John Hegarty on Creative Judgement

"Creative judgement is all about taste. We are living in a fashion world. Taste is fundamentally important and you can't teach taste." John Hegarty

It always angers me when people argue that a skill, knack or ability is something you are born with. So few abilities are 100% innate. Most abilities are learned even if they are not taught. Taste does not exist in a cultural vacuum. Creative judgements are made in the context of the culture they relate to. No one is born with a cultural understanding. We acquire it.

"We all have some taste or other, of too ancient a date to admit of our remembering it was an acquired one." the painter, Henry Lamb

UPDATE: Grant McCracken has taken the baton and in response to this video declares that "one of the most powerful people in the world of British advertising has just declared intellectual bankruptcy". You can read his point of view in full here.

Comments

[Maria]

I have a background in law. From that educations I learnt that the desire for power (dominance in hierarchic structures) is something people "are born with", something natural (debatable). From that maybe taste -as a permanent struggle of understanding a set of codes that create dominance- is something we are born with. There are MANY different set of codes or taste. The question would be then, who has better taste, the one that appeals to the most powerful or the one that appeals to the many...
Thanks for the post. Interesting topic.