Acquired Taste

Appreciating subtleness

The most popular condiment in Ancient Rome was garum. Pliny the Elder reported that garum was made from salted, fermented fish intestines. Producing this delectable apparently stank so much that production facilities were relegated to the outskirts of towns and cities. Garum-making smelled too wretched even for towns like Pompeii that had open sewers running down the streets. I imagine the stench was probably up there with leather tanneries, which soaked filthy, gore-caked animal hides in vats of urine. Nevertheless, the Romans couldn't get enough of this stuff. Garum was like ketchup for Americans, HP sauce for the Brits, or pico de gallo for Mexicans. Anyone want a big bowl of fermented fish guts to go with your fries?

For moderns, garum has to be an acquired taste. If you look in Wikipedia, every single example of acquired taste is gustatory. That’s absurdly narrow. We’re talking about aesthetic taste, not just what goes in the mouth, but the ears, eyes, and brain as well. I think the entire idea of acquired taste is puzzling—why do we not like a thing at first, but after repeated, possibly directed, exposure we come to love it? Even more, this is a common occurrence, not some weird anomaly. It’s certainly something I’ve experienced plenty of times.

When I started grad school I decided that I wanted to learn about jazz. I knew it was one of America’s biggest contributions to world culture, and I didn’t want to go my whole life ignorant and missing out. So I went to a jazz-specialty record store in town and asked for a recommendation suitable for beginners. They sold me a CD of John Coltrane’s Soultrane.

Honestly, it was not a good choice for a total neophyte. I listened to that thing over and over until what Coltrane was trying to do and the language he was using finally got beaten into my thick skull. For the longest time it was sonic nonsense¹, but then, eventually, I understood. From there it was easy to branch out to Miles, Monk, Mingus, Metheny, Mehldau, Marsalis, and everybody else. If you’re already a jazz fan, you might not think Soultrane is getting tossed into the deep end of the pool. But for a newbie asking for See Spot Run, it was like being handed King Lear instead.²

There’s just so much like this. Is there anyone who liked whisky the very first time they tried it? I mean genuinely put a glass of Lagavulin to their lips, knocked it back, and declared, “my god that was delicious!” I seriously doubt it.

Acquired taste is not intentionally changing preferences

Almost as puzzling as acquired taste is the nearly complete silence on the topic in the professional literature. The PhilPapers database lists exactly one article on it from nearly 20 years ago. That article, by Kevin Melchionne, argues that acquired taste is a matter of intentionally directed preference change. For example, suppose you want to quit smoking. Although you desire a cigarette, you want to get rid of that desire. But how? One thing you can do is think about how bad smoking is for your health, reflect on how much others hate the smell of smoke on your clothing, how yellow it makes your teeth, etc. Those things help you change your desire.

Or remember in Les Pensées when Pascal imagines somebody who was convinced by his famous wager that it was in their rational self-interest to believe that God exists, but they just couldn’t bring themselves to do it? Pascal recommends that they do what everyone’s done to start believing in God: go to mass, have some holy water, hang out with the Christians, and you’ll come around. Just fake it until you make it.³

Melchionne thinks acquired taste is like this. You think Cezanne is a great painter and a cornerstone of modern art, but you just don’t care for his work. Still, you want to like him because you think somehow you should. So you embark on a project of intentionally changing your taste—you hang out with Cezanne lovers, read up on him, try to focus on whatever good you do see in his work. Melchionne is worried that this kind of forced acquisition of taste might be bullshit or somehow inapt—a case of sour grapes maybe, or inauthentic preferences you adopt just to impress other people.

I get the idea of bogus preferences, when you pretend to like what all the cool kids like for so long that eventually, like Pascal’s skeptic, you do actually like those things. Nevertheless, it still feels fake, that it’s not authentic personal taste that you’ve developed for yourself. Instead you bought tastes off the rack and pretended they were bespoke couture. I don’t think Melchionne’s quite right about the nature of acquired taste, though. It’s not about intentionally changing your preferences. Rather, acquired taste is about learning to detect and appreciate subtle, hidden properties.

Appreciating subtle qualities

An analogy is the hidden 3D image in “Two Cranes.” The cranes are hard to see, and at first the eye is overwhelmed with the dense green foliage. It takes some effort, attention, and refocusing, but then the cranes emerge in a startling “a-ha!” moment.⁴

Two Cranes by Gary W. Priester

Some things have immediate, easy appeal. Maybe not everyone likes them, but they are very popular and widely enjoyed after minimal exposure:

• Taylor Swift songs

• Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons”

• Cheesecake

• Coca-Cola

• Jack Reacher novels

• Classical statues

• Gothic architecture

• Looney Tunes cartoons

Other things very few people like at first but after repeated, often effortful, exposure they come to love it. These experiences tend to be acquired tastes:

• Philip Glass operas

• Bebop jazz

• Kimchi

• Islay Scotch whisky

• Faulkner novels

• Non-representational modern art

• Brutalist architecture (in case no one actually likes that, substitute Frank Gehry)

• Slasher movies

Not everything can be an acquired taste. For one thing, there are biological and psychological limitations. In the same way that no one can get acclimated to the oxygen levels above 26,000 feet, no one can enjoy a glass of pure capsaicin, a snack of poison-dart frogs, or a recording of Banshee screaming played at 160db. Even things you can get acclimated to aren’t necessarily an acquired taste. People can get used to all kinds of horrible living conditions, for example, but that doesn't mean they seek them out or enjoy them. You might get used to life in the concentration camp, but it is not an acquired taste.

