Distinction and the Aristocracy of Culture

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Distinction and the Aristocracy of Culture

• Pierre Bourdieu

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Needs

• Cultural needs are the product of upbringing and
  education
• Linked to social origin
• Social hierarchy of arts corresponds to social
  hierarchy of consumers
• Taste functions as a marker of class, separated
  by modes of acquisition
• Scholastic/domestic

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• Cultural titles of nobility
• Degrees pedigrees
• Definition of cultural mobility is struggled over
  by groups with different ideas of culture and
  art, due to different conditions of acquisition

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• Reading a work of art requires knowledge of codes
  programs for perception
• Art has meaning only for someone possessing
  cultural competence to understand the code.
• Hidden condition for moving beyond sensory to
  secondary cultural meanings
• legitimate perspective naturalized, acquisition
  forgotten and seen as taste eye for art

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Artistic autonomy

• References other art, not reality
• Necessarily historical understanding
• Aesthetic perception also historical, requires
  understanding of background styles
• Demands a specific cultural competence acquired
  by exposure no explicit rules
• Implies social separation, as opposed to popular
  aesthetic of function art and life connect
• Working class expects image to mean something, be
  functional, judge on ethical basis
• Aesthetic distance of art and life related to
  life of ease, distance from necessity

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• Different ways of relating to reality and fiction
  linked to class characteristics taste
• Oppositions of value quantity vs. quality,
  substance vs. form
• Linked to taste of necessity vs. liberty
• Art and cultural consumption predisposed to
  legitimate social difference
• Work imposes norms of perception, defines one
  disposition as legitimate, better
• Product of learning not nature unequal class
  opportunity to meet norms.