Simone Varriale

Beyond distinction : theorising cultural evaluation as a social encounter

This article expands recent attempts to theorise the role of culture’s materiality in Pierre Bourdieu’s relational epistemology. Drawing on empirical research about the reception of rock and jazz in Italy, and focusing on the evaluative practices of Italian critics, the article theorises cultural evaluation as a social encounter between the dispositions of social actors (i.e. their habitus) and the aural, visual and narrative properties of cultural objects. The article argues that such encounters produce relational aesthetic experiences, which are neither a property of social actors (e.g. their class) nor of cultural artefacts, but emerge from interactions between the socio-historical specificity of the habitus and different cultural materials. This theoretical synthesis, it is argued, can account for meanings and affects which, albeit co-produced by embodied dispositions, are neither reducible to such dispositions nor to practices of distinction. Further, it can account for the formative power of aesthetic experiences, that is, the extent to which they create durable dispositions and attachments.

Is that girl a monster? Some notes on authenticity and artistic value in Lady Gaga

This article will discuss a specific reading of Lady Gagas image as something new and provocative in pop and celebrity culture. Since the release of The Fame Monster (2009), arguments for the postmodern ‘subversiveness’ of Gaga have emerged both in music journalism and scholarly writing. Such claims surprise me for one basic reason: the extent to which Gagas star persona is related, in many media texts, to specific discourses about the cultural and social value of music. For this reason I will deliberately ignore the visual texts on which ‘postmodern’ readings usually rely (for example, Gagas music videos), and will look at the discourses that emerge in Gagas interviews, analysing one particularly long piece from the online music site Noisevox (Norris 2009). This example clearly shows the construction of a biographical narrative that relies on quite distinctive notions of authenticity. Drawing on Frith (1998), authenticity can be defined as a series of statements of truth about the value of music. More specifically, I am referring to what have been called a ‘romantic discourse’ about music as a non-mediated expression of the self, and a ‘folk discourse’ about music as cultural expression of a community (Frith 1998, pp. 21–46). Overall, I want to underline that more extensive studies on Lady Gaga should not ignore this discursive rhetoric, as it frequently re-frames Gagas visual and allegedly postmodern ethos.

Reconceptualizing Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism: Evidence From the Early Consecration of Anglo-American Pop-Rock in Italy:

This article explores how foreign, recently imported cultural forms can redefine the dynamics of legitimation in national cultural fields. Drawing on archival research, the article discusses the early consecration of Anglo-American pop-rock in 1970s Italy and analyzes the articles published by three specialist music magazines. Findings reveal the emergence of a shared pop-rock canon among Italian critics, but also that this “cosmopolitan capital” was mobilized to implement competing editorial projects. Italian critics promoted both different strategies of legitimation vis-à-vis contemporary popular music and opposite views of cultural globalization as a social process. Theoretically, the article conceptualizes “aesthetic cosmopolitanism” as a symbolic resource that can be realized through competing institutional projects, rather than as a homogeneous cultural disposition.

Conclusion: The Struggle Goes On

This conclusion discusses how the book’s case study enriches current debates about cultural globalization, artistic legitimation and their relationship with social divisions.

Economic Cosmopolitanism: The Case of Ciao 2001

This chapter starts investigating critics’ struggles over competing understandings of cultural value, expertise and globalization. It focuses on the most successful music magazine of the 1970s – the weekly Ciao 2001 – and explores how this publication promoted a distinctive ‘economic cosmopolitanism’. This ideological project implied a view of globalization as economic modernization and a subjectivist understanding of cultural hierarchies, which I describe as ‘loose’ aesthetic boundaries. Moreover, the chapter considers the possibility, unexplored in Bourdieu’s work, that commercial success may be transformed into a form of prestige and symbolic capital.

Young, Educated and Cosmopolitan: A New Cultural Institution

This chapter reconstructs the socio-cultural transformations that made the rise of pop music criticism in Italy possible. Further, it reconstructs the social biography of Italian critics and how they drew new cultural distinctions between Anglo-American and Italian, valuable and debased popular music. Focusing on critics’ shared trajectories, resources and values, this chapter reveals that the aesthetic and generational character of their distinctions obscured the inequalities of education, class, gender and geographical location which marked the emergence of the music press (and the Italian ‘economic miracle’ at large).

Globalization and Artistic Legitimation: Reconceptualizing Bourdieu

This chapter outlines the theoretical approach used in the book’s succeeding chapters. It revises Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory towards a consideration of global forces and their influence on processes of artistic legitimation. The chapter highlights three inter-linked dimensions of transnational cultural legitimation: the discovery and appropriation of new aesthetic materials (‘aesthetic socialization’); the ways in which these cultural resources are mobilized by competing groups of experts (‘legitimation struggles’); and the reception of their cultural distinctions among publics with unequal symbolic and economic resources (‘homologies and asymmetries’).

Political Cosmopolitanism: The Case of Muzak and Gong

This chapter looks at magazines with lower commercial success but higher symbolic recognition than Ciao 2001, especially for their aesthetic and political innovations: the monthlies Muzak and Gong. This chapter investigates these magazines’ ‘political cosmopolitanism’, which questioned the commercial and cultural domination of Anglo-American pop-rock and promoted normative aesthetic boundaries. More generally, this chapter reconstructs the forms of political activism which, during the 1970s, animated various sectors of Italian society, and which made political engagement an important line of division among music critics.

Music Magazines as Alternative Public Spheres

This chapter draws on the readers’ letters published by Italian music magazines to explore the reception of their projects of legitimation. It reveals that asymmetries of cultural and subcultural capital, and differences like gender, age and class, were likely to shape readers’ relationship with music magazines, and that Bourdieu’s assumption about the social similarity, or ‘homology’, between cultural producers and their publics needs to be probed vis-a-vis different socio-historical contexts. More generally, the chapter highlights the role of music magazines as public spheres ripe with conflict and power asymmetries (Fraser 1990), but which nonetheless enhanced a reflection about the inequalities affecting Italian youth.

Introduction: How Things Come into Being

This chapter discusses the book’s research questions and its original contribution to theories of artistic legitimation, studies of cultural taste and cultural globalization, and studies of Italian popular music. Further, it summarizes the book’s organization and situates its case study vis-a-vis contemporary Italian music cultures.