Exhibition Essay for The House of Good Taste: The Fine Art of Liking Things Correctly
Liking something should be one of the least complicated things a human being does. You see a chair. You like the chair. Perhaps you buy the chair. At no point should this require certification, peer review, a consultation with six strangers on the internet, or an emergency search for whether walnut is still acceptable this year.
And yet, here we are.
There is an astonishing number of people prepared to help you determine whether the thing you like is, in fact, something you should like. Your jeans may be the wrong shape. Your sofa may be dated. Your rug may be too small. Your curtains may be hung at an embarrassing height. Your haircut may not flatter your face shape. Your shoes may have ruined the proportions of an otherwise perfectly respectable outfit. Your kitchen cabinets may be lowering the perceived value of the entire Western world.
Even your coffee is apparently not safe.
Put cream in it in front of the wrong person and you may discover that you have not merely added dairy to a beverage. You have revealed something about yourself. A person who knows about coffee might explain that good coffee does not need cream. This is useful information if your lifelong ambition has been to receive a satisfactory performance review from a man who owns a burr grinder.
Of course, expertise itself is not the problem. An interior designer knows things about scale that you may not know. A tailor understands proportion. A chef can teach you why one preparation produces a different result from another. Learning from people who know more than you do is one of the great pleasures of being alive. You can encounter a painting, fabric, building, wine, song, or strange little lamp because someone introduced you to it and discover that you genuinely love it.
Something stranger happens when information becomes instruction, instruction becomes judgment, and judgment eventually becomes so familiar that you forget anyone taught it to you.
Now you simply know.
You know the room looks dated. You know those shoes are wrong with those trousers. You know the countertop looks cheap. You know that particular handbag is trying too hard. You know the restaurant is embarrassingly touristy. You know that nobody with serious taste would order the sweet wine. You know the gallery wall needs editing. You know the woman wearing that dress should have chosen something more flattering.
How do you know?
This is where things become interesting.
Because most of us would insist that taste is personal. In fact, we become remarkably protective of this idea. You like what you like. I like what I like. There is no accounting for taste. Beauty is subjective. Everyone should express themselves. There are no rules anymore.
Wonderful.
For something with no rules, we certainly have a lot of fucking rules.
We have rules for looking timeless and rules for looking current. Rules for appearing polished and rules for appearing effortless. Rules for minimalism, maximalism, traditionalism, modernism, eclecticism, personal style, quiet luxury, anti-fashion, vintage collecting, gallery walls, coffee, wine, books, restaurants, hotels, gardens, weddings and apparently the morally correct number of throw pillows to place on a sofa.
Even breaking the rules has become remarkably organized.
You cannot simply clash anymore. You must clash intentionally. You cannot simply own a bunch of weird shit. It must look collected. You cannot merely dress strangely. There needs to be a point of view. You cannot ignore trends in any random fashion. You must achieve the particular appearance of a person who is far too individual to care about trends, preferably using several items currently being worn by everyone else who is far too individual to care about trends.
Somewhere along the way, personal preference acquired an administrative department.
That department is the subject of The House of Good Taste: The Fine Art of Liking Things Correctly.
This exhibition is interested in the peculiar machinery that gathers around something as supposedly private as preference. The authorities who teach us what deserves admiration. The cliques that develop around knowing the difference. The identities we construct from our preferences. The social rewards attached to recognizing the right thing. The judgments reserved for people who fail to recognize it. And perhaps most interestingly, the moment all of that instruction becomes so thoroughly internalized that it stops sounding like anything we learned at all.
It starts sounding like us.
This does not mean everything you love was secretly selected for you by an interior designer, a runway show, an algorithm, or some insufferable fellow with opinions about espresso. The question is far more interesting than whether your taste is really yours.
The question is how often a rule can enter through the front door, live in the house long enough to become part of the furniture, and eventually introduce itself as your personal preference.
Because for all our declarations about individuality, self-expression, breaking rules, rejecting trends, and not giving a damn what anyone thinks, we remain remarkably concerned with getting subjective things right.
Which raises a rather inconvenient question for The House of Good Taste:
How the hell did liking something become something you could do incorrectly?
The House Has Rules
The House of Good Taste is a remarkably well-regulated establishment for a place that insists taste is subjective.
Fashion alone could keep an administrative staff employed indefinitely. There are proportions to consider, silhouettes appropriate to your body, colors appropriate to your complexion, clothes appropriate to your age, shoes appropriate to the trousers, trousers appropriate to the occasion, and entire categories of garments that can apparently become unacceptable while hanging peacefully in your closet overnight. You can go to bed owning a perfectly good pair of jeans and wake up to discover that the circumference of the leg has become socially unfortunate.
Then there is the matter of looking flattering, polished, current, timeless, effortless, intentional, sophisticated, or whatever adjective has recently been appointed to supervise getting dressed. This would be easier if the instructions remained stable, but they have a habit of reversing themselves. The thing that ruined your proportions five years ago is now precisely what will fix them. The color combination you were warned against is suddenly interesting. The shoe once capable of destroying an outfit has returned as the only shoe capable of saving it.
Interior design is no less diligent. Your rug should be large enough to accommodate the furniture in a particular relationship. Curtains should be hung at a particular height. Artwork has a correct relationship to the furniture beneath it. Coffee tables must maintain diplomatic distance from sofas. Woods can be mixed, but not carelessly. Metals can also be mixed, provided you understand how to mix them. Clutter is bad until it becomes collected. Empty space is elegant until it becomes sterile. A room should look finished, although apparently not so finished that it looks designed, because the current aspiration is often to create a room that looks as though nobody tried very hard to create the room they spent six months creating.
And heaven help you if your house becomes dated.
This is a particularly fascinating accusation to make against a house, an object specifically designed to continue existing through the passage of time. Nevertheless, there are kitchens all over the world quietly incriminating their owners with yesterday’s cabinet profiles. There are backsplashes that have fallen from grace. There are light fixtures that now reveal the approximate year you purchased them.
Somewhere, somebody is looking at a perfectly functional gray sofa with the grave expression normally reserved for structural damage.
Beauty has its own regulations. So does food. So does art. There is a proper way to apply makeup while looking as though you are barely wearing any. There are foods one is expected to appreciate after acquiring sufficient sophistication and foods one should perhaps enjoy privately. There are paintings you are supposed to understand, books you should have read, wines you should know better than to order, and coffees you should apparently have the decency not to contaminate with cream.
None of this means expertise is fraudulent or that every convention is arbitrary. A designer may recommend a larger rug because scale genuinely changes how a room feels. A tailor understands what happens when a seam falls in a different place. A chef knows what heat does to food. An artist may understand composition in ways an untrained viewer does not. There are technical principles, accumulated knowledge, craftsmanship, historical context, and practical reasons for doing one thing rather than another.
