Event overview
Andrés Jaque, Office for Political Innovation (Madrid/New York and Antoine Hennion (Centre de Sociologie de l’innovation, Ecole des Mines, Paris)
Chaired by the new directors: Marsha Rosengarten, Michael Guggenheim & Alex Wilkie
Andrés Jaque is an architect. His work explores the role architecture plays in the making of societies. He has been considered one of the most challenging contemporary European architects. In 2003 he founded the Office for Political Innovation, a transdisciplinary agency engaged with the making of an ordinary urbanism out of the association of heterogeneous architectural fragments. In 2014 he won the Silver Lion to the Best Research Project at the 14th Venice Biennale directed by Rem Koolhaas.
Antoine Hennion’s research in the sociology of music and culture focuses on the cultural industries, advertising and design, mediators, services and users. He is currently working on a comparative analysis of various forms of attachment, through a study of amateurs. With J.-M. Fauquet, musicologist at the CNRS, he has also undertaken historical research on the development of the taste for classical music, primarily in relation to the case of Bach in nineteenth century France.
In these areas he is working towards a definition of a sociology that studies the mediations through which a relationship with objects is established, in order to analyze taste as an accomplishment. A mediation is neither a cause nor an effect: it is a pause, a support, before the advent of a new configuration.
The analysis thus defies the dualistic debate between aesthetics and sociology of culture: taste does not fear the revelation of hidden determinations of which it may not have been aware; it seeks them out to produce new effects. Mediations trigger the appearance of the objects of taste, the amateurs who adopt them and the frame that allows their relationship to be experienced. The world of taste is constructed on the basis of organized places, trained bodies, texts, instruments and various material objects.
Taste does not exist without these systems of collective and materialized appreciation that make it part of a history. It constantly produces its own questioning on what determines it, on the quality of objects, on the nature of the attachment itself. Thus defined, it is less an object to explain than a key area in which to grasp the combined formation of subjectivities and collectives, the objects that make us and the others with whom we live, relations between ourselves and our bodies.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 23 Mar 2016 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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