more Bourdieu

I liked this excerpt from from Katha Pollitt's obituary of Pierre Bourdieu. It relates directly to the kind of development we try to foster here at Youth Onstage! and the All Stars Project:

"Take, for example, his attack on the notion that making high culture readily available--in free museums and local performances--is all that is necessary to bring it to the masses... In fact, as Bourdieu painstakingly demonstrated in Distinction, his monumental study of the way class shapes cultural preferences or 'taste,' there is nothing automatic or natural about the ability to 'appreciate'--curious word--a Rothko or even a Van Gogh: You have to know a lot about painting, you have to feel comfortable in museums and you have to have what Bourdieu saw as the educated bourgeois orientation, which rests on leisure, money and unselfconscious social privilege and expresses itself as the enjoyment of the speculative, the distanced, the nonuseful. Typically, though, Bourdieu used this discouraging insight to call for more, not less, effort to make culture genuinely accessible to all: Schools could help give working-class kids the cultural capital--another key Bourdieusian concept--that middle-class kids get from their families. One could extend that insight to the American context and argue that depriving working-class kids of the 'frills'--art, music, trips--in the name of 'the basics' is not just stingy or philistine, it's a way of maintaining class privilege."