The interesting question is not whether rules exist.
It is what happens to them after we learn them.
At first, a rule usually arrives with a source attached. A stylist tells you that a particular silhouette is more flattering. An interior designer explains why the curtains should be higher. A magazine declares something dated. A friend with impeccable taste recoils from a finish you had been considering. You watch enough rooms being redesigned, enough outfits being critiqued, enough faces being analyzed, enough restaurants being reviewed, and enough experts explaining what works and what absolutely does not.
Then, gradually, the attribution falls away.
A few years later, you walk into a room and something looks wrong.
You cannot necessarily explain why. The rug just feels too small. The curtains look strange at that height. Those two woods do not belong together. The sofa looks dated. The artwork is somehow ruining the wall.
You put on an outfit and know the proportions are off. You see someone else’s shoes and know they do not go. You look at a face and think a particular haircut is unflattering. Someone pours cream into coffee and a tiny part of your brain wonders why they bothered ordering good coffee in the first place.
Nobody had to tell you this today.
That is the important part.
The instruction has already completed its work.
What entered as information has become familiarity. What became familiar eventually became obvious. And once something feels obvious, we rarely think to ask where the obviousness came from. The rule no longer arrives wearing a name tag from the runway, the design magazine, the beauty counter, the critic, the expert, the social circle, or the person whose taste we once admired.
It simply arrives as judgment. You do not think, I once learned that this looks wrong. You think, That looks wrong. Those are very different statements, although from inside your own head they can feel identical.
This is where The House of Good Taste becomes considerably more interesting than a collection of silly aesthetic rules. The House does not need to follow you around forever with a clipboard. Eventually, if the education has been successful, you carry the clipboard yourself.
And because nobody else appears to be holding it, you may even mistake it for your own hand.
Your Completely Personal Taste, Courtesy of Everyone Else
One of the more charming ideas maintained by The House of Good Taste is that after spending your entire life being shown what to admire, you somehow emerge with a completely independent collection of personal preferences. You simply happen to like what you like, and what you like has absolutely nothing to do with the thousands of people, images, judgments, trends, environments, and social codes you have encountered since you were old enough to notice that some things received compliments and other things received a concerned expression.
Long before you developed strong opinions about clothes, houses, food, art, beauty, or coffee, somebody was already showing you what looked good. Your family had preferences. Your friends had preferences. The people you admired had preferences. The people you desperately did not want to resemble had preferences too, which can be equally instructive. You learned what belonged in certain houses, what certain kinds of people wore, what was appropriate for particular occasions, what counted as attractive, and which choices quietly announced that someone did not know what they were doing.
Then the professionals got involved. Fashion magazines showed you the new silhouette. Runways introduced the thing everyone initially thought was hideous and would somehow be wearing eighteen months later. Interior designers explained why the perfectly functional room you had enjoyed for nine years suddenly needed a larger rug. Stylists taught you about proportion. Beauty experts identified problems with your face you had somehow failed to notice while using it every day. Retail stores arranged objects into little demonstrations of the life those objects supposedly belonged to, while celebrities and tastemakers supplied convenient examples of the sort of person who might own them.
Pinterest and Instagram made the education nearly continuous. You no longer needed to wait for a magazine to discover what beautiful people with beautiful houses had decided was beautiful. You could receive several hundred examples before breakfast. After enough exposure, an aesthetic that would once have looked strange begins to look familiar, then attractive, then obvious. Eventually you may find yourself wondering why anyone would choose anything else.
Algorithms make this even more entertaining because they can turn preference into a hall of mirrors. You pause over a particular room, so you are shown another room like it. You save that one, so you receive twenty more. You begin liking the thing partly because you keep seeing the thing, and because you keep liking the thing, you keep seeing the thing.
Six months later, you have apparently arrived through independent personal discernment at precisely the aesthetic your feed has been serving you three hundred times a week.
None of this means your preferences are fake. That would be a childish conclusion, and it would require an impossible standard of originality in which nothing could truly belong to you unless you invented it in complete cultural isolation. Human beings discover things through other human beings. Someone can introduce you to a musician you love for the next thirty years. You can know nothing about Japanese ceramics until someone teaches you enough to appreciate what you are looking at. A designer can explain proportion and suddenly you can see relationships in a room that were previously invisible to you.
Influence is not the opposite of authorship, and learning from someone does not invalidate what you eventually come to love.
The more interesting distinction is between learning to appreciate something and learning what you are supposed to appreciate. Unfortunately, those experiences do not arrive wearing different uniforms.
Consider the formerly hideous shoe. The first time you see it, you think it is ridiculous. Then it appears on a runway. Then someone whose style you admire wears it. Then you see it in an editorial, followed by several versions on Instagram, followed by a particularly convincing outfit on Pinterest.
Six months later, you see the shoe again and think it looks fantastic. Perhaps you genuinely developed an appreciation for it. Perhaps repetition made the unfamiliar familiar. Perhaps you finally saw it styled in a way that revealed what was interesting about it. Perhaps the people wearing it gave it a social meaning it did not previously possess. Perhaps knowing that people whose judgment you respect considered it desirable quietly changed the way you saw it. Most likely, several of these things happened at once.
What becomes fascinating is how quickly the history of the preference disappears. Nobody keeps citations for taste. You do not look around your living room and think, I prefer this particular arrangement according to Architectural Digest, forty-seven Pinterest images, my friend Caroline’s house, three hotels I stayed in, and an interior designer I followed for four years. You simply think the room looks good. You do not stand in a fitting room reconstructing the cultural genealogy of your opinion about the trousers. You look in the mirror and know they are wrong.
The borrowed rule has lost its attribution.
That matters because once the source disappears, instruction can begin masquerading as instinct. What was once something you were shown becomes something you notice. What you repeatedly noticed becomes something you recognize. What you recognize becomes something you judge, and eventually the judgment feels so immediate that it becomes difficult to distinguish from preference itself. You are no longer remembering that you learned a particular combination looks cheap. You simply see cheap. You are no longer recalling that a designer declared a particular finish dated. You simply see dated. The authority has vanished from the sentence while the verdict remains intact.
Social groups intensify this process because taste is not taught only through magazines and algorithms. It is also taught through belonging. Every family, profession, class, subculture, scene, hobby, and aesthetic clique develops its own forms of literacy. Spend enough time inside one and you learn what its members recognize as sophisticated, embarrassing, interesting, obvious, tasteful, pretentious, basic, beautiful, tacky, or unforgivably mainstream. Nobody needs to hand you the official manual. A raised eyebrow can accomplish quite a lot.
