Against Taste

The piece argues that what is now called taste is a degraded substitute for patronage. In earlier systems, capital, labor, and a transcendent aim were in the same room, and the work emerged from their friction. Modern taste turns the human into a selector after the fact.

It traces that shift through cathedrals, the Sistine Chapel, Diaghilev, Tom Wolfe, and Mark Fisher, then brings it to AI and the role of the discriminator. The claim is that human value after AGI should not be selection alone, but co-creation, will, worship, and a “fine disregard” for rules that can produce something new.

Reading notes

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• Taste is presented as a modern consensus that appeared quietly and made humans into critics and consumers rather than co-creators.
• Patronage is described as a premodern relation in which capital and artistic labor were tied together before the work existed.
• The biblical first vocation is labor in creation, not detached appreciation.
• The bottega, the cathedral, and the Sistine Chapel are used as examples of collaboration among patron, maker, and the divine.
• The essay treats the modern art market as the moment when patronage broke apart into collector, critic, and gallery.
• Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word is used to show art becoming literary and taste becoming social performance.
• Mark Fisher’s hauntology is linked to taste as backward-looking consumption that cannot generate the genuinely new.
• The text argues that Silicon Valley taste culture keeps selection and drops mastery, labor, and transcendence.
• The GAN example is used to say the discriminator is meant to become unnecessary, just as taste would become obsolete if human creation remained central.
• After AGI, the proposed human task is to handle the transcendent with a “fine disregard” that can co-create rather than only judge.