The Persistence of Taste ─ Art, Museums and Everyday Life After Bourdieu

This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of taste. It brings curators together with sociologists and art theorists and artists with design historians, art historians and cultural historians, with the common aim of developing rigorous and relevant ways to approach the practice of taste. The contributors to this book engage with the practice of taste as this relates to encounters with art, engagements with cultural institutions and the practices of everyday life in national and transnational contexts. While taking account of Bourdieu’s legacy, the book addresses the larger question of why it became important to seek out the social value conferred by taste and whether this form of value will persist in future.

Malcolm Quinn is Professor of Cultural and Political History, Associate Dean of Research and Director of Camberwell, Chelsea, Wimbledon Graduate School, University of the Arts London. His current research focuses on the issue of prejudice in taste in the thought of Jeremy Bentham and David Hume. He has written about the politics of taste in the development of state funded art education for the journals History of European Ideas, International Journal of Art and Design Education, Journal of Visual Arts Practice and Revue d'etudes Benthamiennes. His book Utilitarianism and the Art School in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Pickering and Chatto) was published in 2012.

Dave Beech is an artist in the Freee art collective and is Professor at Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg. His book Art and Value (Brill 2015) was shortlisted for the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Prize. He has written widely on the politics of art, including The Philistine Controversy (Verso, 2002, co-authored with John Roberts) as well as editing a special edition of Third Text 16:4 (Art, Politics, Resistance?) and co-editing a special issue on Biennales for Art and the Public Sphere Journal. He has also contributed to debates on participation and art’s publics, in books such as In Search of Art’s New Publics and The Pedagogical Turn, as well as being a founding editor of the journal Art and the Public Sphere (Intellect Publishing, from 2011).

Michael Lehnert studied marketing, business administration, and social and political theory in Freiburg, Newcastle and Edinburgh, and for a PhD in international relations at the London School of Economics. He was also on the editorial board of Millennium, LSE’s journal of international studies. He has worked in the private sector, at London Business School, for the EHRC, and with the World Economic Forum. He joined the British Museum to conduct institutional innovation, income generation and cultural diplomacy projects for its Director, Neil MacGregor. After a similar role held for the Camberwell, Chelsea, Wimbledon Pro Vice-Chancellor at the University of the Arts London, he is currently a director of the PEF, spearheading its rejuvenation and move to London’s new Battersea diplomatic precinct.

Carol Tulloch is a writer and curator based at Chelsea College of Arts, the Chelsea, Camberwell, Wimbledon Graduate School and V&A Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as a member of Transnational Art, Identity and Nation Research Centre. Her recent work includes the monograph The Birth of Cool: Style Narratives of the African Diaspora (2016), co-editor and co-curator of Syd Shelton: Rock Against Racism (2015), ‘Dress and the African Diaspora’ a special issue of Fashion Theory, Journal of Dress, Body and Culture (editor, 2010) which included her article ‘Style-Fashion-Dress: From Black to Post-black’ (2010). Tulloch was the Principal Investigator of the Dress and the African Diaspora Network.

Dr Stephen Wilson is a writer, practitioner and theorist who programmes, curates and lectures in contemporary art and is currently a Senior Lecturer and Postgraduate Theory Coordinator at Chelsea College of Art, University of the Arts, London. He is editing three new volumes: Memories of the Future - On Countervision, The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums and Everyday Life After Bourdieu and Where Theory Belongs, based on a series of lectures and conversations held at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts.