Introduction
This chapter is in three parts. The first part focuses on Bourdieu’s own work on museums and art galleries, and the sociocultural relationships which exist between museums and their visitors. Key texts here are L’Amour de l’art (1991d/1969/1966), La Distinction (1984/1979) and The Field of Cultural Production (1993b). We show how Bourdieu used empirical evidence to demonstrate how an individual’s experi- ence of culture, in this case art museums, is structured by class, education and social origin, and how these have varied between sites and over time. The second part of the chapter presents three distinct national art institutions as case exemplars: the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York and the Tate Gallery in London. Each art museum is considered in terms of the configura- tion of its symbolic capital, its position within the field of cultural production and its trajectory over time. For each, examples of a three-level Bourdieusian analysis (see chapter 3) are offered to show the structure of the field through the interrelationships of field participants and institutions. The third part of the chapter raises some spe- cific questions about the present and future functioning of art museums within the artistic field, the broader social field and the field of power.
I
Bourdieu’s View of Culture
Bourdieu’s early work on museums and their audiences was written at a time of changes in French society. The issues of social class and access to education found in L’Amour de l’art would eventually come to a head in the student riots in Paris in 1968. His empirical work was undertaken at a time before the study of museums – museology – was an established field of knowledge. Since its publication, and its translation into English in 1991, it has become a key text in the sociological analysis of culture and in the study of museums. Bourdieu’s findings could be argued to have shaped subsequent discussions between politicians, curators and art historians about access to culture, and its links to education and social class (cf.
Sandell 2002; Smith 1998).
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La Distinction was first published in France in 1979 and translated into English in 1984. This book continues Bourdieu’s examination of culture and patterns of cultural practices, including art galleries and museums, and considers how indi- viduals position themselves within French cultural space. As set out in chapter 3, he undertook extensive empirical work and used the strong correlations between patterns of cultural engagement and social and economic characteristics to show the structure of the artistic field in France in terms of the volume and the nature of agents’ cultural capital.
The Field of Cultural Production, published in English in 1993, is a collection of papers written by Bourdieu between 1968 and 1989, in which he discusses the function and purposes of museums and museum visiting as examples of socio-eco- nomic participation within the field of cultural production. In one article, written in 1968, ‘Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception’, he considers works of art as symbolic goods. In a later article, ‘The Market of Symbolic Goods’
(1993e/1985/1971), he offers a theory to account for the relationship between the art works themselves and the space of social possibilities generated by artists, their strategies, habitus and trajectories. These books form the backdrop to ideas pre- sented in this chapter.
French Museums and their Visitors
Bourdieu’s early work on art and culture includes a detailed study of museum attendance in the 1960s. L’Amour de l’art presents the findings of a series of sys- tematic studies of European museums and their publics which Bourdieu directed between 1964 and 1965. Sixteen different survey instruments were used in the research, with approximately 25,000 museum visitors participating. These surveys were commissioned by the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, at a time of increasing social turmoil and change in France. Thus, issues of social equality and access to culture and education were targeted through questionnaires and interviews, which included such questions as: What is your highest educational qualification? What is your occupation? How many years of schooling have you received? How many times did you visit a museum during 1964? When did you go to a museum for the first time? With whom? Visitors to twenty-one French museums, ranging from small provincial museums to prestigious Parisian galleries like Musée des Arts Décoratifs or Jeu de Paume, were interviewed about the patterns of their visits, their experiences of museums and about themselves, their occupation, education and family. French regional museums were compared with each other and with their Parisian counterparts. The survey also extends to European art museums in Greece, Holland, Spain and Poland.
