What makes this essay special is that it refuses the usual lazy opposition between “good taste” and “bad taste” and instead reframes taste as infrastructure, a social technology that edits visibility before censorship ever has to arrive. That is a sharp extension of the Museguided tradition, not critiquing aesthetics, but exposing aesthetics as behavioural governance disguised as refinement. The move from Bourdieu’s distinction to the disciplining of the body and appetite is strong because it relocates the discussion from theory into lived texture: interiors, fabrics, volume, posture, lighting, silence. You make taste feel architectural. And it is amazing.
Working in galleries, one sees this mechanism constantly. Collectors who claim to want “challenging” work often mean work that challenges safely, within the tonal palette of an apartment already designed for Architectural Digest. A painting can depict violence, grief, migration, eroticism, political collapse, provided the canvas still harmonises with the walnut dining table and the indirect lighting plan. The market has become extraordinarily efficient at converting rupture into décor. Even dissent now arrives framed, editioned, and colour-corrected.
Your point about “absence of need” is incredible because it identifies the hidden moral fantasy underneath contemporary luxury aesthetics, the ideal subject as someone frictionless, appetite-free, emotionally climate-controlled. In practice, the art world rewards exactly this performance. Artists are expected to produce work about instability while maintaining immaculate personal branding, coherent aesthetics, legible politics, tasteful vulnerability, and a studio that photographs well for interviews. The myth of the “effortless” creative is one of the most exhausting fictions in circulation.
There is also an important economic dimension sitting underneath your argument that deserves expansion. Taste today functions increasingly as a compression algorithm for class recognition in oversaturated cultural markets. In previous centuries, wealth announced itself materially. Now wealth performs literacy. The signal is no longer “I own expensive things” but “I know which expensive things are permitted to look unexpensive”. Hence the triumph of quiet luxury, the ceramic cup that costs $250 because it resembles something peasant-made, the gallery collector who flies business class to Basel to purchase “anti-commercial” work about de-growth. Capitalism has entered its camouflage phase.
And ironically, the more aggressively culture performs minimalism, the more anxious it becomes. Truly alive spaces are rarely visually obedient. Francis Bacon’s studio looked like psychic weather. Louise Bourgeois lived among accumulated memory, fabric, notes, fragments. Even Cy Twombly, canonised now as the patron saint of elegant abstraction, understood that the mark only matters if it still carries residue of impulse and risk. The contemporary obsession with seamlessness removes precisely the evidence that something was actually lived through.
Your closing idea, that freedom may simply mean not organising oneself for legibility, is probably the essay’s most important insight since legibility has become the hidden religion of digital culture. Every platform incentivises recognisable identities, coherent palettes, stable brands of selfhood. Even rebellion now arrives preformatted into consumable aesthetics. The truly difficult act is no longer transgression. It is inconsistency. To remain intellectually or aesthetically unoptimised. To love things that do not triangulate into a personal brand strategy. To keep attachments that cannot be explained in one caption.
That is why your essay feels timely in a way that exceeds design criticism. It is really about the disappearance of private interiority under conditions of continuous cultural display.
And the irony, of course, is that many people now spend enormous sums of money trying to purchase the appearance of having escaped performance altogether. Which may be the most expensive performance of all.
Tamara, you are an astonishing thinker and writer. I get this confirmation weekly in your essays.
I have to be honest here, Alexander, the compression algorithm framing is one of the sharpest things I’ve read in a comment on anything I’ve written. Wealth performing literacy rather than ownership is a more precise instrument than I had. I’m keeping it.
I am fascinated by the specific cruelty of the gallery observation, the work is permitted its difficulty provided it doesn’t inconvenience the wall. Rupture as décor is the mechanism, and it’s self-sealing… the more convincingly the market can absorb dissent, the more it can point to that absorption as evidence of openness. “We collect grief and political collapse”. Ohhhhh yes, in editions of five, framed in museum glass, hung where the light is most flattering. The container neutralises faster than the content can insist.
Your point about artists maintaining immaculate personal branding while producing work about instability deserves a separate essay. I love the “tasteful vulnerability” formulation. There is now an entire aesthetic of disclosed difficulty, the caption about the hard year, the interview about the breakdown, that has been so thoroughly formatted for palatability that it functions as its own form of shield. Vulnerability performed at the correct resolution, with the correct lighting, for the correct audience, is a photogenic cousin. But surely NOT vulnerability.
Twombly… of course! The mark that carries residue of impulse. That residue is precisely what the seamlessness removes, and seamlessness is now so ambient it has become the default definition of seriousness. Ohhh God, Bacon’s studio as psychic weather is an image I won’t recover from quickly!
The inconsistency proposition is where I think you’ve really extended the thoughts beyond where I left them . I argued against legibility; you’ve identified what legibility’s opposite actually requires. Not transgression, which the market has already priced in, but the less photogenic refusal to resolve into a recognisable self. That is harder because no one applauds it. There is no aesthetic category for it, which is, of course, entirely the point.
For thinking with me rather than simply at my essay, truly, this exchange is what I write for. Thank you so much, Alexander!
A touch of Emerson might be worth an entry here: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." And "great souls should speak their current truth even if it contradicts what they said previously, as growth requires the flexibility to evolve one's perspective." Might it be said we have become "small-minded" people without an ounce of Self-Reliance?
Most people don’t have taste! They have algorithms. The same three “life-changing” bestsellers lined up on every coffee table like decorative compliance, the same playlists assembled by Spotify for people terrified of silence, the same tiny restaurants where everyone eats identical burrata under identical Edison bulbs while congratulating themselves on being “curated”. Entire personalities now arrive pre-assembled, flat-packed like ikea furniture. Minimal effort, maximum sameness.
What you capture so brilliantly is that taste is not pleasure anymore, but social camouflage. People no longer ask themselves what moves them, unsettles them, obsesses them, or stays with them for years. They ask what will look intelligent, refined, current, acceptable. They consume culture the way corporations buy office plants. Because it improves the atmosphere. Which is ridiculous!
And the irony is sharp. The most desperate to appear original often end up looking like members of the same aesthetic militia. Same neutral clothes, same “essential” books they never finish, same carefully exhausted way of speaking, as though personality itself has been outsourced to trend forecasting. They do not expressing themselves. They audition for approval from strangers equally lost inside the performance.
The truly stylish person now is almost shocking to encounter. Someone with mismatched bookshelves, strange references, terrible-but-sincere enthusiasms, music nobody else in the room understands, clothes they’ve worn for 15 years because they love them, not because it became fashionable again. Someone whose tastes were formed in solitude rather than assembled in public. That kind of person feels rare now because it requires something modern society discourages, i.e. the courage to develop a self before branding one.
Another masterpiece, Tamara. All people performing on social media should read this.
Developing a self before branding one is the sequence modern culture has inverted, and the inversion is so complete most people no longer notice the order has changed.
The aesthetic militia image is its accuracy about the energy underneath. There is something anxious, even desperate, in that particular uniformity, the carefully exhausted affect, the unfinished essential books, the neutral palette worn like a password.
Conformity in the service of appearing not to conform requires constant maintenance. It is, paradoxically, one of the most effortful performances available because it must never appear to be one. Actual individuality is far less exhausting. You simply follow what genuinely pulls you, which requires no maintenance at all because it isn’t constructed.
The office plant consumption of culture is perfect. Yes, it’s cruel, but it’s structurally exact too. The office plant is chosen for ambient effect, requires minimal engagement, and is replaced when it stops performing its atmospheric function. Nothing about the relationship involves being changed by it, which is the one thing culture, a book that won’t leave you alone, a piece of music that reorganises something interior, a film that makes the walk home feel different…. actually does. It changes the person who encountered it. The algorithm optimises against exactly this because being changed is unpredictable, and unpredictability doesn’t retain users.
The truly stylish person you describe is shocking to encounter partly because they make visible, by contrast, how much has been quietly surrendered everywhere else.
I love that you avoided critiquing. Most people can identify aesthetic conformity when it becomes cartoonishly obvious, but very few writers can trace the invisible moral machinery underneath it, the way “good taste” trains people to amputate spontaneity before spontaneity embarrasses the social order. That is an extraordinary intellectual achievement. You turned interior design, fashion, silence, even linen, into political evidence. How many writers manage to make the reader feel newly suspicious of a beige room?!
But your essay becomes even more powerful when read against our current algorithmic moment. Taste today is no longer curated only by aristocracy, galleries, or magazines. It is increasingly produced by recommendation systems trained on consensus itself. Spotify smooths music into “moods”. Instagram rewards visual coherence over psychic truth. TikTok aestheticizes entire personalities into reproducible templates: “clean girl”, “old money”, “Scandi intellectual”, “quiet luxury”, “stealth wealth”, each functioning almost like pre-approved emotional software. Individuality disappears, as well as eccentric continuity, the strange, stubborn attachments that make a self feel historically alive.
I keep thinking about how previous generations accumulated identity accidentally. A person inherited odd books from an uncle, developed obscure passions because a cinema near their house happened to screen Tarkovsky retrospectives, wore a coat for 20 years because there was no reason not to. Now identity arrives pre-sorted, frictionless, optimized for display. The algorithm does not ask, “Who are you becoming?” It asks, “Which category performs best?” Your essay brilliantly captures the spiritual exhaustion produced by living inside that loop.
And the most painful insight is your point about evidence. That word lingers. Evidence of wanting. Evidence of appetite. Evidence of living without pre-approval. Entire cultures now aestheticize restraint so aggressively that visible enthusiasm itself starts to feel socially dangerous. To love something too openly, a song, a color, a person, a political idea, a terrible but beloved lamp, risks appearing unsophisticated.
We have produced generations fluent in irony and starving for conviction.
The passages about objects moved me deeply because they reveal something unfashionable but profoundly human. Attachment without performative justification. The old coat kept because it became a companion. The ugly yellow wall chosen for the afternoon light. The rugs that “have no business being in the same room together”. Those details resist optimization. They belong to a world where meaning is accumulated through intimacy rather than branding. Reading that felt almost corrective to the nervous over-curation of contemporary life.
And stylistically, what you accomplished here is rare, your essay performs the very freedom it advocates. The sentences refuse minimalism. They sprawl, accumulate, digress, insist. The piece itself becomes anti-beige. Anti-sanitized. It carries intellectual density without losing emotional voltage. That combination of philosophical rigor with genuine sensuality of language is incredibly uncommon now, especially in a culture where most criticism is terrified of sounding too alive.
You wrote about the cage, Tamara, but you made the reader hear its hinges. BRAVA!
“Fluent in irony and starving for conviction”. I want to put that on the wall. Not a beige one!!!
