Clouded judgments? Aesthetics, morality and everyday life in early 21st century culture

Abstract

This special issue investigates the relationship between aesthetics and morality. How do the good and the beautiful, the bad and the ugly, happen in everyday life? How do these 'orders of worth' interact? Do they reinforce each other? What happens when they contradict one another? Does one order typically trump the other? Five contributions, from Israel, Italy and the Netherlands, scrutinize different sites where both aesthetics -the continuum of evaluations from beautiful to ugly -and morality -evaluations about good and evil, right and wrong -have a strong presence. The contributions zoom in on everyday cultural consumption, where people create, seek out and discuss 'good' food, clothing, films and architecture, and professional situations where people look for 'good' jobs, want to work in 'good' work spaces and aim to be a 'good' worker. Integrating insights from cultural studies, sociology, valuation studies and science and technology studies, this special issue shows, first, how judgments of aesthetic and moral value are central to the fabric of social life -from the smallest level of everyday interactions to the large scale of economic relations and power im/balances. Second, these valuations often clash, blend and blur. This blurring and blending enables the drawing of social boundaries, the Article 384 European Journal of Cultural Studies 22(4) consolidation of identities and the shaping of selves. But it also allows for seduction, manipulation and obfuscation of power dynamics. Third, the contributions show that in contemporary post-Fordist, meritocratic consumer societies, beauty and morality are increasingly entangled with economic and political logics, leading to new social struggles and new forms of alienation and exploitation.

Defusing moral panic: Legitimizing binge-watching as manageable, high-quality, middle-class hedonism

“…Our analysis highlights the moral dimensions of cultural taste. To establish new cultural boundaries, moral work also has to be undertaken (Lamont, 1992(Lamont, , 2000Jarness and Friedman, 2017;Kuipers et al, 2019). Any type of cultural consumption-including television watching-accordingly demands moral justification; not only to determine what can be consumed by whom, but also-or possibly even more so-to establish how it can be consumed and under what conditions.…”

Peer Feedback in Aesthetic Labour: Forms, Logics and Responses

“…It is unclear whether this market logic is also a driver for peer feedback and whether workers might be invested in their peers' appearance in other ways as well. Seeing as, for instance, aesthetic value and moral judgement have a tendency to be associated in the minds of people (Kuipers et al, 2019), co-workers might be invested in each other's aesthetic appearances in ways that go beyond commercial interests. This raises the question of how peer feedback is legitimised.…”

Ugly and uglier: defining value and politics in architecture

“…There are some notable limitations to this influential 'cultural capital' approach, however. Bourdieu famously argues that, in modern Europe, a 'disinterested' aesthetic disposition emerged, and its purported separation from morals or politics cemented the dominance of some aesthetic judgements over others (Kuipers, Franssen, and Holla 2019). More importantly, Bourdieu's own empirical studies tend to reduce actors' purportedly disinterested judgements to unconscious strategies by which social class members distinguish themselves from others.…”