Scores of sociological studies have provided evidence for the association between broad cultural taste, or omnivorousness, and various status characteristics, such as education, occupation, and age. Nevertheless, the literature lacks a consistent theoretical foundation with which to understand and organize these empirical findings. In this paper, we offer such a framework, suggesting that a mechanism-based approach is helpful for the examination of the origins of the omnivore-univore taste pattern as well as its class-based distribution. We re-ground the discussion of this phenomenon in Distinction (Bourdieu 1984), conceptualizing omnivorous taste as a transposable form of the aesthetic disposition available most readily to individuals who convert early aesthetic training into high cultural capital occupational trajectories. After outlining the genetic mechanisms that link the aesthetic disposition to early socialization trajectories, we identify two relational mechanisms that modulate its manifestation (either enhancing or inhibiting it) after early socialization.

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In this paper, we review recent sociological research dealing with the consumption of culture produced in the fine and popular arts realms. Most of the initial theoretical developments in the study of culture consumption were intended to explain audience segmentation in the fine arts realm under the ‘cultural capital’ paradigm developed by Pierre Bourdieu. This paradigm shift has led to the current dominance of the ‘omnivore thesis’ in the sociology of taste. The consumption of popular culture, however, remained for a long time dominated by the Birmingham ‘resistance’ and ‘subculture’ paradigms developed in the 1970s. Recent popular arts consumption research has moved beyond the limitations of the subculture paradigm by incorporating the theoretical legacy of the cultural capital paradigm in order to account for patterns in audience and producer differentiation in popular arts ‘scenes’. This has brought the study of popular and fine arts culture consumption under a single conceptual framework after a long period of theoretical disengagement.

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A key premise in sociological studies of culture and taste is that patterns of acceptance, rejection, and engagement with cultural goods are not exclusively driven by their intrinsic features but also by collectively shared perceptions of the association between cultural goods and the groups that are perceived to be their primary consumers (Bourdieu 1984; Bryson 1996, 1997; Tampubolon 2008). This allows analysts to link seemingly individual acts of aesthetic judgment to collective patterns of symbolic inclusion and exclusion (Bourdieu 1984). The basic idea is that there is a duality between the category labels used to classify cultural genres and the categories labels used to classify social groups (DiMaggio 1987), such that heavy metal might be to "male" as blues/rhythm and blues (R&B) is to "black" (Bryson 1996). These shared categorical linkages help to partially constitute the cultural and social meaning of the genre in question (DiMaggio 1997; Goldberg 2011). This is especially likely if persons come to modulate their patterns of engagement with goods classified by given labels in a manner that makes the linkage into a self-fulfilling prophecy. This results in (self) selection into or out of engagement with cultural goods that are perceived as consistent or inconsistent (respectively) with salient social identities. Studies of the production of culture show that as the meanings of shared links between genre labels and social labels undergo historical change, audiences modify their patterns of engagement with cultural offerings. For instance, the consumption of art forms traditionally classified as "high culture," such as classical music, the fine arts, and literature, has undergone a dramatic feminization in the United States since the middle of the twentieth century, such that women outnumber men in the consumption of these types of cultural goods in every recent arts participation survey fielded (Christin 2012; DiMaggio and Mohr 1985; DiMaggio and Mukhtar 2004; Katz-Gerro and Sullivan 2004). In the same way, while in the early 20th century jazz music was thought of primarily as a "black" genre, the gradual incorporation of jazz into the "high culture" canon has been accompanied by a perceived (and actual) whitening of its audience (Lopes 2002). Similar stories can be told for rockabilly and early rock and roll (Peterson 1990), or for the ethnoracial and class-based transformation experienced by the hip hop and rap audience from its beginning as an African American urban music in the late 1970s and early 641695S RDXXX10.