ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the dilemmas of comparatively art-and-design-conscious households to show why the material evidence of choice generates so much anxiety. It reveals the actual processes through which taste is formed. The chapter attempts to address the nature of the aesthetic by examining the process of aesthetic judgement within three contexts from which it is all too commonly excluded. They are an analysis of aesthetics as applied to everyday objects rather than works of art, aesthetics as a social process rather than merely an encounter between an art work and an individual, and considering not only the relationship between the persons involved but also the relationship between the objects involved. The evidence is drawn from an ethnography of household consumption carried out in a single street and some adjacent roads in North London over a three-year period.
