In his article “The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic” Pierre Bourdieu argued that the western aesthetic attitude is not shared by all humanity, or even by all people at all times in Western societies. He picks up on the current popular theoretical position that art is not defined by a type of creation, but a kind of social institution, and he argues that it follows from this that the cultural framing or representation of of the aesthetic attitude is also historically produced.

According to Bourdieu, the western conception of aesthetic appreciation is the disinterested contemplative attitude of the art lover. This is a product of history, because the process of aesthetic appreciation is inseparable from the historical appearance of producers of art motivated by artistic intention, and is inseparable from the production of fine art as autonomous and as having ends and standards that are found or created by the artist. The aesthetic appreciation, or having an aesthetic experience, is culturally specific learnt response or ability.

This creates a hermeneutic circle. The institution of art is maintained by people who accord art a special status, and the aesthetic attitude is dependent on, and a product of this institution, just as the institution is dependent upon, and a product of, the aesthetic attitude. The circle is maintained by belief in the ‘sacred’ status (sacred as in set apart from every day or mundane functions) of the art work. Within this circle the aesthetic experience’ is articulated in terms of the idea of disinterestedness in the sense of it being distinct from moral, political, or instrumental purposes.

Bourdieu’s historical account of the historical relationship between the rise of the concept of a distinct, or autonomous, realm of aesthetics and the history of the development of our art institutions and practices is uncontroversial.The notion of disinterestedness in our account of aesthetic experience disengages aesthetic experience from life’s other concerns, in the same way that Western cultures disengage fine art from everyday live.

This s is a problem if we want to understand indigenous art. However Bourdieu's account does not preclude us holding that aesthetic appreciation is a basic human capacity, and that that the predominant western Enlightenment philosophical understanding of aesthetic appreciation as disinterested is a culturally specific concept. So we need to explore other ways of articulating what aesthetic appreciation involves if we want to say something applicable cross culturally about indigenous painting--eg., Western Desert painting.

One way to do this is to challenge the Kantian notion of aesthetic experience as disinterested, and to do so by placing aesthetic experience firmly within a social structure of a particular society.