Is it ugly, or do you just not like it?

I bought a 4' tall paper mache parrot and it got me thinking about personal taste.

There’s a thrill in seeing something widely considered ugly and secretly thinking, I kind of love it. I felt this most recently when I bought a 4-foot-tall red and blue paper mache parrot on Marketplace. (He’s sitting on a perch and meant to be hung from the ceiling.) I think he’s fantastic. I plan to install him this weekend. These types of design choices might make an interior purist recoil, but they make me want to defend their oddness.

We’re told taste is personal, but in practice, it’s deeply social. Our preferences aren’t formed in isolation. They’re shaped by what we grew up with, what we were told was aspirational, what we see online and what we want to project, whether we realize it or not. Often, the concept of “bad taste” doesn’t mean something is ugly—it just means it doesn’t match the current cultural consensus of what’s tasteful.

And that consensus changes. Constantly.

Glass blocks, like peacock chairs and lava lamps, have come, gone and come back again. Personally, I adore them and the diffused light they create.

The rattan peacock chairs our parents sold at garage sales? Now going for hundreds on 1stDibs. The glossy forest green tile that looked dated 15 years ago? They’re popping up on the mood boards of boutique hotels’ reno plans. Even the humble lava lamp, once a punchline, is back on bedside tables thanks to a new generation of design maximalists. (And thanks to mega retailers like Urban Outfitters.)

As sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued in Distinction, first published in 1979, taste is never just about beauty. It’s about power. Aesthetic judgement becomes a way to signal status and mark ourselves as “in the know.” And what’s considered “good” is often tied to class, education, race and exclusion. When we say something has “no taste,” we’re really saying: It doesn’t belong here.

I used to think developing good taste was a kind of moral improvement. That if I worked hard enough, I’d train my eye to recognize quality. That I’d learn to love a classic black leather Eames chairs and that I’d stop being drawn to shiny glass fruit at the thrift store.