Field Manoeuvres

Bourdieu and the

Young British Artists
Michael Grenfell
Cheryl Hardy
University of Southampton

This article offers an empirical study of the field of contemporary British art in the 1990s. It considers the nature of this field as an artistic avant-garde and discusses Bourdieus theory of art production. The Young British Artists are studied through three distinct levels of analyse derived from
Bourdieus methodology and theory of practice. Issues of habitus and field structure are highlighted
in order to examine the processes and operations of the artistic avant-garde. The article also briefly
addresses the products of this field through issues of style and technique and offers some reflections
on this sociological approach to art.
Keywords: field theory; artistic avant-garde; contemporary British art; Bourdieu

British Art and the Avant-Garde

British art is booming, so declares the art critic Louisa Buck (1998) in her users
guide to art now (p. 7) in the late 1990s. It certainly considered itself to be booming
in the 1990s. Arguably, half of a century has passed since the last time British art attracted the attention of the international art markets to the same extent. Recognition

Authors Note: I wish to acknowledge with gratitude the interest and support of Pierre Bourdieu
throughout this project and his helpful comments on its outcomes in the spring 2001.
space & culture vol. 6 no. 1, february 2003 19-34
DOI: 10.1177/1206331202238960
2003 Sage Publications
19

20 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / f e b r u a r y 2 0 0 3

of its significance is evidenced by the media coverage given to the Sensation exhibition,
which was held at the Royal Academy of Arts (the home of the British art establishment), London, in late 1997. Sensation (see Rosenthal, 1997) exhibited work of the
leading Young British Artists (yBas): Hirst, Whiteread, Hume, Gormley, Wearing, and
38 others. Its claims to be a movement of international significance further supported
by the notoriety and interest it attracted across the world as it toured Berlin, Sydney,
and Tokyo. In New York, the mayor threatened financial sanctions if the exhibition
took place.
The traditional role of the avant-garde is to challenge established hierarchies and
the bourgeois values of the status quo. British contemporary art in the 1990s did just
that. Critiques and theorists have discussed extensively the nature of the avant-garde
(cf. Williams, 1989). For example, it is now almost a clich to use the term avant-garde
to designate the rapid succession of artistic groups or schools in turn of the century
Paristhe Impressionists and post-Impressionists, the Nabis, the Fauve, Cubism, Orphism, amongst others. Change in art in some ways necessitates a vanguard movement, which sweeps away the old and ushers in the new. Greenberg, writing in the late
1930s, expressed a view that might be seen to have continued contemporary relevance:
that the most important function of the avant-garde is not to experiment but to keep
culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence (Greenberg,
1939/1986, p. 8). Yet if we analyse a range of leading British art reviews and journals
from the 1990s (Art Review, Artists Newsletter, Untitled, FlashArt, Contemporary Visual
Culture, Modern Painters, Art Newspaper and Time Out), we find that the term avantgarde rarely occurs. It is as if avant-garde indicates a modernist view of change: collective in character, with artists assumed to be autonomous and able to adopt common subversive strategies to established art practices. Most journals cited above prefer
to use in place terms such as cutting edge or edgy (themselves emotive terms) to denote
an innovative but subversive generation, pointing to a postmodernist view of culture:
individualistic practice with a view of change as fragmentation and discontinuity.
These perspectives raise questions concerning the relations between tradition,
modernism, postmodernism, and the mechanisms of change in artistic movements.
Furthermore, there is the issue of the role and status of the avant-garde. Their selfproclaimed raison dtre is to be an independent voice and to challenge. However, this
mission is not to be confused with heroic altruism. Weiss (1994), for example, argued
that artists self-aware deployment of what we would call avant-garde strategies is
merely a deliberate mechanism for establishing public recognition: The avant-garde
is perceived as an on-going publicity stunt, and innovation in pictorial style is a promotional strategy (Weiss, 1994, p. 90). In other words, although artistic practice may
well be overtly aimed at artistic recognition and judgments made by cultural peers, it
also has clear economic bases in self-advertisement and marketing.

