The Love of the art is not innate

Here is a quotation from Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction. Social Critique of the judgment, Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1979, p 83, which illustrates an exemplary non-innéité of the judgment of taste.

In The Distinction, but especially in The Love of art (1966, Collection of ” common sense “, Editions de Minuit) Bourdieu démythifie the concept of innate good taste. With The Love of art, Bourdieu and Darbel want to show that the differences in the attitudes of men in the face of the works of art are not the result of faculties and predispositions innate.

“What is acquired through the daily contact with ancient objects or by the regular practice of the antique shops and galleries, or, more simply, by inserting them in a world of familiar things and intimate friends “who are there, as said Rilke, without back-meaning, good, simple, certain’, is of course a certain “taste” which is nothing other than a report of familiarity immediately with the things taste ; it is also the feeling of belonging to a world that is more polished and more policed, a world which finds its justification to exist in its perfection, its harmony and beauty, a world that has produced Beethoven and Mozart and that reproduces continuously people who play and enjoy it ; it is, finally, an immediate accession, recorded in the depths of the habitus, to the tastes and dislikes, sympathies and aversions, fantasies and phobias which, more than expressed opinions, based, in the unconscious, the unity of the class. “

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