Showing papers on "Taste (sociology) published in 1988"

The Social Life of Things

Abstract: The meaning that people attribute to things necessarily derives from human transactions and motivations, particularly from how those things are used and circulated. The contributors to this volume examine how things are sold and traded in a variety of social and cultural settings, both present and past. Focusing on culturally defined aspects of exchange and socially regulated processes of circulation, the essays illuminate the ways in which people find value in things and things give value to social relations. By looking at things as if they lead social lives, the authors provide a new way to understand how value is externalized and sought after. They discuss a wide range of goods - from oriental carpets to human relics - to reveal both that the underlying logic of everyday economic life is not so far removed from that which explains the circulation of exotica, and that the distinction between contemporary economics and simpler, more distant ones is less obvious than has been thought. As the editor argues in his introduction, beneath the seeming infinitude of human wants, and the apparent multiplicity of material forms, there in fact lie complex, but specific, social and political mechanisms that regulate taste, trade, and desire. Containing contributions from American and British social anthropologists and historians, the volume bridges the disciplines of social history, cultural anthropology, and economics, and marks a major step in our understanding of the cultural basis of economic life and the sociology of culture. It will appeal to anthropologists, social historians, economists, archaeologists, and historians of art.

The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture

Abstract: This stimulating and perceptive study of jazz relates the work of jazz artists such as Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Lester Young, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman to such subjects as primitivism in the arts, neoclassicism, good and bad taste, improvisation and recordings and the imperfection of art, and aesthetics in general. Students of music and all those interested in jazz

Taste and ideology in seventeenth-century France

Abstract: Preface 1. 'Taste' and history 2. Defining gout: the dictionaries 3. Mere: taste and the ideology of honnetete 4. Saint Evremond: taste and cultural hegemony 5. La Rochefoucauld: tastes and their vicissitudes 6. La Bruyere: taste-discourse and the absent subject 7. Boileau: taste and the institution of 'literature' Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index.

Aesthetic perception in environmental design

Abstract: For well over two centuries, the doctrine of the disinterestedness of aesthetic perception has stood as a dogma of Western philosophy Developing in the eighteenth century in the works of Shaftesbury and succeeding British writers, emerging as the theoretical centerpiece in Kant, elaborated by Schopenhauer, and refined by Bullough, Bergson, and Croce, aesthetic disinterestedness stands as a “major watershed in the history of aesthetics” (Stolnitz, 1961, p 139) Indeed, up to the present time, the tendency to affirm this attitude has dominated most theoretical discussion in the English-speaking world Let me recall the claims of this idea by citing Kant's (1790) classic formulation: Taste in the beautiful is alone a disinterested and free satisfaction; for no interest, either of sense or of reason, here forces our assent Taste is the faculty of judging of an object or a method of representing it by an entirely disinterested satisfaction or dissatisfaction The object of such satisfaction is called beautiful (First Moment, 35) Although there is much in the Kantian aesthetic that continues to reflect our experience and claim our assent, such as his contention that the judgment of taste concerns pleasure that is unintellectual and immediate, there are facets of his view that reflect a tradition in aesthetics that is open to serious question This is because the doctrine of disinterestedness and the correlative ideas that it fosters do not derive from a close examination of the conditions and features of our aesthetic experience of art and nature

Post-impressionists in England

Abstract: Documents the response of English taste to modern French art from the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1905 to the outbreak of the First World War, showing how responses were conditioned by social and political concerns.

Democracy and Excellence

Abstract: Underlying some of the most vigorous debates about the arts today are attitudes which are rooted in history or general assumptions which are rarely made explicit. We are all democrats now-provided you don't ask us to define democracy. In contemporary debates about the arts "elitism" is the most frequently used term of abuse. Significantly, it is regularly misused to denounce any belief in excellence, whereas it properly means the belief that excellence should be kept for the few, the elite. Lord (Kenneth) Clark was being elitist when he rejoiced in his autobiography that a certain architectural gem in Rome was usually empty, showing the huge gap between informed and popular taste. "God forbid," he wrote, "that it should ever be narrowed." This was a strange sentiment for a former chairman of the Arts Council, but fortunately Clark was an inconsistent elitist who used television skillfully to narrow the gap between informed and popular taste. "Democracy," however, has not always been so favorably regarded, especially in discussion of the arts. In the nineteenth century Sir Edmund Gosse (author of the novel Father and Son) warned against what he called "the spread of the democratic sentiment." He believed that the traditions of literary taste were being overturned: "Until now, the values in the arts have been determined by the educated classes. Now they are determined by the popular vote. Of late there seem to be certain signs, especially in America, of a revolt of the mob against our literary masters. The revolution against taste, once begun, will land us in irreparable chaos."

Art Critics and Art Publics: A Study in the Sociology and Politics of Taste

Abstract: This article examines theoretically and empirically a central question in the sociology of art: the role of art critics and their influence on artists, art works, and art publics. The study compare...

The Pedagogical Imperative

Abstract: In 1762 Lord Kames published his Elements of Criticism. His object, like Hume’s (1757) a few years earlier, was to describe and justify the principles of taste by showing their origins in human nature or ‘the sensitive part of man’s being’.

