Introduction: Taste, Hierarchy and Social Value after Bourdieu

The introduction to this book, for which I was the General Editor, begins by outlining how the book, which began with a conference at Chelsea College of Arts in May 2014, offers an interdisciplinary analysis of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of taste. It addresses the historical development and contemporary relevance of the socially distributed value conferred by taste and asks how those who are involved in the arts contribute to the analysis of taste. The introduction then engages with:

1. An analysis of the sociology of taste ‘After Bouurdieu’
2. An analysis of how Bourdieu’s account of taste as a means of producing and reproducing social hierarchy, paradoxically does not take account of the transformation of social hierarchy by taste in the bourgeois revolution.
3. The possibilities and contradictions for arts practitioners revealed by Bourdieu’s ‘socioanalysis’ of taste.
4. A summary of the chapters.
5. A conclusion in which I outline the possibility that we may now be experiencing bourgeois taste in reverse, a situation in which the general management of pathology is the cultural norm and self-management through taste is the cultural exception.