Suchergebnisse

Taste usually occupies the bottom of the sensorial hierarchy, as the quintessentially hedonistic sense, too close to the animal, the elemental and the corporeal, and for this reason disciplined and moralised. At the same time, taste is indissolubly tied to knowledge. To taste is to discriminate, emit judgement, enter an unstable domain of synaesthetic normativity where the certainty of metaphysical categories begins to crumble. This second title in the 'Law and the Senses' series explores law using taste as a conceptual and ontological category able to unsettle legal certainties, and a promising tool whereby to investigate the materiality of law's relation to the world. For what else is law's reduction of the world into legal categories, if not law's ingesting the world by tasting it, and emitting moral and legal judgements accordingly? Through various topics including coffee, wine, craft cider and Japanese knotweed, this volume explores the normativities that shape the way taste is felt and categorised, within and beyond subjective, phenomenological and human dimensions. The result is an original interdisciplinary volume – complete with seven speculative 'recipes' – dedicated to a rarely explored intersection, with contributions from artists, legal academics, philosophers, anthropologists and sociologists.

A review of recent wine literature.

'Taste and Democracy' is the title of a glazed ceramic pot made by Grayson Perry in 2004. When Perry delivered the first of four Reith Lectures for the BBC in 2013 with the title 'Democracy Has Bad Taste', arts practitioners were given a new kind of platform in debates on taste. In this Professorial Platform, I will ask what position the art school occupies in debates on taste and democracy in the twenty-first century and how it can affirm its position when caught between the cultural ideal of the critically astute tastemaker and the contemporary spectre of the algorithm. I will argue that the true democratic problem of taste lies in the claim on a socially responsible act of self-representation within the domain of free choice, which sacrifices individual gratification in the name of better judgement. The historical basis of this claim is worth examining in order to understand the role of the art school at a moment when the commercial idyll of middle-class taste is coming apart at the seams.