"The Art of Success in Art. Social Origins, Educational Trajectories, and Artistic Careers in Sweden, 1938–2007"

• What inherited & acquired resources do individuals, who are admitted to the most exclusive areas of the educational system or who establish themselves at the most prominent positions within professional fields, possess? How do these possessions change over time? In the paper, we try to answer these questions by focusing on the fine arts. We examine, on the one hand, the most dominant school of fine arts in Sweden, and, on the other hand, the field of artists. Our empirical data are constructed as collective biographies of the 1,100 students attending the school between 1938 & 1986 (information from the school archives concerning for example admission, prizes, study travels abroad) & of 13,500 artists (data on exhibitions, stipends, prizes, teaching positions, etc.) for the years 1945 to 2007. The main statistical technique employed is specific multiple correspondence analysis, enabling us to study the structures of the students’ & the artists’ properties as well as the relations between the two populations. We show that there is a strong relation between the leading school & dominant positions in the field of artists. One striking preliminary result a in a social democratic ruled country with a strong emphasis on equity in education is that art students & artists increasingly are recruited from the upper middle classes.

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