Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Art or the Aesthetic? The Relevance of the Classical Sociology of Art for the Current Sociology of Culture

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory

Part of the book series: Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research ((HSSR))

Abstract

Classical sociological theories of art proceed from a shared insight: although cultures have always produced objects of esthetic beauty and symbolic significance, the emergence of art as a secular, commodified, and institutionalized practice is distinct to modernity. Because art was viewed as novel and historically specific, these theories took the study of art as an especially direct means of understanding the process of modernization itself. The classical accounts have notable limitations: they took a very narrow, exclusionary view of what merited study as art, gave little attention to local and subjective aspects of esthetic experience, and underemphasized the state’s investment in art. The contemporary sociology of art arose from a strong reaction against these classical theories during the late twentieth century. The resulting sociology of art is more inclusive and flexible, but lacks compelling theoretical grounds for studying certain cases over others. The chapter concludes by suggesting two ways that reviving the classical impulse may be of value for the current sociology of art: it could drive an empirical research agenda focused on new institutional arrangements in art, or could inform an effort to develop a general social theory grounded in esthetic experience.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 299.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 379.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 379.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Abbott, A. 2019. Living one’s theories: Moral consistency in the life of Emile Durkheim. Sociological Theory 37 (1): 1–34.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Acord, S.K. 2010. Beyond the head: The practical work of curating contemporary art. Qualitative Sociology 33: 447–467.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Adorno, T.W. 1991. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1997. Aesthetic Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2002. Essays on Music. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Barth, J. 1995. Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction, 1984–94. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.

    Google Scholar 

  • Becker, H.S. 2008. Art worlds, 25th anniversary edition. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Benjamin, W. 1999. The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2007. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Benzecry, C. 2014. An opera house for the “Paris of South America”: Pathways to the institutionalization of high culture. Theory & Society 43 (2): 169–196.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Boelhower, W.Q. 1980. Introduction. In Essays on Method in the Sociology of Art and Literature, ed. L. Goldmann, 5–34. St. Louis: Telos Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1988. Homo academicus. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1991. Genesis and structure of the religious field. Comparative Social Research 13: 1–44.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1996a. The Rules of Art: Structure and Genesis of the Literary Field. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1996b. The State Nobility. Cambridge: Polity.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2017. Manet: A Symbolic Revolution. London: Polity.

    Google Scholar 

  • Casanova, P. 2004. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cerulo, K. 2018. Scents and sensibility: Olfaction, sense-making, and meaning attribution. American Sociological Review 83 (2): 361–389.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Childress, C. 2017. Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Childress, C., and A. Gerber. 2015. The MFA in creative writing: The uses of a “useless” credential. Professions & Professionalism 5 (2): 1–16.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Davis, M.S. 1973. Georg Simmel and the aesthetics of social reality. Social Forces 51 (1): 320–329.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • De La Fuente, E. 2008. The art of social forms and the social forms of art: The sociology-aesthetics nexus in Georg Simmel’s thought. Sociological Theory 26 (4): 344–362.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • DeNora, T. 1996. Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792–1803. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dewey, J. 1934. Art as Experience. New York: Minton, Balch & Co.

    Google Scholar 

  • DiMaggio, P. 1997. Culture and cognition. Annual Review of Sociology 23: 263–287.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Durkheim, E. 1979. Essays on Morals and Education. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1984. The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Free Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Durkheim, E., and M. Mauss. 1963. Primitive Classification. London: Cohen & West.

