Another commenter recommended this method: "It's a stereogram. Put your nose against the screen and slowly (I mean slowly) back away. You'll start to see something weirdly 3D which you can then focus on pretty clearly. It's not so much about attention as having to trick your eyes to focus behind the screen"
Very on point. All art is contextual and depending on its complexities it can take repeated exposure to begin to appreciate those resonances. My appreciation for different genres of music is very wide, but I know that as my tastes have developed over the decades some of that development has come from the repeated exposure. It also requires a willingness to challenge your own expectations of what you like or don't like. Much of rap music sounds the same to me, but I know that's because I haven't taken the time to let myself take in the context. On the other hand, every couple of years I listen to Mozart and I still don't get what makes people so wild about him. But I love Haydn. As my tastes have expanded over the years, I also become more adventurous, knowing that taking the effort may yield great rewards. I recently listened to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music for the third time since first encountering it 40 some years ago. That first time it was nothing but noise. Now, after decades of coming to love free jazz, I hear the subtleties in what Reed was trying to do. Once you understand that tastes can be acquired, it encourages you to keep going back to things that you didn't appreciate at first. "How can anybody like that!" becomes an open query rather than simply being dismissive.
I really appreciated this post and will probably think about it for a long time as I try new things. Among my most rewarding acquired tastes are have been listening to jazz and other instrumental music, along with running and reading fiction. Not all my efforts succeed. Despite past attempts, I’m unable to enjoy eating sushi, watching professional sports, or sipping hard liquor straight with no mixer.
I wonder if others have thought about cigarette smoking. I am not sure anyone enjoys their first cigarette yet there was a time when nearly half the US adult population smoked. Nicotine is of course addictive and the social signaling was also its own reward, so it is complicated to say how much of this taste is acquired. In any case, the psychology of pleasure is a fascinating topic to parse
One plausible hypothesis is that the more purely hedonic the pleasure - the more the brain simply encodes it as pleasurable sensation like sexual climax or the sweetness of sugar - the more beneficial the associated activity has been in our evolutionary history regardless of culture or one’s place in society.
The alternative capacity to “learn to like” things could have been a useful way for evolution to create humans who could successfully adapt to their particular social environment.
In the modern scientific era, we can hack this mechanism by deliberately and repeatedly exposing ourselves to activities that evidence tells us is beneficial, like exercise, until we like it.
When I was a kid, I thought the rock band REO Speedwagon was really good. Now I think they're shit, even though I still like plenty of other rock music. However, with some effort I can get myself into the right "mindset" so that their music can sound good to me. Something similar for Taylor Swift: I've never liked her music but I can come close by finding the right mindset. I can't do it with all music, but certainly some. Perhaps this is due to the role of imagination in the process of listening to some music?
That seems somewhat similar to what you're getting at, no?
But when it comes to food, I don't think I could do it. If you loved food F as a kid, and don't like it now, I doubt you can make yourself like F now just by messing with your mindset. That's an interesting difference.
Thanks. There is something to being in the right mindset. Do you think you could pleasurably listen to REO out of nostalgia, thinking back to how you felt when High Infidelity first came out? Maybe something similar is true of the food you loved as a child, like box mac and cheese. I can see someone eating it with nostalgic pleasure while in full recognition that handmade pasta with three kinds of cheese is superior.
It's not nostalgia. At least I don't think so. It's more like I can control myself in such a way that I make the music cause the same positive feelings that it did when I was in high school. When I listening to it "as my current self", there's no causal pathway from hearing that music to those positive feelings. But then I change my mindset and the causal pathways open up.
For what it's worth--maybe not much--that's what introspection suggests to me.
I loved your article but….After hours of looking, I can find no Cranes. Eye strain, yes. Vision almost incapable of discerning any colour other than green, yes. A tendency for the mind to wander off to thinking about what horse might win the Derby this year, possibly influenced by the green tinge affecting my vision, yes. I am obviously incapable of seeing, let alone appreciating the subtle. Now I understand why my family consider me to be stubborn, it isn’t that I don’t want to change my ideas and preferences. It’s just that I cannot see any ideas and preferences that I don’t already have. This is obviously a limitation in my ability to persuade myself that what I don’t see is actually seeable. I am not too perturbed. If I can’t see it, it is obviously not really there and the two imaginary Cranes are evidently a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes.
