A second-generation affluent class can afford artistic careers their parents could not

Evidence

‘For the first time in our history we are producing a critical mass of college graduates who are children of college graduates themselves. Like most artistic movements, the NBA is a post-bourgeois movement; driven by a second generation of [the] middle class. Having scraped their way to relative wealth and, too often, crass materialism, our parents have freed (or compelled) us to bite those hands that fed us and sent us to college. We now feel secure enough to attend art school instead of medical school.’ — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 671

Categorization

• SEED: The materialist parents/free child artist dynamic is fertile ground for an essay on how economic security underwrites artistic ambition and generational rebellion.
• XREF: Connects to Bourdieu’s reproduction theory and the sociology of cultural capital as embodied in The Namesake’s immigrant-family dynamics.