Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

CLASSLESS TASTE
home or being around artists; being encouraged in artistic activity at school; visiting
museums and attending concerts, etc. A simple example of familiarity with
art is the presence of small art museums at elite universities in the United States,
and their absence from lower-class schools. Even if many students at Harvard,
Mount Holyoke, or Berkeley never visit their campus collection, the fact that
the collections are there to be visited corresponds to the high likelihood that students
at those institutions will have grown up in households taking an
acquaintance with art and its history for granted, just as that fact helps to maintain
that likelihood. Similarily, students attending museum-less Adelphi
University, where I teach, are highly unlikely to have gone to an art museum (or
classical-music concert) outside of school trips, which teach at once the social
legitimacy of such institutions and their distance from the young person’s out-ofschool
experience.
The social distinction manifested in taste is effected not so much on the plane
of formal knowledge as on that of unconsciously formed and maintained habits
of social and therefore physical interaction with art. Passing the Fogg Museum
on a walk across the Harvard campus reinforces the feeling that art is a natural
part of the environment, which one may choose to attend to or not on a given
occasion, that a student is likely to have derived from growing up with art in
the home, on the walls and in adult conversation. Such a student has acquired
what Bourdieu calls the habitus of his or her class, the set of dispositions to act,
in a range of social situations, in ways “appropriate” to a person of his or her
sort. It is habitus which generates a unified “lifestyle” involving such diverse
practices as eating cheese after dinner, the adoption of certain styles of dress,
ownership of books, the reading of particular magazines and not others, ownership
of a country house or summer place, and having tastes in art. In
generating this style, habitus is embodied in what one might call micropractices
of life—ease in wearing a suit or ordering food in a restaurant, for instance,
along with ill-ease in other social circumstances, such as wandering into a
working-class neighborhood.
In the concept of habitus Bourdieu has revived a concept from the seventeenthcentury
origin of aesthetics, the idea of taste as an unconscious propensity (Pascal’s
“second nature,” for instance) to make the right judgment and do the right thing
in response to the je ne sais quoi characterizing different situations. Habitus creates
a class identity in the form of a unified practice of classification, as choices are
made. Because these choices exist within a social space of different possible
choices they necessarily have meaning as the rejection of different choices. This is
how taste classifies the classifier; because in a class society all distinction has status
implications,
Distinction does not necessarily imply [as in Veblen’s theory of conspicuous
consumption], a quest for distinction. All consumption and, more
generally, all practice, is conspicuous, visible, whether or not it was performed
in order to be seen . . . hence, every practice is bound to function
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