Beauty and the eye of the beholder: aesthetic dispositions and museum audiences in Flanders (Belgium)

Views on what the fine arts are/should be and how they should be appropriated have changed during the last century—in line with Bourdieu’s conception of the emergence and development of a field. The ‘traditional’ view grounded in 19th century bourgeois society with its emphasis on beauty, elegance, balance, and emotional aesthetics has been challenged by the emergence of artistic movements based on transgression, experimentation, conceptual forms, sensuousness. At present—anno 2011—these different forms of art and ditto forms of reception coexist and are more or less similarly institutionalized. One of the key findings of La Distinction is exactly showing that aesthetic judgment and taste are socially anchored. In this paper we want to contribute two things using Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA): (1) we use an item battery specifically designed to measure the different aesthetic dispositions and conceptions. We want to construct the space of aesthetic perception by means of about twenty items describing how/what art should be or incorporate: e.g. ‘Art should be beautiful’ versus ‘One colour or one line are enough to create a piece of art’; (2) we analyze the relationship between these different aesthetic conceptions and the social origin and environment of spectators, i.e. besides including the traditional socio-demographic variables, we insert items that indicate perceptions of someone’s social position, and perceptions of what members of his/her social network prefer. The use of MCA has a number of advantages. First, it allows for the inclusion of a lot of variables simultaneously. Second, it explicitly visualizes a space in terms of a relational logic. Third, it enables the inclusion of a number of structuring—supplementary—factors showing the homology or association between aesthetic perception and their social embeddedness. We rely on an audience survey of about 1,000 visitors from two art museums in Ghent (Belgium), namely the Museum of Fine Arts and the City Museum for Contemporary Art (also known as S.M.A.K.)