Reflections on Taste

ON REFLECTIONS

TASTE

REFLECTIONS

ON TASTE

Contents

Introduction 04 / Foreword by Professor Malcolm Quinn 06 / Taste and Post-Taste Confession Booth 12 / Chrissa Amuah 18 / Tastes of Reality Caroline Derveaux-BertĂŠ 20 / Taste Curation Jaime Greenly 22 / Designing Taste Jessica Hart 24 / Self-Consciousness of Taste

Mohammad Namazi 26 / A – Representation Alex Roberts 28 / Repetition Kioka Williams 30 / On the Impossible Exposition of Taste through Lived and Considered Experiences Communal Essay 32 /

Credits 40 /

Introduction

A collective of Chelsea’s Fine Art and Textile Design postgraduates came together to present their own observations and questions of taste after Bourdieu. Led by UAL academics, Dave Beech* and Malcolm Quinn*, our reading group for ‘Taste After Bourdieu’ was inspired by Owen Jones’ writing on the demonization of the working class and ‘Chav’ culture, and Jukka Gronow’s examination of taste and fashion, informed

by Immanuel Kant and Georg Kimmel.

Through a visual, tactile and interactive confession booth, the group sought to provoke the subtle and sometimes obvious denials, ironies and conflicts of private versus public tastes. Because we elucidate ourselves in relation to those around us, a question of ego becomes pertinent: how can you, as an individual, foster a taste that is unique, not perverted by conformation to the standards of others? Whilst this may seem like a leading question, it merely points to the networks we enact, and the ways in which we position ourselves within them.

To what extent does desire for a beneficial position, one that garners

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acceptance or validation of sorts, skew our behaviour? Are we made to play the role of a fearful subject, telling the cultural emperor how magnificent their new clothes are?

In the worlds of Fine Art and Design, such questions of positioning and mediation can be related to the commercially viable product. As makers of things, the questions arise: can taste transcend behaviour? Is personality and creativity evidenced aesthetically? There is difficult ground to be broken, and a pertinent question remains: is the extent to which identity and expression are bound to systems of commodification, a bad thing?

The Confessional Booth and this publication is a culmination of our thoughts, questions and observations.

*Dave Beech is a Chelsea College of Art and Design Senior Lecturer – BA Fine Art *Malcolm Quinn is Associate Dean of Research and Director of Graduate School Camberwell, Chelsea, Wimbledon Graduate School

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Taste and Post-Taste Professor Malcolm Quinn

A group of students in CCW Graduate School have developed this publication as part of their contribution to the conference Taste After Bourdieu, held at Chelsea College of Arts on 15 and 16 May 2014. Their contribution to the conference also involved the construction of a confessional booth, which provided conference delegates with a private space in which they were invited to disclose their ‘guilty pleasures’ and doubtful tastes anonymously.

The student group realised that the term ‘guilty pleasures’, alongside other terms used in common discourse on taste, such as high and low, naff, kitsch, ‘so bad it’s good’ etc., indicate that what is always at stake in taste is legitimacy and that the home, the street, the gallery, the museum and the art school all contribute to this struggle for legitimacy. During the conference, the confessional booth became a temporary ‘school of taste’ that occupied the negative space that had been created by public cultural institutions. The booth was a micro-institution devoted to private anxiety about legitimacy rather than the public achievement of legitimacy. In this way, the student group focused on one of the key challenges that Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of taste has offered to art institutions and cultural organisations, namely his claim that we all make taste and we are all analysts of taste, but not under conditions of our own choosing. These conditions set the terms for our valuations, revaluations and devaluations of tastes and they affect the way that we conceive of ourselves and are conceived by others as having choices to make in the domain of taste. Networked sets 8

