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In the establishment of people's lifestyles, places, and especially cities, have become central arenas for display and consumption, and have become part of the aesthetic experience itself. These changes have affected the composition of cultural capital, which may have then taken an urban dimension. Art museum visitors, often associated with highbrow culture, constitute an excellent case study to explore the links between cultural capital and place. Based on a survey of 1900 visitors of the six main museums of modern and contemporary art in Belgium, this article will focus on the distribution of the audience characterized by their cultural tastes and activities across the Belgian territory (through their postcodes). It shows that visitors mainly come from areas with high and moderate density and that the socio-demographic but also urban characteristics of their place of residence can be related to the way visitors' cultural capital is composed. Yet, it also suggests that places like cities (just like museums) form meeting places, in which co-exist and interact different stories, different trajectories and, as this article shows, a multiplicity of lifestyles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists traditionally focus on the power of socio-economic variables as drivers of attendance at museums. However, this research runs the risk of a certain socioeconomic reductionism which fails to register the aesthetic dimensions of cultural consumption.To remedy this, I propose a new focus on cultural profiles beyond the prism of SES, which allows us to better interpret the role of the art museum visit in visitors' daily life. The cultural profile is defined as a set of cultural, creative and leisure preferences and activities, towards various forms of art, which classify and can be classified. I use multiple correspondence analysis to examine the nature of cultural profiles among visitors of six museums of modern and contemporary art in Belgium. Six different cultural profiles are defined, each a 'bricolage' of different classifying registers that structure and define practices and tastes. My approach allows us to reconcile and elaborate current interests in cultural sociology about the relationship between high versus low culture (Bourdieu), experimentation versus classicism, transgression versus conservatism and omnivores versus univores (Peterson). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that although museums have increasingly changed their mission to embrace 'spectacular' and 'commercial' goals in recent decades, their audiences resist this redefinition of the museum's role. Based on a structural equation model derived from a survey of 1,900 visitors of the six main galleries of modern and contemporary art in Belgium, it shows that different kinds of visitors tend to share the same conceptualization of what museums signify, as a kind of 'educative leisure'. They continue to differentiate museums from more commercial forms of leisure, and associate them with schooling and educational processes. We demonstrate that this appreciation of 'educative leisure' is shared by visitors from different socio-demographic backgrounds and is affected by other dimensions of the visitors' profiles, such as the practice of creative activities or recent experiences of other art places (commercial galleries, fairs, contemporary art centers). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]