Page 83 - Constructing Craft

Often the habitus was reinforced by rarity. Bourdieu claimed ‘that rarity [was] not an
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accident of beauty, but rather its cause.’ A work of art was considered beautiful
because it was rare and ‘rarity is almost always expressed using words that carry a
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positive connotation … Whereas what is common is valued negatively …’. Art,
because it was rare through limitations in the understanding of it and the ownership

of it could be made inaccessible to a large proportion of the population. Craft in the
traditional sense, on the other hand, was available to many and was more

comprehensible because of its utilitarian nature or the way it was made and as such

had less capital value.

Functionality, because of its association with necessity, also placed limitations on

craft. Bourdieu believed that the choices individuals made about their preferences in
art and craft were determined by their habitus which itself was ultimately determined

by the distance or immediacy of material need. People with greater material needs
could, to some extent, justify the purchase of craft because it served a functional

purpose as well as having aesthetic appeal, while people with more cultural,
economic and symbolic capital could afford to use their greater economic resources

to purchase paintings and other forms of ‘fine’ art that appeared not to have any

practical use. Furthermore, rarity offered opportunities for financial investment while
most craft did not.

However, individuals with less economic power could still influence taste and could

exchange cultural capital for economic capital. Bourdieu carried out surveys to
determine which sections of French society held particular forms of capital and in

what proportions. In the early 1960s he observed that one group, the bourgeoisie,

had a surplus of economic capital over cultural capital while another, the
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intellectuals and artists, had the opposite. Bourdieu suggested that the modern
craftsperson in France were the children of the petite-bourgeoisie who possessed

less wealth than the bourgeoisie but had, since the end of the Second World War,
been the recipients of a higher level of education than their parents, had enjoyed

greater economic benefits and endured less disruption in their lives. They were
often the children of people involved in the growing service industry. This group had

been the recipients of levels of education that matched those of the bourgeoisie
and, in addition, their ambitions to rise higher in the French class system had been

Constructing Craft