Taste and the experience of art: a critical legacy.
Chair: Dave Beech
This panel of Professor Peter Osborne, Dr Pil Kollectiv, Dr Galia Kollectiv and Dr. Ken Wilder considers taste and its critical legacy within the experience of art. All 3 presentations reject the vulgar sociological reduction of aesthetic experience to quantifiable social aggregates without reverting to the established construction of the autonomous individual subject of taste.
Professor Peter Osborne, whose book Anywhere or Not At All argues that the philosophy of art must be distinguished sharply from the study of aesthetics, introduces the category of ‘postconceptual art' as the legacy of the philosophical inquiry into the ontology of art, casting the viewer as critically engaged rather than aesthetically sensuous.
Pil and Galia Kollectiv explore the political legacy of modernism and the avant-garde through critical aesthetic interventions. They explore the role of taste in the construction of post-ironic subculture, focusing on the phenomenon of normcore.
Dr Ken Wilder writes on the philosophy of art through a close analysis of the problematic of beholding. A particular concern is the ambiguous encounter between the viewer and the virtual: a feature of artworks that imply two modes of interiority, one belonging to the viewer and one belonging to the work.