Imagine walking into a room with fluorescent lighting and low ceilings, you can touch them without fully extending your arms. The walls are so close that you can’t extend them without grazing the stark white drywall, and the room is long and narrow, like a hallway you’ve forgotten was a room before you can tell what it’s for. Every corner is illuminated, there is nothing in the shadows, the light hums with the clear sound of chemical conductivity, unforgiving, flat and completely indifferent to the human body inside. If you don’t want to live in an A24 horror movie, your flight response may have been slightly activated by reading this.
That fluorescent room is the only place where anything approaching a universal aesthetic response actually exists: a hard-wired brain response based on our ancestors’ threat detection system. Above the neurological floor, the question of what good taste is is much more complex, more historically entangled, and, frankly, more interesting than most conversations about it admit.
So let me try to make this conversation more real.
The first thing worth saying (and I say this as someone trained as a postcolonial scholar in graduate school) is that what the Western design world has historically called “good taste” is not a natural standard that some people perceive delicately and others do not. It is largely a product of Western European aesthetic dominance, gradually institutionalized over the centuries into something resembling objective reality rather than the culturally specific preferences of people who dictate the terms of conversation. Traditions outside this framework were aesthetically inferior or co-opted into the dominant culture on its own terms, as dynamic historians and cultural theorists have extensively documented. Admitting this is not a radical move; it’s simply historically accurate, and failing to say it would cause many other claims about taste to collapse under scrutiny.
And yet pure relativism, that is, the position that all aesthetic preferences are equally valid expressions of cultural conditioning and that no meaningful judgment can be made about them, is insufficient. Aesthetic relativism cannot explain why my research into human instincts and aesthetic preferences produces those patterns, or the discomfort in a fluorescent room, or the unique physiological sensation of being in a deep, undeniably harmonious space. In those moments, something real happens, something not reducible to cultural conditioning, even as cultural conditioning shapes how we experience it.
Thus, taste is not one thing; It’s at least five things working at once, and if there’s anything I’ve learned as a researcher and author, it’s that few human things are simple.
The first layer is neurological and evolutionary: truly universal responses to the human perceptual architecture, regardless of cultural background, including the basic principles of visual coherence and spatial proportion, which begin to assess comfort or threat at the biological level. These are not Western standards; they are human. The second is instinctual drive, the area to which my research is most directly related: my IRB-approved study at the University of Oklahoma found that the three primary motivational imperatives (emotional instinct, oriented toward safety and material sustenance; communal instinct, oriented toward social belonging; and magnetic instinct, predicted experience) had a 77.6% concordance rate, while security-oriented participants matched in 98%. The third personality structure, esp openness to experiencea characteristic associated with the active search for specific aesthetic frames. The fourth is the immediate cultural environment: the family system, the aesthetic world of human upbringing and the attitude towards that world, whether it absorbed it, purified it or reacted against it; In any case, this is still a conversation with aesthetics. The fifth is the macrocultural hegemony, the dominant aesthetic ideology of the historical context, which shapes what is primarily defined and understandable (“good taste” is always someone else’s taste dressed as a universal taste, Bourdieu rightly said and Cerulean sweater scene. The Devil Wears Prada It remains the most effective popular illustration of the argument ever produced).
What unites all five layers is not a clear answer to whether taste is objective or subjective; this is evidence that the question itself is poorly worded. Taste is both, the relationship between dimensions is not hierarchical but dialectical, always contextual, always relational, always in conversation with who is designing and who or why is designing.
Beauty is not a standard that covers all five layers without devolving into universalism or relativism, it is too changeable and too culturally established to serve as a stable yardstick. This is consistency: the degree to which the visual environment accurately represents the internal logic of the individual or community to which it belongs. It cannot be used as a gimmick, as “good taste” has historically been used, but it is not arbitrary either; Most people can feel the difference between a space that is in harmony with their inner experience and a space that is not, even if they lack the vocabulary to say why.
The degree of self-adjustment is what I mean by taste, if I mean something specific by the word at all. Not a ranking of objects in a hierarchy of inheritance, but a sensitivity to both the self and the world being created, and an ongoing dialectical conversation between the two.
