Abstract
Sociology of the Arts: Exploring Fine and Popular Forms Victoria D. Alexander, Blackwell, Oxford, 2003, £15.99, 366pp.
The Sociology of Art: A Reader Jeremy Tanner (ed.), Routledge, London, 2003, £20.99, 265pp.
If, as Bourdieu noted, ‘sociology and art do not make good bedfellows’ (in Tanner, 2003: 96), the productive tension between them is at least revealing of the contours of each, and illuminating of the dilemmas facing sociology as it grapples to ‘sociologise’ its object. The appearance of three books in the field of the sociology of the arts is welcome testament to a renewed vigour with which sociology is accounting for relatively autonomous spheres of culture. And not before time, for art is also achieving unprecedented coverage throughout the culture industries, its figures and forms fanning out beyond the hallowed realms of the museum, the canon and the library, into mainstream consumer culture. In fact, one can't help observe the ironies of a small division of Charles Saatchi's über-collection going up in flames at a warehouse in East London as the demise of some of Britain's most inflated art is ceded by and abandoned to the fires of cultural entrepreneurialism – a fitting but inevitable circularity Baudrillard would undoubtedly liken to the ultimate art of disappearance in postmodern times. Whatever the reason for the current interest, students no longer have to rely exclusively on classics such as Becker's Art Worlds, Zolberg's Constructing a Sociology of the Arts, and Wolff's The Social Production of Art, to guide them through the field.
Yet a series of pitfalls await the noble sociologist of art, armed with their critical theories, tools of deconstruction and data sets on the demographics of arts consumption. First, as the almost imperialistic discipline of sociology cuts a swathe through its object (the social construction of x) there is danger in failing to capture what is distinctive about that object, content in the knowledge that now × has been revealed to be subject to power, ideology, discourse and so on, sociology's job is done. Second, there is the problem of definition: what does constitute ‘art’? Who or what decides? Can anything be ‘art’, as with the much-discussed limit cases of art history such as Warhol's brillo boxes, Duchamp's urinal and Manzoni's tins of ‘artist's shit’, or is it at least partially dependent upon qualities of the material object itself? Whilst taking the constructivist approach that art is anything defined by powerful institutions and agents as ‘art’ gets us somewhere, it perhaps slides us further away from the particularity of the object. Both dilemmas are oriented to a third, even more complex, question of value. Can (and should) the sociologist make value judgments about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ art? Is it beyond the kingdom of sociology to adjudicate over what is ‘great’, ‘distinctive’ or ‘valuable’ art? If not, on what grounds can these value judgments be made?
These are knotty issues and it is to Harrington's credit in Art and Social Theory that they are tackled head on. Addressing itself to broadly-conceived traditions of social theory, the book is organised into seven thematic chapters covering areas such as aesthetic and political value, ideology and utopia, the role of patronage, the market, taste and consumption, modernism and postmodernism. The author achieves two impressive feats here. First, he paves a way through social theory in order to trace the ideational unravelling of art's relationship to society – as dialectical, as ideological, as utopic, and as autonomous. Here we have some familiar conceptual traditions and thinkers, from Hauser's Marxist social history to Baudrillard's postmodernism, from Nochlin's feminist social constructivism to Bourdieu's field analysis, from Nietzsche's Dionysian aestheticism to Danto's institutional theories, and from Adorno's aesthetic theory to Williams' cultural materialism. The list is, indeed, expansive, the risk being that each theoretical tradition might be abbreviated to a series of hackneyed synopses. But this is rarely the case. Indeed, Harrington delves into social theoretic traditions with a degree of intellectual holism in order to give a broader understanding of the position of the aesthetic in relation to fundamental principles within that tradition. The sections on German idealism and humanism, in particular, are revealing accounts of aesthetic value-appraisal that disabuse the sociologist of stereotypical notions of these traditions as simply universalist and elitist. Having a knowledge of the original German texts is clearly an advantage, but the force of the argument also comes from Harrington's commitment to the necessity of aesthetic evaluation.
