Increasing cultural capital through the act of demonstrative consumption of works of art

The postmodern reinterpretation of values led to the blurring of boundaries between social groups and the diffusion between mass and elitist art. As a result, there was a need to form a new cultural threshold, which was fulfilled by symbolic capital. For a long time, contemporary art could not compete in prices with the works of old masters. However, since the early 2000s, there has been a trend of a rapid increase in prices for contemporary art. This article attempts to analyze this phenomenon, where a work of contemporary art is viewed as a "source" of symbolic capital, and the act of purchase is considered a form of conspicuous consumption, i.e., it is done not for the purpose of enrichment, but for the acquisition of authority and social status. The article proposes the assumption that in the current socio-cultural situation, an increase in symbolic capital can be achieved through the consumption of art. In the space of the modern art market, the artistic value of a work of art and, therefore, the volume of symbolic capital, are inversely proportional to its "accessibility", and the category of artistic value can be substituted with the economic category of price. In addition, the role of the art market in shaping new forms of art is traced. Contemporary artists, like their colleagues in the 1960s, continue to resist the art market. If this protest is fundamentally valuable, it leads to the emergence of new conceptual art practices, such as performance, land art, happening, etc.