You also learn whose judgment counts. A stranger can hate your sofa and you may happily continue sitting on it. Let an interior designer whose work you adore call it dated and suddenly the poor sofa is under investigation. Your uncle can think your outfit is ridiculous and perhaps that only confirms you made the correct choice. Let the person whose style you admire make the same face and now you are standing in front of the mirror wondering whether the jacket has always looked like that.
This is why the machinery of taste cannot be explained simply as wanting everyone to approve of us. Most people do not want everyone’s approval. They want recognition from particular people, and they often want distance from others. The coffee snob does not need the person ordering a caramel latte to approve of his espresso. He may derive considerably more satisfaction from knowing that the caramel-latte person does not understand his espresso at all. Disapproval can be just as useful as approval when both help establish who belongs where.
The House of Good Taste therefore does not need to impose one universal taste upon everyone. It only needs to provide enough standards, authorities, references, and social distinctions that we learn to locate ourselves in relation to them. Eventually the machinery becomes difficult to see because we are no longer consciously consulting anything. We look, assess, approve, reject, admire, recoil, and experience the whole process as our own judgment.
That may be the House’s finest achievement. It does not need to follow you around forever explaining what to like. Once its standards have been repeated often enough, the external supervision becomes unnecessary. The designer can go home. The stylist can close the magazine. The tastemaker can move on to next year’s thing. The algorithm can serve somebody else for a while. The House has already accomplished something much more efficient.
It has taught you to administer its standards yourself.
Membership Has Its Privileges
The House of Good Taste would be much easier to escape if everybody inside it agreed.
Fortunately, they do not. The minimalist thinks the maximalist needs to put some things away. The maximalist thinks the minimalist’s house looks like nobody lives there. The vintage obsessive would rather die than buy the reproduction. The person buying the reproduction would rather not spend six Saturdays digging through dusty warehouses looking for a lamp that needs rewiring. The traditionalist thinks the avant-garde dresser looks ridiculous. The avant-garde dresser considers this confirmation that the outfit worked. Everyone is looking across the House at everyone else wondering how people can possibly live like that.
This disagreement creates the impression that we are dealing with wildly different systems of taste. In one room, restraint demonstrates sophistication. In another, restraint demonstrates cowardice. One group considers something timeless while another considers it painfully conventional. One person wants the restaurant nobody knows about. Another wants the reservation nobody can get. One person is horrified by trends. Another knows the trends six months before everyone else. They may disagree about nearly every object placed in front of them while remaining remarkably similar in what those objects are being asked to accomplish.
Because taste is rarely only about whether you enjoy the thing. It can also tell other people whether you know what the thing means.
This is where the House gets cliquey.
Every room develops its own literacy. There are references you recognize if you belong there, distinctions you know how to make, names you are expected to know, mistakes you would never make, and objects whose significance would be completely lost on somebody outside the room. You know which version is the good version. You know which restaurant used to be good before everyone found out about it. You know which designer everyone suddenly loves but has actually been doing this for years. You know that the thing everyone else thinks is ugly is precisely why it is interesting.
None of this requires an actual membership card. Fluency is the membership card.
This is one reason taste can become such an efficient social sorting mechanism. You can learn quite a lot about where someone locates themselves by noticing what they praise, what they ridicule, and perhaps most revealingly, what they would be embarrassed to admit enjoying. There are people who will happily tell you they hated an award-winning film but become strangely evasive when asked whether they enjoyed a wildly popular romantic comedy. Apparently pleasure itself can require reputation management.
The same thing happens with clothes, books, music, restaurants, furniture, neighborhoods, vacations, art and food. The object becomes useful for establishing coordinates. This is for people like me. That is for people like them. We know better than to buy that. They do not understand why this costs so much. We would never eat there. They would never understand this place anyway.
Coffee may be the perfect example because the stakes are so magnificently low.
You can simply enjoy black coffee. There is nothing particularly remarkable about that. You can learn about beans, roasting, extraction, water temperature and brewing methods because you find the subject genuinely fascinating. You can become extremely knowledgeable about coffee and develop preferences you did not have before. All of that is perfectly reasonable.
But somewhere in the process, it is possible for a beverage to become a tiny entrance examination.
Now someone puts cream in their coffee and this apparently means something. Perhaps they do not really appreciate the bean. Perhaps their palate is unsophisticated. Perhaps they have ruined the careful work of the roaster. Perhaps ordering specialty coffee and adding cream is evidence that they simply do not understand what they are drinking.
The other person, meanwhile, is trying to have a fucking coffee.
This is the point where preference has quietly acquired a border patrol. It is no longer enough that you know what you like. Your knowledge of what you like has become knowledge about the kind of person who likes it correctly, and therefore about the kind of person who does not.
The movement is subtle because every individual step seems reasonable. You like something. You discover other people who like it. Those people teach you more about it, so naturally your appreciation becomes more informed. You begin recognizing distinctions that were previously invisible to you. Eventually, the people who recognize those distinctions begin to seem as though they understand the subject better than the people who do not. Somewhere along that perfectly sensible road, I like this can become people who understand this like this, which is dangerously close to people who do not like this simply do not understand it.
Now your preference is no longer describing only your relationship with the object. It has begun making claims about somebody else’s competence.
This is where cliques become so useful to identity. A clique does not merely give you people who share your interests. It gives those interests social meaning. It creates insiders who understand the reference and outsiders who miss it. The obscure band sounds different once everybody knows the band. The hidden restaurant feels different after it appears on every tourist’s itinerary. The vintage chair becomes less interesting when a mass retailer produces something similar. The outfit loses some of its charge when everybody starts wearing it.
Nothing about the physical object may have changed. What changed was its usefulness as a distinction.
This helps explain the peculiar phenomenon of liking something right up until too many other people like it. If pleasure were the only thing at stake, popularity should have very little effect. The song still sounds the same. The restaurant still serves the same food. The handbag still holds your wallet. But if part of the object’s value came from what recognizing it said about you, mass recognition can spoil the arrangement. The credential no longer proves very much once everybody has one.
Of course, this works in the opposite direction too. Some groups derive their distinction precisely from liking what everybody else considers ordinary, sentimental, unfashionable, ugly or hopelessly uncool. They are not necessarily less invested in social meaning. They may simply be using a different admissions policy.
That is why The House of Good Taste can accommodate so many contradictory rooms without collapsing. It does not require the minimalist and maximalist to reach an agreement. It does not need the traditionalist to appreciate the avant-garde dresser or the coffee obsessive to make peace with the person ordering a venti caramel something-or-other with enough additions to qualify as lunch. The disagreement can actually strengthen the architecture because every room becomes more legible in contrast with the others.
