Documented: La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (1979) built on Bourdieu's 1963 and 1967-68 surveys of French consumption and preference, music, food, furniture, newspapers, plus ethnography and photographs. Its documented findings: cultural choices correlate with class origin more than with income, and the aesthetic disposition, preferring form over function, abstract art over representation, is the bourgeois marker, while the taste for necessity defines the working class.
The book's documented thesis line: taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier, social subjects are classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make. Taste is not self-expression but classificatory warfare, and the weapon works because it feels like neither. The Kantian critique of judgment is the target of the title: the aesthetic was never pure.
The reception, documented: Distinction became sociology's most cited modern classic, named by the International Sociological Association in 1998 among the ten most important sociology books of the twentieth century. Its afterlife's irony: a book arguing taste is domination became itself a marker of distinction, assigned in graduate seminars, its ownership now a class signal. Bourdieu, who collected ironies, would have filed this one.
If your taste were really yours, why does it match your tax bracket?