LEARNING HOW TO THINK, AND FEEL, ABOUT CONTEMPORARY ART: AN

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1 LEARNING HOW TO THINK, AND FEEL, ABOUT CONTEMPORARY ART: AN OBJECT RELATIONAL AESTHETIC FOR SOCIOLOGY SOPHIA KRZYS ACORD 1 This is a preprint of the publication: Acord, S.K. (2016) Feeling and thinking in art curation: Grounds for a relational aesthetic for sociology? In Mike Savage and Laurie Hanquinet (eds.), Handbook of the Sociology of Art and Culture. London: Routledge, Marc: [The art snobbery] started some time ago To be precise, it started on the day we were discussing some work of art and you uttered, quite seriously, the word deconstruction. It wasn t so much the word deconstruction which upset me, it was the air of solemnity you imbued it with. You said, humourlessly, unapologetically, without a trace of irony, the word deconstruction, you, my friend. Art, the play (Reza 1996 [1994]: 26-27) All knowledge is sensorially embodied in some capacity. Knowledge may be mentally indexed through our physical learning experiences in the world, lodged in our muscle memory, or deeply felt in the sense of tacit knowledge or common sense understandings that we come to expect in certain circumstances. And studying what (and how) individuals know in different situations is integral to developing a robust understanding of how culture works or is put to work (Acord and DeNora 2008) in our social worlds. As Emirbayer (1997) has argued in his manifesto on relational sociology, this idea that actors engage with cultural norms in dynamic, unfolding situations is a key part of illuminating action in society. As a tangible cultural form, visual art provides sociology with an excellent case study to examine these processes of knowing and sharing through close studies of artistic producers, mediators, 1

2 and consumers. The dynamic terrain of contemporary art, in which the making and negotiation of artistic knowledge is visible, offers a particularly good opportunity to witness the formation and employment of knowledge as a cultural meaning system. According to Zolberg (2005), the current state of contemporary art means that both art and sociology may need new paradigms for understanding and analysing the arts. Within the contemporary art world, many have embraced Bourriaud s (1998) relational aesthetics to describe and categorize contemporary artworks. This approach sees the aesthetic nature of an artwork not as a property of the artwork itself but, rather, as a dimension of one s behaviour in relation to the artwork, combined with other objects and events. In other words, as Witkin (2003) has described from a sociological agenda, the role of reception has become progressively greater in establishing the meaning and significance of contemporary artworks. As curators are often an artwork s first receivers, their judgements play an important role in shaping its meaning. This chapter examines curatorial judgments to see how Bourriaud s concept of relational aesthetics generated within the art world might also inform how sociology understands relationality in the study of culture. Following Becker s (1982) landmark publication of Art Worlds, the role of curators and other mediators in the contemporary visual art world(s) has been a key area of sociological attention, as well as more popular interest (Millard 2001; Thornton 2008). In the uncertainty of aesthetic values that marks contemporary artistic creation (Crow 1996; Danto 1992), curators play an active role in evaluating artworks and shaping the institutional criteria for classification (Heinich 1998; Moulin 1987[1967], 1992; Moulin and Quemin 1993, 2001; Quemin 2002; Tobelem 2005). Working independently or from a permanent position in a 2

3 museum, exhibition curators play a dual role in the museum and market by choosing artists and artworks to feature in monographic or group exhibitions. The museum confirms these choices through immortalization in the exhibition catalogue (or purchase for its permanent collection), something which sends signals to the rest of the field. While there may not be a unified consensus about the curator s choices, the dual machines of the institution and market support these decisions with enough capital (cultural and financial) to make them viable in the short-term (which, naturally, is the only state in contemporary art). A secondary effect of this process of cultural consecration is to enhance the curator s own reputation, in a cyclical manner. Similar to the research on cultural intermediaries, curators operate as members of a larger creative team to assist the production of culture by linking products to groups, influencing the flow of information, and establishing the practices for consuming products (Friedman and Miles 2006; Gardner 2002; Hesmondhalgh 2002). They define for others what art is. In the visual arts, the mediation work of curators includes selecting artists for exhibition and conducting associated promotional work, as well as working closely with artists as sounding boards and interpreters of their work for audiences. I choose to adopt the actor-network terminology of mediator rather than that of cultural intermediary (cf: Latour 2005) to emphasize that curators do not merely reproduce or pass on established artistic knowledge, but rather play a key role in shaping that knowledge through organizing framing devices for artworks in the form of exhibitions and their accompanying texts. These installations proceed in sometimes unexpected ways, creating unpredictable opportunities to understand artworks and their meanings (Acord 2014). 3

