Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

220
Chapter 10 The politics of the popular
argues that the two aesthetics articulate relations of power. Without the required
cultural capital to decipher the ‘code’ of art we are made socially vulnerable to the
condescension of those who have the required cultural capital. What is cultural (i.e.
acquired) is presented as natural (i.e. innate), and is, in turn, used to justify what are
social relations. In this way, ‘art and cultural consumption are predisposed . . . to fulfil
a social function of legitimating social differences’ (7). Bourdieu calls the operation of
such distinctions the ‘ideology of natural taste’ (68). According to the ideology, only a
supposedly instinctively gifted minority armed against the mediocrity of the masses
can attain genuine ‘appreciation’. Ortega y Gasset makes the point with precision: ‘art
helps the “best” to know and recognise one another in the greyness of the multitude
and to learn their mission, which is to be few in number and to have to fight against
the multitude’ (31). Aesthetic relations both mimic and help reproduce social relations
of power. As Bourdieu observes,
Aesthetic intolerance can be terribly violent. . . . The most intolerable thing for
those who regard themselves as the possessors of legitimate culture is the sacrilegious
reuniting of tastes which taste dictates shall be separated. This means that the
games of artists and aesthetes and their struggles for the monopoly of artistic legitimacy
are less innocent than they seem. At stake in every struggle over art there is
also the imposition of an art of living, that is, the transmutation of an arbitrary way
of living into the legitimate way of life which casts every other way of living into
arbitrariness (57).
Like other ideological strategies, ‘The ideology of natural taste owes its plausibility and
its efficacy to the fact that . . . it naturalises real differences, converting differences in
the mode of acquisition of culture into differences of nature’ (68).
In an argument that draws heavily on the work of Bourdieu, Paul Willis (1990)
argues that the aesthetic appreciation of ‘art’ has undergone an ‘internal hyperinstitutionalization’
(2) – the dissociation of art from life, a stress on form over function – in
a further attempt to distance itself and those who ‘appreciate’ it from the ‘uncultured
mass’. Part of this process is the denial of the necessary relationship between aesthetics
and ‘education’ (understood in its broadest sense to include both formal and
informal): the production and reproduction of the necessary ‘knowledge’ on which
aesthetic appreciation is founded. In denial of such a relationship, aesthetic appreciation
is presented as something innate, rather than something learned. Rather than
seeing this as a question of non-access to knowledge – they have not been ‘educated’
in the necessary code to ‘appreciate’ the formal qualities of high culture – the majority
of the population are encouraged to view ‘themselves as ignorant, insensitive and
without the finer sensibilities of those who really “appreciate”. Absolutely certainly
they’re not the “talented” or “gifted”, the elite minority held to be capable of performing
or creating “art”’ (3). This manufactures a situation in which people who make
culture in their everyday lives see themselves as uncultured. Against the strategies of the
‘internal hyperinstitutionalization’ of culture, Willis argues the case for what he calls
‘grounded aesthetics’: the process through which ordinary people make cultural sense