Imagine you’re plopped into a room with fluorescent lighting and ceilings low enough that, without fully extending your arms, you can touch them. The walls are close enough that you cannot extend them without grazing stark white drywall, and the room runs long and narrow in that particular way that registers as wrong before you can say why, like a corridor that forgot it was supposed to become a room. Every corner is lit, nothing is in shadow, the light humming with the unmistakable sound of chemical conduction, unforgiving, flat, and completely indifferent to the human body inside it. Unless you want to live in an A24 horror movie, your flight response was likely slightly activated just reading about it.
That fluorescent room is the one place where something approaching a universal aesthetic response actually exists: a hardwired brain response rooted in our ancestral threat-detection system. Above that neurological floor, the question of what constitutes good taste becomes considerably more complicated, historically entangled, and frankly, more interesting than most conversations about it acknowledge.
So let me try to have that conversation more authentically.
The first thing worth saying (and I say this as someone trained as a postcolonial scholar in my graduate program) is that what the Western design world has historically called “good taste” is not a natural standard that certain people have the refinement to perceive and others don’t. It is, in substantial part, a product of Western European aesthetic dominance, gradually institutionalized across centuries into something that came to feel like objective truth rather than the culturally specific preference of the people who happened to control the terms of the conversation. Traditions that fell outside that framework were either positioned as aesthetically inferior or selectively absorbed into the dominant culture on its own terms, a dynamic historians and cultural theorists have documented extensively. Acknowledging this is not a radical act; it is simply historically accurate, and the failure to say it is what makes so many other claims about taste collapse under scrutiny.
And yet, pure relativism, the position that all aesthetic preferences are equally valid expressions of cultural conditioning and no meaningful judgment is possible across them, is also insufficient. Aesthetic relativism cannot account for why the research I conducted on human instinct and aesthetic preference yielded the patterns it did, or for the discomfort of the fluorescent room, or for the specific physiological sensation of being in a space that is deeply, unmistakably coherent. Something real happens in those moments, something not reducible to cultural conditioning, even if cultural conditioning shapes how we experience it.
So taste is not one thing; it is at minimum five things operating simultaneously, and if there is anything I have learned as a researcher and author, it is that few things relating to human beings are simple.
The first layer is neurological and evolutionary: responses genuinely universal to human perceptual architecture regardless of cultural background, including the basic principles of visual harmony and spatial proportion that trigger comfort or threat-assessment at a biological level. These are not Western standards; they are human ones. The second is instinctual drive, the territory my own research is most directly concerned with: my IRB-approved study at the University of Oklahoma found that three primary motivational imperatives (the Sensual instinct, oriented toward security and material nourishment; the Communal instinct, oriented toward social belonging; and the Magnetic instinct, oriented toward intensity of experience) predict aesthetic preference at a 77.6% concordance rate, with security-oriented participants matching at 98%. The third is personality structure, particularly openness to experience, the trait most associated with actively seeking aesthetic frameworks different from one’s own. The fourth is immediate cultural environment: the family system, the aesthetic world of one’s upbringing, and the relationship developed to that world, whether one absorbed it, refined it, or reacted against it; either way, it is still a conversation with the aesthetic one came from. The fifth is macro-cultural hegemony, the dominant aesthetic ideology of one’s historical context, which shapes what is legible as refined in the first place (Bourdieu was right that “good taste” is always someone else’s taste dressed up as universal taste, and the Cerulean sweater scene in The Devil Wears Prada remains the most efficient popular illustration of this argument ever produced).
What all five layers add up to is not a clean answer to whether taste is objective or subjective; it is an argument that the question itself is malformed. Taste is both, and the relationship between the dimensions is dialectical rather than hierarchical, always contextual, always relational, always in conversation with who is doing the designing and who or what they are designing for.
The standard that holds across all five layers without collapsing into either universalism or relativism is not beauty, which is too variable and too culturally embedded to serve as a stable criterion. It is coherence: the degree to which a visual environment accurately externalizes the inner logic of the person or community to which it belongs. It cannot be used as a bludgeon the way “good taste” has historically been used, but it is also not arbitrary; most people can feel the difference between a space coherent with their inner experience and one that isn’t, even when they lack the vocabulary to say why.
That level of attunement with the self is what I mean by taste, if I mean anything precise by the word at all. Not a ranking of objects according to an inherited hierarchy of refinement, but a sensitivity, both to oneself and to the world being made, and the ongoing dialectical conversation between the two.
