by Jon Lackman | 6 April 2007 | Theory
At the recent College Art Association conference, several speakers referenced the work of the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In Petra ten-Doesschate Chu’s new book The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture (“the first comprehensive reinterpretation of Courbet in a generation” according to its flap copy), she opens with a discussion of his work. So it seems like good timing for the arrival of a book such as Art Rules: Pierre Bourdieu and the Visual Arts, by Michael Grenfell and Cheryl Hardy. In their introduction, they write: “it is probably still as a sociologist of education that he is most well known … Education is not content-free, however, and we see that Bourdieu takes a particular interest in culture from the earliest works. In 1965 he published Un Art moyen, which examined photography … and then, in 1966, L’Amour de l’art (revised and expanded in 1969), which dealt with the museum and gallery visiting habits of the French … In [La Distinction (1979)], Bourdieu offers a sociological analysis of taste and, by implication, aesthetics … In the years which followed the publication of the English translation (1984) of La Distinction, it was often assumed that Bourdieu was mainly interested in cultural consumption per se rather than its production. However, as far back as 1968, we see Bourdieu questioning the nature of aesthetics itself … [and] how it was that individuals acted the way that they did … we see a much wider discussion of artistic practice: the nature of aesthetics, artistic groups, the formation of the avant-garde, technique and the social role of artists. The Rules of Art [1992; 1996 Eng. trans.] is very much a summative statement of this work … What emerges is a field analysis of the way artists, writers, curators and gallery owners are mutually engaged in a symbiotic practice, the totality of which is ‘art.’ The state — politicians, ministers, museums, and national galleries — is never far away … We shall see how Bourdieu argues that the social philosophical approach to studying art implies that we apply the same method to both researcher and the researched as part of what he calls an ‘invitation to reflexive sociology’ … Bourdieu begins The Rules of Art with a quotation from Sallenave: ‘Shall we allow the social sciences to reduce literary experience — the most exalted that man may have, along with love — to surveys about leisure activities, when it concerns the very meaning of life?’ — a statement which we might apply to any artistic or aesthetic experience. Bourdieu himself anticipated objections when art came under the sociologist’s scalpel. The following is what happens when we do exactly that.”
