Rees D.

Developing Taste in Art

Stub • 331 Words • Art, 2025 • 10/19/2025 • View in graph

⚠️ This post contains a rougher cut of my thoughts on the topic and may be updated in the future. Please forgive any mistakes or lack of polish!

How can one develop their own taste in art?

There are 360 words in this article, and it will probably take you less than 2 minutes to read it.

This article was published 2025-10-19 00:00:00 -0400, which makes this post and me old when I published it.

It took an estimated to develop this article from conception to publishing.

Developing taste is simply noticing and honing in on what you like and what you don’t like.

• This doesn’t mean that you don’t like paintings or anything like that. I think that you can not be interested as much by the medium, but to outright not like anything to me seems like premature close-mindedness or a lack of exposure.

Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean that it’s bad.

• Taste is subjective!
• Assessing achievement of authorial intent is still subjective, but less so
• This is something that plagues me with beer but also movies and books. I typically try to just consume things I know I would like, but it doesn’t always work out that way.

Taste depends on exposure.

• Early exposure and good experiences
  • This is the same as food! *What We Eat Early in Life Influences Our Adult Food Preferences

Developing taste requires exposing yourself to good work.

• The discourse around good art can be stuffy, but the art itself shouldn’t be so. The artist can talk about it any which way, but it all depends on how it actually strikes you.
• You can like things about bad work, but usually you won’t find yourself liking it on the whole. While it’s good to know what you don’t like, I do think that doesn’t exactly help you drive to what you do like.
• Developing Taste by Emil Kowalski

Taste is not entirely decided by us.

• Algorithmic filter bubbles mean that we are (only) exposed to things that are usually pretty close to things that we already like.
  • “Within this bubble, our tastes are shaped, curated, and sometimes even predetermined by algorithms”
    • Unravelling the Disruption of Personal Taste in the Algorithmic Filter Bubble by Ramona Daniel
• What is considered to be good and what we have been conditioned to like has already happened outside of us and is always occurring.
  • What is considered great is in part based on tradition and what has lasted.
    • Should We Abandon the Canon?