Objectivity of Art and the Challenge of Taste
Glon, Emmanuelle
Objectivity of Art and the Challenge of Taste - 2014.
95
Is aesthetic taste just a matter of embodied cultural preference? It is commonplace that the promotion of a certain kind of aesthetic value depends on the context, be it social, economic, ideological, generational, etc., in which dispositions are actualised. This idea has been widely popularised by cultural sociology, Bourdieu’s work especially. Now, how it matters is not clear. One theoretical topic is to ask whether aesthetic propositions using evaluative concepts, such like “original”, “beautiful”, “innovative”, “complex”, etc., can have a truth value. There are epistemic values, such as moderation, judgment, intelligence, scruple, etc. What about aesthetic values? Even though aesthetic values are not applicable to everyone everywhere, yet there is a sense in which our aesthetic judgments are valid. The article proposes to open the dialogue between cognitive science and cultural sociology. In the first section, I present an overview of the existing approaches developped in sociology about cultural practices. Then, after outlining these approaches, I engage them in a broader epistemological analysis of social causality, between reductionism and contextualism. In the final section, I briefly expose the “folk aesthetics hypothesis”, which, similar to other kind of implicit knowledge, such like “folk physics”, defins the spontaneous interaction with a certain kind of object – that is aesthetic objects.
Objectivity of Art and the Challenge of Taste - 2014.
95
Is aesthetic taste just a matter of embodied cultural preference? It is commonplace that the promotion of a certain kind of aesthetic value depends on the context, be it social, economic, ideological, generational, etc., in which dispositions are actualised. This idea has been widely popularised by cultural sociology, Bourdieu’s work especially. Now, how it matters is not clear. One theoretical topic is to ask whether aesthetic propositions using evaluative concepts, such like “original”, “beautiful”, “innovative”, “complex”, etc., can have a truth value. There are epistemic values, such as moderation, judgment, intelligence, scruple, etc. What about aesthetic values? Even though aesthetic values are not applicable to everyone everywhere, yet there is a sense in which our aesthetic judgments are valid. The article proposes to open the dialogue between cognitive science and cultural sociology. In the first section, I present an overview of the existing approaches developped in sociology about cultural practices. Then, after outlining these approaches, I engage them in a broader epistemological analysis of social causality, between reductionism and contextualism. In the final section, I briefly expose the “folk aesthetics hypothesis”, which, similar to other kind of implicit knowledge, such like “folk physics”, defins the spontaneous interaction with a certain kind of object – that is aesthetic objects.
Réseaux sociaux