> what the taste thesis actually proposes is not an empowerment of human agency but a fundamental demotion. It might be the most elegant and well-branded demotion in the history of human self-regard. ## Patronage = Collaborative Creative Act > Patronage was a relationship between capital and artistic labor so intimate that the two were functionally a single body. The patron did not select from finished works on a wall, allocating neat sums of money to purchase them. The patron animated the work before it existed. > The patron didn't stroll in once the painting was finished to evaluate it. He arrived before the first brushstroke. He specified the subject. He specified the materials. The contract was explicit down to the gram — how much ultramarine, how much gold leaf — because these things cost real money and the patron was not interested in artistic ambiguity. He specified the dimensions, he specified what figures should appear and where. > > The painter pushed back. He knew things the patron did not. He understood composition, perspective, the play of light, the behavior of pigment on gesso, the structural properties of the poplar panels he would paint on. The patron's money bought the ultramarine and the painter's knowledge determined what it could become. > > ==The negotiation between these two was the generative act.== The patron's capital and ambition, the painter's skill and stubbornness. They were locked in a generative argument about what the thing should be, and what emerged was a product of that argument — not of anyone's judgment, but of their shared labor. 尤利乌斯没有"品味地"选择完成的作品。他爬上六十英尺高的脚手架，和米开朗基罗吵架。 ## Taste = Consumption 品味是什么时候出现的？十八世纪。当赞助人离开了创作现场，当收藏家取代了赞助人，当画廊取代了工坊。品味是赞助关系破裂后的残渣——纯粹的消费，指向虚无。 > This is taste. Taste is what you call the patron's function after you have removed the patron from the process of making. It is the disgusting residue of a relationship that used to be generative, refocused entirely towards consumption. > The collector replaced the patron. The critic replaced the guildmaster. The gallery replaced the bottega. Taste replaced patronage. What was lost was friction. The argument. The being in the room. The orientation towards something that mattered. The relationship between capital and labor and the transcendent that made something neither could produce alone. ## 创造链的末端 The emphasis on "taste" 让人站在创造链的末端，评判已经存在的东西。 人类的功能 -- 不是站在生成物的末端评判和选择，而是在开端参与和共同创造。 [[Taste is about using like a builder]] [[Be the creator not consumer of your world]] > If you asked me what the function of humans is after AGI, It is to handle the transcendent with this same fine disregard for the rules. To look at what is great and what serves us, to play with it, to riff on it, to hold it loosely, and to orient towards it in a way that lets us co-create with it.