Sociology of Art

A Reader

Jeremy Tanner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134393299
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

Introducing the fundamental theories and debates in the sociology of art, this broad ranging book, the only edited reader of the sociology of art available, uses extracts from the core foundational and most influential contemporary writers in the field. As such it is essential reading both for students of the sociology of art, and of art history. Divided into five sections, it explores the following key themes: * classical sociological theory and the sociology of art
* the social production of art
* the sociology of the artist
* museums and the social construction of high culture
* sociology aesthetic form and the specificity of art. With the addition of an introductory essay that contextualizes the readings within the traditions of sociology and art history, and draws fascinating parallels between the origins and development of these two disciplines, this book opens up a productive interdisciplinary dialogue between sociology and art history as well as providing a fascinating introduction to the subject.

PART ONE
Classical sociological theory and the sociology of art

INTRODUCTION

SOCIOLOGY CAN BE CHARACTERISED as a problem-oriented and generalising discipline, in contrast to art history which is object-oriented and particularising. These differing orientations imply a fundamentally different relationship to ‘theory’. In sociology, theory plays a central role in the discipline, whilst in art history it is often regarded as an optional extra. No sociology undergraduate programme, let alone MA programmes, would be without required courses in ‘classical’ and contemporary sociological theory. By contrast, even today, prestigious graduate programmes in art history may lack any core theory education shared by all their students, in the belief that the real business of art history is a matter of period specialities and first-hand knowledge of the objects. Art-historical theory also has a character very different from sociological theory. It is essayistic and often of a rather ephemeral character, whereas sociological theorising is systematic and part of a cumulative tradition.

The different character of the two disciplines is particularly marked in their relationship to their founding fathers. The classics of art-historical theory – Winckel-mann, Hegel, Taine, Riegl, Wölfflin, Panofsky – are largely unread by practising art historians. They are seldom mentioned in most normal art-historical research, except in passing dismissive caricatures of positions – Taine and milieu theory, Riegl and evolutionism, Wölfflin and formalism. Serious scholarly engagement with these texts is limited to primarily historiographic exercises, placing the authors and their ideas in their cultural and intellectual context (Iversen 1993; Holly 1984). Critical rereadings such as Podro’s (1982) study of the German idealists are relatively rare, and there is little evidence to suggest that they significantly affect the wider practice of art-historical research.

In sociology, careful reading and rereading of a stable, but not fixed, canon of theoretical texts plays a central role in the socialisation of students into the discipline, and of individual and collective redefinition of research orientations and objectives.¹ A familiarity with the works of Marx, Weber, Durkheim and (increasingly) Simmel is held to provide an understanding of the key intellectual problems of sociology – the origins of modernity, the nature of social action, the bases of social solidarity and of conflict, the role of material interests and cultural values in social life – and some of the most fundamental tools for grappling with those problems in whatever thematic area or geographical region of specialisation. This shared and continuously revived intellectual heritage thus serves to integrate the discipline. But far from engendering disciplinary closure, the classics provide a structured basis for debate, disagreement and theoretical change. Theorists such as Weber, Marx and Durkheim take distinctive positions on what are the key characteristics of modernity or the most important determinants of action (cultural values, material interests) and social order (aggregation of individual choices, patterning of action based on membership in collectivities). The existence and continuous development of this theoretical core provides a coherent framework for exploring the compatibility between sociological and other theoretical orientations, and for selectively and judiciously building the insights of other disciplines – evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, psychonalysis, structuralist and post-structuralist theories of culture and signification – into a continuously reconstructed sociology.² This facilitates a rather more balanced relationship between continuity and change, disciplinary integrity and interdisciplinarity, than the often uncritical ‘trendy’ assimilation or mindless ‘traditionalist’ rejection of fashionable new theories characteristic of less theoretically mature disciplines such as art history or archaeology.