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Museum Visits and Social Class
Bourdieu is most often quoted (e.g. Rice 1987) as finding that museum visiting was a product of social class. However, his findings are both more complex and more subtle than this simple correlation between class and museum attendance. He set out to establish empirically the relationships and patterns between experiences of museum visits and a range of distinct educational, social and economic charac- teristics, including social class. These characteristics constituted his notion of cul- tural capital and became key constituent aspects of habitus. In fact, Bourdieu does report that in France in the early 1960s, the middle and upper classes visited museums regularly, while those from the working class seldom visited. Typically, very few regular museum visitors were farmers or farm labourers (only 1 per cent), or industrial manual workers (4 per cent) (working-class groups); over a quarter of visitors – craft workers (5 per cent), clerical staff and junior executives (23 per cent) – were from middle-class groups, while almost half of regular visitors (45 per cent) were from upper-class backgrounds. This distribution across social cate- gories in French museum-goers matched the profile of the population of French university students at that time, but was almost the exact reverse of the distribution of socio-economic categories across the total French population. Bourdieu con- cluded that there was significant differential engagement with culture across social class groups.
Museum Visits and Education
Bourdieu’s data shows that there was a similar relationship between visiting pat- terns and levels of education, and visiting patterns and social class. However, it was in fact education and not class origins which determined an individual’s pattern of museum attendance. He found that: ‘Museum visiting increases very strongly with increasing level of education, and is almost exclusively the domain of the cultivated classes’ (Bourdieu 1991d/1969/1966: 14). Visiting intensifies as level of education increases. In Bourdieu’s survey, over half (55 per cent) of visi- tors held at least a baccalaureate. Only 9 per cent of visitors had no qualifications, but three-quarters of this group of visitors were children – too young to have taken any qualifications (p. 15). Regular museum-goers were, on the whole, well edu- cated.
Bourdieu goes on to argue that it is the ‘level of cultural aspiration’ which is more influential than the level of qualification itself. In his survey report he found that some middle-class visitors claimed a higher cultural level than was indicated by their actual qualifications. For these individuals, visits to museums served to establish their cultural aspirations by mimicking the ‘practice of baccalaureat holders’ (p. 15). This idea is one Bourdieu later developed in La Distinction, where he writes about cultural choices: ‘Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.
Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the
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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 1984/1979: 6). This reflexive view of cultural choice making – in this case, which art museum to visit, when and with whom? – situates artistic consumption clearly within the struggle for position within a larger social space.
As Bourdieu succinctly expresses it: ‘…art and cultural consumption are predis- posed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences’ (ibid.). Here, appreciation of established masterpieces, shown through visits to art museums, is constructed from social and cultural expectations, since recognition of membership of the middle or upper classes results from con- formity to the cultural and artistic norms of that class.
Cultural Subgroups
In the surveys reported in L’Amour de l’art, Bourdieu found that the cultural prac- tices of particular occupational groups do not always match their socio-economic grouping. For example, some individuals classified as craft workers and trades- people belong to an atypical subgroup: they visit museums more frequently than their educational peers at all levels of education; they are better qualified than other craft workers and tradespeople; they present opinions closer to those of the upper classes than the middle classes; and 60 per cent of this atypical group are booksellers or fashion workers, or work in the art field, nearly all in Paris. In other words, social class is too simple a classifier because different strategies charac- terize differentiated intentions within the cultural space. In La Distinction, Bourdieu analysed empirical variations like this by distinguishing between the economic and cultural capital of distinct employment groups. He showed that higher education teachers (high-volume cultural capital, low-volume economic capital) prefer ‘the rarest works of the past rather than the contemporary avant- garde’, choosing Picasso, Braque, Breughel and, occasionally, Kandinsky. These choices differ from those made by people with highly consecrated cultural capital and high economic capital: professionals or executives with long-standing mem- bership of the bourgeoisie, who inherited furniture, prefer traditional cooking and comfortable houses and who express preferences for Raphael, Leonardo and Watteau, and visit the Louvre and the Musée d’Art moderne. For these ‘happy few’
from dominant social groupings, the purchase of art objects from commercial art galleries is a material possibility. For social groupings where cultural capital, espe- cially educational capital, is predominant, museums provide consecrated sites to view art in a social space where economic capital is neutralized; since art objects are not available for purchase, they can participate on an equal footing with those from more dominant fractions of society. Thus, teachers are strongly overrepre- sented in museum attendance, since these ‘always offer the purified, sublimated pleasures demanded by the pure aesthetic… [and] …often call for an austere, quasi-scholastic disposition, orientated towards the accumulation of experience
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and knowledge…’ (Bourdieu 1984/1979: 272). Bourdieu found that teachers and other middle-class visitors are most likely to combine contemplation of a work of art with note taking (recording) and the purchase of reproductions (accumulation), indicating the valuing of knowledge over ownership. Hence, two distinct relation- ships to art objects, and to museums and art galleries, emerge. These are deter- mined by material appropriation of, or knowledge about, art. These relationships vary with sociocultural groups defined by habitus – the balance, age and volume of economic and cultural capital. These patterns of consumption exemplify what is meant by field structures.
