ABSTRACT
Undoubtedly Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) was the most influential art sociologist of the second half of the twentieth century. Leaning on, although also attacking, the French neo-Marxist-structuralist tradition of the 1960s (Althusser, 1 Hadjinicolaou, Macherey) he began his career with the critical study of education, in particular how educational systems reproduce class distinctions. In 1970 he wrote, together with Jean-Claude Passeron, Réproduction: Élements pour une théorie du système d’enseignement, which was translated into English in 1977 (Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture) and reprinted in 1990. Bourdieu’s lifelong themes – the character of social distinction and the processes of societal reproduction of distinction – are already fully present in this first book of his. His magnum opus, published in 1979, is La distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (English translation in 1984: Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste), in which he shows how different tastes (in particular aesthetic tastes) are connected with, and in a sense determined by, levels of education and class background. This book, from which every art sociologist in the Western world had to quote during the two decades that followed in order to be taken seriously, will not be discussed here. It does not concern the main topics of the present study specifically, although some of the concepts developed in it (such as habitus or the distinction between aesthetic and functional disposition) are most useful for understanding the opportunities for art to function in society. These concepts will play a role in the second part of the present study, in which the possible values and functions of art will be discussed.