There is no reason to think that this difference in relationship to theory is intellectually intrinsic to the disciplines. On the contrary, it seems likely that it is in part a function of the differing institutional bases of sociology and art history (and the disruption of the critical idealist tradition in the 1930s and 1940s), as discussed in the introduction. Taine, Riegl, Wölfflin and Panofsky certainly deal with problems as fundamental to the history of art as those of Weber, Marx, Durkheim and Simmel to sociology: the nature and bases of aesthetic meaning and art-historical interpretation, the relationship between the work of art and the viewer, the bases of the organisation of artistic form and the principles of the transformation of such patterns of organisation, the relationship between art and culture or society – all intellectual problems relevant to art historians whatever their period or regional specialisation. The creation of a truly interdisciplinary sociology of art will certainly involve a return to these classic art-historical theorists and an integration of their insights and perspectives into the research programmes of sociology. Only on this basis will it be possible to construct an intellectual platform for the kind of cumulative and generalising intellectual development in the sociology of art that has characterised the field of sociology more generally.

The readings in Part One are all from classical sociological theorists, each of whom formulated a distinctive position on the key problems of sociological thought, and by implication distinctive accounts of the relationship between art (and other forms of culture) and social structure. Throughout the course of this reader, it should become clear to what extent later writers define and elaborate their own positions by aligning themselves with or distancing themselves from various positions held by these key theorists. Although I offer brief introductory sketches of these thinkers’ main lines of thought, readers should bear in mind not only that the writings of these theorists are vastly richer and more complex than such sketches can allow, but also – by virtue of the function of these works in the disciplinary matrix of sociology – their interpretation is hotly contested.

Karl Marx

Marx’s distinctive sociological perspective draws on three intellectual traditions: the German idealism of Hegel, English classical economics and French socialist thought. On this basis, he constructed a ‘materialist’ theory of history characterised by a set of interlinked assumptions. First, ‘man’ is defined primarily by his relationship to nature, which he masters through labour in order to produce the means to sustain himself. Second, men enter into co-operative relations in order to secure sustenance from and security against nature, and these material relations of production constitute the basis of any social order. The idealism of Hegel is inverted by drawing on the more materialist ideas of English economic theory and French socialism. French socialism and Hegelianism provide a collectivist correction to the individualism of classical economic theory.

The selected readings provide succinct statements of the Marxist theory of history, and its implications for the analysis and understanding of cultural production. The first group (Chapter 1a) defines Marx’s key concepts: base (forces of production, relations of production), superstructure and the dynamic interrelationships of these components of social structure (antagonism/contradiction, transformation/revolution). The second group (Chapter 1b) develops a general theory of ideology and ideological production. They emphasise that material experiences are the basis on which ideas are erected as a cultural reflex, and the way in which ideologies often invert material reality, like a camera obscura, thus functioning to legitimate inequality. The control of the dominant class over the means of cultural production ensures that in the last instance the relative autonomy of specialised cultural producers in complex societies has only a phantom existence. The final group (Chapter 1c) explores the role of cultural traditions within a materialist framework. The problem of the perennial value of Greek art, long after the demise of the material conditions which gave rise to it, suggests the possibility of a lack of correspondence between aesthetic and social development. Marx’s analysis of the use of past cultural forms in revolutionary situations – for example of Roman Republican imagery by French revolutionaries – points towards a more active, constitutive role of culture in social change, and opens up the question of the limits within which visual expressive culture is ‘determined’ by the social base.

