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Audience Taste?#mac201

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Harold Bloom

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American literary criticSterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University

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Frank Kermode (2002):‘probably the most celebrated literary critic in the United States’

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Stephen KingAuthor of contemporary horrorNational Book Foundation (2003):Award for distinguished contribution to American Letters

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‘another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I've described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis’

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‘Her prose style, heavy on cliché, makes no demands upon her readers [...] How to read ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’? Why, very quickly, to begin with, perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do […] Why read, if what you read will not enrich mind or spirit or personality?’

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‘Can more than 35 million book buyers, and their offspring, be wrong? Yes, they have been, and will continue to be for as long as they persevere with Potter.’

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What are now called ‘Departments of English’ will be renamed departments of ‘Cultural Studies’ where Batman comics, Mormon theme parks, television, movies and rock will replace Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and Wallace Stevens- (Bloom, 1995: 519)

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Pierre Bourdieu

1930-2002

École Normale Supérieure (Paris)

1964: University of Paris Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études

1968: took over the Centre de Sociologie Européenne

1981: Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France

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Research: 1963-19681200 quantitative surveys, interviews and photographs.

Cross-referenced with national trends and government data

The things you prefer correspond tightly to defining measures of social class: your profession, your highest degree and your father’s profession.

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"Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their

classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful

and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective

classifications is expressed or betrayed."- Bourdieu, 1984: 6

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Art?

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‘The very title Distinction serves as a reminder that what is commonly called

distinction, that is, a certain quality of bearing and manners, most often considered innate

[…], is nothing other than difference, a gap, a distinctive feature, in short, a relational

property existing only in and through its relation with other properties’

- Bourdieu, 1994/1998: 20

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Power and social space

A geographical/mathematical metaphor for how people are arranged in society.

It’s a (multi dimensional) space constructed on the basis of principles of differentiation or distribution constituted by the set of properties under consideration

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Capital:

Economic capital - how much money

Cultural capital the systems of value and meaning a person can draw on

Social capital the sets of relations one can draw on

Symbolic capital power to NAME. Symbolic power rests on RECOGNITION

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‘differences in cultural capital mark the differences between the classes’

- Bourdieu, 1984: 69

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‘differences in cultural capital mark the differences between the classes’

- Bourdieu, 1984: 69

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I was there. I was the first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids.

I played it at CBGB's. Everybody thought I was

crazy. We all know. I was there. I was there.

I've never been wrong.

I used to work in the record store.

I had everything before anyone

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“It took a great deal of evidence to allow me to transcend my own cultural assumptions and accept the fact that Shakespeare actually was popular culture in nineteenth-century America” (Levine 1988: 4).

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“Shakespeare was performed not merely alongside popular entertainment as an elite supplement to it; Shakespeare was performed as an integral part of it. Shakespeare was popular entertainment in nineteenth-century America”. (Levine, 1988: 21)

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“If Shakespeare had been an integral part of mainstream culture in the nineteenth century, in the twentieth he had become part of ‘polite’ culture – an essential ingredient in a complex we call, significantly, ‘legitimate’ theatre. He had become the possession of the educated portions of society who disseminated his plays for the enlightenment of the average folk who were to swallow him not for their entertainment but for their education, as a respite from – not as a normal part of – their usual cultural diet”. (Levine, 1988: 31 – emphasis added)

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Culture and the Legitimisation of Power

Culture as right of birth

Difference shifted from economic field to field of culture

Power as a result of cultural difference, for example Brian Sewell on the Cobra exhibition at the Baltic

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‘London has for centuries been the centre of the art world in

Britain…By the very nature of the audience in London it is exposed to very much more

art and culture and is therefore more sophisticated.

There is no doubt about it.’- Sewell, 2003

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Distinction – Pierre Bourdieu

Patron versus consumerAficionado versus fan

“the making, marking and maintaining of cultural difference” (Storey, 1996: 116)

Putting taste on display – becoming part of, or apart from, a particular group

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Taste not fixed – changes through history

Consider the following: • Brown bread• Opera• Sun tan • Burberry

Music – from exclusivity to abundance?Everyone’s an expert in the internet age?

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The changing ‘tastes’ for Brown Bread

- Associated with working class originally, using whole-grain flour-White flour had previously been more expensive (coloured with alum)

This reversed – brown bread now seen as middle class consumable

Hovis – images of working class life

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From brown bread to ‘brown’ skin

The sun tan

Now seen as vulgar- it had been a status symbol – a marker of wealth

However, trends keep changing as do cultural responses to the sun tan. Royalty would associate tans with the working class – labourers who work the fields. Aristocracy would keep out of the sun or use white face paint to remove any trace of tanning.

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Healthy?Wealthy?

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The ‘Sad’ Fate of Burberry

Founded in 1856Outdoors attire – supplier to royaltyThe Burberry Check (1924)

1970s - Burberry linked to football casuals

1990s - Association with chavs and football firms

2000s - Burberry attempt rebrand; advertise in high-end lifestyle magazines

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The fan as fanatic?

“fans are the most visible part

of the audience for popular

cultural texts and practices”

“Fandom is what ‘other people’

do, ‘we’ always pursue

interests, exhibit tastes and

preferences”

- Storey, 1996: 123-125

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The acceptable face of fandom?

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“Fans, when insistently characterized as ‘them’, can be distinguished from ‘people like us’ (students, professors and social critics) as well as from (the more reputable) patrons or afficionados or collectors”

Jenson in Lewis, 1992:9

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Summary

Taste is a battleground of ideology, marked by distinction and difference.

It’s inadequate to say that people merely have different tastes – these tastes are the product of intersecting power relations that seek to valorise those that articulate them.

Worth thinking about this in terms of fan culture and their tastes. Have the geeks inherited the earth?

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SourcesHoward Bloom (1995) The Western Canon, Harmondsworth: Penguin

Howard Bloom (2000) How to Read and Why, New York: Touchstone

Pierre Bourdieu (1979/1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, (translated by R. Nice), London: Routledge,

Pierre Bourdieu (1994/1998) Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, Oxford: Polity Press.

Lawrence Levine (1988) Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, Harvard: Harvard University Press