You know who you are partly because you know what you would never choose.
And once taste begins doing that much identity work, the chair is no longer just a chair, the outfit is no longer just an outfit, and the cream in somebody else’s coffee has somehow become your business.
At that point, we are no longer talking about taste.
We are talking about membership.
Taste Makes a Wonderful Identity
There is an enormous difference between liking black coffee and becoming a Black Coffee Person.
The first is a preference. You pour coffee into a cup, leave the cream in the refrigerator, and get on with your life. The second has possibilities. Now the coffee can participate in a larger story about who you are. Perhaps you appreciate simplicity. Perhaps you have a sophisticated palate. Perhaps you care about quality. Perhaps you are not one of those people disguising mediocre coffee beneath six pumps of vanilla and a cloud of whipped cream. A small decision made at breakfast has somehow acquired a supporting role in the production of You.
This happens everywhere because identity is extraordinarily good at recruiting ordinary preferences into its service. You can like vintage furniture, or you can become a vintage person. You can enjoy clothes, or you can become someone with fashion literacy. You can read books, or you can become a reader, which may eventually require having opinions about what other people are reading and whether listening to the audiobook counts. You can enjoy wine, gardening, perfume, jazz, architecture, independent films, antiques, contemporary art, obscure restaurants, old cars, handmade pottery, or expensive olive oil.
Given enough enthusiasm and the correct social environment, nearly anything can be promoted from something you enjoy to evidence of what kind of person you are.
There is nothing inherently sinister about this. Humans organize themselves through identity constantly, and shared interests are one of the easiest ways to find other people with whom we have something in common. The problem begins when the preference is no longer merely included in the identity, but enlisted to prove it.
Now the objects around you have jobs.
The books on the shelf do not merely need to interest you. They can demonstrate what kind of mind lives in the house. The clothes do not merely need to delight you. They can establish that you understand proportion, references, designers, subcultures, or whatever else your particular room in The House of Good Taste values. Your furniture can demonstrate discernment. Your restaurant choices can demonstrate knowledge. Your vacation can demonstrate that you know where to go before the wrong people discover it. Even the apparently casual objects can become curiously articulate. A lamp may have considerably more to say about you than any lamp should reasonably be expected to say.
Once preferences become evidence of identity, other people’s preferences begin acquiring a significance they did not previously possess.
This is where things get wonderfully ridiculous, because another person’s coffee should present no meaningful threat to yours.
Suppose you have spent years learning about coffee. You know the regions, processing methods, roast profiles and extraction variables. You have developed a palate capable of noticing distinctions another person genuinely cannot taste. That knowledge is real. Then somebody sits beside you, orders an excellent coffee and pours cream into it.
Nothing has happened to your cup.
Your knowledge remains intact. Your palate has not deteriorated. Your coffee has not been contaminated by proximity. The other person has not broken into your house at three in the morning and replaced your grinder with a jar of instant Folgers. They have put cream into a beverage they purchased for themselves.
Yet if coffee has become part of identity, their choice can begin to look less like a preference and more like a mistake. They do not appreciate what they have. They cannot taste the difference. They do not understand the point. They should have ordered something else.
Which raises a much more interesting question than whether cream belongs in good coffee: Why does your preference need their mistake?
The same question can be asked all over The House of Good Taste. Why does loving the vintage chair require somebody else’s mass-produced chair to be inferior? Why does understanding fashion require another person’s outfit to demonstrate that they do not? Why does appreciating difficult literature become more satisfying when someone else’s beach read can be dismissed as intellectually vacant? Why does having an eye for design so frequently produce the urge to diagnose what is wrong with houses in which you do not live?
Because distinction is extremely useful to identity.
It is difficult to establish I am someone who knows without eventually encountering someone who does not know. The contrast gives the identity definition. I recognize what you missed. I understand why this matters. I can see the difference. I know why that version is better. I know why this object is worth the money. I know why your choice reveals that you are unfamiliar with the subject.
The knowledge itself may be completely legitimate. The interesting move occurs when possessing the knowledge becomes socially meaningful because somebody else does not possess it.
This is one of the reasons taste can become so judgmental while continuing to describe itself as personal. If taste were purely personal, another person’s terrible lamp would be an exceptionally boring event. You would see it, think it was hideous, and continue toward the snacks. The lamp becomes much more useful once it can tell you something about the person who selected it. Now it can indicate that they are basic, pretentious, unsophisticated, unimaginative, trying too hard, hopelessly conventional, trend-obsessed, cheap, flashy, provincial, elitist, or whatever offense is recognized by your particular faction of the House.
Notice how quickly we have stopped discussing the lamp.
This is where good taste can become a form of social position. Knowing the right things provides distinction, and distinction requires a field against which it can be perceived. There must be people who get the reference and people who do not. People who know and people who merely think they know. People who can recognize quality and people who are impressed by the wrong things. People whose approval matters and people whose approval might actually damage the value of the choice.
This also explains why some identities become more protective as the underlying preference becomes more obscure. If very few people know the designer, recognize the vintage, understand the wine, read the author, visit the neighborhood, or appreciate the artist, recognition carries more information. Finding another person who knows can feel like discovering a fellow citizen abroad. You have both passed a test nobody officially administered.
Then the thing becomes popular.
Suddenly everyone knows.
This should be excellent news if the pleasure was entirely located in the thing itself. More people have discovered something wonderful. Unfortunately, popularity can create an identity emergency. The restaurant is ruined. The neighborhood is over. The band sold out. The designer is everywhere. The formerly obscure perfume now appears in videos titled Five Fragrances You Need This Fall, which is apparently grounds for mourning.
The object may not have changed at all. Its usefulness as a social coordinate has.
That is the peculiar bargain identity makes with preference. The more a choice helps establish who you are, the harder it becomes to let the choice simply belong to you. Other people’s choices become relevant because identity requires contrast, recognition and boundaries. What began as pleasure becomes classification, and classification inevitably produces questions about who belongs on which side of the line.
The House of Good Taste is very happy to assist with this. It has rooms for nearly everyone, including people who pride themselves on refusing membership in rooms. You can locate yourself through what you love, what you hate, what you understand, what you would never buy, and what you cannot believe anyone still thinks looks good.
You may even become so skilled at distinguishing yourself from everyone else’s terrible choices that you forget the original activity was supposed to be liking things.
And that would be a shame, because the coffee is getting cold.
A Few Rules for People Who Don’t Follow Rules
Eventually, someone becomes suspicious of all this.
