ABSTRACT
Bourdieu advances the further argument that popular art cannot be aesthetically legitimate because it essentially denies its own aesthetic validity by implicitly accepting the domination of the high art aesthetic which haughtily denigrates it. Our culture, for Bourdieu, is one where high art’s aesthetic of ‘the pure disposition . . . is universally recognized.’ Hence, simply by existing in this culture, the popular aesthetic (which he links to the working class) must be ‘a dominated aesthetic which is constantly obliged to define itself in terms of the dominant aesthetics.’ Since by these dominant standards popular art fails to qualify as art, and since it fails to assert or generate its own independent legitimation, Bourdieu concludes that in a sense ‘there is no popular art’ and that popular culture is ‘a paradoxical notion’ which implies willy-nilly the dominant definition of culture and hence its own invalidation or ‘self-destruction.’
