zero introspection
on taste!
Diaries unpublishable, lately. Too much of life. Biking through the thick air, forgetting that it’s a premonition for a thunderstorm. Getting caught in the thunderstorm, Helmut Lang slip even clingier when wet. Running to the temporary house of a friend who is even more itinerant and paranoid than I am. We have known each other for 1.5 years and still have not exchanged last names. The height of trust. He slices limes for fizzy drinks and I shower with the door open. He shows me a couple of fresh scars clawed into his abdomen — a motorbike accident, he says, though it looks more like someone had failed to kill him — and then sends me back out into the world. Which is all to say that I am moved, at velocity — everything matte and blurred— until I am held in place by the kindness of others. Bullseyed by gratitude into presence without narrative. High speed calm air tonight.
In lieu of a coherent internal monologue, I’ve been possessed by the impulse to Recommend. Possessed, as in by a demon. Like the second-nature ability to stage a photoshoot anywhere, anytime, Recommendation is a tic of my generation. Like how the young aspire to become influencers, not astronauts, to collective adult astonishment. Something works, so you feel the need to stage and share it. Recommend what? Rahel, Cat and I are supposed to submit a collective beauty round-up but the only product we have in common is [redacted], which works well and is available in train stations and airports globally. What we do share is a reputation for being high maintenance, and a constant underestimation of how preoccupied we are by things that are not Products1.
I was engaged in the practice of image production — taking bikini pics at the villa — and in the practice of discernment — in a momentary reprieve from ugliness. In their recent episode on Taste, New Models reflect on how ‘taste’ is really, actually contact (handling, assessing); that attempts at infrastructural taste produce what Jay Springett calls ‘interface behaviour’; that ‘tastefulness’ with consensus makes synonyms of ‘mid’ and ‘bourgeois.’ Carly posts that “there is increasingly no clear human witness to human discernment. Taste breaks down when middle-manned by social platforms and LLMs (minotaur mode).”
In general, I hate sweeping generalisations of pleasure and desire — including the exercise of taste, which can be said to direct desire and catalogue pleasures — because these are active and relational, only and always shaped through continuous contact with the world (including the recommendation algorithm, but not solely or even predominantly determined by it). It’s true that I have the privilege to cultivate taste, but it’s also true that cultivation happened anywhere and under low- and extremely-high-cortisol conditions. When I was cashier at a market where I didn’t speak the language, reading in between customers; when I was working until 3am as a corporate weapon, reading on one monitor and doing my job on the other; at art school and outside of it; in conversation with others, in the network, and in solitude. Cultivating taste does not protect the sovereignty of the individual but rather requires openness (to be affected in ways you can’t predict) and discernment (to choose what changes you). It is active, insofar that you are constantly making decisions. I would never impose my taste on others; but I am convinced it is good because it is always running in the background, determining what I will and won’t tolerate. Determining what I will and won’t cherish. Who or what I will or won’t let in. I would never impose… anyway, Nihal already has the title of ‘dictator of taste.’
In the spring, I told the cuties at Reference Point that I don’t have crushes, I just dream of success, which was true, and derided the tech world’s recent preoccupation with taste, which I stand by. To write well and critically about these systems, you generally have to understand them — at least at the structural level. You can know how a car works, from its physics to its infrastructure and history, without needing to know how to build the car yourself, etc. Rarely is the feeling mutual. It is difficult to declare, let alone build around, a general ‘taste’ because it is so phenomenological. It would be like declaring a general ‘sex’ — god knows they’ve tried. Taste is your experience, and talent is whatever is wrong with you. Both are incompatible with scale, consensus, and protocolization; both are somewhat antisocial (avant-garde) and prosocial (standard-raising). Taste can’t be replicated though it is fervently desired — that is why we have so much recommendation, both human and algorithmic. The same applies to talent — that’s why we have so much process porn and creative self-help even though, as far as I know, talent is what sabotages normalcy and ruins routines. It is possible to create the conditions where each can be developed well, through discernment and attentiveness… but those conditions are scarce in an industry that associates ‘high agency’ with “zero introspection.” Isn’t that satisfying? In the words of the sage horsegiirL… Thank U Karma!!!
Non-exhaustive list of things I like: Silk slips (ibid). Moto boots. Microskirts. Lab-grown diamonds. Unusual types of honey. Rooftop bar. Port city. Post-industrial sunsets. Brutalist monument or library. Modernist hotel suite. Jasmine, plumeria, oleander. Crash (1996). Nymphomaniac (2013). Lispector, Nabokov, Bolaño. Rachmaninov. Black Swan (2010). Spring Breakers (2012). Male manipulator music, esp. early Weeknd & late Carti. Fakemink, DJmegan23. Bordelle lingerie sets. Forsythe, Balanchine. Anne Imhof to La Horde pipeline. Pretty much any performance of Giselle or Manon. Peony, ranunculus, spray roses. Zumthor, Khan, Locsin, Ando. Kanye and Bianca destroying an Ando… Bullet holes in concrete. Shards of glass as break-in deterrent. Concertina wire. Moët. Cartier trinity ring. Muji pen. Black sand beaches. Wine with volcanic terroir. Remote tarot readings and divinations texted from a friend. Agnes Martin, Nam June Paik. WangShui, Arunanondchai, P. Staff. O’Hara, Ashbery, Carson. Reef swimming, alpine skiing. Don DeLillo and Rachel Kushner. Haider Ackermann at Tom Ford. Lana del Rey, esp. Ultraviolence era. It takes a life…