When a gentleman wishes to believe that "taste" is a magically self-formed capacity that doesn't bear the imprint of social relations, and could not possibly express the individual's relation to culture, he renders culture as an independent sphere which, closed off from lived conditions, is left as a spurious arena wherein the only task of the critic is to act as a professional product rater. That is to say, no matter which particular artists he champions, he embodies the ideology of the salesman with whom he shares a singular quality: a fervent commitment to "intuitive aesthetic judgments" which not only remain unexamined but must remain so, insofar as if they were actually discovered to exist, he would be out of a job.
Posted by jane at May 9, 2006 08:36 PM | TrackBack