INTER-LINKED: Politics of Aesthetics

The politics of aesthetics has often been the cause of debates when it comes to the way in which art is consumed and understood with respect to intersections with class, caste, gender and other such markers of society. Pierre Bordieu classified high art and popular culture as being significant to the ways in which society organised and understood the value and classification of what art is. Berger defined the self as being created by the gaze, be it the oppressive nature of the male gaze or the constitutive one of the orient. The changing landscape of art consumption where the movement has been from physical spaces to our smartphone screens has been both transformative in the ways in which it has broadened access and also in how art itself has begun to be constituted and reconstituted. With this, we have Aryan Nair. Aryan shoots and records banal life-- his profile is peppered with videos of moscow streets and tutorials on how to make ginger tea.