People talk about taste as if it were a personality trait. You either have it or you do not. I think that is mostly a way of avoiding the work.
Taste is a practice. It is the accumulated result of paying attention, making comparisons, and being willing to say why one thing is better than another. The why is the important part. A preference without a reason is just a mood.
Attention is the raw material
You cannot develop taste without exposure. But exposure alone is not enough. Most people consume an enormous amount and notice very little. The difference is attention: the willingness to stop, look again, and describe what is actually there.
This is why criticism is useful even when you disagree with it. A good critic does not tell you what to like. They show you what to look at. The argument is a set of instructions for seeing.
Constraints clarify
A useful exercise: take something you love and remove the thing you love most about it. Does it still work? If the answer is yes, you may have been attached to a detail rather than the thing itself. If the answer is no, you have found the load-bearing decision.
Taste improves fastest under constraints. A budget, a deadline, a material that will not cooperate — these force you to distinguish between what is essential and what is merely familiar.
The danger of the refined
There is a failure mode on the other side. Taste can become a kind of armour: everything must be impeccable, and nothing is allowed to be strange. The result is expensive and lifeless.
The things I return to usually have one deliberate imperfection. A rough edge that keeps the object from feeling sealed. Perfect is a closed system. Taste, at its best, leaves a door open.
A working definition
Taste is the ability to make a decision, explain it, and revise it when the evidence changes.
That is all. It is not a gift, and it is not a verdict. It is a habit of mind that gets stronger the more honestly you use it.