ABSTRACT
Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste completes what is perhaps the strongest case We have about the social functions of cultural artefacts; but it is a case that is deeply flawed. In this article I try to isolate some of the theoretical presuppositions and implications of its central concepts, and to clarify their political limitations. The subtitle of Bourdieu’s first book in the area of cultural practice, Un Art moyen: essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie, indicates how his interest is focused: he and his collaborators are concerned not with an aesthetics of photography (although, paradoxically, something like this emerges in the book) but with the social uses it is put to; specifically, they analyse the normative structures of aesthetic legitimacy in relation to which photographic practices are structured, and the way this relation then produces different conceptions of what photography is or should be-different sets of aesthetic standards-among different classes of practitioners. In a subsequent book, L’Amour de l’art: les musées d’art européens et leur public, Bourdieu and Darbel reject the assumption that there is a universal and undifferentiated public of the state-run art galleries-that ‘everyone’ goes-in order to conduct a statistical analysis of who precisely does visit them. What they found was that their public is differentiated along class lines or, more precisely (the difference is important), in terms of levels of education and in terms of cultural aspiration rather than achieved position. The statistics are stark: most working-class people don’t go to art galleries, especially when difficult modern art is being exhibited; when they do go they stay for less time than middle-class and upper-class people (an average stay of 22, 35 and 47 minutes respectively); and the musée d’art reminds them of a church rather than of a library or a store. Experiencing a mixture of hostility and deference, working-class people choose to reject the alienating institutions
of legitimate culture, and this means that access to cultural goods ‘is the privilege of the cultivated class; but this privilege has all the trappings of legitimacy. In effect, the only ones excluded are those who exclude themselves.’2