Age and Schooling
In L’Amour de l’art, Bourdieu was also looking at how museum visits varied with the age of the visitor. In France, museum-goers were relatively young – over a third (37 per cent) were aged fifteen to twenty-four, although this age group represented only 18 per cent of the whole population. He noted that ‘the rate of visiting [which]
remains constant up to the age of 65 after an initial decline around the age of 25 – is demonstrably explained by the influence of schooling’ (Bourdieu 1991d/1969/1966: 19). This pattern was mirrored by surveys undertaken in Poland and Holland. In Greece, although the museum public was relatively young, atten- dance declined rapidly for those over thirty-five. Three-quarters of Greek museum visitors were aged between fifteen and thirty-four, with only a small proportion (10 per cent) over forty-five. In other words, Greek cultural patterns are distinct from those of northern Europe, perhaps because of differing patterns of parental visits to museums.
School visits were another significant factor in the high proportion of visits from young people. In France, survey participants with a baccalaureate typically visited museums three times a year while at school, but in later life only half con- tinued to visit museums regularly. For higher levels of qualifications, attendance stayed the same after leaving school. In Greece and Holland, as in France, the pro- portion of museum visitors with secondary or higher education was much higher than the corresponding proportion in the whole population. In other words, few visitors had no educational qualifications or only primary education. A typical European museum visitor was relatively well educated – the cultural capital accrued through schooling is made manifest by regular museum-going. These pat- terns are further examples of field structures, since they are generated from spe- cific logics of practice.
Habitus and Families
The empirical work presented in L’Amour de l’art, and later in La Distinction, showed that for any given level of education there were marked variations in
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cultural practices and artistic preferences according to the cultural level of the family rather than the social group of the individual concerned. The slowness of the process of acculturation in artistic matters means that the length of access to culture determines subgroups of individuals within the same social position and educational level. As Bourdieu puts it: ‘Cultural nobility also has its lineages’
(Bourdieu 1991d/1969/1966: 20). A ‘taken-for-grantedness’ of culture, which is associated with the middle and upper classes, is developed by early family experi- ences of art, art objects and visits to museums, and gives a surety of access to cultural and artistic heritage which is not developed through schooling alone. In Bourdieu’s view: ‘…there is nothing better placed to give a feeling of familiarity with works of art than early museum visits undertaken as an integral part of the familiar rhythms of family life’ (p. 67). Thus the conclusion was that parents’ edu- cation affected the deep-seatedness of education of their children. Youngsters from the haute bourgeoisie are brought up to have an understanding of how to visit a museum and how to observe art. This understanding is more secure than that acquired through schooling or by autodidacts. Consequently, the length of educa- tion, including across generations, is as important as the level of education itself in determining knowledge about art and the acquisition of educational capital, which can be deployed effectively in the cultural field.
