The rules of (Maori) art: Bourdieu’s cultural sociology and Maori visitors in New Zealand museums

Abstract

Bourdieu wrote that the sacralisation of art serves to consecrate the social order by ‘enabling educated people to believe in barbarism’ and persuading ‘the barbarians of their own barbarity’. But what about the ‘primitive’ art now accepted within the canon of western art? Do the ‘rules of art’ apply to the recent success of Maori art or do Maori artists play by their own rules? This article draws on field theory to examine indigenous culture in New Zealand museums, which occupies an ambiguous position in a post-settler nation. It explores the production of ‘Maori art’ in its various forms through its display in museums: from the ‘discovery’ of traditional Maori carving in the 1980s to the ‘triumph’ of contemporary Maori art in the 1990s, before considering the reception of this art by both majority Pakeha (European) and indigenous Maori visitors. The results of research at Te Papa (the national museum) simultaneously echo and depart from the prevailing patterns of social stratification seen in Bourdieu-inspired visitor studies worldwide. On the one hand we see the emergence of a new Maori museum audience as part of a social inclusion agenda, and, on the other, the persistent elitism of fine art, which eschews the new museology’s agenda of audience development. Despite paradoxical findings which question Bourdieu’s original concepts, such as the problematic absence of a Maori audience for contemporary Maori art, the article argues that we still need a ‘social critique’ of taste and distinction. While ‘Maori art’ has made gains in the museum world, the research has equally shown that indigenous art and artists are constrained within Antipodean artistic fields because the rules of the game are stacked against them, and success for their work comes at the expense of the continued exclusion of a broad Maori audience.