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HYLAND Can taste be taught? The New York School of Interior Design, nearly one hundred years old this year and thought by many to be the only free-standing institution of its kind in the United States, strives, through its curriculum, to impart in equal measure technical expertise and the second sight— better known as taste—learned from meticulous study of the past. Taste is a fraught question, embedded with all sorts of cultural and even economic implications, possibly a tacit snobbery. The greatest decorators—Michelangelo, Robert Adam—possessed a je ne sais quoi that surpassed learning, which in Adam's case was a prodigious Classical education, both visual and literary. Michelangelo, beginning at the age of thirteen, passed through a one-year apprenticeship in the art of fresco with Ghirlandaio, moving on to studies of anatomy (forbidden by the Catholic Church) while under the patronage of the Medici. Whether one is a gifted apprentice, or gentleman architect endowed with all the instruction of the Grand Tour, there is in every great designer a core—what philosopher James Hillman called the "acorn"—that transcends and even defeats immediate genealogy or upbringing. My tentative answer to my own question is to say that any education in design, interior design particularly,