Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

CLASSLESS TASTE
Burning call “academic realness”) is not of course sufficient to give me the powers
that accompany my (sub)class position as a professor. But, more than a mere
sign of that position, these things demonstrate my acquisition of the habitus that
that position requires because they are that habitus in action. The practice of
class taste is part of the process by which my classification as an academic is realized,
that is, it is part of my occupying that class position. This is evident as soon
as we remember with Bourdieu that taste is “the propensity and capacity to
appropriate (materially or symbolically) a given class of classified, classifying
objects or practices” (p. 173): my ability to enjoy fine art, classical music, and
rare wines, as well as my relation to the processes of social production, which
makes the exercise of that ability possible, help define my membership in a
particular fraction of what Bourdieu calls “the dominated fraction of the dominating
class.”
Art objects have specific properties, requiring particular elements of habitus for
their adequate consumption. As already mentioned, they function particularly
well as social classifiers because, Bourdieu notes, they “enable the production of
distinctions ad infinitum by playing on divisions and sub-divisions into genres,
periods, styles, authors, etc.” (p. 16). In addition, peculiar to the modern concept
of art, in contradistinction to its historical relatives in other social orders, is the
use to which the name “autonomy” has been given: as embodiment of the
“higher” (noncommercial) interests of the dominant classes in society, providing
opportunities for the cultivation of a capacity for perceptual experience independent
of normal practical function. This is what is signaled by the idea of the
“aesthetic attitude” as one of detachment from the claims of “practical life.”
According to Bourdieu,
the aesthetic disposition, a generalized capacity to neutralize ordinary
urgencies and to bracket off political ends, a durable inclination and
aptitude for practice without a practical function, can only be constituted
within an experience of the world freed from urgency and
through the practice of activities which are an end in themselves, such
as scholastic exercises or the contemplation of works of art.
(p. 54)
Thus, as Bourdieu describes it, it is not only that art is accessible primarily to
those who have the wealth, leisure, and education to encounter and appreciate
it. Art itself, in its modern form, represents “the primacy of form over function,”
of a “stylization of life,” of the detachment from the practical and the exercise of
taste peculiar to the aesthetic attitude (p. 176). In this it emblematizes the social
position of the executive, as opposed to the operative: the decision-maker who
looks for “results” without getting his or her hands dirty. The love of art is an
expression of the upper-class habitus in the cultural sphere; “the aesthetic disposition
is one dimension of a distant, self-assured relation to the world and to
others which presupposes objective assurance and distance” (p. 56).
177