Taste is only as good as how one can articulate aspects of a certain taste that one appreciates.
If one enjoys something but cannot deconstruct the attributes of one's joy, then it isn't necessarily taste that one has but merely a pleasurable sensory perception.
You can judge whether someone actually has taste if they can describe to you why they appreciate a particular thing. Ask someone who listens to a lot of rap music and they can tell you what they think makes a good rap song. Ask someone who reads poetry and they will tell you how they judge good poetry. Hell, I bet you could ask someone who watches a lot of porn and they'll tell you what they look for in a good porn scene.
To demonstrate the opposite case, ask a person who casually binge watches everything on Netflix and ask them why they enjoy a particular show. They might stare at you blankly for a second and only respond with nonspecific reasons such as "it's really scary" or "because it's funny" and little beyond that. This isn't taste, because their experience is hardly different from a tickle. A person can have taste for comedy, but just because comedians and tickles both result in laughter doesn't mean it takes the same level of thought to appreciate the two. (though I suppose it's possible for one to be a good tickler, so my analogy falls apart in that sense)
In fewer words, my point is that taste is a thing, but it has no objective qualifier other than that it is merely the differentiation between thought applied to sensory input as opposed to thoughtlessly responding to input.
One's tastes can be entirely inverted from the norm, but we can't qualify those tastes because that would require uncommon knowledge and experience. On the other hand, the presence of some kind of taste can at least be partially measured. It's the goodness and badness of taste that is purely relative absent any shared mechanics involved.
If one enjoys something but cannot deconstruct the attributes of one's joy, then it isn't necessarily taste that one has but merely a pleasurable sensory perception.
You can judge whether someone actually has taste if they can describe to you why they appreciate a particular thing. Ask someone who listens to a lot of rap music and they can tell you what they think makes a good rap song. Ask someone who reads poetry and they will tell you how they judge good poetry. Hell, I bet you could ask someone who watches a lot of porn and they'll tell you what they look for in a good porn scene.
To demonstrate the opposite case, ask a person who casually binge watches everything on Netflix and ask them why they enjoy a particular show. They might stare at you blankly for a second and only respond with nonspecific reasons such as "it's really scary" or "because it's funny" and little beyond that. This isn't taste, because their experience is hardly different from a tickle. A person can have taste for comedy, but just because comedians and tickles both result in laughter doesn't mean it takes the same level of thought to appreciate the two. (though I suppose it's possible for one to be a good tickler, so my analogy falls apart in that sense)
In fewer words, my point is that taste is a thing, but it has no objective qualifier other than that it is merely the differentiation between thought applied to sensory input as opposed to thoughtlessly responding to input.
One's tastes can be entirely inverted from the norm, but we can't qualify those tastes because that would require uncommon knowledge and experience. On the other hand, the presence of some kind of taste can at least be partially measured. It's the goodness and badness of taste that is purely relative absent any shared mechanics involved.