Transcript slides - University of Warwick

Tastes: An Aesthetically &
Morally Sensitive Approach
Laurie Hanquinet
University of York
[email protected]
Taste is not all about
aesthetics; it is not all about
social forces either
What makes the high art high? Is it that
its appeal is mostly to high audiences?
Then what makes the audience high?
That its taste is for high art?
(Cohen, 1999, p. 142)
Towards a theoretical model?
Seeks to give aesthetics a substantial role in the
account of tastes
Aesthetic values should be treated seriously
Aesthetic values evolve over time: how are these
historical developments being internalized into
cultural classifications?
Aesthetics interacts with morality to fashion the
‘good’ and the ‘bad’ taste
But first, a note on the
difference between aesthetic
experiences and aesthetic
classifications
Socio-historical genesis of
aesthetic classifications
• Aesthetic criteria are the products of
historical moments
• Role of the habitus in the development of
renewed aesthetic dispositions
 Need to update our vocabulary?
Another look at Bourdieu’s theory
• Cultural capital is based on the idea of accumulation of
resources, which was, in Bourdieu’s mind, led by different
aesthetic principles
• Highbrow aesthetic: abstract (form over content),
disinterestedness, distance, affective neutralisation
• Popular aesthetic: concrete, immediate, emotionally
teinted
• But Bourdieu’s definition of highbrow culture draws on an
implicitly modernist aesthetic that needs to be updated
< changes in the field of cultural production: what is
aesthetically refined has changed
Aesthetic paradigms
• Modernism challenged the traditional characteristics of
works of art, such as representation, harmony and beauty, and
artistic skills
 detachment in arts appreciation and autonomy of
artworks
• Postmodernism endorses a playful
aesthetic based on
trangression and experimentation
Merges life and art, the commercial and popular
 Possibility for art to encapsulate
visions of how to live together
Morality & Aesthetics
‘[I]n many instances everyday judgments of
taste are not only understood as a question
of aesthetics but that they are also matters
of moral, ethical and communal sensibility’
(Woodward & Emmison, 2001, pp. 296–297,
highlighted by me)
Morality: different levels of
consciousness (Vaisey, 2009)
• Discursive consciousness
e.g. Heinich (1998): Moral values can be used to justify
rejections of contemporary art
• Practical consciousness: ‘ethical dispositions’ (Sayer
2005) and aesthetic dispositions are intertwined in the
definition of the good and the bad
‘people do not experience their aesthetic beliefs as merely
arbitrary and conventional; they feel that they are natural,
proper and moral. An attack on a convention and an aesthetic is
also an attack on a morality’ (Becker, 1974: 773).
A model as conclusion
Sociohistoric
context
(7)
Social
Origin
(1)
Social
position/
age
(9)
Different
registers
of values
(2)
Aesthetic
(3)
Schemes of
perceptions
(5)
Moral
(4)
Generative process of aesthetic classifications
Cultural
capital
(6)
Tastes as
practices
(8)
Indirect role of socio-demographics
• Condition the set of values people can have at disposal –
according to the social context they live in
• Influence the selection of aesthetic and moral principles
people operate in the development of their cultural
capital
• Not the end of cultural hierarchies and symbolic
domination
More insidious, hiding themselves being the ideas of
diversity and plurality
• Society still divided between those who have taste and
those who don’t with the social and economic
advantages that go with it
THANK YOU