They notice that fashion keeps announcing new rules and then pretending the previous rules never happened. They notice that every supposedly timeless interior eventually acquires a date. They notice that beauty standards change just quickly enough to ensure the human face remains an unfinished project. They notice that the people telling everyone to develop personal style are often standing in remarkably similar outfits. At some point, the obvious solution presents itself: stop following the rules.
This is an excellent idea, and The House of Good Taste has an entire department dedicated to helping you do it correctly.
You can reject trends, develop personal style, embrace imperfection, mix periods, clash patterns, wear the unexpected thing, decorate intuitively, ignore conventional beauty standards, buy what you love, and stop caring what anyone thinks. There are books about this. There are experts who can teach you. There are Pinterest boards full of examples. There are Instagram accounts devoted to showing you what it looks like when a person stops following Instagram aesthetics.
Naturally, there are rules.
Consider eclectic interiors. In theory, eclectic means you can mix things from different styles, periods, origins, and aesthetic traditions according to whatever delights you. In practice, there is a rather precise visual difference between an eclectic room and a room containing a bunch of shit that does not go together. The first is layered, collected, personal and unexpected. The second needs editing. Exactly who determines when an unexpected combination becomes an unfortunate combination remains one of the great mysteries of the decorative arts, but rest assured, somebody can tell.
Maximalism has the same problem. You might assume that a philosophy organized around abundance would offer considerable freedom, but you cannot simply fill the room with whatever you want. That would be clutter. Maximalism requires intention. Colors must converse. Patterns must play together. Objects should tell a story. Collections should feel curated rather than accumulated, which means your forty-seven weird objects are acceptable provided they look as though you acquired them during a fascinating life rather than at HomeGoods last Saturday.
Even ugly has standards now.
There is ugly that demonstrates you do not know any better, and there is ugly that demonstrates you know so much better that you have transcended the need for beauty. These are not the same ugly. One is unfortunate. The other is interesting. The ability to distinguish between them is, conveniently, another form of taste.
Fashion performs this trick beautifully. Once dressing correctly begins to feel oppressive, you can enter the liberating world of dressing incorrectly, where you will discover sophisticated forms of wrongness. Proportions can be awkward, provided they are the right kind of awkward. Shoes can be hideous, provided their hideousness is legible as intentional. Clothes can be oversized, mismatched, distressed, deconstructed, childish, severe, shapeless, impractical, or aggressively unflattering, but there remains an invisible line between someone who has deliberately rejected conventional attractiveness and someone everyone assumes simply got dressed badly.
Apparently freedom also has a dress code.
The same thing happens when people reject trends. “I don’t follow trends” sounds like the end of external reference until trend rejection develops its own aesthetic vocabulary. Now you buy timeless pieces. You invest in quality. You avoid microtrends. You cultivate a wardrobe that transcends seasons. Perhaps you buy vintage because you refuse to participate in disposable fashion. All perfectly reasonable choices, right up until not following trends becomes another recognizable type of person with predictable clothes, preferred brands, approved materials, favored references, and strong opinions about people who have not yet realized polyester is destroying civilization.
Rebellion is particularly susceptible to this because opposition feels so much like freedom.
If the rule says wear this, wearing the opposite feels independent. If everyone is decorating in beige, painting the room oxblood feels radical. If everybody wants polished perfection, visible wear becomes desirable. If mainstream beauty prizes symmetry, conventional attractiveness, and refinement, another group may elevate strangeness, severity, asymmetry, age, artificiality, or deliberate ugliness instead.
The content has changed dramatically. The relationship to the original coordinate may not have changed at all.
You are still looking at the rule.
You are simply facing the other direction.
This distinction matters because opposition and departure are not the same thing. Opposition requires the thing it opposes in order to know where to stand. If conventional taste says yes and your identity depends upon saying no, conventional taste still has a vote. It may even have the first vote. You need to know what everyone else is doing before you can make sure you are not doing it.
This is why rule-breaking cultures can become every bit as rigid as the cultures they reject. Once a group organizes around being unconventional, unconventionality itself acquires conventions. People learn the references. They learn the acceptable violations. They learn which mainstream things can be enjoyed ironically, which can be reclaimed, which remain unforgivably basic, and which have recently become cool precisely because they were considered deeply uncool fifteen years ago.
Nothing says freedom from social judgment quite like waiting until the social conditions are correct to admit that you like something.
Eventually even not caring what anyone thinks can become a performance requiring an audience.
You can become the person who does not seek approval. You can dress in ways designed to communicate that you do not seek approval. You can surround yourself with objects demonstrating that you do not follow conventional taste. You can cultivate an entire identity around refusing to participate in the standards everyone else follows, then find your people and receive recognition for refusing them correctly.
The House is delighted.
It does not particularly care whether you choose the beige room or paint the ceiling purple. It does not care whether you buy the fashionable shoe or devote yourself to finding the shoe fashionable people would never wear. It does not require everyone inside to obey the same rules because disagreement between the rooms makes the House look enormous.
What matters is that the coordinate remains intact.
This is the trap hidden inside so much rule-breaking. If your choices remain organized around what you are rejecting, the rejected authority has not necessarily lost its authority. It may simply have changed jobs. Instead of telling you what to choose, it now tells you what not to choose. Either way, it remains involved in the decision.
This does not mean the person wearing the bizarre shoe secretly wants mainstream approval, or that the maximalist is secretly a minimalist, or that every rejection of convention is counterfeit. It means that doing the opposite of a rule tells us very little about whether the rule has stopped governing the field.
That requires a different question.
If nobody were standing on the other side of this choice, would you still make it?
The answer may be yes. Excellent. You may genuinely love the purple ceiling, the aggressively ugly shoes, the sentimental novel, the weird lamp, the enormous floral sofa, the black lipstick, the cream in your coffee, or the outfit every available style guide insists has done unspeakable things to your proportions.
But if the answer depends upon what the choice proves, rejects, signals, disrupts, distinguishes, or communicates about you, then we have wandered back into familiar territory.
You may have broken every rule in one room of The House of Good Taste. That does not necessarily mean you left the House.
The Libra Egregore
By now, it would be easy to conclude that all of this is simply about approval. We care too much about what other people think, we should stop seeking validation, wear whatever we want, decorate however we please, and perhaps finally order the embarrassing dessert without checking whether anyone else at the table is doing it.
Unfortunately, Libra is more sophisticated than that.
The Libra egregore does not require you to want everybody to like you. It does not even require you to be particularly likable. You can be difficult, provocative, eccentric, confrontational, badly dressed by conventional standards, and openly delighted when respectable people find you appalling. None of this necessarily places you outside its architecture.
Because the deeper mechanism is not approval.
It is reference.