It's a stereogram. Put your nose against the screen and slowly (I mean slowly) back away. You'll start to see something weirdly 3D which you can then focus on pretty clearly. It's not so much about attention as having to trick your eyes to focus behind the screen
A truly philosophical piece. I can only agree, contra Melchionne, that acquired taste is not about a conscious modification of preferences. I would say it is almost the opposite: it seems that the ability to appreciate the subtle differences grows on you through habituation, irrespective of your intention. A distant anecdote that I owe to my father, an engineer by profession, illustrates. Almost seventy years ago he was tasked with designing and testing a hi-fi amplifier (this was still the time of vacuum tubes, which some hi-fu purists continue to appreciate: another acquired taste, perhaps). The music piece chosen for the testing was Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps, which I think is a good example of acquired taste, as attested by the almost violent reaction that followed its première. My father, who was not familiar with the piece, recalled being initially almost repelled by the music. As the testing of the equipment demanded scores of repetitions, he was eventually captivated, to the point of buying a personal copy of the record. All along he could not exactly say what made him appreciate the piece, besides repeated exposure. He hypothesised however that repeated exposure to ‘easy appeal’ pieces, by contrast, would eventually elicit a sense of nausea, as it is the case with the jingle ‘Punch’ in Mark Twain’s A Literary Nightmare. I guess that you would argue that the the eventual revulsion would come from the appreciation of the subtle negative properties of the ‘easy appeal’ piece. In this connection I would argue that, while complexity per se is not guarantee of quality, the best forms of art have an inherent complexity: as someone said, a good slogan may be better than a bad novel, but you can’t simply compare it to a good novel.
Yes, I think that’s right. It’s complexity that great art has. There’s a reason chocolate truffles are better than pure sugar; there’s just so much more going on. Sacre du Printemps is a good example of acquired taste, as was Pissarro and Monet 50 years before that. It took time to understand the subtle features of their artistic language.
There seems to be some natural predisposition (or lack thereof) toward complex/non-representative art that correlates with the liberal/conservative divide:
It’s been a while since I read it, but if memory serves “An Experiment in Criticism” by C.S. Lewis makes some related points, not about acquired tastes per se but about aesthetic quality as inherent in the kinds of engagement that a particular work allows. The potential for deeper engagement means higher quality, on his account.
It’s Eddie Van Halen he is imitating, not Hendrix! Interestingly though, I think the former would have required more taste acquiring in the 50s than the latter, but vice versa today.
Funny you post this now, as I've been thinking about acquired taste lately, specifically in relation to coffee. I've been wondering what it is that pushes us to start acquiring acquired tastes in the first place. For example, did coffee become a hit in Europe because people tasted it and found it very interesting, eventually developing a taste for the subtleties? Or did people drink it, enjoy the caffeine high, and then learn to like it in order to bring their gustatory tastes in line with their... taste for stimulants?
Personally, I've found that the driver for me has always been "why would anyone ever do this?" That question has been particularly interesting for music — why would someone like Boulez dedicate their whole life to making music that sounds so horrible? I then get sort of obsessed trying to figure out what it is that people actually like about it and end up acquiring the taste in the process. But I don't know if that transfers over to every acquired taste.
Well, nobody likes everything. That’s taste in general. At least in my case I’m motivated to acquire (or at least make the effort to acquire) a taste when I think there’s some realm of aesthetic appreciation that I’m missing out on, and maybe getting educated would open that up to me.
Makes sense. I think that's fairly in line with my experience — I subjected myself to Boulez and similar composers because I figured there must be something there that I'm not getting, and I wanted to know what it is. I'm not sure if I'd consider it a desire for aesthetic appreciation in my case though, maybe more just some type of intellectual understanding.
The Boulez experiment was not particularly successful. It never became something I sought out.
Your argument for why sommeliers have real expertise yet can be easily fooled by "fake" fine wines could be applied to most other types of acquired tastes, right?
Could a connoisseur tell the difference between two examples of the class new to them, one considered excellent by other authorities and the other considered not so great?
-garum (if you are a Roman gourmand)
-bebop jazz
-slasher films
-Scotch
-Brutalist architecture
If an expert can reliably tell you what is considered excellent in a blind test, it's not the same as wine.
I like what you say about your own development in jazz enjoyment and in the example of the cranes. Learning to enjoy something takes time.
Something I've done in the past when visiting an art museum is to pick just one painting, sit down and look at it for 30 minutes, and then leave, or go to the cafe. I have found this far more interesting than briskly walking from room to room as I used to, taking in no more than a passing glance at anything.
