Taste After Bourdieu: questions to the panels

Taste After Bourdieu is a two day conference exploring the relationship between aesthetic judgment and social distinction in the practice of taste. Organised by CCW Graduate School, it was initiated and developed by a group of five academics at CCW and a graduate student group. The panels are led by Dave Beech, who is the chair of the panel on 'Taste and the Gallery', Michael Lehnert, who is chair of the panel on 'Taste and the Museum', Stephen Wilson, chair of the panel on 'Taste and the Street' and Carol Tulloch, chair of the panel on 'Taste and the Home'. The graduate student group members are Chrissa Amuah, Caroline Derveaux-Berte, Jaime Greenly, Jessica Hart, Katasi Kironde, Mohammed Namazi, Alex Roberts and Kioka Williams, who have devised an installation project for the conference. We are delighted to be hosting a truly international event with an introductory panel, four panels of speakers and two keynote speakers who include arts practitioners, sociologists, philosophers, museum directors, curators, design historians and art historians from Asia, North America, Australia and Europe. Each of the four panels has formulated some key questions that address the condition of taste after Bourdieu:

Taste and the Gallery:

  • How is taste related to aesthetics and art?
  • What is a viewer of art and how do individuals inhabit this role?
  • What is the relationship between changing regimes of taste and revolutionary social transformation or resistant subcultures?

Taste and the Museum:

  • To what extent is discussing taste a relevant exercise for museums, in light of dispersed social practices, disaggregating cultural capital, current accessibility of aesthetic experiences and the diffusion of social emulation to achieve distinction?
  • When developing and executing a distinct institutional narrative or curatorial objective, what role and relevance is and can be given to the visitor, as individuals and cultural groups?
  • What influence on bildung, and leverage over gemeinschaft and gesellschaft do museums have today, to set cultural precedents, influence public discourses, and make societal impacts?

Taste and the Street:

  • How is the contemporary male gaze in Japan applied and reconfigured as a judgement of taste?
  • How are Bourdieu's notions of taste subsumed by models of transnational awareness?
  • What happens to our understanding of taste in transnational Asian art practices that travel away from 'home' and return to a nation based, heritage driven context?

Taste and the Home:

  • While Bourdieu rightly points out that there are hierarchies of taste, do we live those hierarchies in our day-to-day sensorial existence?
  • What happens with the move of everyday object from one context to another, thereby pushing the boundaries of public and private and the devolution of taste and taste-making through the body?
  • How do we understand the incorporation of strategic and tactical code-switching of the presentation of self by individuals and cultural groups between one geographical space and another?

For more information and registration visit the conference website.

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