The understanding of oneself when viewing any form of creative art.

• In Event: Joint Roundtables: Social Psychology Section and Sociology of Emotions Section
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 2 - Organizations & Work

Abstract

Disrupting the Status Quo: Art, Judgment, and the Exposure of the Critic
This paper confronts the taken-for-granted authority of aesthetic judgment. Drawing on labeling theory, particularly the work of Howard S. Becker, and the symbolic interactionist framework of George Herbert Mead, I argue that acts of public criticism function less as objective evaluations of art and more as social declarations of identity and power. When viewers or institutions degrade a work or its creator, they are not simply assessing quality; they are asserting boundaries around taste, legitimacy, and belonging.
Cultural institutions routinely elevate certain forms as “serious,” “refined,” or “canonical,” while dismissing others as trivial, deviant, or unworthy. These labels do not emerge from neutral standards but from socially organized systems of classification that reinforce hierarchies of class, race, education, and cultural capital. The language of critique becomes a mechanism through which dominance is reproduced and dissenting expression contained.
Through qualitative analysis of critical discourse and audience response, this study reframes the viewing encounter as reflexive exposure. To condemn art is to reveal one’s own investments in the status quo. Disrupting that status quo requires a shift from reflexive judgment to reflexive awareness. Rather than asking whether art measures up to institutional standards, viewers must confront what their rejection discloses about themselves and the structures they implicitly defend

Author

• Xavier Pennway