| Summary: | This thesis presents a series of small-scale empirical investigations into artists, education and change. It is flamed by a theoretical perspective derived from the work of the French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu and his conceptualisation of the social world and its functioning in relationship to education, formal and informal, and, artistic and cultural change. See (Bourdieu, 1977/72), (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970), (Bourdieu, 1993). The thesis combines published book chapters and journal articles with a previously unpublished commentary to highlight aspects of education and artistic change in terms of habitus field, and cultural capital. Each empirical research project employs a three-level relational approach (Bourdieu 1992) to the analysis of artists' biographies, including their educational experiences in relation to cultural institutions, and to the changing structures of the artistic field. Artists are studied during the 30s and 40s in St Ives, in the 40s and 50s in New York, and at the turn of the twentieth century in London. The studies investigate how artists of a certain habitus constituted themselves as an avant-garde by their positioning within the art, field and the broader social space, and examine the role of education in the development of an artistic avant-garde. In each case, configurations of social, economic and cultural capital are examined to show the crucial role of education at times of change. The temporal structure of social change and its disruptive effects are discussed directly in a book chapter -Hysteresis. Cultural institutions are also analysed as sites of informal education and artistic consumption, e. g. through field analyses of the founding of three major museums. The study explores how such a social analytical approach to artistic production enriches and deepens our understanding of the 'rules' of art and the part played by education within this. Qualitative analyses of this type which apply Bourdieu's methodology and theory of practice to art and culture are original and have been developed from the earlier work of Grenfell (Grenfell, 1995) that explored the nature of pedagogical habitus for trainee teachers. A series of qualitative methods have been developed by the author and are presented in this thesis. Concluding remarks also address what, in the author's view, are the advantages and limitations of adopting a Bourdieusian approach to the study of the social world.
|
|---|
