Untitled

Nick Prior
differences and thereby reproducing power relations. The Love of Art was
Bourdieu’s initial attempt at an empirically based study of museums which
assaulted Kantian and other essentialist theories of taste which assumed certain a
priori faculties towards aesthetic pleasure. 26 The sensitivity to experience higher
artistic pleasures, a facet that may be experienced by any human being, as Kant
had it, is revealed by Bourdieu as the privilege of those who have access to the
conditions in which “pure” and “disinterested” dispositions are acquired. Hence,
museum visiting is unveiled as a socially differentiated activity resting on the
possession of educational and cultural dispositions towards art practices and
products and, as such, almost the exclusive domain of the cultivated classes.
Cultural competence, for Bourdieu, is a precondition for the classification and
organization of artistic knowledge. Individuals can decipher works of art “aesthetically”
as it were, only if they have a mastery of the codes and systems of
classification which are able to process styles, periods, techniques, and so on.
Repeated contact with high culture via informal and formal education processes
encourages the accumulation of these instruments of appropriation, leading to an
“unconscious mastery” of art and its discourses. Having a “feel for the game”
(sense pratique), or a familiarity with art objects is the outcome of culturally
acquired systems of perception, not something naturally or universally programmed.
However, this sense is expressed in a form which emphasises its natural,
quasi-instinctual and pre-reflexive quality, in the dispositional form of the cultured
habitus, itself an expression of favorable material conditions of existence. 27
Cultural proficiency, then, appears as a gift of natural talent and taste, available
to all on an equal basis. It is not recognized as accumulated outcomes of differential
learning and training, requiring, at least, some distance from material
necessities and leisure time. Members of the initiated classes, from this perspective,
accept as a “gift of nature a cultural heritage which is transmitted by a
process of unconscious training.” 28 The “masters of judgement and taste” appear
as rising above the vagaries of material processes, even though they are definite
products of such processes. Culture, in short, is achieved by negating itself as
culture (i.e., acquired) and presenting itself as nature (or grace).
It is to this extent that the museum and its objects remained the natural
appurtenance of middle-class elites. The museum comprised a “pure” space,
symbolically opposed to the vulgarities of the carnival, where the values of
civilized bourgeois culture were coded and decoded by this class itself. As
Sherman does, we can make sense of a seemingly trivial instance such as the
refusal to give up umbrellas at the doors of nineteenth-century French provincial
museums as an important illustration of the bourgeois urgency to retain the objects
and codes of its distinction. The umbrella was a particularly resonant object of
middle-class apparel, carried even in clement weather. Its shape and possession
codified the habitus and deportment of this class to itself and to others within the
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