Only rarely is this used in an analytical way to try to probe more deeply into questions of differences between audience segments in their responses to exhibitions, or to explore what might be entailed in the expression of a particular preference. The most famous such study, as Hooper-Greenhill notes, is that of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu
whose comparative findings across four European countries suggest important differences of ‘taste’ in art (and by association in different museological approaches) held by different class fractions (Bourdieu and Darbel 1991; and see also Bourdieu’s larger work on class and taste, Distinction 1984). In this research we see how expressed preferences are both
located within a broader social context and, as theorised through Bourdieu’s notions of ‘cultural’ and other forms of ‘capital’, help to reproduce social differentiations. Although carried out in the 1960s, these studies remain among very few that have addressed questions of social class and exhibition reception (see Fyfe 2006 for an overview), although some studies have, for example, correlated educational levels with contentrelated findings. Likewise, other social differentiations such as gender, age and ethnicity have received some, though still fairly limited, attention in individual studies (Fyfe 2006).