This article charts key developments and cross-national variations in the coverage of foreign culture (i.e., classical and popular music, dance, film, literature, theater, television, and visual arts) in Dutch, French, German, and U.S. elite newspapers between 1955 and2005. Such coverage signals the awareness of foreign culture among national elites and the degree and direction of "globalization from within. " Using content analysis, we examine the degree, direction, and diversity of the international orientation of arts journalism for each country and cultural genre. Results denote how international arts and culture coverage has increased in Europe but not in the United States. Moreover, the centrality of a country in the cultural "world-system" offers a better explanation for cross-national differences in international orientation than do other country-level characteristics, such as size and cultural policy framework. Recorded and performance-based genres differ markedly in their levels of internationalization, but the effect of other genre-level characteristics, such as language dependency and capital intensiveness, is not clear. In each country, international coverage remains concentrated on a few countries, of which the United States has become the most prominent. Although the global diversity of coverage has increased, non-Western countries are still underrepresented.

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This article analyses the Danish ‘cartoon crisis’ as a transnational ‘humour scandal’. While most studies conceptualize this crisis as a controversy about free speech or international relations, this article addresses the question why the crisis was sparked by cartoons. First, the article discusses the culturally specific ‘humour regime’ in which the cartoons were embedded. Second, it analyses the power dynamics of humour.Thirdly, it discusses how the cartoon crisis added a new element to the image of Muslims as completely Other and lacking in modernity: they have no sense of humour. Analysis of this controversy as humor scandal allows us, first, to identify its ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. Next, it underscores the emergence of a transnational public sphere. Finally, and most importantly, it highlights the politics of humour — a slippery, often exclusive mode of communication — in national and transnational public spheres.

This article analyzes cultural globalization as the emergence of a transnational cultural field, integrating Bourdieusian field theory with globalization theory. Drawing on interview materials and secondary data analysis, it compares the “opening up” of national television fields in France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland and the formation of a transnational TV field with (partly) its own standards, practices, and cultural geography. Cultural intermediaries, such as television buyers, are crucial to this transnational field, mediating and maintaining relations between the national and transnational arenas. These transnational professional create transnational practices and quality standards and diffuse them into national cultural fields.

This is the unspecified version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link: AbstractUsing British and Dutch interview data, this article demonstrates how people from different social classes draw strong symbolic boundaries on the basis of comedy taste.Eschewing the omnivorousness described in recent studies of cultural consumption, comedy audiences make negative aesthetic and moral judgements on the basis of comedy taste, and often make harsh judgements without the disclaimers, apologies and ambivalence so typical of 'taste talk' in contemporary culture. The article demonstrates how, in particular, Dutch and British middle class audiences use their comedy taste to communicate distinction and cultural superiority. We discuss several reasons why such processes of social distancing exist in comedy taste and not other cultural areas: the traditionally low status of comedy; the strong relation between humour and personhood; the continuity between comedy tastes and humour styles in everyday life; as well as the specific position of comedy in the British and Dutch cultural fields.

This article analyses the professional ethos and practices of television buyers in France, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands. During interviews and ethnographic observations, the professional ethos of this 'cosmopolitan tribe' proved to be remarkably similar across national backgrounds. This article discusses the relation between personal taste and professional ethos in television buying, pointing to specific forms of 'cosmopolitan capital' central to this process. Moreover, it develops a typology of buyers, each type representing a different solution to the tensions between culture and economy, consumption and production and national and transnational inherent in transnational cultural mediation. This analysis of the practices of transnational cultural intermediaries highlights several limitations of Bourdieusian accounts of cultural mediation. Moreover, it opens up new questions about (transnational) cultural mediation, the shaping of professional habitus and 'the production of belief' in the cultural field.

How are hierarchical relationships between taste cultures possible in a fragmented, popular and accessible medium like television? This article explores this question by looking at relationships between taste cultures in Dutch television comedy. A survey of 340 Dutch people showed four humour tastes, two of which were related hierarchically: a lowbrow style disliked by educated informants, and a highbrow style mostly unknown to less-educated informants. Interview materials were used to understand the mechanisms behind this asymmetric pattern of knowledge and dislike. Whereas educated informants' readings of lowbrow humour were confidently rejecting, less-educated informants' readings of highbrow comedy are best described as ‘despondent’. These findings fit Bourdieu's notion of legitimate taste rather than Hall's encoding/decoding model. The article argues that taste must be understood not only as a pattern of preferences, but also as cultural knowledge. This knowledge varies between groups, and is crucial in the perpetuation of taste hierarchies.