Taste as a Collective Involvement to Expand the Worlds That We Inhabit

14. November 2018, 18:00 – 21:00

Antoine Hennion
Taste as a Collective Involvement to Expand the Worlds We Inhabit

One might “take a liking” to a style of music, a wine region, any number of things; but how does taste shape objects and in turn how does it shape oneself? Sociologists have systematically investigated what determines taste, not what taste determines. This talk, on the other hand, will consider tasting, sensing, valuing things in their performative dimension: Amateurs and the objects they hold dear inform one another through a long process in the course of which devices and bodies, collectives and subjectivities take shape. A study of this process gives a better account of the amateur experience, which is both a demanding involvement and an uncertain fate that makes the particular force of things emerge and lets one be sensitive to them. By testing the object’s capacity to respond and evolve, but also by offering the opportunity to grasp it and render it with greater intensity, taste expands the potential of our world. In short, all aesthetics also contains an ethics and a politics.

Sophia Prinz
Challenging the Sensory Order: Artistic Practice and Forms of Perception

‘This exhibition is an accusation’ – these were the words Lina Bo Bardi used to introduce her 1963 Nordeste exhibition, the inaugural show at the Museu de Arte Popular (MAP) in Salvador da Bahia. Standing accused was a modernism forgetful of history, purely formalist, and full of disregard for the Afro-Brazilian population’s ways of life. Through this example, the talk will provide a practice-theoretical examination of the interdependent relationship between collectively shared schemes of perception and material culture. This will both address the ‘form’ as a mediation of sensory ordering and engage with the artistic and curatorial practices that, through aesthetic means, question the established canon of forms – and the social forms contained therein.