There is a concept that the French call goût — a word that translates roughly as taste, but carries a weight that "taste" in English cannot quite convey. It encompasses not just preference, but judgement; not just aesthetic sense, but the cultivated capacity to distinguish between the genuine and the counterfeit, the enduring and the merely fashionable.
Taste as Currency
For centuries, taste was the private possession of aristocracies and their artistic courtiers. It was cultivated through education, travel, and the long study of excellence across disciplines — architecture, music, literature, painting, cuisine. It could not be purchased directly; it had to be acquired. And because it could not be purchased, it remained the most reliable signal of a particular kind of social position.
What has changed in the twenty-first century is that taste has become explicitly economic. The luxury industry has built a global business of several hundred billion dollars per year on the premise that taste can be authenticated and sold. The art market prices discernment in real time. The best restaurants are financial instruments as much as cultural ones. Taste, in short, has become capital.
In a world where information is abundant and attention is scarce, the ability to identify and communicate genuine quality is one of the most valuable skills a person can possess.
The Digital Curator
The rise of social media created a democratising force in culture: suddenly, anyone with a phone and an eye could curate a world of beauty and share it with millions. The traditional gatekeepers of taste — the editors, the critics, the auction houses — found their authority contested by individuals who had never set foot in a museum but who possessed, through some combination of intuition and effort, a genuine capacity to find and share the extraordinary.
This democratisation is, on balance, a good thing. But it has also produced a flood of noise — a relentless stream of images and endorsements and recommendations in which genuine discrimination is nearly impossible to find. The pendulum, I suspect, is beginning to swing back. As the volume increases, the value of a trusted, consistent, discerning voice increases with it.
Investment at the Intersection
For those managing significant capital, the intersection of taste and investment has practical consequences. Art collecting, when approached seriously, is both a cultural engagement and a financial discipline. The same is true of wine, design, craftsmanship, and — increasingly — fashion. These are not mere indulgences. They are areas in which deep knowledge produces asymmetric advantage.
The family offices I advise that have developed genuine expertise in one or more of these domains consistently outperform those that treat them as peripheral. Not because the returns are always superior — though often they are — but because the discipline of developing taste in any domain produces habits of mind that transfer broadly: patience, attention to detail, scepticism of hype, and the ability to hold a long view.
Taste, properly understood, is not elitism. It is the discipline of caring enough about quality to take the time to learn what it actually looks like.
In a world saturated with the mediocre and the merely adequate, the capacity to recognise and create genuine excellence is rarer than it has ever been. This is both a cultural problem and an economic opportunity. Those who develop and honour that capacity — who take taste seriously as a discipline — will find themselves increasingly well-positioned, in every sense of the word.