Second, then, Art and Social Theory tackles the question of judgment by moderating Weber's principle of value-freedom and invoking a distinction between a strictly value-neutral contextualisation of art and appraisals of the specificity and ‘sensuousness’ of artistic products – or, in the author's words, between ‘normative components’ and ‘factual components’ of discourse. For Harrington, there is something left after all the sociologising that cannot be explained using conventional sociological categories. Systems of patronage and social conventions, institutions and power relations are all discussed in the text, but strict ‘scientific’ analyses fail to apprehend art works as sources of existential knowledge and experience irreducible to any other form of knowledge or experience.
In a mode of reconstituted humanism, Harrington delivers a provocative defence of judgment and aesthetic standards based upon the following criteria. First, art is unique, it can show us certain things about the social world that social-scientific knowledge cannot. For instance, despite recent processes of commercialisation, art can constitute a form of protest ‘against alienation, reification and commodification. It is the sensuous work of freedom’ (p. 205). Second, whilst putatively universal categories such as ‘genius’, ‘beauty’ and the ‘sublime’ are idealized components of a romantic conception of art, such metaphysical conceptions are not ultimately inferior to sociological conceptions. In fact, they can be considered ‘linguistically rich ways of expressing appreciation, wonder and admiration’ (p. 54). Third, reconstructed use of proclamations to quality, such as ‘merit’, ‘distinction’ and ‘accomplishment’ are possible and valid if one accepts that ‘any subject positions can be bearers of them – women, children and non-western peoples as much as white European males' (54). In fact, value judgements can be defended if they are intersubjectively shared or generalisable. Finally, social theory should act as a mediating discourse between social-scientific methods of value distanciation and more humanistic appraisals of value. The task of sociology, in other words, is ‘to find ways of mediating … socio-political considerations with practices of aesthetic appraisal’, if the latter is defined ‘as an effort at discerning features of perceptual experience in particular objects capable of supporting claims for their universal worth’ (pp. 56–57).
These are, indeed, bold claims for a sociologist to be making and reveal a degree of originality and commitment that is often missing in more conventional texts. They certainly move us away from Wolff's agnostic stance towards aesthetic value in The Social Production of Art, whilst meeting the challenge posed by some sociologists of art to ‘bring meaning back in’. However, the claims also push the author into troubled waters, for they often meld quite seamlessly with older unreconstituted approaches to art that the author is trying to avoid. The defence of judgment, for instance, is often no more than a conventional Kantian apologia prefigured with a caveat that Kantian notions themselves should be historicised. This is given away in language that discursively replicates the style of traditional aesthetics, such as the author's description of Wagner's operas having ‘an all-absorbing emotional power over the audience’ (133–34), and of appreciation as ‘independent processes of aesthetic valuation by ordinary spectators based on what they see, feel and sensuously experience in the work’ (p. 35). In this sense, it overlaps with some aspects of Zangwill's (2002) defence of metaphysical presence, especially its aspirations towards correctness and constancy in judgment, its denigration of positivist sociologies of the aesthetic and its elevation of the cultivated critic. The ultimate desire to posit theory as a mediating device between sociological and idealist approaches, therefore, begins to look all the more uncertain as it takes on the character of fitting together two distinct jigsaw puzzles. After all, whilst it is indeed possible, in principle, that working-class women, children and non-western peoples can make aesthetic value judgments, in practice – that is, in context – these judgments are rarely sanctioned, satisfied or validated. In fact, to start with the assumption that art has value independent of its social context is not straightforward because to talk about art already invokes discourses laden with the weight of institutional, historical and ideological formations, making it well-nigh impossible to isolate an ‘outside’ from which value can be ascertained.
Finally, there are some inevitable, but disappointing omissions and glitches – the avant-garde is given short shrift, there are sections on German critical theory that are too abstruse to be useful for undergraduate level teaching, and the chapter on postmodernism, by far the weakest, barely mentions art works made in the last thirty years. Moreover, the whole question of popular culture's imbrication with high culture, whilst broached in part, lacks breadth. The book claims not to discriminate a priori in favour of ‘fine art’ or ‘high culture’, but the value commitment to understanding European high culture over the force and complexity of popular forms gives the former much more credence, and this is something the author is coy about.
