On Taste and the Emergence of Aestheticism
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The notion of “taste” is taken to be a bourgeois invention. But its necessity now and then was urgent.
In a world where too much cultural production had incurred the risk that beauty or “value” would become relative terms, it was the concept of taste which sought to discover the principle of the “beautiful” and “value” running through the most apparently heterogeneous assortments of cultural forms.
Despite what intellectual historians say, aesthetic judgment—as a practice—was not invented out of thin air as a means of justifying the oppression of the uncultured, that is, a means of preserving and justifying the social hierarchy. For the ancients could be snobs as well.
The difference between antiquity and modernity lies in the possibility for the latter that the ugliness of capitalism and mechanical production and with it proletarian sensibility, on the one hand, would bring about an anti-sensibility, replacing the beautiful; and, on the other, that the seemingly enormous differences in sensibility among cultures around the world would negate, on a rational basis, any absolute sense of good and bad. In the ancient world, say, in Rome, it was more than common to encounter divergent standards of beauty in art and craft. All empires have faced this reality.
Then the more important factor, which made relativism a real threat in modern times, was the hideousness of modern production: the fact that efficiency brought into existence an ugliness that was both ubiquitous and profitable, which meant that it would continue and colonize the beautiful which had ceased to be profitable, even though it was rare. Its rarity of course did become important…
But one could not wish away the bourgeois world, since it was making the rulers richer at the same rate that it was making the world more and more drab and hideous. It was necessary to carve out a space for sophisticated sensibilities to reign but through the imagination.
So different from the rich and powerful of past centuries and millennia who possessed everything, particularly what was beautiful, the new elite class were impecunious aristocrats of the senses and the spirit. They were expressly not aristocracy of the material world. For only the bourgeoisie were rich, and the aesthetes were their antithesis.
While aesthetic posturing may have been the culmination of the philistine/artist dialectical agon, a failure to bring about a creative synthesis, it expressed something real: quality was being repressed in favor of quantity… ugliness.
. . .
The notion of “taste” is taken to be a bourgeois invention. But its necessity now and then was urgent.
In a world where too much cultural production had incurred the risk that beauty or “value” would become relative terms, it was the concept of taste which sought to discover the principle of the “beautiful” and “value” running through the most apparently heterogeneous assortments of cultural forms.
Despite what intellectual historians say, aesthetic judgment—as a practice—was not invented out of thin air as a means of justifying the oppression of the uncultured, that is, a means of preserving and justifying the social hierarchy. For the ancients could be snobs as well.
The difference between antiquity and modernity lies in the possibility for the latter that the ugliness of capitalism and mechanical production and with it proletarian sensibility, on the one hand, would bring about an anti-sensibility, replacing the beautiful; and, on the other, that the seemingly enormous differences in sensibility among cultures around the world would negate, on a rational basis, any absolute sense of good and bad. In the ancient world, say, in Rome, it was more than common to encounter divergent standards of beauty in art and craft. All empires have faced this reality.
Then the more important factor, which made relativism a real threat in modern times, was the hideousness of modern production: the fact that efficiency brought into existence an ugliness that was both ubiquitous and profitable, which meant that it would continue and colonize the beautiful which had ceased to be profitable, even though it was rare. Its rarity of course did become important…
But one could not wish away the bourgeois world, since it was making the rulers richer at the same rate that it was making the world more and more drab and hideous. It was necessary to carve out a space for sophisticated sensibilities to reign but through the imagination.
So different from the rich and powerful of past centuries and millennia who possessed everything, particularly what was beautiful, the new elite class were impecunious aristocrats of the senses and the spirit. They were expressly not aristocracy of the material world. For only the bourgeoisie were rich, and the aesthetes were their antithesis.
While aesthetic posturing may have been the culmination of the philistine/artist dialectical agon, a failure to bring about a creative synthesis, it expressed something real: quality was being repressed in favor of quantity… ugliness.
. . .
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