Bourdieu’s study also investigated visitors’ motivation and its relationship to education and social class. In France in the early 1960s, the proportion of individ- uals who visited museums as tourists increased with higher social class – 45 per cent of working-class, 61 per cent of middle-class and 63 per cent of upper-class visitors. Both income and social class factors also affected holiday taking. At the time of the survey, few working-class families would have taken holidays. Only a fifth of families with an income of less than 600 francs took a holiday, while almost all families (93 per cent) with an income of 2,000 francs or more took a holiday (p. 23). Since Bourdieu’s findings closely matched the patterns shown in relation to education or social class, he showed that tourism did not exert a deter- mining influence on museum visiting. Rather, he states that: ‘tourism was seen as a permissive condition rather than a necessitating cause’ (p. 24). In other words, the relationships observed between visiting patterns and socio-economic category, age or environment were almost totally reducible to a single relationship between frequency and pattern of museum visiting and the education characteristics of an individual. To use the terminology adopted later by Bourdieu, the strongest corre- lations to be found are between levels of cultural participation and the educational capital of the participants.
Social Class and Museum Collections
L’Amour de l’art showed that the proportion of visitors attracted to museums by historic, folk or ethnographic objects – furniture, for example – increased regularly and sharply with lower social class. When asked, ‘Did you come to see anything
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in particular?’, twice as many upper-class visitors (61 per cent) as working-class visitors (29 per cent) expressed a preference for ‘major arts’ – painting and sculp- ture. Conversely, four times as many working-class visitors (71 per cent) as upper- class visitors (17 per cent) wished to see ‘objects’ – furniture, folk objects. This overall pattern was repeated in the surveys in Poland and Holland, although a higher proportion of Dutch working-class visitors (59 per cent) preferred ‘major arts’ than in other European countries. Findings from Greece were again atypical, since here folkloric arts were much more popular than major arts overall. Only a fifth of upper-class visitors in Greece preferred ‘major arts’, while twice as many claimed an interest in folkloric arts (Bourdieu 1991d/1969/1966: 158). In general, a museum attracted the middle classes more if it presented folk and historic objects as well as painting. This pattern was also demonstrated in Bourdieu’s analyses of attendance at regional museums in France, where there was a relationship between the nature of their collections and the proportion of each social class which chose to visit the museum. The greater the diversity of works exhibited by the museum, the more diverse the public visiting. Museums in Arles, Douai, Rouen, Lille and Marseille were predominantly exhibiting paintings, and received a restricted range of visitors; while museums in Dieppe, Laon, Moulins and Agen were visited both by art lovers and by those usually interested in historic objects, chateaux or local archaeology. In other words, the characteristic visitor to a museum depended on the nature of the collection displayed.
Bourdieu suggested that effective strategies for increasing visiting will vary with the purposes of museum curators. Increasing visits from art lovers – the middle and upper classes – may be achieved by rekindling their interest in painting by novel presentations of familiar paintings, by publicity and special exhibitions or through ‘Friends’ associations. Attracting new visitors from social classes who rarely go to museums is significantly more challenging. In the surveys undertaken in the 1960s, Bourdieu cites a particular example from Lille museum, where three exhibitions at very different levels were presented simultaneously: the museum energetically publicized a traditional exhibition of eighteenth-century painting, an exhibition of Egyptian art, sponsored by Lille University, and an exhibition of glass, crystal and furniture – ‘The Art of the Interior in Denmark’. A socially diverse public might well have been anticipated. Visitors almost doubled, but their social profile closely matched that of the regular public of the museum. Bourdieu’s analyses of the distribution of attendance by educational level confirmed that the privileged classes profited most from this attempt at popularization, since the pro- portion of visitors without a baccalaureate was markedly lower during these exhi- bitions than in the museum at other times (p. 90).
Visitors’ familiarity with painters or schools of painting was also explored in these studies and found to correlate strongly with social class. Only 21 per cent of working-class visitors could name two or more painters or schools, compared to 55 per cent of middle-class visitors and 71 per cent of upper-class visitors. This pattern was repeated in questionnaires undertaken in other European countries.
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