ABSTRACT
This chapter will address Pierre Bourdieu’s writing on taste and distinction, first through an interdisciplinary framework, and second by offering a nation-state perspective that stems from historical and contemporary conditions of art and culture within Japan. Exploring primarily an exchange of cultural provisions of taste within art and a Japanese public sphere (an urban context less available to the complex historical associations of a Bourdieusian analysis of taste), this chapter will reposition Bourdieu’s connection to a global ‘habitus’ through historical, sociological and the contemporary art perspectives that begin to suggest the possibility of an alternative habitus. How do the revisionist conditions of taste, as exposed by Bourdieu, return to a present-day assessment of Japan in relation to class-based habitus, capitalism, aesthetic leanings/tastes, homes and the reproduction of culture? Identifying Bourdieu’s relationship to taste and distinction outside of Europe, this chapter charts a global contemporary art practice in terms of public reception and the specificity of Japanese artistic production. This case is examined in relation to examples of artworks by the London-based Portuguese artist, João Penalva, which identify the socio-political constructions of Japanese historical pictorial reception in abstract depictions of urban destruction, myth, radiation and plant-life within Japan.
