art-e-conomy _ reader - marko stamenkovic

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interactional exchange, and hierarchically organized into genres with some ritual
potency. In other words, it must be a society with a state, a relatively high level of
political incorporation, and substantial institutional differentiation. Thus, the symbolic
economy associated with cultural capital comes into being with industrial capitalism.
(DiMaggio, 1991, p. 135)
Because of this dependence upon social institutions and a stable political
order, the dissolution of these has concomitant effects upon culture: changes in
social structure and the rise of an open market for cultural goods have weakened
institutionalized cultural authority, set off spirals of cultural inflation, and created
more differentiated, less hierarchical, less universal, and less symbolically potent
systems of cultural classification than those in place during the first part of this
century. (DiMaggio, 1991, p. 134)
At the level of the nation-state, cultural capital is now acknowledged to be extremely
important. Brazil offers an extreme example of a nation-state that deliberately took
control over information and communications industries for the purposes of creating
and protecting cultural capital as well as for other purposes (Mattelart & Mattelart,
1990). Through tourism, many states create cultural capital out of their images,
as “Certain aspects of the culture of the people are transformed into the nation’s
cultural capital, represented as a `heritage’ or `tradition’ of that country, and then
marketed for tourism” (Leong, 1989, p. 76). The state also creates and protects
its cultural capital through control over communications, though this is done most
successfully when transmitted through decision makers at the local level (Mattelart &
Cesta, 1985). And the state can reduce the cultural capital created by its citizens by
permitting access and other resources for the individual to go up in cost or become
more difficult to obtain in other ways (Hills & Papathanassopoulous, 1991).
Objects, events, and processes are not intrinsically those of cultural capital; rather,
cultural capital is formed through activity on the part of institutions and collectivities
of people, and in ways that vary from place to place. DiMaggio (1991) describes four
dimensions of symbolic classification along which societies differ from each other:
1. differentiation--the extent to which cultural goods are grouped into a few or
many types or genres;
2. hierarchy--the extent to which genre distinctions and hierarchies are commonly
recognized;
3. universality--the extent to which genre distinctions and hierarchies are commonly
recognized; and
4. symbolic potency--the extent to which transgressions of boundaries and
hierarchies are commonly recognized.
He further notes that changes in the organization of cultural authority and the
mode of allocation of cultural goods have an impact on systems of classification.
Structural forces affect symbolic classification systems by influencing the capacity of
actors to organize and the uses to which individuals may put cultural resources.
Consumer markets for cultural objects emerged several centuries ago, but the
extension of the market to new forms of expression and new publics represented
a disjunctive step. In the U.S. before 1850, the arts were generally created and
enjoyed in the home or in public venues characterized by a mixing of genres and