Gestural Abstraction

originally posted by Oswaldo Costa: I'd like to do a show using Pierre Bourdieu's ideas about how different social classes use taste as a form of identity, perhaps inviting a poor person, a middle class person and a rich person to pick their favorite works from the collection and show the different tastes side by side..
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I was just re-reading Distinction and found it as fun and elegantly elaborated as ever.

I wonder if the same tastes/knowledge limitations exist in the world of the internet. Much of what he was talking about was access to ideas/art and surely that has broadened a bit.

But, I guess he was also talking about the modes of acquiring experience. So the internet might allow someone to become an autodidact faster or earlier in life, but it still wouldn't replace the family-based cultural capital.

Either way, the idea sounds interesting, although I wonder how you would execute it. Lots of potential to be exploitative/demeaning (to all classes). Although maybe that's what you want!
 
Sounds like your collection has considerable depth, Oswaldo....that alone intrigues me...and in a way led to my next question, about having guest curators, which is a cool idea, I think. (So the checklist, is the total inventory...and complete provenance, among other things, about those things?) Sounds very stimulating. The potential dissonances between what you see in certain works and bodies of works vs someone else (who has no personal investment in the work) would in itself be fascinating, I think....and taking it all further (along your Bourdieux idea), I could see 3 different "class" types, being offered their own spaces to make into their own, with furniture etc...walls for hanging things on, tables to set things on (their own comfort zones, as it were)....and have them be comfortable enough to spend at least a few hrs a day in their spaces, utilizing the spaces with your chosen materials. Even have them stay the night. Cool experiment...or it could flop too. Probably the most benefit would come to the participants themselves. (heck, I'll volunteer...as long as there's decent cot (malbec or mattress) either way is fine).
 
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
I'd like to do a show using Pierre Bourdieu's ideas about how different social classes use taste as a form of identity
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Bourdieu is interesting and I have taught Distinction, but I always took his thesis to be stronger than that. Particularly though not exclusively in the postscript, Bourdieu seems to be arguing that taste is (equivalent to/reduces to/has no significant dimensions beyond being) a tool for reinforcing identity, in the form of class and cultural boundaries. The weaker thesis that Oswaldo states is both obvious and an interesting and fruitful area for sociological inquiry as to the details; the stronger thesis is polemical and false. I teach Bourdieu because he actually managed to do some good work on the details of how taste and cultural boundaries interact, which is valuable and interesting; but the latter thesis is exactly as much of a waste of time as reductionist theses from Comte, de Mettrie, Nagel, etc., etc., in the natural sciences and is in any event is not supported by Bourdieu's data.

This sounds like a great idea for a show though.

I'm sorry, something snapped the other day and I want to discuss aesthetics all the time. I'll try to put a sock in it.
 
Wow, I am thrilled to discover that when I develop my ideas a bit more I'll have you guys to bounce them off. The Bourdieu scholars I hope to consult will be sympathetic towards Bourdieu, so it will be good to be able to tap into more critical positions (I believe Jonathan is in that camp too).

Rahsaan, I often wonder about the homogenizing effect of television, magazines, widely-read novels and self-help books, and now the internet. When people lived in greater cultural isolation from each other, I imagine there was much more idiosyncrasy. Thanks to technology, we increasingly drink from the same fountains, and our differences will probably become increasingly due to differing temperaments rather than different cultural baggages. My Bourdieu idea is still very raw, but if it comes to pass, I promise to be an equal opportunity exploiter/demeaner. I'll try not to be patronizing to the rich guy.

Joel, the checklists I tried to send you (your mailbox was full) are for this show only, which shows about 5% of the collection. Over the coming year I intend to develop complete files on each work, with all the info you mention, inc. provenance, price paid, etc. Guest curators are definitely in the cards. Your idea of developing a domesticity component in the Bourdieu idea is messy but fascinating! I can be a little anal sometimes, so anything that subverts that helps me. But I can't chose you: I need an everyman in each category, and, sorry, you have given ample evidence that you ain't. But there will be always be a cot or glass of it waiting for you here.

