SOURCE: Dunn, Allen. “Who Needs a Sociology of the Aesthetic? Freedom and Value in Pierre Bourdieu's Rules of Art.” Boundary 2 25, no. 1 (spring 1998): 87-110.

In the following essay, Dunn investigates a contradiction in Bourdieu's theory about the role of art in society.

Sociology and art do not make good bedfellows. That's the fault of art and artists, who are allergic to everything that offends the idea they have of themselves: the universe of art is a universe of belief, belief in gifts, in the uniqueness of the uncreated creator, and the intrusion of the sociologist, who seeks to understand, explain, account for what he finds, is a source of scandal.

—Pierre Bourdieu, Sociology in Question

Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of art is a rough affair. Through the conceptual violence of what he terms a “double rupture” (RA [The Rules of Art], 77), he has attempted to show that both the producers...