Showing papers on "Taste (sociology) published in 1993"

The Passion of Michel Foucault

Abstract: This is a study of Michel Foucault's life in philosophy. Foucault was probably the most influential Western philosopher since Sartre. Hailed as an original thinker, he has also been criticized as a dangerous and irresponsible nihilist. Drawing on extensive research, this book focuses on the philosopher's obsession with death and his taste for sado-masochistic sex. By the author of "Democracy in the Streets".

Re-made in Japan : everyday life and consumer taste in a changing society

Abstract: Introduction - domesticating the west the "Depaato" - merchandising the west while selling "Japaneseness" "For Beautiful Human Life" - the use of English in Japan tractors, TV, and telephones - reach out and touch someone in a Japanese village the Japanese bath - extraordinarily ordinary messages of western style in Japanese home magazines reclaiming social and psychological space in a Japanese institution for the elderly drinking etiquette in a changing beverage market ordering in a Japanese French restaurant in Hawai'i the aesthetics and politics of "Japanese" identity in the fashion industry "Omiyage" - shopping behaviour among Japanese tourists in Hawai'i "Bwana Mickey" - constructing cultural consumption at Tokyo Disneyland paved play - rewriting culture with automobile tango in Japan and the world economy of passion.

Management Laureates: A Collection of Autobiographical Essays

Abstract: Challenged on the cutting edge, Kathryn M. Bartol Performing, achieving, and belonging, Janice M. Beyer A hopscotch hike, Geert Hofstede Roots, wing, and applying management and leadership principles: a personal odyssey, John M. Ivancevich A common man travels "back to the future", Fred Luthans Taking the road less traveled: serendipity and the influence of others in a career, Jeffrey Pfeffer A taste for innovation, Derek S. Pugh Never say never!, John W. Slocum, Jr.

Taste and Fashion: The Social Function of Fashion and Style

Abstract: In the classical European humanistic tradition, fashion was alwavs thought to be anti thetical to good taste. A person blindly following the whims of fashion was without style, whereas a man of style - or a gentleman - used his own power of judgement Immanuel Kant shared this conception with many of his contemporaries. It is well known that Georg Simmel's idea of a formal sociology was influenced by his reading of Kant's aesthetic writings. Even Simmel's famous essay on fashion can best be understood as a somewhat ironic commentary on Kant's idea of a semus communis: the community of fashion is the real community of universal taste To Simmel, fashion is a societal formation always combining two opposite forces It is a socially acceptable and safe way to distinguish oneself from others and, at the same time, it satisfies the individual's need for social adaptation and imitation Furthermure, the charm of novelty offered by fashion is a purely aesthetic pleasure. Fashion helps to solve - at least provisional...

Music preference and taste cultures among adolescents

Abstract: (1993). Music preference and taste cultures among adolescents. Popular Music and Society: Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 55-69.

France at the Crystal Palace: Bourgeois Taste and Artisan Manufacture in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract: Whitney Walton approaches the nineteenth-century French industrial development from a new perspective--that of consumption. She analyzes the French performance at the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 to illustrate how bourgeois consumers influenced France's distinctive pattern of industrial development. She also demonstrates the importance of consumption and gender in class formation and reveals how women influenced industry in their role as consumers. Walton examines important consumer goods industries that have been rarely studied by historians, such as the manufacture of wallpaper, furniture, and bronze statues. Using archival sources on household possessions of the Parisian bourgeoisie as well as published works, she shows how consumers' taste for fashionable, artistic, well-made furnishings and apparel promoted a specialization unique to nineteenth-century France.

