✪ The Curator's Key Skill: a Strong Taste His Audience Can Trust - #71

Taste requires more than knowledge. If you can't explain why something is better, you don't have it yet. Here 5 practices I recommend to develop it in any field.

Where I First Learned About Taste

There was one thing that really struck me, every time when - as a kid - my mom Ghita would take me to buy some shirt, pants or a new pullover.

We’d both look at shelves and at the stuff hanging around. So I’d be looking around for things I thought were cool and would look great on me. She would let me try anything, but, invariably, like clockwork, after I have tried out a few items without me getting truly excited, she suggests one item I would have never considered.

“Try that one out for me, would you?” she’d say.

To me this part always felt very odd. How could she think that such an anonymous cut, such a flat colour or improbable design could be cool on me?

And then, BAM, what I couldn’t predict, regularly happened.

I tried what I have already slotted in my mind, as ugly, uncool, not my type of thing… and…

I couldn’t believe it…

it looked good on me!

I mean: I didn’t have to be convinced. I was 100% surprised. It was self-evident. The thing I had put on, was a winner.

But I would have never said so without trying it on.

How did she know?

Because she was good at this. Bloody good. And she was that good every single time. Each time I tried one of her recommendations… wow, they looked so good and up-with-the-times, that I wondered how in the world she really did that.

How was it possible that she could spot so easily stuff that would look so good on me but that not only I could not see, but which if I saw, I would have readily rejected?

How could she know my taste better than me?

And I must tell you, she was and she still is, at 95, that good.

A few years back, when I visited her in the small town of Rovato - north of Italy - where she lives, we went together for a little shopping like we used to do when I was a little kid. She really likes doing that. Shopping clothes with her first son.

Believe me, now like 60 years ago, she instantly knew what designs and cuts were trendy and cool, like she had a quad-core AI turbo GPU running in her head just for this. And she can still pick what would look good on me, out of hundreds of options.

I can’t.

And so, there you have it. This is what I’d define as strong, refined taste.

An ability to instantly recognize patterns, differences, while adjusting selection to context and need, and being consistently good at this over time.

Now, let me share with you a little detail, I held up till now, as I wanted the story to be humble and discrete and not some kind of personal show off.

My mom, in the 70’s and 80’s was a small fashion designer. She had a small physical showroom, did periodical small defilees and loved to design and put together original, elegant lady’s dresses. I even DJed for a few of her small private shows. She was not famous, nor rich or celebrated. But she created beautiful handmade women dresses that made some of her clients look like stars. She had a true passionate love for designing clothes and cultivating that skill for many years, gave her that unique confident taste, I was so impressed by.

Out for lunch with my mother Ghita. Rovato (BS). Italy. 2019.

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I write for experts, consultants, coaches and journalists, who want to become trusted guides, go-to persons in their field of work. I show them how to build authority and credibility through the mindful organization of existing resources and information.

To learn together how you can do this yourself, subscribe or get in touch.

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In this issue:

Everyone writes about why taste matters. Almost nobody explains how you actually build it in practice, especially if you are not working in a traditional aesthetic field.

When it comes to taste, you can find a bunch of wonderful articles to read on how critical and strategically important taste is.

But when it comes to explaining how you in fact develop, rather than perform such an ability, things start getting harder.

This is the type of thing you may likely find:

“Taste is discovery. Taste is editing. Taste is the long, private, often embarrassing process of figuring out what you actually like, as opposed to what you’ve been trained to approve of. It requires getting it wrong, a lot. Wearing something ugly. Loving the work of art all your friends hate. Sitting with a piece of music that makes no sense until, three years later, it suddenly does. Taste is accumulated through contact with the world, not through the production of moodboards.”

Source: Tom Garland - “Taste Test: Encrusting the Tortoise”

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And honestly, these are fine and good in communicating the appearance, the semblance and the feeling of taste, but they don’t really tell you how - in practice - you can become a connoisseur (someone with a refined taste for something) in your field of expertise.

This is the focus of this issue.

How to develop taste in practice, when you are not a fashion designer, art director, painter or professional musician. They already know how to do it.

What Is Taste? My Definition

Here’s how I would define taste.​​

Taste = Demonstrated Capacity for Consistent, High-Quality Contextual Judgment (evaluate alternative options) and the Ability To Articulate It

In other words taste is recognizable by these specific traits:

• strong capacity to choose intentionally in ways that do not conform with the average mass preference

• augmented ability to perceive / appreciate something

• keen eye (or ear) in perceiving subtle details and differences

• extraordinary sensitivity in seeing what can work, fit, in a certain scene.

