Sacred Grove
(1969), Dillon Ripley offers some impressions of his early experi-
ence with museums:
My own philosophy of museums became established at the age of ten one
winter when we were living in Paris. One of the advantages of playing in the
Tuileries Gardens as a child was that at any one moment one could be riding
the carousel, hoping against hope to catch the ring. … Another moment and
one could wander into one of the galleries of the Louvre. I still remember one
day I found the ship models … Then out to the garden again where there was a
patch of sand in the corner to build sand castles. Then back to the Louvre to
wander through the Grand Gallery.
There was no essential difference in all of this. The juxtaposition was natural
and easy. No threshold of tiredness and lack of concentration was reached. It
was as easy as breathing in and out.
(Ripley 1969: 140)
Second, not unlike Ripley, Tim Millar (aged 6) is being introduced to the arts – and
letter writing to national newspapers – as a natural part of his social life:
My dad read the article on Rebecca Horn … and took me and my brother to see
her exhibition at the Tate Gallery. I was very cross and disappointed to find
that the hanging piano wasn’t working. But I loved the guns.
(letter
in the London
Independent Magazine,
15 October 1995)
Ripley learned the code as if it were play; master Tim is being taught it in a similar
manner by his father. Yet not everyone is so fortunate:
A beholder who lacks the specific code feels lost in a chaos of sounds and
rhythms, colours, and lines, without rhyme or reason. … Thus the encounter
with a work of art is not ‘love at first sight’ as is generally supposed … [rather]
the art-lover’s pleasure presupposes an act of cognition, a decoding operation,
which implies the implementation of a cognitive acquirement, a cultural code.
(Bourdieu 1984: 2)
Successful mastery of the code to gain artistic competence, according to Bourdieu,
requires use of scarce resource time. First, there must be economic means to invest
in educational time; this marks differential class access to different levels of educa-
tion. Second, the development of cultural practice and artistic production has
become more complex in its coding; the requirement that one is
au fait
with a wider
and wider range of cultural references – because much contemporary art is self-
referential – has meant that one needs to devote more and more time in order to
remain competent, or use money to recruit advisors who can supplement one’s
own taste and time commitment. The following exchange between two friends in
the play
‘Art’
(1996), by French playwright Yasmina Reza, emphasizes that condi-
tions exist for the aesthetic appreciation of so-called legitimate art:
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