The algorithmic extension of the argument is where I feel my essay’s premise becomes a bit vertiginous. What I was describing as a class mechanism, the management of visibility, the pre-emption of appetite, has been industrialised into infrastructure. The aristocracy needed generations to transmit its taste. The algorithm achieves the same disciplinary result in a single scroll session, with the added efficiency of making the user feel they chose it. At least the old system was legible as power. This one presents as a mirror.
That friction (the randomness, the inheritance, the geographical accident) was not inefficiency in the process of self-formation. It was the process. The self that coheres through drift and stumbling and stubborn attachment to inexplicable things is qualitatively different from the self assembled by selecting among pre-optimised categories. One has history. The other has a palette….. Simple!
What the algorithm cannot produce, and this may be its single most important limitation, is the experience of being surprised by yourself. Of discovering, through some unglamorous accident, that you care about something you had no prior language for. That surprise is where interiority actually lives. The recommendation engine forecloses it structurally, it knows what you liked before you finish liking it.
I was aware of performing what I argued as I wrote, and really uncertain whether it would hold or tip into self-indulgence. The sprawl was not accidental but it was not entirely controlled either. Some of it simply refused to be smaller. Which is, I suppose, the only honest way to write about refusing to be smaller.
You heard the hinges, and that is precisely the right thing to have heard. Thank you so much, Céline!
Most luxury brands have a tier of products for the middle and lower-middle classes, at "entry level" prices. These products tend to be the loudest in the catalogue and covered in branding. The reason is obvious: status signaling, except in the cases of these lower-tier products, it's an obviously false signal because the exclusivity built into high prices is absent. In light of this falseness, I think we can better understand these products as aspirational signaling; as such, anything more than subtle becomes a display of social climbing; a sort of desperate attempt to "fake it until you make it."
The effect of this is the heart of your essay: in your words, " the overall effect is of someone who has spent considerable time and money assembling the appearance of someone who spends no time or money thinking about appearance." In essence, it's the countersignal to the false signal of status; it's what the person with money does to prove they don't have anything to prove, and to separate themselves from those trying to elevate their status.
What "good taste" really boils down to, in my mind, is the old-money ethic of not doing unnecessary victory laps. Conscious or not, there is a recognition, and maybe even a deep insecurity, that the stories of meritocracy aren't quite true; of the fear that the concept of the "deserving poor" might one day be turned around, to delineate the "deserving rich". Old money, by definition, is an anathema to bootstrapping and trickle-down economics, and would fail any logically or ethically consistent framework of "deserving". The oldest of the old money has learned, over the course of generations, that good taste means the good sense of keeping your victories private, in order to avoid, at all costs, having a "let them eat cake" moment serve as the catalyst for revolt.
"Good taste" is dual use: it is both a means of panoptical self-discipline for old money, to moderate themselves, and an expository tactic for those with poor taste and shopping addictions to wrap themselves in glittering, garish Gucci labels, which simultaneously excludes the masses while orienting them towards aspiration and not rebellion.
Another fantastic piece. This one really got my gears going!
The “deserving rich” formulation inverts the moral logic that keeps the bottom of the hierarchy compliant and turns it, uncomfortably, upward. Old money’s studied discretion is prophylaxis. The faded curtains are a risk management strategy dressed as aesthetic philosophy.
I would add that the entry-level logomania you describe isn’t only aspirational signalling, but also the tax the system levies on those it excludes. The person who cannot afford the unbranded cashmere pays for the logo. The logo then becomes the evidence used to dismiss them as lacking taste. The hierarchy extracts money and then uses the transaction as proof of vulgarity. It is almost elegantly punitive.
But where I think the mechanism gets truly interesting is your panopticon observation. The tasteful rich perform moderation for an audience that includes themselves. The internalised restraint functions as a kind of ongoing proof that they deserve what they have because they are not seen to want it. Desire, visibly worn, would be the crack in the edifice. Old money doesn’t display appetite because appetite implies need, and need implies that the whole arrangement could have gone differently.
The garish Gucci label and the invisible merino are both control systems. One keeps aspiration pointed upward. The other keeps guilt pointed inward. Between them, very little energy escapes in a direction that would actually threaten anything.
That your gears went is the best thing an essay can do. Thank you so much for this compliment, Andrew!
A decade before the MAGA faithful perfected the art of conformance performance I attended some social function or other of maybe two hundred where everywhere you turned the words “anti-social” were stamped on a cap, or t-shirt, or jeans’ ass. It left me so momentarily stunned all I could do was mutter, "What the Fu...." to myself. The atmosphere of ironic compliance was so boggling I couldn’t even muster the energy to curse. My fuck just trailed off into oblivious breath, which is where I hoped to escape to once the evening closed.
Taste is tasteless by design is what I hear you saying. Like Teriyaki Beef Jerky. Available in convenience stores on all eight corners of small town, USA, which basically turns cow flesh into a candy. So harmless, three year olds can suck on it. Tasteless because all the flavors cancel each other out completely. Can you imagine a ‘fusion’ restaurant serving teriyaki brisket? The Japanese sweetness camouflaged in the smoky meat, and the smoke destroyed by the sweet sauce. No taste is the rule. Compliance is mandatory. You can no longer escape it. The most boring food in the world wins the blue ribbons for taste today. No wonder Anthony Bourdain turned his belt into a lethal leash. Everything is baby food now.
Anything real, whether food, or apparel, or home interiors, is inappropriately appropriated into a blended blandness. Statements about heritage risk the label: presumptuous. It’s a specific kind of snobbery to unveil pre-colonial colors to colonialists; it reeks of shaming. Reality must be realigned and re-imagined by stripping away every flavor for the tender feelings of the tasteful. Taste is all about feelings now. It is no longer about feeling.
The Anti Social Social Club moment is a perfect specimen…. 200 people wearing their nonconformity in identical font, on identical merchandise, purchased from the same distribution channels as everything else, the ouroboros completes itself so neatly it becomes almost aesthetic. Your unfinished expletive is the only honest response available. Language fails because the situation has already consumed its own punchline.
I want to keep the distinction you land on at the end. Taste is about feelings now, not feeling. Feelings are managed, communicated, legible, safe for public consumption. Feeling is ungovernable, idiosyncratic, often embarrassing, resistant to the caption. The tasteful universe has perfected the former and pathologised the latter. What gets called sensitivity is usually the management of feelings. What gets called excess is usually actual feeling, present tense, unedited.
The teriyaki jerky as cultural metaphor is quite philosophical, I’ll be honest! The cancellation of distinct flavours into universal palatability is exactly what happens to any aesthetic tradition that passes through the metropolitan taste filter. Not destruction, something worse!!!! Assimilation into a blandness so total it reads as harmony. The pre-colonial colour that becomes a seasonal palette. The heritage textile that becomes an accent. The smoke eaten by the sweet, the sweet eaten by the smoke, and what remains is neither but is somehow everywhere.
Bourdain understood this in his bones, which is probably why the world’s increasing conversion of everything real into baby food was not, for him, an aesthetic problem.
I am grateful that you felt it acutely enough to almost curse is the appropriate response. The full expletive would have been justified. Thank you so much, Andrew!
Agreed! both are compliments that reveal nothing about the person and everything about the comfort of the person giving them. Both are forms of social clearance dressed as praise. The highest compliment the system can offer is that you have passed unnoticed through it.
Yes. The algorithms we pander to reinforce this sort of non proof of value. You follow the etiquette, you get the visibility. The irony in that is there is this idea that vloggers or influencers are somehow more authentic or vulnerable than their counterparts for showing up online. It’s very rarely their “selves” they show up as. You’ve really already said this; I’m just reprocessing it. Always a delight, Tamara.
The authenticity performance is its own genre now, complete with conventions as rigid as any classical form. The strategically imperfect lighting. The pause before the difficult admission. The caption that begins with “I don’t usually share this but…..” which is, at this point, one of the most reliable signals that what follows has been carefully prepared for maximum reception. Vulnerability has been so thoroughly productised that genuine exposure, when it occasionally appears, is almost unrecognisable. We have lost the ability to tell the difference because the simulation has been optimised to the point where the seams no longer show.
What the algorithm actually rewards is its affective signature, the feeling of witnessing something unguarded, delivered with sufficient production value to hold attention. The self that shows up has been pre-approved by the self that watches the metrics.
The reprocessing you mention is not repetition though. It’s how ideas actually move from understood to inhabited. There’s a difference between following an argument and finding it has reorganised something in how you see. The second takes longer and requires exactly the returning you’re doing.
Always a delight to think alongside you too.
What strikes me reading this is that the freedom you're describing begins one step earlier than being outside the frame, it begins with being able to see the frame. From inside, the cage doesn't look like a cage. It looks like the shape of reality. And so the people kept inside become unwitting curators of its walls, perpetuating it not through any active enforcement but through a sincere inability to perceive that anything exists beyond. To them there is no outside to point to. The frame's most thorough capture is the person who would tell you, with complete conviction, that there is no cage.
I have been that person. The walls did not appear in my vision, they appeared in my emotion. I didn't see them, I felt the impossibility of stepping past where they would be, and the fear kept the test from ever happening, which kept the wall invisible. I even reinforced it in others while still inside it myself: "of course there is no wall, we stay by choice." What I've learned since is that you can't reason your way to where the walls are. The instinct is to look, to map them by thinking. But the only way to find them is to step in the direction that is uncomfortable. The discomfort is the wall. That is how it shows itself.
The discomfort is the wall. We tend to treat discomfort as signal noise, the thing to be managed, reduced, reasoned through. But you describe it as the most precise diagnostic tool available. Not a warning to retreat but a coordinate. The wall doesn’t seem a wall. It shows itself as an emotion with very convincing reasons attached, which is why thinking your way to it fails… thought operates inside the same language the cage was built with. The body knows first. The tightening before the rationalisation. The impossibility that presents itself as common sense.
Reinforcing the wall in others while still inside it is something more structurally interesting than hypocrisy . You were a true believer. The sincerity was not performance; it was the mechanism. The cage is essential precisely where it is most truly felt as open air. The system working exactly as designed…
But I would push slightly further, if you allow me. Finding the wall is not the same as getting through it. Discomfort locates it. But there’s a second threshold, the one where you step past the feeling without waiting for it to resolve first. That step, taken before the fear lifts, before you know what’s on the other side, is the one that actually costs something. And that cost is, I think, what makes it real rather than understood.
The courage in what you have shared here is not small. Thank you for this, Grant!
Thank you for your thoughtful reply, and for pushing further. I agree, finding the wall and getting past it are two very different things, the latter being the one that actually costs. Curiosity has been my most reliable tool in actually attempting passage through these walls, for curiosity, I have found, can most discreetly carry fear and still persist. The cost, in my experience, has been realising that the only place the air will ever feel so completely open is inside the cage. Outside is more open, yes, but in the way that comprehending the size of the universe makes you feel small. The cage offered a bounded, total openness. Stepping past gives you the real thing, which is vast in a way that does not flatter the self.
