Sandy Diamantino

People who create genius don’t just produce a huge volume of work, but they also consume a huge volume of work. And not blind consumption as in mass media products that everybody else is consuming just so that they can keep up, but rather, they consume anything and everything that their inner itch draws them towards — from lived experience in day to day life to information beyond the confines of any particular genre. Their core motivation isn’t to judge, but it’s to understand. Judgment is driven by personal biases, whereas taste is driven by pure, unadulterated, and child-like curiosity.

…when it takes a preference for one thing over another, it doesn’t work with the good-bad dichotomy. The core driver of taste is whether or not the critic can understand where the product came from, whether or not it can follow the path that the creator themselves followed to get to where they ended. When it comes to taste, it’s fine not to like a strange, experimental sound in the middle of a new s…

…hink are great, but it’s another to understand them in a way that they were meant to be understood. When the majority of us like or dislike something like a great piece of art, or a particular brand of information, or indeed, a dish of food, it’s rarely a matter of taste; more so, it’s a matter of judgment. We have our lived experience, and that lived experience has thought us to see some things as good a…