Casos de Uso con Rational Rose

Bourdieu’s interest in the restricted production of the cultural field is represented by his research and examination of various aspects of the different arts fields. For instance, his writings cover photography as a leisure practice and mass cultural form (Bourdieu, Boltanski et al., 1990); the emergence of the modern literary field and its relation to the notion of the autonomous artist (1996a); cultural practice and consumption in relation to social differentiation within class structure (1984); the link between socio-economic status and museum attendance (Bourdieu, Darbel & Schnapper, 1990).

Particularly significant are those writings that explore issues pertaining to artistic perception and practice. For instance, an early essay, “Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception” (1968/2003), considers how artistic competence, or the skill by which artworks are decoded, functions as cultural capital to validate the dominance of

those who possess the skill and the ability to decipher works of art. He examines these same forces, the interaction of agents, their socio-cultural origins and the fields in which they are operating, in relation to artistic production and the social role of “artist” in another essay, “But who created the creators?” (1993b). Also, Free Exchange (1995), Bourdieu’s conversation with the artist Hans Haacke, examines a range of issues including the art field’s economic dependence on state sponsorship and the potential consequences for contemporary artists’ autonomy and the production of innovative and critically engaged art; the role of the media in promoting and discrediting intellectual activities and cultural products; and the strategies that artists and intellectuals can adopt to subvert the influence of the political and economic fields.

Another significant exploration of his theories is found in his essay on the publishing industry, “The Production of Belief” (1993a), in which he also discusses the character of the avant-garde in relation to commerce. In this essay, he clearly lays out his theory of large-scale and restricted production as it applies to the publishing industry. The opposing subfields consist of distinctively different motivations in relation to economic capital linked to different types of art: “bourgeois art” of classics and best-sellers

produced by large, integrated firms that seek short-term commercial profits and follow a short-term publishing cycle, and “avant-garde art” produced by small firms that accept the uncertainty of long-term investments with no market in the present.

It is not surprising, then, that general references to Bourdieu and his ideas appear in the writings and scholarship of artists, philosophers, sociologists of culture and others who engage with questions dealing with cultural practices concerning the symbolic prestige of artists and consumers’ tastes within the cultural field (see, for example, Bryson, 1996; Jyrämä, 2002; Macdonald, 2006; Silva, 2006; Woodward & Emmison, 2001). The purpose here, however, is to present an overview of the research in the arts field that engages more specifically with aspects of Bourdieu’s field theory and identify some of the key debates that have engaged these scholars as they pertain to this study.

A number of research studies have been conducted that systematically employ

Bourdieu’s field analysis approach. Grenfell and Hardy, who are responsible for a large percentage of these studies, apply Bourdieu’s three-stage approach to a range of artistic contexts (for another example of an applied field analysis, see Braden, 2009). For instance, one study applies field theory to the context of photography (Hardy &

Grenfell, 2010) and examines photographers and their practice in relation to social, political and commercial contexts. Other research (Grenfell & Hardy, 2003; Hardy & Grenfell, 2006) uses Bourdieu’s socio-analytic approach to examine two examples of the avant-garde, the “Young British Artists” and the St. Ives colony, within the English visual arts field. The researchers consider the artists’ habitus and their access to and acquisition of various forms of capital in relation to the development of particular styles and forms of artistic production. Two of their other studies (Grenfell & Hardy, 2007; Hardy, 2007) have an institutional focus and present cross-national comparisons of museums. Overall, these works exemplify the application of Bourdieu’s field analysis, but are not especially critical of his conceptual approach.

Along with the applied research is literature that focuses on and critically engages with Bourdieu’s theories and concepts. Some scholars (Born, 2010; Lane, 2006; Vickery, 2007) have pointed to several problems in Bourdieu’s model of the cultural field, one of which is his notion of aesthetic value. Artistic value, in Bourdieu’s model, is related to the artist’s relative autonomy and distance from the market, rather than to the form or content of the artwork, although form and content do figure into the differentiation of artworks. The influence of the economic field, as Bourdieu presents it, is generally negative. However, as Lane (2006) points out, economic success can also offer a certain amount of autonomy.

Another related problem identified in the literature is that Bourdieu’s notion of cultural production based on 19th century economic and cultural models (Lane, 2006; Prior, 2005; Vickery, 2007) is anachronistic. Bourdieu’s (1968, 1984, 1996a) classificatory scheme linking socio-economic status and cultural capital does not adequately describe, for instance, the behaviours and choices of contemporary consumers of music (Prior, 2005, 2008) or media (Bolin, 2009, 2012). The criticism suggests that Bourdieu’s ideas need to be reframed to apply to aesthetic categories and styles associated with

postmodern art and with the speed and accessibility of digital cultural production and consumerism (Bolin, 2012; Prior, 2008). Notwithstanding, Prior (2005) notes that Bourdieu’s conceptual categories of capital, habitus and field are useful as they provide one of the most comprehensive and flexible approaches for describing and

understanding contemporary art and culture, or, as Jenkins (1992) has observed, Bourdieu is “enormously good for thinking with” (p. 11).

Researchers studying symbolic capital and the interrelation of fields with other areas of restricted production have also drawn on Bourdieu’s concepts. As applications of field theory in these other contexts, these studies provide useful insights and serve as models of the application of field theory within cultural field analysis. For example, in his examination of the literary prize game, English (2002) found that competition for symbolic capital, or cultural prestige, underlies the “convergence of interests” (p. 115) between journalist-critics and those in the literary field and the strategies they employ. In her seminal work analysing the institutional culture of IRCAM (an institute engaged in researching avant-garde electroacoustic music and the promotion of contemporary classical music), Born (1995) draws on Bourdieu’s theories to shed light on the systems of legitimation of high culture and of the avant-garde and the “relations of difference” (p. 29) that constitute and differentiate the IRCAM culture in relation to other areas of the music field.

This next section of the chapter discusses how this study employs textual analyses, particularly CDA, in relation to field theory, and demonstrates that combining field theory and textual analysis approaches provides a suitable methodological framework for the analysis of the interrelationship of the visual arts and journalistic fields. This section ends with a brief review of examples of media studies research that employ both textual analysis and field theory.