ABSTRACT
This chapter takes the evidence provided by those members of the Australian Cultural Fields survey who, in follow-up interviews, elaborated on the information they had provided about their visual art tastes and practices. It focuses particularly on what these interviewees say about their preferences for different genres, the types of art museums they do (or do not) visit and the Australian artists they do (or do not) like. In doing so, it places these art tastes in two broader perspectives. First, it looks at what the interviewees had to say about their tastes for different genres and items of specifically Australian culture in the five other fields encompassed by the Australian Cultural Fields project: the literary, music, heritage, television and sport fields. Second, it considers the statistical correlations between tastes for different items of Australian culture on the one hand and an array of social positions on the other. In bringing these concerns together, the chapter will probe the extent to which the relations between the interviewees’ art tastes and other aspects of their cultural tastes form parts of distinctive habitus related to their different social positions. It concludes by considering the respects in which different social trajectories lend a distinctive inflection to the art tastes and practices of those occupying similar social positions.