of social relations in the domain of taste, demand that our personal values and manifested preferences are based on a distaste for and a devaluation of other kinds of preferences. Taste, in these terms, is made of a thousand distastes, in which I feel that my tastes are natural and ‘real’ while your tastes are unnatural, artificial or out of place. Taste, in this sense, means perfecting yourself in the image of someone else’s imperfections – the worse you look, the better I look. Although it is often assumed that we live in an ‘anything goes’, post-taste world, this kind of symbolic violence visited on the taste imperfections of others is still widespread. In a recent article, Jean Touitou, the founder of the fashion brand APC, made the following comment on a female journalist who he had seen interviewing a male politician on French television: “I noticed that her bum was squeezed into rather ordinary trousers, the polyester crepe kind with a waist that sits a little too low for anyone other than a 12-year-old boy. Her torso was stuck in some sort of cache-coeur, a small top supposed to look cute but which was just too tight. She looked like a ninny, dressed by rote, wearing what she thought looked feminine rather than what suited her body and her job.”1 The key question here is which tastes can be devalued with impunity – in this case, the personal tastes of a female journalist can be devalued with impunity, while those of a male politician cannot. While Touitou’s article includes a barbed comment on the political class in general, his analysis of the male politician’s taste was simply ‘The man wore a suit, not too badly cut.’ Another example of the exercise of the power of devaluation in the domain of taste was the UK Conservative Party ‘Beer and Bingo’ advert of 9

March 2014, which announced that, following the cuts to bingo tax and beer duty in the last budget, hardworking people could do ‘more of the things they enjoy’. The point here is not that the Conservative Party was devaluing ‘working class culture’, but that it was devaluing certain taste preferences that could be devalued with impunity, as occurred with Touitou’s comments on the female journalist. Tastes for Beer and Bingo are open to cultural devaluation or revaluation, whereas tastes for (for example) the work of Martin Creed or Tracey Emin are not so easily affected.

It is no surprise, therefore, that the relentless games of devaluation and revaluation in taste, in which we polish our own self-image in the mirror of someone else’s imperfections, has prompted many people to propose ‘posttaste’ solutions, through which the vicious traps of taste can be superseded.

In a recent article ‘Just the right amount of wrong’2, the writer Dave Eggers proposed just such a solution. The focus of the article was on a taste for derivative or ‘second rate’ versions of culture, in this case a concert Eggers had attended given by a band called Starship, which was derived from the band Jefferson Starship, itself derived from the band Jefferson Airplane.

The arc of Eggers’s article begins with him reflecting on a younger version of himself who would have looked down on both derivative versions of the original Jefferson Airplane: ‘The point is that I knew nothing then, but felt that music was a wonderful way to divide people, to assess their cultural knowledge and use it to arrange them in complicated taste-based caste systems.’3 By the end of his article, which goes on to describe his uncomplicated ecstatic joy in the fundamental human communion of the Starship concert, Eggers is keen to show us how far he has travelled beyond these divisive taste-based caste systems, into a post-Bourdieusian universe: 10

“It’s important to note that everything we humans do is messy. It’s important to note that we are makers of mistakes, a billion mistakes every day . .

Sometimes we learn, usually we don’t. But then every so often we create a little joy. Every so often someone creates a perfect pop song, and then people can come and hear it being played, even in an Native American casino built on land stolen and restolen over and over again, by a band far past its creative prime.”4 Who would argue against creating a little collective joy that takes no account of divisions of taste, when this is set against the violence involved in perfecting your personal taste in the image of someone else’s imperfections? But in fact all Eggers has done is to shift the blame for imperfection onto the whole of humanity (‘everything we humans do is messy’) whose irredeemable and permanent imperfection finds its positive image in the perfection of the commodity (‘Every so often someone creates a perfect pop song’). The communion that Eggers describes was also described by Karl Marx in the middle of the nineteenth century in his work on commodity fetishism:

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“It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realms of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race.”5 David Egger’s secular religion of post-taste, with its pantheon of Starships that commune with a humble, messy, earth-bound audience, does not enable us to transcend the relations of perfection and imperfection that determine the social production of taste.

