Showing papers on "Taste (sociology) published in 1989"

The Open Work

Abstract: 1. The Poetics of the Open Work 2. Analysis of Poetic Language 3. Openness, Information, Communication 4. The Open Work in the Visual Arts 5. Chance and Plot: Television and Aesthetics 6. Form as Social Commitment 7. Form and Interpretation in Luigi Pareyson's Aesthetics 8. Two Hypotheses about the Death of Art 9. The Structure of Bad Taste 10. Series and Structure 11. The Death of the Gruppo 63 Notes Index

No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture

Abstract: The intellectual and the popular: Irving Howe and John Waters, Susan Sontag and Ethel Rosenberg, Dwight MacDonald and Bill Cosby, Amiri Baraka and Mick Jagger, Andrea Dworkin and Grace Jones, Andy Warhol and Lenny Bruce. All feature in Andrew Ross's lively history and critique of modern American culture. Andrew Ross examines how and why the cultural authority of modern intellectuals is bound up with the changing face of popular taste in America. He argues that the making of "taste" is hardly an aesthetic activity, but rather an exercise in cultural power, policing and carefully redefining social relations between classes.

Dining Out: A Sociology of Modern Manners

Abstract: Part 1 Dining out: the meaning of food in the public domain the modern restaurant - a diorama of desire dining out. Part 2 The manners of modernity: pleasure and desire manners and the expression of desire fashions in taste civility.

The taste of ethnographic things

Abstract: This book is, at one level, a charming set of anecdotal essays on some of Stoller's experiences among the Songhay of Niger, and at another level a plea for more ethnographic candor on the part of anthropologists and for a changed ethnographic style. He finds anthropologists reticent about their problems in the field, particularly when the anthropologist has been treated with something less than friendship or respect by the people being "studied," or has been seriously mistaken in one or another interpretation of speech or behavior, or has been over zealous in giving credence to norms rather than practice, or has had an experience that cannot be accounted for rationally. Stoller uses these tales about himself in the field, incidents of insult, misunderstanding and emotional involvement as an ingeniously constructed springboard for a criticism of anthropology. The most lamentable style of anthropological writing and anthropological thinking is something he calls "realistic ethnography," following Marcus and Cushman (1982). The writing conventions of realist enthnography as described by Marcus and Cushman involve a description strongly informed by preconceived theoretical analytical categories (cultural, functionalist, or structuralist), a third person narrative voice, a good deal of professional jargon, a presentation of individuals in such a way that they remain nameless and characterless, a description of events not as idiosyncratic incidents, but as typifications of marriage, kinship, ritual etc., and, in the package, an assertion that the ethnography represents the indigenous point of view, though often such authors are reticent on the subject of their competence in the other's language. Stoller asks the current crop of self-questioning ethnographers, "Are there other dimensions of ethnographic discourse, other conventions of representation which may carry anthropology deeper into the being of the others? Are there other modes of representation that better solve the fundamental problems of realist ethnographic representation: voice, authority, and authenticity" (p. 27)?

Art of judgement

Abstract: Part 1: Beauty under judgement - the difficulty of beauty, the matter, form and power of a commonwealth, a certain beauty of order taste and civil society - taste and the je ne sais quoi, Whig Hellenism, the institutionalization of beauty and order, critic on the beach, form and discrimination, materials for a good system, taste and the wealth of nations, taste and civil society aesthetic and the police-state - polizei and philosophy, rational jurisprudence and culture, the dream castle of reason, art and the lower faculty, art and the system, aesthetic as a philosophy of history, aesthetic and the police-state. Part 2: Judgement before the critique - orientation in tradition, theoretical judgement, practical judgement, judgement and pleasure, the riddle of the "self-alienating understanding" the critique of judgement power-the critical text - pleasure and technique, analytic of the beautiful, analytic of the sublime, tradition in the deduction, life and frivolity, life and the summum bonnum.

Different Worlds: A Sociological Study of Taste, Choice and Success in Art

Abstract: Introduction 1. Historical background 2. The population of painters and the split into subsystems 3. Patterns of success 4. The 'gatekeepers' - critics 5. The 'gatekeepers' - curators 6. The 'gatekeepers' - gallery owners 7. The artists - attitudes of Conceptualists and Lyrical Abstractionists 8. The artists - attitudes of figurative painters 9. The publics 10. Conclusion Appendices Notes Index.

“A Church-going People are a Dress-loving People”: Clothes, Communication, and Religious Culture in Early America

Abstract: When the early nineteenth-century pastor William Henry Foote reflected upon the eighteenth-century Christians who were his forebears in North Carolina and Virginia, he paused at one point to make an observation about the clothes they wore. “A church-going people are a dress-loving people”, he said; “The sanctity and decorum of the house of God are inseparably associated with a decent exterior; and the spiritual, heavenly exercises of the inner man are incompatible with a defiled and tattered, or slovenly mein. All regular Christian assemblies cultivate a taste for dress, and none more so than the hardy pioneer settlers of Upper Carolina, and the valley and mountains of Virginia” As they readied themselves for worship, Foote elaborated, the faithful “put on their best and carefully preserved dress” in preparation for “their approach to the King of Kings”.

