To explore the economic and social
elite's use of aesthetics in their ascendancy to power we
need to trace at least two threads of present history. The
first involves mapping the rituals of tastefulness, the distance
it creates from the uninspired mob, the language and manners
of the tasteful, and the inherent hypocrisy that this implies.
The second centres on the histories of peoples, either ascendant,
static or uncounted which recognise themselves in terms of
that tastefulness, or in reaction to it, and act accordingly. |