To analyse taste effectively, we have to go back to the beginning of Egger’s article, and ask what it is that people are doing when they arrange themselves in complicated taste-based caste systems. They are constructing a set of individual, egotistical positions on taste that only work because they are based on a deeper altruism, in which even a female journalist whose ‘torso was stuck in some sort of cache-coeur’ takes her place within a set of possible cultural preferences of taste, preferences that can be subject to improvement, education and enculturation as to what is legitimate taste and what is not. The person with worse taste than yourself is also someone who presents no threat to your existence, while confirming your own legitimacy and your social status. The true threat to social distinctions of taste comes from the unconscious desires that are not taken into account in the social register of taste preferences. Here one is reminded of the story of the academic who visited a psychoanalyst because he was worried that he was stealing other people’s ideas. The psychoanalyst assured him that he was not plagiarising, but the anxiety persisted. In one session the patient told 12

the analyst that every time he left the analyst’s apartment, he went to a restaurant and ate his favourite meal – fresh brains. In this case, a taste for fresh brains has nothing to do with a wish for social legitimacy, and everything to do with a socially illegitimate desire to steal, a desire which found its disguised expression through a restaurant menu. If the relations of perfection and imperfection in taste mean that we can’t always get what we want, the unconscious desires that may inform our preferences also mean that, in the global market of taste, we don’t always want what we get.

Malcolm Quinn Professor of Cultural and Political History Associate Dean of Research and Director of Graduate School Camberwell, Chelsea, Wimbledon Graduate School University of the Arts London

Endnotes 1. Jean Touitou, ‘Why Unsexy Fashion is So Fresh’, The Guardian: The Fashion issue 2 Spring/Summer 2014, p.96.

2. Dave Eggers, ‘Just the right amount of wrong’,The Guardian Review, 29 March 2014, pp.2-4.

3. Ibid., p. 2.

4. Ibid., p. 4.

5. Karl Marx, Capital, volume 1, introd. Ernest Mandel, trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin 1976, p.165.

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Taste Confessional

The idea of a confessional was borrowed from Catholicism; the notion of reconciling and purging ourselves of the self inflicted lies of taste said in our everyday social interactions. The Taste Confessional booth was created to allow for revelations of private thoughts and admissions in a public space, yet still guarded in privacy. The construct facilitated a subtly interactive and tactile means for dialogue.

Between a humble Post-it and Sharpie pen, disclosures showed the plethoric range of things safeguarded in the minds of participants. Religious comforts, sexual preferences and personal hygiene habits were just some of the admissions.

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However, despite the assurance of seclusion offered by the booth and its promise to reserve no judgement, it still failed to overthrow the pangs of guilt perhaps felt by some. There were many that attended the conference who despite invitations to participate, offered excuses or employed delay tactics.

It may be that even taste havens are not sacred and safe enough for the most honest personal truths.

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Tastes of Reality Chrissa Amuah My palette of taste is quite sound, that I can assure you. This includes my partiality to the consensus and ill regard of trash or reality TV. So when it comes to declaring my hankering for two US shows, ‘Dog The Bounty Hunter’ and ‘Keeping Up With the Kardashians,’ I ask for your understanding in my conflict.

A critic warns, “When people watch reality TV, they tend to think that what they are seeing is a true depiction of reality. Because of that, they tend to believe that what they see on TV is how life really is.”

Now I’m smart enough to know these two shows are not complete reality, but I know that they are not complete fiction either. Their appeal to me, sits somewhere in between. It is a mistake to think that we are universal in our cultural, moral and aesthetic values. But it is even more problematic to assume that we should all live and curate the same lives. My questions and reflections of taste have encouraged me to continually consider that just because another’s choice is different to my own, it does not make it wrong.

Regardless of the extent to which they are staged, both shows are examples of alternative truths so remote from my own. They are not my gospel; I take them for the superficial entertainment they offer. But it’s not all folly; presented in ‘Dog The Bounty Hunter,’ there are people who struggle with unlawful addictions, which tie them into an eternal waltz with the judicial system. At the other extreme lie the Kardashians, who discuss the weakened muscles of one’s ‘vajayjay’ to 2.3 million viewers (per episode), then in the next scene shout in celebration, ‘shake your titties.’ … So escapism it is. Nothing more, nothing less.