Reference requires another point against which something can be established. Beautiful compared with what? Appropriate according to whom? Sophisticated within which social environment? Tacky to which group? Interesting to which audience? Correct by which standard? Even the language of taste is crowded with invisible relationships. Something is too much, not enough, outdated, ahead of its time, conventional, daring, refined, vulgar, flattering, inappropriate, elevated, basic. Each judgment quietly assumes a field in which the thing can be located.
This is where Libra becomes considerably more interesting than the familiar caricature of someone desperately hoping everyone approves of them. Approval does not have to mean universal acceptance. In many environments, universal acceptance would ruin the entire arrangement.
The avant-garde dresser may have no desire whatsoever to be admired by the mainstream. In fact, mainstream confusion may be deeply satisfying. If everyone at the office suddenly understands the outfit, something has gone terribly wrong. The obscure music obsessive does not need millions of people to appreciate the band. The design obsessive may actively dislike the object once it becomes ubiquitous. The person eating at the tiny restaurant nobody knows about may not be thrilled when it becomes impossible to get a table because somebody put it on a list.
These people are not necessarily free from approval. They may simply have become much more selective about whose approval counts.
The desired response is no longer everyone likes this. It becomes the people who know, know.
That is a much more sophisticated social currency because disapproval can now perform useful work. If the wrong people hate your clothes, their disapproval can confirm that you are dressing correctly. If the wrong people think the artwork is ugly, perhaps they simply do not understand it. If your parents hate the music, your coworkers think the shoes are ridiculous, and half the internet cannot understand why anyone would pay that much for a chair, the rejection may strengthen rather than weaken the identity attached to the choice.
Libra can use the negative vote too.
This is why rebellion does not automatically dismantle the architecture of approval. A rebel can be every bit as socially calibrated as a conformist. The conformist looks toward the group and asks what will place them inside it. The rebel can look toward exactly the same group and ask what will place them outside it. Their choices may be opposites, but both positions can remain organized around the same reference point.
One says, I would wear this because people like us wear this.
The other says, I would never wear this because people like them wear this.
Either way, the other people remain remarkably involved in getting dressed.
This is also why cliques matter so much to the Libra egregore. Once taste becomes a form of membership, approval becomes increasingly precise. You do not need to impress everyone at the party. You need the one person whose judgment establishes that you know what you are doing. You do not need every visitor to understand the strange object on your shelf. You need the right visitor to recognize it without being told. You do not need everybody to appreciate your obscure reference. Its value may depend partly on the fact that most people cannot.
Recognition becomes a kind of handshake.
And once recognition becomes valuable, distinction becomes valuable with it. There must be people who recognize and people who do not, people who understand and people who miss the point, people whose approval confirms the choice and people whose approval might make you reconsider it. The social field can become extraordinarily elaborate while everyone involved continues insisting that taste is merely personal.
This is the architecture Libra preserves.
It calibrates the self through relationship to an external point. The point itself can change endlessly. One decade says thin eyebrows, another says thick. One room says restraint, another says abundance. One clique considers polish sophisticated while another considers polish evidence that you are trying too hard. The standard can reverse completely without disturbing the underlying mechanism because the mechanism was never dependent upon any particular standard.
It depends upon reference.
That is why According to what? becomes such a dangerous question inside The House of Good Taste.
The room looks unfinished. According to what?
The outfit is unflattering. According to whom?
The restaurant is touristy. In relation to which social group?
The chair is tacky. Under which aesthetic standard?
The coffee has been ruined. By whose definition of what coffee is supposed to provide?
The question does not automatically invalidate the judgment. The room may still look unfinished to you after you investigate it. You may still hate the chair. Expertise may reveal technical differences that are perfectly real. The purpose of the question is not to make every judgment meaningless. It is to restore the missing reference.
Because reference becomes most powerful when it disappears.
Once the external coordinate has been internalized, you no longer experience yourself as calibrating against anything. You simply experience yourself as knowing. The judgment feels immediate, personal, obvious. The social architecture that helped produce it becomes invisible precisely because it has become so familiar.
And this is why the Libra egregore can survive rebellion, individuality, eccentricity, anti-fashion, anti-trends, and entire identities constructed around not giving a fuck what anybody thinks. It does not need you to obey the prevailing standard. It only needs the standard to remain a meaningful coordinate in establishing your position.
You can comply with it.
You can reject it.
You can invert it.
You can mock it.
ou can build an identity around being everything it is not.
The content can change completely while the relationship remains intact.
And once that becomes visible, the question is no longer whether you have good taste, bad taste, conventional taste, unusual taste, sophisticated taste, or taste so advanced that nobody else has caught up yet.
The question is whether you are authoring the choice or locating yourself through reference.
Because the Libra egregore does not particularly care which answer you choose. As long as you keep checking the coordinates.
Amenta Has Plenty of Squares Available
This is where our discussion of rugs, coffee, ugly shoes, and bizarre lamps becomes considerably less frivolous.
Amenta does not require everyone to agree. In fact, a system with only one acceptable position would be painfully easy to recognize. If there were one approved way to dress, one approved kind of house, one approved definition of beauty, one approved lifestyle, and one approved identity, the architecture would be sitting there in plain sight wearing a little badge that said HELLO, I AM THE ARCHITECTURE.
Amenta is much more sophisticated than that.
It offers options.
The Mimic Grid can accommodate the minimalist and the maximalist. It has plenty of room for the conformist and the rebel, the traditionalist and the iconoclast, the tastemaker and the person who considers tastemakers insufferable. You can follow every trend, reject every trend, rediscover an old trend, ironically participate in a trend, or insist that what you are doing is not a trend despite the unfortunate presence of four million other people currently doing it.
There is a square for you.
This is one of the reasons movement inside Amenta can be mistaken for departure from it. The squares can look radically different from one another. Moving from one to another can involve changing your clothes, your house, your social circle, your vocabulary, your heroes, your enemies, your reading list, your restaurants, your politics of consumption, your ideas about beauty, and possibly every object visible from the front door.
That feels like an enormous change because materially, it is.
But the question is not whether the square looks different. The question is whether the organizing architecture changed with it.
If your choices are still being made through reference, through what the choice means in relation to a standard, a group, an authority, an identity, an opposition, or a social coordinate, then you may have changed your position without changing the system through which position is established.
This is the Mimic Grid operating through taste.
It can offer an extraordinary number of apparently contradictory identities because contradiction does not threaten the Grid. The minimalist needs the maximalist in order for minimalism to mean something. The avant-garde needs convention in order to remain avant-garde. The person who rejects trends needs trends to reject. The person with exquisite taste requires the existence of people with terrible taste, preferably within viewing distance, so the distinction can remain pleasantly apparent.