Steven, I will keep your position in mind when I do my research. Bourdieu's ideas would probably have a harder time without relying on class distinctions, and that is precisely where the crux of my interest lies. Despite my exhibition idea, I don't care so much about the difference in taste between the rich, the middle class, and the poor. The idea has the advantage of methodological clarity, but I am actually more interested in how taste might be a marker within subsections of single class. If one lived in an essentially classless society (perhaps a country like Iceland is close to qualifying), where everyone has access to the same information, there would still be differences in taste. What would these mean, if anything, is the more difficult area that interests me. Like what makes one middle class teenager a nerd and his next door neighbor a goth and the next one a jock, and how these organize into groups, and joust on the battlefield of esthetics.
 
Oswaldo - some random possibly relevant thoughts -

1) I have always suspected that the elite cultural producers and economic elites are more closely connected in their tastes in France than those two groups are in the US. In any case the type of study PB does would show different things in different societies - it's easy to forget sometimes that what his book is actually talking about is Paris, more or less.

2) We use art to discover our commonalities but also to specify our differences. (The latter use doesn't fit easily into a Kantian or Tolstoyan framework.)

3) The use of aesthetics to demarcate communities is indeed an interesting subject, and studying it in environments where social class is minimized as far as possible seems very fruitful. I often think of this in terms of US high schools, where everyone really listened to all the music, but various groups (jocks, stoners, the drama crowd, etc.) had a 'public' genre of popular music with which they were identified to others. But it seems likely to me that the US high school social groups are to some degree microcosms of our economic caste system, so that might not be an ideal example.

4) To the degree that we form 'pure' aesthetic communities - that is to say, demarcate ourselves from one another for reasons other than attracting mana, money, and mates - the problem of taste-as-concerned-with-beauty-as-opposed-to-mere-agreeability starts to press itself again.

5) What we learn about (3) is highly relevant to selling wine.
 
Indeed to all, with exception of #4. I don't believe pure esthetic communities such as you describe exist, or are even possible, no matter how idealistic the members. But vast expanses of impure fun and pleasure remain possible!
 
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
Indeed to all, with exception of #4. I don't believe pure esthetic communities such as you describe exist, or are even possible, no matter how idealistic the members. But vast expanses of impure fun and pleasure remain possible!
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Does this bored count? (I'm not here to get famous, rich, or mated.)
 
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
Indeed to all, with exception of #4. I don't believe pure esthetic communities such as you describe exist, or are even possible, no matter how idealistic the members. But vast expanses of impure fun and pleasure remain possible!
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Does this bored count? (I'm not here to get famous, rich, or mated.)
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`

Don't think so. We are here because we have some need that real life is not fulfilling to our complete satisfaction, some longing for community, for engagement, for exchange...
 
Very sincere congratulations, Oswaldo, and best wishes to you for sharing your passion. May this venture bring a new facet of pleasure to your life-long pursuit.

So Paulo has long been on my to-visit list, and this might bump it up a spot or two.

PS- If you plan an exhibit with the audience _participating_ in the emptying of those bottles of DRC, please do let me know. That would likely warrant a special trip.
 
originally posted by Seth Hill:
Very sincere congratulations, Oswaldo, and best wishes to you for sharing your passion. May this venture bring a new facet of pleasure to your life-long pursuit.

So Paulo has long been on my to-visit list, and this might bump it up a spot or two.

PS- If you plan an exhibit with the audience _participating_ in the emptying of those bottles of DRC, please do let me know. That would likely warrant a special trip.
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Alas, Seth, they are empty. Necrophilia.
 
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
Alas, Seth, they are empty. Necrophilia.
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Agalmatophilia?

ETA: It was amusing to look up the technical term for sexual desire for a mock-up and to find that there actually exists a paraphilia called "homeovestism," i.e. wearing clothing emblematic of one's own sex. I knew I was doing something kinky when I opened my closet every morning.
 
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
Agalmatophilia? (...) homeovestism
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which of these might be the better title for the third show, about how desire blurs boundaries between its objects, undermining taxonomies and hierarchies?
 
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