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The fizz of decadence, the bourgeois and those that wish they were 21

Taste Curation Caroline Derveaux-Berté

How do we decide what is good or bad, do we choose each film, each work of art, each building on its own merit independently or are we influenced by the ‘curators’ of taste, reviewers, critics, others in the field or museums?

Let’s take the font: Papyrus. Font ‘experts’ webdesignerdepot.com1 names

it «The king of bad font: equal parts childish, kitschy and irritating.» The site explains that this font isn’t just bad because of its overuse but because ‘It just doesn’t look good.’ It is so unpopular as to warrant an anti Papyrus blog.2

They are telling us that it is objectively bad ‘just because.’

They may be right, and even if they aren’t, the negative associations of the font are enough to influence our feelings. Font however serves a definite function, to clearly convey a message and its tone effectively and appropriately, perhaps Papyrus is rarely up to that task, and the curator (webdesignerdepot.com) is right in telling us so. But is that the same in art?

Is there a way to judge the quality of art?

Art institutions can be seen to be taking the role of defining positive taste by selecting art in museums. Are they guiding forces, or simply the reflection of well rounded experts and popular opinion?

Endnotes 1. 10 iconic fonts and why you should never use them, February 2011 2. www.papyruswatch.com

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Inner Taste

Outer Taste

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Designing Taste Jaime Greenly

Clothes are an element of our taste we cannot hide; they are a ‘human environment.’ Whether you are interested in fashion or not your clothes follow you everywhere and are on show at all times.

Personal taste is a funny thing when you are a designer. Design puts your taste on show for all to see, and consume. You are presenting, and yet fabricating taste. Putting ideas on the line ready for others to analyse, is it good taste, bad taste, to their taste?

It’s a contentious role, something I’ve never found myself very comfortable with. Maybe I am cheating but being a conventional designer has never suited me. I am changing the role of the designer from someone who provides a finished project, to someone who provides the tools for others to harness their own creativity.

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Ugly Swan Cushion

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Self-Consciousness of Taste Jessica Hart

Throughout the course of this project, I have found myself contemplating the origins of this introspective conflict that so often exists between public and private taste. How is it that we are able to construct for ourselves an environment in which we exist and grow through our choices of surroundings, possessions and pursuits?

We spend so much time developing personal taste, and nurturing our sense of self, however when some outside force threatens this world we have created, we may find ourselves questioning the legitimacy of our choices.

The imposition of public tastes, trends or values, may produce within us a sense of social aspiration, a force so powerful that it may cause us to deny the self we have created, infiltrating the world we knew to be true, and stamping out the individuality that we so coveted previously.

In this atmosphere of socially expected conformity, we find ourselves as creative practitioners with the choice to move with or against the tide. We must decide for ourselves if we wish to position our work in a way that flatters the tastes of society, or in a way that challenges it. The commercial value of the concept of trends is an undeniable consumerist force in the contemporary design industries, however as designers we may feel that it is our role to challenge a sense of norm. It is no wonder therefore that this feeling of anxiety exists when projecting your personal tastes through the work that you create; social acceptance, however much we may wish to reject the concept, is a very real measure of the legitimacy of commercial creative practices.

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The answer surely rests in a greater acceptance and celebration of our own taste, breaking down the barrier of fear that exists between the realms of public and private self is sure to result in greater diversity and individuality in the work that we create. Contemplating the dangers of conformity whilst endeavouring to make more unconscious decisions, untarnished by our fears of public acceptance, will strengthen our confidence in ourselves and make it easier to share and celebrate our tastes with the world. This is by no means an easy task; self-consciousness is a hard habit to break, but in order to create new and exciting work we must endeavour to succeed.

Sometimes our favourite possessions are the ones that express our individuality 27

A – Representation Mohammad Namazi

A hand made object is a representation of craft, a symbolic attribute of skills, and it is nostalgic of traditional art. In direct opposition to this is a mass-produced object; it is a representation of consumerism, a symbol of industrial revolution, and a key element of the architecture of contemporary society.

