Modes of openness to cultural diversity: Humanist, populist, practical, and indifferent

The main objective of this paper is to examine how openness to cultural diversity is expressed in the field of cultural consumption. Drawing on qualitative interviews on leisure and cultural activities conducted in Quebec in 2005, I ask whether people who are classified as cultural omnivores on quantitative measures have an attitude of ‘openness’ when discussing and justifying their tastes and practices. Are people who select many items on a list of cultural preferences and practices in survey research really more ‘open’ than those who select fewer items? How is this openness expressed concretely in the discourses that people draw upon when discussing their practices? Results indicate that openness to diversity is articulated in at least four different ways – humanist, populist, practical, and indifferent – depending on the cultural domains to which it refers as well as to the cultural and material resources from which it is constructed. Openness to cultural diversity, I argue, represents a new aesthetics and a new ethos, but it builds upon, rather than displaces, the older categories of high and mass culture in which it remains thoroughly embedded. Far from being dismantled, social and artistic hierarchies are being reconfigured in more individualized ways. Modes of openness rest on different models of agency which are themselves hierarchized along class and gender lines.