• Korean Association of Arts Management
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• no.52
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• pp.5-37
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• 2019

Despite a copious volume of work on the relationship between social class and cultural consumption, scholars have paid scant attention to the increasingly apparent observation that a vast majority of the population exhibits indifference toward fine arts regardless of one's socio-economic status. Much of the prior literature on cultural consumption has treated the public's indifference to fine arts not as a distinct analytical category that deserves an explanation of its own, but simply as the opposite of "likes" or the act of consumption, let alone being disentangled from the concept of "dislikes" in taste-formation and consumption behavior. In this paper, we suggest that the seemingly increasing trend toward indifference to fine arts, especially among those who are part of the well-educated and economically well-off, merits close scholarly attention on its own term. As an initial step toward this endeavor, we explore the factors behind indifference toward fine arts among Korean middle-class, using the ground theory method. Our interview findings reveal that much of indifference toward fine arts is attributable to the lack of tastes in fine arts and artistic competence. Our results suggest that research drawing on Bourdieu's theory and Peterson's omnivore hypothesis needs to be further revised through an in-depth investigation of the institutional and societal contexts where art education takes place in Korea. We discuss the implications of our findings for policy-making in the cultural and artistic sphere.

• Survey Research
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.61-87
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• 2012

This research is a part of a fundamental research to form the topographic map of the South Korean society's cultural capital, based on large scale research data. Its purpose is to suggest suitable questions for today's Korean society as well as to compare with previous data accumulated from other nations. For this, this research is to establish theoretical background through critical study on the extensive literature on domestic and foreign cultural capital and collect measures, questionnaires, and data used in important literature and surveys. Based on this, the major domains and levels that should be dealt in the questionnaire were chosen, literature review was conducted for each field; experts were investigated in order to develop questions more suitable for the Korean society considering each domain and level, and qualitative research on the subjects were conducted. This research as seen through the above processes, music genres and culture activities were chosen as major domains, "high/popular" level and "consumption/production" level were chosen as items, and specific items were composed considering Korea's distinct characteristics. Each of these items combine and complement the three aspects of measuring cultural capital(preference, participation, perception), which have been used incoherently in previous researches in measuring the level of possession in cultural capital. This led to developing questions such as the level of liking each item(preference), the level of participating in each item(participation), the level of luxuriousness in each item(perception), and the level of stylishness in each item(perception). This research holds significance in that it critically examines the vast amount of questionnaires used in the past for cultural capital research, provides a large framework to find Korean cultural capital by adding items considering Korea's distinct characteristics, and provides groundwork to fill in the non-Western gap in the discussion of cultural capital, which has been based on the West.