Le sucré dans les livres de cuisine français, du XIVe au XVIIIe siècle

Abstract: The analysis of cookbooks suggests that contrary to their Western European neigh- bors, the French of the fourteenth century did not hâve a taste for sweet things. Later, the constant expansion of sugar consumption shows that they did acquire a taste for sweets. However, beginning in the seventeenth century, an increasingly clear distinction is made between which foods can be sweetened and which can be salted. Their position within the course of a meal was specified with greater and greater precision.

Sixteen Textbook Authors Respond.

Abstract: I discovered sociology almost 30 years ago in a small introductory course at the University of Buffalo (now SUNY at Buffalo). We used the second edition of Broom and Selznick, which neither set nor extinguished intellectual fires. Its chief virtue was the use of "adapted readings," mildly bowdlerized journal articles and book excerpts that could stimulate a taste for real social science. Fortunately for me, sociology was personified by a wise and patient teacher, Llewellyn Gross, who somehow encouraged me to think sociologically within the limited range of my own knowledge and experience. Had my impressions of the field been shaped by the textbook alone, I might now have some other vocation. During those 30 years, textbooks have become worse, not better. They have more colors but fewer ideas, they no longer presume that students are literate or interested in sociology (or in much else), and they say less and less of substance about sociology, not to mention the social world that our discipline presumably studies. Although I suspect that the declining quality of the introductory textbook has had little to do with the tides of undergraduate enrollment, which seem to ebb and flow in response to other influences, the genre makes little contribution to the education of undergraduates and even less to the success of sociology as a discipline. What has gone wrong, and what, if anything, can we do about it? I find it difficult either to describe the problems or to feel optimistic about the future. There have been many changes in higher education in my three decades of experience; the discipline of sociology has declined; and the presumption that there is some usable introductory textbook format, if only we could discover it, has itself become suspect. In the department where I majored in sociology, each of the seven or eight faculty members seldom taught more than 40 students in one classroom. Now, as Frank Graham points out in his excellent assessment of textbook publishing, the large lecture is more typical. Then, even in the liberal arts program of a relatively impoverished local university, intellectual demands could be made on students, including freshmen. Now the range of abilities seems to be wider, and those who teach demanding courses seem to be more the exception than the rule, particularly at the beginning level in large universities. In addition, we define many of our students as having intellectual appetites and digestive tracts tolerant of only the blandest diet, and therefore as incapable of any serious work.

The Maze of Taste: On Bataille, Derrida, and Kant

Abstract: The case of Kant's Critique of Judgment offers a powerful example of the radical disruption of the metaphysical text, enacted by Bataille's major сoncepts. The analysis of the metaphor of economy in Kant, Bataille and Derrida suggests the crucial importance of Bataille's general economy—as the economy of loss—for deconstructing the Kantian conception of genius and the whole scheme of taste—as an economy of consumption—and inscribing a complex interplay forces that the general economy is designed to account for. Once however taste, art and the economy of genius can no longer be inscribed through the restricted economy of the metaphysical text, the question of genre and style of a different inscription—a general economy—acquires a crucial significance. Bataille's own discursive practice can be seen as an exemplification of such a different—plural— style.

The Relationship between Sport Involvement and Life-style in Youth Cultures:

Abstract: The article is a first attempt to apply Bourdieu's theory of social class differences, as it has been outlined in his book "La distinction, Critique sociale du jugement", to the understanding and the explication of the development of sport involvement in childhood and adolescence. The article puts the stress on sports in the context of family and peers and tries to demonstrate (1) how elements of taste do penetrate sportive situations, (2) how and why sportive situations are not apt to integrate people of different tastes, (3) that sport even in childhood and adolescence is a social system that helps to differentiate society vertically, (4) and it is shown that Bourdieu's concept of classes (incl. taste) might be able to explain social differences in sport involvement better than the traditional concept of class or social stratification.

Intellectuals and Ordinary People: Reading the Rosenberg Letters

Abstract: T Tnder what circumstances could the respectable, standard-sized, dwelling units of a low-rent housing project on New York's Lower East Side come to be characterized accusingly as the "visible manifestation of the Stalinized petty-bourgeois mind"?' In the tradition of establishing "guilt by housing," it has long been a commonplace to see the "petty-bourgeois mind" and its place of residence being pilloried for their respective lack of distinction, their failure of imagination, or their ready embrace of convention. Since the charges rarely come from below, they are almost wholly elitist; an entire class is impeached on the grounds of its sorry failure of taste. The addition of "Stalinized" to the "petty-bourgeois mind," however, suggests something altogether new,

1924: The Green Hat

Abstract: The Green Hat vexed the critics. Ralph Wright, reviewing it for the New Statesman, found Michael Arlen ‘an irritating writer’. Wright was particularly irritated by the ‘smart and thin style’ of Arlen’s prose, the boastful parade of knowledge about modern literature, and, last but not least, by the self-assurance of the man-about-town on matters related to women and sex: There is a sort of epigrammatic cocksureness on all the details of love-making that I find particularly unpleasant: an assumption that love has something to do with silk underclothing at one moment and at the next a rhetoric outburst on almost Wellsian lines of optimism. I do wish he [Arlen] would be a little more modest and show a little better taste when dealing with the subject.1

The Attitude of John Nash toward the Gothic Revival Style

Abstract: This paper explores the impact of an error in an important secondary source, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste, written in 1928 by Kenneth Clark, on the attitudes of subsequent architectural historians, as they describe the supposed antagonism of the English architect John Nash (1752-1835) toward the Gothic Revival style.