I think you're onto something here. (Though I'm going to argue that garum is alive and well in the forms of things like fish sauce and shrimp paste! Listen to the wonderful Gastropod episode about it and similar sauces like Maggi) In general, I agree with you that exposure and openness to subtlety helps people "acquire" a taste. I hated Thai iced tea the first time I drank it... and then one day I found myself *needing* to try it again. But there are things, mostly sensory, that I can't stand no matter what. Goat cheese apparently makes my biology scream "ick!" no matter how I try to appreciate its subtlety. And there are forms of music that I am willing to admit have lots of subtlety that I just can't listen to; it makes my skin crawl. That said, I have observed that people who are highly restrictive ("picky" in terms of food; very opinionated in terms of arts) are often people who are uninterested in subtlety and are very closed to new experiences.
It would be interesting to see if openness to experience correlates with the likelihood of gaining acquired tastes. I suspect it would. (I’ve always assumed modern fish sauce is the diluted and weakened descendent of garum).
I always figured that openness was pretty important. Certainly, we saw that with our kids and the kids around them. The kids who were willing to try things generally had wider tastes. I teach a class about food for kids and the kids always love the gross-out factor of how garum was made!
As a young jazz fan, I had a similar experience with the music of Bill Evans (Pat Metheny was my gateway drug into this music, specifically the first two PM Group albums). I knew I was supposed to love Evans, but I struggled at first to understand what made him great. Once I "got" it, though, I was hooked for life. Was this a case of fake-it-till-you-make-it? I don't think so, since there are many other artists all serious jazz lovers are supposed to adore whose music I simply don't enjoy.
I don’t think it is fake it until you make it. I think you figured out those subtle, hidden properties that made Evans great, and once you did you knew how to listen for them elsewhere.
I really enjoyed this post. I've also been staring at Two Cranes for about 40 minutes because I cannot for the life of me see these alleged cranes.
Another commenter recommended this method: "It's a stereogram. Put your nose against the screen and slowly (I mean slowly) back away. You'll start to see something weirdly 3D which you can then focus on pretty clearly. It's not so much about attention as having to trick your eyes to focus behind the screen"
Very on point. All art is contextual and depending on its complexities it can take repeated exposure to begin to appreciate those resonances. My appreciation for different genres of music is very wide, but I know that as my tastes have developed over the decades some of that development has come from the repeated exposure. It also requires a willingness to challenge your own expectations of what you like or don't like. Much of rap music sounds the same to me, but I know that's because I haven't taken the time to let myself take in the context. On the other hand, every couple of years I listen to Mozart and I still don't get what makes people so wild about him. But I love Haydn. As my tastes have expanded over the years, I also become more adventurous, knowing that taking the effort may yield great rewards. I recently listened to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music for the third time since first encountering it 40 some years ago. That first time it was nothing but noise. Now, after decades of coming to love free jazz, I hear the subtleties in what Reed was trying to do. Once you understand that tastes can be acquired, it encourages you to keep going back to things that you didn't appreciate at first. "How can anybody like that!" becomes an open query rather than simply being dismissive.
Cool
I really appreciated this post and will probably think about it for a long time as I try new things. Among my most rewarding acquired tastes are have been listening to jazz and other instrumental music, along with running and reading fiction. Not all my efforts succeed. Despite past attempts, I’m unable to enjoy eating sushi, watching professional sports, or sipping hard liquor straight with no mixer.
I wonder if others have thought about cigarette smoking. I am not sure anyone enjoys their first cigarette yet there was a time when nearly half the US adult population smoked. Nicotine is of course addictive and the social signaling was also its own reward, so it is complicated to say how much of this taste is acquired. In any case, the psychology of pleasure is a fascinating topic to parse
One plausible hypothesis is that the more purely hedonic the pleasure - the more the brain simply encodes it as pleasurable sensation like sexual climax or the sweetness of sugar - the more beneficial the associated activity has been in our evolutionary history regardless of culture or one’s place in society.
The alternative capacity to “learn to like” things could have been a useful way for evolution to create humans who could successfully adapt to their particular social environment.
In the modern scientific era, we can hack this mechanism by deliberately and repeatedly exposing ourselves to activities that evidence tells us is beneficial, like exercise, until we like it.
Thank you for writing such an interesting piece.
When I was a kid, I thought the rock band REO Speedwagon was really good. Now I think they're shit, even though I still like plenty of other rock music. However, with some effort I can get myself into the right "mindset" so that their music can sound good to me. Something similar for Taylor Swift: I've never liked her music but I can come close by finding the right mindset. I can't do it with all music, but certainly some. Perhaps this is due to the role of imagination in the process of listening to some music?
That seems somewhat similar to what you're getting at, no?
But when it comes to food, I don't think I could do it. If you loved food F as a kid, and don't like it now, I doubt you can make yourself like F now just by messing with your mindset. That's an interesting difference.