These two objects and the ideologies they represent, form the basis of discussions around the role of art and artists in our time. Art has become involved in activities and discourse far wider in scope than the traditions of academy style painting and craft, and as such the meaning of art has been deconstructed and renewed in many diverse ways. As a result of these changes, taste in the realm of art is skewed according to popular opinion (or dissent from popular opinion), thus any reading of good or bad art has justified itself according to theories of modernisation (and post-, and alter-). To define what is good art is not the intention here, but certainly one strong aspect of adequate taste, would seem to involve a critical reflection of the current state of affairs in the art world.

Regardless of being judgmental about artworks (e.g. good or bad), the different layers of thought evoked by the notions of hand-made and ready-made provide compelling strains of dialogue. Could any dialectical tension between these terms come to the fore at the intersection of art and politics? Or are such arguements only evidence of the ability of art to subsume it’s own contexts as a means to further content?

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Untitled Taste, C-Print, Various dimensions, 2014, Limited edition

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Repetition Alex Roberts

Bourdieu’s study and social critique on taste, examines the notions of ‘cultural capital,’ ‘habitus’ and ‘field,’ and raises questions about aesthetics as a set of principles, concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty.

Who is the arbiter of these principles? How does this affect our appreciation and how does it influence others?

Looking at the expansions of Western culture’s social history, specifically British development, it was amongst Georgian society that taste accompanied those with privilege; it was vainly delineated and quantified by the gentry.

Throughout escalating generations, the public taste of how ‘one presents themselves’, continues. Amid our collaboration, the relationship between private and public presentation has been at the forefront of our conversation, in which we try to re-address our own society’s ‘cultural capital,’ ‘habitus’ and ‘field’.

From the Victorian era, Oscar Wilde stands as an exemplar. Wilde lived through constant tensions between his private and public life. He lived a double life because of his sexuality, and the heteronormative demands of society’s taste. The pressure of the Victorian’s obsession with social class and the accompanying ideology is articulated in his play, “An Ideal Husband”.

Now, our contemporary’s need to manipulate our personal presentations persists but with a renewed evolvement, linked to our own social institutions’ vicissitudes - digital media.

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Living with our ever-present digital need, and constant appetite to update to social media, again fuels discussions about the anxieties to be an authentic individual, continuing the wider discourse about class, identity, and our personal lives. ‘In a democratic culture people are inclined to believe that it is presumptuous to claim to have better taste than your neighbour… But things are not simple…’ 1 To conclude, it appears as if the crux of history’s social critique, repeats. Whichever the generation or era, will we ever flee the paradox of this demand to present, and will we ever cease to be complicit in the manipulation of taste? Will Western culture, and British classification ever escape ‘keeping up with the Jones’?

Takeaway culture! Michelangelo’s David

Endnotes 1. Full quote: Roger Scrutton, p.133 “Beauty”, Oxford University Press, 2009 31

On the Impossible Exposition of Taste through Lived and Considered Experience

Kioka Williams

Judging taste is a cynical pastime, but earnestly cultivated to soothe our inability to understand anything truly.

Image Credit Infernal Deity of a Psychotic Mind Wordpress (2012) [Internet] http://idpm.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/fashion-forward.jpg

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Elevated Nudity on the Street, 2012

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Communal Essay

This experimental document traveled anonymously through the chain of exhibitors each reflecting and writing on the theme Taste.

The resulting essay is a series of responses and reflections.

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How is taste experienced and acknowledged? As an everyday consideration in routine scenarios, how is taste perceived? Is it a self-reflective concern?

An ideological one?

Is taste a matter of aesthetic or cultural training? Is it etiquette? A tacit knowing? Where is this knowledge acquired? Who exactly is the judge of taste? What happens when we oppose established ideologies of taste?

Likening taste to a set of strictures, we built a place of contemplation to consider taste, a place to display our taste confessions. But seriously, what about taste produces feelings of guilt and causes us to feel inappropriate, offensive, and inadequate? Is it failure to express our knowledge and refinement? And really, does it matter?

