Inside Culture: Art and Class in the American Home

by David Halle

Dubbed as "You Are What You Hang (or Don't)" by the New York Times, Inside Culture takes us on a tour of 160 homes in and around New York City, from affluent townhouses on Manhattan's Upper East Side and rowhouses in blue-collar Brooklyn to middle and upper-class suburbs of Long Island. The result is an unprecedented portrait of the use of cultural artifacts—fine art, photographs, religious art—in private lives.

"This is a first-class addition to what we know about culture in the specific rather than the abstract."—Howard S. Becker, Contemporary Sociology

"This book is well worth reading, especially in your own home."—Eugene Halton, American Journal of Sociology

"David Halle's researches earned him a license amateur voyeurs would kill for. . . . Refreshing for readers outside his discipline."—Peter Campbell, London Review of Books

"[This book] tells us interesting things about ourselves. . . . It affords us a birds-eye view of American culture from which we can see . . . unsuspected patterns of tastes and acquisitions."—James Gardner, Washington Times

"[A] voyeuristic thrill. . . . Lucid and entertaining. . . . A fascinating book that will open the eyes of anyone who's ever glibly said about art, 'I know what I like.' After reading Inside Culture, they'll also know a little bit more about why."—Maureen Corrigan, New York Observer

Genres: Sociology, Nonfiction, Academic

277 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was impressed by both the empirical rigor of this book as well as the theoretical place it came from. Halle wants to show how the meanings people make of art in their home are neither imposed from a top-down cultural dictator (the Frankfurt School thesis) nor are the products of education into hierarchical tastes (Boudieu's notion of cultural capital). Rather they are the product of a variety of influences, from personal to political, spiritual to learned. Though there are few surprises about what types of art Halle finds in the places he visits (wow...middle class Italian communities have lots of religious iconography and urban ethnic communities contain more "primitive" art than others), what Halle shows is that it isn't the art that matters as much as the reasons and stories behind its presence that count for these people. For sure, Halle generalizes more than he might and probably doesn't give culture as much credit as it deserves in determining the preferences of his subjects (just because people have never heard of Bourdieu and don't mention cultural capital explicitly, doesn't mean that they aren't influenced by it nor does it mean they won't avoid explicitly attributing their tastes, especially in the case of upper class propensities, to such a causative agent). However, Halle is right to point out that there is never any one meaning people make of their possessions and studying them in the context of the home is a great place to draw attention to this.

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book is all Halle ... I'm excited that it might be a cornerstone of my dissertation. he compares art in the houses of residents of los angeles with art in the houses of new yorkers, making statements about domestic aesthetics in different contexts. whoo hoooo.