ABSTRACT
As a result of certain developments in twentieth-century art,most notably Dada and Pop art, common, functional objects,“mere real things”—to use Arthur Danto’s words-have made their appearance not only in art museums and galleries but in critical and philosophical writings as well. Whenever critics and philosophers have discussed such artifacts as Duchamp’s bottles or Warhol’s famous “Brillo” box, this was primarily to discuss the difference between a mere artifact and a work of art, leading to the acknowledgement that the artistic status of a man-made work is the fruit of a negotiation between textual, intrinsic features, socially determined uses and expectations, and individual inclinations and circumstances of reception.2 French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has offered a socio-political reading of a cognate phenomenon, one that Dada and Pop Artists may be said to have brought to attention or parodied, namely “the capacity to confer aesthetic status upon objects that are banal or even ‘common’ [ . . . ], or the ability to apply the principles of a ‘pure’ aesthetic to the most everyday choices of everyday life, e.g., in cooking, clothing or decoration, completely reversing the popular disposition which annexes aesthetics to ethics.”3 Bourdieu claims not merely that aesthetic value is socially construed but also that the aesthetic disposition in general is not natural, as Kant and virtually all philosophers writing on the subject ever since have assumed, but rather the product of historical circumstances and the means to achieve a goal: to sanction and
legitimize social differences. Conferring aesthetic status upon common, everyday objects is thus interpreted by Bourdieu less as complicating the philosophical question of what is aesthetic than as exemplifying the social roots of the aesthetic, for “nothing is more distinctive, more distinguished.”4
