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Bourdieu’s Distinction (1984) has been highly influential in sociological debates regarding cultural inequality, but it has rarely been considered a theory of aesthetics. In this article we explore empirically how the modernist framing of Bourdieu’s aesthetics needs to be rethought in the context of contemporary aesthetic change. Drawing on a survey of museum visitors in Ghent, Belgium (n = 1195), we use Multiple Correspondence Analysis to analyse what aesthetic dimensions are important when people contemplate works of art. We find that the familiar Bourdieusian opposition between popular (based on beauty and harmony) and highbrow aesthetics is still important. However, the content of highbrow aesthetics has changed, now privileging ‘postmodernist’ dimensions over modernist ones. We can also detect another dimension that favours a socially reflexive art compared to a detachment of art from social preoccupations, which is not recognized in Bourdieu’s account.

Does love follow an institutional logic? 1 Institutional logics have been applied to the study of organizational behaviors where changes are effected in public through the actions of officeholders and there is abundant textual activity both in justification and codification, all of which leave their traces in public statement, law, regulation, budgets and official statement. Romantic love, in contrast, is an individual phenomenon effected in private through interpersonal relations that not only leave little textual trace, but whose enactment depends on registers of corporeality, affect and co-presence that do not even accede to language, let alone text. Is it even possible to investigate the intimate behaviors of college students to see if they are ordered by the institutional logic of romantic love?2 We think so. In this paper we build on a theorization of institutional logics and a long tradition of measuring cultural logics from a relational perspective that provide figurations more appropriate to that theory. We use the formal method of correspondence analysis (MCA) to examine a set of data recently collected from a sample of American university students in order to see how institutional logics operate in the lived experience of individuals who negotiate their intimate "love lives" within a complex social space in which different institutional logics are operative. What is An Institutional Logic?Institutional logics obtain where subjects, practices and objects cohere as cultural grammars.3 An institutional logic is an order of production composed of distinctive subjects and In contrast, the eminent historian of the conventions of American courtship prefaces her book this way: "the word love scarcely appears in the following pages. This is not because I have a cynical view of the subject but because love was not so much the province of convention. Convention looked to a multiplicity of desires, not to love itself. It structured and controlled the manifestation of sexual desire and the desires for security, for status, for a clear role in societyeven the desire for love. Love and desire are intertwined, but I will leave love to lovers in private and examine the public conventions of desire" (Bailey, 2013:12). 3 Institutional logics refer to materialized languages, not just linguistic speech, but to constellations of unit acts, concepts, objects and relations. Note that this paper builds on but also goes beyond earlier theoretical and empirical work that we have published on the formal analysis of institutional logics as duality structures (e

The central focus of this article is to analyse empirically whether and how the monopoly and legitimacy of highbrow arts as a status marker varies across age groups. Drawing on unique Flemish survey data ( n = 2846) that include information on what cultural objects are consumed as well as on how these are appropriated, I construct a two-dimensional social space that relates cultural practices to positions in the social hierarchy through Multiple Correspondence Analysis. Using Class Specific Analysis, I look into the structuring principles within two age clusters (−25 and 55+) and try to determine the ways in which the distinguishing status and legitimacy of highbrow arts varies among different groups – thus challenging the assumption that cultural classifications are equally salient to every social group.

In this article, we contrast the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of cultural consumption. We use data from an audience survey in two art museums ( n = 1448) and contrast manifested preferences towards artefacts of various artists – that is, (dis)liking Duchamp, Rubens, Kandinsky, Pollock and Van Gogh – with how people appropriate works of art. These ways of preferring are measured using items reflecting abstract evaluation criteria people use to assess/evaluate works of art and are considered proxies for aesthetic dispositions. Our results indicate that taste profiles – that is, certain combinations of (dis)liking different artists – are not very strongly related to socio-demographic characteristics and to social status position. However, among individuals having the same preferences, we find differences in ways of preferring. These differences are associated with socio-demographics and also with social inequality. This suggests that in the context of art museums, distinction is not – or only slightly – embedded in manifested preferences, but more in dispositions, that is, in ways of preferring. These findings corroborate theoretical challenges of the premise that dispositions are socialized into individuals and that this explains the social patterning of cultural practices and preferences.