4 The research cited above has done the difficult work of demonstrating how contemporary art, as an organizational world, maintains its structures and forms a base of knowledge in the face of uncertainty. Yet, we still know little about how this knowledge is composed and enacted by the curators themselves: the relational aspects of art worlds. This is the question to which the current chapter is addressed. This chapter is based on ethnographic research with a snowball sample of over 30 international curators of contemporary art conducted between 2005 and I accompanied them on studio visits, exhibition installations, planning meetings, art fair trips, and other backstage moments when they made decisions about the inclusion of particular artists/artworks in exhibitions. On these occasions, we used digital video or photography and subsequent video/photo-elicitation interviews to visually unpack the moment of decision-making together (cf: Acord 2006). All quotations are presented in English, and any translations are my own. The gender and minor elements of speaking style for some speakers have been changed to protect their anonymity. I will draw on this data to examine how curators, as experts of contemporary art, create and engage the criteria upon which their judgments are based. In particular, I will demonstrate how the artistic encounter is a critical moment that combines discourses of feeling and thinking. While the feeling discourse reveals a curator s attraction to a particular work, the curator then turns to a more theoretical, thinking discourse based in contemporary art world codes and conventions to explain his/her decisions to fellow art world participants. I argue that this dual exercise of expertise may have more in common with Willis (1990) relational grounded aesthetic than Bourdieu s structured pure gaze. Finally, I explore how the ways in which curators make meaning aesthetically offers groundwork for informing an object relational approach for sociology. As the groundwork for this discussion, I first embark on a 4

5 short literature review of the curatorial gaze, the elusive way we have sought to explain and transfer the mastery of contemporary artistic knowledge. From the good eye to the curious eye : Evolution of the expert gaze Both art history and sociology have long sought to identify the way that expert aesthetic knowledge is learnt and manifested. Before modernism, an artwork was seen to have internal rules and art historians/critics had the special skills to decode them in a more or less objective manner (Witkin 2003). In the art world, elite mediators particularly dealers, collectors and curators were described as possessing a good eye (Rogoff 2002 [1998]) in their ability to quickly pick out the art historical codes in a given artwork: When I was training as an art historian, we were instructed in staring at pictures. The assumption was that the harder we looked, the more would be revealed to us; that a rigorous, precise and historically informed looking would reveal a wealth of hidden meanings. This belief produced a new anatomical formation called the good eye. Later, in teaching in art history departments, whenever I would complain about some student s lack of intellectual curiosity, about their overly literal perception of the field of study or of their narrow understanding of culture as a series of radiant objects, someone else on the faculty would always respond by saying Oh, but they have a good eye. (Rogoff 2002 [1998]: 27) In this reflection by noted art historian Irit Rogoff, historical or curatorial expertise is traditionally defined as a mastery of symbolism, the knowledge of a set of symbols and the meanings that they signify. Similarly, as Bourdieu (1993) describes, the good eye of art 5

