By the way, Celine Dion is amazing:
Quote from: Mrs. Jarvis Cocker on January 03, 2008, 06:47:46 AMBy the way, Celine Dion is amazing:Let's hope this author had the foresight to address some or all of these points:
This one is about Céline Dion's 1999 album Let's Talk About Love--the one with that Titanic songon it. What's unusual about Wilson's book is that he can't stand Dion's music. But this isn't abook about why her music sucks: it's a book in which he tries to understand why he thinks so,and why the tens of millions of people around the world who adore it think it's wonderful.And that takes him straight into the problem of taste. (The book's subtitle is a little joke--areference to another famous Céline.) Dion, in Quebecois slang, is kétaine: tacky, naff. Thefirst few chapters of the book ("Let's Talk About Hate," "Let's Talk About World Conquest," "Let'sTalk About Schmaltz") talk about how she got that way: they run through the curious particulars ofher biography, her commercial domination of the globe, and the history of the particularpop-music aesthetic she embodies. Then we get to the core of the discussion, a pair of chapterscalled "Let's Talk About Taste" and "Let's Talk About Who's Got Bad Taste."Wilson runs through the old but still vexing question of criticism's relationship to populism;he talks about Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid's brilliant Most Wanted/Unwanted Paintings project,and the related Most Wanted/Unwanted Song project. He quotes David Hume's description of aperson with good taste (which is essentially someone who likes things that will stand the testof time), and points out that that standard tends to favor tradition over innovation. Eventually,he gets to Pierre Bourdieu. To quote Wilson's summary: "What we have agreed to call tastes, hesaid, is an array of symbolic associations we use to set ourseles apart from those whose socialranking is beneath us, and to take aim at the status we think we deserve. Taste is a means ofdistinguishing ourselves from others, the pursuit of distinction... In early twenty-first-centuryterms, for most people under fifty, distinction boils down to cool. Cool confers status--symbolicpower. It incorporates both cultural capital and social capital, and it's a clear potential routeto economic capital." Wilson has plenty of points of disagreement with Bourdieu (and so do I), buthe notes that "even if Bourdieu was only fifty percent right--if taste is only half asub-conscious mechanism by which we fight for power and status, mainly by condemning people weconsider 'beneath' us--that would be twice as complicit in class discrimination as most of uswould like to think our aesthetics are."The rest of the book is Wilson playing around with taste in general and taste for Céline inparticular. He interviews a handful of big fans (of one of them, he writes: "His taste world iscoherent and an enormous pleasure to him. Not only does it seem as valid as my own, utterlyincompatible tastes, I like him so much that for a long moment his taste seems superior. What wasthe point again of all that nasty, life-negating crap I like?"); he goes to see "A New Day" inVegas (and has a miserable time that leads him to meditate on why sentimentality in art gets such abad rap, and how aesthetes tend to sentimentalize ambiguity); he forces himself, at last, to listenclosely to Let's Talk About Love and write about it. And then, in the final chapter, he tries toimagine a new and more "democratic" kind of criticism: "What would criticism be like if itwere not foremost trying to persuade people to find the same things great? If it weren't aboutmaking cases for or against things?... It might be more frank about the two-sidedness ofaesthetic encounter, and offer something more like a tour of an aesthetic experience, atravelogue, a memoir."
Watch the Celine Dion Is Bananas video in its entirety, people. I used to dislike her, and now I DON'T KNOW. I'm confused.
[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=7iUlJrP5FXc[/youtube]I've seen The Devil, and it's the intern who wrote this.I've just discovered whole new anger muscles I didn't know I had. Thanks for that, Guvna! You too, Fuck Norris!