Eating art and the art of eating: unsettling the practices of taste

This paper draws on an experimental performance in which ideas of what food is were unsettled. FOOD|sustainable|DESIGN was a performance held in Milan in October 2015. Orchestrated and performed by honey and bunny, performance artists from Vienna, the unusual meal was attended by scientists, artists, policy makers and the public. Here food itself became art as we encountered familiar foods in unusual ways. Analysed using ideas of taste - as a performative practice which turns materials into food -- FOOD|sustainable|DESIGN can be understood as a chance to disrupt and make visible the industrialised processes that enable our every-day food practices. As an activity, tasting goes beyond the palate and the plate, involving our bodies including guts, fingers, tongues and brains. By working with and against these routine embodied practices, honey and bunny made us aware of issues around sustainability, not through only words and ideas but through tastes. Consequently, through the unsettling of the material practices in the performance, our embodied, reflexive engagement with food might be seen to offer space to speculate on how food might otherwise be

Pragmatics of Taste

In this chapter we consider the problems facing the sociology of culture with respect to taste. We us primarily to the case of music and its various genres but also include comparisons with other objects of passion such as cookery and wine, or sport. The aim of our research on different forms of attachment was to steer the sociology of taste away from a critical conception that had become dominant, in which taste is conceived only as a passive social game, largely ignorant about itself. How, without endorsing the concomitant reduction of real practices to their hidden social determinants, can we incorporate sociology's contribution? Various studies have proved the over-determined nature of tastes, their function as markers of social differences and identities, their ritualized functioning, relations of domination between high culture and popular culture, etc. (Hoggart, 1957, Toffler 1965, Williams 1982, Bourdieu 1984, Mukerji & Schudson 1991, Lamont & Fournier 1992, Crane 1994). But taste is first and foremost a problematical modality of attachment to the world. In terms of this pragmatic conception it can be analysed as a reflexive activity, "corporated", framed, collective, equipped and simultaneously producing the competencies of an amateur and the repertoire of objects that she/he values

Retelling, Memory-Work, and Metanarrative: Two Musical-Artistic Mediations for Sexual Minorities and Majorities in Tokyo

This is the final version of the article. Available from the publisher via the link in this record.Music is not only something to play, but it is also a way to produce a new sharable metanarrative through musical practice, which could represent a renewed set of social values in which people of diverse backgrounds are appreciated. The present paper explores this aspect of music, examining two musical activities held in Tokyo, Japan. One is Prelude, an annual music festival for music circles of sexual minorities and their supporters, and the other is Living Together Lounge, a monthly club event for those who are both HIV-positive and negative. These activities aim to create community empowerment and social transformation among minority and majority groups. While those involved are aware of musical aspects being an integral part of the events, the ways in which music plays a central role has not been well articulated. This is partly because the declared mission of each event has no overt connection to music, but more significantly because there has been no proper way, either commonly or academically, available to describe what is happening performatively in the practices of these events. The present study thus attempts to examine the unuttered aspects of these practices through ethnographic and interdisciplinary investigations. It reveals that the musical practices with various artistic engagements represent tangible memory-work in which participants are enabled to retell existing musical works in their own ways, producing a new sharable metanarrative and acquiring an acknowledgement of the retelling in public. Creating this musico-ritualistic practice is itself a work of art, which eventually becomes a life resource for those who take part in the events and a means of transforming a social situtation of conflict

Music and Mediation. Toward a New Sociology of Music

After a century of studies, there is no agreement on what it means to construct a sociology of music. From the beginning this 'of' has been a place of tension, not of smooth coordination. If music has easily attracted social readings, there has been strong resistance to a systematic sociology of music whose aim would be to explain musical values or contents through reference to sociological factors. The most vehement prosecutor of such alleged reductionism was undoubtedly Adorno (e.g. 1976) - even though he himself became the worst reductionist when it came to popular culture (Adorno 1990); for him, only kinds of music that are not really art deserve sociological treatment (it is difficult to know if this is more disrespectful of popular music or sociology!). By contrast, the opposite programme - a positive explanation of the ways in which music is produced, diffused and listened to - has been attacked on the grounds that, given its refusal to address 'music itself', it cannot acknowledge music's specificity

