More Matter, with Less Art? On The Transformation of University Students’ Cultural Lifestyles and Culturalisation after the Millennium
More Matter, with Less Art? On The Transformation of University Students’ Cultural Lifestyles and Culturalisation after the Millennium

Summary/Abstract: The university has traditionally been a cornerstone of a nation’s artistic and cultural life through its education of professional artists and cultural workers, the bildung of an interested audience capable of apprehending its products, and functioning as a hotbed of avant-garde cultural appropriation and experimentation. In the last twenty years, this role has been challenged by an increasing and more socially varied recruitment of students, a changing educational landscape, massive university reforms and the digitalisation of cultural goods. How has this changed students’ relationship with the world of art and high culture? Using a series of surveys from the second largest city in Norway in 1998 (N=1113), 2008 (N=1223) and 2020 (N=1589), the analysis paints a broad picture of the importance of social class to understand students varying integration into the cultural field (their culturalisation). The results suggest that students’ educational mobility and cultural lifestyles are increasingly weighted down by their social inheritance. At the same time, they appear increasingly detached from the national field of art and its products.

• Details
• Contents