Imagine you’re in a room with fluorescent lights and ceilings low enough that you can touch them without fully extending your arms. The walls are close enough that you can’t stretch them without grazing a stark white wall, and the room is so long and narrow that before you can tell why the mistake registers, like a hallway that forgot it was supposed to turn into a room. Every corner is clear, nothing is in shadow, the light is melted with a chemical noise, unforgiving, flat and completely indifferent to the human body inside. Unless you want to live in an A24 horror movie, your flight response has probably been activated a bit just reading this.
That fluorescent room is a place with something close to a universal aesthetic response: a brain response rooted in our ancestral threat detection system. On top of this neuroscientific floor, the question of what constitutes good taste is much more complex, historically entangled, and frankly, more interesting than most conversations about it admit.
So, let me try to make this conversation more precise.
The first thing to say (and I say this as someone who trained as a postcolonial scholar in my graduate program) is that what the Western design world has historically called “good taste” is not a natural standard that some people are skilled at understanding and others are not. It is, in significant part, a product of Western European aesthetic preference, gradually institutionalized over the centuries into something rather than a specific cultural preference of the people who controlled the terms of the conversation. Traditions that fell outside this framework were either aesthetically inferior or were selectively incorporated into the dominant culture on their own terms, as cultural historians and theorists have extensively documented. Admitting this is not a radical act; it’s only historically accurate, and not saying that makes so many other claims about its taste fall under scrutiny.
And yet, pure relativism, the position that all aesthetic preferences are equally valid expressions of cultural conditioning and that no meaningful judgment is possible between them, is also insufficient. Aesthetic relativism cannot explain why the research I’ve done on human aesthetic instincts and preferences yielded patterns, or the discomfort of a fluorescent room, or the specific physiological sensation of being in a space that is deeply and surely harmonious. In those moments something real happens, something not reducible to cultural conditioning, even if cultural conditioning is how we experience it.
So the taste is not the same thing; it does at least five things at once, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned as a researcher and author, it’s that few things about humans are simple.
The first layer is neurological and evolutionary: responses to human perceptual architecture regardless of cultural background, including basic principles of visual coherence and spatial correlation that produce comfort or threat assessment at the biological level. These are not western standards; they are human. The second is instinctual motivation, an area to which my own research is directly related: my IRB-approved study at the University of Oklahoma showed that the three main motivational imperatives (sensory instincts, focused on security and material nourishment; social instincts, focused on social belonging; and the magnetic instinct on predicting or anticipating an instinct) had a 77.6% agreement rate, with participants who were security-oriented experience 98% agreement. It is the third personality structure, esp openness to experienceis a character that is more characterized by an active search for aesthetic frameworks different from one’s own. Fourth, the close cultural environment: the family system, the aesthetic world of his upbringing and the relationship with the world that he assimilated, purified or reacted against; in any case, it is still a conversation with the aesthetic of came. Fifth, macrocultural hegemony is the dominant aesthetic ideology of one’s historical context, which shapes what has become clear in the first place (Bourdieu was right that “good taste” is always someone else’s taste disguised as universal taste, and the Cerulean sweater scene in The Devil Wears Prada remains the most effective popular example of this argument ever developed).
What all five layers add up to is not a neat answer to objective or subjective taste; this is proof that the question itself is wrong. Taste is both, and the relationship between dimensions is not hierarchical, but always contextual, always relational, always in conversation with who designs and for whom or what they design.
A standard that holds up across all five layers without collapsing into universalism or relativism is not beauty, which is too variable and culturally inclusive to serve as a stable standard. This is coherence: the degree to which the visual environment accurately conveys the inner logic of the person or society to which it belongs. It cannot be used as “good taste” in history, but it is not arbitrary either; most people can feel the difference between a space that matches their inner experience and one that doesn’t, even when they don’t have the vocabulary to tell.
This level of attunement with oneself is what I mean by taste, if I mean anything precise by the word. Not the ranking of objects according to an inherited hierarchy, but a sensitivity, both to the self and to the world being constructed, and the ongoing dialectical conversation between the two.