Taste is not:

• personal preference

• originality

• novelty

• being different for the sake of being different

If what you are looking at, doesn’t have these characteristics, what you’re looking at it’s not taste: it’s opinion.

Four Things That Tell You Instantly That Someone Has Taste

How can I tell when a person is a true expert, a connoisseur, someone that truly knows a specific subject?

I look for these specific traits:

1. Ability To See Differences and Details Others Miss

Examples:

• noticing subtle variations in quality

• identifying weak elements inside something that appears good

• recognizing hidden strengths inside something overlooked

This comes from accumulated pattern recognition.

Experts develop this through what I have been referring to as crystallized intelligence: accumulated stored experience that makes it second-nature / intuitive the recognizing of what belongs and what doesn’t.

2. Ability To See What Is Relevant In a Specific Context

Someone with taste can answer:

• Does this work here?

• Does this work for this audience?

• Does this work at this moment?

This is why taste often looks contrarian. It optimizes for context, not popularity.

3. Ability To Choose Consistently

If someone consistently selects:

• highly relevant and instructive examples

• meaningful references

• complementary elements

his choices form a recognizable pattern.

This is exactly the mechanism I describe with the Bowerbird Method: when many similar elements are clustered, consistent judgment becomes visible through the coherence of the collection.

This is why taste becomes visible through curated sets.

4. Ability To Explain Choice Logic

Taste is not mystical intuition.

A person with taste can explain with precision:

• what they looked for

• what they rejected

• what pros and cons they considered

And this is what builds credibility: Making these criteria visible. Because people can inspect the reasoning behind each selection. They can put themselves in the shoes of the curator. This is why paradata matters.

Taste that is transparent about its process and criteria is perceived as expertise. Taste that cannot explain itself is nothing but opinion.

How To Develop and Refine Taste: Five Specific Practices That Work in Any Field

And here comes the critical point. How do you actually develop taste?

Here are my top personal recommendations emerging from my experience in DJing, video production and editing, design, tools discovery and review, information design, critical curation analysis.

If I’d ever met you in person and you would have asked me for simple and actionable advice on how to develop a strong, refined taste, here is what I would have advised you to do:

1) Get Constant Exposure To New Stuff

No exposure, no party. Unless you expose yourself to a lot of whatever you curate, your taste is going to remain raw, primitive, possibly a bit commercial (following popular trends and preferences).

2) Study the History and the Masters

Study the historical evolution of your field. Get to know who have been the masters and what they have produced. Study the ideas in it - who influenced who and how things came to be the way they are now.

3) Follow Other Curators, Critics and Reviewers

Watch closely how other experts in your sector evaluate things. What they pick, how they select, what they include and what they leave out. Study and absorb their best approaches their best skills. Interrogate yourself on how their work could be improved.

4) Do Critical Reviews

Review relevant information in your sector: books, articles, videos, podcasts, tools, reports, ideas and opinions from others. Explain why they are relevant to your audience, what are their strengths and weaknesses, why they deserve attention, what could be changed or improved and how.

5) Curate and Recreate

Create curated collections, newsradars, showcases, directories… Bring together resources from different authors and arrange them for a special purpose while highlighting their differences. Rebuild and imitate challenging collections, compilations and other curated artifacts while changing their subjects and perspective.

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Taste Development Formula

Exposure + Comparison + Reflection over time.

1. Exposure
   you need to see a lot of stuff, frequently, not passively, but actively and critically
   .

2. Comparison
   you need to collect lots of interesting things and compare similarities and differences between what you put aside. Good and bad.
   .

3. Reflection
   you need to think over what you pick and ask yourself questions about its relevance, integration, use. Writing about it makes it perfect.

In summary:

a) Taste grows when you repeatedly ask two questions:
Why is this so good? What is it that I like about it and why?
Where it is not up to par and why? Where and why does this fail?

b) Taste can be developed only through high-volume exposure.

In every field where taste matters…

• chefs taste hundreds of dishes

• editors review hundreds of cuts

• music producers listen to thousands of mixes

• curators analyze thousands of works

The brain becomes good at judgment only after repeated exposure to variation. Taste grows from volume of evaluated examples, not from reading, listening or simply consuming information.

As taste is the capacity to see differences, recognize patterns and choose what fits best - consistently, over time, then the only way to develop it is through repeated comparison and selection under constraints.

