Into the Great Wide Open? a Comparative Study of Cultural Legitimacy and the Arts in British and Finnish Newspapers, 1960-2010

Classifications and social valuations of culture and the arts vary cross-nationally and historically. Recent studies have questioned the role of classical highbrow culture as a status marker in Western countries and suggested that the self-evident bourgeois “good” or legitimate taste is becoming less hierarchical and more open. The famous idea of cultural omnivorousness, that the taste of the high status groups is no longer exclusive but inclusive, is one way of conceptualizing this trend. Omnivore scholarship, however, has concentrated mostly on the consumption rather than the production side of culture. Changes in the social value and composition of the legitimate taste as expressed in people’s dispositions and preferences should nevertheless receive support, or even be preceded, by transformations in cultural institutions which consecrate legitimate art. Since art journalists and intellectuals play a crucial role as cultural intermediaries, the changes in dominant taste patterns should be reasonably recognizable in their evaluations and writings, i.e. in how cultural classifications and aesthetic standards are represented in the media. Sociological studies of such cultural institutions that would include both cross-national and longitudinal dimensions have so far been rare. This paper presents the first results of a research project examining cultural pages of the main newspapers in five European countries, Britain, Finland, France, Spain and Sweden, from 1960 until 2010. Since we are interested in changes in the legitimate taste and the processes that have created space for omnivorous tastes, we pay special attention to the appearance of new (and the disappearance of old) cultural genres and art forms as well as the weight of popular culture in these pages and the boundaries between entertainment and “serious” art. By using both quantitative and qualitative content analyses, we focus here particularly on two countries and the respective newspapers, Britain (The Guardian) and Finland (Helsingin Sanomat).