Curiosity as the vehicle that can carry fear without being stopped by it works because curiosity has a forward orientation that fear lacks. Fear contracts toward the known. Curiosity leans, however slightly, toward the unknown. When they travel together, curiosity sets the direction. It is not courage exactly. It is something more available than courage, and therefore more useful.
But the thing you have said about the air that stops me… the cage’s bounded openness feeling more total than what’s outside. What an accurate perception! The cage offers a horizon you can see the edge of, which gives the illusion of having grasped the whole. Outside, the horizon keeps receding. You never arrive at the full picture because the full picture doesn’t exist. What you gain is reality. What you lose is the comfort of a world sized to fit the self.
I think you describe the difference between freedom as a feeling and freedom as a condition. Inside the cage, freedom could be felt completely because it was partial. Outside, it cannot be felt completely because it is actual. And actual freedom is not flattering. It does not confirm the self’s centrality. It simply continues, in all directions, indifferent to whether you have adjusted to it yet.
The universe analogy is excellent and does not resolve. You simply learn to navigate by different stars.
I Followed along like a Child reaching for everything they can get their Eager Hands on at the Corner Market. What Fun! Now I’ve a metaphorically Untidy strewing of unique Cultural objects, people, places, etcetera out of their usual Context.
Some future day there’s likely to be an excess of Marble Slabs about when they outlast their domestic dormancy as flat surfaces for the Drab Rich.
I confess, the corner market child is the right reader for this essay. Grabby, delighted, no filter between wanting and reaching. That unchoreographed appetite is what the tasteful universe spends so much energy civilising out of people.
The marble slab prophecy is gutting. Every luxury material follows the same trajectory: precious, aspirational, ubiquitous, embarrassing, salvaged, eventually archaeological. The Carrara countertop that currently signals a certain income bracket will one day be stacked behind someone’s barn, or repurposed into something its original owners would find mortifying, which is the most honest thing that could happen to it. Materials outlast the social meaning attached to them and become again……. just stone. The meaning was always the fragile part.
I'm reminded of the time I hauled an entire case of mahogany flooring out of a dumpster and brought it home to the farm. The main cabin at the farm was built of cardboard, plastic, and carpets stapled to pine poles, and floored with plywood scraps overlaid by several layers of cardboard and then a few scraps of scavenged linoleum. It worked. The hardwood flooring planks were quite difficult to cut or even split, but it made good durable stakes to hold down the perimeter fence against the ground to prevent various creatures slipping under. The rest of it made most wonderful kindling. It did seem to first glance to be entirely too beautiful for these purposes, but they were better purposes than the landfill, to which it was headed. And I couldn't think of anything else to do with it. I certainly wasn't going to take the time to tear up a perfectly usable floor in the cabin and try to put it down in its place!
There is more real aesthetic intelligence in that decision than in every marble countertop installed in every renovated kitchen this decade. The mahogany found better purposes than the ones it was designed to signal. Fence stakes and kindling… functional, honest, entirely without pretension about what it was being asked to do. The landfill would have been a worse ending than the fire. The fire at least was warm.
And the refusal to tear up a perfectly usable floor to replace it with something more beautiful is my essay’s argument lived rather than argued. The floor worked. That was enough. The hierarchy that places mahogany above plywood and linoleum is purely social, entirely arbitrary, and in your case was ignored in favour of what was actually needed.
The most subversive thing you could have done with expensive hardwood was exactly what you did with it.
You so aptly finished the Destiny assured (imo) of marble mined and cut to feed the insatiable longing for belonging of the uber rich domesticated market. I’ve a Hungry Eye for Beauty and the aesthetic of Interiors held within Architecture. It is actually disappointing to hear that Neutral isn’t just preference but also Persona. To contain one’s Fears of Exposure in hollow Fads is an unsustainable Lifestyle. The future is coming for All of Us. I assumed the Neutral Spaces like Blank Canvases were the perfect atmosphere to Spread Out and inspire Colorful People. But no. Considering, on the other hand, Anais Nin’s flirtations with the irresistible eccentric passions of Henry Miller and his June, I find there’s still hope for these Rooms.
Greetings from my Strip Mall nation. I resent Her for Choosing Convenience over Culture.
The blank canvas assumption is generous, and I understand its logic. Neutrality as invitation, the empty room as potential. But in practice the neutral space rarely stays potential for long. It becomes prescription. The blank canvas that costs $250 a square foot has already made most of the decisions before anyone walks in….
Anaïs Nin and Miller are exactly the right counter-evidence though. What those rooms contained, the chaos, the appetite, the manuscripts everywhere, the absolute refusal to subordinate living to the appearance of living, produced work that is still metabolically alive decades later. The bohemian interior is not an aesthetic. It is the residue of people who were too busy actually existing to arrange the evidence of it.
The Strip Mall nation observation lands somewhere real…. Convenience as the slow replacement of culture is a choice made at the level of planning, zoning, capital allocation, the deliberate flattening of the built environment into pure function stripped of any friction that might slow consumption. You cannot stumble into the unexpected in a strip mall. Everything is exactly where the algorithm predicted you’d need it. Which is, of course, the point!
Greetings received, and the resentment is entirely justified.
I don’t like sarcasm much. But you deploy it with a refreshingly youthful impertinence, insolence, & impudence, capturing the unfettered-by-affectation drive to self-expression you seek to portray.
Black, actually the absence of colour & light, is still the ‘way to dress’ at an exhibition opening. The uniform of those who consider themselves ambassadors of stylish self expression. In fact black expresses nothing at all. I remember at the NGV in Melbourne, an around 40yo man descending an escalator, in subdued lighting. Polished head, pale complexion, heavy black-framed glasses, he looked, against black clothing almost invisible in the light, like an egg with scaffolding, the very epitome of an arbiter of taste. His minimalism was writ large. I’ll never forget the walking cliche.
When people observe my clothes, or my belongings at home, there is no ‘look’ to be seen. I’ll wear a brown duffle coat bought for me by my parents in around 1970.
Each item of furniture is different. Often of natural materials, each timber different. Each with a family story to tell. A table, stool or bookshelf made by my father any time from the 1950s to 1990s. A 1930s sideboard from my great aunt. An 1880s piano from my GGUncle. In the kitchen, a bright yellow 1950s dishrack, & a scale & kettle of similar age. 1960s bathroom scale.
People are surprised that I have 2 cars from the 1980s. They’re full of memories, made well, & I know them so well they feel part of me. All my family have travelled in them, & now they’ve all died, the cars have acquired more significance.
At a geology conference recently, a professor asserted to me “I thought long hair had come & gone”. I retorted that he should stick to his field of expertise, & that actually my long hair (not very long, more Leo Sayer) had gone & come.
As for raves, people come up to me & say such things as ‘I love the way you dance as if nobody is watching’. I don’t do things for show. I don’t live for show. I do things because I like to.
Thanks Tamara, your essay is in so many ways biographical of me, without of course intending to be. I’m lucky to read it.
The egg with structural support…. I can see him completely, and the image is so precise it becomes almost tender in its cruelty. The minimalism writ large is the perfect contradiction. He had achieved the ultimate tasteful paradox: maximum effort toward the appearance of zero effort, rendered so thoroughly it became its own kind of extravagance.
What you describe in your home and your objects is something my essay was reaching toward but couldn’t demonstrate… only argue for. You’ve lived it. The 1880s piano, the father’s joinery across four decades, the great aunt’s sideboard, I don’t see them as a collection. They are a sediment. The difference matters enormously. A collection is assembled by taste, which means by a self performing its own discernment. A sediment simply accumulates through the living, through love and loss and the stubbornness of good materials and the fact that your family travelled in those cars and now they haven’t. Objects that carry grief are the furthest possible thing from décor.
The geology professor deserved exactly the response he received. Expertise in deep time apparently does not confer perspective on the present moment.
And dancing as if nobody is watching, except of course people are watching, and what they see is someone who has genuinely forgotten them, which is the rarest and most compelling thing a body in a room can do. It cannot be performed. The moment you attempt it, it vanishes. And I love that! I dance the same way.
I am glad my essay felt biographical without intending to be because it js the best possible confirmation that it was true. Thank you, Russell!
Your way of writing is like something I've never seen before, and I am not trying to be flattering here. I genuinely have a hard time understanding how someone can produce so much text, and how someone can express so much that points to such a rich inner life. Is it possible to have such a rich inner life? I am almost hesitant to believe that you are real. There seems to be so much inside of you, your inner world seems so full, although not crammed. Reading your texts makes me reflect on my own inner world. Do I also have the capacity to contain a lot, to contain a world that does not allow itself to be well-defined, a world that doesn't allow itself to be limited, as in contained, as in *with borders*. I sense that the inner parts of our beings, of my being, could be allowed to be open, free, unending, something to explore rather than understand and control.
I will say I haven't read particularly many books or spent a lot of time in art and literature. So perhaps my amazement is an effect of ignorance, I don't know. Not to discredit you or your writing, I am truly amazed and touched by it.
Reading this text in particular truly gave me a new perspective on taste. I'll probably be thinking about this when furnishing my apartment, as well as when contemplating how to dress. I long for freedom but I am greatly limited by my need (?) for approval and acceptance. Part of me longs to be corner-free, frictionless, non-noticable but noticable because of it. Perhaps that part of me is not the part which will guide me to freedom. Maybe freedom is more messy and less related to what others think about me. Maybe freedom can be outright "ugly". You've made my gears turn.. thanks :)
Hmmm that hesitation about whether your amazement is ignorance or genuine response… ignorance of books does not produce the attention you’ve just demonstrated. What you’ve written here is philosophically precise without any of the borrowed vocabulary that usually substitutes for precision. You found, on your own, the distinction between a world that is full and one that is crammed. Most people with extensive literary training never land on it.
The inner life doesn’t require reading as its raw material. It requires honesty, and the willingness to sit with what doesn’t resolve. You have both, visibly.
On the corner-free, frictionless, noticeable-because-unnoticeable longing, I recognise it completely, and I’d say it gently…. that particular freedom is still organised around the other person’s eye. It is a very refined form of the same need it’s trying to escape. The self that wants to be noticed for its restraint is not yet free of the audience. It has simply learned a more elegant way of performing for it.
The messier freedom you gesture toward at the end, the one that might be outright ugly, that is less related to what others think, that one is real. And the fact that you arrived at it yourself, without me having to lead you there, suggests it wasn’t the essay that gave you a new perspective. It was already yours. The essay just made it visible.