The positions oppose one another while quietly sharing the same architecture of reference.
This is why Amenta does not care which square wins.
Perhaps you once lived in a beige house because you had learned that neutral interiors were sophisticated. Then you became suspicious of the whole thing. You realized every house on your feed looked like an unusually luxurious bowl of oatmeal. You wanted color. Personality. Weirdness. Objects with stories. You threw away the beige sofa, painted the room oxblood, bought the bizarre Italian lamp, covered a chair in a fabric that would cause three interior designers to require immediate medical attention, and announced that you were finally decorating for yourself.
Wonderful.
The House of Good Taste would like to direct you to its Eclectic Individuality Department, where you will find several thousand people doing something remarkably similar.
Perhaps fashion was your escape route. You abandoned “quiet luxury” after noticing that an aesthetic supposedly organized around discreet individuality had somehow produced an army of people wearing nearly identical camel coats. You stopped following trends. You bought vintage. You developed personal style. You learned to appreciate unusual proportions and obscure designers. You acquired a pair of shoes so aggressively unattractive that your mother asked whether something had happened to you.
Fantastic.
The Grid has updated your coordinates.
Or perhaps coffee will finally get you out.
You no longer drink the corporate stuff. You buy beans from a tiny roaster whose website requires you to understand several agricultural processes before placing an order. You grind them by hand and drink the resulting coffee from a handmade ceramic vessel produced by a one-eyed potter living somewhere inaccessible by paved road.
Congratulations.
Which square would you like next?
The joke works because the objects themselves are irrelevant to Amenta. Beige is not Amenta. Maximalism is not Amenti. Black coffee is not more authored than a caramel latte. Vintage clothing does not possess an inherent liberation frequency. There is no sofa capable of carrying you across the Abyss, although I am certain someone on Instagram could sell you one.
What matters is the architecture organizing your relationship to the choice.
This is also why changing identities can produce such a convincing sensation of liberation. You really did leave something behind. You stopped obeying one authority. You rejected one set of expectations. You discovered preferences you had previously suppressed. You found people who understood you differently. Those changes can be meaningful without necessarily constituting departure from the larger system.
Amenta is perfectly capable of allowing movement. What it preserves is the architecture through which movement occurs.
You can therefore spend years refining your position on the board while believing that each refinement brings you closer to freedom. You can become more discerning, more unconventional, more sophisticated, more rebellious, more niche, more authentic, more impossible to categorize. You can reject yesterday’s standards and acquire tomorrow’s standards. You can leave one clique because its rules became unbearable and enter another clique whose rules feel like freedom because you agree with them.
The costume changes. The reference point remains.
And this is precisely why the Mimic Grid is difficult to recognize from inside it. If every square looked identical, nobody would mistake movement for escape. Instead, the Grid offers enough variation that crossing from one square to another can feel like entering another world.
The new square may even be considerably nicer.
It may suit you better. You may genuinely prefer the people there. The clothes may finally feel like you. The coffee may be excellent. The bizarre Italian lamp may make you happy every single time you turn it on. None of that is being disputed.
The question is whether you are choosing from authorship or locating yourself through reference.
That distinction is easy to lose when the new square feels better than the old one. Comfort can look like freedom. Recognition can look like authorship. Opposition can look like departure. A more compatible identity can look like the end of identity altogether.
Meanwhile, Amenta remains entirely unbothered.
You can spend an extraordinary amount of time moving around its board, redecorating your square, renaming your square, rebelling against your previous square, discovering a much more interesting square, and explaining why the people still occupying your former square simply have not figured it out yet.
You can call every move liberation.
But at least your house looks Pinterest-worthy.
The Terrifying Possibility of Simply Liking Something
After spending this much time inside The House of Good Taste, there is an obvious temptation to escape by constructing a new philosophy of taste. We could discover our authentic preferences, eliminate external influence, reject social conditioning, stop consulting experts, and develop an aesthetic so entirely our own that nobody could possibly accuse us of having acquired it from Pinterest.
This would be an excellent way to build another room in the House.
Soon there would be people with authentic taste and people whose taste was still conditioned. We would learn how to identify the difference. There would be exercises for recovering your true aesthetic, experts who could help you locate it, and social media accounts showing you what an authentically self-authored home looks like. Before long, everyone committed to escaping aesthetic conformity would own the same strange lamp.
There is no need to make authorship this complicated.
You do not need to stop being influenced. You do not need to forget everything you learned about design, fashion, food, art, beauty, or coffee. You do not need to distrust expertise or deliberately choose the thing an expert dislikes as proof that you are thinking for yourself. You do not need to discover some pristine preference buried beneath civilization that existed before anyone showed you a magazine.
You only need to become capable of recognizing reference when it appears.
This is where a very small question becomes surprisingly useful. The next time something immediately strikes you as tacky, dated, wrong, basic, pretentious, unsophisticated, unflattering, badly designed, too much, not enough, or simply something you would never choose, ask:
According to what?
Not Is this judgment allowed? Not Am I being influenced? Not What would a truly sovereign person think about this backsplash? The question is not another tribunal. It is an attempt to restore information that disappeared when the judgment became automatic.
Perhaps there is a technical answer. The type is difficult to read. The chair is poorly constructed. The garment restricts movement. The lighting makes the room difficult to use. The coffee has been extracted badly enough to make even the Black Coffee Person reconsider his entire personality. Expertise can reveal problems that have nothing to do with social approval.
Perhaps there is a learned aesthetic principle behind the judgment. You understand composition, proportion, materials, color, construction, or historical context differently because you have studied them. That does not make the judgment illegitimate. Learning changes perception. Once you know something, you cannot conveniently unknow it every time you want to prove that your taste belongs entirely to you.
But perhaps the answer is social.
Perhaps you think the restaurant is embarrassing because people whose judgment matters to you would consider it touristy. Perhaps the handbag suddenly looks cheap because you learned which details signify expensive. Perhaps the room looks dated because you have seen enough current interiors to recognize that its visual language belongs to another moment. Perhaps you genuinely dislike the object, but your dislike has also become useful evidence that you belong to a particular group of people who know not to like it.
Or perhaps you simply hate the fucking lamp.
Fine.
Recognition does not require every preference to undergo a forensic investigation. You are allowed to dislike things without convening a tribunal to determine whether your disgust originated from an appropriately authored source. Turning every aesthetic response into a six-part inquiry would merely replace unconscious reference with exhausting self-surveillance, which sounds suspiciously like something The House of Good Taste would enjoy.
The point is not to interrogate yourself until you can certify a preference as pure. There is probably no such thing. The point is to notice when a judgment has arrived carrying more authority than you remember giving it.
