2026-09-25T01:22:17Zhttps://mro.massey.ac.nz/server/oai/requestoai:mro.massey.ac.nz:10179/45822025-11-11T14:16:20Zcom_10179_294col_10179_296
DSpace at Massey University
author
Bernanke, Judith Lee
2013-06-09T22:37:25Z
2013-06-09T22:37:25Z
2013
http://hdl.handle.net/10179/4582
Q112903117
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q112903117
In June 2004, when Creative New Zealand announced that the artist collective et al. had
been selected as New Zealand’s representative at the 2005 Venice Biennale, much of
the country’s mainstream media engaged in a critical representation of the case that
resulted in unprecedented national attention to a visual art news story. Using Bourdieu’s
field theory as its primary analytical framework, this thesis focuses on the coverage of
et al. during the reporting period of June 2004 to December 2005 by a selected sample
of mainstream New Zealand media outlets, including broadcast television and major
metropolitan newspapers, to examine the antagonisms that structured the most high
profile journalistic field representations of the controversy.
This study of the interfield relations of the journalistic and visual arts fields is primarily
an examination of journalism’s power. This power derives from the journalistic field’s
domination as a centralised mediator of a range of information and discourses to a
general public, including the specialized knowledge of particular fields like the visual
arts. Highlighting the capacity of the journalistic field to symbolically dominate other
fields, this study examines how this power is reproduced through symbolic violent
forms of representation and considers how the field’s increasingly commercial
(heteronomous) concerns constrain other fields, in this case, the visual arts field.
Analysis of the case highlights the discursive logic of the New Zealand journalistic
field’s dominant narrative demonstrating values aligned with the populist sensibilities of
an imagined mainstream public and represented through common-sense appeals such as
those concerning political accountability, the funding cost to taxpayers, the
representation of a national identity and an anti-intellectualist stance opposed to the
elitist and even “bizarre” values of the artists and their associates.
Applying Bourdieu’s approach to understanding this interfield relationship requires a
consideration of the structure of the fields’ social spaces in terms of their agents (the
artists, journalists, politicians and other field participants), their products (textual and
visual) and their consumers (readers and viewers) and to describe them, not in terms of
causality, but in relation to each other and to their social, cultural and economic
conditions. To examine various aspects of the fields’ relational dynamics, this study
employs the investigative approaches of content analysis and surveys and draws on
different textual analytical methods, including critical discourse analysis and aspects of
conversation analysis, to analyse different print media and television representations of
the case.
This study’s analysis shows that a marketplace logic governed the media’s construction
of the et al. case with an emphasis on discursive appeals aligned to the populist
sensibilities of an imagined mainstream readership. Furthermore, this thesis will show
that an interfield analysis provides a more useful interpretive framework for
understanding media power than a singular focus on internal journalistic field structures.
en
The Author
Venice Biennale
et al. (artists' collective)
Media coverage of art
Television broadcasts
Press coverage of art exhibitions
Journalism and visual arts
Interfield antagonisms : an examination of the New Zealand journalistic and visual arts fields in the case of the mainstream media coverage of et al. and the 2005 Venice Biennale : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communication and Journalism at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
Thesis
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