That being said, since I am a voracious reader, I encourage everyone to read (starting with my essays…. :))) I’m joking!).
Thank you so much for what you wrote here, Rasmus!
I wonder what taste would be, if it were prohibited to be exhibited, advertised, showcased or performed. If it were constrained to be private, as the physical sense is. It couldn't be cultivated, just encountered or discovered or stumbled upon. Much like you pick up on a certain depth or quiet aspect of someone else...
What a precise inversion! I like to! Taste returned to the condition of its original metaphor, something experienced in private, unrepeatable, impossible to display without immediately falsifying it.
What you describe would not eliminate taste but the social machinery that has colonised it. What would remain is something closer to sensibility, the private accumulation of genuine encounters, preferences that exist because they actually occurred, attractions that were never auditioned for an audience. The difference between knowing you love something and knowing you love something because you have said so publicly, repeatedly, to people who responded well to it.
The depth you mention in another person, that quality of noticing something in someone before they have performed it for you, is precisely this. It arrives before the showcase. It exists in the register below announcement. You catch it the way you catch a scent: involuntarily, briefly, without being able to fully account for it afterward. And it is, almost always, more convincing than anything that was deliberately communicated.
The tragedy of contemporary taste culture is that it has made this sort of encounter nearly impossible. Every preference arrives pre-announced, pre-validated, pre-packaged in the language of identity. To stumble upon something genuinely, without having been directed there by an algorithm or a social signal, is becoming a rarer and rarer accident.
Which may be why, when it happens, it feels so disproportionately significant. Like finding something you didn’t know you’d lost.
Brilliant and lots to think about, Tamara, thoughts percolating slowly in my mind...I once dreamt about hiring a stylist (just for fun, I thought). My idea of style would often mean going to vintage shops, inspired by Classic films, and choosing what fits. Your essay offered me a warning I hadn't expected....of being placed into a box I never asked to enter. Style truly is a juxtaposition with inner freedom, Thank you, Tamara!
Ohhh, right, the stylist dream is my essay’s argument in miniature, the moment the interior impulse toward self-expression considers outsourcing itself to an exterior authority. And I’m not saying out of laziness but out of something more interesting…. the suspicion that your own instincts might not be legible enough, coordinated enough, defensible enough. That someone else might know better what you should look like.
The vintage shop, the classic film, the thing that simply fits are already a method, and a more honest one than most. It has a source: something moved you, on a screen, in a particular light, and you followed the feeling into a shop and tried something on. That chain, from real response to embodied choice, is exactly what the stylist relationship interrupts. The intermediate step of professional legibility replaces the direct current between desire and expression.
The box you never asked to enter is the right way to put it since the box is rarely presented as a box. It arrives as help, as refinement, as the friendly suggestion that what you already are could be made more coherent, more considered, more you, which is the moment it begins to be less you.
Your instincts brought you to vintage shops and classic films. Those instincts have excellent taste, in the only sense of the word I find defensible. Thank you for this, Paulina!
The title says it all: Taste is a Leash. You could have kept it at a provocative level yet not gone too deep. But you don't do that. As soon as I read your statement about what Bourdieu said: "power wearing the clothes of sensibility" I knew you were going for the jugular. And you confirmed that a little later with, "It is about containment, the management of appetite...and of whatever in a person refuses to be made legible for someone else's comfort." And then toward the end, the devastating statement: "The violence is slow because it disguises itself as refinement."
I kept coming back and saying to myself, "So what is this thing about rugs?" But I get it. "the management of appetite" - yeah, I know a little about that one. My mind, though, is still trying to make the leap you made so easily. From the color of the walls to the color of your life and how it is controlled - or not - is, well, it's a lot. I had to look up Rosa Luxemburg, because I knew the name, but I had no idea why. And once I read about her, I had no idea where I'd heard of her, but the one line of hers I loved: "Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently." And that's exactly who the taste police are targeting, if I understand you correctly.
I'd never heard of Elias Canetti, nor of his book Crowds and Power. So I looked that up too, and found it's available for $3.99 on Kindle. Reading through the sample was chilling. Reading about "the discharge," or as he says, "This is the moment when all who belong to the crowd get rid of their differences and feel equal." What he describes in the bit I saw about crowds is exactly what horrifies me about them. And it's fascinating to read of the center or beginning of the crowd being only around a dozen people. They are the nucleus and the propulsion of the crowd (or at least I think so).
I'm not sure why Canetti stood out, but those were the two of all the names you mentioned, that compelled me to find out more. And I'm not sure I understand why all the folks who wrote comments seem able to comment with what feels like engagement, but no anxiety. I'm not even sure I'm right about that, because I couldn't fully read everyone's comments because I couldn't focus on anything but the essay. I will say this essay left me anxious in a way very few things I've read have, and reading about Luxemburg and Canetti didn't make me feel any better.
It's tempting to focus on how brilliant what you wrote is, because that's true. But the more I sit here and write this, the more I have to acknowledged how disturbing I found this, how disturbed I am, and I'm not even sure why. It will become more apparent with time, as I sit with it, or at least, I hope so. :))
The anxiety is my essay working correctly. Of course, not the anxiety of confusion, you understood it clearly, the Luxemburg and Canetti connections prove that, but the anxiety of recognition. That discomfort is the reading succeeding.
What you have identified in Canetti’s discharge is precisely why I included him. The moment of equalisation in a crowd is experienced as liberation, the self briefly relieved of its separateness, its anxiety, its need to maintain a coherent position. It feels like freedom. It is the opposite. And taste operates by the same mechanism, more silently, over a longer duration. The slow crowd. The discharge that takes years rather than minutes, and leaves you not exhilarated but simply… adjusted. Smaller. More manageable. Having forgotten that you were ever otherwise.
Rosa Luxemburg from a prison cell, still completely herself, still thinking with full force, still writing letters about plants and birds and political philosophy with equal attention… she is in the essay because she is evidence that the self can remain unmanaged under conditions designed to manage it entirely.
The rugs are where the argument lands in the body. Abstract claims about power and containment are navigable. A rug you love for no defensible reason, that has no business being where it is, that you would rescue first in a fire… well, that is where the question becomes personal. Unavoidably, uncomfortably personal.
Sit with the disturbance, Doc! It knows something. And thank you for looking up some of the references, it is so important to me that my readers do that. I just want to open an entire new universe for them.
Wu Wei as reading posture, receiving without immediately converting the experience into response or opinion. I love it! Not all thinking needs to surface as language. Some of it just needs to settle.
As usual you take my amorphous thoughts and crystalize them with precise language.
I have no idea how many languages you speak but I’m guessing English is not your first. That makes you like a Da Vinci of words.
Not saying that to flatter you but feeling grateful for the education that you stated I would receive early on in our call and response, what, a couple of years ago?
I keep having to look some of your references up, learn something new, forget it and then look it up again leading to more and more education.
The looking up, forgetting, and looking up again is how things actually enter. The first encounter plants something below the threshold of conscious memory. The second time, you don’t start from zero, you return to somewhere already faintly marked. Eventually it stays because it found a context to live in.
English is not my first language, you’re right. And I don’t take words for granted, never mistake familiarity for understanding in any of the 6 languages I speak. Every sentence is a small negotiation. That friction is what you’re reading as precision. It’s not mastery so much as permanent, affectionate foreignness.
The Da Vinci comparison I’ll receive without deflecting since you’ve pre-empted the false modesty. Thank you, Jim!
Bonjour Tamara … formidable !! … this is about the world I’ve lived in all my life … Biting, almost cruel … but sooo accurate … not without humour, though … Taste and censorship … Taste ! Vaste sujet, as would say our lovable general …
Les mots qui restent …
*** Evidence that the person before you has an interior life that was not arranged for your comfort or their own social safety.
When I am in a period of real creative life, when writing is actually alive rather than strictly competent, my apartment looks like a library that has been gently burgled, and I am producing something I could not produce from inside a curated existence. The mess is not incidental to the thinking. The mess is where the thinking lives.***
Sounds like my (painting) studio … when I had one. Total chaos, but one that I navigated so well that I could move and remove, and place and replace objects in a sort of transe so that they would arrange and rearrange themselves and always surprise me with new juxtapostions and cause my ever loving eyes to sparkle.
And more …
*** Taste, in the end, is just manners for the soul. And manners, as anyone who grew up on the wrong side of a class line knows perfectly well, were never about comfort. They were about knowing your place, and staying in it, beautifully, with excellent posture, without making a sound that carries. The violence is slow because it disguises itself as refinement.
From somewhere outside the frame, still declining to arrange myself for your comfort, illegible, ungainly, and considerably louder than the ceiling height permits, my essay ends where she begins: outside the frame, off the leash, magnificently uncontainable. ***
Formidable !!! la vraie liberté, n’est-ce pas ? Je pense à votre manteau, à la Place des Vosges … Ah, les couleurs !
J’aurais aimé vous envoyer des photos d’où j’habite … cela vous ferait sourire (je crois) Hors du cadre – out of the box .. I feel you may like my little myth after all …
I read you softly furious … il y a une douce folie dans ces mots … vous voyez tellement clair, à travers les choses, que ça fait un peu peur … une peur qui fait frémir … peur de souffrir, peur de douceur … trop de douceur, de tendresse … 🦋
PS : si vous êtes d’accord, bien entendu, j’aurais besoin d’une adresse mail pour vous envoyer mon texte …
J’aime le chaos du studio que vous décrivez, ça veut dire que c’est un système vivant, navigable uniquement par celui qui y a séjourné pour en connaître la logique. L’état de transe des objets qui se réarrangent d’eux-mêmes, surprenant leur propre arrangeur est l’état créatif que l’existence organisée interdit entièrement. On ne peut pas être surpris par ce qu’on a déjà contrôlé et mis en place.
La douce folie….. j’accepte volontiers. La fureur et la douceur ne sont pas des contraires dans le registre où je travaille. L’essai est furieux parce qu’il tient à quelque chose, ce qui est peut-être la seule raison défendable d’être furieux.
What makes this essay special is that it refuses the usual lazy opposition between “good taste” and “bad taste” and instead reframes taste as infrastructure, a social technology that edits visibility before censorship ever has to arrive. That is a sharp extension of the Museguided tradition, not critiquing aesthetics, but exposing aesthetics as behavioural governance disguised as refinement. The move from Bourdieu’s distinction to the disciplining of the body and appetite is strong because it relocates the discussion from theory into lived texture: interiors, fabrics, volume, posture, lighting, silence. You make taste feel architectural. And it is amazing.
