My granddad a sweet, gentle man, who in my experience of him was only capable of unconditional love, had a history of distrusting art. He was a secret philistine. While he kept his indifference and antipathy hidden from me, the ferocity of his anger burnt my father.

Granddad was a gas worker. My father was a beneficiary of the post war expansion of the education system, that saw previously excluded members of the community (i.e. what used be called the working class) becoming enfranchised. Like many of his generation he was proudly, and forever tagged, as ‘the first one in the family to go to college’ : in his case art college. My fathers embodiment of a post war freedom and individuality, all silver lame suits, skiffle and beat poetry, rapidly became too much for my granddad. Over the years I’ve heard filtered stories of my granddad crossing the street to avoid my fathers hippie beat embrace of everything diametrically opposed to his smart, crisp tailoring.

Art became the focal point around which this particular strand of oedipal, generational conflict spun. The interminable sounds of Ravi Shankar, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen ("why would anyone want to listen to music as depressing as that" my granddad once asked me) was bad enough, but the abstract paintings....well. Once in a fit of anger, my granddad threw all my dads paintings on a bonfire. The ultimate liberation of the abstract art object from the grip of autonomous uselessness into utilitarian functionalism - i.e. warmth. Also of course the ultimate act of cultural philistinism.
Consequently despite the mutual love, there was always a sense of distance between my father and his father. A gulf, a division. While they spoke the same language, they were incapable of communicating or understanding each others passions. This distance has always troubled me. As has the very notion of my grandfather being labeled a philistine. Not just because it was rooted in my family, but because it seemed emblematic of the broader gulfs and divisions which riddle our culture.

The growth in education programs designed specifically to address the gaps in our culture, has been a striking aspect of the last twenty years of art. Today there is much chatter about social inclusion, of art disrobing itself of elitist vestiges. The people these initiatives are aimed at are people not unlike my grandfather, who when faced with a an art work are prone to look for the nearest exit. The wealth of education programs, workshops, leaflets, initiatives are all directed towards closing the gap between initiates and outsiders.

Part of the impetus for this attempt to transform the social relations of art, has sprung from the wide ranging critique which art experienced from the late 60’s onwards. The weight of modernist painting pressed heavily on the brows of a whole legion of sociologists, conceptualists, feminists, who aimed their theoretical sights on many of the underlying, naturalised assumptions of art. With the crumbling of the old cultural order where it was uncritically assumed and accepted that art occupied a lofty position on the cultural ladder, the role of art within the broader culture has had to be re-examined and re-thought.

Work by sociologists such as the highly influential writer Pierre Bourdieu, have given rise to the notion of cultural competency, of the necessity for viewers to possess sufficient cultural capital to consume art correctly. Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital, is that it contains the necessary cognitive skills to adequately decipher art. If the "world of art is as contrary to the world of the everyday life as the sacred is to the profane", cultural capital is the key which enables the viewer to decipher this alternate logic of perception. Importantly Bourdieu’s analysis has shown how the distribution of cultural capital, the key to decoding art, is unequally distributed through the social structure.

As a consequence of his work the comforting belief that art can be enjoyed equally by anyone and everyone has been severely dented. The quasi magical power previously ascribed to art, to awaken the grace of aesthetic experience in anyone and everyone offered apparently freely by galleries and museums is as he says a "false generosity". Pinpointing the role social, economic forces play in determining cultural standing, his is a hard , cold stare at the field of culture, which finds it is no more exempt from hierarchies and division than any other sphere of life. As he remarked in his influential book " In the Field of Cultural Production" - "silence concerning the social prerequisites for the appropriation of culture or, to be more exact, for the acquisition of art competence (..) is a self seeking silence because it is what makes it possible to legitimatize a social privilege by pretending it is a gift of nature" For some this is a banal insight. For others an irksome truth.

Unfortunately there are problems with Bourdieu and others mapping of art . In trying to pull apart how it is that someone like my grandfather was culturally blind to the art in my fathers abstract paintings, the faith in there being a code for art, which is unequally distributed through the social structure (with people like my granddad, poorly educated at the bottom of rung obviously left out in the cold) does lead to something of a theoretical cul de sac.
Ultimately such a conception of art implies that the meanings of an artwork are given, produced with consensus by the artistic community and that the task of looking at art is to rediscover this set of meanings. Such a notion propels much contemporary accessibility programs for bridging the cultural gap. The aim becomes to redistribute some of Bourdieu’s cultural capital. So in the case of my grandfather the idea would be to retrospectively and partially correct the paucity of his education (he left school at fourteen after all) by supplying him with the code, the keys to seeing like an initiate of art. The assumption being that while he lacked the knowledge to fathom abstract art, it at least had the capacity to learn how to look the right way .
However what may be conceived of as empowering is really a further form of subjection. As the writer Dave Beech has written " the notion of the art being encoded by the art community seems to preclude outright the possibility of anyone from outside that community having anything worthwhile to say about art".

Such programs of instruction, grant little space for alternate readings of art.
In essence it amounts to nothing more than learning to look the right way, (read perhaps the only way). It also singularly avoids the uncomfortable possibility that some criticisms voiced by ‘philistines’ like my grandfather, might contain candid, counter interpretations of art. Or that alternative responses, forms of attention from outside art (those sullied forms from popular culture, laughter, horror, entertainment, visceral engagement) may have a place within art.

The American artist Ad Reinhardt once famously remarked that "looking isn’t as easy as it looks". Visitors to any contemporary art exhibition may find themselves agreeing. Walking around a gallery the feeling of being bored and out of place, is just as likely to infuse the mind as moments of epiphany. Trying to find new means of negotiating cultural distance, of increasing understanding, has to be mutual. Perhaps ignorance isn’t just the preserve of the philistines like my grandfather.