For many centuries, Western elites followed the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s clear and authoritative definition: taste was “the faculty of estimating the beautiful.” Someone with good taste could properly and virtuously identify beautiful things as beautiful things. And in those years, beauty was found in complex pieces of classical music, venerated artworks in museums, and the intricate craftwork of skilled artisans. A person with bad taste, on the other hand, found allure in the vulgar, ersatz, and wretched. Bad taste, thought Voltaire, was a “sickness of the spirit.”