Bourdieu and Art

Bourdieus (1965) interest in what might loosely be termed the social construction
of art goes back to his earliest writings or at least to his study of the social uses of photography. Curiously, however, his subsequent publications on cultural practices concentrated more on the art consumer than the art producer, culminating in his social
critique of aesthetics, La distinction, in 1979. It was not until 1987 that he turned his
attention to an analysis of the social conditions of production of a particular artist:

F i e l d M a n o e u v r e s 21

Manet. Bourdieus focus on Manet stemmed from his interest in the period in which
the artist lived, which saw the establishment of an autonomous art world separate
from aristocratic patronage. Bourdieu dedicated the whole 10-session programme of
his leon at the Collge de France, Paris, in 2000 to this subject, but unfortunately, his
major book-length work on Manet remained an unfinished manuscript at the time of
his death in January 2002. Nevertheless, it is possible to use Bourdieus generic theory
of practice (which has become highly developed with several applications) to analyse
the field of yBas in the 1990s.
The complicity between artistic practice and economic aspiration referred to in the
last section fits neatly with Bourdieus delineation of field positioning, where social
structures and cognitive structures are recursively and structurally linked, and the correspondence that obtains between them provides one of the most solid props of social
domination (Bourdieu, 1992, p. 14). Avant-garde groupings occupy a dominated position within the dominating class, and in this sense, their autonomy can only ever be
relative. It is the relationship between oppositional (both within and without) attitudes of a generation of artists and their artistic and social positioning that gives rise
to the structures of the field. Change in attitude, change in artistic practice, and the
consequent change in positioning and field structuring are all mutually constituting
phenomena, coincidental with the struggles for position within any specific field. The
structure of the artistic field and the way it changes is graphically illustrated by Bourdieu (1996) in The Rules of Art, where he sets out the temporality of the field of artistic production (p. 159). His subject here is the literary field. Figure 1 is an adaptation
of this representation for fine art and illustrated with specific examples from successive generations of painters.
Modern Painters is an established British review journal, which often favours a
modernist and progressive view of artistic development. A summary sheet from the
journal (November 1999) lists key artists and authors featured in back copies over the
previous 10 years. An analysis of this data for the 1990s shows the artists falling into
successive generations:
Tradition: Poussin, Donatello, Michaelangelo, Giotto, Frans Hal, Velazquez, Titian, Vermeer,
Tiepolo, Gericault, and Goya.
European avant-garde: Monet, Van Gogh, Guaguin, Bonnard, Cezanne, Picasso, Braque,
Morandi, Matisse, Mondrian, Brancusi, Derian, Masson, Duchamp, Magritte, and Chagall.
American avant-garde: Hooper, Pollock, Rothko, Rauschenberg, Jasper John, Twombly,
Motherwell, Stella, De Kooning, Ellsworth Kelly, Jeff Koons, and Basquiat.
British art: Sickert, Henry Tonks, Epstein, Stanley Spencer, John Piper, Barabara Hepworth,
Victor Passmore, Henry Moore, Elizabeth Frink, Lucien Freud, Carel Weight, Eduardo
Paolozzi, Howard Hogkins, David Hockney, Prunella Clough, Patrick Heron, Julian
Schnabel, Tony Cragg, Gilbert and George, Anish Kapoor, Damian Hirst, Ron Muek, and
Richard Billington.

Figure 1 expresses this information in terms of a series of artistic generations. European avant-garde of the late 19th to early 20th century defined themselves in oppositional relation to traditional painting practices. American avant-garde came to the
fore after the Second World War with the rise of abstract expressionism, minimalism,
and so forth. British art in the 1990s claimed to be at the forefront of artistic developments, superseding earlier American innovative practice, although some artists are
more closely related to the modernist practices on the European continent. These four

22 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / f e b r u a r y 2 0 0 3

Artistic Age

Rear-garde
Goya
Gericault
Poussin
Michaelangelo
Titian

Duchamp

Consecrated
Avant-garde

Mondrain
Picasso
Bonnard
Monet
Van Gogh

Past

Future

Basquiat
Koons

American
Avant-garde

Twombly
Rothko
Pollock
Hopper

Hirst
Gilbert & George
Bacon

British
Avant-garde

Hockney
Moore
Spencer

Sickert

PRESENT FIELD
Figure 1. The Present Field of Artistic Production

groups of artists could, of course, be subdivided into more tightly defined groups in
terms of time-specific practices. For example, Edward Hopper sits uncomfortably in
the same artistic generations as Pollack, Rothko, and Rauschenberg, nor do the latter
share artistic practice with Jeff Koons or Basquiat. In other words, the time scale used
here for each generation is a broad one. Nevertheless, Figure 1 does draw attention to
significant characteristics of artistic generations. First, it shows that artists and artistic
generations define themselves in terms of what Bourdieu called a prise de distance between each other. Second, artistic movements do have boundaries, and these may be
hard or softly defined. Third, an individual artist or grouping is rarely recognised as
of note without legitimation within the field. In other words, artistic consecration

