Dissing Dion

Céline, to be precise. But why?

...Dion is the Antichrist of the indie sensibility, an overemoting schmaltz-bot who has somehow managed to convert the ethos of Wal-Mart into sine waves and broadcast them, at kidney-rupturingly high volume, directly into our internal soulPods. A book pondering the aesthetics of Céline risks going wrong in about 3,000 different ways. Most obviously, it could degenerate into one of those irritating hipster projects of strategic kitsch-retrieval, an ironic exercise in taste as anti-taste in which an uncool phenomenon is hoisted onto a pedestal of cool simply as a display of contrarian muscle power.

[...]

Wilson’s real obsession here is not Céline but the thorny philosophical problem on which her reputation has been impaled: the nature of taste itself. What motivates aesthetic judgment? Is our love or hatred of “My Heart Will Go On” the result of a universal, disinterested instinct for beauty-assessment, as Kant would argue? Or is it something less exalted? Wilson tends to side with the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who argues that taste is never disinterested: It’s a form of social currency, or “cultural capital,” that we use to stockpile prestige. Hating Céline is therefore not just an aesthetic choice, but an ethical one, a way to elevate yourself above her fans—who, according to market research, tend to be disproportionately poor adult women living in flyover states and shopping at big-box stores. (As Wilson puts it, “It’s hard to imagine an audience that could confer less cool on a musician.”)

Although Wilson never grows to love Dion’s music, he’s also no longer comfortable with his former scorn. He acknowledges the merits of her work: “It deals with problems that don’t require leaps of imagination but require other efforts, like patience, or compromise”; although it is “lousy music to make aesthetic judgments to,” it “might be excellent for having a first kiss, or burying your grandma, or breaking down in tears.” And he ends the book with a Céline-inspired plea for a new species of “democratic” criticism: “not a limp open-mindedness” but a refusal to indulge in our baser cultural-capitalist instincts. Céline, he says, “stinks of democracy,” and his effort to understand her has taught him to “relish the plenitude of tastes, to admire a well-put-together taste set that’s alien to our own.”..

I'm as "democratic" as the next guy, but I still Kant like her. But maybe there'll eventually be some sort of Hegelian synthesis from this antithesis.

Via Arts & Letters Daily.

Mark C.

Posted by markc at December 20, 2007 09:35 PM