A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
Guilty Pleasures
Taste, Design, and Democracy
In this chapter, I suggest that the relationship between design and taste is best understood by defining taste primarily as middle‐class or “bourgeois” taste, that is, as a specific form of cultural idealism that has developed within commercial society and liberal democracy. Attention to the manner in which middle‐class taste builds this cultural idealism through personal habits of discernment and discrimination clarifies the relative positions of design and taste within a democratic sphere of free choice. It helps us to understand how the notion of perfecting bourgeois culture through modernist design emerged in the late nineteenth century and was rejected as unrealistic and/or ethically unsound in the second half of the twentieth century. If the characteristics of middle‐class taste are used to understand the relationship between design and taste, this describes a specific kind of design history that includes aspects of design activity within a hegemony of bourgeois taste and places a number of diverse design activities at the periphery. This peripheral activity can be understood by using an account of the limits of the cultural idealism of bourgeois taste, those occasions where this idealism “comes apart at the seams.”
Guilty Pleasures
Taste, Design, and Democracy
In this chapter, I suggest that the relationship between design and taste is best understood by defining taste primarily as middle‐class or “bourgeois” taste, that is, as a specific form of cultural idealism that has developed within commercial society and liberal democracy. Attention to the manner in which middle‐class taste builds this cultural idealism through personal habits of discernment and discrimination clarifies the relative positions of design and taste within a democratic sphere of free choice. It helps us to understand how the notion of perfecting bourgeois culture through modernist design emerged in the late nineteenth century and was rejected as unrealistic and/or ethically unsound in the second half of the twentieth century. If the characteristics of middle‐class taste are used to understand the relationship between design and taste, this describes a specific kind of design history that includes aspects of design activity within a hegemony of bourgeois taste and places a number of diverse design activities at the periphery. This peripheral activity can be understood by using an account of the limits of the cultural idealism of bourgeois taste, those occasions where this idealism “comes apart at the seams.”
Guilty Pleasures
Taste, Design, and Democracy
Massey, Anne (editor) / Quinn, Malcolm (author)
2019-04-12
22 pages
Article/Chapter (Book)
Electronic Resource
English
Online Contents | 2000
| Taylor & Francis Verlag | 2019
Online Contents | 2011
Online Contents | 2008
Online Contents | 2010