Taste Today: The Role of Appreciation in Consumerism and Design

Abstract: Chapter headings and selected contents: Foreword. Preface. Acknowledgements. What is Taste? Taste yesterday. Discriminating palates and keen eyes. Taste and temperament. Attitudes, beliefs and choices. The pleasures of the table - taste as a metaphor. Goods and Language. Purifying the dialect of the tribe. Structuralism and the world of goods. Good form: Gestalt and the nature of nuance. Product semantics. Metaphor and the importance of context. Irony, sophistication and camp. What is kitsch? Critical Values and Social Behaviour. Beauty and truth. On technique. Restraint - rhetoric and moral values. 'A sprawling, highly ornamental rococo extravagance'. Managing impressions. Taste and the Professionals. Creators and curators. Raising the nation's taste. Artists, intellectuals and the market place. The professionalization of taste. Design as a profession. Educating the taste makers. Ivory towers and real worlds - reward systems in curator professions. Them and Us. Taste cultures and taste publics. Styles and the structure of society. High Art, Big Design and What Sells. Legitimacy, quality and value. Professional ideology and good design. Popular, vernacular and pop. Fashion. Stability and change in symbolic forms. The diffusion of innovation. Fashion and commerce. Innovators, opinion leaders and gatekeepers. The dialectics of display. Fashion cycles. Quality and Equality. Quantification or understanding. Taste engineering. Quality in a democracy - the designer's responsibility. The 'grey area' of aesthetics. Design and the poetry of everyday things. Consumer education and cultural values. Notes and references. Index.

Sara Levy and the Making of Musical Taste in Berlin

Abstract: The salons of educated women represent an important aspect of the cultural history of Berlin during the second half of the eighteenth and the nineteenth century. Their full significance has been recognized only recently.' These salons provided a social setting in which the ideals of rationality, liberty, and "Bildung" could be realized in disregard of the hierarchical structure of the Prussian state. And it is not accidental that the first generation of salons were established almost exclusively in Jewish circles, where novel concepts of tolerance, equality, and emancipation were being developed at the same time. Of particular importance for the musical life of the Prussian capital is the salon of Sara Levy, daughter of the influential Jewish banker Daniel Itzig, great-aunt to Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, and student of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. In his function as "Miinz-Entrepreneur" and court Jew of Frederick the Great, Daniel Itzig (1722-1799) held the highest position a Jew could reach in the hierarchy of the Prussian state. Thus, it is not at all surprising that, following the customs at Frederick's court, Sara and her brothers and sisters received a thorough education in the French language and manners. Their musical education appears to have been equally profound: it is said that the family employed an excellent piano instructor with a fixed annual salary.2 Sara Levy's long life (1761-1854) spanned the second half of the reign of Frederick the Great, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Revolution of 1848. Documentary evidence for her salon exists mostly for the nineteenth century;3 the writers E. T. A. Hoffmann and Ludwig Bmrne, the historian Gustav Droysen, and musicians like the director of the Berlin Singakademie, Carl Friedrich Zelter, and of course Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy counted among her regular guests. More obscure, however, is the early phase of the social gatherings at her home. In this essay, I will present some ideas about the period prior to 1800 and attempt an assessment of the role she played as collector and patron of music, particularly by members of the Bach family.

Intellect, taste, and anxiety

Abstract: This is a history of the French, which tries to explain their idiosyncrasies, enthusiasms and prejudices. It goes beyond the recital of events to investigate their attitudes and behaviour over an unusually wide range of activities. The first part scrutinizes the peculiar way of thinking and of talking adopted by the French, their powerful sense of national identity, their ambivalent feelings about foreigners. It shows what it meant to be a Breton or a Provencal, an Alsation or an Auvergnat. The second part analyses French taste and the role of the artist. It enquires into the quality of life, the French view of happiness, friendship and comfort, humour, reactions to scientific progress, compromises with corruption and superstition. This survey is a major reinterpretation of France's achievement as a nation and of the individual experience of the French. It has taken its place as one of the great works of scholarship on modern France.

Machine Songs IV: The Menace of Mechanical Music

Abstract: Sweeping across the country with the speed of a transient fashion in slang or Panama hats, political war cries or popular novels, comes now the mechanical device to sing for us a song or play for us a piano, in substitute for human skill, intelligence, and soul. Only by harking back to the day of the roller skate or the bicycle craze, when sports of admitted utility ran to extravagance and virtual madness, can we find a parallel to the way in which these ingenious instruments have invaded every community in the land. And if we turn from this comparison in pure mechanics to another which may fairly claim a similar proportion of music in its soul, we may observe the English sparrow, which, introduced and welcomed in all innocence, lost no time in multiplying itself to the dignity of a pest, to the destruction of numberless native song birds, and the invariable regret of those who did not stop to think in time. On a matter upon which I feel so deeply, and which I consider so far-reaching, I am quite willing to be reckoned an alarmist, admittedly swayed in part by personal interest, as well as by the impending harm to American musical art. I foresee a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste, an interruption in the musical development of the country, and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue--or rather by vice--of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines. When I add to this that I myself and every other popular composer are victims of a serious infringement on our clear moral rights in our own work, I but offer a second reason why the facts and conditions should be made clear to everyone, alike in the interest of musical art and of fair play. It cannot be denied that the owners and inventors

