perhaps he was pulling a fast one, perhaps all of art was a sham, or perhaps people had so much more to them than I had ever considered, things that were illegible and incomprehensible without media of art to communicate them. Perhaps, in my left-brained, math-and-science-focused sixteen years of life at that point, I hadn’t figured things out, and perhaps there was more to this art thing than I ever realized that I needed to tap into if I wanted to have any sense of what was truly going on.

When I finished high school, I decided that I’d become an artist in some form. I had never thought of myself as creative, but I decided that it seemed like a learnable skill. I googled the best books on creativity, found Austin Kleon’s work and started taking his word as gospel. I discovered the Ira Glass monologue on taste and made it a part of my theory on creativity. These formed a basic creative doctrine that I largely follow to this day:

1. If I produced enough work, I would become good at creating the work

2. Doing the work is worthwhile because it makes me feel whole

3. I will always be attempting to make my work match my taste

This was how an artist was formed — I applied these principles to writing, then photography, then illustration, before I returned to writing upon realizing it was my home. I started to write weekly and found myself proving the the rules over and over again. After some time, I returned to principle three and realized how much my taste changed. My conclusion was straightforward:

What you consume shapes your lenses and your taste, which affects both what you create and what you share and support. So, if you change your inputs to things that augment compassion and empathy, perhaps that will help lead to more compassion and empathy in the world. At least I hope so.

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I’ve been listening to Spotify consistently for over ten years now. Downloading the app onto my laptop one day in high school was magic. One day I was having to skip intros of music videos on YouTube to listen to my favorite songs, the next I could easily find and listen to any album in the world at a moment’s notice.

There’s a specific memory I hold from one of the first times I used Spotify, sitting at the breakfast table of my childhood home and hearing a song for the first time from some sort of rising hits chart. I can picture where I sit, where my brother sat as he put on the song. I wish I could tell you that the song that signaled the change of my music listening was something amazing and beautiful, but no. It was “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore. How cruel memory can be.

Spotify slowly took over my music listening, even as I kept some songs locally that I couldn’t find on streaming. With time, those songs were forgotten for sake of convenience, and everything came from the little green circle app. Music was just overflowing out of it, always there for whatever mood or vibe I wanted. It made music discovery easy, and I wanted to listen to as much as possible. 

I followed my brothers’ playlists since I’d grown up listening to the CDs he would burn for us, and I would listen to every artist on each of his playlists closely. He showed me sites like Hype Machine and Pitchfork and I began to discover new music, learn through the writing, dive into music communities on Reddit and beyond. I would find new genres, look up the highest-rated albums of those genres and listen deeply, gathering my favorites in my playlists and libraries.

As time passed, I started to use more of Spotify’s new smart features. I started listening to Daily Mixes and Discover Weekly’s, as they introduced me to cool new artists. And later, I would listen to genre mixes and album radios nearly constantly. At first, they seemed to show me new music endlessly, until they didn’t. Instead, they opted to play the songs that I already listened to a lot, like some sort of repeating loop.

It’s been a few months since I stopped letting the Spotify algorithm dictate any of my music. It was after Spotify released the Daylist feature, which would create a playlist that had specific genres and moods that you tended to listen to on a given day of the week and time of day, complete with nonsensical adjectives to give a BuzzFeed quiz-esque experience. As I write this, mine is titled “euphoric garage wednesday late night” with the description “You listened to breakbeat and melodic on Wednesday late nights. Here’s some: garage, 2-step, euphoric, breakbeat, melodic, and drums.”

Every time I saw one of these Daylists, I felt off. To most recommendation algorithms, human beings are simple consumers that always want more of whatever they already have. It’s inconsistent for a person to desire something that goes too far from what they’re familiar with; it’s incomprehensible for someone to want to consume something they might not like. 

Just because I’ve done something a certain Wednesday night, or a Tuesday morning, does that mean I will do it again? Maybe, maybe not, but won’t listening to the same music help reinforce the pattern? In listening to this playlist, am I strengthening the taste profile or simply conforming to it? Do I give up my agency to choose what I want to listen to in favor of convenience? Do I let the same art flow into me repeatedly just because I always have, or because the algorithm decided this is who I am? When I let the tool tell me to listen to “wistful songwriter tuesday afternoon,” am I letting a machine affect my mood, lead me towards yearning? Am I human being or some sort of pattern matching tool?

I want to take art seriously. As long as I keep digging deeper into my own artistic practice, I want to be able to look at art with intensity to connect with what the artist intended, I want to see the beauty within the work, and I want to engage with the art with intention. I want to take art seriously, so I stopped letting an algorithm tell me what to listen to.

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This past year made me realize how much my taste was starting to diverge from what was most popular. Since high school, I’ve had a tendency to dislike things simply because they were popular, but this was something different. I tried to genuinely engage with much of the media from this year, whether it was the most popular films or highly regarded anime or music that everyone was excited about.

I started to question myself, whether there was something wrong with me and my ability to consume media. Was I missing something grand and important about these things that everyone else understood? Why did things people love ring hollow to me? 

In an interview with Kyle Chayka about algorithms affecting culture, Ezra Klein brings up a Voltaire quote that appears in Chayka’s book, “In order to have taste, it is not enough to see and to know what is beautiful in a given work. One must feel beauty and be moved by it.” I feel beauty often — in visual art, in poetry, in prose, in music, in film. In this way, I know that I’m not wrong in my experience, in my personal taste. I wonder if others put this much pressure on their own enjoyment of things, if being moved by beauty is a higher standard than what is normalized.

I reflect on what moved me this year: the best book I read was Circe by Madeline Miller, shared by my friends in my writing group; my favorite film I saw was Chungking Express (1994), recommended by a friend years ago; the best show I saw was an anime called Pluto suggested by a friend. Some of the best things I consumed were films from the 50s and 60s, unlike anything else I had seen before and discovered through lists of films crafted by curators and movie fanatics. I read Russian literature for the first time inspired by a friend, I read Grapes of Wrath for the first time after barely reading any classics beforehand. I saw Gustav Klimt’s paintings in Vienna and nearly cried thanks to what Mrs. Magill taught me in high school, I saw another Kazimir Malevich and wasn’t moved nearly as much.

Increasingly, the most popular things will be dictated by technology, both as algorithms infect more of our lives and as more art is optimized to perform well on those algorithms. Already, I’m discovering that they don’t serve me in the ways that fulfill me. That in order for me to find the art that fulfills me, I must search for it from those who have studied, or hear from those who know me, or dig into new areas that would break any discernible patterns for who I am. I look to curators who can be trusted, like my brother and Pitchfork that have always introduced me to interesting and new music. I look to educators in film and music and art to teach me what else is out there.

I imagine a world where I never took an art history class. Maybe I’d work a more technical career and one day try to learn more about visual art through TikTok and YouTube. Maybe it would show me new worlds, or maybe it would just show me things that I understood, photorealistic paintings and Greek statues. I imagine never seeing Malevich’s Black Square, never letting the world I once knew disintegrate before me. Another me, without a purpose or a pen.

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We must do what we can to push back against the genocide in Gaza. Consider calling your US representatives to support de-escalation and a ceasefire, donating to Care for Gaza, a grassroots organization delivering food to Palestinians, or buying e-SIMs to keep folks connected to their families.

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💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• ALBUM - Symbol by Susumu Yokota - strange, excellent electronic record h/t Katie

• FILM - Godzilla Minus One - deeply emotionally moving and the best film that came out in 2023

• POEM - “January” by W.S. Merwin - So after weeks of rain / at night the winter stars / that much farther in heaven

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