Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.
When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.
The shaping of taste is essentially the science of merchandising, whether of detergents or cars or books or objects of fine and decorative art.
The thing I most love and hate about fashion is that it changes all the time. But I don't think I or anyone else can singlehandedly get rid of hooker style. Popular taste isn't great by definition. It's just popular.
It's hard to run away from who you are, and when your taste is formed is a very important thing.
Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food.
Just out of curiosity, I wonder what makes music or culture or taste go in certain directions. Who knows what the forces are behind it.
For all its flexibility, television is more a mirror of taste than a shaper of it.
What I mean by an educated taste is someone who has the same tastes that I have.
To form our taste, we must neither depreciate nor imitate, but we should understand and originate.
If the eye is constantly greeted by harmonious objects, having elegance of form and color, a standard of taste naturally grows up.
But the one thing I'll always know is that people don't know what they want until they get it. They didn't know they wanted a song about taking a horse to the old town road in 2019. But they did.
We carry with us habits of thought and taste fostered in some nearly forgotten classroom by a certain teacher.
The idea that things can be serious minded but must be somehow balkanized in the art-house ghetto is very upsetting because I think it limits not just the audience who was already going to see it, but those who might have had their tastes developed at a younger age.
I learned that there's no reason why people decide they like music when they do.
For an architect's son, I am remarkably unformed in my architectural tastes.
The greatest man is he who forms the taste of a nation; the next greatest is he who corrupts it.
They say your childhood influences your tastes and interests, or your approach if you're an artist. So what you create, whatever you saw, whatever your childhood was like - it influences how you're going to end up.
Art school can be a wonderful place if you're trying to find your voice and your style and your taste.
I write for young people because I like them and because I think they are important. Children's books can be mind-stretchers and imagination-ticklers and builders of good taste in a way that adult books cannot, because young people usually come to books with more open minds. It's exciting to be able to contribute to that in a small way.
The taste of the more recent accessions to the leisure class proper and of the middle and lower classes still requires a pecuniary beauty to supplement the aesthetic beauty, even in those objects which are primarily admired for the beauty that belongs to them as natural growths.
I try to use other songs or bands as reference points - it seems like the easiest way to get across what are really differences of taste or opinion. If you know what kind of music somebody loves, then you can kind of figure out why they do what they do.
