Daily Inspiration Quote by Marshall McLuhan

Good taste looks like a virtue until McLuhan turns it into a tell: a mask worn by people who can curate but can’t invent. The line is built as a two-step trap. First, it punctures the bourgeois idea that taste is evidence of refinement; it can just as easily be evidence of caution. “Refuge” frames taste as defensive architecture, a place to hide when you have no work of your own to risk. Then McLuhan flips it: for the artist, taste isn’t a starting point but a “last-ditch stand,” the emergency brake pulled when experimentation has run out of road, or when the audience, market, or medium is pushing back.

The subtext is pure McLuhan: creativity isn’t primarily a matter of individual genius but of how forms, technologies, and institutions shape what can be said. In a mass-media environment, “good taste” becomes a social technology - a consensus filter that keeps things legible, saleable, and non-threatening. It’s what lets gatekeepers reward polish over surprise. That’s why it’s a refuge for the non-creative: taste can mimic judgment without generating new perception.

For the artist, though, taste functions like triage. When a work teeters on incoherence, taste is the last remaining constraint that prevents novelty from collapsing into noise. McLuhan’s sting is that both uses are conservative; the difference is whether taste is protecting comfort or salvaging a risk.