Is there such a thing as good taste?
Wrote professionally about taste in a previous life. It is related more closely than we expect to <i>techne</i> or competence from physical knowledge.<p>When we think of poor taste, we tend to think of symbols that are separated from their function and meaning, where instead of representing that, &quot;I do this thing,&quot; something gaudy says, &quot;I have this thing!&quot;  That&#x27;s what crassness is, and it comes down to our relative apprehension of the real vs. the represented, where typically, something real is powerful independent of who is observing it, and the representation is not.  It&#x27;s whether something legitimately represents power. Taste may be an instinct for honest signals, which would seem like its own sort of intelligence.<p>Viewed this way, taste is the expression of what you percieve to be power based on your experience, good taste is the inverse of the distance between them, and poor taste is measured in  the gap between what is affected and of-what it is the effect.<p>That difference between <i>effect</i> and <i>affect</i> is one of the sneakiest bits of the english language and perhaps even the culture&#x27;s most cunningly set trap. Do not underestimate the value of good taste, it&#x27;s an intuition about power.