Thanks. There is something to being in the right mindset. Do you think you could pleasurably listen to REO out of nostalgia, thinking back to how you felt when High Infidelity first came out? Maybe something similar is true of the food you loved as a child, like box mac and cheese. I can see someone eating it with nostalgic pleasure while in full recognition that handmade pasta with three kinds of cheese is superior.
It's not nostalgia. At least I don't think so. It's more like I can control myself in such a way that I make the music cause the same positive feelings that it did when I was in high school. When I listening to it "as my current self", there's no causal pathway from hearing that music to those positive feelings. But then I change my mindset and the causal pathways open up.
For what it's worth--maybe not much--that's what introspection suggests to me.
I loved your article but….After hours of looking, I can find no Cranes. Eye strain, yes. Vision almost incapable of discerning any colour other than green, yes. A tendency for the mind to wander off to thinking about what horse might win the Derby this year, possibly influenced by the green tinge affecting my vision, yes. I am obviously incapable of seeing, let alone appreciating the subtle. Now I understand why my family consider me to be stubborn, it isn’t that I don’t want to change my ideas and preferences. It’s just that I cannot see any ideas and preferences that I don’t already have. This is obviously a limitation in my ability to persuade myself that what I don’t see is actually seeable. I am not too perturbed. If I can’t see it, it is obviously not really there and the two imaginary Cranes are evidently a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes.
The secret of the cranes is to not focus your eyes on the same point. Kind of let your eyes go out of focus. It’s hard to explain.
They are normally out of focus and even with encouraging them to go completely cross eyed, no Cranes!
It's a stereogram. Put your nose against the screen and slowly (I mean slowly) back away. You'll start to see something weirdly 3D which you can then focus on pretty clearly. It's not so much about attention as having to trick your eyes to focus behind the screen
A truly philosophical piece. I can only agree, contra Melchionne, that acquired taste is not about a conscious modification of preferences. I would say it is almost the opposite: it seems that the ability to appreciate the subtle differences grows on you through habituation, irrespective of your intention. A distant anecdote that I owe to my father, an engineer by profession, illustrates. Almost seventy years ago he was tasked with designing and testing a hi-fi amplifier (this was still the time of vacuum tubes, which some hi-fu purists continue to appreciate: another acquired taste, perhaps). The music piece chosen for the testing was Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps, which I think is a good example of acquired taste, as attested by the almost violent reaction that followed its première. My father, who was not familiar with the piece, recalled being initially almost repelled by the music. As the testing of the equipment demanded scores of repetitions, he was eventually captivated, to the point of buying a personal copy of the record. All along he could not exactly say what made him appreciate the piece, besides repeated exposure. He hypothesised however that repeated exposure to ‘easy appeal’ pieces, by contrast, would eventually elicit a sense of nausea, as it is the case with the jingle ‘Punch’ in Mark Twain’s A Literary Nightmare. I guess that you would argue that the the eventual revulsion would come from the appreciation of the subtle negative properties of the ‘easy appeal’ piece. In this connection I would argue that, while complexity per se is not guarantee of quality, the best forms of art have an inherent complexity: as someone said, a good slogan may be better than a bad novel, but you can’t simply compare it to a good novel.
Yes, I think that’s right. It’s complexity that great art has. There’s a reason chocolate truffles are better than pure sugar; there’s just so much more going on. Sacre du Printemps is a good example of acquired taste, as was Pissarro and Monet 50 years before that. It took time to understand the subtle features of their artistic language.
There seems to be some natural predisposition (or lack thereof) toward complex/non-representative art that correlates with the liberal/conservative divide:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/18478235_Conservatism_and_art_preferences
Interesting, but I wonder if that replicates. It looks like a rather low-powered study.
This seems like a plausible account to me.
It’s been a while since I read it, but if memory serves “An Experiment in Criticism” by C.S. Lewis makes some related points, not about acquired tastes per se but about aesthetic quality as inherent in the kinds of engagement that a particular work allows. The potential for deeper engagement means higher quality, on his account.
The philosopher Agnes Callard has written extensively on this subject.
Also, if you have never tried Durian (the world's stickiest fruit), I highly recommend it. It is the ultimate acquired taste.
I’ve never had a chance to try durian fruit, although I know of it. I have tried Callard. She is an acquired taste.
L. A. Paul on "transformative experiences" is also highly relevant here and there's a burgeoning recent literature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_Experience https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transformative-experience/ Transformative experiences are arguably a superset of 'acquired tastes'.
I know Paul’s work in passing, but it hadn’t occurred to me to connect acquired tastes to transformative experiences. Worth thinking about, thanks.
