Institutional Legitimation in the Artistic Field

• In Event: Roundtable Session 47
  In Roundtable Session: Philosophical and Critical Inquiry in Arts Education

Abstract

This paper is an exploratory discussion of the artistic field of cultural production to understand what has constituted the dominant power structure of the art world, and how the mainstream has been formed and progressed. I discuss accessibility and equity issues in arts education, and schools’ roles in reproducing social inequalities, especially in the public system using Bourdieu’s notion of institutionalized cultural capital and social capital. I explore the issue of access to arts education through examining the admission process to the specialized arts schools in Toronto, and argue that these schools contribute to the maintenance and reproduction of class inequalities.

Author

• Ju-Hye Ahn, University of Toronto