The legacy of Marxism to the history and sociology of art is considerable. The most familiar strand is the social history of art of Hauser (1951), Antal (1948) and Schapiro (1939), where traditional iconographic and stylistic analyses are contextual-ised in contemporary conditions of material life and changing class structures. Art as an expression of specific class ideals and interests replaces traditional ideas of art as an expression of national or period spirit. A more theoretically ambitious programme was developed first by Lukács, then his succesors in the Frankfurt School (see below, pp., for further discussion of the Frankfurt School). Lukács (1923) sought to draw out the Hegelian components in Marxist thought, and in particular to develop a concept of ideology not simply as an epiphenomenon of the base but as a more pervasive cultural system, ‘dialectically’ related to the social base, in other words acting back upon and conditioning the base’s development (cf. Hamilton 1974, 144ff.). Both Lukács and his successors in the Frankfurt School were particularly concerned with the idea of art as the last residue of human freedom. Art, they suggested, had the potentiality to perform a critical and hence emancipatory function in the development and transformation of capitalist society, in particular through ‘realist’ forms of representation which penetrated bourgeois ideology and revealed the truly exploitative and inegalitarian character of modern industrial society (Swinge-wood 1987, 55ff.; Arato and Gebhardt 1982). The empirical work of the Frankfurt School concentrated on literature, and has been most influential in the work of literary theorists such as Raymond Williams (1977, 1981) and Terry Eagleton (1976). But it has also been crucial in the formulation of the projects of Marxist sociologists and social historians of art such as Janet Wolff (1981) and T. J. Clarke (1973a, 1973b, 1985). Their work develops the Frankfurters’ attention to the specificity of art by exploring how social structures and cultural codes are mediated through visual representation, rather than straightforwardly reproduced or reflected. Relatively few sociologists of art would today identify themselves as Marxists. Nevertheless, there is a strongly materialist orientation to most contemporary sociology of art, seeking as it does to reduce manifest cultural meaning systems – whether the content or style of art works, or the values that animate high cultural ‘ideologies’ – to more fundamental social bases: the structure of the organisations through which culture is produced, or the status interests of the consumers of high culture.

Max Weber

Like Marx, Weber sought to understand the nature and origins of capitalism. Writing a generation after Marx, however, Weber’s cultural and sociological horizons were somewhat different. Like all intellectuals of his generation, Weber was deeply influenced by Nietzsche’s account of the autonomy of the human will to power, and the intersection between power relations and the socio-genesis of moral orders. At the same time, the massive expansion of the German state in the late nineteenth century, and the commonalities between capitalist enterprises and state bureaucracies in the organisation of action and social relationships, suggested to Weber that modern western capitalism was simply the economic component of a much more far-reaching social and cultural phenonenon, namely ‘rationalisation’.

Weber sees economic action in capitalist enterprises as one example of a more widespread type of action, namely ‘rational action’, in which means are selected on the basis of the best available knowledge in terms of their efficiency to achieve a particular end, rather than because the particular means are sanctioned by tradition or mandated according to a particular value orientation. ‘Rationalisation’ is the process whereby a domain comes to be organised more and more systematically in terms of such calculable mean–ends rationality. The modern west is unique in the range and pervasiveness of the rationalisation of all domains of life: the economy, political organisation, theology, music, science. This level of rationalisation is also characteristic of the visual arts of the west, manifested in the Gothic vault, as a rationalised calculable means of distributing the weight of a roofing system, and central vanishing point perspective in painting (Chapter 2a). The strength of the impulse behind western rationalism, and its peculiarly instrumental world-mastering character, Weber attributed to the development of a worldly concept of ‘vocation’ in Protestant thought which gave a positive moral character to systematic acquisitive activity which had previously been merely tolerated (Weber 1904/5).

In order to understand the uniqueness of western rationalism and capitalism, and to clarify the role played by Protestantism in its genesis, Weber undertook a series of studies of the economic ethics of the world religions – Judaism, Hindusim and Buddhism in India, Confucianism and Taoism in China (1916, 1916/17, 1917/19). In particular, he sought to show how these religions shaped the systematisation of patterns of life conduct in ways which were antithetical to the development of the same kind of full-fledged modern capitalism as was created in the west, despite the fact that structural conditions (levels of urbanisation, use of money, communications systems) in late medieval India and China were on the face of it more favourable to the development of capitalism than those in the west. In the posthumously published Economy and Society (1922), these studies were developed into a wide-ranging analysis of how patterns of action were systematically shaped by social, economic, political and cultural conditions, retaining a particular focus on factors which impeded or promoted rationalisation, and the varying forms taken by rationalisation processes in different social and cultural settings.

