Sociology Looks at the Arts Open Access

In the last few decades, the sociology of the arts has been one of the growing fields among sociological sub-disciplines; for instance, the respective ISA and ESA research networks are now among their biggest. Several global conferences in the Americas, Asia, and Europe have proven the attractiveness of this field – not only as a special area where art-sociological expertise can be applied to a specific societal inquiry but as a mirror that reflects general societal structures, and can be used to understand these structures. The borders to adjacent disciplines remain fluent; ideas and notions of political science, economics and business studies, psychology and especially media studies are absorbed and digested. All in all, this sub-discipline has been a fertile terrain for trying out new concepts in sociology. The current field has been prepared by two major players in sociology of the twentieth century, Howard S. Becker and Pierre Bourdieu. These two scholars – not to forget Vera Zolberg and Janet Wolff – legitimated sociological inquiry into the arts, and gave this new inquiry symbolic capital. Especially in the last 15 years, sociology of the arts has been taught in undergraduate and graduate courses, and with this comes a demand for comprehensive textbooks. The first was Victoria Alexander’s Sociology of the Arts – Exploring Fine and Popular Forms (2003), followed by two compilations of texts that strived to create a canon, Jeremy Tanner’s The Sociology of Art – A Reader (2004) and David Inglis and John Hughson’s The Sociology of Art – Ways of Seeing (2005).¹

The time has come for a new and comprehensive introduction into this field. Julia Rothenberg, however, does not entitle her book Introduction to a Sociology of the Arts but Sociology Looks at the Arts – and with that twist of words she conveys an important message. We can use the fundamental imagination of sociology for also understanding the arts; we do not need a sub-disciplinary special sociology particularly developed for studying the arts. This motto will be repeated throughout the book, and applied to concepts that Rothenberg considers important: class, gender, race, politics and the economy, technology and globalisation, the work of artists, and the recipient’s meaning giving to the arts. How do these concepts apply to the arts? How do the arts reflect these social structures? How can we understand the arts with our sociological imagination? Rothenberg’s study of the arts becomes a stealth tool for teaching sociology and society in general. For example, already very early, she establishes the trinity level of macro–meso–micro to the unacquainted reader by introducing the ‘wide angle lens’ looking at the effects of capitalism and rationalisation on the arts, the ‘middle-range lens’ exploring the organisational mechanisms of producing, distributing, and consuming the arts, and the ‘telephoto lenses’ of ethnomethodology (applied for example to Duchamp’s breaching of conventional art) or of Goffman’s production of the self (applied to Cindy Sherman’s portraits). The arts are thus significant props for our social world and our analysis thereof.

The chapters of the book run through the main sociological concepts that are generally introduced to the (American) sociology student, and then connected, illustrated, and explained by examples. Rothenberg follows, thereby, a clear and convincing pattern that has its didactic merits. Concepts related to class such as consciousness, status, and distinction theory are introduced by convincingly relating them to issues such as working-class or mass culture, artistic tastes, or aspirations. Concepts of gender are related to the mainstream norm of the Victorian Family and its breaching as depicted by French impressionist in the late nineteenth century. Concepts of race, imperialism, and African-American identity are explained by film (Spike Lee), European and non-European visual arts, caricatures, and music (jazz). The political dimensions of society are linked to critical artists such as Ai Weiwei and other artists who have got into trouble with governmental institutions, to controversies such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and to aesthetic protests from society’s countercultures. The positive and negative effects of globalisation and new communication technologies on the current ‘shrinking of time and space’ (Harvey, 1989) are illustrated and explained by examples from photography, the global network of the art market, distribution of music, film, and literature. The social construction of the artist and of her working relies on Howard Becker’s collective meaning giving, and lays out the transformation of the artist from being elevated as genius in Romanticism via the insistence on autonomy in modernity to the cynical business orientation of a postmodern artist.

Rothenberg’s book is an indispensable compendium for any student of the exciting field of ‘sociology of the arts’. This does not only include those undergraduates and graduates who want to become familiar with a new field; it also addresses the scholar who wishes to review her position as either an ‘internalist’, emphasising the effects of one art on others or on society as a whole, or as an ‘externalist’ – Rothenberg puts herself in that position although this is my expression – emphasising the arts as reflection and outcome of society and its tension and processes.