6 perception involves a conscious or unconscious deciphering option based upon a structuring code which has been more or less completely mastered as a function of artistic competence (his italics). Repeated exposure to past works and their patterned meanings informs our ability to interpret correctly new works. For Bourdieu, speaking now of modern art, this artistic code privileges the search for symbols over more popular (emotional and literal) responses to the content of a painting, and thus acts as a form of social distinction what is described as disinterestedness or the pure gaze (cf. Bourdieu 1984, 1987; DiMaggio 1982). As art becomes more abstract, the importance of upbringing and education in creating the good eye intensifies. It is worth noting, for purposes of comparison, that the opposite of the good eye may be the good ear, or someone dependent on the opinions of others (Thornton 2004). According to several prominent critics and historians of contemporary art, traditional criteria like the good eye no longer apply in the contemporary art world, where the production of a new intellectual discourse on a work of art is crucial to establishing its value. This discourse draws less on a textualist approach steeped in art history, and more on a theoretical discourse drawn from cultural studies, sociology, philosophy, and literary theory. This shift of interpretation leads Rogoff (2002 [1998]) to dismiss the good eye of connoisseurship in lieu of the curious eye of scholarship. Art historian/critic Arthur Danto follows this curious approach by observing that contemporary art concerns intellectual, not aesthetic, responses: You have to project a hypothesis: Suppose it is a work of art? Then certain questions come into play -- what's it about, what does it mean, why was it made, when was it made and with respect to what social and artistic conversations does it make a contribution? If you get good answers to those 6

7 questions, it's art. Otherwise it turned out just to be a hole in the ground. (quoted in Wallach 1997: 36) The growth of the curious eye means that artistic expertise is now based less on the pure act of perception and the ingrained exercise of art historical knowledge and technical training, and more on the documentation or theory surrounding a work of art (Crow 1996; Marí and Schaeffer 1998). This is what Rosenberg (1972) terms the de-aestheticization of art, the total elimination of the art object in favour of a focus on the concept behind the object. Bourdieu (1993) also acknowledges that contemporary art is in a period of continued rupture, in which the traditional codes of artistic perception (the good eye) lag behind the new instruments of art production (theoretical discourse). Of course, the need for expertise in these periods does not disappear. Rather, contemporary artistic expertise is exerted by a few virtuosi or cultural prophets who, by virtue of the position they occupy in the intellectual structure and artistic field, have an all-knowing understanding and awareness of past and present artistic and social codes: the fact is they demand a capacity for breaking with all the codes, beginning obviously with the code of everyday life, and that this capacity is acquired through association with works demanding different codes and through an experience of the history of art as a succession of ruptures with established codes. In short, an ability to hold all the available codes in abeyance so as to rely entirely on the work itself, and what at first sight is the most unusual quality in it, presupposes an accomplished mastery of the code of the codes, which governs adequate application of the different social codes objectively 7

8 required for the available works as a whole at a given moment. (Bourdieu 1993: 227) As Bourdieu describes here, the exercise of knowledge in contemporary art begins to give more agency to the work itself and its most unusual quality, rather than residing purely in the application of an art historical framework. This accomplished mastery of all codes in contemporary art does not come from objective and collectively agreed-upon codes of artistic criticism for attributing value. Instead, a widespread and current familiarity of the international art context is the knowledge base for the expert of contemporary art; s/he is a permanent seeker and aggregator of information, a specialist of context (Moulin and Quemin 1993: 1435). Expertise involves not a passive social exposure, but an active experience: an awareness of the history of modern art, empathy with the spirit of the times, regular contact and sustained relationships with artists, and influence in the art world. In her ethnographic study of a public art commission, Heinich (1997) confirms these characteristics, observing the way decision-makers drew on their familiarity with art world actors, knowledge of market prices, and awareness of recent exhibitions. This curious eye of the contemporary curator takes them around the world to develop a deep and rich set of theoretical vocabularies for explaining their decision-making. And the multiple skill sets that this implies may mean that curators have more in common with Gardener s (2012) journalists than the traditional art historian or critic. The growth of the curious eye has also changed the nature of curatorial education. 8

9 Training curators: From art history to art networking As I have discussed above, given the gradual formalization of artistic training over the second half of the twentieth century (cf. Singerman 1999), cultural studies and other analytical concepts have become increasingly important in the contemporary art world. As one curator said of his Ph.D. thesis on an avant-garde writer, This has been really helpful for me because it allowed me to develop all of these discourses that can cope with contemporary art. Indeed, many members of the freelancing star generation of curators had very little or no training in art history, something confirmed by Octobre (1999a), who found that over 60% of those in her sample started out in another domain (although 68% had university degrees, and, on the whole, curators of contemporary art had a higher level of education than other curators). Indeed, the curators in my sample have advanced degrees in a wide variety of fields, including artistic practice, literature, philosophy, economics, political science, sociology, classics, theatre, and even journalism and clinical psychology. For some curators, their cultivation of other fields provides important skills for writing, communication, and reflection. For others, their backgrounds provide precise analytical resources and tools, such as philosophy and critical cultural theory, that directly influence how they look at and frame works of art using the curious gaze. These analytical and transferable skills enable curators to invent and converse with theoretical discussions around artistic practice and artistic works. As with the creation and growth of any profession, the contemporary curatorial world has recently witnessed an institutionalization of its role, prompted first and foremost by the immense, global growth of university-based curatorial programs, often founded by these same pioneering individuals in the 1990s. This return to an academic professionalization of curating has necessarily brought about a return to a dominant art-theoretical discourse in the field, as well as an emphasis on formal training and management (Tobelem, 2005). Yet, I also 9

