The Western Sydney University (WSU) has published findings from a national survey of cultural tastes, in the publication Fields, Capitals, Habitus: Australian Culture, Inequalities and Social Divisions, which details Australians’ social patterns of engagement with sport, media, the visual arts, music, literature and heritage.
The key word here is ‘detail’. Lead editor and researcher, Professor Tony Bennett said that while this kind of research has been conducted sporadically over the last 60 years (he even pointed to an earlier study he produced with colleagues, Accounting for Tastes in 1999) this is the most comprehensive dive to date.
‘There’s no project in the world that has surveyed this topic in this detail,’ Bennett told ArtsHub.
‘That this research has been ongoing for a long time, points to the systemic aspects of inequality in contemporary society in relation to cultural tastes and opportunity. The policy implications are clear,’ said Bennett.
What is interesting about this new research is that it highlights the pivotal role culture plays between classes, age groups, ethnicities, genders, city and country locations, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.
‘There is clear evidence that the kinds of culture Australians have access to depends on their social backgrounds,’ Bennett said.
That there can’t be a ‘fair go’ in Australian culture without taking steps to counter the effects of this cycle, he added.
‘It would require a real commitment – clearly lacking at the moment – to equality of educational opportunities, and arts and cultural policies with a much stronger focus on public support for a wider range of Australians’ cultural interests.’
The publication was released on 24 August – just two days prior to the Australia Council for the Arts’ latest research into national engagement in arts and culture.
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Bennett told ArtsHub: ‘For organisations like the Australia Council, it is their business to advocate for funding for the arts and present a strong picture. Both reports had massive participation. But those [OzCo] statistics often don’t get down to the exact details of what that engagement looks like and the background impacting those tastes and participation.’
This is the deep dive Bennett and his team at the Institute for Culture and Society have taken.
Is it just class?
While the publication at times is a dense academic read couched on theoretical frameworks and models, it really is also a simple conversation about inequality and impact.
Cutting through from the academic to the everyday, Bennett told ArtsHub: ‘The sharpest message that comes out from the research is, for many people in working-class occupations, they clearly play little part in, or have little interest in, the publicly funded arts and culture sector and its offerings.’
Bennett reported that that while galleries, museums and heritage sites work very hard to make what they do accessible, they are not broadly engaged with by all social groups.
‘It is not the fault of those cultural institutions. The degree to which people take interest in culture comes back to their education, but is also related to their parents’ background. These are strong systemic conditions.
‘The degree to which people take interest in culture comes back to their education, but is also related to their parents’ background.’
‘Those who are most privileged in cultural terms are more likely to have parents who studied at a post-graduate level; ditto for tertiary and for secondary. There is a powerful dynamic of inheritance impacting cultural tastes and engagement,’ he continued.
Bennett added that in Australia, inequalities have been increasing since the 1980s, and particularly since the 1990s, noting that the diversion of funds away from the public education sector to the private sector is further impacting the cultural tastes and engagement of Australians.
While this might sound like just a roll out of gloomy data that keeps everyone in their social place, Bennett advocates that these inequalities in cultural consumption impact on broader aspects of life including employment outcomes.
‘This has a strong bearing on how well people do at school, whether they go to university, and if so what they study – all factors bearing crucially on the occupations they go on to, and the economic rewards these offer. This then, strongly influences how far they are able to take advantage of the wide range of cultural pursuits that are available in Australia,’ Bennett said.
Mapping this journey of inequality
The report / publication is structured across three main drivers – Fields (artistic mediums), Capital (aka the dollars), and Habitus (home influence).
The book looks first at how social divisions play out across the six cultural fields: the visual arts, literature, music, heritage, television and sport.
‘We not only ask about [creative] genres and what they do, but we also name for example, ten Australian artists and ask what Australians like and don’t like about them; and then we do the same for ten International artists; ten TV personalities right across the range from high-status current affairs to sports personalities. It is really, really detailed and we do this for each of these fields,’ explained Bennett.
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The book then examines Australians’ cultural preferences with close attention paid to class, which includes an engagement with the role of ‘middlebrow’ cultures in Australia and the role played by new forms of Indigenous cultural capital in the emergence of an Indigenous middle class.
These are discussed more closely in the final part of the book which explores the gendered, political, personal and community associations of cultural tastes across Australia’s Anglo-Celtic, Italian, Lebanese, Chinese and Indian populations.
‘How this all hangs together, and what happens when we bring all that data from those six fields together, is that we start to see general patterns emerge,’ said Bennett.
It is these patterns that are the gem of this publication.
Weighing up visual arts, to literature, to heritage, to sport
Co-editor, Professor David Carter from the University of Queensland, notes that book reading is a strong example of particular social characteristics reinforcing and being reinforced by cultural pursuits.
He said in a statement: ‘Book reading is clearly influenced by class and gender. Reading books for pleasure is associated with higher levels of education, with relative affluence, and with women more than men.
‘It’s not only reading – these are also the people who participate most in book groups, and who go to book launches and writers’ festivals.’
That is not to say that a school leaver choreographing dances for tic tok is not cultural engagement, or captures a particular taste for music and dance.
Bennett said that things get a little different with the other fields – in music, for example, tastes are divided more sharply by age than class; and with sport gender is more important than class in dividing the ways in which people engage in sport.
He continued: ‘The most divisive, in the sense that the effects of class and education are most marked, is the fields of [visual] art, followed by literature, and then heritage sites. Few from working-class backgrounds go to a gallery, or go to book fairs or to a library.
‘Simply there are low working-class levels of participation in art and literature as those inequalities have become sharper,’ Bennett added.
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‘One of the things favoured by the Australia Council is to claim that more people go to cultural events than to sports. That is because most people watch sport on television, and the numbers that watch art on television are negligible,’ explained Bennett, adding that is why this report has been necessary to dive deeper behind the numbers and perceptions
Bennett concluded: ‘We are all culturally engaged in different ways. I don’t want you to come away with the sense that those who are not “highbrow” are not informed; they are just informed in different ways. In any western society, different forms of culture have different degrees of legitimacy.
‘The policy and political questions are how to level out opportunity to take part in high status, more legitimate forms of culture. There’s no fault on the part of the people who miss out – the fault is in the system that denies them opportunity. What is more is needed more equitable levels of funding support across the education sector,’ Bennett said.
Fields, Capitals, Habitus: Australian Culture, Inequalities and Social Divisions is edited by Professor Tony Bennett, Dr Michelle Kelly and Professor Greg Noble (Western Sydney University), Professor David Carter (University of Queensland) and Professor Modesto Gayo (Universidad Diego Portales, Chile).
It is published by Routledge. The book is an outcome of the major Australian Cultural Fields research project funded by the Australian Research Council and led by the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University (DP140101970).
