![]()
Part I
Taste and art
Dave Beech
Introduction
This part of the book revisits Bourdieuâs legacy in art, art theory and the philosophy of taste, oriented around the institution of the gallery, interpreted in the widest sense as the principal institution of artâs public manifestation. As such, this group of chapters examines art and power by deliberately transgressing the disciplinary and normative boundary of art to examine the points of contact between art and its various others. Although Bourdieuâs late work on Manet provides for the possibility of the artist becoming âa symbolic revolutionaryâ, that is to say, âsomeone who is completely controlled by the system, yet manages to take control of it by turning his mastery of the system against the systemâ, by and large Bourdieuâs sustained interest in art was more like a recurring symptom than what is colloquially called a labour of love. The result is that he ingrained himself into a set of practices, institutions and discourses that produced in him irritation, anger and suspicion.
In recent years the political theory of art has been reshaped by the likes of Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou and Chantal Mouffe, particularly insofar as these writers have focused on disputes about artâs political agency. However, when the political analysis of art has emphasised artâs complicity in economic and non-economic systems, it is Bourdieu more than any other thinker since the 1960s who continues to provide the conceptual framework â and, perhaps more importantly, the vocabulary. Artists, critics, curators, historians and pedagogues have warmly welcomed Bourdieu and his body of work not only in the critical fringes but at the heart of artâs major institutions, and not only as a tolerated nuisance but as the origin of its common sense. Judged by the proliferation of his ideas throughout the literature produced by the art community, Bourdieu is the bard of critical thinking on contemporary art. As such, not only does it seem self-evident to include a section on art in a study of Bourdieuâs legacy, it is almost impossible to imagine a satisfactory audit of contemporary artâs intellectual terrain without Bourdieu featuring prominently.
Bourdieu has proven to be a vital resource for modes of contemporary art that turns its critical attentions to art as a system. Andrew Hemingway observes that Bourdieuâs sociology of culture âhas proved most attractive to art historiansâ, an assertion that is justified by the deployment of Bourdieuâs ideas in the art historical writing of Carol Duncan, Marc James LĂŠger, Julian Stallabrass, Jonathan Vickery, Chin Tao Wu and others. Artists Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser and Hito Steyerl represent three generations of critical contemporary art oriented around Bourdieuâs thinking. Fraser in particular drew heavily on Bourdieu in the formulation of her early works intended to âperform a fieldâ explaining that âI was very influenced by the work of Pierre Bourdieu ⌠who developed a theory of social fieldsâ. Bourdieu supplies academics and activists alike with a toolkit for the analysis of artâs own political footprint in culture and society. The twin notions of cultural capital and distinction have transformed how theorists and practitioners navigate a bundle of pressing issues around artâs relationship to capitalism, wealth and power. Whereas prior to Bourdieu the question of the politics of art was understood largely in terms of artâs political agency, art after Bourdieu appears to be immanently political in a new way through its own modes of institutional complicity with systemic social division.
Denise Gigante, who is Professor of English at Stanford University, extends and deepens the historical framing of the concept of taste at the intersection of art, consumer culture, the bourgeois public sphere, the codification of gender, the birth of haute cuisine and the colonial condition. âTaste was a lived, material and experiential aestheticâ in the eighteenth century, Gigante points out, not to deny the function of art and taste in the economies of social distinction but in order to pay closer attention to the heterogeneous political modalities of taste, including more than one âtransgressive intervention into the history of tasteâ. In her chapter, therefore, taste is given an empirical content that resists the theoretical reductivism to a single operation of cultural distinction.
Peter Osborne, who is Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, addresses Bourdieuâs social critique of taste through the filter of a precise disaggregation of art and the aesthetic. Partly based on a close reading of Kant and the Romantic philosophy of art and aesthetics, and partly based on an understanding of the changed ontology of art after the 1960s, Osborne subjects the concepts of art and taste â that are necessary for Bourdieuâs sociological project â to philosophical critique. If it is possible to describe Bourdieuâs implied theory of art as one in which the aesthetic is discursively and experientially dominant while remaining explanatorily irrelevant, Osborne, by contrast, presents a âdialectics of taste (aesthetic) and non-taste (concept) within postconceptual artâ that raises fundamental questions about the commensurability of Bourdieuâs critique with contemporary art. What separates Osborneâs philosophical critique of the aesthetic in philosophy and art after Duchamp is that he does not propose the anti-aesthetic as the cure for aesthetic art, but articulates a dialectic of taste through the conceptual unpacking of the image.