Acquired taste is a matter of learning subtle knowledge, and experiencing minute differences in properties. With the easy appeal examples, they have enjoyable obvious properties, and either few subtle properties (cheesecake, Taylor Swift songs, Gothic architecture) or negative subtle properties (Reacher novels can be roughly hewn). In the limited appeal examples, the obvious properties tend to be offputting—jazz can have weird dissonance, atonalities, and strange chords, whisky has a harsh alcohol taste, Faulkner novels are hard to follow, modern art looks stupid or childish, etc. Those things are acquired tastes.

What that means is people learn about, and appreciate, their subtle properties. Just like you have to get past the busy foliage of “Two Cranes” to appreciate the hidden secret, you’ve got to get past the fiery burn of whisky to pick up the notes of vanilla, figs, tobacco, and smoke. Once you figure out what Faulkner is trying to do, and get a feel for his use of language, then you can see what makes him good. Einstein on the Beach sounds repetitious and dull until the surprise shock of a real change, and then you understand how you were intentionally lulled into complacency. Acquired taste is largely epistemic: you have to discover, grasp and understand the hidden virtues and not just the obvious ones. Those subtleties must also be positive ones. If your beer subtly tastes of manure, and it takes you a while to figure that out, then it is an acquired distaste.

I think it is tempting to associate acquired taste with highbrow stuff because it is likelier that the highbrow has more subtle properties. Maybe a better way to think of it is that really powerful aesthetic experiences are dense with aesthetic properties, and that will include more subtle ones as well as more obvious ones. For example, contrast the violence in Cormac McCarthy with that in Lee Child. I remember that after I finished Blood Meridian, I compared the experience of reading it to being shat from Satan’s fiery anus onto the battlefields of the apocalypse. Pretty sure I needed some therapy after that book.

Nobody feels that way after reading about Jack Reacher beating up bad guys. There the catharsis is easily achieved and swiftly forgotten. Reacher novels are a one-night stand, McCarthy is a committed relationship. In case that metaphor sounds judgmental, Reacher novels are a bag of Tostitos and McCarthy is a Michelin-starred meal. Don’t worry, I like Tostitos as much as the next person; I just don’t confuse them with dinner at Noma.

That said, the distinction between immediate and acquired taste is not the same thing as high brow/ low brow. I’m not suggesting that the things on the second list above are aesthetically superior to those on the first list. I hate slasher movies and like Looney Tunes. I love bebop jazz, but also think Swift’s albums Folklore and Evermore are pretty solid.⁵ I don’t care for either kimchi or Coke. I’m a big Glass fan but also like cheesecake. In short, acquired taste is orthogonal to quality. It is more related to complexity.

One nice thing is that my account helps explain both why there are genuine expert wine tasters and also why they can be easily led astray. There’s a bunch of examples of expert error—white wines with red food coloring added that wine tasters then describe in language appropriate to true red wine. Cheap plonk in an expensive bottle with a grand cru label gets highly rated. Regional biases that easily creep in during non-blind tasting. A good discussion is here. If the difference between average wine and fabulous vino is subtle, this is exactly what we should expect: trained wine experts are able to detect fine properties that a generic wine mom cannot, but that ability can easily be swamped by various cognitive biases. That’s entirely consistent with the aesthetic differences between wines being real ones. Great wine is a matter of diminishing marginal returns because the relevant aesthetic properties get tinier and tinier.

Expectations

Maybe what’s an acquired taste and what’s not is just a matter of expectations? A nice bowl of garum during the reign of Vespasian would have been totally expected, normal and appreciated by guests. But if I served it at a dinner party, my friends would flee in horror and paint a red plague cross on my door with “Lord, have mercy upon us” emblazoned above.

Of course, they would do that even if I set culinary expectations ahead of time. Likewise, I know what’s going to happen onscreen with Demonic Chainsaw Nightmare in Murderville 3, but I’m still not going to like it. Melchionne knows what he’s going to get with Cezanne paintings, but they still don’t float his boat.

Remember this scene from Back to the Future?

Marty McFly does a Jimi Hendrix-type guitar solo on “Johnny B. Goode” in 1955—almost 15 years too early for anyone to appreciate it. That style of playing just wasn’t culturally salient yet. Cultural background and expectations don’t define acquired taste, but they help determine which properties are obvious and which are not.

If the only music you grew up with is Indonesian gamelan, perhaps Taylor Swift is an acquired taste—nothing about what she does is familiar or obvious. Maybe to TS Monk, son of jazz legend Thelonious Monk and a first-rate jazz drummer in his own right, the conventions of jazz were manifest from childhood. Which qualities of a thing are obvious and which are subtle is at least partly a matter of cultural background. All of that is fully compatible with my basic account: acquired taste has to do with learning to identify and appreciate the subtle properties of aesthetic experiences.

1. TBH I still kind of feel that way about Interstellar Space.

2. If I were asked what jazz albums are a good entrée into the genre, I would recommend Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert. Give those a few listens. If you still don’t get it, maybe jazz is not for you.

3

Endeavour then to convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of God, but by the abatement of your passions. You would like to attain faith, and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief, and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. Even this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness. (Sec. 233 of Les Pensées)

4. I’m talking about the two large, 3D cranes in the middle of the image with hills in the background and the moon on the left. Not the two rows of small cranes at the bottom.

5. Probably because they were largely co-written with Aaron Dessner from my favorite alt-rock band The National.