Most of what passes for “content” these days is disposable. Made fast, optimized for whatever invisible math decides what people see today, and forgotten about five minutes later.
That never interested me much.
I’m Kennyatta, and what I care about are the stories that stick. The ones rooted in culture, in places, in the messy, contradictory reality of how people actually live, work, and make things.
“No matter where you go, you are what you are, player, and you can try to change, but that's just the top layer. Man, you was who you was 'fore you got here...”- Jay-Z, P.S.A. (Interlude)
Why Everyone in Tech Suddenly Cares About “Taste”
In certain corners of the internet—conference stages, venture capital podcasts, and Twitter tribal communes, a curious shift in vocabulary has taken place. The word of the moment is taste. Not to be confused withstorytelling, which was the word of the moment three months ago. It appears in sentences about artificial intelligence, about product design, and about the future of creative industries. Marc Andreessen’s orbit talks about it now. Kevin O’Leary wants to sport iced-out Pokémon cards on the red carpet to show how tasteful he is after his feature role in Marty Supreme. And the President of OpenAI released the tweet that launched a thousand debates, claiming “taste is the new core skill.”
Kind of right message, the worst messengers.
They are not entirely wrong. That’s why the conversation provoked visceral irritation in the creative industries.
For designers, editors, architects, photographers, creators, and creative directors, those of us who have spent decades arguing about proportion, restraint, intuition, and judgment, the sudden discovery of taste in Silicon Valley is like watching someone discover gravity. We’ve always understood that taste matters. Our careers are built around it. But there’s still something unsatisfying to me about the way both sides of the debate describe it.
The tech space treats taste as a selection process; the ability to recognize when something works, distinguish good output from mediocre ones, and choose the right direction from among many plausible ones.
That’s a very “assess from outside the club because I haven’t been in the club” kind of perspective.
Taste Isn’t an Input — It’s an Output
Being able to distinguish between two things with clarity and conviction is a real skill. It is becoming more valuable as our world clashes and new boundaries are being developed in real time.
But that’s not taste.
The creative industries, for our part, tend to describe taste as the result of exposure. Time spent around good work. Years spent in studios and galleries and editorial rooms where judgment is refined through proximity to excellence. From this perspective, taste accumulates slowly. It can be cultivated.
That explanation gets closer to the truth, but it still implies that taste is primarily an input or something that exists before action, which is still misleading.
Truth is, taste is not an input.
Taste is an output.
Taste is the evidence left behind.
And history proves this.
Picasso and the Myth of Perfect Taste
Look at Picasso in 1907, when he completed Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The painting now hangs in the Museum of Modern Art and is routinely described as one of the works that opened the door to Cubism. But when Picasso first showed it privately to friends, the reaction was bewilderment bordering on alarm, as portrayed in one of my favorite series, Genius in season 2. Matisse thought it grotesque. Georges Braque reportedly said it felt like someone had swallowed kerosene and spat fire. Even Picasso’s own dealer struggled to understand what he had made.
The painting fractured the human figure into angular planes while faces borrowed the geometry of African masks in ways European audiences had rarely seen.
None of this looked like good taste at the time.
And yet, Picasso committed to the work anyway, not because he possessed impeccable taste but because he had an instinct he could not yet justify. The coherence we now admire in Picasso’s career, his restless movement across Cubism, sculpture, ceramics, and printmaking, is simply the visible record of a man who kept following that instinct forward, often before it was widely accepted by critics or the audience.
The taste we attribute to Picasso today did not produce the work.
The work, compelled into existence by something intangible and ignorant of taste, is what produced the taste.
Style Icons Like Gianni Agnelli Didn’t Follow Rules
Gianni Agnelli, the Italian industrialist who led Fiat through decades of political upheaval, developed a reputation as one of the most elegantly dressed men in Europe. He’s risen in popularity today again as photographs of him circulate as a kind of shorthand for cultivated masculinity: impeccably cut Caraceni suits, narrow ties, the nonchalance of someone completely at ease in his clothes.
But Agnelli’s style was built on small acts of violation. He wore his watch over his shirt cuff, which would irritate the armchair fashion critics of today. He paired tailored suits with ski boots and would occasionally tuck his tie inside his shirt.
The gestures themselves were not elegant by Italian standards, but what made them compelling was the man inhabiting them. Agnelli had spent his life navigating industrial power struggles, public scrutiny, family tragedy, and the pressures of managing a national symbol of Italian industry. By the time the photographs that made him an icon were taken, his relationship to convention had already been altered by experience.
People have tried to copy the watch-over-the-cuff trick for decades, or live as he lived to channel his aura, and it hasn’t worked since.
Hip-Hop Proves Taste Comes After the Risk
Hip-Hop gives us the clearest evidence that taste is an aftereffect of taking action, and not some kind of advanced curation.
The South Bronx was not a place anyone would have predicted the emergence of a new global aesthetic vocabulary. The borough was economically devastated, and entire neighborhoods were effectively abandoned by the institutions that once sustained them.
What emerged from those conditions is still driving all facets of modern culture worldwide: DJ culture, sampling, streetwear, beauty aesthetics, and the linguistic innovations of rap. All of it reshaped fashion, music, and visual culture.
But none of it began with taste.
It began with necessity, with curiosity, and without the approval of the outside world.
People like Kurtis Blow made something where nothing existed before. They committed to sounds and styles that had no institutional approval because the existing institutions had nothing to offer them. The aesthetic vocabulary from Hip-Hop that continues to dominate the zeitgeist came later, once the work had accumulated enough momentum to be recognized.
By the time the world decided Hip-Hop possessed taste, the movement had already changed the world.
Taste was simply the record of the risk.
Courage, Not Taste, Drives Creative Breakthroughs
The tech space is starting to understand that something about the conditions of cultural production has changed. For most of the twentieth century, producing a convincing aesthetic surface required skill, labor, and time. Designing a chair, photographing a campaign, and illustrating an advertisement were expensive activities. The surface itself had value because it was difficult to produce. Today, the surface is nearly free.
An AI model can generate a plausible mid-century lamp in seconds. A campaign that resembles a European fashion editorial from fifteen years ago can be assembled with a few prompts and a subscription fee. The visual language of entire decades is now available on demand.
When the surface becomes cheap, it stops being “the thing” that matters.
What remains scarce, however, is the willingness to commit; the ability to choose a direction before consensus forms and invest in work that may not immediately justify itself.
To say no when yes would be easier.
That willingness is still not taste, though funny enough.
It’s courage.
“Taste is what accumulates if you keep exercising courage long enough.” - Kennyatta
Taste Is the Evidence That the Work Happened
Right now, there’s a seductive belief that taste can be assembled from the right ingredients, like the correct references, the correct tools, or the correct cultural feed.
But history proves that the wandering, that awkward period when instincts are unreliable, and the outcome is uncertain, is where the calibration occurs that will determine whether taste was produced or not.
Fortune, in the older sense of the word, still matters. Access to the right rooms changes what one sees and hears. Proximity to power can accelerate a career. Yet the cultures that have produced the most enduring aesthetic shifts rarely emerged from the most comfortable environments. They emerged from people who kept committing to work before that work had been validated.
In retrospect, these patterns of aesthetic judgement begin to resemble taste.
But the resemblance is misleading.
Taste is not the cause of the work.
Taste is the evidence that these individuals were courageous enough to do the work long before the approval or agreement of the masses came in.
It’s the receipt, not the purchase.
Let me know what you think taste is or whether you agree or disagree HERE. I’m always down for a good discussion.