“A work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who posses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded. The conscious or unconscious implementation of explicit or implicit schemes of perception and appreciation which constitutes pictorial or musical culture is the hidden condition for recognizing the style’s characteristics of a period, a school or an author, and, more generally, fro the familiarity with the internal logic of works that aesthetic enjoyment presupposes.” (Bourdieu, 250)
This quote, as well as the reading, is talking about the gatekeeping that goes on within our culture. If you are not surrounded by a specific cultural artifact, then you might not have the cultural competence to understand it. For example, the theater is something that is considered very high culture in the United States. That is because the tickets for theater is often very expensive and inconvenient for many people. Thus, not as many low to middle-class people go to see performances. However, in the UK, theatre is much more accessible and seen as more of common art. Theatre in the UK is also federally funded, thus theaters are able to lower their ticket prices in order to have more people come and see shows. So, when people who don’t have access to these cultural artifacts, they don’t know how to “encode” the culture in front of them. The price, in essence, is gatekeeping theater from a mass audience. In Cinema and Modernism last semester, we discussed the concept of “high culture” and “Low culture.” What we deem as either of these changes as the cultural paradigm shifts. Though I argue that theatre is considered High culture in both the UK and the US, the theater is seen as a “higher” culture due to its lack of accessibility.
No comments:
Post a Comment