Taste is just attention that has been paid for a long time

People talk about taste as though it were innate, a thing you have or lack. Everyone I know with genuinely good taste simply looked at more things, for longer, and kept asking why one worked and another didn't. It is embarrassingly unglamorous. The reason this matters is that treating taste as innate makes it a class marker you either inherit or don't, and treating it as accumulated attention makes it something anyone can build. One of those framings is true and also more useful, which is rare.