A question of perception

Bourdieu, art and the postmodern

Bibliographic Data

ID5614246
AuthorsNick Prior (0000-0002-5893-5111, University of Edinburgh, corresponding author)
Year2005
Volume56
Issue1
Pages123-139
Publication date2005-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueBritish Journal of Sociology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0007-1315 • E-ISSN: 1468-4446
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1468-4446.2005.00050.x
PMID15777466
OpenAlexW2170506628
LanguageEN
Citations received35
References cited33

Bourdieu and Darbel's classic study of European art museum audiences,The Love of Art(1991), remains one of the most influential academic studies of the social indices of art perception. Its findings were central to Bourdieu's on-going study of culture-mediated power relations, as found in the bookDistinction(Bourdieu 1984), as well as social surveys of the behaviour of museum audiences across the world. Much in Bourdieu's account of art perception, however, has begun to appear dated and in need of supplementation. This paper will be a critical but sympathetic re-reading of Bourdieu's sociology of art perception in the light of recent criticisms of his approach. Whilst fine art and its institutions continue to function as sources of social identification and differentiation, this paper argues that the relationship between perception and stratification is somewhat looser than connoted in Bourdieu's work. Beyond the shift to a less rigid taxonomy of social formations, the immense expansion of the visual arts complex has opened up possibilities for the dissemination of art knowledge beyond the cultivated bourgeois. The erosion of boundaries between the aesthetic and the economic, between art and popular culture, are the result of processes of commodification that have placed museums alongside shopping malls within the realms of consumption and entertainment. New audiences have emerged from this mix with less dichotomized - that is,eithercultivated or popular - ways of seeing culture that suggest a revision of Bourdieu's overly integrated account of class and cognition. An alternative, 'postmodern', approach to art perception is entertained, where an aesthetics of distinction is replaced by a culture of distraction, but this abstracts culture from any structural grounding. Capturing the shift to an accelerated cultural present, instead, requires a warping of Bourdieu's categories to account for broader patterns of culture and economy and the accentuation of modern visual culture

Aesthetics · Art criticism · Commodification · Contemporary art · Epistemology · Media studies · Popular culture · Postmodernism · Social science · Sociology · The arts · Visual arts · Art History and Market Analysis · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Social and Cultural Dynamics

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