Working in galleries, one sees this mechanism constantly. Collectors who claim to want “challenging” work often mean work that challenges safely, within the tonal palette of an apartment already designed for Architectural Digest. A painting can depict violence, grief, migration, eroticism, political collapse, provided the canvas still harmonises with the walnut dining table and the indirect lighting plan. The market has become extraordinarily efficient at converting rupture into décor. Even dissent now arrives framed, editioned, and colour-corrected.
Your point about “absence of need” is incredible because it identifies the hidden moral fantasy underneath contemporary luxury aesthetics, the ideal subject as someone frictionless, appetite-free, emotionally climate-controlled. In practice, the art world rewards exactly this performance. Artists are expected to produce work about instability while maintaining immaculate personal branding, coherent aesthetics, legible politics, tasteful vulnerability, and a studio that photographs well for interviews. The myth of the “effortless” creative is one of the most exhausting fictions in circulation.
There is also an important economic dimension sitting underneath your argument that deserves expansion. Taste today functions increasingly as a compression algorithm for class recognition in oversaturated cultural markets. In previous centuries, wealth announced itself materially. Now wealth performs literacy. The signal is no longer “I own expensive things” but “I know which expensive things are permitted to look unexpensive”. Hence the triumph of quiet luxury, the ceramic cup that costs $250 because it resembles something peasant-made, the gallery collector who flies business class to Basel to purchase “anti-commercial” work about de-growth. Capitalism has entered its camouflage phase.
And ironically, the more aggressively culture performs minimalism, the more anxious it becomes. Truly alive spaces are rarely visually obedient. Francis Bacon’s studio looked like psychic weather. Louise Bourgeois lived among accumulated memory, fabric, notes, fragments. Even Cy Twombly, canonised now as the patron saint of elegant abstraction, understood that the mark only matters if it still carries residue of impulse and risk. The contemporary obsession with seamlessness removes precisely the evidence that something was actually lived through.
Your closing idea, that freedom may simply mean not organising oneself for legibility, is probably the essay’s most important insight since legibility has become the hidden religion of digital culture. Every platform incentivises recognisable identities, coherent palettes, stable brands of selfhood. Even rebellion now arrives preformatted into consumable aesthetics. The truly difficult act is no longer transgression. It is inconsistency. To remain intellectually or aesthetically unoptimised. To love things that do not triangulate into a personal brand strategy. To keep attachments that cannot be explained in one caption.
That is why your essay feels timely in a way that exceeds design criticism. It is really about the disappearance of private interiority under conditions of continuous cultural display.
And the irony, of course, is that many people now spend enormous sums of money trying to purchase the appearance of having escaped performance altogether. Which may be the most expensive performance of all.
Tamara, you are an astonishing thinker and writer. I get this confirmation weekly in your essays.
I have to be honest here, Alexander, the compression algorithm framing is one of the sharpest things I’ve read in a comment on anything I’ve written. Wealth performing literacy rather than ownership is a more precise instrument than I had. I’m keeping it.
I am fascinated by the specific cruelty of the gallery observation, the work is permitted its difficulty provided it doesn’t inconvenience the wall. Rupture as décor is the mechanism, and it’s self-sealing… the more convincingly the market can absorb dissent, the more it can point to that absorption as evidence of openness. “We collect grief and political collapse”. Ohhhhh yes, in editions of five, framed in museum glass, hung where the light is most flattering. The container neutralises faster than the content can insist.
Your point about artists maintaining immaculate personal branding while producing work about instability deserves a separate essay. I love the “tasteful vulnerability” formulation. There is now an entire aesthetic of disclosed difficulty, the caption about the hard year, the interview about the breakdown, that has been so thoroughly formatted for palatability that it functions as its own form of shield. Vulnerability performed at the correct resolution, with the correct lighting, for the correct audience, is a photogenic cousin. But surely NOT vulnerability.
Twombly… of course! The mark that carries residue of impulse. That residue is precisely what the seamlessness removes, and seamlessness is now so ambient it has become the default definition of seriousness. Ohhh God, Bacon’s studio as psychic weather is an image I won’t recover from quickly!
The inconsistency proposition is where I think you’ve really extended the thoughts beyond where I left them . I argued against legibility; you’ve identified what legibility’s opposite actually requires. Not transgression, which the market has already priced in, but the less photogenic refusal to resolve into a recognisable self. That is harder because no one applauds it. There is no aesthetic category for it, which is, of course, entirely the point.
For thinking with me rather than simply at my essay, truly, this exchange is what I write for. Thank you so much, Alexander!
A touch of Emerson might be worth an entry here: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." And "great souls should speak their current truth even if it contradicts what they said previously, as growth requires the flexibility to evolve one's perspective." Might it be said we have become "small-minded" people without an ounce of Self-Reliance?
Most people don’t have taste! They have algorithms. The same three “life-changing” bestsellers lined up on every coffee table like decorative compliance, the same playlists assembled by Spotify for people terrified of silence, the same tiny restaurants where everyone eats identical burrata under identical Edison bulbs while congratulating themselves on being “curated”. Entire personalities now arrive pre-assembled, flat-packed like ikea furniture. Minimal effort, maximum sameness.
What you capture so brilliantly is that taste is not pleasure anymore, but social camouflage. People no longer ask themselves what moves them, unsettles them, obsesses them, or stays with them for years. They ask what will look intelligent, refined, current, acceptable. They consume culture the way corporations buy office plants. Because it improves the atmosphere. Which is ridiculous!
And the irony is sharp. The most desperate to appear original often end up looking like members of the same aesthetic militia. Same neutral clothes, same “essential” books they never finish, same carefully exhausted way of speaking, as though personality itself has been outsourced to trend forecasting. They do not expressing themselves. They audition for approval from strangers equally lost inside the performance.
The truly stylish person now is almost shocking to encounter. Someone with mismatched bookshelves, strange references, terrible-but-sincere enthusiasms, music nobody else in the room understands, clothes they’ve worn for 15 years because they love them, not because it became fashionable again. Someone whose tastes were formed in solitude rather than assembled in public. That kind of person feels rare now because it requires something modern society discourages, i.e. the courage to develop a self before branding one.
Another masterpiece, Tamara. All people performing on social media should read this.
Developing a self before branding one is the sequence modern culture has inverted, and the inversion is so complete most people no longer notice the order has changed.
The aesthetic militia image is its accuracy about the energy underneath. There is something anxious, even desperate, in that particular uniformity, the carefully exhausted affect, the unfinished essential books, the neutral palette worn like a password.
Conformity in the service of appearing not to conform requires constant maintenance. It is, paradoxically, one of the most effortful performances available because it must never appear to be one. Actual individuality is far less exhausting. You simply follow what genuinely pulls you, which requires no maintenance at all because it isn’t constructed.
The office plant consumption of culture is perfect. Yes, it’s cruel, but it’s structurally exact too. The office plant is chosen for ambient effect, requires minimal engagement, and is replaced when it stops performing its atmospheric function. Nothing about the relationship involves being changed by it, which is the one thing culture, a book that won’t leave you alone, a piece of music that reorganises something interior, a film that makes the walk home feel different…. actually does. It changes the person who encountered it. The algorithm optimises against exactly this because being changed is unpredictable, and unpredictability doesn’t retain users.
The truly stylish person you describe is shocking to encounter partly because they make visible, by contrast, how much has been quietly surrendered everywhere else.
Brilliant and more brilliant!
I love that you avoided critiquing. Most people can identify aesthetic conformity when it becomes cartoonishly obvious, but very few writers can trace the invisible moral machinery underneath it, the way “good taste” trains people to amputate spontaneity before spontaneity embarrasses the social order. That is an extraordinary intellectual achievement. You turned interior design, fashion, silence, even linen, into political evidence. How many writers manage to make the reader feel newly suspicious of a beige room?!
But your essay becomes even more powerful when read against our current algorithmic moment. Taste today is no longer curated only by aristocracy, galleries, or magazines. It is increasingly produced by recommendation systems trained on consensus itself. Spotify smooths music into “moods”. Instagram rewards visual coherence over psychic truth. TikTok aestheticizes entire personalities into reproducible templates: “clean girl”, “old money”, “Scandi intellectual”, “quiet luxury”, “stealth wealth”, each functioning almost like pre-approved emotional software. Individuality disappears, as well as eccentric continuity, the strange, stubborn attachments that make a self feel historically alive.
I keep thinking about how previous generations accumulated identity accidentally. A person inherited odd books from an uncle, developed obscure passions because a cinema near their house happened to screen Tarkovsky retrospectives, wore a coat for 20 years because there was no reason not to. Now identity arrives pre-sorted, frictionless, optimized for display. The algorithm does not ask, “Who are you becoming?” It asks, “Which category performs best?” Your essay brilliantly captures the spiritual exhaustion produced by living inside that loop.
And the most painful insight is your point about evidence. That word lingers. Evidence of wanting. Evidence of appetite. Evidence of living without pre-approval. Entire cultures now aestheticize restraint so aggressively that visible enthusiasm itself starts to feel socially dangerous. To love something too openly, a song, a color, a person, a political idea, a terrible but beloved lamp, risks appearing unsophisticated.
We have produced generations fluent in irony and starving for conviction.
The passages about objects moved me deeply because they reveal something unfashionable but profoundly human. Attachment without performative justification. The old coat kept because it became a companion. The ugly yellow wall chosen for the afternoon light. The rugs that “have no business being in the same room together”. Those details resist optimization. They belong to a world where meaning is accumulated through intimacy rather than branding. Reading that felt almost corrective to the nervous over-curation of contemporary life.
And stylistically, what you accomplished here is rare, your essay performs the very freedom it advocates. The sentences refuse minimalism. They sprawl, accumulate, digress, insist. The piece itself becomes anti-beige. Anti-sanitized. It carries intellectual density without losing emotional voltage. That combination of philosophical rigor with genuine sensuality of language is incredibly uncommon now, especially in a culture where most criticism is terrified of sounding too alive.
You wrote about the cage, Tamara, but you made the reader hear its hinges. BRAVA!
“Fluent in irony and starving for conviction”. I want to put that on the wall. Not a beige one!!!
The algorithmic extension of the argument is where I feel my essay’s premise becomes a bit vertiginous. What I was describing as a class mechanism, the management of visibility, the pre-emption of appetite, has been industrialised into infrastructure. The aristocracy needed generations to transmit its taste. The algorithm achieves the same disciplinary result in a single scroll session, with the added efficiency of making the user feel they chose it. At least the old system was legible as power. This one presents as a mirror.
That friction (the randomness, the inheritance, the geographical accident) was not inefficiency in the process of self-formation. It was the process. The self that coheres through drift and stumbling and stubborn attachment to inexplicable things is qualitatively different from the self assembled by selecting among pre-optimised categories. One has history. The other has a palette….. Simple!
