| |
|
Hey thanks... okay, 25 words or less version...
The word 'breeding' in that sentence is pretty misleading because basically one thing he said was that 'taste' (the ability to symbolically distinguish oneself from the masses) is acquired through social institutions, esp. the family and the university. He used incredible amounts of documentation and empirical research to show that high taste - Art - was simply the social valorisation of the particular tastes of the dominant classes. And he wasn't just a marxist banging on about this stuff - his book Distinction has dozens of charts & graphs based on huge surveys which are pretty hard to argue with. I would recommend the intro to Distinction to anyone - it is amazingly succinct, clear, and devastating.
He wrote other books demolishing/ destabilising the superior status of various kinds of 'high' culture - Homo Academicus and his Heidegger book about the academy, The Rules of Art about art, On Television about journalistic commentary, etc. Basically, he said that lofty social values were almost entirely the values of the rich -not a very original thesis, but his subtlety, conscience, and documentation were just amazing. |
|
|
