Page 82 - Constructing Craft

that everyone involved, artist, patron, dealer and critic alike, is
kept assured of the superiority ... of painting and sculpture over
the other arts disciplines. Consciously or unconsciously
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(hopefully the latter), all are engaged in this process.

Bourdieu believed it was more likely to be the latter.

However, when applied to art and craft in New Zealand Bourdieu’s ideas
demonstrated that class status and influence were not fixed by economic relations

alone, nor were they permanently fixed. For example, in a letter to the magazine
New Zealand Crafts in 1984 a reader complained that in an article in an earlier

edition on handmade furniture the word ‘craft’ was notable by its absence: ‘There is

... the arty/crafty, so pretentious as to be way above the heads of all but the “in”
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set.’ The complaint implied that the well-educated middle-class in New Zealand,
could control fields by indirect means such as access to education and defining
artistic taste through the use of hidden (sometimes unconscious) codes that

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Bourdieu called the ‘critique of taste’. Those educated in a particular way
understood the codes and used them to exclude those who had not received the
same education. He called this process ‘symbolic violence’ and suggested that

neither the perpetrators nor the recipients were consciously aware of what was
happening – although in the case above the reader was aware that something was

not quite right.

Bourdieu’s ideas are important because they relate to the place that ‘cultural

producers’ (artist and craftspeople) played within the ‘new middle class’ – a group
that has been identified as having a dominant role in the latter half of the twentieth

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century. Moreover, the same group had a significant role to play as cultural
consumers in an increasingly affluent world and, in addition, formed the antithesis of
the group that craftspeople had been assigned to in the past – manual workers.

Bourdieu determined that taste, previously thought of as idiosyncratic individual
choice was, in reality, a predictable phenomenon and defined by economic and

social class. Furthermore, he established that consumption can be seen as the
battleground where social class distinctions are fought out.

Constructing Craft