‘Art consumption’ as identity social practice

Surprising and often inscrutable economic apparatus, the art world is a powerful producer of symbols. Art, even more than other objects, contributes to make visible and stable the categories of the culture, producing and reproducing symbolic borders and ocial relations. As anthropology of the art suggests 'art' objects constitute today - as in the past - a vital and animated complex that works as a big significant, as a 'social agent' who creates connections between individuals and groups. The paper investigates how the art possession moulds individual and collective identities, creating relations among the individuals (i.e. in the private and reciprocal gift economy) and shaping ties among generations, through the hereditary transmissions of art objects. They are part of our everyday environment, representing the practical side of the everyday life aestetization. Since the last decades of the twenty-century, to 'consume art' has the characteristics of a mass pleasure, as an immaterial, distinctive and cultural practice ‘par excellence’. Through art objects, individuals declare their social and relational status, defining themselves with respect to their groups of membership (familiar, of friends, social and professional), so building their 'differential' identity. Following the suggestions of material culture studies and media studies, the art consumer can be seen as a social actor attributing its own meaning to these particular cultural objects, from its own ‘cultural field position’, i.e. from its own habitus. So who buys and collects art objects - as 'significant pieces' of the « material culture » - is a complex subject with a variety of attitudes and various styles of behavior: occasional or habitual onlookers; purchasers amateurs; professionals. Actually each of these 'groups' represents a reference community that the art consume/purchase/possession can contribute to strengthen in inclusive sense. Despite the pervasive presence of objects and messages of art in the daily life, the art consumption in narrow sense is still a practice not so often investigated. For instance little is known on the art buyers, on that 'grey zone' of the art world that goes from the sphere of the circulation to the sphere of the consumption. Data from a recent research on 600 visitors on the most important Art Fair in Italy are forthemore presented, suggesting that to buy and to possess art works is an aiming distinctive cultural practice: to build individual identity, to strengthen an inclusive action, as real or imaginary membership to a group of 'taste', to produce and allow 'unique experience forms', through art objects considered 'authentic and original', in an epoch characterized by a wide circulation of reproduced and serial objects.