Liking Australian art, liking Australian culture

Diane was one of 1461 Australians included in a 2015 national survey of cultural tastes and practices conducted as a part of the Australian Cultural Fields (ACF) project.2 She was also one of the 42 people we talked to in follow-up interviews to explore further what they had told us about their cultural tastes and practices across the six Australian cultural fields included in the ACF survey: the visual art, literary, heritage, music, sport and television fields. What Diane told us was fairly typical of what we learned from our other interviewees: namely, that while there was a pattern to their cultural do’s and don’ts, likes and dislikes, that related fairly clearly to what they told us about their family and social backgrounds (in Diane’s case, the close fit between her art and heritage tastes), there were also some aspects of their cultural practices and tastes that didn’t quite fit with the others (Diane’s reading preferences). This is now a fairly typical finding of the tradition of cultural sociology initiated by Pierre Bourdieu (1984), within which the ACF project was conducted, which argues that our cultural tastes tend to cluster together in ways that testify to the shaping influence of our family and social backgrounds. This is, however, a tradition which has increasingly acknowledged that different aspects of our family and social backgrounds might exert contradictory influences on our cultural tastes so that, while tending in a similar direction, they rarely do so completely (Lahire, 2004; Bennett, 2007) in part because familial influences are often specific and limited to particular fields (Gayo, 2016). These then are the questions we explore in this chapter by looking first at what the survey findings tell us about the art tastes and practices of Australians; at how these relate to their engagement with and taste for other kinds of Australian culture;3 and at the connections between these art and broader cultural tastes and practices and a range of social positions: principally age, gender, class and education. We then return to Diane and other ACF interviewees to see how their interests in Australian art relate to their interests in other aspects of Australian culture and how either the alignment or misalignment of these with their art tastes might be accounted for in terms of different aspects of their social position and background. In doing so we consider how the different social trajectories through which the interviewees arrived at the social positions they now occupy lend a distinctive aspect to their ‘taste profiles’ that places them at odds – usually only marginally, but sometimes predominantly so – with the tastes more generally associated with those positions.