10 heard repeatedly that the essence of curating cannot be taught, something which Octobre (1999b) describes as part of the curatorial rhetoric that describes expertise as a gift rather than something learned. While these ways of thinking about curating bear a strong resemblance to our post-van Gogh ways of attributing gifts to artists (cf: Heinich 1996), they also bear an important question: If star curators cannot teach curating, then what do these curatorial programs do? Below, I share three answers to this question from different curators who have instructed in curatorial programs: (1) Curating cannot be taught. All that we can actually teach are things that may help people to become a curator, or to work as a curator. But ultimately the essence of this profession is something vague that has a lot to do with curiosity, inspiration, and the ambition to immerse yourself in a particular context. (2) Of course you can t teach curating. So, the way we ve proceeded is to let the students develop a reading list that works for them. Obviously, this is very different than [another] curating course, which does it properly by teaching them about art history, theory, etc. Basically, my generation of curators is the very last generation of curators who can curate without having taken a course in curating. It s just like artists: they didn t need to go to school, but now they do. But, we are resisting any sort of orthodoxy or molding the students to be like us. [ ] Instead, we ve recently moved the curating program into the same space as the art students studios. So, physically, we demonstrate the need for curators and artists to be constantly interacting, and that the role of the curator is to be around art and, more importantly, artists. 10

11 (3) Curating, of course, can t be taught. Curating is something that is coming out of let me think how you would say that experience, or conditioning even, or listening, whatever that may be. But, you can definitely teach other aspects that may be useful for a curator. You could teach theory, reading, the history of exhibitions, analyzing a work of art As these curators emphasize above, curating is an experience or instinct. Training, then, takes a practical shape (spending time with artists or mounting an exhibition), as much as a theoretical shape (giving students conceptual tools derived from theory). In speaking to recent graduates of these curatorial programs, however, another important part of cultivating curatorial knowledge is identified: writing. Writing is what one young curator termed a transferable art world skill, which complements the practical experience pursued through internships and on-the-job training. Two young curators weigh in below. (1) I abandoned my artistic practice, because it was weighing me down. I lost interest in it, I guess. But at the same time, I became more interested in the economy of culture. Plus, that allowed me to go to university and find the means like writing to understand and express all of the things that were interesting me. And, I found this to be increasingly more fruitful than the engagement I had with these ideas back in art school. (2) While I was [in school], I got a job working for [a gallery] part time. [ ] I wasn t really doing any work, just things like opening the door. The job itself wasn t demanding, but just being exposed to how that system worked was 11

12 really interesting. [ ] So, I did that for a couple of years, and then I was beginning to consolidate what the idea of curating was much more, and how the practice of writing and bringing ideas together through writing might be manifested through an exhibition. As illustrated in the quotes above, writing is described as an important way in which young curators learn to synthesize the code of the codes and put into practice all of the ideas, theories, and interests that curators developed in their studies and life experiences. The analytic, discursive relationship to art accompanies the experiential, sensorial components of curatorial learning about art. To summarize these varied tracks and orientations to curating contemporary art, there are a variety of learned activities that can make up the process of becoming a curator: networking, learning how to write about art, learning about the economy of the arts, and learning how to engage with artists. Although one cannot teach curating contemporary art, the informal learning that takes place through internships and curator-led training courses demonstrates that curatorial knowledge is not codified through abstract guidelines and principles, but rather, is suspended in the sphere of practical engagement that ultimately takes the form of exhibitions and written texts. As Henderson (1999: 8) notes in regards to design work, The knowledge used in everyday work is grounded in practice, the learning of practice, the history of a given practice, and the cultural, technical, and organizational constraints constructed around practice. Similarly, the experiential engagement through social and material interaction plays an important role in learning the practice-based knowledge comprising curatorial work, as well as how to perform it successfully. The question remains, however, as 12