Where I Train My Taste

A curator never stops refining his/her taste.

That is true for a DJ, a sommelier or an art curator as much as for any other type of trusted advisor. Each systematically updates and refines his taste by visiting specific places, by engaging in specific activities and by reflecting and analyzing the critical, individual elements that make up their taste.

But there’s no universal set of steps, place or sequence to do it. Each one does this in different ways according to his habits, cultural traditions, personal preferences, field of interest, audience and goal/need/intent.

So, far from pretending to be directly applicable to other curators, here is a bit of where and how I train my own taste when it comes to my field of focus - building visibility, credibility and trust through curative editorial approach for experts, consultants, journalists.

I train my taste by:

1. Actively searching for people I don’t know, who write on subjects strictly connected to my focus (through Substack search, through news scouts like Yutori and Nbot).
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2. Providing context and/or interpretation (why is this relevant for my readers?) to anything I reference, restack or cite.
   .

3. Reading and analyzing great curators’ work and what critics say of them.
   .

4. Avoiding using AI to replace my personal crystallized intelligence, taste and intuition. Using AI to critically analyze my choices.
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5. Studying and analyzing as many curated artefacts - newsletters, publications, collections - as possible. Good and bad ones. Look what they do and notice what they do well and where they miss.

Why This Matters Specifically To Curators

Taste matters a lot to curators, because ability to judge builds trust.

If your older brother recommended every single movie he ever saw, you would stop listening to his recommendations after a while.

But if he only ever recommended films when he was 100% sure you would love it, and he was right most of the time, you would start trusting his word more than any algorithm or movie review site. That selective judgment, knowing when something is genuinely worth your attention and when it is not, is taste. And when someone has a lot of taste, you trust it.

Taste is the human antithesis to an algorithm. It is selection through refined human taste, not through invisible engagement-enhancing filters.

Over time, the consistency and quality of those selections is what turns a curator into a trusted guide because his choices over time become his credibility.

That’s why judgment -- built slowly through real experience and genuine curiosity -- is taste. It is your key characterizing trait. It is the reason people come to you instead of asking ChatGPT.

Paradata

I chose to write this article because I felt a personal need, curiosity and true interest for exploring deeper taste, beyond the poetic and surreal descriptions that always surround this term. Its topic was not suggested to me by AI, or chosen based on performance data from my past published content. It was an intuitive heartfelt choice.

AI usage: Only one section in this article was written by AI: “Four Things That Tell You Instantly That Someone Has Taste”. The rest was all originally written by me. Note that English is a second language to me. This is a departure from previous articles, where, under my scrutiny I allowed AI to clean up and express in better words, original ideas and concepts I had originally drafted. I did not do this time.

Process: Here is how I arrived at identifying the five practices to build and refine taste I have presented in this article.

First, I unilaterally decided that I would limit the recommended practices to max six. I could have opted for going the opposite way and list as many as possible, but then I thought it would be too difficult for the truly interested reader, to take something worth home.

That’s why I chose to consciously limit this analysis to six practices.

I set as criteria that the practices I would include had to be activities that I had indeed tried and that had worked for me. Not opinions, or hearsay. What has worked for me so far.

Then I started.

On one hand, I just jotted down with no external help, what I would have recommended to anyone who, out of the blue, would have asked me how to refine their taste. No preparation, no research, no studies. My gut intuition, plain and simple.

I took a physical piece of paper and I wrote down my recommendations. I got 7 down.

On the other I used again the wise winnowing method and assigned Claude.ai to identify 100 ideal practices to build and refine taste drawn specifically from the fields of music DJing, wine tasting and art gallery curation.

I chose these three fields because they are very different and thus they offer a greater variety of philosophies and approaches when it comes to taste refinement.

I then closely looked at all 100 practices that AI suggested, and discovered a great deal of taste-building activities I did not know of and would have never considered. I also did find three additional practices that I had not thought of in my basic 7, and that I could be added to my initial list.

From there I proceeded to further refine my list of 9, joining elements in it that were very similar or highly complementary, and getting to my final recommended five taste development practices.

Tools: Claude.AI free edition, Google Docs

Intent: Provide a less esoteric-artistic-poetic definition of taste. Something grounded, clearly definable and identifiable. What is really taste? What is it made up of? How do you make it better?

