50 Times Folks With Zero Taste Executed Their Ideas Perfectly (New Pics)

If you’re been around the internet for long, you’ll likely know of the r/ATBGE, or Awful Taste But Great Execution, community on Reddit.

It’s a subreddit dedicated to sharing all things gaudy, tacky, overdone or tasteless, but done in a way that makes you doubt any of its negatives. In fact, you might spiral into a love-and-hate affair over it.

In other words, it looks like its lacking in elegance and grace, but is otherwise masterfully crafted.

The community was created in mid-2016—right about when the world started going south—and has since then grown to become one of the top-ranking subreddits out there.

The community boasts a solid 2.1 million members and is considered the top 1% of the Reddit ecosystem.

Subreddits mostly aim to call themselves in self-explanatory ways, and this is no exception.

The shared content mostly revolves around tattoos or other personal aesthetic decisions—brains for haircuts, religio-classic self-iconographic tattoos, literal body suits, what have you—there’s also product designs, statues, and art in general that’s often featured in this group.

When it comes to determining what taste is all about, David Hume’s essay titled Of The Standard of Taste is a good guide. Hume’s essay attempts to discuss and determine the aesthetic standards and understanding of what makes things beautiful to us. Or at the very least, aesthetically pleasing to the eyes, heart, and mind.

Hume points out two elements, the first of which is the subjective. As the word already suggests, it’s all about people’s preferences and sensibilities, very individual. That in and of itself is the first standard, shaped by personal experience, cultural background, emotions, and everything in-between.

The other side of the argument is the objective element. This is meant to be a common ground with which people can evaluate works of art and aesthetics. It’s a kind of shared human convention for judgment, one that is not individual, but rather unbiased, critical and one that adheres to specific universal criteria.

Subjective taste is something we just have from the get-go, but objective taste demands refinement. Hume believed that, in order for one to acquire an objective taste meant that they need to expose themselves to that which is objectively considered as good. That means reading books, going to museums to experience art, and otherwise training yourself to understand what the “it” factor is in the collective hive-mind.

Now, David Hume is one of many people who have discussed the idea of personal and objective taste. German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote Critique of Judgment, which deals with pleasure in form and arrangement versus pleasure in the idea of the infinite.

Walter Benjamin is another philosopher and cultural critic who dove into the topic, explaining how tech and mass production affects our experience of art in his The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Edmund Burke, John Ruskin, Arthur Schopenhauer, Susanne Langer—many have approached the topic of taste. In a sense, they’ve all added to the discussion of what the benchmarks and thresholds for the issue ought to be. But because taste as a concept is complex, a lot still remains to be determined about it. And as time goes by, even more nuances to consider appear.

Now, if you still have a thirst for tasteless things of exceptional craftsmanship, this Bored Panda article might just be your next stop as it features more of what you’ve seen today.

And if all that you’ve taken from this listicle today is “screw what the greats and not-so-greats say about taste, I’m gonna decide that for myself,” then just roll with it.

Speaking of which, there’s an entire comment section awaiting your judgments, opinions, and stories of what taste is or anything else that you’ve seen or read here today.