1998 Dagueneau Pur Sang sure is over the hill (with help from Politburo) AND new news, the '97 Silex is ALIVE

The members of the politburo might have, or accept as a norm of their joint aesthetic inquiry, a shared communal sensibility which acts as the subjective yet universal ground of genuine aesthetic judgments among them.

And then they might go forth and kick the asses of those who disagree.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Who knew the politburo had taste, good, bad or indifferent. In fact, to the extent that it manifests taste, can it really be a politburo?
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It seems to me that the politburo can manifest(o) taste, provided that it's never revealed. "Those who know don't tell; those who tell don't know."

Mark Lipton
 
Socialist realism is the proof that politburo's don't have taste. It judges the value of art by virtue of the ends it performs. I didn't say that politburo's can't have aesthetic criteria, though they are generally bad ones, just that they can't have taste. Steven Spielman does a not bad parody of Kant's claim that the aesthetic judgment claims to be universal while not being objective. Politburos, however, can't afford such modesty. They reach only objective judgments, and therefore do not have taste.
 
Actual politburos haven't manifested actual taste - in the Kantian sense at least - for more or less the reason Jonathan states.

In principle, however, it is at least arguable that a politburo with a more 'pure' aesthetic bent could exist - this was the point of my post, which was intended as a counterexample and not a parody - though they would not in that case be using their cultural influence to keep themselves in power or advance their control of society.

Following this out, JL could defend his point here by insisting that acting to keep themselves in power and/or to advance their control of society are essential features of politburos, intrinsic guiding norms of their conduct which they can not act against without either failing to be politburos or being deficient politburos, in the way that a hammer with a cracked handle is a deficient hammer.

As usual, having thought it through a little more, I'm not sure I care enough about 'the' 'concept' of politburo to have a strong opinion on this one way or another.
 
I would agree that the concept of Politburo ought not to evoke much interest. But Steven posits a genuinely interesting question: is it even possible for a Politburo to operate on the basis of Kantian aesthetic principles, some form of aesthetic Politburo. To the extent that there are Kantian aesthetic principles that could be applied in an agreed upon way in a manner that could be objectively articulated, this of course would be possible. Since Kant, however, insists that while, when we make a judgment of taste, we make it with the claim for universal agreement, nevertheless all judgments are our own. We cannot negotiate them or come to agreements about them. We either think x is beautiful or we don't, and we do it individually. Since a Politburo is by definition, not a collection of individuals but a group operating as a group, I conclude that it can't have taste.

Of course, Stalin could have taste and could demand that the Politburo enforce it, but that's a different matter.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
I would agree that the concept of Politburo ought not to evoke much interest. But Steven posits a genuinely interesting question...
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Speaking for yourself, of course.
 
In my view, there is no such thing as "bad esthetic criteria." In any society, at any point in time, there are cultural power struggles, attendant upon economic ones, and the several winners are seen as the different kinds of "good" taste, and the several losers are seen as the different kinds of "bad" taste. But good and bad do not exist objectively, only culturally, so must always be presumed to be in quotes.

I also see all taste as instrumental. Every taste judges the value of art, whether it realizes it or not, by virtue of the ends it performs (the word ends covering a huge territory of possibilities). That in no way demeans it or takes away the mystery. Socialist realists were extraordinarily heavy-handed about this instrumentality and, most unforgivably, lost their particular power struggle.

On the issue of whether a collective, any collective, can have taste, the taste of individuals is already quite fuzzy, and that of collectives, if posited, would just be an aggregate of the individual fuzzy tastes (therefore even more fuzzy, perhaps even unrecognizable). But if one can say that individuals have taste, it seems to me only a big stretch, not a categorical leap, to say that collectives can have taste. Yes, even the Politburo.

Each member of this board has his/her own fuzzy taste, but to the extent that some self-selection occurs (and I think it does), the fuzzy taste of the aggregate, here, appears somewhat different than the fuzzy taste of the aggregate at, say, eBob.
 
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
In my view, there is no such thing as "bad esthetic criteria." In any society, at any point in time, there are cultural power struggles, attendant upon economic ones, and the several winners are seen as the different kinds of "good" taste, and the several losers are seen as the different kinds of "bad" taste. But good and bad do not exist objectively, only culturally, so must always be presumed to be in quotes.

