'Distinction and the Aristocracy of Culture' Pierre Bourdieu

What is the Topic and Issue of the chapter?
This was a very in depth piece of writing, and I found it quite difficult to stay focused as Bourdieu was quite repetitive in this chapter. However the main issue here is that our own culture can be determined by many factors, like our family, our education and what we are exposed to, like longer schooling - visiting theatres and museums for a few examples.
What is the autor arguing? what is his point?
As a consumer, we must possess cultural competancy - that is to say if the working class audience refuses any sort of formal experimentation, will distance them as a spectator, which will prevent them from getting involoved and fully identifying the characters and the situation.
What method does the author use to make his case?
I would of thought guessing from his findings Bourdieu would have conducted visual ethnography along with interviews and historiography to accumulate his findings.
What suggestions/ conclusions does the author make?
He concludes with his theory of 'The Aesthetic Disposition' where who judges art and where the only socially accepted 'right' way of approaching the object. He continues to discuss whether it is refusal or privatisation which distances us, that through
deciphering and decoding even the 'ordinary people' adopt the negative conception of ordinary vision which is the basis of every 'high' aesthetic.
Do you agree/disagree with the author?
I strongly agree that what we surround ourselves with, in turn opitimises what our own culture is, however why do we have to understand something to appreciate its cultural value. Who is to say that Museum visits and Ballet trips enrich us as human beings, and why is this categorized as high culture?

"Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by thier classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or portrayed."

"The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile - in a word, natural - enjoyment which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture, implies an affirmation of the superiority of those who can be satisfied with the subliminated, refined, disintersted, gratuitous distinguished pleasures forever closed to the profane. That is why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function and legitmating social differences."

"There is an economy of cultural goods, but it has specific logic. Sociology endeavours to establish the conditions in which the consumers of cultural goods, and their taste for them, are produced, at the same time to describe different ways pf appropriating such of these subjects as are regarded at a particular moment as works of art, and the social conditions of the consitution of the mode of appropriation that is considered legitimate."