13 to how curatorial knowledge manifest in physical exhibitions relates to that expressed through the written word. Sensorial and theoretical discourses in curatorial decision-making As art critic Rosenberg (1972) describes, the de-aestheticization of art in favour of the ideas it produces does not mean that it does not have aesthetic properties. Indeed, the physical artwork remains a significant force in the contemporary art world. In the paragraphs that follow, I draw together quotes from curatorial interviews and observations to explore how formulating and applying the curious eye involves the sensorial relationship with object interactions as well as a theoretical discourse. The existence of this first kind of a relationship to artwork suggests that curation may involve not merely a vast store of theoretical experience, but also emotional and bodily experiences in the world. The existence of a feeling -based discourse in contemporary art mediation can be seen through ethnographic studies of curators at work. When curators see a work they like, they describe it in vague terms, often accompanied by dramatic flourishes of the hands or body. They say that the work struck them, or they liked it, or it excited them. At the opening of one exhibition at a private foundation, the managing curator closed his eyes and recounted to me his first encounter with the artist s work three years prior at a gallery in a nearby city: I was completely taken aback And I said to myself, Ah, really, this is this is. When he physically encountered the artist s work for a second time during the installation of the exhibition, he observed, I was struck again in the same manner, with the same emotion, the same sentiments, the same things that were sensuous and unclassifiable. And, yet, when I asked this curator why he decided to invite this artist for a monographic exhibition at the 13

14 foundation, he explained to me that the artist had a relation with politics that excited him. There seems to be a distinction between the theoretical discourse on art ( a relation with politics ) and the actual lived experience of consuming ( I was struck again in the same manner ). What is particularly interesting in this case, which parallels many other cases in my research, is that the actual emotional modality of artistic interest is translated into a more theoretical discourse to situate that experience within the expected logic of the art world. Of course, artworks provoke feelings as well as intellectual reactions for experts; after all, art is an exercise in sensorial knowledge-making. And curators may draw on their sensory experience to elaborate their more intellectual curatorial concepts. To explain this, I turn to a thematic exhibition about racial and ethnic difference in a contemporary society. The central piece in this group exhibition was one of Afro-Caribbean artist Sonia Boyce s hair pieces (Do you want to touch, 1993), crafted by the artist from synthetic hair extensions. Reflecting on the inclusion of this piece in the exhibition in our interview, the curator Gilane Tawadros said: When I first conceived of the project and was writing the essay, I started off wanting to say something about the fact that the issue of race and representation is: (a), not something new, and (b) not something that has been resolved or gone away. And it is almost as if the [Tube bombing] events in July precipitated once again questions about race and belonging, definitions of Britishness, and the discomfort around difference. On some levels, the hairpieces are quite repellent. I tried to describe it to someone it s like finding somebody else s hair in the bath in a hotel room. It s like that. It s yucky and uncomfortable. But, in a sense, that s what difference, incommensurate difference, feels like. That s what it feels like to encounter 14

15 something to which you can t relate. It doesn t make sense to you. It feels foreign and alien. So, that s why those pieces are there. In the reflection above, the curator describes how the visceral, immediate, feeling experience with a work of art the ewwgh is both shaping of and shaped by her discursive orientation to the theme of racial difference. The way the curator feels about the work is an important, constitutive part of what she thinks about it. Her ability to dialogue with and engage these feelings is an important element of her expertise and decision to include the work in the exhibition. To digest what I have said so far, curators are drawn to particular art works for personal or situational reasons. They feel a connection to them and their judgment is embedded in the material circumstances of the work s reception. Yet, the only way they can say what they think about the work is to refer to a discourse following social or political discussions that exist outside of this object-relational moment. While sometimes the way a curator feels and thinks about a work of art goes hand in hand, as in the quote above, in other situations there can be more of an abrupt disjuncture between these two modalities. This is demonstrated by an additional interview quote below, by a curator of a monographic exhibition: It s quite a hard one to talk about, actually, what he [the artist] is doing. He s put together this stuff in his studio, visualizing the space, right, but, actually visualizing isn t quite right, but the thing is his own work is very much about the body, and these big lumpy objects which are kind of in relationship to your body. [ ] So, what it looks like is almost irrelevant it s more like what it feels like, which sounds pretentious and arty, but it has this kind of physical 15

