Most people who want to develop taste start by looking for better inputs. Better films. Better design. Better music. More exposure to more excellent things.
That instinct is not wrong. Exposure matters, and a later installment will take it up directly.
But exposure without attention is just consumption. And consumption, however refined, does not develop taste on its own.
Before you can learn from what you encounter, you have to actually encounter it. Not scroll past it. Not extract what is useful and move on. Not process it efficiently and file your impression. You have to receive it, which is a different activity entirely, and a harder one than it sounds.
Attention is not the same as looking. It is what looking becomes when the self gets out of the way.
Simone Weil wrote about attention with an intensity that most philosophers reserve for logic or metaphysics. Her account is often read through an ethical or spiritual lens, and that reading is not wrong. But there is a perceptual dimension to her thinking that deserves equal weight, and it is directly relevant to how taste develops.
For Weil, genuine attention is not concentration in the ordinary sense. It is not simply the effortful direction of mental energy toward an object. It is something closer to a receptive waiting: an emptying of expectation and agenda so that what is actually present can be perceived. She describes thought being held available, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object itself.
What she is pointing at is the way the self interferes with perception. We do not usually see what is in front of us. We see what we expect to see, what we want to see, what fits our existing frameworks and confirms our prior judgments. The process happens quickly and largely without awareness. We look, we categorize, we move on, satisfied that we have understood.
What we have actually done is confirmed what we already knew.
Genuine attention interrupts that process. It holds the object long enough for something unexpected to emerge. It creates the possibility of surprise. A painting reveals a relationship you had not noticed. A piece of music acquires a complexity that escaped you on first hearing. A difficult text begins to say something other than what you assumed it would say.
Taste develops not when perception confirms itself, but when it encounters something it did not already know how to see.
This is a demanding account. It asks for a kind of perceptual patience that runs against nearly every incentive in the current environment. But it is also an accurate description of what taste development requires at the most fundamental level. You cannot refine your perception of things you are not actually perceiving.
Iris Murdoch developed a related account through a different route. Where Weil approached attention through mysticism and moral philosophy, Murdoch arrived at similar territory through her work on ethics and the nature of moral vision.
For Murdoch, the central obstacle to genuine perception is what she called the fat relentless ego: the tendency of the self to interpret everything in terms of its own needs, fears, desires, and narratives. We do not see things as they are. We see things as they relate to us, which is a fundamentally different activity.
Her response to this was the concept of unselfing: a deliberate act of attention directed outward, toward the reality of what is actually there, rather than inward toward the self’s ongoing interpretation of it. She found this most clearly demonstrated in encounters with natural beauty and great art. A person genuinely attending to a painting, she argued, undergoes a temporary but real suspension of ego. The self recedes. The object becomes present in a way it cannot be when the self is busy evaluating, categorizing, and responding.
Murdoch was not making a mystical claim. She was making a perceptual one. The quality of what you see depends on the quality of the attention you bring. And the quality of attention depends, in significant part, on how much of the self is in the way.
For taste development, this has direct consequences. The person who approaches a work already certain of their judgment, already positioned to confirm or deny, already performing their response, is not developing perception. They are rehearsing an existing one. Growth requires a kind of openness that ego tends to foreclose.
The current environment makes this specific kind of attention considerably harder to sustain, and not only because of distraction in the familiar sense.
The deeper problem is structural. These tools are optimized for output, not reception. They produce, summarize, generate, and respond. They do not attend. And in a culture increasingly shaped by that orientation, the receptive dimension of perception, simply looking, simply listening, without immediately doing something with the experience, atrophies from disuse.
When a summary is always available, sitting with a difficult text until it opens becomes optional. When an image can be generated in seconds, spending twenty minutes with a single painting starts to feel like a misallocation of time. When confident output is always at hand, the tolerance for not yet knowing what to think, which is precisely where genuine perceptual learning tends to happen, narrows.
But the deeper issue is not speed. It is fluency.
AI-generated output tends toward coherence, resolution, and closure. It presents itself as already formed, already interpreted, already moving toward an answer. Genuine aesthetic encounter often works in the opposite direction. It opens questions, creates productive uncertainty, and leaves something unresolved.
That unresolved quality is not a deficiency. It is the beginning of perception.
Some objects require time not because they are obscure, but because what they offer is not available on a first pass. A piece of music heard once while doing something else yields almost nothing of what it contains. A complex work seen briefly hands you its surface but not its structure. Taste develops through the kind of encounter where you stay long enough for the second and third thing to become visible. That encounter is increasingly difficult to justify in an environment that rewards throughput.
When resolution is always available, the capacity to tolerate and learn from productive uncertainty begins to erode. And with it, one of the conditions under which taste develops.
None of this means attention is simply lost. It means it has to be cultivated deliberately, because nothing in the current environment cultivates it for you.
What does that cultivation look like in practice?
It looks like returning. Going back to the same work, the same problem, the same object, not to confirm your first impression but to find out what your first impression missed. The first encounter establishes a surface. Subsequent encounters go deeper, if you let them.
It looks like slowing down on purpose in front of specific things, not as a general posture but as a deliberate decision. This is worth more of my time than I am giving it. What changes if I stay?
It looks like noticing resistance. When something does not immediately yield meaning or pleasure, that friction is information. It may mean the work is genuinely poor. It may mean your perception is not yet developed enough to receive what it offers. Learning to tell the difference is itself a form of perceptual development, and you cannot begin without enough attention to feel the resistance in the first place.
And it looks like protecting the conditions that make attention possible. Deep perception is not only a mental act. It depends on environment, time, and the absence of competing demands. Creating and protecting those conditions is not a lifestyle indulgence. If taste development depends on sustained attention, and sustained attention depends on conditions that support it, then those conditions are a practical necessity.
Weil did not treat attention as something you either have or lack. She treated it as something you practice, imperfectly and incrementally, with the understanding that the practice itself changes what you become capable of perceiving. Murdoch said something similar: the direction of attention is not neutral. Where you look, and how you look, shapes what you are eventually able to see.
Attention is the foundation. But attention directed at what?
The next installment takes up exposure: the question of what you should be looking at, how deliberately you seek out the genuinely excellent, and why intentional curation matters more now than it ever has.
Because you can develop the capacity to attend carefully and still spend that attention on things that do not reward it. Seeing well requires both the discipline of attention and the wisdom of what you choose to attend to.
Before judgment comes attention. Before discernment comes the discipline of seeing.
And taste begins not with choosing better things, but with learning how to see what is already before you.
I work with organizations and individuals who want to think more carefully about judgment, meaning, and the conditions that shape everyday decisions.
If that sounds like your situation, you can reach me at michaelrspicher@gmail.com or learn more at michaelrspicher.com.
Reorienting through Aesthetics
Aesthetic Experience: A Basic Reason for Action
My latest for Fast Company: Are You Part of the ‘Distraction Economy’?
“The Aesthetic Edge” is a free ebook, co-written by myself and Hannah Spicher. Download your copy today!
I appeared on Jeffrey Shaw’s podcast to talk about beauty, luxury, and the aesthetic advantage.
Michael’s interview with NeuroArts Resource Center.
Digital Fashion: Theory, Practice, Implications, edited by Michael R. Spicher, Sara Emilia Bernat, and Doris Domoszlai-Lantner, is available for purchase! (Our book was featured in a BeautyMatter article.)
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