Ken Wilder, who is an artist and writer, asks the question: âIf postconceptual art presents a crisis for critical judgement, does this thereby negate Bourdieuâs critique of taste?â He answers this by developing a concept of the aesthetic that is pertinent to contemporary art and yet resistant to the reduction of taste to sociological categories of distinction. In so doing, he challenges both (1) Bourdieuâs reduction of taste and the aesthetic to the cover story for social distinction and (2) the elimination of the aesthetic from contemporary âpost-aestheticâ art. Wilder asks whether there is still a place within contemporary art for aesthetic experience and claims that at least some contemporary art affords an encounter that is still best understood as aesthetic in the light of Wolfgang Iserâs notion of the blank as a staged suspension of connectivity.
Mark Hutchinson, who is an artist, interrogates the absence of avant-gardism and anti-art in Bourdieuâs sociology of art, revealing the means by which Bourdieu diminishes and excludes artâs negation of art, and taking issue with Bourdieuâs assumption that the avant-garde consists only of âritual acts of sacrilege, profanations which only ever scandalise the believersâ for the purpose of establishing a career and obtaining wealth, power, fame and influence. Not only is Bourdieuâs theory of art, according to Hutchinson, âunderpinned by the belief that the field of art is untransformableâ, but, drawing on Alasdair Macintyre, it is nothing but a âsociological account of artâs external goodsâ. That is, it is a theory of art that âgives very little time or weight to ⌠positions, practices or actions originating within art but which themselves oppose artâs dominant understanding of itself and its dominant institutionsâ.
My own chapter criticises Bourdieuâs analysis of bourgeois taste as being aristocratic. I re-examine the so-called âaristocracy of tasteâ through an historical retrieval of the transformation of art and the aesthetic during the bourgeois revolution. Nothing of the aristocratic regime of art and aesthetics is left untouched by the long bourgeois revolution. Beauty and taste for the aristocracy refers to the objective qualities of objects and their recognition whereas for the revolutionary bourgeoisie it referred only to subjective feelings of pleasure. Jerome Stolnitz calls this revolution âthe turn inwardâ. Modern bourgeois taste was universal, subjective, individual, authentic and public. The lexicon of the new formulation of taste was borrowed directly from the incipient bourgeois revolution: freedom, equality, subjectivity, individuality, universality, liberty.
The essays in this section confront Bourdieuâs reduction of aesthetic value to social distinction not by withdrawing from artâs social embeddedness or isolating art and aesthetics from the economies of social life, but by immersing art and taste in broader historical events and discourses. Indeed, the guiding principal for the selection of contributors to this section was to extend Bourdieuâs framework for thinking about the institutional complicity of art with economies of distinction. In particular, the essays re-examine Bourdieuâs concept of taste and the attendant concepts of cultural capital, distinction and so on that simultaneously insert the artist, viewer and collector into a normative economy of esteem and, unfortunately, isolate art from the rest of culture and immunise art from its own self-critique.
![]()
Chapter 1
Historical drag
Bourdieu, taste and the bourgeois revolution
Dave Beech
Bourdieu has bequeathed to art theory the trope of the aristocratic or noble as a critical descriptor of bourgeois culture. In one sense the nobility disappears completely from Bourdieuâs inquiry (as empirical social subjects) but in another sense the nobility pervades his work. This is because, in Bourdieu, bourgeois taste is aristocratic. An absent nobility reappears as a kind of haunting that possesses the bourgeoisie. No longer the monopoly of a privileged elite, nobility is universalised â the property of anyone and everyone who elects to abide by its creed â albeit pegged by Bourdieu exclusively to the upper middle class. Nobility survives the bourgeois revolution by metamorphosing into an assemblage of norms, postures, codes and gestures available to all classes. In this chapter I will dwell on these metamorphoses of class, and question the value of explaining the specifically bourgeois processes of cultural distinction through a rhetoric of privilege derived from the aristocratic social order.
An example. According to Bourdieu, Proudhon expresses âa naively systematic expression of the petit-bourgeois aestheticâ, (Bourdieu 1984, 48) when he says: âI have no quarrel with nobility, or elegance, or pose, or style, or gesture, or any aspect of what constitutes the execution of a work of artâ. (Bourdieu 1984, 49) Emblematic of the politics of aesthetics that runs through Distinction and his other works, Bourdieu classifies Proudhon, the âfather of anarchismâ, in a seamless image of a man born into the working class who expresses bourgeois ideology by defending nobility. While it is vital not to reduce the class character of culture to the actual or original class of the enunciator of a given cultural iteration, the techniques of masquerade in which a member of one class dresses up as (or is dressed up as) another, are not merely the means by which cultural processes are to be explained, but social processes themselves in need of explanation.