That is especially useful when the judgment begins changing your behavior. You loved the chair until you learned it was dated. You felt fantastic in the outfit until you wondered whether it was flattering. You enjoyed the restaurant until somebody whose taste you respect called it touristy. You wanted the weird lamp until you became concerned that it might be weird in the wrong way. Those moments are worth noticing because they reveal the instant when pleasure encounters a coordinate.
Then you can look at what actually entered the room.
Was it useful information? Was it expertise? Was it a convention you happen to agree with? Was it anticipated approval? Was it fear of looking ignorant? Was it membership? Was it distinction? Was it an identity you have become accustomed to maintaining? Was it an old rule whose source disappeared years ago? Or did someone simply offer an opinion that your mind immediately promoted to evidence?
You do not need the correct answer before proceeding. Recognition itself changes the arrangement because the reference is visible again.
That is the function of According to what?
It puts the missing citation back into the judgment.
Instead of this is tacky, you may discover this violates the aesthetic standards of a particular design culture I have spent years looking at. Instead of this is unflattering, you may discover this does not produce the body proportions I learned clothing is supposed to produce. Instead of this person has terrible taste, you may discover this person is choosing according to criteria that carry absolutely no status inside the group whose judgment I recognize.
You may still agree with the original judgment. That is important. Recognition does not require reversal.
You do not have to buy the tacky chair because you discovered that your dislike has social origins. You do not have to pour cream into your coffee as an act of resistance. You do not have to wear an unflattering dress, hang the artwork too high, order the unfashionable wine, or decorate your house like a yard sale simply to demonstrate that Libra no longer controls you. Doing the opposite for the sake of opposition would return us to exactly the problem we just spent several thousand words examining.
The possibility is much less dramatic.
You can know the rule and choose with it. You can know the rule and choose against it. You can learn something new and change your mind. You can receive approval and enjoy it. You can receive disapproval and decide it contains useful information. You can admire someone else’s taste without appointing them Commissioner of Yours.
What changes is that the reference no longer gets to hide.
And perhaps this is why simply liking something can feel almost terrifying after enough time inside The House of Good Taste. Without the usual coordinates, there may be nothing impressive to say about the choice. The chair does not prove that you are interesting. The dress does not establish your individuality. The restaurant does not demonstrate your discernment. The coffee does not certify your expertise. The lamp does not need to communicate that you possess an unusually sophisticated relationship with ugliness.
You might simply like it.
There is very little identity available in that sentence.
Which may be precisely what makes it interesting.
No Rules Will Be Provided
After all of this, you may reasonably expect the practical portion of A Practical Guide to Liking Whatever You Want. We have identified the rules, investigated where they came from, watched them disappear into personal judgment, joined several cliques, turned coffee into a personality assessment, rebelled against the establishment, and discovered that Amenta has thoughtfully provided squares for people who hate the establishment too.
Surely there should now be instructions.
Perhaps five principles for sovereign taste. Seven questions to ask before buying a sofa. A helpful checklist for determining whether you genuinely like something or have merely been manipulated by Pinterest. There could be a quiz. You could calculate your Personal Authorship Score and discover that you are currently operating at 63 percent independent preference, with particular vulnerability around lighting fixtures and outerwear.
Unfortunately, that would put us right back where we started.
The moment I tell you what authored taste is supposed to look like, we have built another room in The House of Good Taste. It may have a different sign on the door. It may contain stranger furniture. Everyone inside may congratulate themselves on having escaped the other rooms. But sooner or later somebody will begin explaining the correct way to choose things without reference, and before you know it we will have standards for sovereignty.
There will be people who are better at not caring what anyone thinks.
There will be objects considered more expressive of authentic preference.
There will be approved methods for determining whether your desires are truly your own.
There will almost certainly be a podcast.
That is not authorship. It is the same architecture wearing a new outfit.
The point of this exhibition was never to produce better taste. Better according to what would immediately become the problem. Nor is the answer to cultivate deliberately worse taste, since choosing the ugly thing because the House considers it ugly still gives the House an astonishing amount of influence over your shopping. The goal is not even originality. Originality can become another exhausting social position in which every choice must prove that you are unlike everybody else, leaving you more preoccupied with everybody else than the conformist you were attempting to escape.
The useful distinction is much simpler. It is recognizing when reference has been mistaken for authorship.
That recognition does not require you to purge every influence from your life. You could not do it, and there would be little value in trying. Keep the things you learned. Learn more things. Develop expertise. Change your mind after somebody shows you something you had never considered. Let an architect teach you about buildings. Let a tailor teach you about clothes. Let the coffee obsessive explain extraction if you are interested, although you are under no legal obligation to surrender the cream.
The question is not whether another person influenced your judgment. The question is whether the reference has become an invisible authority.
You can notice the difference when the language changes. There is a different architecture inside I don’t like that chair and that chair is in bad taste. There is a different architecture inside I prefer these jeans and those jeans are wrong for your body. There is a different architecture inside I love this restaurant and people who know food would never eat there. One statement describes a relationship with something. The other quietly installs a standard and begins arranging people around it.
Once you can see that movement, you do not need another rule to correct it. You can simply see what is happening.
Perhaps the room really does look better with a larger rug. Perhaps you still think the shoes are hideous after they become fashionable. Perhaps you adore the wildly popular restaurant despite the fact that somebody with an impressive knowledge of regional cuisine considers it tourist garbage. Perhaps your favorite chair is dated, your kitchen cabinets are unfashionable, your handbag is trying too hard, and your outfit has violated several important principles of proportion.
Fine.
None of those verdicts require an emergency.
The chair can be ugly and remain in your house because you fucking love the chair. The outfit can be wrong and still be what you want to wear. The room can be dated without immediately becoming a renovation project. The restaurant can be touristy and serve the thing you have been thinking about since Tuesday. The coffee can be excellent and still receive a completely unreasonable quantity of cream.
You do not have to convert any of these choices into proof that you are a liberated person either. That would only give the identity department more paperwork. You do not need to become someone who proudly loves ugly chairs, rejects trends, ignores experts, breaks rules, or performs indifference to social approval. You can like the chair without making the chair testify on your behalf.
That may be the most irritatingly simple possibility left after an entire exhibition devoted to The Fine Art of Liking Things Correctly.
You encounter something. You like it. You might even learn that everyone with excellent taste thinks it is hideous. This is interesting information.
And then you can decide what, if anything, you would like to do with it.
No new House is required. No replacement identity needs to be issued. No square on the board needs to be selected simply because it sits opposite the one you just left. The reference can be visible without becoming the authority, which leaves authorship exactly where it belongs.
With you.
Apparently, this has been A Practical Guide to Liking Whatever You Want.