I also see all taste as instrumental. Every taste judges the value of art, whether it realizes it or not, by virtue of the ends it performs (the word ends covering a huge territory of possibilities). That in no way demeans it or takes away the mystery. Socialist realists were extraordinarily heavy-handed about this instrumentality and, most unforgivably, lost their particular power struggle.

On the issue of whether a collective, any collective, can have taste, the taste of individuals is already quite fuzzy, and that of collectives, if posited, would just be an aggregate of the individual fuzzy tastes (therefore even more fuzzy, perhaps even unrecognizable). But if one can say that individuals have taste, it seems to me only a big stretch, not a categorical leap, to say that collectives can have taste. Yes, even the Politburo.

Each member of this board has his/her own fuzzy taste, but to the extent that some self-selection occurs (and I think it does), the fuzzy taste of the aggregate, here, appears somewhat different than the fuzzy taste of the aggregate at, say, eBob.
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The question Steven and I were arguing was with regard to Kantian criteria. Since your position entails that there are no aesthetic criteria, only culturally determined beliefs, it will of course follow that there are no bad aesthetic criteria. Even from this position, however, a Politburo can have criteria but no taste. Taste may be culturally relative, but if the individual who experiences believes that about him or herself, he or she will refrain from making the judgment of taste as being groundless. And further, since the judgment is culturally relative, it will also be individually relative, and for that reason, politburos could still enforce agreement on someone's judgment, but would still not have its own judgment. By your own logic, the individual members of the Politburo, except by accident, would have different judgments, each one determined by their own subjective make-up. They could negotiate out a common position, but they could not negotiate out a common judgment.

Poliburos are like corporations. A Supreme Court may decide that they have taste or a right to free speech, but that won't make the decision rational.
 
Aahh, but I didn't see myself as agreeing with a position different than mine, quite the contrary. You acknowledged that my position is consistent with my non-Kantian premise while saying that you had been arguing from a Kantian perspective. Fine, that's it, for me. As for the Politburo having criteria but not taste, I see that as falling under Proposition 4.003 territory, and all are welcome to their choice of words. For me to carry on that Kant, who didn't have a life, or know anything about wine and love and oak and microoxigenation, is irrelevant to my conception of contemporary life, or that you should always write all transcendental value judgments in quotes, all of these would have been churlish, or so it seemed to me, towards someone who binds us together.
 
Kant may be more relevant than you think - I mean to you in particular, Oswaldo. You are obviously compelled to share your judgments of taste, to consider others' judgments, and to participate in aesthetic community. And not only with wine - you opened a gallery. Why? From whence the social dimension to your aesthetic calling?

There is a possible answer from an isolated subjectivist viewpoint, namely, that you are casting about in your Proustian den, hoping that the reflections of others on their own senses and history jar loose thoughts of your own, or that by a sort of miraculous co-incidence their lines of purely private judgment somehow confirm or validate or open up opportunities for extending your own. Is this all there is to it?

Or if not, then how do you distinguish between the beautiful and the merely agreeable?

If these questions strike you as asinine, I apologize - I don't mean to be a jerk and I love your posts. If you say that the social dimension of your enjoyment of visual art, wine, etc. really amounts to a desire to take part in a cultural power struggle, OK, fine. For my part I hope for a better metatheory of my pursuit of beauty, but we can debate high-acid Gamay either way.
 
Thanks for that, Steven. What interests me the most is the way notions of good and bad taste are formed and what interests they serve. I don't believe in the leap from "I like this" to "this is good" and "I don't like this" to "this is bad." I have no interest in absolutes or transcendentals, and don't believe in them at all. But I love sharing what I like and sharing in what others like, and learning from that (to some extent that is what you say in your second paragraph).

I also believe that those who develop sufficient self-esteem through correct (for them) living and feel secure enough in their personal judgments of what is good for them should feel no need to universalize their preferences or call them transcendental. I am happy with the entirely subjective. To me that is, indeed, all there is to it (barring a very minor subset of things nature prevents us all from liking, like, say, ammonia, certain poisons, grenache, etc.).

The distinction between the beautiful and the merely agreeable is felt, not thought, but can sometimes be put into words. The important thing, to me, is that finding one thing beautiful and another agreeable is the result of cultural conditioning, battles fought and won by our ancestors, interacting with our partially unique physiologies, but in ways that we cannot separate.
 
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