🟧 The year in connoisseurship

Out with taste in 2025, plus, OT retrospective.

Dec 19, 2024

The Connoisseur by August Johann Holmberg (1851–1911)

Kyle Chayka: Taste is a problematic word in that its connotations often outweigh its content. Everyone is talking about taste — myself included — but it retains this stigma of pretentiousness. Fellas, is it bad to passionately enjoy something? Is it bad to feel deeply about a book, a song, an idea, to the point that you feel possessive of it? People get scared if you talk too much about taste because it takes work to actually think about why you like something instead of passively consuming it when it comes up on Spotify. Taste appears as a luxury or an affectation even though it shouldn’t, because everyone has taste in something, whether it’s reality TV, flower arranging, or Nike sneakers. To get around this anxiety, I want to suggest an alternative word: connoisseurship.

The connoisseur originated as a cultural figure in the 18th and 19th centuries, a kind of aristocratic dilettante who studied art by acquiring and looking at it. If you could examine enough Rembrandts up close, you could discern the signature flourishes of Rembrandt’s work, and thus determine which paintings were Rembrandts and which were not. (I write a bit about them in my book Filterworld, pg. 233.) These gentlemen-scholars were the beginning of formalized art history, though the connoisseur was also the subject of some mockery. The writer Oliver Goldsmith wrote in his 1760 satire The citizen of the world: or letters from a Chinese philosopher, residing in London, to his friends in the east.:

…the title of connoisseur in [painting] is at present the safest passport into every fashionable Society; a well timed shrug, an admiring attitude and one or two exotic tones of exclamation are sufficient qualifications for men of low circumstances to curry favour…

If taste is the internal knowledge of what one likes, then connoisseurship is exercising it in public, with intention. It is about identifying the best examples of a given medium and understanding artists’ (or more broadly creators’) creative intentions and aesthetic choices. Not for the sake of criticism, necessarily, but for enjoyment and appreciation, the way you crack a bottle of nice champagne for friends. Taste comes with this idea of somehow keeping score. Curation, its linguistic companion in overuse, is about showing off in an institutional forum. Connoisseurship is perhaps focused on having fun — or at least it should be. I often think back to seeing the Trần Anh Hùng film The Taste of Things early this year. It’s about a crew of 19th-century French food connoisseurs who come together to throw elaborate dinner parties for each other — hedonistic celebrations of quality. The message of the connoisseur is that it’s okay to nerd out with your friends, and not everyone has to love what you love or understand your obsessions.

This newsletter, One Thing, is kind of about connoisseurship. We’ve spent more than a year now thinking and writing about what makes a thing good, what makes a piece of clothing or a film or a coffee roaster meaningful. Part of that quest is to come up with ways to make cultural media better. But it’s also to think seriously about our own enjoyment in this Internet era and about which forms of cultural consumption feel sustainable now, in the sense of not being so quickly co-optable as fodder for ephemeral memes or marketing gimmicks. Here’s a look back at some of the newsletters we published in 2024 and an early attempt at building a One Thing Canon. We may publish another missive or two this year, but otherwise we’ll be looking for inspiration for good stuff in 2025.

Write for One Thing: In the coming year I’d like to highlight some more voices in this newsletter! If you have a recommendation you want to make or an observation about cultural trends or an essay that fits our format, email a pitch to onethingnewsletter@gmail.com. Non-professional writers very much welcomed — we love pieces from designers, engineers, architects, artists, consultants, creative directors, retail buyers. And if you’ve written for us in the past, send another idea!