16 presence. He has got a very particular aesthetic It s kind of garish, it s kind of like a child trying these things, but it really works. The only way I can say what I think about his work is to refer to something else Can I do that? [At this point the curator begins to tell me about Paul Valéry and his writings on the third body.] As shown in the quote above, the theories of Paul Valéry become a way of verbally articulating the curator s feeling experience with a work. As the curator notes, the point of the work is what it feels like, but she turns to a published theorist to explain this. Here, thinking becomes a way to try to access and explain feeling, a way of making the felt experience more accessible and less pretentious. In my interviews it was always clear that the experience of feeling an artwork was never reducible to how one would speak or think about it. Indeed, if a curator can easily and immediately speak about an artwork, it is perhaps a sign that the piece is not original because the curator could very easily draw upon existing verbal registers to describe it. Those artworks that curators identify as the most original make them first feel and explore perhaps more novel and affectual ways of being. Before moving on, I draw on one final curatorial interview quote that nicely summarizes this close relationship of thinking and feeling: I don t think you can respond to art in nice, neat ways. And, I think that it s very difficult to measure the balance between analysis and intuitive response, but we all have a mixture of the two in us. Some are more analytical, some are more intuitive, some are more feelers, some are more thinkers. But, the big thing for me is not really caring where that balance is. It s all mixed up in 16

17 there somewhere. A bit of you s thinking, a bit of you s feeling, it s kind of all working, stuff s ticking in your brain [sing-songy voice] it gets in your eyes, whatever it is, light gets in your eyes this whole wacky existential notion it s all kind of ticking over. And, you feel very much in the moment of experiencing it, as in, with the work, with the show, being there, it s all very much it s quite an experience, in the best exhibitions. Curators visual familiarity with an enormous range of artists and artworks allows them to perceive or create the social and artistic codes found in contemporary art works (such as similarities between artists, and popular aesthetic themes or techniques). Identifying these codes helps curators to think with artworks and place them in relations of value among others in the artistic field. This is what Bourdieu describes as a mastery of the code of the codes. But, scholars taking an ethnomethodological approach warn that the use of language codes to bring object-interactions into shared meaning results in a loss of sorts (Sacks and Garfinkel 1970). As Bourque and Back (1971) demonstrate empirically, while these codes enable people to talk in depth about certain things, they also prevent them from exploring other facets of the ecstatic experience. It may be this fundamental relationship between feeling and thinking that undergirds expertise in contemporary art and the pursuit of originality (as works that break with the codes and cannot be easily identifiable by them). The state of curating contemporary art offers another sociological example of how knowledge even that which assumes to be tightly codified and theoretical involves more complex cognitive acts that involve sensorial experiences that emerge through and are suspended in object interactions. 17

18 Discussion: The grounded basis of relational aesthetics I suggest that expert knowledge in contemporary art may be the result of successfully negotiating what one feels about a work of art with how one thinks about it. As masters of the code of codes, curators hold all of their knowledge about art in an intellectual repository when confronted with a new piece of art. They then have an aesthetic (sometimes emotive) encounter with the work and a particular feature of it appeals to them which spurs them to fix their impressions of the work in existing discourses and codes that allow them to communicate about it in the art world. (They may also create new discourses to explain emerging trends). As demonstrated by Heinich (1997), this discursive mediation is a fundamental way in which experts convince others of the value of the art work and legitimate their own expertise as a function of accumulated knowledge about the field. But, it may not convey the totality of their experience. If the situational, felt encounter with art cannot be completely translated into a written form, a premise that this chapter aims to provide data to reinforce, how can sociology best account for the entire experience of artistic mediation? In this final discussion section I seek to outline how sociology might draw on the concept of relational aesthetics from art the idea that the aesthetic nature of an artwork is not predetermined but shaped through our own behaviour and experiences in relation to it to inform a sociological research program attuned to all aspects of cultural experience. One established way of conceptualizing the relationship of feeling to thinking discourses is offered by work in expert studies. Experts have finely-tuned perceptual skills; they possess more tacit knowledge than novices and are able to notice more and make fine discriminations 18

