The creative spark : A qualitative analysis of students’ pathways to preparatory art schools using Bourdieusian concepts

Abstract: This qualitative study focuses on trajectories leading to preparatory art schools. It departs from in-depth interviews of considerable length with a small number (9) of students in preparatory art schools in Stockholm. The interviews shed light on the family of origin, the school years, and the time in upper secondary school and afterwards where the wish to enter an art school was definitively shaped. The study centres on three major questions: how is artistic symbolic capital accumulated and a habitus shaped that valorises art? What is the importance of a geographically situated social space for the formation of the artistic project?  How does the trajectory leading to the preparatory art schools reflect dimensions related to the existence of art as social field, such as illusio, doxa, nomos and (a socialised) libido? A major finding of the study was that inherited artistic symbolic capital greatly facilitated the path leading to the preparatory art schools, while students originating from families with weak or no proximity to artistic practices had to find their own way to art. The study also illustrates that strong academic and general cultural capital in the family of origin is not sufficient for shaping an artistic project and personality. Except for inherited familiarity with the world of artistic expression, the study points to the importance of attending artistically oriented streams in compulsory education and, in particular, to the crucial role of personal networks formed during and after upper secondary school and of being part of a local context in which the field of art was more or less indirectly present though individual persons, events and institutions. These findings remind of the autonomous character of the field of artistic practices, with its own institutions and forms of consecration.