Image/Sound/Text:
Interview with Professor Tony Bennett – Recorded 8 July 2010
With Andrew Dewdney, David Dibosa and Victoria Walsh
Biography of Tony Bennett
Tony Bennett joined the University of Western Sydney as Research Professor in Social and Cultural Theory at the Centre for Cultural Research in 2009. His previous positions included a period as Professor of Sociology at the Open University where he was also a Director of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change, and as Professor of Cultural Studies at Griffith University where he was also Dean of Humanities and Director of the ARC Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy. He is a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Professor Bennett’s interests span a number of areas across the social sciences and humanities, with significant contributions to the fields of literary theory, cultural studies, cultural sociology, and museum studies. His work in literary studies includes influential assessments of the relations between formalist and Marxist criticism, and critical appraisals of Marxist aesthetic theory. In cultural studies his work has had a formative influence on the study of popular culture and he has played a leading role in the development of cultural policy studies. His work in cultural sociology includes major surveys of the social patterns of cultural practice and consumption in both Australia and Britain, and critical engagements with the sociology of literature and audience and reception theory. His work in museum studies has contributed to the development of the ‘new museology’ particularly in the light it has thrown on the role of museums as instruments of social governance.
Outline questions sent in advance:
At what point did you become interested in museums and why? How did the art museum specifically figure within these interests?
Looking back, did you anticipate the impact of 'The Birth of the Museum?' Who was it really aimed at?
How did you think / expect / want museums to respond /engage?
What was the major project of museum study that you were interested in and how has that changed over the last 20 years?
What do you think is the value of museum studies through sociology?
What prompted your interest in the arguments you put forward around 'intellectual practice in the present'' and the potential of the 'critical intellectual' (Ian Hunter's good bureaucrat) which you put forward in 1999 in your article ‘Intellectuals, Culture, Policy’?
Tate Encounters has attempted to realise a practice-based form of sociological enquiry within the art museum but this has coincided with immense academic anxiety and debates around the instrumentalisation of research. What do you think are the limits of collaboration in relation to the preservation of disciplinary expertise? Or do you think these are conditions for a new kind of public intellectual?
In your article ‘Figuring Audiences and Readers’ (1995) you raise questions around museum visitors, the development of the ‘active visitor’ and the spaces of the museum for surveillance and techniques of observation. Do you think the relationship between governmentality, the museum and its audiences has remained constant during the last decade or so and hence the reason why there is so little critical research into audiences directly?
In your article ‘Acting on the Social’ you discuss the ‘Culturalisation of the social’ which has been welcome but has also muddled and rendered indistinguishable the two spheres. Tate talks of itself as a ‘social museum’ – do you see a valid argument around the socialisation of the cultural?
In the global context of contemporary culture what do you think the opportunity and limitations of museological studies are?
Further and adjacent points of discussion:
- the history and theory of the development of modern forms of cultural governance and their role in shaping social conduct in the context of different regimes of citizenship
- statistical and ethnographic studies of everyday cultural practice and their relevance to the concerns of both contemporary class theory and cultural policy development;
- the development of forms of cultural analysis, drawing on the perspectives of science studies and governmentality theory, that are capable of throwing new light on the relation between culture and the social
- the relationships between social theory and cultural theory in terms of thinking of f the 'museum/exhibition as agent of social change'
- the utility of Bourdieu's cultural capital in understanding contemporary Britain in global context. What does Latour and ANT open up that Bourdieu does not or how do they complement each other?
- What agency do you ascribe to exhibition and museums in produce progressive social change?