Roger Scruton, Beauty *** Carl Wilson, Let's Talk About Love **** 1/2

Two small books on the subject of aesthetics. Roger Scruton, a philosopher, defends the very traditional view that true beauty is that which ennobles the human soul. Carl Wilson, a music critic, explores the question of where our personal tastes come from.

Beauty is an elegantly written book whose main argument I find unconvincing. I enjoyed Scruton's analysis of particular art works more than I did his philosophical musings (similar to the way I felt about Kierkegaard's Fear and Loathing).

Nominally, Let's Talk About Love is a book about the Celine Dion album of that title, the one containing the Titanic theme "My Heart Will Go On." But Wilson really just uses the album and the artist as a case study to investigate the question of "whether anyone's tastes stand on solid ground, starting with mine." This concrete approach makes the abstract question of objectivity quite vivid. Wilson starts with the polarizing case of Celine Dion, but he quickly gets to the point where he is quoting Kant and talking about "cultural capital."

One of Bourdieu's most striking notions is that there's also an inherent antagonism between people in fields structured mainly by cultural capital and those in fields where there is primarily economic capital: while high-ranking artists and intellectuals are part of the dominant class is society thanks to their education and influence, they are a dominated segment of that class compared to actual rich people... And this opposition between cultural and economic capital carries down into less-privileged class strata, perhaps helping to motivate school teachers to vote for Democrats (currently the party associated with cultural capital) and auto workers to vote Republican (symbolically the party of economic capital). — page 94

The book paints a sympathetic, rounded portrait of Celine and the origins of her music, although a true Celine Dion fan would likely find it condescending.

Let's Talk About Love inspired introspection about my own (musical) taste, making me wonder whether they derive from anything other than my social class and the persona I want to convey to others. I like to think that it does — and Carl Wilson agrees with me, although the one weakness of the book is that he doesn't present his own ideas about the X factor in taste. Why do hipsters find subversion more compelling than sentimentality, and favor complexity over being crowd pleasing?