I rediscovered Virgil Abloh's Tumblr; I'm reminded of the Boston summer I spent scrolling through all 467 pages. His come-up from creative directing Donda to founding Off-White and designing for Louis Vuitton is fully documented in a series of spontaneous observations captured by his phone.

I was talking to Ronald about taste as we were trudging up to North campus in the snow last week and it became obvious that taste is the product of seeing a ton of work and self-assessing it. If you see hundreds of paintings—on purpose or not—and make small mental labels, you can develop a taste for "good" paintings. You'll know what you like the instant you see a painted surface. I did (and continue to do) that accidentally—just because I find stuff cool—and common features of anything I look at have become intuitive to me. Like rule of thirds when I paint or take photos—no need for me to pull out a ruler... it's just obvious.

If people are born (mostly) tabula rasa, and taste is acquired through expanding the (labeled) dataset for our biological neural networks, how can you develop distinct taste? If you look at what everyone else is doing and copy the stuff you like, is it truly new? Tarantino does that with his films but I wonder if that is how major leaps are made. Everything is technically a derivative of something before and you can Markov chain your way back to the old cave days. You don't even need to go that far: iPhone, the archetype of a revolutionary product, can be traced to the Newton MessagePad. Is the best strategy for making products that truly revolutionize the way humans interact with the world consuming as much stuff on X as possible (disgustingly easy for me) or sitting in a cave and consuming nothing and just thinking?

To develop taste a little more intentionally, and because I like visual stuff, I added cool artwork to the top of my blogs. I also might hack together a Photo-to-Blog Tumblr clone so that people have a way to look back at the early days. I can't question the heavenly mandate but it's clear that the feeling is in the air.