19 in any situation (Ross et al. 2006). As defined by Cianciolo et al. (2006: 615), tacit knowledge is a person-environment exchange that is not articulated and that arises without explicit attempt to link environmental stimulation to phenomenological experience. It is an adaptive intellectual resource, in that the cognitive processes involved in the often unconscious manipulation of novel information learn from experience. In other words, experts are better equipped at translating their novel aesthetic experiences into art world discourses. It is because curators have both emotional and cognitive reactions to works of art that they are adept at recognizing how the former can inform the latter. This concept of tacit knowledge allows us to re-insert the sensorial aspects of expert judgment into a sociological analysis, but it falls short in its ability to explain the origins of new artistic codes. Another way of understanding the presence of emotional and feeling discourses in relation to art is found in Willis s (1990) formulation of the grounded aesthetic. In our original formulations of the good eye or pure gaze of cultivated mediators, emotion is only present insofar as curators take pleasure in a successful decoding operation. Indeed, the idea that one s emotional reactions to an artwork would inform his or her interpretation was identified by Bourdieu as a popular gaze tied to lower social class. In complaining about the symbolic violence at the heart of this distinction, Willis (1990) rejected the popular gaze and instead defined the popular masses as engaging in a grounded aesthetic, a way of interpreting artworks by linking them to social relations of consumption in everyday life. Willis emphasizes that value is not intrinsic to a text or practice, but rather is always inscribed in the sensuous/emotive/cognitive act by which the good is used. For Willis, grounded aesthetics represent the creative ways in which symbols and practices are selected and highlighted so as to resonate further appropriate and specific meanings; these dynamics are emotional as well as cognitive. 19

20 Similarly, perhaps curators of contemporary art, in the absence of the fixed textual codes and display conventions that gave rise to the pure gaze, actually draw on a grounded aesthetic in their experiences with art works. This approach gives artworks themselves significant agency to shape the discourses that surround them, as they engage in processes of interessement with their users. The notion of high cultural goods being consumed with distance and sobriety has already been broken by Benzecry (2007) s study of opera publics, and other studies of contemporary art audiences (Farkhatdinov 2014; Hanquinet et al. 2010). And now here, we see that experts of contemporary art, while producers of artistic hierarchies, are also grounded, embodied, and feeling consumers of art. Most importantly, harkening back to our discussion of curatorial training programs, the experiences that feed artistic judgment are not tightly codified through an art historical discourse. Rather, they stem from a more decentralized, grounded network of curators own readings, background, networking, and other experiences in the context of their use in their daily lives. The sociological formulation of the grounded aesthetic for artistic reception works well to explain the social foundations for Bourriaud s concept of the relational aesthetic for contemporary art. In the forward to his 2002[1998] book, Bourriaud suggests that contemporary artists break with other art movements by producing works that are not meant to represent the world, but rather works that are meant to create an action or relation within it. Art is relational in that its form exists in the dynamic relationship that it enjoys with human interactions and social context. Art is a place that produces a specific sociability by keeping together moments of subjectivity that only exist in this human-material-social encounter, and the exhibition is the arena of exchange where this encounter occurs (Bourriaud 2002[1998]: 18-20). The relational aesthetic of contemporary art teaches us that the meaning of art is to be 20

