The Mediated Manufacture of an ‘Avant-Garde’: A Bourdieusian Analysis of the Field of Contemporary Art in London, 1997–9

Abstract

The mediated manufacture of an 'avant-garde': a Bourdieusian analysis of the field of contemporary art in London, 1997-9. 1 Roger Cookone would need to construct a true chronicle of events to get a concrete appreciation of how this universe, anarchic and wilfully libertarian in appearance (which it also is, thanks in large part to the social mechanisms that authorize and favour autonomy), is the site of a sort of well-regulated ballet in which individuals and groups dance their own steps, always contrasting themselves with each other, sometimes clashing sometimes dancing to the same tune, then turning their backs on each other in often explosive separations, and so on, up until the present time ... (Bourdieu, 1996: 113).Wherever you look, people are thinking in terms of market success. Only thirty years ago, and since the middle of the nineteenth century ... immediate market success was suspect. It was taken as a sign of compromise with the times, with money .... Today, on the contrary, the market is accepted more and more as a legitimate means of legitimation ... It is very disturbing to see this ... because it jeopardizes works that may not necessarily meet audience expectations but, in time, can create their own audience (Bourdieu, 1998b: 27-8). Creating capital: Charles Saatchi, the Royal Academy and SensationSince its initial introduction, field (champ) has been a central concept in Pierre Bourdieu's work along with the earlier concepts of habitus, capital and practice (Swartz, 1997: 118). His analysis of the 'field of cultural production' provides a model with which to make 'site-specific' analyses of particular fields of cultural production (Bourdieu, 1993a). In this chapter I want to use it to make an analysis of transformations in a particular recent field of cultural production in the visual arts in London, the so-called young British artist ('yBa') phenomenon which climaxed in an exhibition of the work of forty-two artists purchased by the advertising mogul Charles Saatchi entitled Sensation: Young

The ambivalence of cultural homophily: Field positions, semantic similarities, and social network ties in creative collectives

“…With the recent expansion of 'cultural industries' (Hesmondhalgh, 2007) and 'creative economy' (Howkins, 2002;Kuleva, 2018) agendas and subsequent strengthening tendencies towards heteronomy in the artistic field (Cook, 2001;Hewison, 2014), the heteronomy-oriented positions increase in 'distinctiveness', up to complete separation of the arts management from the arts. Bendixen (2000: 4) highlights with the very first words of his programmatic article on arts management: "[w]hen we speak of arts management, we are speaking of management, not art" (for empirical evidence on opposing arts and arts management, see Kuesters, 2010).…”

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“…Bourdieu (2010) also focused on, for instance, music, food and art, as do other scholars following Bourdieusian theory (e.g. Brown & Griffin, 2014; Cook, 2001; Rhys-Taylor, 2013). Crucially, between these analyses, the recurrent conclusion is, essentially, that different cultural tastes ‘can be attributed to different classes’ (Bennett, in Bourdieu, 2010, p. xxii), with Bourdieu’s (2010) general argument being that those shorn of capital stocks consume the practical and necessary, and those in dominant social positions develop a taste for the abstract.…”

Sam Friedman: Comedy and Distinction; the Cultural Currency of a ‘Good’ Sense of Humour

“…For example, high profile artistic movements such as Pop Art transgressed the boundaries between 'high' and 'low', rejecting elite art forms such as abstract expressionism in favour of popular source material taken from advertising and consumer culture (Malpas, 2005;Cook, 2000). Such developments coincide with the doctrines of prominent postmodern theorists such as Baudrillard (1995) and Featherstone (1991), who argue that late modernity is defined by a massive and bewildering production of 'commodity signs'.…”