Sociology of Art

Sociologyindex, Sociology Books 2009,

Sociology of art is concerned with the social worlds of art and aesthetics.

The `New Sociology of Art': Putting Art Back into Social Science Approaches to the Arts
Eduardo de la Fuente
Monash University, Australia, arts.monash.edu.au
This article maps recent developments in social science writing about the arts and argues for seeing this work in terms of the label the `new sociology of art'. It considers four major lines of re-assessment being carried out by sociologists studying the arts: firstly, a reconsideration of the relationship between sociological and other disciplinary approaches to art; secondly, the possibility of an art-sociology as against a sociology of art; thirdly, the application of insights from the sociology of art to non-art `stuff '; and, fourthly, the sociology of the artwork conceived as a contingent social fact. The argument is made that these developments represent an advance on the tendency to limit sociological investigations of the arts to contextual or external factors. The `new sociology of art' is praised for framing questions about the aesthetic properties of art and artworks in a way that is compatible with social constructionsim.

Mobilization of the Arts
Joseph W. Ruane
Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science
faculty.frostburg.edu/soci/rmoore/Article2.htm
Sociologists have studied the world of art in identifying role differentiation (Parsons, 1951: 408-14), the deviance within jazz subcultures (Becker, 1963), the structures within which the artist survives (Crane, 1987), or the art world itself as the unit of analysis (Becker, 1982). Our interest will be an extension of the commercial elements surrounding art.
In writing about Art and the State, Becker (1982: 165) relates that states and the governmental apparatus which they operate, participate in the production and distribution of art within their borders. He goes on to say that many states regard art more or less as a good thing, at the very least as a sign of cultural development. To support art the state makes laws and regulations which favor the arts and artists. An artist¹s work is treated as commodity, protected by property laws and copyright laws. While state laws providing for the production, marketing, selling and distribution of art usually is not directly concerned with art, but with any manufactured product, art and artists benefit from such laws. The state, however, can become intricately involved with art and artists when the art challenges views of the society. The recent Mapplethorpe disputes over the portrayal of the American flag in conjunction with nudity moved the government to restrict grant funds from schools or museums that would teach, encourage or exhibit such art. Censorship of art varies as Becker points out (1982:166) in the example in which one state may censor art depicting the mixture of races while another state may demand it. Such state involvement also affects the careers of the artists whose works are praised or criticized.
States may use art to mobilize the country politically through images and music, or the state (Becker. 1982:181) may see the arts as integral to national interests, as in the opera to Italy, and for that interest subsidize it. The use of the national anthem of each country would be an example of the use of music to create national solidarity. Bourdieu and Haacke (1995:11) note that artists need to exhibit in museums to place their works on the market or to receive public funding. Museums need to be recognized by public authorities in order to have sponsors. All of this creates intersecting pressures and dependencies. The artist¹s painting must be judged in a gallery or museum before the artist receives any recognition. It is the basic code of the art world.

Discussion
As art plays a function for the state and the museums, so it plays a role for the city or metropolitan areas in which the art is displayed. This paper highlights another use of the art world. Art is a commodity which can be packaged to draw an audience which is economically important to the city in which the art is displayed. The current decline in federal financing of urban centers and the loss of revenues from a declining tax base spawned by the loss of manufacturing jobs brings to light the evolving efforts of municipal governments to attract tourists to their cities. In a service economy tourists become big business, and tourism becomes a major facet of the economy.

