[Timothy D. Taylor is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of
Supply Chains and the Production of Value of Cultural Goods
-
Published:March 2024
One of the ways that capitalism operates, at least in the realm of cultural goods, is by disciplining, or creating, forms of value that exist alongside it; these are forms of value that might be culturally viewed as something other than capitalist but actually are part of capitalism—camouflaged and stored forms of capitalist value that I theorize, following Pierre Bourdieu, as symbolic capital. Three case studies help make this argument: the rise of the virtuoso musician in western Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and their management by concert agents; the history of provenance as a form of value in the visual arts; and the process of designating a cultural practice as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO, which shows how bureaucracies create a stored form of capitalist value as symbolic capital.
Advertisement