Taste Consultant is an ongoing conceptual work in which taste ceases to be a private instinct and becomes, instead, a service.
Most people’s taste is terrible. Change that by outsourcing your taste to artist Jay Pole.
Clients pay a deliberately, unapologetically enormous fee to gain access to the artist, Jay Pole, via messaging. From the seemingly inconsequential to the faintly existential, nothing is considered too minor for consultation. Which chair? Which coat? Which restaurant? Which wine? Which holiday? Which lamp? Which art?
The client sends a message. Jay Pole considers the matter. A judgement arrives.
The work is predicated on a simple but increasingly difficult proposition: taste is power. Or at least, good taste is power. And if you don’t have it, or are too busy to have good taste, at last you can out source your taste to someone else.
There is, of course, something faintly ridiculous about paying such extraordinary sums to be told what to buy. This ridiculousness is precisely where Taste Consultant becomes interesting. The fees are enormous. Quite enormous. And yet the clients continue to pay them. Indeed, satisfied clients apparently regard the expense not as a burden but as a kind of luxury: the luxury of having someone else worry about whether something is good.
In this sense, Taste Consultant offers a peculiar contemporary service: the outsourcing of discernment.
Jay Pole’s advice extends beyond objects into the larger choreography of a tasteful existence. Purchases, habits, destinations, gestures and decisions may all be submitted for consideration. The service does not merely ask, “Do I like this?” It proposes the more sophisticated question: “Would I like this if I had taste?”
Clients report satisfaction. They return. Some ask to pay more.
There is something almost ecclesiastical about the arrangement: a monthly offering, a private channel, a trusted authority and, in return, the possibility of salvation from the terrible burden of choosing badly.
Taste Consultant is therefore both artwork and proposition, satire and luxury service, social experiment and genuinely excellent idea. It asks what happens when cultural capital becomes a subscription, when aesthetic judgement becomes on-demand, and when the unbearable freedom of contemporary life can be alleviated by simply messaging an artist.
The fee might be enormous. But apparently, so is the relief.
Clients wishing to experience the work for themselves are invited to enquire. Naturally, places are limited.