For a sociology of art and artists
Danila Bertasio and Giorgio Marchetti
uniurb.it/imes/essad/essad2.html
The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to illustrate the theoretical premises and the methodological approach on which the work of our group is based; second, to describe the research we have carried out until now. We strongly believe that art can constitute a subject of the sociological research as long as the latter sets as its objective not only that of describing, explaining and predicting how the former reflects cultural events, but also how it generates new and different ones. The main problem is then to devise a level of analysis capable of avoiding the dangerous forms of reductionism represented by considering art as a variable either completely dependent on or completely independent of society. We think that such a level is met when we assume a position that approaches the study of art from both a sociological and artistic point of view, or, what we have termed a sociological-artistic approach to art. Consequently, our objective and effort has been, and is, to try to implement this approach an to apply it to our research.
The theory and the method
“La sociologie et l’art ne font pas bon menage. Cela tient à l’art et aux artistes (…) mais cela tient aussi aux sociologues …” [1] : twenty years have passed from when Pierre Bourdieu pronounced these words at the École nationale supérieure des artes decoratifs (Bourdieu, 1984: 207), but the prejudice denounced by the French sociologist still survive. Sociologists’ contribution to the study of art is still limited. As Strassoldo (1998) points out, only 0.5% of sociological production can be classified as the sociology of art. It is also partial: most of the sociological work on art has an introductory character or, at best, looks like a general program which is seldom brought into effect. It could not be otherwise, however, if, as Crane (1987: 148) observes, “few guidelines exist for a sociological examination of aesthetic and expressive content in art object”.
The insufficient contribution of sociologists to the study of art can be ascribed to the difficulties they have in empirically approaching it: indeed, when they try to explain, for example, the cultural and structural conditions that promote audiences, they have to face numerous methodological problems raised by the complex set of variables involved. Nevertheless, the heritage of the old controversy which opposes the Marxist and structural points of view to the cultural ones cannot be underestimated. The current marginality of the sociology of art is due, in our opinion, to sociologists’ prejudice against, and fear of, introducing into the analysis of art elements, methods and intellectual attitudes typical of the humanistic disciplines. In other words, sociologists have difficulty in admitting the “amphibian” nature (Strassoldo, 1998) of the sociology of art; because of the presupposition that their aim is to study objective facts, they limit themselves to such things as the organization and consumption of artistic production.
It is necessary to emphasize the ambiguity implied by the concept of “objectivity” in this context: as shown by Weber (1919), all knowledge is partial because it always derives from a particular point of view or level of observation. Objectivity lies only in the appropriateness of research methods. Therefore, it seems obvious to question the opinion that studying the consumption of works of art is less problematic than studying artists and their works. Equally questionable is the position of sociologists following the earlier work of Wolff (1981) who, despite maintaining that the investigation of artistic phenomenon must be based on the analysis of the interdependence between structural and cultural variables, reduces the concepts of creativity, artist and work of art to the influence of economic, social and ideological factors. Demystifying, as Wolff does, the uniqueness of the work of art and of the artist, is not, in our opinion, the correct way to study art: in fact it means encouraging an exogenous approach to art. Presuming that artists are puppets completely controlled by critics, museum curators, dealers, art-gallery managers, etc., and that only these “others” can decide if their work is really art, entails, on the one hand, depreciating the cultural meaning that art has always been given, and, on the other hand, disregarding the fact that all the activities performed to legitimate works as art are made possible only because these works already exist, that is, because someone has produced them.
Certainly, it has never been as difficult as today to identify the rules and criteria that can assist the public in recognizing art and distinguishing it from other contemporary forms of expression. The way to overcome this difficulty is not by reducing the analysis of the phenomenon to either the sociological level of observation or the historical-esthetic one. What we propose is to assume a sociological-artistic level of observation. This new level is not just the product of the sum of the two other levels, but has its own status: in fact, as the theory of the artificial shows (Negrotti, 1999), when a level of observation is formed combining two different levels of observation, the former, while losing part of the characteristics of the latter, assumes new and specific characteristics that cannot be found in the latter. By setting up new concepts, models, methods, and theories, the sociological-artistic level of observation represents the instrument that allows the researcher to control the relations existing between sociological competence, on the one hand, and, on the other, art-historical, critical, and esthetic levels of competence. It will provide the researcher with the possibility of exploiting the opportunities offered by effectively connecting various levels of observation [2] . It is worth noticing that it is precisely those individuals who study art from a traditional point of view who propose the establishment of new relations between different disciplines: for example, art-history is progressively becoming the social history of art, and aesthetics recognizes the importance of opening itself up to the other human sciences.
The current difficulty in categorizing artistic activity explains, at least partially, why sociologists prefer to deal with those structural aspects of art that are characteristic of the empirical tradition, such as consumption, the market, and social institutions. It also explains why there is an increasing number of sociologists who choose to consider the communicative aspect of art. It is not our intention to devalue the contribution of the latter to the study of art. Art is also a form of communication. Contributions from Italian scholars working in this vein - Tessarolo (1998) and Sanguanini (1998) - are noteworthy in this context. Nevertheless, communication is not the central aspect of art. Artists generate objects that widely transfigure their ideas, images or feelings. If artists simply intended to communicate their ideas, images or feelings, they would use ordinary language. The fact that they invent new languages or that they elaborate the ordinary one implies that their objective is not transferring information about their mental state but generating esthetic knowledge, that is, adding a new value to their images and feelings, a value which transcends pure informational content. For this reason, the artists’ message is always new, ambiguous and polysemic, and enriches the range of our knowledge. Paradoxically, it is precisely the analysis of art as communication that poses the problem of the importance of knowing artists and their activity. Trying to explain, as sociologists of communication do, what in art functions as communication, and how it functions implies knowing what is art and what is not, and how to distinguish it from other forms of expression. In other words, analyzing the communicative function of art, means first of all applying criteria that allow us to recognize if something is or is not art.
In our opinion, the sociological-artistic level of observation should enable us to achieve the proper balance between the traditional requirements of empirical sociological research and the necessity of effectively considering the autonomous role played by artists in the creation and realization of a work of art, and in inducing cultural change. Recognizing the autonomy of the artist is not a hindrance to sociological analysis but a precondition for it. Only by recognizing the autonomy of the artist is it possible to get the two following complementary variables under control: the influence of art on cultural development, and the artist’s attitude to re-present consolidated cultural models. Indeed, in a work of art both social and individual representational forms can be found. A work of art testifies first of all to the artist’s poetic world view, and secondly to his/her social and cultural context. As Padovani (1998) observes, if it is true that it is the artist who decides what forms of representation to choose, how to combine, relate and shape them, and what new forms to create, it is equally true that these same forms of representation are the product of his/her social life, and as such, already classified and arranged in a specific hierarchy.