Painted Promises: The Politics of Public Art in Late Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract: During the Second Empire, according to this essay, prescriptive principles for mural painting served as a common aesthetic for artists, provided industrial workers with an appropriate vocabulary of form, and associated all aspects of production with the fine arts. By contrast, in a cultural turning point for public art, Third Republic policy associated public art projects with new marketing techniques of mass consumption that stressed individual subjectivity and feeling, personal fantasy and taste, and the immediacy of pure aesthetic effect.

Henri IV and the Decorative Arts of the Bourbon Restoration, 1814-1830: A Study in Politics and Popular Taste

Abstract: Throughout the Bourbon Restoration (1814-1830), Henri IV enjoyed a unique status in contemporary popular culture. Personification of royal authority, military hero, gallant lover, friend to the common man, this historical figure charmed many factions of the Restoration public. The widespread fascination with the monarch was manifest in virtually every form of creative production during this period, including the decorative arts. Henri IV was portrayed frequently and in a variety of media, ranging from ceramics and clocks to tapestries and printed textiles. Such diversity is indicative of the popularity of the first Bourbon as well as the range of his appeal. Representations of Henri IV in the decorative arts can be divided into two basic categories: the official, politically inspired works produced for the royal family and its aristocratic supporters, and the popularly inspired works aimed at a broader, primarily bourgeois, audience. Despite the apparent dissimilarity of these categories, there was substantial interaction and overlap between them. The dialogue of political enthusiasm and popular taste is central to the depiction of Henri IV in the decorative arts. Depictions of the first Bourbon constitute a significant vein of decorative production during the Restoration, production that in turn embodies the prevalent aesthetic and intellectual tastes of that era. Both artistically and politically, the Bourbon Restoration was a period of transition, a time seeking an identity. When the Bourbon monarchy was restored in April 1814, Louis XVIII and his heirs were hardly suited to inspire the popular endorsement necessary for the preservation of a fledgling regime. The Bourbons were regarded with suspicion by the French people, who feared that the reestablishment oftheir reign would bring with it a renewal of the oppression and abuses fostered under the ancien régime. Further eservations concerning the abilities of the inexperienced fifty-nine-year-old kingmerely heightened the crisis of confidence engendered by the return of the Bourbons. Throughout the first year of his reign, Louis XVIII made overtures to appease the wary bourgeoisie, including the signing of the Charter on June 3, 1814, which guaranteed the liberties that had been won during the Revolution and subsequently appeared to sooth the apprehensions of the populace at large. But the political climate of the Restoration was very far from stable.

The Spiritual in Organizations

Abstract: Adam Smith realized that aesthetics played an important role in politics. But the kind of aesthetics that Kandinsky is advancing in his manifesto “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” seems better suited to fit some recent studies of “beauty” as an important organizing factor. This paper tries to grasp the novelty, beyond “the design of objects” and the “taste of individuals”, of such an organizational aesthetics. It seems this “aesthetics” has its historical roots in romanticism such as the philosophy of Friedrich Schiller. It has re-emerged in today’s Europe where both a liberal Smithonean aestethics and materialism with its Marxian aesthetics have lost their appeal. Between subject and object the spiritual in organizations takes on an important aesthetic value. The growing interest in organizational aesthetics vanguards the coming importance of romanticism to understand why people organize.

