ABSTRACT
Bourdieu’s Distinction famously reorientated debates about aesthetic judgement away from philosophy towards the political sociology of reception. The Rules of Art, on the other hand, used the more theoretically elaborated notion of the ‘fields of cultural production’ to investigate the historical genesis of modern structures of artistic production, including that ‘pure aesthetic’, of which Distinction analysed the contemporary ideological class function. However, the cultural field of the production of art, in the institutional sense governed by the modern art museum, has changed decisively since the 1960s, and with it, the historical ontology of art itself. Setting out from the position that the philosophy of art must be distinguished sharply from the study of aesthetics, this essay reorients the debate on art and taste, away from the opposition between sociology and aesthetics, towards the revival of philosophical reflection on the historical ontology of art. In ‘postconceptual art’, it is argued, the legacy of the philosophical inquiry into the ontology of art casts the viewer as critically engaged rather than a subject of taste in the conventional sense. There is a postconceptual dialectics of taste here: neither a dialectic internal to taste (which is impossible if taste is to be non-conceptual), nor a Kantian dialectic of ‘conflicting concepts of the basis of the possibility of judgements of taste’ – a transcendental dialectic of the ‘aesthetic power’ of judgement – but a dialectics of taste and not-taste: a dialectics between the multiplicity of categories of taste, on the one hand, and the multiplicity of ways of negating their non-conceptual status on the other. The latter primarily involve establishing the relational and historical character of their meanings. The primary terrain of this dialectics is the terrain of ‘the interesting’ and the ‘image’.