F i e l d M a n o e u v r e s 23

can only be bestowed with the mobilisation of an entire network of artists, critics, curators, dealers, and gallery owners. As Bourdieu (1996) wrote,
To impose a new producer, a new product and a new system of taste on the market at a
given moment means to relegate to the past a whole set of producers, products and systems of taste, all hierarchized in relation to their degree of legitimacy. (p. 160)

Furthermore, Figure 1 draws attention to at least five dimensions of time, or temporality: first, real physical timefuture, present, and past; second, socially defined
time, including months, weeks, years, and epoques; third, an individual artists lifetime, in that they are born, grow up, age, and die in time; fourth, the period a particular artistic generation lasts; and fifth, the time an individual artist remains recognised
within a particular artistic generation. Each of these is defined in relation to each
other. There are fields within fields and individuals within these fields within fields.
The diagram offers a static presentation of a dynamic process. An individual artist ages
in physical and social time, but his or her passage through the field of his or her generation may be fast or slow according to the degree of recognised legitimacy bestowed
on him or her. And his or her generation itself may establish a consecrated position,
or simply pass out of the current field, which contains the rear-guard tradition as well
as successive generations of avant-garde defined in opposition to it and each other.
This discussion begins to present Bourdieus theory when applied to the field of art.
Clearly, the illustration uses a broad brush and is pitched at a large international level.
However, this type of diagram offers an analytic tool, which could certainly take any
one local context and identify generations as rearguard, consecrated avant-garde and
potential future avant-garde. In the rest of the article, an empirical case is offered in
more detail. It focuses exclusively on the example of the yBas of the 1990s. The research represents the sort of methodological experiment Bourdieu advocated on various occasions. It applies his field theory to artistic fields and to a particular context
and illustrates further the dynamic of artistic practice.

Methodological Considerations
Bourdieu always took theory and practice to be two sides of the same coin. Often,
therefore, his methodological procedures and tools of analysis are buried amongst his
findings and discussion. However, there are explicit methodological statements, most
notably Bourdieu (1977, 1968, 1990, 2001) and Bourdieu (1989, 1992). We must take
his basic analytical instrumentshabitus, field, capital, legitimacy, structure, and so
forthto be axiomatic to the present discussion. There is not space in such a brief article to go into detail of these terms. However, I would add the following preliminary
remarks.
The above begins to set out how we might regard the field of artistic production.
In what follows, we shall see the part habitus, both individual and group, plays in relation to the field. The crux of any individuals position (and his or her subsequent
choices about position taking) within a particular field is the quantity and form of any
capital (social, economic, and cultural) accrued by that individual. All capital is symbolic, although, clearly, its forms operate in different ways. Thus, for example, economic capital is symbolically powerful to hold in that it implies purchasing power in
a direct, immediate, and explicit sense, whereas cultural and social capital have to op-

24 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / f e b r u a r y 2 0 0 3

erate through legitimated valuing systems. Because all capital is symbolic, its action
within any particular field is dependent on the participants understanding of the social, economic, and cultural parameters of that field. Bourdieu commented on how to
understand these field parameters:
There is thus a sort of hermeneutic circle: in order to construct the field, one must identify forms of specific capital that operate within it, and to construct the forms of specific
capital one must know the specific logic of the field. There is an endless to and fro movement in the research process. (Bourdieu, 1992, p. 108)

The logic of the field is the subject of this article. However, we wish to draw attention to two further methodological aspects of the present study.
First, a methodology of three stages. When asked by Wacquant to give his approach
to analysing a field, Bourdieu (1992) referred to three necessary and internally connected steps (p. 104):
[First,] one must analyses the position of the field vis--vis the field of power.
[Second,] one must map out the objective structure of the relations between the positions occupied by the agents of institutions who compete for the legitimate form of specific authority of which the field is a site.
[Third,] one must analyse the habitus of agents, the different systems of dispositions they
have acquired by internalising a determinate type of social and economic conditions, and
which find a definite trajectory within the field under consideration a more or less
favourable opportunity to become actualised. (Bourdieu, 1992, p. 104)

This study is presented in terms of three distinct levels in order to focus on operations across the field and within it. The levels range from the formal sociopolitical relations in society to field structure and individual habitus.
The second methodological aspect concerns insider accounts. What matters in establishing the structure of any geographical or temporal field and an artists position
within it is not how, with hindsight, we make objective judgments to establish relative
values for social, cultural, and economic capital but what functional value each configuration of capital has contemporaneously within the practical logic of the field.
Genet Delacroix (1986) used data about particular French artists to illustrate or test
some general classifications of types of 19th-century art. She insisted on using only
historically contemporary insider accounts, such as reviews, letters, and diaries. As
artefacts produced within the field, they contain structural homologies inherent in it.
By using them, it is possible to uncover elements of the field structure: the configurations of capital, relations, and its logic as referred to above. Similarly, in collecting data
for the present study, a range of contemporary insider accounts was used: reviews,
magazines (Flashart, Art Review, Modern Painters), collections of commentaries (e.g.,
Buck, 1998; Kent, 1994). None of these offer data that is objective; rather, they contain
commentary where aesthetic judgements are made. However, it is the writers very
subjectivity that is useful for this study, because it reflects their own artistic habitus
gained as active (themselves cutting-edge) participant observers in the field. Every account contains within it the perceived sociocultural structures and their valuing bases
in the field of contemporary art in Britain. They represent both a position taking
within the field and a personal construction of the relative positions of others within
the same field.

F i e l d M a n o e u v r e s 25

Level 1: The Field of British Art Within the Field of Power

Figure 2 is based on insider accounts referred to above. It demonstrates the way that
the field of contemporary art connects with other media fields and, ultimately, the
field of politics and audiences for all of these. It is indicative of this level of analysis.
Bourdieu (1996) defined the field of power as the set of relations of force between
agents or institutions having in common the possession of the capital necessary to occupy the dominant positions in different fields (notably economic or cultural) (p. 25).
Any cultural field occupies a dominated position within the field of power because,
despite the ambiguity of their relationship to the bourgeois, ultimately cultural producers are dependent on their patrons, be they wealthy art buyers or fine art institutions.
Furthermore, Bourdieu (1996) wrote,
The relationship of homology established between the field of cultural production and
the field of power (or the social field in its entirety) means that works which are produced with reference to purely internal ends are always predisposed to fulfil external
functions as an added bonus. (p. 166)

We can see this dual function in practice. A commentator such as Buck writes of
artists shared desire to use whatever means are at their disposal . . . to make work that
speaks of what it is to be human and live in this world (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 7). Such
ends are internal to the art world and the functioning of the field of artistic production. Simultaneously, however, these internal ends have external consequences. For example, the international lawyer Stuart Evans is identified by Buck as an important art
patron. He buys work by Matt Collishaw and Rachel Whiteread to enliven his companys headquarters. The art works therefore fulfill an external function of art within
the social field: to support a corporate image and to position the company in a more
general field of power. The dynamic nature of these field interactions is further
demonstrated when Stuart Evans buys art from Tracey Emin. She then uses him as
lawyer for property leasing and donates further work to the firm as paymenta mutual exchange of cultural and economic capital and an instance of structured structuring within both fields. Those within a field need to establish hierarchies of classification. In this case, it is possible to see how the valorisation of economic capital and
cultural capital are inextricably intertwined. Along the way, there are appeals to art for
art sake as a legitimation of process, co-existing with a maximisation of exposure to
other fields in order to accrue forms of capital.
Bourdieu (1996) further wrote,
It is a very general property of fields that the competition for what is at stake conceals the
collusion regarding the very principles of the game. The struggle for the monopoly of legitimacy helps to reinforce the legitimacy in the name of which it is waged. (p. 167)

For example, the leading yBa Damien Hirst overtly challenges the hegemony of orthodox artistic hierarchieswhen he mixes up disparate elements from TV series,
children toys . . . with such art historical influences . . . as the pristine Minimalism of
Donald Judd (Buck, 1998, p. 47). However, the result is that his own practice is further legitimated by assimilation, and henceforth, he joins the fine art hierarchy that he
appears to challenge. Many contemporary artists challenge fine art practices with their
hybridisation of traditional forms, by their foregrounding of commodification and

26 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / f e b r u a r y 2 0 0 3

Television
e.g. - Channel 4s involvement
in the Turner Prize
- John Wyver;s Illuminations
Television

Pop Music
e.g. - Brian Enos collaboration
with RCA students;
- David Bowies patronage;
- Collaborative work between
Hirst and Dave Stewart
- Hirsts video for Blur

FIELD OF
CULTURAL
PRODUCTION

British Art

Commercial Art
e.g. - Saatchi as founder of
Advertising Firm

FIELD OF COMMERCIAL
ENTERPRISE

Commerce

Politics

e.g. - Habitats commissioning

of art work from Tracey Emin
- Commercial sponsorship of Prizes
Like The Prudential or Citibank
Photography Prize
- Becks Beer involvement with
Art

e.g. - Saatchis campaigns for

Conservative Party
- Willie Dohertys political
panoramas of Derry
- Nicholas Serotas father was a
Labour party peer

Publishing
e.g. - National Newspapers through
commentators who are Chief Arts
Editors of Times, Guardian or
Time Out
- Iwona Blazwicks work for
Phaidon Press

FIELD OF POLITICAL
POWER

Figure 2. The Fields of Culture, Commerce, and Politics

popular culture, and by their oppositional stance to bourgeois values in prioritising

novelty, shock, and taboo breaking. However, they still hold a dominated positioning
in their markets and audiences, which is itself homologous to that of fine art practices
and positioning in the past. These struggles between field participants for stylistic

F i e l d M a n o e u v r e s 27

domination of the field disguise, therefore, their accumulation of economic and cultural capital. In the longer term, although the same struggles may well result in oppositional cultural producers altering the structures of their own field of production and
of their relations to the established field of power, some successful avant-garde artists
will probably become establishment figuresand certainly rich.
Other factors in positioning the field of art within the field of power include the
following:
Wide circulation of products from the various fields as fashion objects or popular ideas;
for example, Monets Waterlilies was used as a design for Royal Academy carrier bags.
Hirsts Shark and Emins Bed are used in a range of pop art and culture.
Connections with party politics, for example, in the connections to the political establishment of key players such as Saatchi (galley owner and principal purchaser) and Serota
(Director of the Tate).
Political and social position taking associated with key individual field participants, for
example, the photographer Willie Dohertys views on Northern Ireland or art critic Sarah
Kents changing relationship to feminism.
Commercial partnerships, for example, the association between publicity for Becks Beer
and contemporary art or Habitat commissioning work from artists.
Connections with the fields of publishing and pop music, for example, art editors for major newspapers, and collaborations between artists and musicians such as David Bowie
and Brian Eno.

The key factors here are coverage in the popular media, rather than the traditional
elite appeal of fine art: personal politics rather than national politics and individual
commercial enterprise rather than the stereotypical view of an unrecognised artist
struggling in poverty. Such an analysis also suggests that a historic reading of the coupling between a field within the field of power is necessary to show how contemporary imperatives lead to both conflict and collaborations. For example, for a time in
the 1990s, both young artists and the incoming New Labour government in Britain associated themselves with the Cool Britannia sobriquet and then quickly dropped it
(see Cohen, 1999; and Smith, 1998). It also underlines that the autonomy of the field
can only ever be relative.

Level 2: The Field of Contemporary British Art

The next level of analysis looks at a mapping of the field of contemporary British
art itself. Such a map is to show the structural connections between those involved, for
example, artists, critics, teachers, curators, museums and institutions of art, gallery
owners, and buyers. Such relations therefore occur at the personal and institutional
level and the formal and informal. The medium for these relations can be understood
in terms of economic, cultural, and social capital.
Rather than offering a depersonalised map of the field, Figure 3 uses the artist
Damien Hirst as an anchor. Hirst is described by Buck (1998) as an artist with ubiquitous star status (p. 1999) and has been seen very much as leader of the pack of the
yBas. Figure 3 starts with Hirst and moves out to show his connections with other active participants in the field. By doing so, it demonstrates the interrelations referred to
in the last paragraph.

28 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / f e b r u a r y 2 0 0 3
Exhibited in Sensation

Fiona Rae
Chris Ofili

SAATCHI

has bought

Anthony Gormley
Lucien Freud
Richard Wilson

Mark Quinn
Chapman Bros.
Paula Rego

Sells to

JAY JOPLING
Sells to

owns

WHITE CUBE

CARL FREEDMAN
Georgina Starr
Gillian Wearing
Gilbert & George

Sam Taylor-Wood
Mona Hatoum
Tracey Emin
Gavin Turk

exhibits

FRIEND OF

Matt Collishaw
Gary Hume

exhibits
at

In FREEZE

DAMIEN HIRST
Trained with

MICHAEL
CRAIG-MARTIN

artist-trustee

had exhibition
curated by

TATE

Worked at

GOLDSMITHS
Trained

Mark Wallinger
Cathy de Monchaux
Anya Gallacio
Sarah Lucas
Steve McQueen
Julian Opie

IWONA
BLAZWICK

curator at

works at
curated
shortlisted for
Turner Prize

ICA

exhibition of

Susan Hiller

Rachel Whiteread
Cornelia Parker
Douglas Gordon
Willie Doherty
Christine Boreland

Figure 3. Damien Hurst Within the Field of Contemporary British Art

One can conclude that Damien Hirst is well placed within the field. He has connections to three key institutions: Goldsmiths, the Tate, and the Saatchi Gallery. Goldsmiths is a leading art school in London. Hirst trained here under the mentorship of
the influential teacher Michael Craig-Martin. His relations with Goldsmiths, with
other Goldsmiths students (the Freeze exhibition), with Carl Freedman (the Modern
Medicine exhibition), and with Jay Jopling (owner of the White Cube gallery and
fund-raiser for Hirst) are important for his subsequent positioning in the field, as is
his success for the positioning of these individualsa mutually beneficial and selfconstituting relation. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, success begets success, and aspiring
artists might well aim to establish similar field networks. Where they succeed, cultural

F i e l d M a n o e u v r e s 29

consecration is conferred on them. To return to Bucks (1998) commentary, more than

80% of the artists she listed as rising stars are associated with the same key institutions
and individuals as Hirst. At this point, it is worth emphasising how these institutional
links are actually expressed at the level of individual or personal connection. Bourdieu
wrote of the effect of social capital as an enhancer (see Accardo & Corcuff, 1986, p. 94).
Social capital lubricates the process and enables legitimation.
The habitus of those involved is also an extremely important element in social capital and in the institutional power they yield. Let us take the three key individuals associated with Hirst: Iwona Blazwick, Michael Craig-Martin, and Jay Joplin.
Iwona Blazwick curated Hirsts first solo exhibition. She exemplifies habitus that is
particularly strong in terms of institutional cultural capital, with connections to The
Institute of Contemporary Art, Phaidon Press, the National Trust, the Henry Moore
Sculpture Trust, Tate Gallery Liverpool, and most recently, Tate Gallery Modern.
Michael Craig-Martin demonstrates an equally strong pattern of capital, but this
time mostly derived from cultural capital gained by association with educational institutions of art. He is a professor in art at Goldsmiths but also taught at Canterbury
and Bath. Such experience not only provides institutional consecration but places him
in a powerful position to offer institutional consecration to others. His own education
at Yale offers further educationally based cultural capitalfrom the institution itself
but also from more content-specific artistic capital. He was taught by the American
avant-gardist Frank Stella, amongst others, and had experience of teaching based on
Bauhaus principles. His own previously successful experience as a conceptual artist bestows cultural capital on him, as has his subsequent involvement as a Tate artist-trustee.
Jay Jopling has accrued a very differently constituted habitus. He was educated at
the English public schoolEtonbefore going on to graduate in art history from an
establishment university. This background indicates a high level of social capital arising from his social origins. Bourdieu referred to this type of capital as embodied in
the personality and character of an individual. This image of a well-connected young
man is further evidenced by his active involvement with Band Aid and Save the Children in 1986. Jopling also visited New York in the 1980s, making contact with key
artists such as Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He also established the
White Cube gallery, which quickly became a leading site for exhibiting young British
art.
The habitus of each member of this trio is essentially distinct, but taken together,
they offer a powerful configuration of social, cultural, and economic capital that could
be used on behalf of Hirst to accelerate his trajectory through the field. In other words,
this trio of artistic field players offered Hirst a royal flush in terms of structural positioninga sound choice of collaborators on Hirsts part, with capital he could assimilate and that could be used to achieve successively more powerful field positions.

Level 3: Artists Habitus

Clearly, fields change, and with them, individuals activate configurations of capital
within them. The last section showed how vastly different capital backgrounds can
come together to establish a new legitimate configuration, thus establishing a new
form according to an old process. The section also illustrated the effect of key players
habitus in a field. In this section, how artists habitus maps onto field configurations
identified in the last section is examined.

30 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / f e b r u a r y 2 0 0 3

Returning to the review by Buck (1998), she categorised more than 100 artists under three rubrics: presiding forces, current contenders, and rising stars. This categorisation is clearly an individuals judgement, but as discussed above, such an insider account can be seen as a personal expression (habitus) of a collective state (field). It can
therefore be considered more than subjective and idiosyncratic, especially if analysis
of it yields objective patterns in configurations of habitus (structural homologies).
Table 1 offers an analysis of the artists listed under each heading in terms of their
backgrounds and scope of activity.
Basic signifiers of habitus are taken to be age, geographical, social origins, artistic
education, and commercial connections. What are the patterns of habitus according
to successive generations of artists?
AGE

The rear-garde grouping, presiding forces, contains artists, all older than 50. In
1997, all the other artists were in their 30s.
ORIGINS AND CENTRE OF ACTIVITY

The group as a whole is predominantly English, White, and London based but, as
the artists age decreases, there is a strong trend towards centralisation in London. Presiding forces artists live mainly in London but have varied international origins. Current contenders are largely British born and living in London, whilst over half of rising stars are born in or around London and continue to live in London. Almost all of
this youngest group live in London.
GENDER AND ETHNIC ORIGINS

There has been a steady, if somewhat unspectacular, increase in the participation of

women across the groups. Ethnic minority groups are dramatically under-represented
in all groupings10% at most.
EDUCATION

Patterns of educational cultural capital vary little with age. Over time, a small increase to the already high proportion of art schooltrained artists has occurred. Training in art has continued to be almost exclusively London based. Variations are on individual basis rather than overall pattern. Within the presiding forces, mavericks exist;
for example, Francis Bacon had no formal art school training, whilst Susan Hillier
trained abroad, initially as an anthropologist. In the other two groupings, rising stars
and current contenders, there is a provincial subpattern of education, with a small minority of successful artists training in Ireland, Scotland, or Wales, for example, Willie
Doherty, Douglas Gordon, Christine Borland, and Melanie Counsell.
ART SCHOOLS

The SLADE (School of Art in London) recruited the most stable proportion of
artists. St Martins (again, London based) recruited 30% of presiding forces but none
of the current contenders. Comparisons are difficult here, since St Martins, Chelsea,
and Camberwell amalgamated in 1986, but 30% of the rising stars trained within this

F i e l d M a n o e u v r e s 31

Table 1. Generations of Avant-gardes

in Contemporary British Art (Buck 1997)
Presiding Forces

Current Contender

Rising Stars

Age

All of the presiding

forces artists were
over 50

The current contenders The rising stars are genaverage age is 39,
erally younger (average
but the youngest was
age of 33 in 1997);
31
the oldest rising star
was 39

Origins

90% live in Britain;

80% in London

All live in Great Britain;

80% live in London

Gender/
ethnicity

70% were not born in

Approximately 70%
England: 50% abroad
were born in England
just over 10% were
born abroad

All were born in Britain:

one in Scotland

Education

30% are female

46% are female;

10% Black and male

Art schools 80% are art school

trained. 30% at St
Martins; 20% each at
the Slade and Royal
College of Arts; 10%
at Goldsmiths

40% are female;

one with Arabic roots

Almost 95% live in London;

one in Glasgow

All are art school trained: All are art school trained:
almost 90% in London:
almost 90% in London:
more than 50% at
13% at Slade; 33% at
Goldsmiths, 20% at
Goldsmiths; 40% at
the Slade; only one,
RCA and St. Martins 5%
the oldest artist in this
group, at the RCA and
none at St Martins

Art
galleries

40% are associated

Over 20% are associwith Anthony
ated with White Cube
dOffrays Gallery: 20% Gallery; 20% with
with Marlborough I.
Matts, only one artist
and 20% galleries
international galleries
abroad

Artistic
output

50% work in more than

one artistic medium,
30% are painters

20% are associated with

White Cube; 20% with
Victoria Miro; 13% with
Lisson and 13% with
Anthony Reynolds

Over half of this group

Almost 90% of artists use
uses mixed or hybridsome form of mixed
ised media; 13% are
media; about 10% are
painters and about
painters; about 30%
the same proportion
use film or photo
work mainly with film
graphic techniques
or photography

new grouping. The Royal College of Arts in London trained few of the presiding forces
or current contenders but offered postgraduate training to 40% of the rising stars.
Goldsmiths trained more than 50% of the current contenders and 30% of rising stars.
This suggests that in the late 20th century, Goldsmiths may have been losing its field
position as the incubator of the avant-garde.
Still, a field contender who is White; in his or her 30s; art school trained, preferably
at Goldsmiths College; and who is London based is well positioned in the field and is
likely to be successful.

32 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / f e b r u a r y 2 0 0 3

Artworks
Bourdieu (1982) wrote of an ontologic complicity (p. 47) between habitus and
field, and the above analysis briefly shows how this might be so for an art field. It
demonstrates how field patterns and habitus configurations mutually collude to sustain processes of capital accumulation for all concerned and how symbolic capital can
have very real economic consequences.
In La distinction, Bourdieu made what he called a deliberate refusal to appeal to
the tradition of aesthetics. However, having offered a social analysis of aesthetics, he
wrote, We must now allow the return of the repressed [aesthetics], in order to prevent the absence of direct confrontation from allowing the two discourse to coexist
peacefully as parallel alternative (p. 486). Bourdieu posited a double structure between the social and the aesthetic. Here, it would be possible to follow up with an
analysis, which shows how these habitus and field structures are identifiable in the
product of artin other words, the artists work itself (see Grenfell, 2001).
If we consider the yBas of the 1990s, we recognise an avant-garde, to a lesser of
greater extent. It is a highly structured and hierarchical group, with its own cutting
edge. We can identify this edge by taking all artists covered in this discussion and
analysing them in terms of three principal factors of prestige or distinction: First,
those artists whose work has been bought by Saatchi, the leading London-based buyer
of the yBas; second, those artists who had won the Turner Prize (the most prestigious
consecration of modern art in England); and third, those artists who feature in comprehensive reviews such as Bucks. In fact, only four artists appear in this group:
Gillian Wearing, Damien Hirst, Chris Offili, and Rachel Whiteread. What is their approach to artwork? All of them use film, photography, painting, and sculpture in their
art. Where paintings are produced, they might include collage, popular icons, plastic,
pins, and natural substances. Art objects are not necessarily crafted by the artists
themselves, so that issues of uniqueness of artwork and authorship are blurred (e.g.,
Hirst). Whiteread literally turns inside-out one of sculptures fundamental assumptions about the relationship between surface and volume. Wearing uses video and
photographs in a format derived from documentaries but blurs distinctions between
reality and fiction, the public and private, and voyeurism and collaboration. These
artists share characteristics of postmodern practice: appropriation, site specificity, impermanence, accumulation, and hybridisation. They seek to subvert fine art characterisations in terms of media and categorisations. At the same time, we can note that
they all conform to the habitus background discussed above: All were born within the
same 5-year period, all trained in London (two at Goldsmiths), and all are London
based. Moreover, they all connect closely with the structures of the field of contemporary art.

Conclusion
In the preface to The Rules of Art, Bourdieu (1996) anticipated the cries of protest
if the sociologist puts the love of art under the scalpel (p. xvi) of a social deconstruction of aesthetic sensation. He justifies doing so for a variety of reasons. First, it
attempts to construct systems of intelligible relations capable of making sense of sentient data (p. xvi) and, in so doing, offers the possibility of escaping the rule of the so-

F i e l d M a n o e u v r e s 33

cial construction of pure sensation. Such an understanding recreates the social space,
which gave rise to it, identification with the characters active in it, and the necessity of
what they did according to the sociohistorical logic of the field. To this extent, the approach enhances an appreciation of the raison dtre of artistic experience and pleasure, which might seem to be more reassuring, more humane, than belief in the miraculous virtues of pure interest in pure form (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 188).
In one sense, what we see in the field of art production might be considered to be
a fairly cynical manipulation of social means for personal gain. It certainly raises questions about the nature of art and creative practice. For example, in the terms of this
analysis, we might conclude that radical art can only occur outside of the field. But to
note the field manoeuvres of the contemporary is to offer no judgement. There is little point in asserting a sociological deconstruction in place of an aesthetic construction. Rather, it is to approach a reflexive understanding of what Bourdieu concluded
to be the expressive impulse in trans-historic fields and of the necessity of human
creativity immanent it them.

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