Proudhon, it should be noted, uses the word ânobleâ in its common metaphorical sense. Since the Enlightenment the noble is not elitist or privileged but commendable. The concept of the ânoble savageâ (Cro 1990) and the ânoble outlawâ (Hobsbawm 1969) testify to the decoupling of the noble from the aristocracy. Schiller attaches the Enlightenment concept of nobility to art when he says the freedom of the poet âbecomes a contemptible license, unless it can be traced to the high and noble ideal which constitutes the groundwork of the poetâs soulâ (Schiller 1861, 566). Hegel, too, uses the term ânobleâ as an adjective of high praise, speaking of the ânoble force of great menâ. (Hegel 1983, 155)
Bourdieu, however, deploys the concept of nobility to identify something elitist and unearned within the seemingly meritocratic and universal bourgeois institutions of taste, culture and education. He does this by reconnecting the concept of nobility with the aristocracy. âAristocracies are essentialistâ, Bourdieu (1984, 16) says, explaining, they set no value on deeds, only on âessenceâ. What matters for the aristocracy, it seems, is breeding or âcultural pedigreeâ. (ibid., 55) Without mediation, without masquerade and without difficulty, nobility for Bourdieu is used exclusively to refer to the characteristics of the aristocracy which survive the Revolution in the breast of the cultivated bourgeoisie.
By montaging the aristocracy onto the field of bourgeois cultural distinction, however, Bourdieu signals a problem rather than states a fact. If bourgeois taste is aristocratic then in what sense is it bourgeois? Is it possible for bourgeois taste to shed its aristocratic skin, or is taste an aristocratic form regardless of where and when it crystallises itself? Telling an aristocrat, especially during a period of aristocratic hegemony, that taste is aristocratic would not signify a problem. Revealing to the bourgeoisie that its regime of taste is aristocratic, on the other hand, accuses it of doing something inappropriate or ridiculous. The problem is perhaps best viewed, therefore, at an oblique angle, as an intentional distortion. That is to say, since Bourdieu reads aesthetic theory critically, the grotesque image of the noble bourgeoisie is neither problem nor fact: it is an accusation. Like the critical redescription of the art museum as a site of ritual (Duncan 1995), the disparity between the two systems is the precondition for the critical effect. Bourdieu portrays the bourgeoisie in drag in a bid to disclose a concealed inheritance or an illegitimate transfer.
The sociological critique of the aesthetic detects the markings of social distinction within private judgements of taste by presenting the bourgeoisie as little aristocrats. In doing so it neglects the analysis of the historical confrontation between the revolutionary bourgeoisie and the feudal aristocracy which not only ushered in the capitalist mode of production but also the modern system of the arts (Kristeller 1990), the concept of art in general (Shiner 2001; de Duve 1998; Osborne 2013), the radical reinvention of taste (Stolnitz 1961a, 1961b; Ferry 1993) and the formation of modern bourgeois institutions of art (Duncan 1995; McLellan 1999).
Bourdieu constructs a three-tier hierarchy of taste consisting of âpopular tasteâ, âmiddle-brow tasteâ and âlegitimate tasteâ (montaging three distinct logics1 of hierarchy), on which he hangs a three-tier class division of culture, namely, vulgar, light and noble (which employs terms from three separate codifications2 of distinction). Bourdieuâs eclectic map of cultural differentiation is the perfect environment to breed a loose class analysis in which nobility runs semiotically free and yet is always simultaneously anchored firmly to the historical aristocracy and lodged in the habitus of the bourgeoisie. Bourdieu never acknowledges the historical and social processes by which a section of the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth and nineteenth century took on aristocratic trappings while feudal lords were forced âto transform themselves into capitalistsâ (Davidson 2012, 577).
The opening chapter of Distinction carries the title âThe Aristocracy of Cultureâ, but the aristocracy plays no part in it. The nomenclature is like a Magrittean gag in which we feel we learn something new about a horse because it is unexpectedly called a suitcase. And yet, since there is no trace in Bourdieuâs writing of the complementary argument that aristocratic taste is or was bourgeois, the equivalence of bourgeois taste and aristocratic taste is asymmetric...