Turning to the second text, one of the virtues of Alexander's Sociology of the Arts: Exploring Fine and Popular Forms, is its treatment of popular as well as high art forms – ‘from Rembrandt to rap’ as the author puts it (xiv). Conceptually less challenging, but no less ambitious in scope, this is designed as a user-friendly textbook. It is comprehensively researched and contains the kinds of additional activities and questions suited for modern undergraduate courses. The text is laid out in four parts, with Part I discussing various approaches to the art/society equation (reflection approaches, shaping approaches and the mediated view) and Part III turning to formalism and semiotics, where the focus is on the properties of the art works themselves. In between, Parts IIA and IIB demonstrate the author's expertise and background in American cultural sociology, with particular attention given to Becker's ‘art worlds’ approach and Griswold's ‘cultural diamond’ model, where the interactions between four elements – social world, receiver, creator and cultural object – exhibit the complex linkages between audiences, objects and social contexts. Alexander goes beyond this model, however, to accommodate distribution networks such as museums that work as conduit systems between creators and audiences. This has the effect of inserting another node between art and society and countervailing reflection approaches that underestimate the notion of mediation. The various models are illustrated by discrete case studies from the worlds of ‘high’ and ‘popular culture’ such as the film industry, romance novels, rap music and the collapse of the French Academic art system during the 19th century. The cases are well chosen and connect meaningfully with preceding discussions, not least because they are accompanied by ‘points of discussion’ which help orient the student to the issues embedded in the art/society problematic.
One of the consequences of attributing so much weight to ‘production of culture’ approaches, however, is its slanting of the text towards the somewhat arid regions of the sociology of organisations – a world of gatekeepers, reward systems, filtering mechanisms, and market structures. These are interesting and valid dimensions of artistic production, but they're not always suitable for capturing the distinctive texture of art forms themselves; nor are they able to address issues of ideology, quality and value raised by the largely European traditions outlined in the Harrington text. Alexander's solution to the question of value is to invoke Griswold's concept of ‘cultural power’ to account for the resonance of particular art works considered to be ‘truly great’ (p. 294) across different systems. These are works that ‘linger in the mind’ (p. 240), making them meaningful and enduring beyond the present, but the assertion lacks sophistication, for clearly ‘bad works’ may also linger. Elsewhere, the lack of attention to photography is a notable gap, as is the relative paucity of treatment of critical theory and postmodern perspectives on art (as opposed to sociology). Bourdieu's field theory, in particular, is arguably the most comprehensive sociological approach to the arts there is and might have been given a more balanced position vis-à-vis Griswold's cultural diamond model. Still, as a textbook, Sociology of the Arts is a very clear and accessible introduction to debates within the sociology of the arts, the finer complexities of which can be finessed with readings from elsewhere.
One such text might be The Sociology of Art: A Reader, edited by Jeremy Tanner. This is a collection of extracts from seventeen influential classic and modern writers that, prima facie, takes on a familiar thematic structure. It is split into five parts, beginning with classical sociological theory and then tackling the social production of art, the role of the artist and the museum, and the particularities of aesthetic form. It's no surprise to see contributions from the likes of Weber, Williams, DiMaggio, Bourdieu, Becker and Hauser included in the collection. These are essential extracts for students interested in sociologically-informed approaches to art that set out the problems, dilemmas, and assumptions inherent in the field. The inclusion of two extracts from Williams' Marxism and Literature is a particularly welcome addition, because it locates a conceptual lineage of ‘mediation’ firmly within a Marxist tradition often caricatured as irredeemably spoiled by ‘reflection’ metaphors. Becker's contribution is contrasted to the Marxist position in its focus upon art worlds as ‘negotiated orders’ which are crystallised in the form of conventions; whilst Bourdieu appears twice, first as critical commentator on the notion of the individual ‘creator’ and second as theorist of social inequalities in artistic reception.
