"Did you do those photographs in there or what?"

"Yeah, I sort of dabble around, you know."
("Dabble? Listen to me, what a jerk.")

"They're wonderful. They have a quality."
("You're a great looking girl.")

"I would like to take a serious photography class."
("He probably thinks I'm a Yo-Yo")

"Photography is interesting because it's a new art form and a set of aesthetic criteria
have not emerged yet."
("I wonder what she looks like naked.")

"Aesthetic criteria? You mean whether it's a good photo or not?)
("I'm not smart enough for him. Hang in there.")

"The medium enters in as a condition of the art form itself."
("I don't know what I'm saying. She senses I'm shallow.")

"To me it's all instinctive. I just try to feel it. I try to get a sense of it and not to think about
it so much."
("God, I hope he doesn't turn out to be a schmuck like the others.")

"Still, you need a set of aesthetic guidelines to put it in a social perspective, I think."
("Christ, I sound like FM radio. Relax.")

---"Annie Hall"


1. I think "Casablanca" is really art, but I am not sure that Baumann does. He might find this
conclusion easier to make if he realized that art is a family-resemblance concept (Wittgenstein)
like the concept of a game. Not all works of art have the same characteristics. Rather there is
a shifting network of features that define art. "Casablanca" possesses some of these features. So
does "Star Wars."

2. I also think Baumann would find this judgment easier to make if he were unabashedly
a cognitivist about value (McDowell) instead of occupying a largely non-cognitivist position. (12-13). Social constructivism is a non-cognitivist position. Only cognitivism about value makes
sense of our phenomenology, our language and our motivations about value. People are only
non-cognitivists about other people's values. We all (probably) think that George Bush was
morally not just instrumentally wrong to start the Iraq War with at best very slender evidence.
The ethical case transfers to the aesthetic case. What Baumann should have argued was that
"Casablanca" and "City Lights" were art all along , but that class and other prejudices blinded
people to this fact until they learned better, not that these films suddenly switched from being non-art to art in 1965. Value is a discovery not an invention.

3. I had a more favorable view of statistics after reading Bourdieu than after reading Baumann.
I just do not know (or remember) enough statistics to understand some of the statistical conclusions he was making nor was he very helpful about explaining them. My view now is that historians should use at most correlations in their analysis not regression, since correlation
has an easy-to-understand common counterpart. Peter Stearns, a professor I worked with while
getting my MA in history, was very opposed to literary sources, but he was also not a big fan
of quantification. His view was that it was sufficient to read through your sources until
you stopped finding new things. I think Baumann should have followed this approach to film
reviews and advertising instead of his quantification approach. Baumann's approach seems like
inaccessible overkill.

4. I think sociologists are too quick to convert everything to the currency of status. Can't I just
like a work of art without worrying about quantity of status it will bring me?

5. I don't think Michelangelo or Raphael or Rubens thought there was such a dichotomy between
art and money or between art and group effort, and if they are not artists who is?

6. We know that Baumann does not like close reading because of his snarky comment about
the analysis of the shark in "Jaws," but does he even like films? At first, I thought he could
not undertake such a large project without liking movies, but the antiseptic tone of the book
leads me to doubt this conclusion. He could have been writing about the history of garden
tools.