    Google Scholar 

  • Edelman, L., A.C. Smith, and A. Rahim. 2016. Legal discrimination: Empirical sociolegal and critical race perspectives on antidiscrimination law. Annual Review of Law and Social Science 12: 395–415.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Elkins, J. 2001. Why Art Cannot Be Taught: A Handbook for Art Students. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Emirbayer, M. 2004. The Alexander School of cultural sociology. Thesis Eleven 79: 5–15.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Eyerman, R. 2004. Jeffrey Alexander and the cultural turn in social theory. Thesis Eleven 79: 25–30.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fine, G.A. 2018. Talking Art: The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Fourcade, M. 2016. Ordinalization. Sociological Theory 34 (3): 175–195.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Friedman, A. 2011. Toward a sociology of perception: Sight, sex, and gender. Cultural Sociology 5 (2): 187–206.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gartman, D. 1991. Culture as class symbolization or mass reification? A critique of Bourdieu’s Distinction. American Journal of Sociology 97 (2): 421–447.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2012. Bourdieu and Adorno: Converging theories of culture and inequality. Theory & Society 41 (1): 41–72.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gerber, A. 2017. The Work of Art: Value in Creative Careers. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gerber, A., and C. Childress. 2017. The economic world obverse: Freedom through markets after arts education. American Behavioral Scientist 61 (12): 1532–1554.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Goldmann, L. 1980. Essays on Method in the Sociology of Literature. St. Louis: Telos Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Green, A.I. 2011. Playing the (sexual) field: The interactional basis of systems of sexual stratification. Social Psychology Quarterly 74 (3): 244–266.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Griswold, W. 1992. The sociology of culture: Four good arguments (and one bad one). Acta Sociologica 35 (4): 323–328.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hall, S. 1990. The emergence of cultural studies and the crisis of the humanities. October 53: 11–23.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jerolmack, C., and S. Khan. 2014. Talk is cheap: Ethnography and the attitudinal fallacy. Sociological Methods & Research 43 (2): 178–209.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Joas, H. 1996. The Creativity of Action. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kant, I. 2007. Critique of Judgment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Klett, J. 2014. Sound on sound: Situating interaction in sonic object environments. Sociological Theory 32 (2): 147–161.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kracauer, S. 1995. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lamont, M. 2009. How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Lamont, M., S. Beljean, and M. Clair. 2014. What is missing?: Cultural processes and causal pathways to inequality. Socio-Economic Review 12 (3): 573–608.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lee, M., and J.L. Martin. 2015. Coding, counting, and cultural cartography. American Journal of Cultural Sociology 3 (1): 1–33.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Leschziner, V., and A.I. Green. 2013. Thinking about food and sex: Deliberate cognition in the routine practices of a field. Sociological Theory 31 (2): 116–144.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lizardo, O. 2004. The cognitive origins of Bourdieu’s habitus. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 34 (4): 375–401.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2013. The puzzle of women’s “highbrow” cultural consumption: Integrating gender and work into Bourdieu’s class theory of taste. Poetics 34 (1): 1–23.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lizardo, O., and S. Skiles. 2012. Reconceptualizing and theorizing “omnivorousness”: Genetic and relational mechanisms. Sociological Theory 30 (4): 263–282.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lukacs, G. 1972. Studies in European Realism. London: Merlin Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1973. The Theory of the Novel. Cambridge: MIT.

    Google Scholar 

  • Martin, J.L. 2003. What is field theory? American Journal of Sociology 109 (1): 1–49.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2011. The Explanation of Social Action. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2017. The birth of the true, the good, and the beautiful: Toward an investigation of the structures of social theory. Current Perspectives on Social Theory 35: 3–56.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Martin, J.L., and B. Merriman. 2015. A social aesthetics as a general cultural sociology? In International Handbook of the Sociology of Art and Culture, ed. L. Hanquinet and M. Savage, 132–148. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marx, K. 1978. Economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844. In The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. R.C. Tucker, 2nd ed., 66–135. New York: W.W. Norton.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1980. Capital. Vol. I. New York: Penguin.

    Google Scholar 

  • McGurl, M. 2009. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Merriman, B. 2017. The editorial meeting at a little magazine: An ethnography of group judgment. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 46 (4): 440–463.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Monk, E.P., Jr. 2014. Skin tone stratification among black Americans, 2001-2003. Social Forces 92 (4): 1313–1337.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Moore, R. 2017. Fast or slow: Sociological implications of measuring dual-process cognition. Sociological Science 4: 196–223.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Price, L. 2019. What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading. New York: Basic Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rivera, L. 2010. Status distinctions in interaction: Social selection and exclusion at an elite nightclub. Qualitative Sociology 33: 229–255.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2015. Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Rose-Greenland, F. 2016. Color perception in sociology: Materiality and authenticity at the Gods in Color show. Sociological Theory 34 (2): 81–105.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rubin, J.S. 1992. The Making of Middlebrow Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schwarz, O. 2013. Bending forward, one step backward: On the sociology of tasting techniques. Cultural Sociology 7 (4): 415–430.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shivani, A. 2011. Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies. Huntsville: Texas Review Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Silver, D., and M. Brocic. 2019. Three concepts of form in Simmel’s sociology. Germanic Review 94 (2): 114–124.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Simmel, G. 1910. How is society possible? American Journal of Sociology 16 (3): 372–291.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1968. The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays. New York: Teachers College Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1997. Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings. London: Sage.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2005. Rembrandt: An Essay on the Philosophy of Art. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2010. The View of Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Vaisey, S. 2009. Motivation and justification: A dual-process model of culture in action. American Journal of Sociology 114 (6): 1675–1715.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Watt, I. 1957. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Weber, M. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1958. The Rational and Social Foundations of Music. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1978. Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2004. The Vocation Lectures. Indianapolis: Hackett.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2009. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with Other Writings on the Rise of the West. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • White, H.A., and C.A. White. 1993. Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilde, O. 2007. The truth of masks. In The Collected Oscar Wilde, ed. A. Fletcher, 464–490. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wohl, H. 2015. Community sense: The cohesive power of aesthetic judgment. Sociological Theory 33 (4): 299–326.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Public Affairs and Administration, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA

    Ben Merriman

Authors
  1. Ben Merriman
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ben Merriman .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Seth Abrutyn

  2. UCLA Department of Sociology, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Omar Lizardo

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Merriman, B. (2021). Art or the Aesthetic? The Relevance of the Classical Sociology of Art for the Current Sociology of Culture. In: Abrutyn, S., Lizardo, O. (eds) Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78205-4_18

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78205-4_18

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-78204-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-78205-4

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation