Fostering art, adding value, cultivating taste: film festivals as sites of cultural legitimization

Bourdieu distinguished between different “fields” in society, such as the political, juridical, economic, religious, scientific, and cultural fields, which share invariant properties, but also have their own sets of values and principles (Bourdieu 1996). He further subdivided the cultural field into the subfields of restricted production and large-scale production (ibid.: 217). Restricted or small-scale production has a relatively large degree of autonomy, such as in poetry circles. Poets operate in a small market where fellow poets dominate the audience of public readings and make up a significant part of the modest sales (Craig and Dubois 2010). Achievements are assessed and careers made in reference to the aesthetic norms of the poets’ internal community. With large-scale production, on the contrary, a mass and thus general audience is targeted, and profitability of the product typically outweighs aesthetic considerations. In Hollywood, for example, test screenings of movies and television series are a common tool to gauge audience interest, and the results may be used to change the product before its release. The two subfields should not be taken as fixed categories, but rather be seen as the poles on a sliding scale, each characterized by a different principle of hierarchization: the autonomous principle for restricted production and the heteronomous principle for large-scale production. The autonomous principle involves internal hierarchization, largely following its own norms and sanctions, while the heteronomous principle implies external hierarchization, importing values from outside fields, most notably economic ones. At this pole, cultural products are considered not so different from other goods in the marketplace; they are measured on their commercial success or social notoriety, and it is recognition by the general public that makes artists renowned. Hollywood stardom, for example, is determined by popularity with audiences. At the autonomous pole, on the other hand, prestige is linked to appreciation by peers or experts from within the field. What public audiences think matters significantly less.1 Poets, in this vein, are made by peers, not a general public. There is a continuous struggle between the different logics in the cultural field, and cultural works produced at the heteronomous side of the spectrum are often not considered as art, but labeled as entertainment or popular culture instead.2