What the algorithm cannot produce, and this may be its single most important limitation, is the experience of being surprised by yourself. Of discovering, through some unglamorous accident, that you care about something you had no prior language for. That surprise is where interiority actually lives. The recommendation engine forecloses it structurally, it knows what you liked before you finish liking it.
I was aware of performing what I argued as I wrote, and really uncertain whether it would hold or tip into self-indulgence. The sprawl was not accidental but it was not entirely controlled either. Some of it simply refused to be smaller. Which is, I suppose, the only honest way to write about refusing to be smaller.
You heard the hinges, and that is precisely the right thing to have heard. Thank you so much, Céline!
I love the word BRAVA!! that word is loaded with a powerful emotion in Latino culture ( Muy brava !!) :)
I love it too.
Most luxury brands have a tier of products for the middle and lower-middle classes, at "entry level" prices. These products tend to be the loudest in the catalogue and covered in branding. The reason is obvious: status signaling, except in the cases of these lower-tier products, it's an obviously false signal because the exclusivity built into high prices is absent. In light of this falseness, I think we can better understand these products as aspirational signaling; as such, anything more than subtle becomes a display of social climbing; a sort of desperate attempt to "fake it until you make it."
The effect of this is the heart of your essay: in your words, " the overall effect is of someone who has spent considerable time and money assembling the appearance of someone who spends no time or money thinking about appearance." In essence, it's the countersignal to the false signal of status; it's what the person with money does to prove they don't have anything to prove, and to separate themselves from those trying to elevate their status.
What "good taste" really boils down to, in my mind, is the old-money ethic of not doing unnecessary victory laps. Conscious or not, there is a recognition, and maybe even a deep insecurity, that the stories of meritocracy aren't quite true; of the fear that the concept of the "deserving poor" might one day be turned around, to delineate the "deserving rich". Old money, by definition, is an anathema to bootstrapping and trickle-down economics, and would fail any logically or ethically consistent framework of "deserving". The oldest of the old money has learned, over the course of generations, that good taste means the good sense of keeping your victories private, in order to avoid, at all costs, having a "let them eat cake" moment serve as the catalyst for revolt.
"Good taste" is dual use: it is both a means of panoptical self-discipline for old money, to moderate themselves, and an expository tactic for those with poor taste and shopping addictions to wrap themselves in glittering, garish Gucci labels, which simultaneously excludes the masses while orienting them towards aspiration and not rebellion.
Another fantastic piece. This one really got my gears going!
The “deserving rich” formulation inverts the moral logic that keeps the bottom of the hierarchy compliant and turns it, uncomfortably, upward. Old money’s studied discretion is prophylaxis. The faded curtains are a risk management strategy dressed as aesthetic philosophy.
I would add that the entry-level logomania you describe isn’t only aspirational signalling, but also the tax the system levies on those it excludes. The person who cannot afford the unbranded cashmere pays for the logo. The logo then becomes the evidence used to dismiss them as lacking taste. The hierarchy extracts money and then uses the transaction as proof of vulgarity. It is almost elegantly punitive.
But where I think the mechanism gets truly interesting is your panopticon observation. The tasteful rich perform moderation for an audience that includes themselves. The internalised restraint functions as a kind of ongoing proof that they deserve what they have because they are not seen to want it. Desire, visibly worn, would be the crack in the edifice. Old money doesn’t display appetite because appetite implies need, and need implies that the whole arrangement could have gone differently.
The garish Gucci label and the invisible merino are both control systems. One keeps aspiration pointed upward. The other keeps guilt pointed inward. Between them, very little energy escapes in a direction that would actually threaten anything.
That your gears went is the best thing an essay can do. Thank you so much for this compliment, Andrew!
A decade before the MAGA faithful perfected the art of conformance performance I attended some social function or other of maybe two hundred where everywhere you turned the words “anti-social” were stamped on a cap, or t-shirt, or jeans’ ass. It left me so momentarily stunned all I could do was mutter, "What the Fu...." to myself. The atmosphere of ironic compliance was so boggling I couldn’t even muster the energy to curse. My fuck just trailed off into oblivious breath, which is where I hoped to escape to once the evening closed.
Taste is tasteless by design is what I hear you saying. Like Teriyaki Beef Jerky. Available in convenience stores on all eight corners of small town, USA, which basically turns cow flesh into a candy. So harmless, three year olds can suck on it. Tasteless because all the flavors cancel each other out completely. Can you imagine a ‘fusion’ restaurant serving teriyaki brisket? The Japanese sweetness camouflaged in the smoky meat, and the smoke destroyed by the sweet sauce. No taste is the rule. Compliance is mandatory. You can no longer escape it. The most boring food in the world wins the blue ribbons for taste today. No wonder Anthony Bourdain turned his belt into a lethal leash. Everything is baby food now.
Anything real, whether food, or apparel, or home interiors, is inappropriately appropriated into a blended blandness. Statements about heritage risk the label: presumptuous. It’s a specific kind of snobbery to unveil pre-colonial colors to colonialists; it reeks of shaming. Reality must be realigned and re-imagined by stripping away every flavor for the tender feelings of the tasteful. Taste is all about feelings now. It is no longer about feeling.
The Anti Social Social Club moment is a perfect specimen…. 200 people wearing their nonconformity in identical font, on identical merchandise, purchased from the same distribution channels as everything else, the ouroboros completes itself so neatly it becomes almost aesthetic. Your unfinished expletive is the only honest response available. Language fails because the situation has already consumed its own punchline.
I want to keep the distinction you land on at the end. Taste is about feelings now, not feeling. Feelings are managed, communicated, legible, safe for public consumption. Feeling is ungovernable, idiosyncratic, often embarrassing, resistant to the caption. The tasteful universe has perfected the former and pathologised the latter. What gets called sensitivity is usually the management of feelings. What gets called excess is usually actual feeling, present tense, unedited.
The teriyaki jerky as cultural metaphor is quite philosophical, I’ll be honest! The cancellation of distinct flavours into universal palatability is exactly what happens to any aesthetic tradition that passes through the metropolitan taste filter. Not destruction, something worse!!!! Assimilation into a blandness so total it reads as harmony. The pre-colonial colour that becomes a seasonal palette. The heritage textile that becomes an accent. The smoke eaten by the sweet, the sweet eaten by the smoke, and what remains is neither but is somehow everywhere.
Bourdain understood this in his bones, which is probably why the world’s increasing conversion of everything real into baby food was not, for him, an aesthetic problem.
I am grateful that you felt it acutely enough to almost curse is the appropriate response. The full expletive would have been justified. Thank you so much, Andrew!
Telling somebody they have good taste reads the same as telling them they are nice.
Agreed! both are compliments that reveal nothing about the person and everything about the comfort of the person giving them. Both are forms of social clearance dressed as praise. The highest compliment the system can offer is that you have passed unnoticed through it.
Yes. The algorithms we pander to reinforce this sort of non proof of value. You follow the etiquette, you get the visibility. The irony in that is there is this idea that vloggers or influencers are somehow more authentic or vulnerable than their counterparts for showing up online. It’s very rarely their “selves” they show up as. You’ve really already said this; I’m just reprocessing it. Always a delight, Tamara.
The authenticity performance is its own genre now, complete with conventions as rigid as any classical form. The strategically imperfect lighting. The pause before the difficult admission. The caption that begins with “I don’t usually share this but…..” which is, at this point, one of the most reliable signals that what follows has been carefully prepared for maximum reception. Vulnerability has been so thoroughly productised that genuine exposure, when it occasionally appears, is almost unrecognisable. We have lost the ability to tell the difference because the simulation has been optimised to the point where the seams no longer show.
What the algorithm actually rewards is its affective signature, the feeling of witnessing something unguarded, delivered with sufficient production value to hold attention. The self that shows up has been pre-approved by the self that watches the metrics.
The reprocessing you mention is not repetition though. It’s how ideas actually move from understood to inhabited. There’s a difference between following an argument and finding it has reorganised something in how you see. The second takes longer and requires exactly the returning you’re doing.
Always a delight to think alongside you too.
What strikes me reading this is that the freedom you're describing begins one step earlier than being outside the frame, it begins with being able to see the frame. From inside, the cage doesn't look like a cage. It looks like the shape of reality. And so the people kept inside become unwitting curators of its walls, perpetuating it not through any active enforcement but through a sincere inability to perceive that anything exists beyond. To them there is no outside to point to. The frame's most thorough capture is the person who would tell you, with complete conviction, that there is no cage.
I have been that person. The walls did not appear in my vision, they appeared in my emotion. I didn't see them, I felt the impossibility of stepping past where they would be, and the fear kept the test from ever happening, which kept the wall invisible. I even reinforced it in others while still inside it myself: "of course there is no wall, we stay by choice." What I've learned since is that you can't reason your way to where the walls are. The instinct is to look, to map them by thinking. But the only way to find them is to step in the direction that is uncomfortable. The discomfort is the wall. That is how it shows itself.
The discomfort is the wall. We tend to treat discomfort as signal noise, the thing to be managed, reduced, reasoned through. But you describe it as the most precise diagnostic tool available. Not a warning to retreat but a coordinate. The wall doesn’t seem a wall. It shows itself as an emotion with very convincing reasons attached, which is why thinking your way to it fails… thought operates inside the same language the cage was built with. The body knows first. The tightening before the rationalisation. The impossibility that presents itself as common sense.
Reinforcing the wall in others while still inside it is something more structurally interesting than hypocrisy . You were a true believer. The sincerity was not performance; it was the mechanism. The cage is essential precisely where it is most truly felt as open air. The system working exactly as designed…
But I would push slightly further, if you allow me. Finding the wall is not the same as getting through it. Discomfort locates it. But there’s a second threshold, the one where you step past the feeling without waiting for it to resolve first. That step, taken before the fear lifts, before you know what’s on the other side, is the one that actually costs something. And that cost is, I think, what makes it real rather than understood.
The courage in what you have shared here is not small. Thank you for this, Grant!
Thank you for your thoughtful reply, and for pushing further. I agree, finding the wall and getting past it are two very different things, the latter being the one that actually costs. Curiosity has been my most reliable tool in actually attempting passage through these walls, for curiosity, I have found, can most discreetly carry fear and still persist. The cost, in my experience, has been realising that the only place the air will ever feel so completely open is inside the cage. Outside is more open, yes, but in the way that comprehending the size of the universe makes you feel small. The cage offered a bounded, total openness. Stepping past gives you the real thing, which is vast in a way that does not flatter the self.
Curiosity as the vehicle that can carry fear without being stopped by it works because curiosity has a forward orientation that fear lacks. Fear contracts toward the known. Curiosity leans, however slightly, toward the unknown. When they travel together, curiosity sets the direction. It is not courage exactly. It is something more available than courage, and therefore more useful.
