File spoon-archives/bourdieu.archive/bourdieu_1998/bourdieu.9803, message 43


Date: Tue, 31 Mar 1998 10:09:09 -0500 (EST)
From: George Free <aw570-AT-freenet.toronto.on.ca>
Subject: Re: Aesthetic Labour


On Tue, 31 Mar 1998, Tobin Nellhaus wrote:

> I certainly agree that high brow works are the product of a specialized
> field, and one which has accumulated higher cultural and symbolic capital
> than low brow.  But those forms of capital are not wholly intrinsic to the
> art works, they are established in relation to (changing) markets, fields,
> and habitus.  The high fashion of the 1970s, many people today wouldn't be
> caught dead in; and so forth.  My question might be phrased as, How do we
> know which works of art "are characterized by their greater degree of
> sophistication and aesthetic value"?  Is this judgment based on actual
> analyses of numerous works from a great variety of fields by a neutral
> judge, or is it presumed because the work has already been characterized as
> high or low brow?  

	These questions certainly raise some difficult issues. I agree 
with what Carsten was saying in a related post.
	Certainly there is no neutral judge who stands outside of the
artistic field. All judges are necessarily part of the field, and thus
part of the competition in the determination of the value of works. To the
extent that a field becomes relatively autonomous in the manner Bourdieu
describes, where a field is progressively narrowed to include only those
who are producers of works, the field itself is the judge of value. (I 
guess this is circular to some extent.)
	To put it crudely, whoever wins in this battle for recognition is
producing the best work. They have won the recognition of their peers, who
must, perhaps grudingly, admit the greater quality of their competitors'
works. The accumulation of symbolic capital in a field involves the
development of all the criteria and judgments by which works are evaluated
as belonging to the field and to their position in the field (high or
low).  To enter, and belong to the field, the participant must acknowledge,
and as Carsten was saying, internalize this symbolic capital. 

>As I pointed out before, one form of low brow
> entertainment in Renaissance England was theater, including the plays of
> Shakespeare.  Were his plays consequently less sophisticated than the poetry
> of Robert Greene, who scorned Shakespeare as an uneducated poetaster?  If
> you agree that "a lot of work and intelligence can go into making a 'low
> brow' work of art," why can't it consequently have higher sophistication and
> aesthetic value than a "high brow" work?  We need to avoid assuming what in
> fact has to be proved--the circularity I warned of.
> 
	Improvising, I would say that Shakespeare was part of a cultural 
revolution (which won only in the 19th century with the romantics?) that 
changed the criteria of artistic evaluation from a court model to a more 
autonomously artistic model.
	....I hope these rushed remarks are intelligible.

cheers,
George
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	George Free		Toronto, Canada		aw570-AT-torfree.net
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