This page is a permanent link to the reply below and its nested replies. See all post replies »
ElwoodBlues · M
Kwek00 · 41-45, M
@ElwoodBlues Yeah... damn yuppie behavior.
[quote]Tastes [i](i.e. , manifested preferences)[/i] are the practical affirmation of an inevitable difference. It is no accident that, when they have to be justified, they are asserted purely negatively, by the refusal of other tastes.[b] In matters of taste, more than anywhere else, all determination is negation; and tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance[/b][i] ('sick-making')[/i] [b]of the tastes of others.[/b] '[b][u]De gustibus non est disputandum[/u][/b]': not because 'tous les gouts sont dans la nature', [b]but because each taste feels itself to be natural-and so it almost is, being a habitus--which amounts to rejecting others as unnatural and therefore vicious.[/b] Aesthetic intolerance can be terribly violent. Aversion to different life-styles is perhaps one of the strongest barriers between the classes; class endogamy is evidence of this. [b]The most intolerable thing for those who regard themselves as the possessors of legitimate culture is the sacrilegious reuniting of tastes which taste dictates shall be separated.[/b]
[b]This means that the games of artists and aesthetes and their struggles for the monopoly of artistic legitimacy are less innocent than they seem.[/b] At stake in every struggle over art there is also the imposition of an art of living, that is, the transmutation of an arbitrary way of living into the legitimate way of life which casts every other way of living into arbitrariness. The artist's life-style is always a challenge thrown at the bourgeois life-style, which it seeks to condemn as unreal and even absurd, by a sort of practical demonstration of the emptiness of the values and powers it pursues. The neutralizing relation to the world which defines the aesthetic disposition potentially implies a subversion of the spirit of seriousness required by bourgeois investments. [b]Like the visibly ethical judgements of those who lack the means to make art the basis of their art of living, to see the world and other people through literary reminiscences and pictorial references, the 'pure' and purely aesthetic judgements of the artist and the aesthete spring from the dispositions of an ethos; but because of the legitimacy which they command so long as their relationship to the dispositions and interests of a group defined by strong cultural capital and weak economic capital remains unrecognized, they provide a sort of absolute reference point in the necessarily endless play of mutually self-relativizing tastes. By a paradoxical reversal, they thereby help to legitimate the bourgeois claim to 'natural distinction' as difference made absolute.[/b]
- Pierre Bourdieu, [i]Distinction[/i] (1979)[/quote]
[quote]Tastes [i](i.e. , manifested preferences)[/i] are the practical affirmation of an inevitable difference. It is no accident that, when they have to be justified, they are asserted purely negatively, by the refusal of other tastes.[b] In matters of taste, more than anywhere else, all determination is negation; and tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance[/b][i] ('sick-making')[/i] [b]of the tastes of others.[/b] '[b][u]De gustibus non est disputandum[/u][/b]': not because 'tous les gouts sont dans la nature', [b]but because each taste feels itself to be natural-and so it almost is, being a habitus--which amounts to rejecting others as unnatural and therefore vicious.[/b] Aesthetic intolerance can be terribly violent. Aversion to different life-styles is perhaps one of the strongest barriers between the classes; class endogamy is evidence of this. [b]The most intolerable thing for those who regard themselves as the possessors of legitimate culture is the sacrilegious reuniting of tastes which taste dictates shall be separated.[/b]
[b]This means that the games of artists and aesthetes and their struggles for the monopoly of artistic legitimacy are less innocent than they seem.[/b] At stake in every struggle over art there is also the imposition of an art of living, that is, the transmutation of an arbitrary way of living into the legitimate way of life which casts every other way of living into arbitrariness. The artist's life-style is always a challenge thrown at the bourgeois life-style, which it seeks to condemn as unreal and even absurd, by a sort of practical demonstration of the emptiness of the values and powers it pursues. The neutralizing relation to the world which defines the aesthetic disposition potentially implies a subversion of the spirit of seriousness required by bourgeois investments. [b]Like the visibly ethical judgements of those who lack the means to make art the basis of their art of living, to see the world and other people through literary reminiscences and pictorial references, the 'pure' and purely aesthetic judgements of the artist and the aesthete spring from the dispositions of an ethos; but because of the legitimacy which they command so long as their relationship to the dispositions and interests of a group defined by strong cultural capital and weak economic capital remains unrecognized, they provide a sort of absolute reference point in the necessarily endless play of mutually self-relativizing tastes. By a paradoxical reversal, they thereby help to legitimate the bourgeois claim to 'natural distinction' as difference made absolute.[/b]
- Pierre Bourdieu, [i]Distinction[/i] (1979)[/quote]
Kwek00 · 41-45, M
@Strongtea It's just stupid Strongtea, you are looking down on people because of something as subjective as taste. There is nothing there, but your own ego that has elevated itself to a region where it thinks it can be the arbitter of good taste. It's just something that makes you feel good, based on absolutely nothing you did. It's like smelling your own farts and pretending they should bottled and sold just because they are yours. Good luck with that attitude.
Kwek00 · 41-45, M
@ElwoodBlues I think it sounds better in french: [i]"Des goûts et des couleurs, on ne discute pas."[/i].
Anyway, artists, museum holders, people with art galleries, fashion designers, ... all that forms of aristery attract people that often [i](not always) [/i]love to smell their own farts by believing that they are the absolute arbitter of taste. I look down on those people, cause it makes no sense. It's just idiots that elevate their own subjective notions to absolute notions just because they are their subjective ideas. It's just collective stupidity to feel important about oneself by doing absolutely nothing then judge someone elses' taste by their own subjective standards. It's hollow as fuck.
Anyway, artists, museum holders, people with art galleries, fashion designers, ... all that forms of aristery attract people that often [i](not always) [/i]love to smell their own farts by believing that they are the absolute arbitter of taste. I look down on those people, cause it makes no sense. It's just idiots that elevate their own subjective notions to absolute notions just because they are their subjective ideas. It's just collective stupidity to feel important about oneself by doing absolutely nothing then judge someone elses' taste by their own subjective standards. It's hollow as fuck.
ElwoodBlues · M
@Kwek00 I think part of fashion is the foundationless self elevation like you describe; another part is separating fools from their money. If you can convince people their self value depends on buying a "new look" every year or two, you're guaranteeing a large and steady stream of income to the fashion "industry." And it's actually a little different from yuppiedom, or at least preppiedom.
When whoever it was published the Preppie Handbook back in the eighties, their idea was it only needed to be written once, because although they was about expensive "business" clothing, they focused on timeless styles like a blue blazers & sensible skirts. They had to come out with a new edition when fleece became established because it's so long lasting. But the ethos of that book at least was anti-fashion even for the monied waspy set. The Preppie Handbook lampooned by the Yuppie Handbook a few years later; it was probably much more about tying one's self worth to the latest trends.
When whoever it was published the Preppie Handbook back in the eighties, their idea was it only needed to be written once, because although they was about expensive "business" clothing, they focused on timeless styles like a blue blazers & sensible skirts. They had to come out with a new edition when fleece became established because it's so long lasting. But the ethos of that book at least was anti-fashion even for the monied waspy set. The Preppie Handbook lampooned by the Yuppie Handbook a few years later; it was probably much more about tying one's self worth to the latest trends.