Where Does Good Taste Come From?
Penguin August 26th, 2008
A few weeks ago, I went back and rewatched a lot of the videos that I’ve made over the past year. Some of them induced smiles of fondness, while others incited cringes of awkwardness. I held on to what Ira Glass said about good taste:
In the last few weeks, this got me to thinking: Where does good taste come from? I watch Daniel on Project Runway and he’s always going on about how he has good taste. But when you look at the colors he picks, or the silhouettes that he makes, it’s not quite there.
I’ve come to the conclusion that good taste comes from experience and education.
As we grow up, we’re molded and shaped by everything we experience. As we integrate these things, we begin to compare them. We’ll compare food against other food. Music, movies, performances, friends, fashion, video games, books, etc. If we’ve only been exposed to mediocre things and we get used to them, they will be our standard. For many people, it’s just a matter of what’s popular because they don’t want to go against the grain. So good taste is internal.
But then we go to school or we like something enough, say movies, that we want to take the step from being consumers to producers. So we start researching and learning how to do it. Through this learning process, we can also be taught why something is good and get a new sense of appreciation.
Then we take that knowledge and evaluate our experiences through that lens and see things that we haven’t seen before. After learning about screenwriting, I go back and rewatch things and my eyes are opened. Like when I re-watched National Treasure, as ridiculous as it was, the story structure is there.
So how do you improve your taste? Experience and learn new things. Be a perpetual student. Study what others deem as “good” and try and figure out why they think it’s good. And just because popular opinion says it’s good, doesn’t make it so.
-Penguin
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