A Cultural Economic Perspective on Omnivorousness

Richard Peterson’s 1992 research on musical tastes in the US showed that the upper class, which he named cultural omnivores, exposed a more eclectic taste of music than the lower classes, the cultural univores. The research challenged Bourdieu’s elite−to−mass model, which stated that the upper class preferred a restricted amount of high status arts over low status culture and mass entertainment. More than twenty later the omnivore is still present in our society. However post−Peterson research on the omnivore proofed it’s hard to pigeonhole the cultural omnivore into a single entity. Yes the cultural omnivore is still that person that is open to many different forms of art and culture, yet research showed that the motivations for the omnivore’s behavior are as diverse as its eclectic taste. In contrast to Peterson’s original social stratification research this research investigates the cultural omnivore from a value−based cultural economic perspective. The aim of this research is to analyze the role of the cultural omnivore as consumer of cultural goods and services and look at its relationship with artists and cultural organization. The research shows that the cultural omnivore tries to realize sequential values through experience and spectacle. Additionally the research pleads for the use of the new label for the cultural omnivore, namely cultural traveler, an appellation that fits character of the cultural omnivore better than its original name.