Western culture and perspective has always placed shifting values upon high and low culture. Two examples of art critics addressing this issue would be: Kenneth Clarke’s commentary about twentieth century aesthetics, and John Berger’s analysis of hierarchical systems (how we perceive them, what defines them, what governs them). However, let us remember that such views are linked to each author’s context, and are a record of scholarly discussion tied to a given paradigm, rather than an adequate representation of the plethora of unrecorded opinions that could have come to be as popular.

This instable placement has leant to the irony of, and insecure associations linked to, our lived and considered experiences surrounding taste.

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We are now living in an age of an ever-present digital addiction, consumed by a constant appetite to update to social media. The abundance of selfies floods our visual intake.

The selfie is just one example of how we as individuals wish to be presented, and it begs the question: what is the public presentation of our taste, and how manipulated is that knowledge?

There is a circular nature to our urge to present ourselves, publicly and privately. There is an awareness that taste is manipulated in a multiplicity of ways, yet our compliancy in entering into this manipulation feeds directly back into our personal rationale, causing complex feedback loops and further insecurities.

An interesting contradiction often exists between the self that we promote outwardly to the world, and the self that we nurture inwardly through the choice of objects, art forms and experiences that we actively consume and acquire. Why do we so often feel the need to cocoon ourselves and our taste away, and how can a barrier exist between our private and public lives and tastes?

The privacy of the home enables us to proclaim our taste to ourselves, however there is a simultaneous need for external approval, for an acceptance of our taste and identity by others.

Within the safety of our own controlled, introspective environment, we display our personal taste with seeming pride and contentment, an

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extension of our psyche, a true expression of self; yet we feel the need to constantly share with the world an outward persona, that aspires to fulfil a preordained and socially prescribed ideal of what it is to have taste.

Perhaps we decide to share what we are doing this Saturday night, or what music we are listening to; sometimes we might decide to prove our credentials and social significance by taking a selfie whilst at a party, or tag ourselves at a significant cultural event. Suddenly we feel the weight of peer pressure and the need for acceptance within the confines of this prescribed perimeter of tasteful normality, pushing us towards an uncomfortable climate of self-promotion.

Why doesn’t the outward persona that we take such an active approach in promoting, always match up with the self that we nurture privately within the shelter the home?

To paraphrase George Orwell’s classic, ‘All humans have taste, but some have more taste than others’.

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Though we consider ourselves 21st century beings, it seems that an evolutionary journey over 85 million years has failed to remove our primal instinct – the need for validation and acceptance. Broken to simplicity, the human desire to be congratulated and acknowledged for having good taste is synonymous with the pack mentality of wolves.

Leading our senses in taste, we have the alpha. S/He is aggressively assured and has convinced the pack, without the slightest doubt, of their authority in the matter. Alphas define the agenda and hold power to which we all submit. Second in command are those that sit confidently in their own conviction of taste; they are happy to follow, yet will occasionally challenge the alpha for their position as leader.

Next in line are those who follow without question, on the basis that doing so ensures a place in pack, preventing any forced ejection. Followers follow and do not rock the boat.

Bottom of the chain is the omega. An omega has no taste; their sense of taste has been consciously and subconsciously force-fed. Despite 38

knowing the likely consequences, an omega may feel an urge to affirm their individuality. When they try to reject their ranking and gain a higher status of appreciation, they are promptly reminded of their rating and bullied back into line. An omega’s battle is perhaps the most constant and unrelenting.

Without the omega there would be nobody for the pack to measure its quality of taste against, so that they could understand the scale of difference between the two ends of the spectrum.

Our measured senses of taste are conjoined with a sense of respect: this is the respect that we have for ourselves, and the way in which we wish to be respected by our peers. Lack of respect for another’s taste automatically asserts an individual’s superior ranking, especially where this ranking is shared by the rest of the pack. Is it possible to rank somebody’s taste below your own and not pass judgement? While the intention is there, I admit for me, it can be a struggle.

Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.” - Alexander Pope. What seems to be expressed in that statement is that ‘taste’ keeps ideas, and even a sense of genius, in check. It ensures that artistic talent is not wasted on trivial or uncouth pursuits, and is instead guided in the right direction. Edward Fitzgerald extends this notion, stating, “Taste is the feminine of genius.” This pushes the idea that, the ability to create is useless without a complimentary ability to assess and critique the inherent merit of a thing, implying that creativity needs to be regulated by those that know - the tasteful.

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How does personal taste manifest itself? Is it the feeling we have in our head or heart, or is it embodied in the ‘stuff’ we own and the ‘things’ we say we like? Is there a disjunction between internal feeling and external thing?

As suggested previously in this essay, it is human nature to self-regulate; we are able to hide or manipulate our ‘taste,’ as a means of fitting in or standing out from our peers. We are acutely aware of the hierarchy of taste not just in the art world, but in daily life too.

Our lives are on show now, infinitely more so than at any other point in human history. There is a shear wealth of information, made accessible through the devices which the majority of us carry around in our pockets, evident in the platforms of: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, online journalism, blogs, forums, reviews etc. This means that we are constantly being barraged by a deluge of other people’s opinions and tastes, and not only does this inform and manipulate us, it forces us to form an opinion.

If we spend so much of our time amending our public appearance and taking on board other people’s opinions, do we even really know what our own true personal taste is? Or is that what taste actually is, an amalgamation of opinion in the guise of personality?

Oh dear! Which colour do you prefer, red or blue? A differentiation in aesthetic judgement can easily be explained as a matter of subjective opinion.

But if we accept this rational, what effect would it have on our contemporary society? In every generation social composition follows a seemingly organic process, creating a system of beliefs instilled into the masses. To view it through this behavioural lens, the social activities of a group, and the inherent motivations, bring about emergent forms of judgement.

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In continuing this line of inquiry we can begin to see, that in every generation the differences in cultural capital mark the differences between social classes (Bourdieu, 1984). Therefore any aesthetic judgement made by a member of society, is pervaded by class factions. These divisions shape specific and distinguishable tastes, representing a standing in a hierarchical matrix, along various axis’ relating to money, power, privilege and acceptance in the society.

In our current time (described as Post-Ford), a culture of mass-production has saturated society with products and by-products, social media and online activities alter the facets of societal interaction, and it seems that taste as an indicator for social orientation is dissipating, losing its power and status. Within this generation, taste can be constructed and deconstructed due to a flexibility of identity.

Through technological, social and economical changes, a paradigm shift has occurred, altering the social orientations of our already heterogeneous society. Boundaries of differences in taste, and their ramifications for social orientation, are now hidden in a vast tangling. This is a time in which it is conventional to align with many social orientations, and therefore several palettes of tastes. A time that you don’t need to think about a choice between red and blue – you choose them both!

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Credits Published as the reflections of a reading group series for the conference, Taste After Bourdieu, the reading group sessions were organised by Professor Malcolm Quinn and Dave Beech.

Project time line: 14th January – 16th May 2014

The Taste After Bourdieu conference was organised by the University of the Arts London, from 15th to 16th May 2014 at Banqueting Suite, Chelsea College of Arts, London.

Contributors to this publication are; Chrissa Amuah, Caroline Derveaux-BertĂŠ, Robert Gadie, Jaime Greenly, Jessica Hart, Mohammad Namazi, Professor Malcolm Quinn, Alex Roberts and Kioka Williams.

Edited by Robert Gadie Designed by Mohammad Namazi Printed by Hato Press in London Publication Funded by CCW Graduate School With special thanks to Laura Lanceley, Claire Mokrauer-Madden and Wendy Short

ISBN 978-1-908339-12-6

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To what extent does desire for a beneficial position, one that garners acceptance or validation of sorts, skew our behaviour? Are we made to play the role of a fearful subject, telling the cultural emperor how magnificent their new clothes are?

In the worlds of Fine Art and Design, such questions of positioning and mediation can be related to the commercially viable product. As makers of things, the questions arise: can taste transcend behaviour? Is personality and creativity evidenced aesthetically?