It is in this context that Weber gave consideration to questions of the sociology of art. Weber’s only major study of art is The Rational and Social Foundations of Music (1912). In this study he draws a distinction between polyvocality, in which multiple voices are related to each other on a basis more complex than unison or the octave, and true polyphony, in which ‘several voices of equal standing run side by side, harmonically linked in such a way that the progression of each voice is accommodated to the progression of the other and is, thus, subject to certain rules’ (Weber 1912, 68). Weber’s primary concern was to discover why it was only in the west that rational calculable systems of harmonic and polyphonic music developed out of polyvocal music which characterised not only the west but other cultures such as ancient Greece and medieval Japan. In trying to answer this question, he explores the role of systems of notation in musical rationalisation, the role of religion in stereotyping and thus formalising certain tone series associated with particular gods, the influence of the structure of guild organisations of musicians and the standardisation of musical instruments. Although Weber never gave the same extended consideration to the visual arts, he does consider them in similar terms in the context of his studies in the sociology of religion (Chapter 2b, 2c). He examines the role of magical stereotyping in primitive religions in the formation of style, and of receptiveness to the content of art in the formation of religious community. He explores the tensions which emerge between art and more rationalised ‘intellectualised’ text-based religions when religion and art are increasingly grasped as independent spheres of values in complex societies with differentiated cultural systems, and the rapprochements between art and religion made in such phenomena as mysticism. Although brief, these passages are hugely suggestive of the kinds of comparative study of the social and cultural dynamics of artistic rationalisation which would bring the sociology of art to the same level of sophistication as other fields in the sociology of culture.

Georg Simmel

Simmel is perhaps the most intellectually elusive of the generation of classical sociological theorists. Both his marginal position (excluded until shortly before his death from securing a chair on account of his Jewish ethnicity and socialist sympathies) and the poorly institutionalised status of sociology in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries afforded Simmel the freedom to range in his lectures and writings over themes that would now be considered quite distinct: history of philosophy, aesthetics, epistemology, sociology (Etzkorn 1968). The early reception of Simmel in English-speaking sociology in the twentieth century emphasised the apparently more specifically sociological aspects of his work: interaction, conflict, structures of inequality and domination. More recently, there has been a considerable revival of interest in his work, in part because his attention to aesthetic issues can be (perhaps anachronistically) interpreted as anticipating important themes of postmodern theory (Frisby 1981, 1986; Weinstein and Weinstein 1993). Both approaches in certain respects misread Simmel in complementary ways. Both treat aesthetic issues as issues of surface: for the reductionist strand in sociology aesthetics is epi-phenomena (superficial effects, determined by an underlying social and economic base); for the postmodernists, influenced by structuralist theories of language and culture, representational surface is all there is, and the search for an underlying reality is misplaced. What seems to me interesting about Simmel is that he treats aesthetic form as a generative deep phenomenon within the social order and conversely, sociological principles of ordering as aesthetically generative from within art rather than as external determinants.

Simmel, deeply influenced by both Nietzsche and contemporary neo-Kantian thought, was fascinated by the interrelationship between life and form, energy and the patterns by which such energy is controlled and shaped (Davis 1973). Like Weber, he regarded the growing autonomy of economic life as one component of a more general process in which all cultural forms – art, science, sociability itself – were becoming increasingly autonomous. He regarded modernity as being characterised by an increasing imbalance between the ‘subjective culture’ of the individual, and the ‘objective culture’ of the increasingly autonomous and self-organising social and cultural domains – economy, politics, art, science. The growing dominance of objective culture threatened subjective culture. As Schiller and Weber had noted, it broke down the integration of the individual as a value in himself, both through the conflicting demands that each of the domains of objective culture placed on the individual, and through corresponding shifts in educational ideals, from the formation of ‘man’ ‘as a personal inner value’ to modern instrumental and vocational training for a specific functio...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: SOCIOLOGY AND ART HISTORY
• PART ONE: CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF ART
• PART TWO: THE SOCIAL PRODUCTION OF ART
• PART THREE: THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE ARTIST
• PART FOUR: MUSEUMS AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF HIGH CULTURE
• PART FIVE: SOCIOLOGY, AESTHETIC FORM AND THE SPECIFICITY OF ART
• REFERENCES