Instagram killed bad taste. And that might be a problem.

ART FRIED® Contemporary culture, served hot. Read in one shot. Digest later. Instagram has done something no design school ever managed: it taught hundreds of millions of people good taste at the same time. Most of us now know what an interesting apartment, a Copenhagen restaurant, a hotel in Menorca, an independent bookstore in Tokyo or the bathroom of someone who works in fashion is supposed to look like. We know the pale wood, brushed steel, imperfect ceramics, natural wine, the correct lamp and that particular shade of beige that somehow costs more than all the others. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Visual education has never been this accessible. The problem is that algorithms do not simply show us what we like; they learn what we like and return increasingly perfect versions of it. Taste, which should probably emerge from some messy combination of education, desire, mistakes, obsessions and accidental encounters, starts behaving more like an optimised playlist of things we have already learned to approve. Which makes genuinely bad taste suddenly rather interesting. Not calculated kitsch, curated camp or expensive ugliness — those already have moodboards — but the sincere bad taste of someone putting two things together that no algorithm would ever have introduced. A room with too much in it. The wrong colour. A ridiculous frame. A shirt that absolutely should not work and somehow does. They may be mistakes, but at least they still belong to someone. When millions of people save the same references, visit the same hotels, buy the same chairs and photograph the same plate from above, personal imperfection starts to look almost like aesthetic resistance. Instagram did not kill bad taste. It did something stranger: it taught us good taste so efficiently that good taste became predictable. And perhaps the worst taste you can have now is exactly the taste the internet expects from you. Art. Culture. No cold takes.