The Sanitized Spectacle

Modernism rather deceptively promised us the possibility of infinite experiments with aesthetic form, though those formal possibilities were always constrained by a belief in an artistic genius that could keep the experimentation under some kind of control, even if only under aesthetic control. Poststructuralism, however, called into question the modernist privileging of the aesthetic and of the artist's control by showing that the aesthetic disposition, what might also be called cultural competence or the disinterested taste that can recognize aesthetic universals, was itself historically specific and partial. universal aesthetic disposition was dissected and shown to be an effect of the material conditions of existence that are, among other things, because most freed from economic necessity, as Pierre Bourdieu argues. partiality or specificity of those rarest conditions most often passes unnoticed, even though they are, paradoxically, so obvious: The most 'classifying' privilege thus has the privilege of appearing to be the most natural one

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