“To the socially recognized hierarchy of the arts, and within each of them, of genres, schools or periods, corresponds a social hierarchy of consumes” (1399).
“A work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded” (1399).
“The ‘naive’ spectator cannot attain a specific grasp of works of art which only have one meaning—or value—in relation to the specific history of an artistic tradition” (1401).
“The pure aesthetic is rooted in an ethic, or rather, an ethos of elective distance from the necessities of the natural and social world, which may take the form of moral agnosticism” (1402).
“Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed” (1402-3).
“art and cultural consumption are predisposed […] to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences” (1403).