Time: Analysis and drafting of article: 2.5 hrs.. Wise winnowing of taste building practices: 1 hr. Manual article writing: 3 hrs. Editing and revisions: 3 hrs. AI check and review, fixes, adjustments, grammar checks: 30 mins. Cover image: 30 mins. Substack formatting and links: 3 hr.. Total time: apx. 12.5 hrs

How It Connects To the Rest

If this piece opened something up for you, these two other issues will help you complete the picture around taste.
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✪ The Non-Writer's Authority System: Stop Writing, Start Curating - #62

In issue #62 I introduced seven curated content formats that any expert can use to build authority without being a writer. What it assumed, but never fully addressed, is that all seven formats only work if the person using them has genuine taste. A tools directory built by someone with poor judgment is just a list. A newsradar run by someone who can’t distinguish signal from noise is just noise with a newsletter wrapper. Taste is the invisible engine that makes all those formats actually deliver credibility. This article is, in many ways, the missing prerequisite for that one.

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✪ The Rise of Trusted Personal Human Filters - #59

In issue #59 I introduced the concept of crystallized intelligence as the core asset of anyone who wants to become a trusted guide. What I didn't say there, but which this article now makes explicit, is that crystallized intelligence and taste are basically the same thing seen from different angles. Crystallized intelligence is the accumulated stored experience. Taste is what you do with it when you have to make a selection. If you want to understand why taste is not just an aesthetic luxury but a strategic professional asset that nobody can take from you or replicate with AI, start from there.

Get the Full Story on Taste

To get the full panorama on Taste you could read for days. To start, here is what I have recently read on the topic and which I think gives a more complete picture of what taste is - and how to develop it - from different viewpoints.

Taste as Inner Compass

• The Art of Personal Taste
  by Holly Meredith Bossung
  Personal taste is about what truly feels right to you, not trends, and learning to recognize what you love versus what you just admire.
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• You Don’t Have Taste
  by Gabrielle Dubois Meloff
  Personal taste develops through recognizing your own internal resonance rather than imitating others, and the practice requires slowing down to notice what genuinely moves you before rationalization drowns out instinct.
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• The Power of Knowing What You Like
  by sydney rheeder 𖣠
  Knowing what you like builds self-trust and identity, helping you make better choices instead of following trends or copying what others think is good.

How Taste Grows

• How To Have Good Taste
  by Henry Oliver
  Good taste comes from curiosity and learning widely, by exploring many things, listening to others, and slowly building knowledge over time.
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• Taste Is a Skill
  by Hayes Carrera
  Explains that taste is a learnable skill built through exposure, practice, and care, helping you recognize what is good and guide better creative choices.
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• What Is Taste and How Do You Get It?
  by Sophie Lou Wilson
  Taste shapes how you see the world, and you build it by actively खोजing things you love, not just consuming what algorithms show you.
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• Learning How To Explain Why You Like What You Like
  by ayushi thakkar
  Real taste grows when you can explain why you like something, by noticing details, patterns, and your own reasons instead of just saying “I like it.”

Why Taste Matters Right Now

• Taste Is The New Intelligence
  by stepfanie tyler (paid - worth the price)
  In a world flooded with content, real intelligence is not knowing more, but choosing wisely what deserves attention and what doesn’t.
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• Taste Test: Encrusting the Tortoise
  by Douglas Brundage
  Argues AI didn’t ruin creativity, it exposed weak taste; real taste means having your own strong point of view, not just copying trends.
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• Why Tech Bros Are Now Obsessed with Taste
  by Kyle Chayka
  “In the AI era, personal taste is the moat”—“moat” being entrepreneur lingo for an unreplicable advantage, the thing that makes your company stand out above its competitors. Startups apparently need taste like A.I. needs data centers.

Dissenting Voice

• Against Taste
  by Will Manidis
  Focusing only on “taste” turns people into passive choosers, instead of active creators who help build and shape things together.

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What I Can Do For You

If you are an expert, a consultant or professional coach, who is truly passionate and knowledgeable for your expertise / focus, and you want to become a recognized trusted guide in your field of work - without resorting to marketing tactics or persuasion techniques - I can be of help.

My expertise revolves around teaching people how create value, visibility and trust by curating existing information and resources, instead of creating more and more average content or AI slop.

Fill out the form behind the button below and let me understand better where you are directed.

Cover image: Teemu Arina, a dear long-time finnish friend (world expert on biohacking) challenging his taste in a top class tailor shop in Angra Do Heroismo, Azores (PT). March 2018. I lived on Terceira island from 2015 to 2020.

Follow a path with a heart.

From Koh Samui (TH)
Robin Good