How to have good taste

Taste is knowledge.

Late Bloomer GPT

If you can’t wait to read my book about late bloomers, try the GPT now live. Ask it anything about being a late bloomer, and it gives you answers based on my book.

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The question of good taste is once again in vogue. Before Christmas, Dirt ran a series about ‘The Future of Writing’, in which Monika Woods wrote about the mediocrity of modern writing.

Subjectivity rules us all— the subjectivity of people who have bad taste.

Woods quotes Merve Emre that too many writers have nothing to say and no good way of saying it.

Tomiwa Owolade wrote in the Times this week about this philistine supremacy in modern culture, where so many adults are Harry Potter fans and read YA fiction. He quotes A.S. Byatt’s comment that adult fans of Harry Potter lack a sense of the mystery of life. Then says,

Yet confronting human nature, in all its wildness and variety, is crucial for any work of art. As Harold Bloom, the American literary critic and author of The Western Canon, once put it: “We read [the great works] to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.”

But good taste must have something to do with subjectivity. Good taste must be related to what we enjoy.