A solid take on this. But I would not say that liking Coltrane is analogous to liking whiskey. Trane soothes your ears whiskey rots your gut 😏
It’s Eddie Van Halen he is imitating, not Hendrix! Interestingly though, I think the former would have required more taste acquiring in the 50s than the latter, but vice versa today.
The hammer-ons are more EVH, the playing behind the back is Hendrix and kicking over the amp is more Pete Townshend. I kind of rounded it off.
Fair enough 😜
Funny you post this now, as I've been thinking about acquired taste lately, specifically in relation to coffee. I've been wondering what it is that pushes us to start acquiring acquired tastes in the first place. For example, did coffee become a hit in Europe because people tasted it and found it very interesting, eventually developing a taste for the subtleties? Or did people drink it, enjoy the caffeine high, and then learn to like it in order to bring their gustatory tastes in line with their... taste for stimulants?
Personally, I've found that the driver for me has always been "why would anyone ever do this?" That question has been particularly interesting for music — why would someone like Boulez dedicate their whole life to making music that sounds so horrible? I then get sort of obsessed trying to figure out what it is that people actually like about it and end up acquiring the taste in the process. But I don't know if that transfers over to every acquired taste.
Well, nobody likes everything. That’s taste in general. At least in my case I’m motivated to acquire (or at least make the effort to acquire) a taste when I think there’s some realm of aesthetic appreciation that I’m missing out on, and maybe getting educated would open that up to me.
Makes sense. I think that's fairly in line with my experience — I subjected myself to Boulez and similar composers because I figured there must be something there that I'm not getting, and I wanted to know what it is. I'm not sure if I'd consider it a desire for aesthetic appreciation in my case though, maybe more just some type of intellectual understanding.
The Boulez experiment was not particularly successful. It never became something I sought out.
Your argument for why sommeliers have real expertise yet can be easily fooled by "fake" fine wines could be applied to most other types of acquired tastes, right?
Could a connoisseur tell the difference between two examples of the class new to them, one considered excellent by other authorities and the other considered not so great?
-garum (if you are a Roman gourmand)
-bebop jazz
-slasher films
-Scotch
-Brutalist architecture
If an expert can reliably tell you what is considered excellent in a blind test, it's not the same as wine.
I wrote about my own life aesthetic-experience highlights and offered some thoughts for what is needed in the first place to enjoy art:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dadathome/p/seeing-art-with-new-eyes?r=4t79io&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I like what you say about your own development in jazz enjoyment and in the example of the cranes. Learning to enjoy something takes time.
Something I've done in the past when visiting an art museum is to pick just one painting, sit down and look at it for 30 minutes, and then leave, or go to the cafe. I have found this far more interesting than briskly walking from room to room as I used to, taking in no more than a passing glance at anything.
I think you're onto something here. (Though I'm going to argue that garum is alive and well in the forms of things like fish sauce and shrimp paste! Listen to the wonderful Gastropod episode about it and similar sauces like Maggi) In general, I agree with you that exposure and openness to subtlety helps people "acquire" a taste. I hated Thai iced tea the first time I drank it... and then one day I found myself *needing* to try it again. But there are things, mostly sensory, that I can't stand no matter what. Goat cheese apparently makes my biology scream "ick!" no matter how I try to appreciate its subtlety. And there are forms of music that I am willing to admit have lots of subtlety that I just can't listen to; it makes my skin crawl. That said, I have observed that people who are highly restrictive ("picky" in terms of food; very opinionated in terms of arts) are often people who are uninterested in subtlety and are very closed to new experiences.
It would be interesting to see if openness to experience correlates with the likelihood of gaining acquired tastes. I suspect it would. (I’ve always assumed modern fish sauce is the diluted and weakened descendent of garum).
I always figured that openness was pretty important. Certainly, we saw that with our kids and the kids around them. The kids who were willing to try things generally had wider tastes. I teach a class about food for kids and the kids always love the gross-out factor of how garum was made!
As a young jazz fan, I had a similar experience with the music of Bill Evans (Pat Metheny was my gateway drug into this music, specifically the first two PM Group albums). I knew I was supposed to love Evans, but I struggled at first to understand what made him great. Once I "got" it, though, I was hooked for life. Was this a case of fake-it-till-you-make-it? I don't think so, since there are many other artists all serious jazz lovers are supposed to adore whose music I simply don't enjoy.
I don’t think it is fake it until you make it. I think you figured out those subtle, hidden properties that made Evans great, and once you did you knew how to listen for them elsewhere.
Gadamer has a discussion of taste in Truth and Method that is insightful.