21 found in its encounter, and that this encounter has physical, material, and grounded elements that involve social informed perceptions as well as personal affects. Experts of contemporary art, then, are not disinterested, but rather, are highly interested in the grounded building blocks of their reactions to art and preoccupied with how to insert those into art world discourse. Conclusion: Towards an object relational aesthetic for sociology As I noted in the outset to this chapter, the current state of contemporary art means that both art and sociology may need new ways to understand how knowledge is produced in the arts. And, in the past decade, Nicolas Bourriaud s (2002 [1998]) relational aesthetic has gained great notoriety in the contemporary art world as a new paradigm to describe and categorize many contemporary works. For Bourriaud, a relational aesthetic in art means that the knowledge of an artwork does not lie internally to it, but rather can be found in the multiple relationships that it establishes outside of itself in the world; art visitors activate and create this knowledge. Now, both Becker (1982) and Bourdieu (1983) describe their sociological approach to the arts as relational, in that they explain artistic works with reference to mediating activities external to the artwork. For Becker, artistic work is organized in relation to the tacit conventions permeating the art world, while for Bourdieu (1983: 312), the the essential explanation of each work lies in the objective relations which constitute this field. These relations, then, are in the human social world. Further work by Emirbayer (1997) and Kirchner and Mohr (2010) has augmented this relational approach by demonstrating how the relations embedded in the structural dynamics of situations govern individual agency, and that language plays a central role in revealing this system of relations. This work reveals that one s building of relationships with others can be occasions for intrapsychic processes of self-reflection and agency, not only structural reproduction. 21

22 While these approaches are a vital part of understanding processes and practices in the contemporary art world, they do not capture the totality of experiences and interactions afforded by contemporary art. Indeed, the experiences of curators of contemporary art demonstrate that a relational approach in sociology must not only conceive of the relationships of actions to other practices and tastes for an individual; it must also conceive of the relationships individuals have to particular moments and situated aesthetic experiences with material forms. In demonstrating that expertise in contemporary art possesses a strong emotive component, embedded in the material environment and relationship between artwork and expert, I argue that sociology could follow Bourriaud and develop an object relational aesthetic as well. This object relational aesthetic for sociology would require basing analyses not only on organizational networks, cultural conventions, and values, but also on the subjective relationships cultural producers sustain with art forms as aesthetic objects, which can be functional, emotional, or completely serendipitous. As the discussions above of feeling and thinking demonstrate, the system of relations that define social life are not simply composed by language and discourse, but also by feelings. The meanings that contribute to our social relationships can be found, or worked out, outside of language as well as within it. And an object-relational aesthetic for sociology would examine not only collective emotions, but also the individual emotional encounters that may be the basic or breeding grounds for new acts or norms. Emirbayer (1997) has called for relational sociology to tackle the study of the dynamic, temporal, and unfolding processes that transform relations; I argue that the grounds for such a study are to be found in object relations and feeling experiences. This study, thus, connects to work that builds on Gibson s ([1979] 1986) ecological approach to perception, in that it understandings how artworks, as aesthetic objects, provide affordances 22

23 that act as the material building blocks of culture and cognition (cf. DeNora 1995; Hennion 1993). Finally, it is my hope that such an approach would create new dialogues between art and sociology. Curators regularly spoke of feeling an affiliation between their work and sociology, because, as one curator explained, We both like to observe. Moulin (1987[1967]: 127) notes that artists are experts in practical sociology, because they master organizational networks and reward systems and use them to their own benefit. Curators are experts in practical sociology in a different way. They have high emotional intelligence and are conscious, as Witkin (2003) would say, of sensing their own sensing. Curators are experts in knowledge production, not only seen in the codification of knowledge in museum and art world texts, but also in understanding how to establish situations for knowledge production to take place, what I have earlier termed an environment for knowing (Sutherland & Acord 2007). Yet, traditional sociology of the arts has examined curators as elite experts, and viewed their ineffable experiences as examples of a symbolically violent pure gaze. Instead of viewing the ineffable with suspicion, we might follow aesthetician Jean-Marie Schaeffer in trying to re-claim aesthetic experience as vital to a democratic relationship with art. Artworks are created not to be explained, but to be experienced; they are created not to be interpreted as signs of something else, but to be reactivated as virtual worlds. (Schaeffer in Marí and Schaeffer 1998:49) Rather than seeing contemporary art as sense data to be decoded, a shared focus on the object relational aspects of the aesthetic experience might allow art world actors and sociologists to 23

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