Les protocoles du goût. Une sociologie positive des grands amateurs de musique

En concevant le goût comme activité réflexive des amateurs, il est possible de redonner leur importance à la fois aux objets sur lesquels portent ces pratiques, aux formats et aux procédures souvent très élaborés que les amateurs mettent en œuvre et discutent collectivement pour en assurer la félicité, à la nature de l'activité ainsi déployée, aux compétences qu'elles supposent et donc, surtout, à leur capacité créatrice, et non seulement reproductrice : à ce qui arrive à travers ces attachements, à ce qu'ils permettent de produire, tant du côté des objets que du côté des collectifs, des relations aux autres et à soi, et des amateurs eux-mêmes. Le goût, la passion, les diverses formes d'attachements ne sont pas des données premières, des propriétés fixes des amateurs, que l'analyse n'aurait qu'à déconstruire. Les publics sont actifs et producteurs, ils ne cessent de transformer aussi bien les objets et les œuvres que les performances et les goûts. Insistant sur le caractère pragmatique et performatif des pratiques culturelles, l'analyse peut mettre en évidence leur capacité à transformer et à créer des sensibilités nouvelles, et non à seulement reproduire sans le dire un ordre existant

Les usagers de la musique. L'écoute des amateurs

Cette contribution est écrite à partir d'entretiens, d'observations ou d'expériences réalisés en équipe ces dernières années auprès d'amateurs ayant des attachements de nature et d'intensité diverses à la musique. Il s'agit de se mettre à l'écoute de leur écoute, en essayant le plus possible de laisser leur espace propre aux formes très variées qu'elle peut prendre. Loin d'être inférieures, incompétentes, passives ou obsédées par le seul plaisir immédiat du son ou de l'image facile, les oreilles des amateurs sont actives, créatives. Elles jouent avec les nouveaux moyens de la musique, la disponibilité démultipliée d'un répertoire, la manipulation instantanée de musiques diverses. Elles travaillent les positions de l'écoute, à commencer par la disposition physique de soi. Elles débouchent souvent sur un art de faire très personnel, inventant de véritables façons de se mettre en musique. Mettre l'accent sur l'écoute, c'est donc réintroduire l'hétérogénéité irréductible d'un réel-événement, fait de plis et de tissages. Non pas une œuvre et un auditeur: des corps, des dispositifs et des dispositions, de la durée, un objet insaisissable, un instant qui passe, des états qui surgissent. Après tout, hors des laboratoires et des écoles, qu'est d'autre la musique

Music Lovers. Taste as Performance

International audienceThis article presents the implications, objectives and initial results of a current ethnographic research project on music lovers. It looks at problems of theory and method posed by such research if it is not conceived only as the explanation of external determinisms, relating taste to the social origins of the amateur or to the aesthetic properties of the works. Our aim is, on the contrary, from long interviews and observations undertaken with music lovers, mostly in the classical field, to concentrate on gestures, objects, mediums, devices and relations engaged in a form of playing or listening, which amounts to more than the actualization of a taste `already there', for they are redefined during the action, with a result that is partly uncertain. This is why amateurs' attachments and ways of doing things can both engage and form subjectivities, rather than merely recording social labels, and have a history, irreducible to that of the taste for works

Music and Mediation: Towards a new Sociology of Music

After a century of studies, there is no agreement on what it means to construct a sociology of music. From the beginning this ‘of' has been a place of tension, not of smooth coordination. If music has easily attracted social readings, there has been strong resistance to a systematic sociology of music whose aim would be to explain musical values or contents through reference to sociological factors. The most vehement prosecutor of such alleged reductionism was undoubtedly Adorno (e.g. 1976) - even though he himself became the worst reductionist when it came to popular culture (Adorno 1990); for him, only kinds of music that are not really art deserve sociological treatment (it is difficult to know if this is more disrespectful of popular music or sociology!). By contrast, the opposite programme - a positive explanation of the ways in which music is produced, diffused and listened to - has been attacked on the grounds that, given its refusal to address ‘music itself', it cannot acknowledge music's specificity