The Aesthetics of Adam Smith

Abstract: In a well known passage from his Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL.D., delivered to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1793, Dugald Stewart wrote: His acquaintance with the polite literature both of ancient and modern times was extensive; and amidst his various other occupations, he had never neglected to cultivate a taste for the fine arts; — less, it is probable, with a view to the peculiar enjoyments they convey, (though he was by no means without sensibility to their beauties,) than on account of their connection with the general principles of the human mind; to an examination of which they afford the most pleasing of avenues. To those who speculate on this very delicate subject, a comparison of the modes of taste that prevail among different nations, affords a valuable collection of facts; and Mr. Smith, who was always disposed to ascribe to custom and fashion their full share in regulating the opinions of mankind with respect to beauty, may naturally be supposed to have availed himself of every opportunity which a foreign country afforded him of illustrating his former theories. (E, 305)1

The aesthetics of Joseph Priestley

Abstract: L'esthetique de Priestley est vue dans le contexte du 18 e siecle en tant qu'intermediaire entre science et art. L'A. analyse plus particulierement l'nfluence formatrice de Hartley, Locke et Newton

A Taste for "Poison": Dickinson's Departure from Orthodoxy

Abstract: ζ /fi Irking in 1859 to thank Mrs. Samuel Bowles for the gift of a Ut/ newly published \"little Book\" bound in the \"immortalcolors\" of green and gold, Emily Dickinson boldly praised its controversial author. \"I never read before what Mr. Parker wrote,\" she confessed. \"I heard that he was 'poison.' Then I like poison very well\" (L213). The small volume in question, Two Christmas Celebrations, was the work of Theodore Parker (1810-1860). Having graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1836, Parker returned to Cambridge two years later to listen attentively as Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his famous address. He involved himself vigorously in the fray that followed and eminently succeeded in deepening the controversy. Although subsequently in effect ostracized for his views, not only by those in the Orthodox Trinitarian camp but also by the majority of those within the Unitarian wing of his denomination, Parker insisted upon remaining within the church and in 1845 formed the TwentyEighth Congregational Society in Boston. Here he assumed an increasingly prominent role in current reform and antislavery movements. While Parker alone exerted no major influence upon Dickinson and as a social activist stands in strong contrast to a poet so intensely private, nevertheless his writing strikingly exhibits those new winds of doctrine referred to by Allen Tate some years ago, when he remarked that Dickinson enjoyed a \"perfect literary situation.\" The impact of Orthodox Congregationalism upon

Rembrandt's Low Diction

Abstract: Intending Rembrandt scholars are early taught professional caution in connecting Dutch art and Dutch religion in general, Rembrandt and Calvinism in particular. Among their primary teachers, Rosenberg and Slive, for example, explain the need for scepticism in terms that amount to a prohibition: the Dutch were not uniformly Calvinist; the Twelve Years' Truce declared in 1 609 did not instantly and completely separate a Protestant north from a Catholic south; all of the artists of the north were not Protestant: 'Conclusions about the importance of Protestant creeds in the formation and achievement of seventeenth-century Dutch painting which do not take account of these facts are of limited value.'1 In fact, the only conclusion along these lines that escapes the distrust of these authorities is essentially uninteresting: ťone may perhaps admit that a general simplicity of taste has something to do with the moral attitude and Puritan spirit of Calvinism.'2

London, 1603–49

Abstract: The years between the accession of James I and the execution of his son saw unparalleled political and religious turmoil. Musically, though very rich, these years were less revolutionary than in some other parts of Europe. English music in this era might almost be described as ‘reluctantly Baroque’. A real divide in the history of English musical taste is marked by the period of the Commonwealth: London after the Restoration was more obviously cosmopolitan than before. In the first half of the century, awareness of continental developments seems to have been haphazard and their adoption rather idiosyncratic. But this was not entirely negative; so often the real eloquence and interest of music in this period (and this has been seen as a characteristic of English music in other ages as well) comes from a peculiar blend of avant-garde expression with more conservative styles and techniques.

Freedom, Neoclassicism, and Republican Nationalism

Abstract: A powerful new myth of freedom thrived among artists and their patrons in Europe and America at the outset of the modern Age of Revolutions. For many reasons, ideals of liberty and constitutional government were coupled with good judgment and taste as reflected in the art, politics, and life style of Classical antiquity — a period then studied with unprecedented archaeological and philological intensity. Simply put, Neoclassic style presented the face and self-image of the first moderns, who, because of the clear merits they perceived and vested in ancient works, made of it a guide and norm. It filled a sore need and was quickly assimilated into the very fabric of government and manners, as well as the visual imagination.