But the thing you have said about the air that stops me… the cage’s bounded openness feeling more total than what’s outside. What an accurate perception! The cage offers a horizon you can see the edge of, which gives the illusion of having grasped the whole. Outside, the horizon keeps receding. You never arrive at the full picture because the full picture doesn’t exist. What you gain is reality. What you lose is the comfort of a world sized to fit the self.
I think you describe the difference between freedom as a feeling and freedom as a condition. Inside the cage, freedom could be felt completely because it was partial. Outside, it cannot be felt completely because it is actual. And actual freedom is not flattering. It does not confirm the self’s centrality. It simply continues, in all directions, indifferent to whether you have adjusted to it yet.
The universe analogy is excellent and does not resolve. You simply learn to navigate by different stars.
I Followed along like a Child reaching for everything they can get their Eager Hands on at the Corner Market. What Fun! Now I’ve a metaphorically Untidy strewing of unique Cultural objects, people, places, etcetera out of their usual Context.
Some future day there’s likely to be an excess of Marble Slabs about when they outlast their domestic dormancy as flat surfaces for the Drab Rich.
I confess, the corner market child is the right reader for this essay. Grabby, delighted, no filter between wanting and reaching. That unchoreographed appetite is what the tasteful universe spends so much energy civilising out of people.
The marble slab prophecy is gutting. Every luxury material follows the same trajectory: precious, aspirational, ubiquitous, embarrassing, salvaged, eventually archaeological. The Carrara countertop that currently signals a certain income bracket will one day be stacked behind someone’s barn, or repurposed into something its original owners would find mortifying, which is the most honest thing that could happen to it. Materials outlast the social meaning attached to them and become again……. just stone. The meaning was always the fragile part.
Grateful your hands reached, iRene.
I'm reminded of the time I hauled an entire case of mahogany flooring out of a dumpster and brought it home to the farm. The main cabin at the farm was built of cardboard, plastic, and carpets stapled to pine poles, and floored with plywood scraps overlaid by several layers of cardboard and then a few scraps of scavenged linoleum. It worked. The hardwood flooring planks were quite difficult to cut or even split, but it made good durable stakes to hold down the perimeter fence against the ground to prevent various creatures slipping under. The rest of it made most wonderful kindling. It did seem to first glance to be entirely too beautiful for these purposes, but they were better purposes than the landfill, to which it was headed. And I couldn't think of anything else to do with it. I certainly wasn't going to take the time to tear up a perfectly usable floor in the cabin and try to put it down in its place!
There is more real aesthetic intelligence in that decision than in every marble countertop installed in every renovated kitchen this decade. The mahogany found better purposes than the ones it was designed to signal. Fence stakes and kindling… functional, honest, entirely without pretension about what it was being asked to do. The landfill would have been a worse ending than the fire. The fire at least was warm.
And the refusal to tear up a perfectly usable floor to replace it with something more beautiful is my essay’s argument lived rather than argued. The floor worked. That was enough. The hierarchy that places mahogany above plywood and linoleum is purely social, entirely arbitrary, and in your case was ignored in favour of what was actually needed.
The most subversive thing you could have done with expensive hardwood was exactly what you did with it.
Thank you for reading me, Alder!
You so aptly finished the Destiny assured (imo) of marble mined and cut to feed the insatiable longing for belonging of the uber rich domesticated market. I’ve a Hungry Eye for Beauty and the aesthetic of Interiors held within Architecture. It is actually disappointing to hear that Neutral isn’t just preference but also Persona. To contain one’s Fears of Exposure in hollow Fads is an unsustainable Lifestyle. The future is coming for All of Us. I assumed the Neutral Spaces like Blank Canvases were the perfect atmosphere to Spread Out and inspire Colorful People. But no. Considering, on the other hand, Anais Nin’s flirtations with the irresistible eccentric passions of Henry Miller and his June, I find there’s still hope for these Rooms.
Greetings from my Strip Mall nation. I resent Her for Choosing Convenience over Culture.
The blank canvas assumption is generous, and I understand its logic. Neutrality as invitation, the empty room as potential. But in practice the neutral space rarely stays potential for long. It becomes prescription. The blank canvas that costs $250 a square foot has already made most of the decisions before anyone walks in….
Anaïs Nin and Miller are exactly the right counter-evidence though. What those rooms contained, the chaos, the appetite, the manuscripts everywhere, the absolute refusal to subordinate living to the appearance of living, produced work that is still metabolically alive decades later. The bohemian interior is not an aesthetic. It is the residue of people who were too busy actually existing to arrange the evidence of it.
The Strip Mall nation observation lands somewhere real…. Convenience as the slow replacement of culture is a choice made at the level of planning, zoning, capital allocation, the deliberate flattening of the built environment into pure function stripped of any friction that might slow consumption. You cannot stumble into the unexpected in a strip mall. Everything is exactly where the algorithm predicted you’d need it. Which is, of course, the point!
Greetings received, and the resentment is entirely justified.
I love this reply. It’s complete in itself. I’ve nothing to add.
This essay is DISTURBING.
I don’t like sarcasm much. But you deploy it with a refreshingly youthful impertinence, insolence, & impudence, capturing the unfettered-by-affectation drive to self-expression you seek to portray.
Black, actually the absence of colour & light, is still the ‘way to dress’ at an exhibition opening. The uniform of those who consider themselves ambassadors of stylish self expression. In fact black expresses nothing at all. I remember at the NGV in Melbourne, an around 40yo man descending an escalator, in subdued lighting. Polished head, pale complexion, heavy black-framed glasses, he looked, against black clothing almost invisible in the light, like an egg with scaffolding, the very epitome of an arbiter of taste. His minimalism was writ large. I’ll never forget the walking cliche.
When people observe my clothes, or my belongings at home, there is no ‘look’ to be seen. I’ll wear a brown duffle coat bought for me by my parents in around 1970.
Each item of furniture is different. Often of natural materials, each timber different. Each with a family story to tell. A table, stool or bookshelf made by my father any time from the 1950s to 1990s. A 1930s sideboard from my great aunt. An 1880s piano from my GGUncle. In the kitchen, a bright yellow 1950s dishrack, & a scale & kettle of similar age. 1960s bathroom scale.
People are surprised that I have 2 cars from the 1980s. They’re full of memories, made well, & I know them so well they feel part of me. All my family have travelled in them, & now they’ve all died, the cars have acquired more significance.
At a geology conference recently, a professor asserted to me “I thought long hair had come & gone”. I retorted that he should stick to his field of expertise, & that actually my long hair (not very long, more Leo Sayer) had gone & come.
As for raves, people come up to me & say such things as ‘I love the way you dance as if nobody is watching’. I don’t do things for show. I don’t live for show. I do things because I like to.
Thanks Tamara, your essay is in so many ways biographical of me, without of course intending to be. I’m lucky to read it.
The egg with structural support…. I can see him completely, and the image is so precise it becomes almost tender in its cruelty. The minimalism writ large is the perfect contradiction. He had achieved the ultimate tasteful paradox: maximum effort toward the appearance of zero effort, rendered so thoroughly it became its own kind of extravagance.
What you describe in your home and your objects is something my essay was reaching toward but couldn’t demonstrate… only argue for. You’ve lived it. The 1880s piano, the father’s joinery across four decades, the great aunt’s sideboard, I don’t see them as a collection. They are a sediment. The difference matters enormously. A collection is assembled by taste, which means by a self performing its own discernment. A sediment simply accumulates through the living, through love and loss and the stubbornness of good materials and the fact that your family travelled in those cars and now they haven’t. Objects that carry grief are the furthest possible thing from décor.
The geology professor deserved exactly the response he received. Expertise in deep time apparently does not confer perspective on the present moment.
And dancing as if nobody is watching, except of course people are watching, and what they see is someone who has genuinely forgotten them, which is the rarest and most compelling thing a body in a room can do. It cannot be performed. The moment you attempt it, it vanishes. And I love that! I dance the same way.
I am glad my essay felt biographical without intending to be because it js the best possible confirmation that it was true. Thank you, Russell!
Your way of writing is like something I've never seen before, and I am not trying to be flattering here. I genuinely have a hard time understanding how someone can produce so much text, and how someone can express so much that points to such a rich inner life. Is it possible to have such a rich inner life? I am almost hesitant to believe that you are real. There seems to be so much inside of you, your inner world seems so full, although not crammed. Reading your texts makes me reflect on my own inner world. Do I also have the capacity to contain a lot, to contain a world that does not allow itself to be well-defined, a world that doesn't allow itself to be limited, as in contained, as in *with borders*. I sense that the inner parts of our beings, of my being, could be allowed to be open, free, unending, something to explore rather than understand and control.
I will say I haven't read particularly many books or spent a lot of time in art and literature. So perhaps my amazement is an effect of ignorance, I don't know. Not to discredit you or your writing, I am truly amazed and touched by it.
Reading this text in particular truly gave me a new perspective on taste. I'll probably be thinking about this when furnishing my apartment, as well as when contemplating how to dress. I long for freedom but I am greatly limited by my need (?) for approval and acceptance. Part of me longs to be corner-free, frictionless, non-noticable but noticable because of it. Perhaps that part of me is not the part which will guide me to freedom. Maybe freedom is more messy and less related to what others think about me. Maybe freedom can be outright "ugly". You've made my gears turn.. thanks :)
Hmmm that hesitation about whether your amazement is ignorance or genuine response… ignorance of books does not produce the attention you’ve just demonstrated. What you’ve written here is philosophically precise without any of the borrowed vocabulary that usually substitutes for precision. You found, on your own, the distinction between a world that is full and one that is crammed. Most people with extensive literary training never land on it.
The inner life doesn’t require reading as its raw material. It requires honesty, and the willingness to sit with what doesn’t resolve. You have both, visibly.
On the corner-free, frictionless, noticeable-because-unnoticeable longing, I recognise it completely, and I’d say it gently…. that particular freedom is still organised around the other person’s eye. It is a very refined form of the same need it’s trying to escape. The self that wants to be noticed for its restraint is not yet free of the audience. It has simply learned a more elegant way of performing for it.
The messier freedom you gesture toward at the end, the one that might be outright ugly, that is less related to what others think, that one is real. And the fact that you arrived at it yourself, without me having to lead you there, suggests it wasn’t the essay that gave you a new perspective. It was already yours. The essay just made it visible.
That being said, since I am a voracious reader, I encourage everyone to read (starting with my essays…. :))) I’m joking!).
Thank you so much for what you wrote here, Rasmus!