A History of Country House Visiting: Five Centuries of Tourism and Taste

Abstract: Travelling hopefully built for envious show a madness to gaze at trifles arbiters of taste the polite tourist creative fancy a well pleased throng of people England my England! the stately home business.

Kitsch and Aesthetic Education.

Abstract: Our seminar in aesthetics this year began with a discussion of a thirteeninch-high painted plaster head of a conquistador, bought in a Salvation Army store. Kitsch objects like this might seem a bizarre choice for a class devoted to the arts. If what we are trying to inculcate in our students are an understanding of fine art and good taste, what could be the point of showing them poorly designed objects in the worst taste? In this article we hope to show the point. We begin with a historical analysis of kitsch and then present a rationale for making it part of aesthetic education.

English and American Textiles: From 1790 to the Present

Abstract: Looks at how textiles have changed during the past two hundred years and discusses taste and technical innovation.

Keepers of Culture: The Art-Thought of Kenyon Cox, Royal Cortissoz, and Frank Jewett Mather, Jr.

Abstract: The conflict between modern and traditional art is one of the best known episodes in American cultural history. The modernists won the war in the sense that their styles and attitudes of mind dominated the discussion and production of new art. But the traditionalists remained strong in the arenas of public opinion and taste. It is a testament to the importance of the ideas involved that the basic issues are not yet settled in the larger cultural world. Kenyon Cox, a painter as well as critic, revealed a devotion to the ideals of a high art tradition, derived in his later years chiefly from admiration for the Italian Renaissance. He knew western art history, surveyed the current art scene in many reviews and analytical essays, and wrote with careful attention to the canons of scholarship. Royal Cortissoz, the art editor of the "New York Tribune" for over 50 years, was an appreciator and connoiseur. His belief in "beauty" in a well-done and recognizable form left him open to more innovation than was the case with Cox. He was well suited to speak to and for the growing middle class in the Progressive era. The fact that he remained a significant figure in art circles long after his tastes ceased to be dominant, testified to the nature of the audience for whom and to whom he spoke. Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., was the most realistic of these critics in estimating how art appealed in society. He was concerned to see that the arts remained integrated in public esteem and thought. Mather took comfort from history of art, which revealed to him that great works and their creators could survive time and criticism. This sense of historical process let Mather escape the bitterness that so affected Cox, and to a lesser extent Cortissoz, as tastes changed.

From the other Side: Public Artists on Public Art

Abstract: The night the evening news in New York carried the story about the removal/destruction of Richard Serra's Tilted Arc, Serra appeared on a local television station and stated that, among other things, the issue was one of freedom of expression, not of taste. After each news report, the newscaster broke into a cynical grin and murmured a deprecating remark to his colleagues—an all-knowing insinuation that the artist was a “kook” and that they, the representatives of the public, knew what good art was, and this was not it. After all, it was merely a steel slab placed across a plaza collecting graffiti.

Nutrition and the chemical senses. Problems and opportunities.

Abstract: Atwater's charts reduced the smell, taste, texture and weight of food to an essential nutritional line…. Were we today less accustomed to tables of proteins and calories, we might find it implausible that the son of a Temperance minister could entirely reconstrue the meanings of foods without reference to taste, ethnic tradition, or social context. Yet that is what Atwater did. (H. Schwartz, Never Satisfied, Viking Press, 1986)

The Cultural Spectrum

Abstract: Culture! Westerners often use this word to mean a taste for the fine arts, music and other aesthetic matters. But it has a much broader meaning, namely, the shared values, language and traditions that define a particular group of people, be they Australian aborigines, black Americans, or the ancient Greeks. Culture is learned as a child, and as children we each learned from those around us a particular set of rules, beliefs, priorities and expectations that moulded our world into a meaningful whole. That is our culture. It tells us what is correct, expected, normal and right. It explains the world for us. It gives meaning and purpose to our lives. Culture is the socially determined mental framework in which we live. It is our Weltanschauung, our worldview, our abstract conception of reality.

(Un)Creating Taste: Wordsworth's Platonic Defense in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads

Abstract: (1989). (Un)creating taste: Wordsworth's Platonic defense in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 333-347.

Wordsworth and the Motions of the Mind

Abstract: Contents: Wordsworth's determination to teach as Nature teaches. His confidence in the human mind and his constantly varying methods of posing intellectual challenges to readers. His role in shaping modern taste and criticism. No previous critic has undertaken such an analysis of the poet's pedagogical philosophy and methods in the works of a very productive artistic lifetime.

Matters of Taste & Style

Abstract: Right now, frizzy hair and large earrings are "in" with the girls in my classes, while the boys are "into" 4-by-4s and t-shirts. When I was in school the "frizzies" were considered a social disaster, and cars were supposed to be streamlined, not boxy. Styles and tastes obviously change, especially in a society as fast-paced as ours. Every segment of the culture seems subject to changes in fashioneven science. Though empiricists would see taste and style as playing no role in scientific research-objective evaluation of objectively accumulated evidence is all that mattersmost present-day observers of science think differently: