Perception over taste

The modern creative is playing a repeated game of perception. The exact same game painters played in 1841.

It was 1840. The European art establishment was a cartel. Rigid academic standards dictated the market. To paint at all required massive capital, a sophisticated studio, and institutional support just to procure and mix rare natural pigments.

In 1841, an American painter named John Goffe Rand patented the collapsible metal paint tube. He thought he was solving a storage problem. He was actually cracking the foundation of the European art establishment (French Academy, the Salon, etc.). By removing the friction of mixing paint and the high cost of studio setups, the tube democratized the medium for artists. As the technology spread, elite patronage restrictions and sponsor covenants slowly unwound.

“Without colors in tubes, there would be no Cézanne, no Monet, no Pissarro, and no Impressionism.”
— Auguste Renoir

The tube didn't arrive alone. For centuries, the full color palette was limited to those who could afford natural-made hues, which in turn limited creation and, more importantly, experimentation for everyone. The Industrial Revolution unlocked chemical products, reducing the cost of colors previously reserved for the wealthiest patrons.

The institution maintained its prestige, but affordable synthetic pigments and portable metal tubes disrupted its dominance. Artists no longer required a benefactor's permission or a large studio to explore new techniques.

Auguste Renoir (c. 1910)

Then photography arrived in 1839 and changed the art world. By making accurate representation cheap, it forced painters to compete on interpretation rather than reproduction. Paul Delaroche, a prominent French history painter, saw his first photograph and famously claimed: “From today, painting is dead.” Sound familiar?

Too many of these to count.

Little did Delaroche know that painting was on the verge of a revolution. The tube, backed by the convergence of two adjacent breakthroughs (synthetic paint, photography), collapsed the legacy hierarchy.

This portability led directly to the rise of “plein air” or “out-of-doors” painting in the mid-19th century (Van Gogh, Seurat, etc.), which the establishment rejected as amateur.

The White Orchard, Vincent van Gogh, c. 1888, oil on canvas (Amsterdam, 2022)

Today, AI is playing the same role as synthetic paint and tubes in creative fields by collapsing production costs and lowering the barrier to experimentation (for the senior dev, the designer, the copywriter, the musician, etc.). But just as the tube flooded the market with thousands of competent outdoor painters, AI is producing an ocean of competent yet undifferentiated content.

At the Second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876, Albert Wolff dismissed the new plein air painters in terms that sound uncannily modern: “These so-called artists take canvases, paint, and brushes, fling a few colours here and there, and add a signature.” He went on, using the phrase “impressionist” as a derogatory term.

The parallel suggests that when tools become ubiquitous, the technical ability to “make” loses its value as a differentiator. Yesterday's high‑polish web UI is today's AI slop. In the 19th century, photography's perfect replication of reality liberated artists from that obligation. This is the question of subjective perception that the Impressionists addressed.

Perception is a new core skill, not Taste.

Wolff misinterpreted the quantity of Impressionist paintings as mediocrity, and confused mediocrity with the entire movement. He failed to recognize that, within it, Monet, Pissarro, and Cézanne were pursuing something that would revolutionize art.

The critics were wrong then, and they are wrong now. The discourse today centers entirely on taste, but we have mislabeled nuance. Taste is a consumer's metric, whereas perception is an artist's.

The Circus Parade, Georges Seurat, c. 1888, oil on canvas (NYC, 2025)

The labor of production has become mere recitation, as automation reduces technical effort. This mistake conflates the collapse of the studio system with the end of art. Physical friction and recording obligations have vanished, leaving only a direct test of perception. Now, everyone is an impressionist in a sea of competence, with cheap tools. The only rare resource is your vision.

Taste is picking this out for a gallery. Perception is creating it.

The Potato Eaters, Vincent van Gogh, c. 1885, oil on canvas (Amsterdam, 2022)

So what is perception? For me, the clearest answer is a single painting: J. M. W. Turner's Whalers. It looks less like whaling than whaling, and yet it somehow embodies the experience more accurately than any literal depiction I've ever seen. It is my favorite painting.

Whalers,  J. M. W.  Turner, c. 1845, oil on canvas (NYC, 2025)