I wonder what taste would be, if it were prohibited to be exhibited, advertised, showcased or performed. If it were constrained to be private, as the physical sense is. It couldn't be cultivated, just encountered or discovered or stumbled upon. Much like you pick up on a certain depth or quiet aspect of someone else...
What a precise inversion! I like to! Taste returned to the condition of its original metaphor, something experienced in private, unrepeatable, impossible to display without immediately falsifying it.
What you describe would not eliminate taste but the social machinery that has colonised it. What would remain is something closer to sensibility, the private accumulation of genuine encounters, preferences that exist because they actually occurred, attractions that were never auditioned for an audience. The difference between knowing you love something and knowing you love something because you have said so publicly, repeatedly, to people who responded well to it.
The depth you mention in another person, that quality of noticing something in someone before they have performed it for you, is precisely this. It arrives before the showcase. It exists in the register below announcement. You catch it the way you catch a scent: involuntarily, briefly, without being able to fully account for it afterward. And it is, almost always, more convincing than anything that was deliberately communicated.
The tragedy of contemporary taste culture is that it has made this sort of encounter nearly impossible. Every preference arrives pre-announced, pre-validated, pre-packaged in the language of identity. To stumble upon something genuinely, without having been directed there by an algorithm or a social signal, is becoming a rarer and rarer accident.
Which may be why, when it happens, it feels so disproportionately significant. Like finding something you didn’t know you’d lost.
Thank you so much for reading me!
Brilliant and lots to think about, Tamara, thoughts percolating slowly in my mind...I once dreamt about hiring a stylist (just for fun, I thought). My idea of style would often mean going to vintage shops, inspired by Classic films, and choosing what fits. Your essay offered me a warning I hadn't expected....of being placed into a box I never asked to enter. Style truly is a juxtaposition with inner freedom, Thank you, Tamara!
Ohhh, right, the stylist dream is my essay’s argument in miniature, the moment the interior impulse toward self-expression considers outsourcing itself to an exterior authority. And I’m not saying out of laziness but out of something more interesting…. the suspicion that your own instincts might not be legible enough, coordinated enough, defensible enough. That someone else might know better what you should look like.
The vintage shop, the classic film, the thing that simply fits are already a method, and a more honest one than most. It has a source: something moved you, on a screen, in a particular light, and you followed the feeling into a shop and tried something on. That chain, from real response to embodied choice, is exactly what the stylist relationship interrupts. The intermediate step of professional legibility replaces the direct current between desire and expression.
The box you never asked to enter is the right way to put it since the box is rarely presented as a box. It arrives as help, as refinement, as the friendly suggestion that what you already are could be made more coherent, more considered, more you, which is the moment it begins to be less you.
Your instincts brought you to vintage shops and classic films. Those instincts have excellent taste, in the only sense of the word I find defensible. Thank you for this, Paulina!
💝💝💝You always bring a smile to my face and light into my heart. Thank you, Tamara.
Grateful to have you here, Paulina.
The title says it all: Taste is a Leash. You could have kept it at a provocative level yet not gone too deep. But you don't do that. As soon as I read your statement about what Bourdieu said: "power wearing the clothes of sensibility" I knew you were going for the jugular. And you confirmed that a little later with, "It is about containment, the management of appetite...and of whatever in a person refuses to be made legible for someone else's comfort." And then toward the end, the devastating statement: "The violence is slow because it disguises itself as refinement."
I kept coming back and saying to myself, "So what is this thing about rugs?" But I get it. "the management of appetite" - yeah, I know a little about that one. My mind, though, is still trying to make the leap you made so easily. From the color of the walls to the color of your life and how it is controlled - or not - is, well, it's a lot. I had to look up Rosa Luxemburg, because I knew the name, but I had no idea why. And once I read about her, I had no idea where I'd heard of her, but the one line of hers I loved: "Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently." And that's exactly who the taste police are targeting, if I understand you correctly.
I'd never heard of Elias Canetti, nor of his book Crowds and Power. So I looked that up too, and found it's available for $3.99 on Kindle. Reading through the sample was chilling. Reading about "the discharge," or as he says, "This is the moment when all who belong to the crowd get rid of their differences and feel equal." What he describes in the bit I saw about crowds is exactly what horrifies me about them. And it's fascinating to read of the center or beginning of the crowd being only around a dozen people. They are the nucleus and the propulsion of the crowd (or at least I think so).
I'm not sure why Canetti stood out, but those were the two of all the names you mentioned, that compelled me to find out more. And I'm not sure I understand why all the folks who wrote comments seem able to comment with what feels like engagement, but no anxiety. I'm not even sure I'm right about that, because I couldn't fully read everyone's comments because I couldn't focus on anything but the essay. I will say this essay left me anxious in a way very few things I've read have, and reading about Luxemburg and Canetti didn't make me feel any better.
It's tempting to focus on how brilliant what you wrote is, because that's true. But the more I sit here and write this, the more I have to acknowledged how disturbing I found this, how disturbed I am, and I'm not even sure why. It will become more apparent with time, as I sit with it, or at least, I hope so. :))
The anxiety is my essay working correctly. Of course, not the anxiety of confusion, you understood it clearly, the Luxemburg and Canetti connections prove that, but the anxiety of recognition. That discomfort is the reading succeeding.
What you have identified in Canetti’s discharge is precisely why I included him. The moment of equalisation in a crowd is experienced as liberation, the self briefly relieved of its separateness, its anxiety, its need to maintain a coherent position. It feels like freedom. It is the opposite. And taste operates by the same mechanism, more silently, over a longer duration. The slow crowd. The discharge that takes years rather than minutes, and leaves you not exhilarated but simply… adjusted. Smaller. More manageable. Having forgotten that you were ever otherwise.
Rosa Luxemburg from a prison cell, still completely herself, still thinking with full force, still writing letters about plants and birds and political philosophy with equal attention… she is in the essay because she is evidence that the self can remain unmanaged under conditions designed to manage it entirely.
The rugs are where the argument lands in the body. Abstract claims about power and containment are navigable. A rug you love for no defensible reason, that has no business being where it is, that you would rescue first in a fire… well, that is where the question becomes personal. Unavoidably, uncomfortably personal.
Sit with the disturbance, Doc! It knows something. And thank you for looking up some of the references, it is so important to me that my readers do that. I just want to open an entire new universe for them.
A quick p.s. - just read the comment above where mine showed up - an attack. Hard for me to see where she got that, but she did. Nice response.
Thank you, Doc! I never attack back or defend myself, I just explain. It’s easy for people to skim through something and miss all the points.
The action of non-action, Wu Wey. I may or may not be there for awhile, just passively listening to hymns of my muses.
Thank you.
Wu Wei as reading posture, receiving without immediately converting the experience into response or opinion. I love it! Not all thinking needs to surface as language. Some of it just needs to settle.
Take your time with it, Jim!
As usual you take my amorphous thoughts and crystalize them with precise language.
I have no idea how many languages you speak but I’m guessing English is not your first. That makes you like a Da Vinci of words.
Not saying that to flatter you but feeling grateful for the education that you stated I would receive early on in our call and response, what, a couple of years ago?
I keep having to look some of your references up, learn something new, forget it and then look it up again leading to more and more education.
Thankfully I’m not being tested. 🫤
The looking up, forgetting, and looking up again is how things actually enter. The first encounter plants something below the threshold of conscious memory. The second time, you don’t start from zero, you return to somewhere already faintly marked. Eventually it stays because it found a context to live in.
English is not my first language, you’re right. And I don’t take words for granted, never mistake familiarity for understanding in any of the 6 languages I speak. Every sentence is a small negotiation. That friction is what you’re reading as precision. It’s not mastery so much as permanent, affectionate foreignness.
The Da Vinci comparison I’ll receive without deflecting since you’ve pre-empted the false modesty. Thank you, Jim!
Six? We American’s are so Limited.
As always, you are most welcome. Bye.
+ 9 years of Latin :)))
Bonjour Tamara … formidable !! … this is about the world I’ve lived in all my life … Biting, almost cruel … but sooo accurate … not without humour, though … Taste and censorship … Taste ! Vaste sujet, as would say our lovable general …
Les mots qui restent …
*** Evidence that the person before you has an interior life that was not arranged for your comfort or their own social safety.
When I am in a period of real creative life, when writing is actually alive rather than strictly competent, my apartment looks like a library that has been gently burgled, and I am producing something I could not produce from inside a curated existence. The mess is not incidental to the thinking. The mess is where the thinking lives.***
Sounds like my (painting) studio … when I had one. Total chaos, but one that I navigated so well that I could move and remove, and place and replace objects in a sort of transe so that they would arrange and rearrange themselves and always surprise me with new juxtapostions and cause my ever loving eyes to sparkle.
And more …
*** Taste, in the end, is just manners for the soul. And manners, as anyone who grew up on the wrong side of a class line knows perfectly well, were never about comfort. They were about knowing your place, and staying in it, beautifully, with excellent posture, without making a sound that carries. The violence is slow because it disguises itself as refinement.
From somewhere outside the frame, still declining to arrange myself for your comfort, illegible, ungainly, and considerably louder than the ceiling height permits, my essay ends where she begins: outside the frame, off the leash, magnificently uncontainable. ***
Formidable !!! la vraie liberté, n’est-ce pas ? Je pense à votre manteau, à la Place des Vosges … Ah, les couleurs !
J’aurais aimé vous envoyer des photos d’où j’habite … cela vous ferait sourire (je crois) Hors du cadre – out of the box .. I feel you may like my little myth after all …
I read you softly furious … il y a une douce folie dans ces mots … vous voyez tellement clair, à travers les choses, que ça fait un peu peur … une peur qui fait frémir … peur de souffrir, peur de douceur … trop de douceur, de tendresse … 🦋
PS : si vous êtes d’accord, bien entendu, j’aurais besoin d’une adresse mail pour vous envoyer mon texte …
Merci, André! Vous êtes trop gentil!
J’aime le chaos du studio que vous décrivez, ça veut dire que c’est un système vivant, navigable uniquement par celui qui y a séjourné pour en connaître la logique. L’état de transe des objets qui se réarrangent d’eux-mêmes, surprenant leur propre arrangeur est l’état créatif que l’existence organisée interdit entièrement. On ne peut pas être surpris par ce qu’on a déjà contrôlé et mis en place.
La douce folie….. j’accepte volontiers. La fureur et la douceur ne sont pas des contraires dans le registre où je travaille. L’essai est furieux parce qu’il tient à quelque chose, ce qui est peut-être la seule raison défendable d’être furieux.
Merci pour vos mots!
Deeply original artwork illustrations; impressive selection by Tamara, as urval.
Thank you so much, Leif, I’m always happy when my readers notice the art too!