Why Elites Love Authentic Lowbrow Culture: Overcoming High-Status Denigration with Outsider Art

Abstract

We develop and test the idea that public appreciation for authentic lowbrow culture affords an effective way for certain elites to address feelings of authenticity-insecurity arising from “high status denigration” (Hahl and Zuckerman 2014). This argument, which builds on recent sociological research on the “search for authenticity” (e.g., Grazian 2005) and on Bourdieu’s (1993) notion of artistic “disinterestedness,” is validated through experiments with U.S. subjects in the context of “outsider” art (Fine 2004). The first study demonstrates that preference for lowbrow culture perceived to be authentic is higher when individuals feel insecure in their authenticity because they attained status in a context where extrinsic incentives are salient. The second study demonstrates that audiences perceive the members of erstwhile denigrated high-status categories to be more authentic if they consume lowbrow culture, but only if the cultural producer is perceived as authentic. We conclude by noting how this “authenticity-by-appreciation” effect might be complementary to distinction-seeking as a motivation for elite cultural omnivorousness, and we draw broader implications for when and why particular forms of culture are in demand.

Strength matters: Tie strength as a causal driver of networks’ information benefits

“…Participants were anonymous in our empirical design; therefore, it is possible that participants did not care about their reputation in our setting. However, other studies suggest that participants manage their reputation even in anonymous experimental settings (e.g., Hahl et al 2015;Yamagishi and Mifune 2008;cf. Salganik, Dodds, and Watts 2006).…”

The Perils of Proclaiming an Authentic Organizational Identity

“…Consider also that a primary interpretation of authenticity involves the perceived moral basis of an agent's goals and motivation, whereby authentic actors are seen as transcending profit-oriented goals and the narrow pursuit of self-interest. Accordingly, behavior that may be regarded as self-promotion or unduly self-interested is often seen as inauthentic (Hahl et al 2016). Instead, an authentic actor or producer is seen as someone who pursues their own thoughtfully considered agenda rather than the usual normatively accepted social script.…”

“…Recent empirical studies demonstrate that individuals typically rate more highly those producers perceived to be authentic , and they are also willing to pay more for authentic products (O'Connor, Carroll, and Kovács 2016). Various theories have been offered as to why consumers seek the authentic (e.g., Beverland and Farrelly 2009;Hahl, Zuckerman, and Kim 2016;Newman et al 2011;Thompson, Rindfleisch, and Arsel 2006), but regardless of motivation, the consensus among social scientists seems to be clear: in modern, advanced economies, many individuals seek and value authenticity.…”

Black Hole Suns: Binarism and Gravity in Cultural Fields

“…Contemporary analyses of art worlds in this tradition ask how artworks are made legitimate, and find that the spatial and social context of spaces like biennials is crucial to symbolic production (Sassatelli 2017); they ask how artists price their work, and find that they distinguish between discerning and non-discerning audiences, sacrificing financial rewards to appeal to aesthetically discerning buyers (Ranganathan 2017). They consider why high-status consumers sometimes love lowbrow cultural objects, and find that they understand and value such objects through the lens of their producers' presumed purity and disinterestedness (Hahl, Zuckerman, and Kim 2017); an emphasis on art objects, it should be clear, is widespread in this tradition. But the real-world applicability and leverage offered by binary distinctions between aesthetic and economic values remains a question for many researchers, especially those who work with ethnographic and interview data; researchers show how artists use particular identities and discursive strategies to make apparently incommensurable practices manageable (Lindström 2016), show how status systems that merge diverse bases of value function in practice (Scarborough 2017), argue that that particular social contexts allow for the networked development of double careers (Fine 2017), and identify new frames for evaluation that challenge both existing and imagined field and market hierarchies (Schwarz 2016).…”