Conventions in a non-professional art world : an application of Peterson's production of culture perspective

Richard Peterson’s « production of culture perspective » describes six « facets » that are sources of influence on the process of production of a cultural object : technology, law and regulation, industry structure, organization structure, occupational careers, and market (Peterson & Anand, 2004). Moreover, it also insists on the fact that a change in one of the facets implies a change in all the others. We will focus here our interest on the changes implied by an « industry structure » rather undetermined, through the study of a production organisation that presents the particularity to finance itself without relying on the market or on public subsidies. Between March and June 2014, we realized the ethnographic study, through interview and participant observation, of a nonprofit association producing and broadcasting musical videoclips on the internet. To ensure its productions, this association has been relying only on the personal resources of its members from May 2013 to June 2014. Following the guideline of filming local musicians playing one original composition in noteworthy places of the city they are living in (Toulouse, France), they have been able to ensure the broadcast, using internet platforms (Youtube, Vimeo, Facebook), of one original video each Sunday. This regularity resulted in the gathering of enough visibility to successfully launch a crowdfunding raising campaign for an amount of more than a thousand euros in June 2014. We will discuss the consequences that this particular « business model », that does not implies the direct use of money but mostly relies on cultural and social capital to mobilize human and material resources, can have on the other facets of the Peterson’s model. Through the informations obtained during the study and their analysis, we first observe that the productions of the association are both situated on the restricted and great production markets (Bourdieu, 1971). Then, we will see how the association is used as a training field for the personal carrier of its members (Portelli, 1993 ; Vermeersch, 2004), a dynamic that is somehow made possible by the particular employment system of « intermittence du spectacle » (Menger, 2011). Finally, we will show that the organization is structured to allow collegial construction of the aesthetics of the videos, in the limits of several non-negotiable conventions designed to ensure the continuity of the partnership between all the actors involved. Thus, we will see that this situation provides a typical case to study how exogenous interests define boundaries for endogenous contents (Kaufmann, 2004).