But this is not a conventional reader in which the editor harbours pretensions towards full coverage across thematic or chronological dimensions. There is no representative of feminist theories of art or the gendered construction of the artist, for instance, despite inclusion of Heinich's chapter ‘The Van Gogh Effect’. Instead, the selection process and order is part of the process of argumentation itself. This is clear from the introduction, which sets out the editor's interpretation of the vexed relationship between art history and sociology. At one point undifferentiated in a pre-modern discursive space, the two disciplines grew progressively remote in the late 19th and 20th centuries as modernity itself formalised the autonomy of value spheres such as aesthetics, morality, law and science. Tanner argues, in fact, that the substantive concerns of sociology and art history were interlaced before the expansion of the university system and the hardening of disciplinary boundaries. Notable early writings of an art historical nature, from Hegel and Herder to Buckhardt and Taine, for instance, were concerned with links between particular distinctive periods in human history and aesthetic formations. Whilst sociology toughened into a positivistic and generalising science of social phenomena, however, art history developed its own leanings towards aesthetic standards and particularistic studies that progressively excised society from its concerns. It has, as a result, become more difficult than ever to reconcile the two fields, and a number of attempts at synthesis, from Michael Baxandall's explanation of art through a general theory of social action, to Bourdieu's evocation of habitus and field, have tended to fall back into theoretical assumptions about the privileged position of either the social or the aesthetic.
Still it's fair to say that the editor sides with sociology more than he does art history and this is reflected both in the selection of extracts and in claims that sociology should be more than a ‘handmaiden’ to art history. After all, ‘sociology’, writes Tanner, ‘makes no claim to give a total explanation of art, only to give a distinctive one, valid in terms of its own presuppositions and offering a point of view not afforded by conventional art history’ (14). This doesn't quite square with the discipline's search for general explanation, but it does highlight the difficulty in bridging evaluative paradigms that have ossified into institutional enclaves, despite a rhetoric of interdisciplinarity.
For Tanner, an appropriate role for the sociology of art cannot be based on its displacement of art history for the sake of revealing the ‘social truth’ of things (p. 22). Instead, the author claims a more realistic role for sociology should be rooted in a return to the somewhat unlikely figures of Wölfflin, Mannheim, and Parsons. Indeed, extracts from the latter two appear in the final part of the reader, ‘sociology, aesthetic form and the specificity of art’. This is the most unusual section of the book because it explores attempts to integrate art-historical concerns for the particularity of aesthetic form with sociological analysis, in the spirit of a ‘critical research programme for the sociology of art’ (p. 22). Such a programme would be characterised by three levels of sociological analysis distinguished by Mannheim – pure cultural sociology, general cultural sociology and dynamic cultural sociology – to cover period-specific case studies, the production of community-wide cultural formations, and correspondences between artistic forms and general structures of group life. Precisely what is ‘critical’ in these formulations remains unclear, because they often reduce art to rather generalised and static propositions regarding ‘structural types’. Selecting a piece by Parsons to be the final extract is also slightly skewed given the editor's aim to present ‘some of the most exciting contemporary developments in the sociological analysis of art’ (p. 208). In fact, Witkin's reading of Van Eyck's The Marriage of Arnolfini becomes the sole exemplar of the contemporary attempt at a general sociology of art in the final part, leaving the reader to plod through rather hard-going essays by Mannheim and Parsons on spiritual realities and expressive symbolism.
These misgivings aside, Tanner's collection effectively underscores the disciplinary limits driving the ‘odd’ relationship between art and sociology, and points to the consistency of failed integration inherent in attempts to bridge the two fields of study. Perhaps sociology should be content with sticking to its own disciplinary strengths and accepting that whilst it can make a decent contribution to understanding conceptions of the art/society problematic, it can't explain everything. Pressed into evaluating artistic standards, sociology might be in danger of diluting its own project, producing second-rate aesthetics rather than first-rate social science. In this reading, the two disciplines might better serve one another as sparring partners, keeping the other critically self-aware, rather than being forced to share the same bed. There is great advantage in seeing these three texts, then, as an instance of triangulation, where authors addressing dimensions and perplexities in the sociology of art become complementary, each wrestling with similar dilemmas, but in the process revealing the limits of the sociological enterprise itself.