Blog #0195: Taste as Art
Source: Photo by Redd Francisco on Unsplash
[ED: If the machine does the making, where does the art live? What DJs, conductors, and vertical listening tell us about curation as the primary creative act. 1/5 hats.]
The Unimaginable Musician
If someone told you thirty years ago that some of the most famous musicians in the world would do nothing but mix other people's sounds, you'd have been baffled. They don't play guitar. They don't play piano. They stand behind a deck with a bunch of buttons on it. And they fill stadiums.
That's where we are now across every creative domain. The abstraction layer has arrived. And the question it raises is the same one electronic music raised decades ago: if the machine does the making, where does the art live?
The DJ, Taken Seriously
There's an argument, still surprisingly common, that DJing isn't real musical talent. It's wrong, and it's wrong in a way that matters for understanding what's coming.
Driving a festival-level deck in front of 50,000 people is an extraordinary performance skill. The DJ mixes live. They read the crowd — a room-sized feedback loop of energy, fatigue, anticipation. They adapt the experience in real time, adjusting tempo, energy, texture, layering. This is not pressing play on a playlist. It's a live performance that demands split-second technical decisions under pressure, with the consequences measured in tens of thousands of people either moving or standing still.
The conductor analogy holds here and deserves to be taken seriously. No one argues that a conductor is not a musician. Conductors must master what musicians and music educators call hearing in the "mind's ear" — the ability to generate and hold auditory images of music without external sound. The concept is well established in music cognition research. Zatorre and Halpern demonstrated in 1996 that imagining music activates the same secondary auditory cortices as perceiving it. The experience is real and measurable.
For a conductor, this skill takes a specific form: vertical listening. An orchestra produces a stack of simultaneous voices — strings, woodwinds, brass, percussion — each moving horizontally through time as an independent line. The conductor must hear both dimensions at once: each part's horizontal progression and the vertical stack of all parts at any given moment. They hold the full texture in their mind's ear and shape it in real time.
A DJ does the same thing. Instead of humans playing orchestral instruments, it's a suite of electronic instruments coordinated with digital sequencing. The DJ must hold that vertical stack — bass, percussion, melody, harmonic pads, vocal samples, effects — and know intuitively when the bass drops, when the melody sits on top, when to strip back and when to layer up. The deck is their score and their instrument simultaneously, and the crowd is their concert hall. The parallel with a conductor is not a metaphor. It's a structural description of the same cognitive task performed with different tools.
Table Stakes and the Thing Beyond Them
So: the technical skill to drive the deck is table stakes. It's formidable, but it's the entry price. The reason Carl Cox commands half a million pounds for a single night performing in front of 50,000 people — or Paul Van Dyk, or whoever occupies that tier — is not technical mastery alone. It's taste. Exquisite taste. The ability to take the enormous volume of material that exists and distil it into something an audience wants to consume. To filter, curate, sequence, and present — and to do it live, in the moment, reading the room.
This is what I call taste as art. The creative act is not generation. It's selection and composition. It's knowing what to pick as the thing to present.
Beyond the Deck
The same dynamic applies everywhere generation gets cheap. The human becomes editor — whether you're editing what gets shipped at your bank or what 50,000 people are dancing to. The abstraction layer rewards creative, insightful judgement. It doesn't eliminate the need for it — it makes the need more acute, because the volume of material to judge has gone through the roof.
The Differentiator
In a world of infinite generation, the differentiator is taste. The machine can generate. It cannot yet know what's good — not in the way that a human with experience, context, and point of view can know what's good. That gap is where the value sits.
Learn to be an editor, not just a creator. And don't confuse "the machine can generate it" with "the machine knows what's good." Those are two very different claims, and conflating them is how you end up with a world full of competent, pointless content.
Regards,
M@
Originally posted on matthewsinclair.com and cross-posted on Medium.
[ED: If you'd like to sign up for this content as an email, click here to join the mailing list.]