ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the large parts of Pierre Bourdieu very familiar sociology of art that can most directly help the current argument. It discusses critical perspective will have to be employed in order to wed Bourdieu’s theory to the Weber/Kant/Hegel/Adorno combination already constructed. Art is a means by which the dominant class maintains power over the working classes. The Marxist orientation in terms of class is explicit, but Bourdieu extends the understanding of ‘class’ through additional concepts such as, most notably, habitus and cultural capital. Complementing the survey-based analysis of legitimate ‘taste’ in Distinction and Love of Art is Bourdieu’s construction of the autonomous fields of cultural production. The academic, literary, and artistic fields are shown to be internally ordered hierarchies of competitions for power, each with their own ‘social history’ of development. Although Bourdieu gives far more precise, extensive attention to G. Flaubert, Marcel Duchamp is taken up repeatedly by Bourdieu as a representative case in art.
