Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

CLASSLESS TASTE
as a distinctive sign and when the difference is recognized, legitimate and
approved, as a sign of distinction (in all senses of the term). 2
Distinction is, as noted, more than difference, in the realm of tastes and in that
of the possessors of taste: “to the socially recognized hierarchy of the arts, and
within each of them, of genres, schools or periods, corresponds a social hierarchy
of the consumers” (p. 4). 3 This hierarchy is complex and more accurately
rendered as a space of positions defined by the different forms of power that
structure social life. If we look, for instance, at the subset of American art collectors
buying modernist art in the 1950s we find, within a generally wealthy and
educated group, wealthier and more socially established men collecting “bluechip”
pictures by artists like Picasso and Matisse, and possessors of lesser and
more recently acquired wealth, often women and people professionally close to
the art world themselves, initiating the patronage of Abstract Expressionist
artists, while sharing the estimation of the blue-chips as the artistic masters of the
time. 4 Meanwhile, for the majority of Americans, “Picasso” was a synonym for
“far-out” rather than a maker of images actually enjoyed, and a mass-market
publication like Life, operating in the space between upper- and lower-class taste,
insisted on the inclusion of the French master in the artistic canon and hedged
its bets on Pollock, both citing experts on his greatness and mocking him for his
drips.
It would be wrong to say that in Bourdieu’s understanding taste reflects class;
rather, taste is for him a constituent of class, a possession that helps to gives a
person his or her social position. My ability to wear the clothes appropriate for
professional occasions (despite the slight trace of discomfort I experience when
engaging in what the voguing masters of disguise featured in the film Paris is
2 P. Bourdieu, “Social space and the genesis of ‘classes’,” in idem, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 237.
3 As sociologist Alvin Toffler made this point in his celebratory book on arts consumption in the
United States, written at around the same time as Bourdieu’s first systematic studies in the anthropology
of culture,
There are a finite number of automobiles for a consumer to choose from, a finite
number of exotic meals that he can eat, and even a finite number of places to which
he can, at the moment, travel. Art, by contrast, is infinite in its variations and possibilities.
It is for this reason the broadest of all possible fields within which the
individual can express his one-and-onlyness.
The Culture Consumers: Art and Affluence in America (Baltimore: Penguin, 1965), p. 63
The typically American substitution of individualism for the French theorist’s class analysis is
contradicted by Toffler’s own description of his “culture consumers” as members of a particular
income and lifestyle class, characterized by features quite similar to those identified by Bourdieu;
see pp. 39 ff.
4 See A. Deirdre Robson, Prestige, Profit, and Pleasure: The Market for Modern Art in New York in the
1940s and 1950s (New York: Garland, 1995), esp. pp. 135 ff.
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